by Brian Doyle
Billy Blake’s Trial
A cold January day, Chichester, England. A “fitfully wet day” along the English coast, according to the Sussex Weekly Advertiser. Midmorning—a melancholy time, too early for lunch, too early for whiskey, breakfast a fond memory.
In the Chichester Guildhall a man named Youatt, a minister, strolls into a courtroom. He is a court recorder, charged with shorthand accounting of trial proceedings. The room in which he found himself was probably made almost entirely of wood: wooden benches, wooden railings, a wooden witness-box adjacent to the wooden magistrate’s seat, wooden floor, sometimes a wooden judge. There were probably two oil paintings to either side of the magistrate’s seat. One was almost certainly of the King—George III at the time. The other was usually of a national hero of some sort; let us say it is a portrait of the genius poet John Milton, a man who looked like a cart horse. Both paintings were probably enormous, as huge paintings were then considered dashing. No other ornaments are visible in the room, although there were almost certainly mountains of loose papers on the two counselors’ tables.
Nothing happens to the Reverend Mister Youatt in his wooden room for a good long while. In a sense this stultifying pause is very English. Nothing happens for long stretches in England. It is the English way—white bread, thin tea, sex on Saturday. A land of hedgerows and gardens, amid which the people dream of order and porter. A slow land, a dreamy land. On this day, however, in about fifteen minutes, Mr. William Blake, age forty-seven, a resident of nearby Felpham for three years, will be tried for sedition against George III, King of England, said treasonous acts being assault and battery on the person of Private John Scolfield of the Royal Dragoon Guards, and dragging the private down the street by his collar, and stuffing the private bodily into his barracks, and the vehement utterance of many seditious expressions, viz.: “Damn the King,” “You Soldiers are all Slaves,” and “If Bonaparte should come he would be master of Europe in an Hour’s Time,” etc., etc. The case, Rex. v. Blake, will be tried before a jury, six magistrates, and the Duke of Richmond. Counsel for the defense, Mr. Samuel Rose. First witness for the prosecution, Private John Cock of the Royal Dragoon Guards. Witnesses for the defense, various.
Now is my grief at worst, incapable of being
Surpassed; but every moment it accumulates more & more,
It continues accumulating to eternity; the joys of God advance,
But my griefs advance also, for ever & ever without end.
O that I could cease to be! Despair! I am Despair,
Created to be the great example of horror & agony; also my
Prayer is vain. I called for compassion; compassion mock’d;
Mercy & pity threw the gravestone over me, & with lead
& iron bound it over me forever.
Blake was nervous about the trial, damned nervous. It had already cost him a hundred pounds simply for bail—money he had to borrow from friends—and the prospect of losing the case was terrifying. England had declared war on Napoleon in May, the country was an unruly bundle of nerves, and rumors of French invasion were rife along the southern coast. It was also rumored that Napoleon had assembled fleets of flatboats in every creek and harbor on the Channel; to fend off these invaders, troops of dragoons had been quartered in various coastal towns. Thus came Scolfield’s troop to Felpham. Under these circumstances few accusations could be more serious than that of sedition, and the fact that Scolfield was a soldier boded ill.
Adding to the actual physical danger of Blake’s position was its inconvenient timing. Blake and his wife, Catherine, had spent this last year in Felpham itching to leave. They were ready to move back to London in September when Scolfield filed charges in August. Felpham, which Blake had hoped would be “a sweet place for Study,” had been a bust: Catherine was constantly sick, his neighbor William Hayley badgered him incessantly, and the weather was unrelentingly, angrily, eternally gray. London, which he had fled cursing its filth and meanness, now looked delicious. “I can carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy’d,” he wrote to his London friend Thomas Butts. “There I can converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals. I assure you that, if I could have return’d to London a Month after my arrival here, I should have done so, but I was commanded by my Spiritual friends to bear all, to be silent, & to go through all without murmuring.”
What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
& in the wither’d field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.
In Felpham, Blake had hired a man named William to tend to his garden. The man was an ostler, or horse groom, at the nearby Fox Inn. On the morning of August 12, Blake emerged from his cottage to find two men in his garden. One was William; the other was Private Scolfield, who, unbeknownst to Blake, had been invited into the garden by the gardener.
“I desired [Scolfield], as politely as was possible, to go out of the Garden,” Blake explained in a letter to Butts. “He made me an impertinent answer. I insisted on his leaving the garden; he refused. I still persisted in desiring his departure; he then threaten’d to knock out my Eyes, with many abominable imprecations & with some contempt for my Person; it affronted my foolish pride. I therefore took him by the Elbows & pushed him before me until I had got him out; there I had intended to have left him, but he, turning about, put himself into a Posture of Defiance, threatening & swearing at me. I, perhaps foolishly & perhaps not, stepped out at the Gate, &, putting aside his blows, took him again by the Elbows, &, keeping his back to me, pushed him forward down the road about fifty yards—he all the while endeavouring to turn round & strike me, & raging & cursing, which drew out several neighbours; at length, when I had got him to where he was Quarter’d, which was very quickly done, we were met at the Gate by the Master of The Fox Inn (who is the proprietor of my Cottage), & his wife & Daughter & the Man’s Comrade & several other people. My Landlord compell’d the Soldiers to go indoors, after many abusive threats against me & my wife from the two soldiers: but not one word of threat on account of Sedition was utter’d at that time.”
