John Baynes

For other people named John Baynes, see John Baynes (disambiguation).

John Baynes (1758–1787) was an English lawyer and miscellaneous writer.

Life

Baynes was born at Middleham, Yorkshire, the son of the solicitor William Baynes (1731–1811), later of Embsay Kirk.[1][2] He was educated at Bradford School under Benjamin Butler, and then at Richmond Grammar School, under Anthony Temple.[1][3][4][5]

Matriculating in 1773 at Trinity College, Cambridge, Baynes graduated B.A. in 1777, gaining a Smith's Prize (2nd place) and the medal for classics (1st place). In 1779 he was elected a fellow of Trinity, and remained one till his death. In 1780 he took his M.A.[3][6]

Baynes was admitted to Gray's Inn on 16 April 1777, where he read law with Alan Chambre.[1][7] He practised as a special pleader.[3] In the undergraduate days of James Scarlett, in the later 1780s, Baynes was no longer a Cambridge resident. At his chambers, Scarlett met Richard Porson.[8]

Shortly before his death Baynes, with the junior fellows of Trinity, memorialised the senior fellows and master on the irregular election of fellows, but they were only answered by a censure. The memorialists appealed to the lord chancellor as visitor of the college.[3] Baynes and Miles Popple acted for the junior fellows, and Denys Winstanley considered it likely that Baynes drafted the petition to Lord Thurlow.[9] The censure was removed from the college books.[3]

Politics

During the American Revolutionary War, from about 1776, Baynes turned his attention to politics and took an active part in the meeting at York in 1779 of the Yorkshire Association of Christopher Wyvill.[3] He had as a tutor John Jebb, from the period after 1776–7 when Jebb left the University of Cambridge.[10][11] In volume I of Jebb's Works (1787), edited by John Disney, a tribute to Jebb as teacher from Baynes was printed by Disney, preceded by a report of remarks from John Hinchliffe of Trinity College, a Parthian shot on Jebb's departure, referring to Baynes's "popular party" politics.[12]

From 1780 Baynes was a leading light of the Society for Constitutional Information set up by Jebb ) with Major John Cartwright.[11][13] He was a member in 1782 of the Westminster Committee of Association, a loose group of opposition Whigs, reformers and Wilkites of the first half of the 1780s.[5][14] Joseph Priestley was introduced to the Earl of Shelburne by Baynes and Benjamin Vaughan;[15] Baynes is also said to have brought some reformist ideas of Jebb's Peterhouse followers into Shelburne's circle.[5]

With a letter of introduction, Baynes and Samuel Romilly called on Benjamin Franklin at the Hôtel de Valentinois, Passy, in France on 27 August 1783.[16][17] On 15 September, the Treaty of Paris having been signed, Baynes returned, to discuss politics further with Franklin.[18] He made further visits into October, documented in a journal.[19] On 7 November 1783, Romilly joined the Society for Constitutional Information, nominated by Baynes and seconded by Jebb.[20]

At the 1784 general election, Baynes supported the nomination of William Wilberforce for Yorkshire, and spoke against the Fox–North coalition.[3] He was credited by Wyvill with the anonymous Third Address of the Society for Constitutional Information, of 14 January 1785, which laid emphasis on trial by jury and liberty of the press.[21][22][23]

Works

Baynes contributed political articles to the London Courant. He wrote (anonymously) political verses and translations from French and Greek poems; some of these were published in the European Magazine (xii. 240). He is mentioned by Andrew Kippis as supplying materials for the Biographia Britannica.[3]

Death

John Baynes died in London from a fever, on 3 August 1787, and was buried by the side of his friend John Jebb in Bunhill Fields.[3] His epitaph was written by Samuel Parr.[10] He left his friend Joseph Ritson a collection of old romances;[24] and his law library to Samuel Romilly.[25]

Associations

Baynes associated with Francis Blackburne, one of the Feathers Tavern Petitioners from 1771, against subscription to the 39 Articles, who included also Disney, Jebb and Theophilus Lindsey.[5][26] An obituary wrote of Baynes as "Unitarian-Christian", and Prest has commented that his "heterodox position is incontrovertible".[10][27] His headmaster at Bradford School, the Rev. Anthony Temple (died 1795), vicar of Easby, was of religious views described as "anti-trinitarian Latitudinarian".[13][28] Theophilus Lindsey came across Temple at Catterick in 1763, and tracked Temple's theological views, originally Arian, which converged in later publications with his own.[29]

Draper commented that Baynes knew the poet William Mason through the Yorkshire Association;[30] he was involved in the 1782 publication of the Archæological Epistle on the Rowley poems, authored anonymously by Mason, which has been called an attempt to reduce the controversy about them to "an elaborate Shandean joke".[1][31] It was addressed to Jeremiah Milles. The work was ascribed to Baynes because it went through his hands on the way to the press; but he denied the authorship.[3] Cannon in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suggests that Mason used Baynes to have it published.[1] A contemporary view, however, was that John Watson Reed, son of Joseph Reed, a close friend of Baynes, had passed it to the press for him.[32][33]

Baynes was also an early literary friend of Francis Douce.[34] William John Thoms reported that Douce had mentioned a curse composed by Baynes:

Sir, my friend John Baynes used to say that the man who published a book without an index ought to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles.[35]

