J.M.W. Turner’s watercolour of Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard (circa 1817–18) was produced for engraving in the Rev. Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s topographical publication An History of Richmondshire (1823), one of twenty designs Turner contributed to that work. The squabbling schoolboys who disturb the foreground are not routine staffage figures and their presence has always provoked comment. This article proposes that Turner included them as a disguised allusion to the Tory government’s persecution of the political satirist William Hone, whose trials for blasphemy and sedition took place in December 1817. It further suggests that, by situating the incident in Kirkby Lonsdale, Turner was able to make an oblique reference to the political corruption associated with the Earl of Lonsdale’s domination of Westmorland elections. The watercolour can be added to a dozen other examples of works by Turner bearing allusions to the Reform movement, painted in the 1820s and 1830s.

J.M.W. Turner painted his watercolour of Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard (fig. 1) for engraving in the Rev. Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s topographical publication An History of Richmondshire (1823).¹ Celebrated for the beauty of its prospect over the nearby countryside, the view from the churchyard had been recommended to tourists since the 1770s and was an obvious choice for inclusion in the book.² As Whitaker described it:

On a plain above the Lune, sufficiently elevated to command the soft foreground, where that river, already majestic and powerful, makes a graceful curve about a peninsula of meadow and pasture, exuberantly fertile, and spotted with standard forest trees, while this soft scene is contrasted by the noblest of backgrounds, the long ridge of Gray Garth, and the towering height of Ingleborough to the south-east, and the piked points of Howgill to the north, announcing the commencement of that bolder style of rock and fell which characterizes the wildest parts of Westmoreland and Cumberland, I know not that the site of Kirkby Lonsdale, however admired, has ever been applauded beyond its deserts.³

Turner made drawings on the spot in August 1816 and later, probably in 1817, produced two colour studies of the composition he developed from them.⁴ The finished watercolour is conventionally dated about 1817–18.⁵ It was engraved by Charles Heath in 1821, with the town’s name spelled as pronounced, “Kirby Lonsdale”, in the title and on the headstone at bottom left (fig. 2).

Commentary on Turner’s design has always praised its superb evocation of the Lune valley as the sun rises over the distant hills, but his representation of this beautiful landscape is qualified by the boisterous group of boys who dominate the foreground, throwing missiles at a pile of books. In many of Turner’s topographical watercolours the staffage is more than incidental and for that reason his introduction of this discordant activity warrants further investigation. Who are these boys? What precisely are they doing? Why are they behaving this way in a churchyard? And why is the scene set in Kirkby Lonsdale? This article proposes that the schoolboys’ inclusion was not simply a means to enliven the watercolour with a genre scene but also included allusions to a number of contemporary issues, all of them converging on the Reform question. If we are to elucidate the deeper meaning of Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard, we must unpick the image’s entanglement with the febrile and fractious political world of the Regency and the heated debates that animated it.

The task of unravelling the iconography of Turner’s paintings is not always straightforward. In many of his works the ostensible subject acts as a vehicle to introduce other concerns, be they historical or contemporary. The formal, narrative, or symbolic elements that allude to these wider contexts are integral to the image, and Turner seems to have been wary of offering explanations that simplified this complex layering of meanings. As he once remarked to John Britton, respecting the letterpress to accompany the engraving of his painting Pope’s Villa at Twickenham (1808), “making the willow tree the identical Pope’s willow is rather strained—cannot you do it by allusion?”⁶ Correspondingly, John Ruskin recalled the artist’s refusal to explain his painting War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet (1842): “He tried hard one day for a quarter of an hour to make me guess what he was doing in the picture … giving me hint after hint in a rough way: but I could not guess, and he would not tell me”.⁷ Circumspect by nature, when it came to political commentary, Turner was reticent in the extreme; he was certainly no propagandist. Not only would such an obvious message run counter to his adherence to the multivalent sophistication of high art, but it also ran the obvious risk of alienating some of his patrons.

With regard to those of Turner’s paintings touching on social and political concerns, the pioneering work of the late Eric Shanes has done much to overcome the artist’s reticence and to reveal his preparedness to bear witness to his times.⁸ However, although thanks to Shanes and others there is now something of a scholarly consensus that Turner’s mature politics were liberal, supporting parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, Greek independence, and the abolition of the slave trade, there is no written source that would confirm this. The most direct evidence for Turner’s presumed allegiances derives from the images themselves.⁹

That said, the idea of Turner as someone responsive to contemporary politics is not widespread beyond specialist studies; those for whom he is best understood as an artist—preoccupied with investigations of landscape, light, and colour—may still find it difficult to accept that his social and political awareness made a significant contribution to his professional practice.¹⁰ To that end, this article goes into considerable detail to establish the circumstances surrounding the production of Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard, insofar as they offer a plausible explanation for Turner’s decision to show books under attack at that moment and in that specific location.

