Campbell) The information now before them charged the defendant with having been guilty of propagating a most calumnious and atrocious libel against the prosecutor, Mr. The A TTORNEY-G ENERAL (with whom was Mr. He however was not in the way, and the box having been filled by the talesman, the cause proceeded. It was high time to teach bankers that they must attend to the service of the public as well as others. Lord T ENTERDEN said, that he had heard several names of bankers called in the course of the sittings, none of whom had appeared.
#BOOK COLLECTOR HEBER TRIAL#
The trial upon the criminal information which had been obtained in this case some time ago, in this court, took place this day, before Lord Tenderden and a Jury, two of whom were special, and the rest supplied by tales, the other special jurymen not having attended. (London Sittings, before L ORD T ENTERDEN and Special Juries.) LIBEL IN THE JOHN BULL. Antwerp Printed in the Year 1684, but it was destroyed by his executors after his death in 1833.ĬOURT OF KINGS BENCH, Saturday, Oct. Incidentally, Heber's library contained a copy of the Earl of Rochester's pornographic play Sodom: A Play by the E of R. Heber didn’t return to England until 1831, two years before his death in seclusion in Pimlico. The affair was brought to the notice of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel (for whom Hobhouse was under-secretary), and Peel and Hobhouse more or less forced Heber to leave the country to prevent the affair becoming public. The specific claim was that Heber had made sexual advances to two young men at the Athenaeum, and the father of one of them threatened to bring charges against him. Sir Walter Scott (with whom Heber had collaborated on Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border) said that Heber fled to Brussels after being warned by John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Byron’s confidante, that a warrant was being drawn up for his arrest. The libel specifically about Hartshorne may have been untrue, but Heber's refusal to return from exile and defend himself is related to other rumours about his private life. Hartshorne successfully sued the John Bull for libel, but Heber refused Hartshorne’s request to return to England to dispel the rumours about himself.
Rumours had been circulating since mid-1824, nearly two years before they were publicized in the newspapers.
In 1826 the John Bull newspaper reported, with heavy innuendo, that "Mr Heber will not return to this country for some time the backwardness of the seasons renders the Continent more congenial to some constitutions." The report added that Heber had "an over addiction to Hartshorn" hartshorn is a smelling salt made from ammonia and deer's antlers, but this reference blatantly alluded to a nineteen-year-old antiquary named Charles Henry Hartshorne who spent Christmas 1823 with the 48-year-old Heber and who lived with Heber in London for two months early in 1824. He once said, "No gentleman can be without three copies of a book: one for show, one for use, and one for borrowers." In July 1825 Heber had suddenly left the country and resigned his seat in Parliament. By the time of his death, he had filled eight or nine houses with 145,000 books. When he filled one house from floor to ceiling with his books, he bought another house and when he filled that one, he bought another. NOTE: Richard Heber (1774≡833) was an obsessive book collector, as perhaps is suggested in the pencil drawing of him.
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