Edward Baines (1774–1848)


Edward Baines was the editor and proprietor of the Leeds Mercury,, politician, and author of historical and geographic works of reference.
On his death in 1848, the Leeds Intelligencer described his as "one who has earned for himself an indisputable title to be numbered among the notable men of Leeds"
Of his character and physical appearance it remarked: "Mr Baines had great industry and perseverance, as well as patience and resolution; and with those he possessed pleasing manners and address, - that debonair and affable bearing, which conciliated even those who might have felt that they had reason to regard him as an enemy… In person he was of a firm well-built frame, rather above the average stature; his features were regular, his expression of countenance frank and agreeable; and he retained his personal comeliness as well as his vivacity and suavity of manners to the last"

Early years

Edward Baines was born in 1774 at Walton-le-Dale, near Preston, Lancashire. He was educated at Hawkshead Grammar School, and then in the lower school of the grammar school in Preston. He then became a weaver, but at the age of sixteen he was apprenticed for seven years to a printer in Preston. In the fifth year of his apprenticeship, he terminated it and moved to Leeds, where he finished his apprenticeship with the printer of the Leeds Mercury, one of two Leeds weekly newspapers. In later years, both Baines and his political opponents would have it that he arrived in Leeds with little more than the clothes on his back but on completion of his apprenticeship he set up his own printworks with the aid of a loan of £100 from his father. He became a member of the Leeds Reasoning Society and of the local subscription library. He became attracted to non-conformism, and after attending the chapels of both Unitarians and Congregationalists settled for the latter.

Journalism

Revitalisation of ''Leeds Mercury''

In 1801, he was approached to start a third Leeds newspaper to support the interests of Dissent and Reform ; the Mercury was not a reliable friend of Dissent and the leading paper, the Leeds Intelligencer, was avowedly opposed. In the event, the owner of the Mercury offered to sell up, and with the help of loans from like-minded supporters Baines bought the paper for £1552. The paper he acquired was published every Saturday, cost sixpence for four pages, and had a circulation of 700–800. Baines set about improving content and circulation. Baines rapidly introduced material reflecting the commercial interests of Leeds: regular agricultural and commercial reports, shipping news and a report of the state of the London markets. Political affairs were not neglected; a digest of parliamentary proceedings in the previous week was also added. The Mercury soon outsold the Intelligencer, and by 1807 it was selling up to 3 000 copies in a good week. Production methods were improved and outclassed those of the Intelligencer, with new fonts allowing more text per page, and cast-iron handpresses allowing clearer printing than wooden ones. He encouraged "letters to the editor" and was amongst the first provincial newspaper editors to make editorial comment a routine feature of their paper. His leading articles could be vigorous and pointed. In the first Mercury under new ownership, Baines promised "Our Paper shall never be made the Vehicle of Party or Personal Abuse" but within the year the Mercury was exchanging insults with the Cambridge Intelligencer, which accused the Mercury of dancing to the Government's tune with vague reports of nocturnal meetings of the disaffected. In 1805 a new editor of the Leeds Intelligencer attacked the Mercury as "bespattered with... sedition"; together with Baines' heated response this initiated a long-lasting state of mutual incivility between the two papers which makes each an unreliable source for the other's deeds and motives. According to counsel in an 1820 libel case "When there was a dearth of political news, nothing was more common for one Editor to attack another, and the public appeared to find amusement in their squabbles".
The Mercury sent its own reporters to significant events outside its circulation area, such as York Assizes: a Mercury reporter was present and taking shorthand notes at the giant Reform meeting at Manchester which became the Peterloo massacre. That reporter was Baines' second son Edward, who from 1820 onwards progressively took over the everyday running of the Mercury as his father became more involved in local politics. Not only did the Mercury displace the Intelligencer as the leading Leeds paper, by 1832 it could be described by another provincial paper as "the leading provincial paper in England"

"The spy Oliver"