In making the case for a politically informed reading of the image, this article inevitably raises wider questions of method, notably the necessary and sufficient conditions for venturing such an explanation. At what point does the historical context of an artwork achieve such a circumstantial weight that it makes better sense to recruit it than ignore it? Conversely, what are the limits of pictorial exegesis that would forestall interpretation becoming over-subtle? These questions are manifestly applicable to the nature of art-historical explanation in a general sense, but they are particularly pertinent in dealing with Turner’s oeuvre.

Ruskin seems to have been the first to comment on the watercolour, describing it in Modern Painters IV, “the notable and most pathetic drawing of the Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, with the schoolboys making a fortress of their larger books on the tombstone, to bombard with the more projectile volumes”, and again in Sesame and Lilies: “a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its brook, and valley, and hills, and folded morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike of these, and of the dead who have left these for other valleys and for other skies, a group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a grave, to strike them off with stones”.¹¹

Modern scholars have given fuller accounts. In his thorough investigation of Turner’s explorations of northern England, David Hill offered a helpful description of Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard and explained the foreground action (fig. 3) in some detail:

a group of boys are waiting for the school to open. Some will no doubt already have walked a considerable distance to get here from their homes and farms in the valley. During the wait some horseplay has broken out. Two of the boys are harassing a third and have tipped his belongings out onto a tombstone. To make matters worse they have piled up the books and ink bottle into a pyramid and are now proceeding to throw stones at it as if they were at a fair. The protesting victim, meanwhile, holds his one surviving book aloft while one of his assailants tries to grab it, no doubt to use for further target practice.¹²

Eric Shanes thought there was a deliberate suggestion of memento mori in what Turner portrayed:

the tranquillity of the scene is disturbed by some boys in the foreground who are throwing books at a target they have made of their school books. This staffage is surely ironic rather than merely playful, for one day these boys will also end up in a graveyard (or perhaps even in this graveyard). The way Turner made the tomb the nearest object to the viewer supports this moralistic interpretation … Moreover, washing is being laid out to dry in the early morning sun beyond the churchyard, and this might have been introduced to summon forth associations of shrouds.¹³

Most recently, Ian Warrell has described the boys as

delaying the inevitable call of the school bell through their iconoclastic use of textbooks for target practice; the contents of one boy’s satchel has been appropriated by his taunters; but he hits back by knocking the hat off the boy holding one of his books just out of reach.¹⁴

All these descriptions agree that what Turner shows us in the foreground is a scene of unruly schoolboys, although what they are throwing at their improvised target is seen differently, either stones (Hill) or books (Shanes) or, in Ruskin’s case, first books (Modern Painters) and then stones (Sesame and Lilies). Both Ruskin and Shanes see all three of the boys as united in the same activity, not discriminating between them as Hill and Warrell do, nor do they mention the object at the top of the book pile, which Hill correctly identifies as an ink bottle, for it has the characteristic shape of the mass-produced penny (or “pork-pie”) stoneware inkwells of the period. As for Turner’s intended meaning, Ruskin opts for a sense of juvenile heedlessness, Hill and Warrell emphasise social observation, and Shanes proposes a symbolic reading. Only Hill and Warrell mention that two of the schoolboys are fighting. Hill sees the boy with the book in his hand as a “protesting victim”, with the boy holding his arm as his aggressor, while Warrell reverses their roles.

Heath’s engraving indicates that the inkwell on top of the pile of books seems to be resting on a hornbook—a paddle-shaped piece of wood with a single sheet of paper glued to it, usually bearing the alphabet or a Christian text. But a hornbook is an elementary learning device for the very young, whereas the jackets, waistcoats, and loose trousers of these schoolboys would be appropriate for boys older than ten, when dressing as miniature adults replaced more juvenile costumes, such as skeleton suits. The figure leaning against the tree is their senior, as indicated by his height and the closer-fitting trousers that were worn by older boys in this period.¹⁵ Both he and the left-hand boy in the group carry schoolbags over their shoulders. The blue fabric hanging over the tomb is the victim’s empty bag, comparable to the one shown in William Mulready’s almost contemporary painting The Wolf and the Lamb (circa 1819–20) (fig. 4).

Turner’s other images of groups of children from about this time are found in three compositions for his Liber Studiorum, made in about 1808 and published in 1811: Juvenile Tricks, Young Anglers, and Marine Dabblers (fig. 5). They all show youths of a comparable age but dressed very casually and they are almost certainly intended to represent children of the labouring classes. In contrast, with their clean shoes and neat clothes, these Kirkby Lonsdale youngsters are well turned out and comparable to Mulready’s paintings of schoolboys in that respect.¹⁶ Their smart apparel points to reasonably comfortable domestic circumstances, as would be expected of boys of that age still attending school.¹⁷

Turner’s decision to depict the schoolboys with such precision is noteworthy and I have laboured these details to approximate some of the social assumptions that a contemporary observer of the image might have projected onto it. But beyond that, how would the boys’ conduct have registered? Naughty schoolboys are a cliché of social life and simply as a genre scene Turner’s invention would have struck most viewers as irreverent, but decidedly plausible. In his autobiography of 1820, the imprisoned reformist leader Henry Hunt recalled something analogous to the activities Turner shows. “Our play ground was the church yard, at the back of the school; a very improper place indeed for boys to amuse themselves in, as it was covered with graves, and tomb and head stones, over which it was our occupation to be constantly jumping. The churchwardens complained … of the injury done to the graves by our jumping on them”.¹⁸ However, as stated earlier, this article proposes that beyond its anecdotal aspects, the boys’ behaviour is much more than a social record and plays into wider political contexts.

