Eliza Flower at the Gurneys, Walworth, to Benjamin Flower, Cambridge, Saturday, 20 November 1802.

                                             Walworth   November 20 1802

My dear Benjamin

   I thought it would afford you satisfaction to be informed of my safe arrival yesterday, & I accordingly dispatched a hasty line or two this morning.  I am better than I could possibly expect to be after so long a journey, indeed I am quite well except a slight degree of pain in my back.  I have not been long down stairs tho it is now nearly one oclock.  Mrs Gurney having recommended me to rest long in bed this morning & to prevent any ill consequences from travelling, she rubbed my back with some Riga Balsam.

   I have just received my dear Benjamins kind little note & the papers for which I thank him—pray let me have a long letter on Monday—Col Despard is heavily ironed & closely immured—my present opinion is that this affair is a meer  state trick, a plan of Government perhaps, to introduce some despotic act, or to revive the worn out ones—the circumstance of the apprehension of these men & the opening of parliament is a singular coincidence  it is reported this morning that the state prisoners are not to be tried for treason, but for seducing the soldiery & that [the] Administration have assured, or mean to assure the public that no advantage will be taken of these circumstances to abridge the liberty of the people but I should trust none of their professions.   Another report is current in Town this morn’g “that the Attorney General has prosecuted the Editor of a French Journal published in London for a libel on Bonaparte”—if this be true I fear it is but the Harbinger of similar measures—indeed I more & more am satisfied with the propriety of your giving up the Editorship of your paper.  I do not think that your hint on the subject is sufficiently explanatory to induce any enquiry to you on the subject because your reasons for giving up the paper will be only understood by people who are already acquainted with your intentions your Hint of yesterday will speak to the Nottingham people but to few others there are very few of your friends who know how badly the public have supported you—indeed public support or approbation I care very little about, whilst the safety of my dear Benjamin is at the mercy of perhaps a very persecuting Administration & that could compensate us for the loss of every thing dear & valuable in this life & I can truly say when viewing the posture of public affairs I have no wish or desire that you should settle any where in a public capacity.

   I must now my dear Benjamin turn from our own individual concerns to inform you of the domestic distress of those who have manifested such affectionate concern for us—Poor Hemming Alas! is a ruined man.  I am sure you will feel for them & their dear little ones as I do & I know of no circumstance that has occurred for some time that has more afflicted me there is no blame whatever to be attached to Mr Hemmings conduct as it was not his own speculations but a failure of his principals & of his being obliged to make up their defaulters—this reverse of fortune has been within a month—a recent loss about 3 days ago completely finished the business.   One circumstance more which adds to their affliction is that the provision which Mr Keene wisely made for Mrs H has not been fairly made up to her, in consequence of the improper conduct of Mr Smithers who was one of the Executors but her frank hope [is] that the whole may be recovered both she & Mr Hemming bear their affliction with much fortitude, & resignation, but you can easily see how agonized are their hearts since Hemming came in possession of so good a business & income he has paid four thousand pounds of debts which were due to his creditors before his former Bankruptcy & was going on to pay them all—tho by law they had no claim on him for a shilling—he’s so much respected on the stock exchange where he is secretary that it is to be hoped & expected that his affairs will be satisfactorily settled I trust they will & that they again may be happy both he & Mrs Hemming passed the last evening with us  they came to meet me—& Mrs Gurney very prudently concealed from me till this morning this distressing affair—tho poor Mrs Hemming could not conceal from me that she had been weeping bitterly—but I suspected not the cause.  I shall I fear be too late for the post—adieu my dearest Ben  I am most affectionately yours

                                             E Flower

You will remember me kindly to Mary.  I will thank her to put my desk quite out of the way of being rummaged or take the key which is tied up with the key of the caddy & lock it up  you will of course go in your whisky to morrow & not on horseback & do not stay out to Ten so as to be obliged to ride after & [at] night.  Your best friends have most heartily subscribe[d] to your giving up your paper—we talked it over last night & both Mr Hemming & Mr Gurney & all hope you would do so.  Mr Hemming called this morning to give me your paper—& said he was much pleased with your Hint—all here seem to expect critical times & as you are no half & half man they fear much for your having now so much more to make your liberty as dear to you than heretofore—besides they say you can make yourself to the world in a variety of ways besides editing a newspaper conducted with so much risk & inconvenience.  I like your stroke on the parsons it was very well introduced & your remarks meet my Ideas quite you cannot bother the present administration too much about giving up their places.

At the top of the first page (upside down) is a note to Benjamin from Eliza Gurney:

I requested your Eliza to give my love to you but she hands the paper to me that I may convey it myself.  Whether it occasions any unpleasant sensation to her to give the love of any other woman to her well beloved I know not but if so I think she manifests a great deal of candor & liberality allowing me to write.  I can only add come as soon as you can & stay as long as you can.     

                                       Yours   E G

My Mother & Bror Wm desire me to send their love to you

Text: Flower Correspondence, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; for an annotated edition of this letter and the complete correspondence of Eliza Gould and Benjamin Flower, see Timothy Whelan, ed., Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould, 1794-1808 (Aberystywth: National Library of Wales, 2008), pp. 256-59.  Eliza is commencing a six-week stay in London. Benjamin was already considering closing down his newspaper, which he did the following year.

