Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers

The Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers was founded on 20 November 1792 by John Reeves at the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand, London.

The Association was "staggeringly successful, outstripping even the Constitutional societies", with more than 2,000 local branches established before long.[1] They disrupted radical meetings, attacked printers of Thomas Paine's works, initiated prosecutions for sedition and published loyalist pamphlets.[2] A letter to Reeves of 1792 proposed the use of ballads for propaganda[3]:

It occurred to me, that anything written in voice [?verse] & especially to an Old English tune … made a more fixed Impression on the minds of the Younger and Lower Class of People, than any written prose, which was often forgotten as soon as Read … By printing copies of the enclosed, as Common Ballads, and putting them in the hands of individuals, or by twenties in the hands of Ballad Singers who might sing them for the sake of selling them, I own I shall not be displeased to hear Re-echoed by Every Little Boy in the Streets during the Christmas Holidays – Long May Old England, Possess Good Cheer and Jollity Liberty, and Property and no Equality.

The Crown and Anchor association met for the final time on 21 June 1793.[4] These loyalist associations mostly disappeared within a year "after successfully suppressing the organizations of their opponents".[5]

See also

Notes
  1. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 69.
  2. Hilton, pp. 69-70.
  3. GAMMON, VIC. “9. The Grand Conversation: Napoleon and British Popular Balladry.” RSA Journal, vol. 137, no. 5398, 1989, pp. 665–674, p.667. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41375010. Accessed 14 Apr. 2020.
  4. Philip Schofield, ‘Reeves, John (1752–1829)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 27 July 2008.
  5. Robert Eccleshall, English Conservatism since the Restoration (Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 35.

Further reading
  • D. E. Ginter, 'Loyalist Association movement of 1792–3 and British public opinion', Historical Journal, ix (1966).
  • Austin Mitchell, 'The Association movement of 1792–3', Historical Journal, iv (1961).
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