Schoolboys’ clothing in the 1810s was a miniature version of adult dress. If we imagine these figures as adult surrogates rather than juveniles, the anecdotal and documentary aspects of the image find another frame of reference of immediate relevance to this period, the Reform movement and the Tory administration’s efforts to suppress it. I will argue that with these schoolboys’ behaviour Turner is pointing specifically to the government’s persecution of the political journalist and satirist William Hone, and more generally to the repression of the reformist press in a climate of political corruption.

The five years following the end of the war against Napoleon in 1815 were marked by social unrest and what E.P. Thompson in his classic account characterised as “the heroic age of popular Radicalism”.¹⁹ Opposition to the status quo was divided on specific policies and tactics but united in singling out an unreformed House of Commons and government corruption as the major obstacles to progress. The Church of England was also seen as a bastion of corrupted privilege, wealthy, highly resistant to reform, and presiding over dubious practices such as non-residency and pluralism among the clergy. The rhetoric of reformist newspapers and pamphlets was unsparing and was echoed in the public meetings convened to agitate for change.

One of these, the Spa Fields mass meeting and ensuing riot of 2 December 1816, was regarded as particularly serious by the government. The Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, immediately took steps to suppress further protest, including suspending habeas corpus and moving against publishers of seditious pamphlets and newspapers.²⁰ Henry Brougham, who had been defence counsel for the Hunt brothers in their trials for seditious libel in 1811 and 1812, had already attempted unsuccessfully to reform the libel laws with his Bill for Securing the Liberty of the Press (1816).²¹ He now protested in the House of Commons.

The tongues and the pens of all who spoke or wrote upon public affairs, must feel the influence of these measures. Every one who rose in a meeting, or sat down at his desk, to attack the measures of his majesty’s ministers, now knew that he did so with a halter about his neck—and was aware that if he passed a boundary undefined in its extent, a line invisible to all eyes but those of the cabinet or the attorney-general, on the morrow his personal liberty was at an end.²²

Despite such opposition, the government successfully passed the two so-called Gagging Acts: the Treason Act (17 March 1817) and the Seditious Meetings Act (31 March 1817). As the Hunts’ Examiner noted, “these and other singular proceedings on the part of the Ministers have naturally increased the indignation of all who value old English freedom—of all who value the personal liberty of the subject, and the real, not nominal, responsibility of the Crown’s advisors”.²³

In addition, and very contentiously, on 27 March 1817, Sidmouth sent the Lord Lieutenants a “circular letter” requesting them to recommend to the magistrates within their jurisdiction that they were entitled to issue arrest warrants to apprehend publishers and newspaper vendors, “to prevent, as far as possible, the circulation of blasphemous and seditious pamphlets and writings”.²⁴ Sidmouth’s purpose was clear, to shut down the growing number of anti-government publications whose reports and commentary analysed the corrupt state of politics and called for reform. In response to these measures, twenty-three prosecutions for seditious libel were filed in the court of King’s Bench in 1817.²⁵

In late January and early February 1817, William Hone had issued four liturgical parodies. All were biting satires on the government and the political corruption over which it presided, variously using texts from the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Anglican catechism as their models. On 3 May, Hone was arrested in the street by two officers of the court, with a warrant from Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice, but no details of the charges against him.²⁶ He was remanded to the King’s Bench prison until 2 July when he finally entered a plea of not guilty to the charge of blasphemy and sedition and was released. In the last week of November 1817, he was called to trial. The preliminaries to the hearing were noticed in the national newspapers, including the prosecution’s unsuccessful attempt to select a biddable jury rather than a neutral body.²⁷ In three separate trials at the Court of King’s Bench, Guildhall, held on successive days (18, 19, and 20 December), Hone was tried in respect of The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism, The Political Litany, and The Sinecurist’s Creed. Dispensing with counsel, he defended himself for a total of twenty-two hours. Much to his accusers’ displeasure, the jury’s verdict at the end of each trial was not guilty. All the major newspapers carried extensive accounts of the proceedings. It was estimated that some 20,000 supporters were in and around the court and, on regaining his freedom after his third victory, Hone became a national celebrity and a popular hero.