On 14 June 1817, the first edition of the Mercury reported that ten Yorkshire men were held in Wakefield jail accused of planning insurrection. It noted that they had been arrested the previous week at a meeting near Dewsbury between them and a Mr Oliver, who had represented himself as a delegate from a central organising committee in London; its readers would probably infer that 'Oliver' was a spy. Following the arrest of the men, there had been disturbances at Huddersfield and Ossett. The second edition made three further charges, supported by the evidence of respectable named moderate reformers: firstly that 'Oliver' had repeatedly urged one of them a Dewsbury bookseller, to attend the meeting: secondly, that 'Oliver' had been seen by another of them at Wakefield after the arrests, and with no satisfactory explanation why he was still at liberty: thirdly that he had been seen in conversation with a liveried man-servant of General Byng, the army officer responsible for internal security in the North of England, the man-servant later saying that on a previous occasion he had driven Oliver from Byng's house to Wakefield to catch a coach. The Mercury made no charge against Byng, but asked who were the employers of 'this double-distilled traitor' and called upon local magistrates to investigate. "On the 16th the exposure of Oliver in the Leeds Mercury was read in both houses of parliament, by Earl Grey in the lords and Sir Francis Burdett in the commons. A strong sensation was produced; and those members, supported by the body of the opposition condemned in the most indignant language the atrocious proceedings brought to light"
Byng wrote to the Mercury, denying much of the initial report, but Baines printed the letter the following week accompanied by further evidence supporting the Mercury's account and rebutting Byng's. The report triggered revulsion locally against Oliver and against conviction of those led to crime by government agents. Earl Fitzwilliam, a Whig magnate and Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding, wrote to the Home Office saying that any disturbances in the Riding had been minor and were brought about by Oliver's activities : the government should not use them to justify a renewed suspension of Habeas Corpus. Fitzwilliam advised the Huddersfield magistrates not to gather evidence against their rioters; that could only come from accomplices and hence be highly objectionable. At York assizes, the judge in his direction to the jury was even harsher than Fitzwilliam on the unreliability of the evidence of accomplices, and no convictions were secured. Whilst the Mercury's exposure of Oliver prevented the conviction of the Yorkshire prisoners, in Derbyshire the participants in the 'Pentridge rebellion' were not so fortunate, having by mischance killed a man before dispersing when faced with the magistrates and twenty dragoons. Thirty-five were tried for high treason and twenty-three convicted; four being executed. Baines could therefore claim to have saved the lives of fellow-Yorkshiremen., and the unmasking of 'Oliver' gave Baines a national reputation.
However, critics such as William Cobbett pointed out that it was the suspicions of a linen-draper, rather than any investigation by the editor of the Mercury, that had unmasked Oliver., and objected to Baines's treatment of Joseph Mitchell. Oliver had made a previous tour of the North and Midlands with Mitchell, who knew and introduced him to potential insurrectionists. Mitchell was arrested in early May and Oliver made his second tour alone. After Oliver's exposure, Baines prevented Mitchell speaking at meetings of Yorkshire fellow reformers, alleging that Mitchell was under the gravest suspicion of being a spy too. No evidence to support Mitchell being an informer - let alone an agent provocateur - was produced at the time, nor has any been revealed by subsequent investigation in Home Office archives.

"The Great Liar of the North"

Baines used the Mercury to advance the causes he supported, and to resist those he opposed, not only in its editorials, but also in its news reporting. This went beyond the selective choice of events to report, and non-neutral reporting of events covered, to the confident assertion of convenient untruths: for example on factory reform the Mercury asserted that Michael Thomas Sadler had never spoken, attended a debate or voted on Hobhouse's Bill of 1831, ; it put into the mouth of Sir George Strickland a speech in Parliament calling for Sadler's Bill of 1832 to go to a Select Committee, when Strickland had made no such speech and had called for the Bill to be considered by a "Committee of the whole House" and not be delayed by a Select Committee; when Strickland attended a great county meeting in York on factory reform and disowned the words put in his mouth by the Mercury the Mercury's report put into Strickland's mouth its explanation of its mistake, avoiding any mention of the Leeds Mercury. The report of the county meeting alleged widespread drunkenness amongst the attendees, a point which had somehow gone unnoticed by other newspapers. Offended by the claims of drunkenness, factory reform supporters subsequently burnt Baines in effigy outside the Mercury offices; the effigy was labelled front and back "The Great Liar of the North", an epithet Cobbett had previously hurled at the Mercury and Baines, to whom it had stuck. Cobbett later wrote more memorably, and more quotably, of
"BROUGHAM's grand puffer, "the GREAT LIAR OF THE NORTH," NED BAINES, publisher of that mass of lies and nonsense called the "Leeds Mercury" … this swelled-up, greedy, and unprincipled puffer, who has been the deluder of Yorkshire for twenty years past."