& then the Knave begins to snarl.
& the Hypocrite to howl:
& all his good Friends shew their private ends,
& the Eagle is known from the Owl.
Three days later Private Scolfield swore out a formal complaint of sedition by the “Miniature Painter” William Blake against the King. Scolfield’s account had Blake delivering a lengthy and bloodthirsty speech during which he shouted that he would cut the throats of his fellow Englishmen at Bonaparte’s command, among other savageries. Scolfield also swore that Mrs. Blake issued forth from the cottage like a Fury and shouted that “altho’ she was but a Woman, she would fight for Bonaparte as long as she had a drop of blood in her.” Scolfield’s account ends with Mrs. Blake telling her “said Husband” to eject the soldier, with Blake seizing the peaceful Scolfield by the collar, and with Blake damning the King as loudly at the top of his voice.
Cold snows drifted around him:
Ice cover’d his loins around.
The matter went to a grand jury in October 1803 at the Michaelmas Quarter Sessions in nearby Petworth. Blake attended, accompanied by his gardener. To Blake’s dismay, the jury found Scolfield’s charges of sedition and assault worthy of trial—the “bills were true,” in the phrase of the day—which meant that he would be formally tried before a judge and jury in January. It was Blake’s right, as defendant, to provide the court with his account of the matter, if he so chose, and to list points of evidence that he or his lawyer would muster in his defense. Blake did so, in a businesslike memorandum titled “In Refutation of the Information and Complaint of John Scolfield, a private So
ldier, Etc.” The memo ends with this editorial flourish:
“If such Perjury as this can take effect, any Villain in [the] future may come & drag me & my Wife out of our House, & beat us in the Garden or use us as he please or is able, & afterwards go & swear our Lives away. Is it not in the Power of any Thief who enters a Man’s Dwelling & robs him, or misuses his Wife or Children, to go & swear as this Man has sworn?”
Los seized his Hammer & Tongs; he laboured at his resolute Anvil
Among indefinite Druid rocks & snows of doubt & reasoning.
Enraged & stifled without & within,
in terror & woe, he threw his
Right Arm to the north, his left Arm to the south, & his Feet
Stamped the nether Abyss in trembling & howling & dismay.
Enter, with a hacking cough, Mr. Samuel Rose. He is a thin and sickly man about thirty years old, a friend of both Hayley and of the poet William Cowper. Hayley, who has already shelled out most of Blake’s bail, hires Rose to defend Blake at Chichester Sessions.
The prosecution argued first, as is the custom to this day in English (and American) law, and after statement of the charge by Private Scolfield and corroborating testimony by Private Cock, Scolfield’s lawyer hammered away at the “atrocity and malignity” of the charge, figuring that if the jury could be awed by the seditious imprecations that had supposedly issued from Blake’s mouth, they would ignore the fact that the only eyewitness, the ostler, was prepared to swear that Blake said nothing of the kind. This tactic, called prosecuting the crime, sometimes works with serious charges, since juries are anxious to assign blame for such crimes; the more serious the offense, the more likely they are to convict someone.
Counselor Rose tooled his defense accordingly. His speech, “taken in short Hand by the Revd. Mr. Youatt,” opens with complete agreement that such an offense is atrocious and malignant beyond words: “If there be a man who can be found guilty of such a transgression, he must apply to some other person to defend him,” says Rose, icily. “I certainly think that such an offence is incapable of extenuation. My task is to shew that my client is not guilty of the words imputed to him, not to shew that [such words] are capable of any mitigated sense.”
Having distanced himself and his client from the devilry of the charge, Rose methodically sets out the pieces of his argument like chessmen. One, Blake has been a loyal subject of the King all his forty-seven years. Two, Blake is a friend of local hero and noted patriot Hayley, who would never have allowed a rebel into his house. Three, Blake is an artist, and therefore apolitical. (“His art has a tendency, like all the other fine arts, to soften every asperity of feeling & of character, & to secure the bosom from the influence of those tumultuous & discordant passions, which destroy the happiness of mankind.”) Four, Scolfield is an undependable witness—he has been broken from sergeant to private on account of drunkenness. Five, the charge prima facie doesn’t make sense—is Blake, a sensitive artist, likely to storm from his house to utter “malignant & unintelligible discourse to those who are most likely to injure him for it”? Six, the ostler, who saw and heard the whole row, denies the charge wholly. Seven, the testimony of Private Cock, who stated that he emerged from his barracks to hear Blake damning King, country, and soldiers, is contradicted by a woman named Mrs. Grinder, who was next to Cock by the door of the barracks, and who says the poet said nothing of the kind.