Seen in this light, the watercolour’s depiction of physical violence and books under attack may be interpreted as alluding to Hone’s persecution. The two struggling figures re-enact the government’s aggressive assault on him. The boy to the left of that pair takes aim at the books, to be understood as Hone’s satirical publications, but they are still standing, reflecting the court’s not guilty verdicts and thereby asserting the principle of free speech. It is conceivable that the blue bookbag draped over the tombstone may also refer to the trials, for traditionally a blue bag is carried by barristers and Hone was effectively his own barrister when he defended himself. The fourth boy leaning against the tree takes no part in the proceedings but looks on at them. His separation from the other schoolboys places him in the position of their monitor, but that same detachment may also have a symbolic function. It is tempting to see him as a cipher for Sidmouth, quietly observing the Crown lawyers putting into practice the administration’s new policies.

As noted earlier, modern scholars disagree about the respective identities of victim and bully in the two fighting schoolboys. While a decision either way doesn’t make a material difference to a political reading of the genre group as a whole, it seems reasonable to propose that the boy holding the book aloft represents Hone, with his assailant’s grip on his arm a reminder of his arrest. His attacker is also trying to knock off his hat. If the boy holding the book is understood as Hone, the choice of colour for his headgear is appropriate, for the white hat had become associated with the people’s clamour for Reform, first worn by William Cobbett and then, much more frequently, by Henry Hunt, two of the most well-known public figures opposing the corruption of government.²⁸ It was for this reason that when Thomas Teulon founded his pro-Reform periodical the White Hat in 1819, he explained its title on the grounds that the white hat “worn by so many steady and dedicated patriots … is become a badge too explicit to be mistaken”.²⁹

Part of the ostensible reason for Hone’s prosecution was that his parodies were blasphemous, thereby attacking the established church and its teachings and potentially undermining its pre-eminent position in society which, in turn, threatened the coherence of the state as currently instituted. His defence was that parody was a legitimate literary device and did not insult the religious texts themselves. Notwithstanding Hone’s successful rebuttal of the prosecution’s case, we should note that his texts, with their titles of “catechism”, “litany”, and “creed”, were published when the influence of the Church of England on education was under scrutiny.³⁰ Those arguing for Reform saw the Anglican Church as a corrupt body, bloated with money, and overwhelmingly Tory in its politics. Its participation in education was seen as its method to maintain its dominant role in society.

In his Improvements in Education as it Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community (1803), the Quaker educationalist Joseph Lancaster stated that he wished to free education from any religious bias: “if any particular sect obtained the principal care in a national system of education, that party would soon be likely to possess the greatest power and influence in the state”.³¹ His book alarmed the Anglican establishment and was critically reviewed by the educationalist and staunch Anglican, Sarah Trimmer, the mother of Turner’s good friend Henry Scott Trimmer.³² Conversely, Lancaster’s proposals were warmly received in liberal circles, and influenced Samuel Whitbread’s Parochial Schools Bill (1807), which was defeated in the House of Lords.

In the 1810s, the debate over education split into two factions: the Anglican supporters’ National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in England and Wales (1811) and the Lancasterian supporters’ British and Foreign School Society for the Education of the Labouring and Manufacturing Classes of Society of Every Religious Persuasion (1814).³³ After Whitbread’s suicide in 1815, the reformist Whig Henry Brougham led the parliamentary group promoting improvements in education, with a Select Committee established in 1816. Public opinion remained divided, with non-conformists, liberal churchmen, and the Edinburgh Review supporting the Lancasterian system and almost all the established clergy, the Tory party, and the Quarterly Review supporting Anglican schools.³⁴ The Education of the Poor Bill (1820) attempted a compromise, but this bill also failed, satisfying neither faction.

Like other Anglicans, Trimmer had criticised Lancaster’s system as antagonistic to the established church and she supported instead the system developed by the Rev. Andrew Bell, which emphasised Anglican religious instruction and was explicitly opposed to educating the poor too highly.³⁵ For Bell, and Trimmer, religious instruction would help purify the manners of the lower orders, but other subjects were less important. Indeed, some commentators held that even reading and writing were not strictly necessary in a scheme of education for the poor, especially when greater literacy might foster the spread of radicalism.³⁶ What conservative opinion feared was celebrated by writers supporting Reform. As one of the reformist newspapers noted in 1817, the Bible and Sunday School societies’ promotion of reading had allowed the labouring classes to gain a better understanding of their rights and to see through government propaganda supporting a restricted franchise.³⁷

The perception of widespread literacy as a threat can be seen in Hone’s trials, when Sir Samuel Shepherd, the prosecuting counsel, stressed that such texts were not only blasphemous but were also especially hazardous when placed in the hands of the lower classes: “The injury likely to arise from the dissemination of this awful system of impiety would be, the Attorney-General observed, particularly great in the case of those who were not enlightened by education, and who were therefore easily initiated into bad principles by publications of this kind”.³⁸ Given the tenor of Shepherd’s case for the prosecution, Turner’s allusion to the trials with schoolboys throwing stones at books is a brilliant satirical portrayal of how those who were supposedly “enlightened by education” responded with such violence to Hone’s publications.

