The quest for the Annapolis voice of Clementina Grierson (1740?-1774) begins in the early 1970s with the two letters that Emily Kutler, wife of a St. John’s tutor and contractual employee of the Maryland State Archives, tracked down for me at the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, London. In the 1990s I placed one on line in a document packet entitled “Hesitant Revolutionaries,” suggesting that Clementina of the letters was the Clementina Rind of Williamsburg who was Thomas Jefferson’s printer. A number of years later Nicole Brown, who reenacted Clementina at Colonial Williamsburg emailed me asking how I came to that conclusion, and requested that I send her legible copies of both letters. When I could not get better copies from the British National Archives (the successor to the PRO) because they could not locate them, I traveled there myself, found them, and with my trusty iphone captured excellent images, as well as delving into the lives of Clementina and her clergyman father.[1]
A close reading of the letters provided a number of clues to what would prove to be a profound passion for independence, religious freedom, and professional achievement that would be the hallmark of her life and of her son William, who I would soon learn was born in Annapolis, not Williamsburg, as all secondary sources to date allege.
Clementina’s letters are clearly of a well-educated individual grieving over the loss of her father who had died on the voyage to Annapolis. But before the content, what clues to her identity are contained in the letters? Both were written on the 31st of October 1756 to women friends in London, one on Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, the other on Mortimer Street, near Oxford Street, Cavendish Square, places that would prove easy to locate on a map contemporary to her departure, but not the recipients who remain obscured by time.
Even the most careful of scholars, Charles McClean Andrews, distinguished Professor of History at Yale, misread it as Clementina Van Grierson in the inventory he provided the basis of which was Emily Kutler’s assignment to procure copies.
The signature is clear and carefully written:
Instead, as can be seen, it is Clementina Vane Grierson. Clementina was the name of the Polish mother of the Pretender to the throne of Great Britain, Charles Stuart, who was defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1745, while the middle name “Vane”was not Clementina’s middle name at all, but rather her defiant reference to Sir Harry Vane, a member of Parliament who was known for his defence of religious freedom, served for a brief time as the governor of Massachusetts, and was executed in 1662 for signing the death warrant of Charles the First.[2]
As I subsequently learned, Clementina’s father was a supporter of religious freedom as a prominent nonconformist minister and follower of John Wesley. He strongly opposed the rule of the Hanoverians and by the time of his conviction for violating Chancellor Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, had already suffered imprisonment for his beliefs by George II’s not so secret police known as “the King’s Messengers,” whose badge of service was a greyhound.
From the content of the letters it is clear that sixteen year old Clementina could write well and passionately in a style that exhibited a large vocabulary, excellent grammar, and few, if any, spelling errors. Her heartfelt descriptions of her father’s ordeal and death are especially moving in the context of the future she saw before her:
You undoubtedly are by this informed of the fatal reason of not receiving a letter from my Father, and it is needless for me to tell you that that dear Tender parent, that friend whom you so much esteemed, is now no more.
Long had he withstood the cruelty of capricious fortune, but in vain, his constitution was broke by the persecutions of his enemies, and Nature unable to support so many repeated shocks, yielded at last to the dreadful blow, and took from me an indulgent Father, a tender friend, and almost every hope of happiness.
Oh Just Heaven what crime had I committed to deserve so great a punishment. Where can I find words that can express the greatness of my anguish. The most eloquent description of distress will fall short of the distraction I was in.
No fortune, no friend, and going to a part of the world where I was an intire stranger, nothing but wretchedness and misery before me, and not the least idea of redress. In short I cannot tell you what I suffered in that distracting fatal moment. Let it suffice to say that my resolution already almost lost by so long a series of misfortunes, was incapable of resisting so severe a stroke, but with my senses quite foresook me and I remained in a manner ignorant of my loss for almost two days, oh that I still was void of that thought which only returned to make me the more sensible of wretchedness. m<y spirits were so oppresst at leaving england that I fell into a violent fever of which I was but just recovered when my dear father died and the affliction and perplexity that involved me in with the dreadful idea of approaching distress, sunk me again into a worse condition than it it was in before, and my illness continued til I arrive in maryland which was the twenty-eighth of April [1756] …[3]
The next step in seeking Clementina’s voice was to see what could be found about the arrival of ship into the port of Annapolis on the 28th of April, 1756. Because the images of the Maryland Gazette are readily available at no cost on the Maryland State Archives web site, it was relatively easy to discover that the only ship that arrived in Annapolis on the 28th of April, 1756 was the “Ship Greyhound, Captain Alexander Stewart, after a passage of nine Weeks, with about Ninety of the King’s Seven Year Passengers. A Clergyman, who was banish’d for marrying contrary to that late Act of Parliament, died on the Passage.”[4]
courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust[5]
While I did not yet know for certain, it was probable that the clergyman was Clementina’s father. I needed to find the manifest of the Greyhound, which fortunately Peter Coldham has conveniently transcribed and published in The King's Passengers to Maryland and Virginia.[6] A Reverend John Grierson who had been sentenced to fourteen years was on the manifest and did die on the voyage. Clementina was not on the manifest, but she had been a paid passenger as her father’s companion, and the Captain by law only had to report the convicts on board.
