Newfoundland, Reeveland: Chief Justice John Reeves as a Conservative Reformer, 1791-1793 by Andy Post A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Department of History Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Memorial University of Newfoundland © April 2019 St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador Canada ii Abstract This thesis argues that John Reeves’s political conservatism is essential to understanding how his job as Law Clerk to the British Privy Council’s Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations influenced his simultaneous appointment as Chief Justice of Newfoundland. Historians of Newfoundland have only recently begun to rediscover Reeves as a leading Tory theorist of the 1790s, but largely continue to regard his politics as separate from his colonial career. However, a closer examination of Reeves’s time as Chief Justice from 1791 to 1793 reveals his agenda of justifying constitutional reforms according to a Tory Administration’s policy of discouraging colonial settlement. This explains his sense of the Supreme Court’s role in enforcing that policy, his efforts to imbue the new Supreme Court with a legislative function, and his efforts as a propagandist as the author of the deceptively populist and violently royalist History of the Government of the Island of Newfoundland. iii Dedication To my great-aunt Esther Post (1938-2011), who died shortly after showing my sister and myself the extent to which she had come to live her best life in Boise, Idaho, and who last knew me as an English major bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia. iv Acknowledgements To start at the beginning. It is entirely possible that I would not have begun the project that led to this present thesis had it not been for the encouragement I received from Professor Judith Thompson at Dalhousie University, who supervised my previous master’s thesis on John Thelwall’s 1801 play, The Lady of the Lake (an obscure Arthurian work that I argued was an allegory against the Divine Right of Kings).1 When Professor Thompson heard that I was taking an audition year of undergraduate and honours coursework at Memorial University of Newfoundland, she was sorry to see me go. But, as I was getting settled into St. John’s, she made sure to remind me that the research I had put into my earlier project might still be put to good use. Judith: Did you know there is a (remote) connection between John Thelwall and Newfoundland? Me: Oh? Judith: John Reeves, the guy who started the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, against whom Thelwall inveighs in The Peripatetic, was a lieutenant governor or some such thing in Newfoundland. Like I said, pretty remote. But it would be interesting to see what he did in Newfoundland and whether he was as big a toad as Thelwall makes him out to be!2 Since that time, I think I have answered Professor Thompson’s challenge satisfactorily— and I find myself able to clarify that while she may have mis-remembered Reeves’s office, she accurately if perhaps accidentally captured Reeves’s own sense of that office as a sort of deputy executive. Thanks are therefore due to her for seeing me so safely off to MUN’s Department of History. I would next like to thank my present supervisor, Jeff Webb, for his guidance and patience during a project that was at least one more year in the making than it might have been otherwise. This thesis grew out of a midterm paper I wrote in the autumn of 2014 for Professor Webb’s seminar in Newfoundland History to 1815, in which I attempted to more or less pick up where Mark Bailey had left off in tracing the political, intellectual, and ideological contours of Reeves’s world. My subsequent term paper was much longer than any undergraduate paper had any right to be, but even so it seems to have formed the basis of my admission to the master’s programme at MUN, which would have been impossible without Dr. Webb’s confidence in my (eventual) ability to accomplish my own designs. His eagerness to see this project through to its final version, and his willingness to entertain my insecurities during the many hours I’ve spent stammering in his office have gone a long way in helping me write as clearly as I have in the following pages—and, frankly, in helping me finish my programme at all. I doubt the quality of 1 Andy Post, “Political Atheism vs. The Divine Right of Kings: Understanding John Thelwall’s The Fairy of the Lake (1801),” (MA thesis, Dalhousie University, 2014). 2 Judith Thompson, personal correspondence with the author, 4 September 2014; used with permission. v research for which I strove would have been possible had not Dr. Webb recommended my project to various organisations as highly and enthusiastically as he did. This thesis was supported in part by a graduate fellowship with Memorial University’s Department of History in the first year of my master’s programme, and by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISeR), also at Memorial University, which latter organisation was kind enough to award me a Fellowship during the 2016-17 school year. Research for this thesis was also supported by two travel grants awarded by MUN’s Department of History, which allowed me to spend a considerable amount of time perusing old documents in the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the British Library, and, for one day at least, the National Records of Scotland. None of these awards or opportunities would have been possible without the confidence placed in me by all of these institutions. Such a substantial project as I’ve managed to piece together would also not have been possible without the assistance of a great many staff at the libraries and archives that I’ve had the good fortune to take advantage of. I would therefore like to thank all of the staff at Memorial University’s Queen Elizabeth II Library, in particular to those who have gotten to know me through the many, many, many times I have reserved books either from the QeII directly or through its Document Delivery service. I sincerely hope my never-ending stream of requests has not proven too strenuous a hassle, and even if it has not, I suspect they will be pleased to know that it is now over. I would also like to thank the archivists at Memorial’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies and at the Provincial Archives of Newfoundland and Labrador for assisting me with my research during various stages of my project—particularly for their patience with my tendency to show up during the last hour of business and manage to find exactly what I was looking for. I would also like to thank David Bradley at the Maritime History Archive for encouraging me in my research, and to acknowledge that he has been waiting quite patiently for this project to reach that finished form I promised I would show him one day. For their support of this project, my deepest thanks are therefore due to all the committee members, researchers, librarians, archivists, and other staff with who have assisted my research in St. John’s, Greater London, and Edinburgh. There are a number of other faculty at Memorial University I would like to thank. The first word of thanks goes, I think, to Mike O’Brien for reminding me that “Context is everything in history” while failing my Naval History midterm paper for “provid[ing] none,” and for reminding me not to trust Linda Colley’s assumption that Edmund Burke was a Tory. And yes, Dr. O’Brien, I did enjoy “the Thompson.” I would also like to thank Dr. Valerie Legge for the freedom she gave myself and my classmates to absorb and explore the assigned texts and their contexts, in her lecture course on Early Canadian Literature to 1918, in a manner of our own choosing. I also doubt I would have been able to approach such sources as Hakluyt, Cartier, or Oldmixon with the confidence that I have, had it not been for her repeated lessons—each of them a memorable performance— in how to see through and summarily deconstruct the dense layers of Canada’s early colonial literature. Thanks are also due to Dr. Robert Sweeney for the conversation he was willing to indulge me with on the subject of Québec’s legal history, a conversation which has borne a considerable influence on the way I’ve attempted to make sense of both England’s and Newfoundland’s legal regimes. I would also like to thank Dr. Larry vi Mathews for putting up with me during my quest to get inside the head of contemporary Newfoundland nationalism in a class he had assumed was about Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction. I would also be remiss if I did not to extend my belated thanks to the late Dr. Christopher Dunn. In our one meeting, the fact that my knowledge of political science did not extend far beyond Alexis de Tocqueville made it clear that not taking any of his courses was ultimately in both our interests, but he was kind enough to recommend Native Liberty, Crown Sovereignty as a helpful aid to picking apart the imperialist dimensions to Reeves’s royalism. I would also like to thank Drs. Marica Cassis and Neil Kennedy for their support during especially the latter stages of this thesis’s development. Thanks are also due to my thesis examiners, Kurt Korneski and Philip Girard, for their feedback, encouragement, and critiques of this project.