The question must be asked whether it is reasonable to suppose that Turner would take such an interest in Hone’s trials that he would introduce an allusion to them in this image. In truth, his deep friendship with his most loyal patron, Walter Fawkes, makes this very likely. Turner stayed regularly with Fawkes at his Yorkshire seat, Farnley Hall, and there made a series of watercolours for him titled Historical Vignettes, charting the emergence of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law in England, with further drawings, titled Fairfaxiana, commemorating Thomas Fairfax, the parliamentary commander-in-chief during the Civil War.³⁹ As modern scholars have noted, “what the Historical Vignettes and Fairfaxiana reveal is that Turner and Fawkes shared a full, friendly but perhaps uncritical mutual understanding of the history and purpose of liberty in Britain”.⁴⁰

Fawkes’s opposition to repression was long-standing. Christopher Wyvill, the Yorkshire political reformer, noted with admiration how Fawkes had “stood forward with great spirit in opposition to the unconstitutional measures of Mr Pitt’s administration from 1797 to 1801 etc.”.⁴¹ Fawkes was a political ally of the champion of Reform, Sir Francis Burdett, and sided with the radical wing of the reformers.⁴² His pamphlet The Englishman’s Manual; or, a Dialogue between a Tory and a Reformer (1817) set out the case for Reform, including the introduction of annual parliaments.⁴³ It received a very positive response from Hone in his weekly newspaper, the Reformists’ Register, and Weekly Commentary.

That you, whose name is dear to every one to whom the British Constitution is dear—that you, on whom the lovers of our liberties have long kept a steady eye of admiration and hope—that you are one of the few faithful amongst the faithless, fulfilling more than we have expected, and all that we have wished—keeping steadily to the great cause of Reform, and openly asserting and proving the right of the People to the practical benefits of their Constitution—is to me [a] matter of great exultation.⁴⁴

Fawkes, for his part, was generous to Hone, when immediately after the third trial a subscription was launched to help him overcome his financial difficulties. Many of the subscribers preferred to remain anonymous, for fear of retribution, but some were proud to record their support, among them Fawkes who gave 20 guineas.⁴⁵

Turner had stayed at Farnley in the autumn of 1817, as is shown by a letter he wrote there on 21 November.⁴⁶ It seems more than likely that he would have discussed The Englishman’s Manual with Fawkes during his visit. The following passage from it, among numerous others, is a rhetorical complement to Hone’s satirical attacks on corruption:

The question then is now come to this, Shall a system, fraught with abominations of every kind, be suffered to continue any longer? The voice of the people, I trust, will declare, No! The spectres which, on every assertion of Constitutional rights, haunt the feverish and self-condemned conscience of corruption, cry aloud that it ought not—while those who look for direction in all their worldly affairs to Providence, will do well to consider, that to countenance a system which commences in bribery and perjury, and is fostered throughout by corruption, can never be considered as “Obedience to God”.⁴⁷

Given Fawkes’s sympathy with Hone’s situation, it is certainly possible that he and Turner also considered the upcoming trials and what was at stake for freedom of expression. We do not know precisely when Turner was working on the Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard watercolour, but the conventional dating would suggest that he undertook it after he returned to London, at some point in the winter of 1817–18. If so, the extensive press coverage of Hone’s three trials that December would have been impossible to ignore.

Fawkes’s commitment to Reform in these years was consistent. Although approached in March 1818 to stand again as MP for Yorkshire—he had represented that constituency in 1806–7—he declined to serve, declaring “it is my decided resolution to take no step towards procuring myself a seat in the House of Commons, as at present constituted”.⁴⁸ In 1819, at a meeting in York with other allies of the reformist cause, he spoke out vehemently against the calamity of Peterloo, exhorting his listeners to “turn and protest against this barefaced and deliberate system of magisterial oppression” and declaring “that he would ten thousand times rather be buried in its ruins, in defence of the temple of liberty, than see it converted into a barrack!”⁴⁹ The speech was considered so inflammatory that the Foreign Secretary and Leader of the Commons, Lord Castlereagh paraphrased it in the debate at the opening of the new session of parliament.⁵⁰ For all his rhetoric, however, Fawkes was no insurgent. As a wealthy landowner with large estates, he had a vested interest in constitutional reform as the best means to avoid the violent insurrection that had marked the French Revolution.⁵¹

That Turner shared Fawkes’s politics and might choose to use his paintings to highlight opposition to government repression is suggested in connection with another subject prepared for Whitaker’s History of Richmondshire. The plate Wycliffe, near Rokeby appeared in the book merely as a topographical image, engraved by John Pye and dated 1823. However, a handful of presentation proofs of the engraving include a 242-word inscription below a different, longer title: The Birthplace of John Wycliffe (“The Morning Star of Liberty”), near Rokeby, Yorkshire (fig. 6).⁵² The inscription links the struggle to make the Bible widely accessible to the recent harassment of the radical publisher Richard Carlile for publishing works by Thomas Paine and others.