Because the court proceedings of the Old Bailey are on line, it was an easy matter to find the trial of Reverend Grierson and the testimony against him. It would take a research trip to London however, to sort out his career as a nonconformist minister whose origins were in the north of England (not Scotland), and who earned his living marrying couples at his chapel in London outside the rules of the established church.
Reverend Grierson openly advertised what were called “Clandestine Marriages”:
When the Parliamentary marriage law of 1753 made such marriages illegal, Reverend Grierson would be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced, but not before he had already been detained by the King’s Messengers for preaching a sermon supporting the Pretender and having in his possession what was determined to be seditious literature. The King’s Messengers were the secret police of the King, who in addition to delivering the diplomatic pouch to his ambassadors, also were charged with investigating and rooting out sedition.
At the age of seven or thereabouts Clementina would have been present when the Kings Messengers, headed by Nathaniel Carrington, and wearing their badges with a silver greyhound dependent, arrived at the door of Reverend Grierson’s on Curzon Street.
1765 map showing a Chapel and Curzon Street[7]
Badge worn by the King’s Messengers during the reign of George III[8]
He was taken under guard to the home of one of the Messengers where he was interrogated on January 15, 1747. In part he explained:
The Examination of
John Grierson living in
Curzon Street near Hyde
Park Corner--
Who saith that he was born at Kirkby Stephen
in Westmoreland: that, he was brought up in
Non juring Principles: that, he was about 7 years
ago ordained a Deacon by the Honble Archibald Campbell
a Nonjuring Bishop at the said Campbell’s House in
Westminster: & since that time the Exam[ed] hath
upon occasions acted and officiated as a nonjuring Deacon,
but never had any Chappell at all …
He saith, that during the time of the
Rebellion … had not any Correspondence with
any people concerned in the Rebellion or… the
Rebels either by Message or Letter: That, he never
was in any Shape concerned for them:
That he never was in his whole life--
engaged in, or privy to any Scheme against the--
present Government: that, it is true [he]
hath read most of the Things published against it,
but in any of his actions he cannot recollect--
that he hath given offence, or that his --
conversation was ever intended or could encourage
Disaffection.
Reverend Grierson was let go without charge, and by 1751 did have his own Chapel, while the King’s Messengers went on to notoriety when in 1765, they broke into the home of an opposition writer, John Entick, and were successfully sued for damages, establishing a legal precedent that inspired the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and became the basis of the 14th.[9]
It was at his own chapel that Reverend Grierson married two actors from David Garricks company, one of whom was best known for her role in “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Garrick was not happy. He was instrumental in having Reverend Grierson charged in violation of the 1753 marriage act that required a license, banns posted, and marriage by an Anglican priest. It did not end well for Pastor Grierson.
The trial of Reverend Grierson at the Old Bailey ended in his conviction and 14 year sentence that required transportation to America and banishment for 14 years.. Before he left on the ship ironically named Greyhound, Reverend Grierson defended himself in the press:[10]
London Daily Advertiser, 1755/12/24, indexed and available on http://newspaperarchive.com
What then can be learned about Clementina’s life in Annapolis and the future she made for herself there? She did not arrive at an auspicious time, at least according to one writer to the Gazette not long after she dispatched her undelivered letters home:
Maryland Gazette, November 6, 1756
Despite the fear of a native uprising and its consequences, Clementina remained in Annapolis for nearly a decade. In the summer of 1762 she ran three ads in the Maryland Gazette, in which she advertised goods and toys for sale at the dwelling house of Mr. William Clajon.[11]
Maryland Gazette, July 22, 1762
Apart from importing goods for sale it is also probable that she also had taught in William Clajon’s school in Annapolis. In 1761 Clajon had moved his school to New York and Clementina, by 1762, was operating a store out of his house.[12]
Rind’s Virginia Gazette, May 30, 1766
(note there were two Virginia Gazettes and both sold editions of Dulany’s pamphlet)
In 1763 or 1764 Clementina gave birth to a son, William Alexander Rind, in Annapolis.[13] The father was William Rind, an Annapolis bookseller and partner of Jonas Green in the printing of the Maryland Gazette, who before he moved his family to Williamsburg in 1765 or early 1766, assisted Jonas Green in the publication of Daniel Dulany’s pamphlet opposing taxation of the colonies, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies. In 1766 Rind would offer Dulany’s pamphlet for sale in Williamsburg as its publisher at his new printing office near the capitol.[14] It is not improbable that Clementina may have been the copy editor in both Annapolis and Williamsburg, and may even have assisted in setting type for the Williamsburg edition.