Colonel E. M. Despard (1751-1803), along with forty others, was arrested on 16 November 1802 (four days before Eliza’s letter) for conspiring to assassinate the King on his way to open Parliament on 23 November. Despard had previously participated in the United Irish conspiracy of 1798, for which the government held him without trial for nearly three years before releasing him.  The Trial of Edward Marcus Despard, Esquire, for High Treason . . . on Monday the seventh of February, 1803, was published by Martha Gurney, with both Joseph Gurney and his son, William Brodie Gurney (mentioned at the end of the above letter in Eliza Gurney's note), served as shorthand transcribers for the trial.  

John Hemming of Hemming & Son, linen-drapers, 38 High Street, the Borough (Lowndes’s [1780]: 80; Wakefield’s [1790]: 160).  His business does not show up in Holden’s Directory for 1805, which would corroborate the announcement of his bankruptcy in the above letter. A Hemming connection existed with the Gurney’s home church, Maze Pond, for Mrs. Hemming was the daughter of Henry Keene. Most likely John Hemming and his family were Baptists and attendants at Maze Pond, though his name does not appear in the Church Book.  He supported Baptist endeavors, being one of the largest subscribers (£10) to the Baptist Missionary Society in 1800-1801; his subscription was considerably less in 1804-05 (he was listed then as living in Walworth), though still quite generous at £3.3 (Periodical Accounts, vol. 2, p. 205; vol. 3, p.133). Hemming, along with William Hawes, Joseph Gurney, Michael Pearson, and John Vowell, served as a Director of the Humane Society in 1788 (see Milne 7-15). Flower may have had a previous connection with Hemming, for in 1796 Hemming, then listed as living in Westwood, subscribed to Flower’s edition of Habakkuk Crabb’s Sermons. There may have been other connections as well, for a John Hemming, M.A. (1793-1847), pastored the Baptist church in Kimbolton, Huntingtonshire, from 1817 to 1847, the same place Flower’s friends, the Hensmans, lived and who may well have been attendants in the Baptist church there (Samuel Couling, “A Biographical Dictionary of Baptist Ministers of Great Britain & Ireland Deceased from 1800 to the close of 1875,” MS., Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, p. 230).  Most likely he was one of the Hemmings’s sons who lived for a time with the Flowers in Cambridge (see letter below, dated 24 December 1802).

Henry Smithers, a member at Maze Pond, became Henry Keene’s business partner sometime around 1790. There were numerous Smithers among the members of Maze Pond.  Martha Keene (Henry’s Keene’s sister) joined on 3 May 1752, afterwards marrying Joseph Smithers, who had joined the church on 7 July 1750 and eventually became a deacon in April 1773.  He was suspended from communion, however, on 21 July 1783 for “immoral conduct,” shortly after the death of his wife.  A Mary Smithers, most likely his daughter, joined on 2 August 1767, but she died in 1783 (Maze Pond Church Book, 1744-1783, pp. 155, 376, 523, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford).  Henry Smithers was probably Joseph’s son and therefore Henry Keene’s nephew.  Apparently, after the death of Keene in 1797, Smithers was appointed one of the executors of Keene’s estate, of which a portion was left to Mrs. Hemming (Keene’s daughter).  Evidently, the investments were not handled as well as they should have been, and, coupled with Hemming’s losses, contributed to his eventual bankruptcy.  Anne Steele Tomkins met Smithers on one of his trips to Wales in 1808. She writes from Malpas, Wales, to Mary Steele (at this point Mrs. Thomas Dunscombe, for she married in 1797) in Broughton, Hampshire, on 8 January 1808: “We have lately become acquainted with a gentleman from London who is entering on an extensive trade in this country who would probably have been a great acquisition had we continued here. He is a very intelligent man of a Literary turn & has a large family probably Mr D[unscombe] – may have heard of him his name is Smithers – he pass’d one night here & at parting presented us with a book which contain’d poems lately publish’d by himself & some exquisite engravings’ (Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, 3.372). Tomkins was referring to Smithers' recently published Affection, and Other Poems, most likely aware of her familial connection to two of the most important Baptist women poets of the eighteenth century, Anne and Mary Steele. Anne Tomkins and Henry Smithers would also have talked about the various Tomkinses (relations of her husband) who attended at Maze Pond and who, like Smithers, had been leaders in the church since the 1740s.

In his editorial in the Cambridge Intelligencer on 20 November 1802, Flower wrote of Pitt: “Detesting as we ever have done, and as we shall ever continue to do, the principles of that party, at the head of which is a man, who is justly considered the enemy, not only of his own species, but of the brute creation, justice to that party compels us to acknowledge, the superior ground on which it stands, when compared with that of our present minister … If ministers had any feeling for their own honour, or the honour of the nation remaining, they would immediately retire from stations, for which their mad, inglorious war, and their ignominious, insecure peace, have in the most forcible manner, pronounced them utterly disqualified!”