As with Hone, what was at issue was free speech. Carlile had been imprisoned in Dorchester gaol since 1819 for blasphemy and seditious libel. His wife Jane carried on the business, only to be imprisoned in her turn in February 1821, followed by Carlile’s sister, Mary-Anne, five months later. Part of Mary-Anne Carlile’s defence at her trial, outlining the obstacles faced by early translators and non-clerical readers of the Bible, is repeated almost verbatim in the first part of the inscription added to the Wycliffe proofs.⁵³ Humphrey Boyle then attempted to maintain Carlile’s business, producing a pamphlet attacking religion as idolatry, criticising the Constitution, and supporting Reform. He, too, was charged with blasphemy and seditious libel. As part of his defence, Boyle read explicit passages from the Bible and the Wycliffe inscription ends with a simple reference to the incident: “On the Trial of Humphrey Boyle before Mr Common Serjt. Denman[.] Women and Boys were ordered to quit the court while the defendant read extracts from the Bible”. Boyle had refused to give his name at his trial and was charged as “a Man with Name Unknown”, so denying the newspapers a way to identify him. Turner’s use of Boyle’s name must therefore have come either from reading Richard Carlile’s Report on the Trial of Humphrey Boyle or from talking to those who knew Boyle’s name, most likely sympathisers themselves.⁵⁴

The additional material in these Wycliffe proof engravings was presumably only meant to circulate privately among a select group of individuals and, although it cannot be proved, it seems most likely that Fawkes and his circle were the beneficiaries. Whoever the inscription was intended for, it nevertheless confirms Turner’s willingness to lend his art to the cause of Reform and specifically to freedom of the press. The foreground of the Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard watercolour was likely motivated by the same concerns.

Like many Anglican clergymen, Whitaker was a wealthy, land-owning Tory and benefited from plurality. As the Manchester Guardian observed in its obituary, “his attachment to Government was devoted rather than discriminating … he was by no means without aristocratic prejudices”.⁵⁵ Naturally, he despised belligerent voices raised in the cause of Reform. He served as a JP for the county of Lancaster and the West Riding of Yorkshire, and in that capacity acted to secure order when faced with assemblies supporting Reform in 1817, 1819, and 1820.⁵⁶ In a speech given at Blackburn on 10 February 1817, he attacked the lower orders’

presumptuous habit of judging on subjects which they cannot comprehend, and of censuring their superiors, whose motives are to them inaccessible. On a soil thus prepared, the seeds of Sedition are never scattered in vain; wicked and seductive pamphlets are dispersed; inflammatory harangues pronounced; absurd and impossible remedies for existing evils are proposed, till at length the populace, having placed themselves under such a state of pernicious pupillage, are brought to believe, that instead of living, as they do, under a government, with all its imperfections, the mildest and most equitable upon earth, they have fallen upon the worst and most corrupted age of one which, from time and decay, wants only a single impulse from hands like theirs, to shake it to pieces.⁵⁷

Given Whitaker’s politics, these remarks are to be expected, but what makes this speech so intriguing for a consideration of Turner’s Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard is that Hone’s recently published parody, the Political Litany, is one of the two “wicked and seductive pamphlets” cited by Whitaker in his speech, seeing it as especially provocative because it burlesqued the established church as well as attacking the corruption of government.⁵⁸

Fawkes and Whitaker were both members of the local gentry and acquainted with one another. Fawkes was a subscriber to Whitaker’s publications, including his History of Richmondshire, and his residence, Farnley Hall, was represented in Whitaker’s 1816 publication Loidis and Elmete with three engravings after Turner. Fawkes’s support for Reform would presumably have made him attentive to Whitaker’s defence of the status quo, and the latter’s Blackburn speech is unlikely to have gone unnoticed. Fawkes was also well informed about the Richmondshire project, for in 1816 he and his family had accompanied Turner for the first few days of his tour of the proposed locations. Mindful of Whitaker’s attack on Hone’s Political Litany, an allusion to Hone’s prosecution in Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard was the sort of ideological subversion that Fawkes, for one, could endorse. Adding an inscription citing material from the trials of Mary-Anne Carlile and Humphrey Boyle on some proof copies of the Wycliffe engraving is a further development of this sort of intertextual sabotage.

The inclusion of reformist references in Richmondshire seems personally ungenerous to Whitaker, for in purely monetary terms Turner had been helped by his publications. He had worked initially to provide illustrations for the History of Whalley (1800–1), visiting Whitaker at his residence in 1799 to make the necessary studies for ten finished watercolours at 10 guineas each. Although Turner’s star was rising, Whitaker seems to have regarded him as a jobbing topographical artist, calling him merely “the draftsman” in a letter he sent about Turner’s refusal to copy an old painting of Gawthorpe Hall, rather than use his own design, and noting that: “Turner has all the irritability of youthful genius”.⁵⁹ The artist’s next connection with Whitaker was in 1812 when one of his designs was used for the second edition of Whitaker’s History and Antiquities of Craven, and in 1816 Whitaker used five extant drawings by Turner for his Loidis and Elmete. In the same year, Turner was commissioned to make 120 new designs at 25 guineas each for Whitaker’s most ambitious work, the projected seven-volume General History of the County of York, although Whitaker’s death in 1821 ended the project with only its first part, Richmondshire, ready for publication, with twenty engraved plates after Turner. These various commissions would probably have brought Turner into renewed acquaintance with Whitaker, and he may have directly experienced some of the latter’s hostility to social and political change.⁶⁰