Authorship

As well as his journalistic output, Baines was the author of a number of histories and gazetteers. His first book - a History of the Wars of the French Revolution - was published in 1817, having first been published as a part-work from 1814 onwards. Its account up to 1801 borrowed extensively from another author's earlier work of 1803 on the same topic. This went unacknowledged until Baines revised, expanded and retitled the work as a History of the Reign of King George III ; his new preface stating "To facilitate... progress, and at the recommendation of the publisher and proprietor of Mr Alexander Stephens' s History of the Wars published in 1803, nearly half the details of the first volume were abridged from that work." This later led to denunciation of Baines as a plagiarist by one of the editors of the Intelligencer. He also produced history/directory/gazetteers for Yorkshire and for Lancashire, later reworking the latter as a county history, The History of the County Palatine of Lancaster.

Political career

Leeds

As proprietor and editor of the Mercury Baines became an important figure in the affairs of Leeds. An obituary in 1848 noted
Mr Baines took a part in the formation and support of many, if not most of the public institutions of Leeds. In early youth he was a visitor of the Benevolent, or Strangers' Friend Society, to which he always continued a warm friend. He assisted to establish the House of Recovery, the Dispensary, the Lancasterian School, the Philosophical Society, the Mechanics' Institution, the Literary Society, the New Library, the Tradesman's Benevolent Society, the Leeds and Yorkshire Insurance Company, our Provident institutions, our Waterworks…- in short, nearly all the institutions for public utility and benevolence established in Leeds within the last half century

He also became an important figure in Leeds politics, although as a Dissenter and a Reformer he was effectively excluded from Leeds Corporation which until the 1830s was a 'closed corporation'; vacancies were filled by election by the existing members of the corporation; they were Tories and generally Anglicans, and hence so were their successors. One area of political life from which Reformers and Dissenters could not be excluded was the vestry meeting of the parish church - all property owners had to pay church rates and rate-payers were entitled to attend and vote. Baines fought a prolonged campaign to impose strict economy on church outgoings, starting in 1819 with a demand that accounts be published, and finally in 1828 managing to secure the election of churchwardens committed to economy.
In the decade before the Great Reform Act of 1832 Leeds was not a parliamentary borough but was included in the Yorkshire constituency, now returning four MPs. In the 1830 General Election, Baines organised West Riding reformers to ensure that their interests were reflected by the choice of Lord Brougham as one of the two Whig nominees. On the Whigs coming to power, Brougham became Lord Chancellor, necessitating a by-election: this time the Whigs of rural Yorkshire forestalled the West Riding and secured a more traditional candidate: Sir John Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone of Harkness Hall, near Scarborough
Baines was a leading light in reform agitation in Leeds, and was commissioned by Lord John Russell to determine whether qualification in borough constituencies could safely be set as low as £10. Baines found that in Leeds a £10 franchise would give the vote to the middle classes but still exclude the working classes: the results of Baines' investigation were reported by Russell in parliamentary debate as showing that "the £10 qualification does not admit any person who may not safely be intrusted with the elective franchise". As the reform crisis of 1831-2 developed, Radicals broke away from the Leeds reform organisation and founded the Leeds Radical Reform Union, pressing for Whig reform bills to be more thorough-going with a minority holding that they should be opposed. Baines strove to minimise the Radical breakaway, and to retain Radical support for moderate reform, by his own actions, by encouraging formation of a rival Leeds Political Union, by editorials in the Mercury and by ensuring that Radical meetings and manifestations were reported upon unfavourably by the Mercury. The Leeds Patriot, a Radical paper, soon found itself under attack from Baines, responding that "veracity has no charms for Mr Baines, when he has an object to carry...he will stoop to the meanest prevarication and the most contemptible falsehoods"
In the expectation that the Reform Bill of 1831, would pass, and would establish Leeds as a two-member borough constituency, the Leeds reformers chose two candidates in August 1831: John Marshall, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, a gifted Whig orator with a national reputation, but no previous connection with Leeds. When elections for the first reformed parliament eventually took place in December 1832, the two Whigs comfortably defeated the sole Tory candidate Michael Thomas Sadler despite active support for Sadler from the Leeds radical reformers. Sadler had taken up the issue of factory reform; the Mercury denounced this as a Tory trick to lure the gullible away from the Whig reform programme. . Years of activity by Sadler and his brother in Leeds meant that much was known for and against him, and the Mercury was assiduous in reminding its readers of the 'against'.
The Tories and their Radical allies had attacked Macaulay as a placeman and a stranger: interested in Leeds only as providing him with a seat in Parliament; interested in a seat in Parliament largely as a means of securing comfortable sinecures for himself and his family. The Macaulay family was seriously financially embarrassed, and Macaulay soon decided that income from posts held only for so long as the Whigs held power was insufficiently secure. He resigned from parliament and went out to India in 1834 as a member of the supreme council of India, on an annual salary of £10,000. Baines was the Whig candidate at the ensuing by-election; there was a separate Radical candidate, but Baines's chief opponent was the Tory Sir John Beckett. Beckett was Leeds-born and educated; the Beckett family bank was pre-eminent in Leeds and was recognised to have acted in the interests of Leeds as a whole in past crises, but Sir John had pursued a legal career away from Leeds, culminating in his appointment in mid-1817 as Judge Advocate-General, and consequent entry into Parliament in 1818 in Cockermouth, one of his father-in-law's pocket boroughs. As the Mercury pointed out, he had been Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office from 1806 to 1817, the Mercury going on to claim that it was from him that Oliver had received his instructions These and other accusations against Beckett were widely placarded across Leeds. Beckett directly addressed Baines's accusations at the earliest opportunity in a good-humoured speech. Baines was elected, but his majority over Beckett
was only thirty-one. Better Tory organisation for the 1835 general election saw Beckett displace Marshall, but at this and the 1837 general election Baines topped the poll; he stood down in at the 1841 election because his health was deteriorating.