“I will call my witnesses [the ostler and Mrs. Grinder] & you shall hear their account,” sums up Rose. “You will then agree with me that they totally overthrow the testimony of these Soldiers.…”
At this point, shockingly, Rose collapsed, overcome with the tension and with the effects of a nervous disease that would kill him a few months later. The court was in an uproar for several minutes.
Lightnings of discontent broke on all sides round
& murmurs of thunder rolling heavy long & loud over the mountains
Rose was helped to his feet but could not carry on, and because there was suddenly no defense lawyer, the defense witnesses were not called. The chairman of the Bench of Magistrates, the Duke of Richmond (who, according to Hayley, disliked Blake intensely and was for political reasons itching to convict him), sent the jury off to its deliberations, and the packed house settled back to wait for a verdict.
It could not have been much later than two o’clock p.m. when the jury retired; the trial had begun at ten a.m., only the two soldiers had testified, and there had been only one full-length summation, the prosecution’s. If we generously allow half an hour for Rose’s suddenly aborted speech (it is 1,650 words in Youatt’s account), and guess that there was a lunch break, or an adjournment of some kind, or that Blake’s repeated shouting of “False!” during Scolfield’s testimony (a boy at the trial later told the journalist Alexander Gilchrist that what he remembered best from that day was Blake’s “flashing eye”) held up matters, or that attending to the fallen Rose may have taken a while, we may have pushed the clock to three o’clock or so. But the jury did not return its verdict until nearly eight o’clock p.m.
So Blake sat there in the courtroom at the Guildhall, on a dank day, his lawyer silenced, his wife sick at home, his freedom and future in the hands of people he did not know, in a county he had been itching to leave for years, for five hours.
How long will ye vex my soul,
& break me in pieces with words?
If this essay was a movie there would be a natural break at this point; the camera would pan around Blake sitting there at the table, eyes flashing, the murmuring crowd staring at him, the Duke of Richmond glaring from the bench, Scolfield glaring from the prosecution’s table, Rose wheezing in a corner, Hayley up in the balcony signing autographs, the Reverend Mr. Youatt leaning back in his chair exhausted. Perhaps the camera would zoom in on Blake’s round face (“he had a broad pale face and a large full eye,” wrote the memoirist Crabb Robinson), always keying on his eyes, using the ferocious glare in them as an anchor for the frame. His eyes were gray and slightly protuberant, an effect heightened by his receding hairline. He had a firm chin, a considerable nose, and the look of a furious hawk when he was angry. The camera sidles up to Blake’s face, the hubbub in the room gets a little louder, Blake turns slightly to stare right into the camera, his glaring eye FILLING THE FRAME.…
Which does a fade-and-flip so fast it barely registers on the viewer, and now the camera is retreating from the same ferocious eye but the eye is in the face of four-year-old Billy Blake, second son of James Blake, hosier and haberdasher, and we are into the flashback scene, which will cover, in a series of cross-cut jumps, the forty-three years between 1761, when Blake, age four, saw God, “who put His head in the window and set him a-screaming,” according to his wife, and 1804, when Blake is the quiet eye of a swirling hubbub in Chichester’s Guildhall.
And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London—a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.
Of course, he screamed,
seeing the bobbin of God’s blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.
—Mary Oliver, “Spring Azures”
At age eight Blake reported to his mother that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree. His mother beat him. At age ten he reported that he had seen a tree filled with angels, their “bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” His father beat him. A month later, as he stood at the edge of a field watching haymakers at work, he saw angels walking toward him through the rye. His parents stopped beating him and sent him to art school, a decision made easier by the fact that the boy was a “booby” who spent all his time in his father’s haberdashery drawing on the backs of bills. At age fourteen he became an engraver; at age twenty-four he married a slim dark-eyed girl named Catherine, who calmed him by cupping his feet in her hands when he shook with visions.
For the next twenty-three years Blake drew, painted, engraved,
printed, colored, stippled, and lithographed. He opened a print shop, which immediately went bust. He invented a new form of engraving after he had a dream in which his dead brother Robert explained it to him. He wrote songs and then simple poems and then vast books of complex poems, many of which he engraved and printed himself, in books that he and Catherine painted and bound by hand. They lived on Green Street, Broad Street, Poland Street, the Hercules Buildings, in Felpham, on South Molton Street, and in the Strand. He sometimes made money and sometimes did not. Mostly he did not. To earn a living he did engravings on commission and drawings and watercolors for books and magazines; meanwhile, at night, at dawn, and often when he was supposed to be working on commissions, he wrote his huge poems and engraved them onto copper plates and printed them and watercolored the sheets and bound them into books, which he offered for sale at outrageous prices.