It seems more likely, however, that these two references to freedom of expression in Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard and Wycliffe were not activated principally by a distaste for Whitaker’s politics. The work for publications Turner had in hand in 1817–18, and for that matter in 1822–23, was dominated by the Richmondshire commission, initially producing the watercolours and then supervising their engraving. If he wished to allude to Hone’s, Mary-Anne Carlile’s, or Boyle’s trials, these designs were the ones readily available to him. The fact that Whitaker himself was wholly opposed to such authors would no doubt have appealed to Turner’s sense of irony and may even have afforded him and Fawkes some private amusement, but the primary motive was more serious than that. In both cases, albeit only the Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard engraving had a wide circulation, Turner was bearing witness to what he surely considered to be legal overreach and a crisis in the exercise of free speech.

Why include a reference to William Hone in a watercolour depicting Kirkby Lonsdale? Was it simply that this was the Richmondshire watercolour on which Turner happened to be working as Hone’s trials took place or was his choice more considered? The answer may lie in the person of the Lord Lieutenant of Cumberland and Westmorland, the mining magnate and Tory politician Sir William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale (of the second creation), who shared his title with the town’s name.

The earl was known to Turner, for in 1809 he had commissioned two paintings of the family seat, then being rebuilt as Lowther Castle to the design of Robert Smirke. Turner sketched the house that August and showed the resultant oil paintings at the Royal Academy in 1810.⁶¹ He may have known relatively little about the earl’s political allegiances at the time of his commission but, by the winter of 1817–18, Lord Lonsdale’s contribution to a corrupt political system was a matter of public interest.

Lonsdale had been a loyal follower of William Pitt and remained an enemy of Reform. Predictably, he was one of the Lord Lieutenants who backed Sidmouth when he was seeking to suppress possible anti-government riots in January and February 1817.⁶² The earl’s family had a stranglehold on local politics, with his two sons representing Westmorland for the Tories: Colonel Henry Lowther, the younger son, from 1812, and Lonsdale’s heir, William Viscount Lowther, joining his brother in 1813.⁶³ In December 1817, a manifesto was published by a London committee to prise loose the family’s grip in the forthcoming 1818 election and a subscription was launched to field a Whig candidate to contest the seat, with Henry Brougham being selected in that role in January. The announcement of the committee’s resolutions included statements that made clear their indignation at Lord Lonsdale’s hold on the electoral process.

That by the Constitution under which we live, it is declared … That the Election of Members of Parliament ought to be free; but that this declaration has, in too many instances, been rendered nugatory, by the abuses which time and venality have introduced; and which abuses it is the first duty of Englishmen to correct. That as freeholders of Westmorland, and Friends to its Independence, we sensibly feel the state of political degradation to which it is reduced, in having its representatives chosen by a single individual, and that we will endeavour by every constitutional means in our power, to effect its liberation from that baneful influence, which has so long trampled upon its dearest rights.⁶⁴

Further manifestos were published at Kendal and Appleby against the Lowther monopoly in Westmorland, but the earl’s financial resources and control of the local press—famously recruiting William Wordsworth in his family’s defence—proved insurmountable obstacles.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, Brougham attacked the Lowthers’ unquestioning support of the ministry and in May 1818 spoke in parliament about their manipulation of the franchise.⁶⁶ This was not a parochial matter; the London press covered the Westmorland contest in some detail as it developed.⁶⁷

Kirkby Lonsdale was in the Westmorland constituency and Turner’s earlier work for Lord Lonsdale may have predisposed him to take notice of these reports. One widely circulated notice in January 1818 described how the supporters of the earl’s family had held a meeting to counter the London committee and had recruited “a phalanx of the clergy” to reinforce the Lowther interest.⁶⁸ Turner’s staging of the battle between Reform and corruption in Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard makes particular sense when seen in that political context. Moreover, using schoolboys as surrogates for political adversaries was coincidentally appropriate when we remember that Brougham, as well as standing in the election, was also leading the parliamentary committee investigating the nation’s schooling at the time.