Parliament

In parliament he occasionally spoke against Whig policies, but generally voted for them. He spoke against the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, introducing the New Poor Law, because he felt that there was no call for central government to interfere in areas where poor rates were low; however he became a supporter when the new Poor Law Commission did not in practice intervene. He spoke frequently on the grievances of Dissenters: in May 1834 he chaired a national meeting of Dissenter delegations which preceded discussion of specific grievances with a resolution describing "full and complete separation of church and state" as "the true basis on which equal rights and justice can be secured to all classes of his majesty's subjects
"; later that year he told parliament that "If the principles of dissent were properly understood, the very circumstance of a man being a Dissenter was a declaration that he could not agree to the union between Church and State." However, the Mercury reported although the 1834 meeting had readily endorsed the principle behind its resolution, there had been considerable debate as to the policy of stating it; as a compromise "it was determined to state the principle, but not put it forward in any petition or memorial" In 1837 Baines seems to have been badly worsted in debate as a result: in a debate on the abolition of church rates he was challenged whether this was the ultimate "healing measure" as far as Dissenters were concerned: he responded by denying that Dissenters had any intention to interfere with the connection between Church and State. The next speaker, however, not only gave the House an account of the proceedings at a recent anti-church rate meeting in Leeds, he had come prepared with a copy of the resolutions of the 1834 meeting, which he read out to the House. Baines failed to retrieve the situation by a subsequent editorial in the Leeds Mercury which asserted that whilst the vast majority of Dissenters thought any connection between church and state wrong, the vast majority of them did not see the existence of an established church as a political question, let alone a grievance: but was not believed. He spoke against the continuance of the English Regium Donum, and repeatedly argued that Queen Anne's Bounty should be put on a much sounder basis: its revenue of 'First Fruits and Tenths' - calculated from revenues in the reign of Henry VIII - would be greatly increased by being calculated from current revenues. He supported Poulett Thomson's Bill of 1836 for relaxation of the 1834 Factory Act; he also voted for subsequent government factory regulation bills, but when he spoke in debates on them made it clear that he thought there was no need for them.

Children and legacy

His son, Sir Edward Baines, of St Ann's Hill, Leeds, was editor and afterwards proprietor of the Leeds Mercury, M.P. for Leeds, and was knighted in 1880; his History of the Cotton Manufacture was long a standard authority, he also wrote a biography of his father The life of Edward Baines, late M.P. for the Borough of Leeds.
An elder son, Matthew Talbot Baines, went to the bar; he became recorder of Kingston upon Hull in, M.P. for Kingston upon Hull in 1847, president of the Poor Law Board in 1849, was returned as M.P. for Leeds 1852, again became president of the Poor Law Board, and entered the cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1856.
He had two further surviving sons: Thomas Baines and Frederick Baines ; his fourth and fifth sons died during childhood.
The youngest daughter of Edward Baines – Margaret – married another political figure, Charles Reed, in 1844.
Another daughter, Charlotte, was the mother of South Australian politician and mayor of Adelaide, Theodore Bruce.

Publications

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