[Shebbeare], Three Letters to the People of England

Samuel Hopkins and Jonathan Mayhew wrote from colonial perspectives on the looming French and Indian War. John Shebbeare provides a Tory metropolitan perspective on the Whig Duke of Newcastle’s conduct of that conflict. Shebbeare begins his first letter comparing himself with Demosthenes, the ‘Patriot Orator’ who upbraided ‘his degenerate Countrymen with universal Venality and Loss of Public Virtue’, noting that ‘Virtue and Wisdom, Vice and Venality, have ever been: The first the Sources of national Happiness and Success, the latter of Decline and Ruin’. Shebbeare wrote three similar subsequent letters, the sixth (1757) earning him prosecution for seditious libel with three years’ imprisonment, 1,000 Pounds security for good behaviour and a period in the pillory that Shebbeare turned into a moment of defiant political theatre. Shebbeare had long had critics of his medical qualifications, polemical politics, abrasive personality, and nationalist and religious bigotries, conducting feuds with Ralph Griffiths, editor of the Monthly Review.