Fawkes’s death in 1825 robbed Turner of one of his greatest friendships, but his continuing commitment to Reform saw him produce a dozen works that have been interpreted as alluding to contemporary politics and political figures as the Reform movement gained strength. Some of them are reasonably obvious such as Salisbury from Old Sarum (circa 1827–28), representing the infamous rotten borough. Others are more obscure, and their references were first systematically revealed by Eric Shanes. The phallic rock bursting out of the sea in Sidmouth (circa 1825) is, in his view, a bawdy reference to Lord Sidmouth’s remarriage in 1823 to a younger woman and thus a way of lampooning one of the chief architects of repression (fig. 7).⁶⁹ Stoneyhurst College, Lancashire (1829) alludes to the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829.⁷⁰ Other works can be aligned with the introduction of the three successive Reform Bills in parliament in 1831 and 1832: most directly the watercolours The Northampton Election, 6 December 1830 (circa 1830–31) (fig. 8) and Nottingham (circa 1831), but also Blenheim House and Park, Oxfordshire (circa 1830–31), which may be understood as a reflection on the waning of aristocratic power faced with the demands of the middle and labouring classes.⁷¹ In Coventry, Warwickshire (circa 1832), the storm clouds over the city’s churches may allude to the vulnerability of the Church of England to reformist pressure, while the children throwing stones in Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire (1833) probably stand for public anger at the bishops’ opposition to Reform, when several of them had their coaches stoned after they voted down the 1831 Reform Bill in the House of Lords (fig. 9).⁷² To this list should be added the oil painting The Prince of Orange, William III, Embarked from Holland, and Landed at Torbay, November 4th, 1688, after a Stormy Passage (1832), inviting viewers to reflect on the parallel between the Glorious Revolution and the “stormy passage” of the Reform Bill’s progress through parliament. The two oils exhibited at the British Institution and the Royal Academy in 1835, both titled The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834 (and in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Cleveland Museum of Art, respectively), have also been interpreted as reflections on the parallel between the physical destruction of the medieval seat of government and the end of the old political order in 1832. In addition, an unfinished oil painting (circa 1833–34), begun in the wake of the successful passing of the Reform Act, is probably to be identified as Turner’s rendering of the climactic moment in Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” when tyranny is finally defeated (fig. 10).⁷³

However, except for The Northampton Election, there is nothing in Turner’s output that represents contemporary political activity in England as such, and it is modern scholarship that has unloaded the allusive or symbolic freight from these works. Turner’s references to the politics of the day are almost always veiled, such that a casual viewer would probably rest content simply with appreciating the artist’s creative approach to the scene in view. That said, a moment’s consideration of the schoolboys’ inclusion in Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard would lead any observer to ponder why Turner wished to introduce such a boorish distraction from the beauty of the overall landscape. Unlike conventional staffage figures who undertake routine activities, and for that reason tend to be overlooked, the boys’ behaviour draws attention to itself as a raucous and violent confrontation. Simply as a pictorial device, their rowdy disturbance of this tranquil spot is highly emphatic and sets up a tension in the visual field that cannot be easily reconciled with the overall treatment of the subject. It seems fair to say that this intrusion was intended by Turner to mirror how politics impacts daily life as a simple matter of consciousness, how our attention may be caught by the urgency of contemporary events and turned away from the innocent pleasures of aesthetic contemplation. Here, then, Hone’s persecution and the repression of liberty more generally, qualify any complacent enjoyment of England’s identity.

While the defence of a free press is the principal subject that is re-enacted in the group of schoolboys, Hone’s indictment necessarily broached wider concerns, too, as indeed his accusers insisted it did. It is a mark of Turner’s sophistication that he found a way to articulate such a complex convergence of ideas in one image. Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard alludes to Reform questions concerning education, religion, freedom of the press, and parliamentary corruption as they manifested themselves in the late 1810s. Of course, none of this is declared forthrightly and for very good reasons. As noted earlier, part of the problem with detecting Turner’s political references stems from the way he had to perform in the public arena. To avoid giving offence to potential patrons or purchasers of his work, he perforce adopted a cryptic approach, allowing him to express his allegiances without announcing them. If this strategy seems over-cautious, we should recall that it was by no means certain at that juncture that the hopes of the Reform movement would prevail. Moreover, affirming one’s support for the freedom of the press in the wake of the Gagging Acts was especially risky, as is demonstrated by the prudent anonymity of so many donors to Hone’s relief fund.

Turner’s covert presentation of contentious matters is therefore understandable; but disguising the allusions in Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard would have had consequences for its comprehension. A well-informed viewer may have understood the timeliness of including schoolboys when education was being actively debated, but the deeper references to William Hone’s persecution and to political corruption, for all their presumed appeal to Fawkes and his circle, are unlikely to have landed at all with the general public. What Turner offered in this image, therefore, was not as fearless, nor as self-incriminating as the assertive productions of Hone, the Carlile family, Boyle, and other oppositional voices, whose courage in the face of harsh legal restrictions is justly celebrated. Nevertheless, even when understood as a compromised statement, Kirkby Lonsdale Churchyard provides further evidence of Turner’s affiliation to the liberal wing of nineteenth-century British politics.

First, my thanks to Baillie Card, Martin Myrone, and Tom Powell for their editorial suggestions as well as their encouragement, and to Maisoon Rehani for securing the images. I benefited from my reviewers’ comments, which proved helpful in revising the article’s presentation and wish to record my appreciation of the care they took to read it. Thanks, too, to Michael Rosenthal for his continued support. Finally, I want to thank the late Eric Shanes, not only for blazing this particular trail in Turner studies, but also for his friendship over many years. This article, for all its faults, is my tribute to his memory.