Douce's transcription of Baynes's manuscript of The Awntyrs off Arthure, after Baynes's death and before the manuscript went to Joseph Ritson, caused a noted literary row. From Douce's copy, John Pinkerton published the romance, ahead of Ritson, and disregarding a undertaking he'd made to Douce.[36]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Cannon, John. "Baynes, John". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/1779. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ Lucas, Joseph (1896). Historical Genealogy of the Family of Bayne of Nidderdale: Showing Also how Bayeux Became Baynes. W. Harrison. p. 449.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Stephen, Leslie, ed. (1885). "Baynes, John" . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 3. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  4. ^ "Butler, Benjamin (BTLR716B)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  5. ^ a b c d Aston, Nigel; Orr, Clarissa Campbell (2011). An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain: Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737-1805. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. p. 85. ISBN 978-1-84383-630-8.
  6. ^ "Baynes, John (BNS773J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  7. ^ Foster, Joseph (1889). The Register of Admissions to Gray's Inn, 1521-1889. Priv. print. by the Hansard Pub. Union. p. 389.
  8. ^ Littell's Living Age. Living Age Company, Incorporated. 1877. p. 389.
  9. ^ Winstanley, Denys Arthur (1977). Unreformed Cambridge: A Study of Certain Aspects of the university in the eighteenth century. CUP Archive. pp. 252–253.
  10. ^ a b c Nichols, John (1814). Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. Vol. VIII. John Nichols. pp. 114–115.
  11. ^ a b Gascoigne, John. "Jebb, John (1736–1786)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/14680. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  12. ^ Jebb, John (1787). Disney, John (ed.). The Works, Theological, Medical, Political, and Miscellaneous, of John Jebb: With Memoirs of the Life of the Author. Vol. I. T. Cadell. pp. 13–16.
  13. ^ a b Haakonssen, Knud, ed. (2 November 2006). Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press. p. 232. ISBN 978-0-521-02987-2.
  14. ^ Baer, M. (25 July 2012). The Rise and Fall of Radical Westminster, 1780-1890. Springer. p. 13. ISBN 978-1-137-03529-5.
  15. ^ Jarrett, Derek (1973). The Begetters of Revolution: England's Involvement with France, 1759-1789. Rowman and Littlefield. p. 259. ISBN 978-0-87471-136-3.
  16. ^ Schiff, Stacy (2006). Benjamin Franklin and the birth of America: Franklin's French adventure 1776-85 (Paperback ed.). London: Bloomsbury. pp. 339–340. ISBN 0747579636.
  17. ^ Romilly, Samuel (2013). Memoirs of the life of Sir Samuel Romilly. Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 69. ISBN 9781108064217.
  18. ^ Schiff, Stacy (2006). Benjamin Franklin and the birth of America: Franklin's French adventure 1776-85 (Paperback ed.). London: Bloomsbury. pp. 343–344. ISBN 0747579636.
  19. ^ "Founders Online: Extracts of John Baynes's Journal, 23 September 1783–17 Octobe …". founders.archives.gov.
  20. ^ Page, Anthony (30 March 2003). John Jebb and the Enlightenment Origins of British Radicalism. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 229 note 79. ISBN 978-0-313-09286-2.
  21. ^ Wyvill, Christopher (1794). Political papers, chiefly respecting the attempt of the county of York, and other considerable districts, commenced in 1799 ... to effect a reformation of the parliament of Great-Britain: collected by C. Wyvill. Vol. II. p. x.
  22. ^ Wyvill, Christopher (1794). Political papers, chiefly respecting the attempt of the county of York, and other considerable districts, commenced in 1799 ... to effect a reformation of the parliament of Great-Britain: collected by C. Wyvill. Vol. II. p. 506.
  23. ^ Bird, Wendell R. (2020). The Revolution in Freedoms of Press and Speech: From Blackstone to the First Amendment and Fox's Libel Act. Oxford University Press. p. 204. ISBN 978-0-19-750919-7.
  24. ^ Burd, Henry Alfred (1916). Joseph Ritson, a critical biography. Urbana: University of Illinois. p. 60 note 57.
  25. ^ Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 97, no. 3). American Philosophical Society. p. 243. ISBN 978-1-4223-8184-7.
  26. ^ Ditchfield, G. M. "Feathers tavern petitioners (act. 1771–1774)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/93823. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
  27. ^ Haakonssen, Knud, ed. (30 May 1996). Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press. p. 181 note 34. ISBN 978-0-521-56060-3.
  28. ^ "Anthony Temple (TML742A)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  29. ^ Lindsey, Theophilus (2007). G. M. Ditchfield (ed.). The Letters of Theophilus Lindsey (1723–1808) Vol.1 1747–1788. Boydell Press. pp. xliii, 298 note 4, 496 note. ISBN 9781843833444.
  30. ^ William Mason,: A study in eighteenth-century culture. New York University Press. 1 January 1924. p. 338.
  31. ^ Lynch, John T. (2008). Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-century Britain. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-7546-6528-1.
  32. ^ Malone, Edmond (1966). Kuist, James M. (ed.). Cursory Observations on Rowley. Los Angeles: WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY. p. vi note 29.
  33. ^ Burd, Henry Alfred (1916). Joseph Ritson, a critical biography. Urbana: University of Illinois. p. 106.
  34. ^ Nichols, John Bowyer (1858). Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century by John Nichols. Vol. VIII. J. B. Nichols. p. 660.
  35. ^ Wheatley, Henry Benjamin (1878). What is an Index?: A Few Notes on Indexes and Indexers. Henry Sotheran. p. 27.
  36. ^ Johnston, Arthur (13 January 2014). Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century. A&C Black. p. 122. ISBN 978-1-4725-0891-1.
Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Stephen, Leslie, ed. (1885). "Baynes, John". Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 3. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

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