John Reeves (activist)

Portrait of John Reeves by Thomas Hardy, 1792.

John Reeves (20 November 1752 – 7 August 1829) was a legal historian, civil servant, British magistrate, conservative activist, and the first Chief Justice of Newfoundland. In 1792 he founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, for the purpose suppressing the "seditious publications" authored by British supporters of the French Revolution—most famously, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Because of his counter-revolutionary actions he was regarded by many of his contemporaries as "the saviour of the British state";[1] in the years after his death, he was warmly remembered as the saviour of ultra-Toryism.

  1. ^ A. V. Beedell, 'John Reeves's Prosecution for a Seditious Libel, 1795-6: A Study in Political Cynicism', The Historical Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Dec. 1993), p. 799.