The story of the Rinds in Williamsburg has been ably documented and is well known. Today an actor portrays Clementina for visitors.[15] Last year, Barbara Sarudy, the former director of the Maryland Historical Society and noted author, published an accurate and perceptive summary of Clementina’s years in Williamsburg.[16] She explains that Thomas Jefferson was instrumental in bringing William and Clementina Rind to Williamsburg and quotes a letter Jefferson wrote in 1809 to William W. Hening:
Until the beginning of our revolutionary disputes, we had but one press, & that having the whole business of the government, & no competitor for public favor, nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it. We procured Rind to come from Maryland to publish a free paper.[17]
Barbara Sarudy notes that the first issue of Rind’s Virginia Gazette appeared May 16, 1766, under the motto: “Open to ALL PARTIES, but Influenced by NONE,” and relates that
The press, the paper & the printer quickly established a good reputation. The fall assembly chose Rind as public printer, & in spite of rising costs of paper & other supplies the business prospered.
When the editor died in August 1773, his family was living on the Main street in the present Ludwell-Paradise House & the printing shop was operated in the same handsome brick building. His widow Clementina immediately took over the editorship & business management of the press for her “dear infants”- William, John, Charles, James, & Maria. The household included also John Pinkney; an apprentice, Isaac Collins; & a Negro slave, Dick who probably worked as a semiskilled artisan.
...
As editor Mrs. Rind was careful to preserve the integrity of the newspaper’s motto & purpose. Reports of foreign & domestic occurrences, shipping news, & advertisements were supplemented by essays, articles, & poems accepted from contributors or selected from her “general correspondence” & from London magazines & newspapers. During her short tenure as publisher, Rind's periodical highlighted new scientific research, debates on education, & philanthropic causes, as well as plans for improving educational opportunities-especially those relating to the College of William & Mary.
...
Clementina Rind Rind was not hesitant to express her own voice in the Virginia Gazette. She wrote articles that expressed her patriotic ideals, which supported rights of the American colonies & denounced British authority. During her tenure, the Virginia Gazette carried an unusual number of poetic tributes to ladies in acrostic or rebus form, literary conceits, & news reports with a feminine slant. As conventional fillers she used sprightly vignettes of life in European high society, in rural England, & in other colonies.
Source: https://classroom.monticello.
In early 1774, she printed Thomas Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of British America just after Peyton Randolph read it aloud in his home to a gathering of Virginia patriots. George Washington was among the first to purchase a copy, writing in his diary that it cost him 3 shillings and ninepence. The pamphlet was reprinted in Philadelphia and London, and its importance has been described as "second only to the Declaration of Independence." It was a document Jefferson had drafted at Monticello for the guidance of Virginia's delegates to the Continental Congress. The colony's House of Burgesses considered the composition too radical for official endorsement, but a group of Jefferson's friends persuaded the Widow Rind to issue it as a pamphlet. Thus A Summary View of the Rights of British America appeared in August 1774. The future author of the Declaration of Independence later wrote: "If it had any merit, it was that of first taking our true ground, and that which was afterwards assumed and maintained." [18]
Clementina did not live long after the printing of Jefferson’s pamphlet. She became deathly ill in September perhaps of a recurrence of the fever that she had contracted aboard the Greyhound. The paper continued for the benefit of her grieving family, and funds were raised to pay her debts and educate her children.
When Clementina died, her eldest, William Alexander Rind was helped by the FreeMasons to become a printer in his own right. He clearly proved to be his parent's child, although in politics he was a Federalist, not a Jeffersonian, and was not averse to working for the Loyalist printer James Robertson who had been strongly opposed to separating from the Crown. William became printer to the Colony of Prince Edward Island, succeeding Robertson, returned to Richmond, Virginia, where his advocacy of Federalist policies forced his departure, and ended his long career as a publisher and printer in Washington D.C. with his death in 1842. Along the way he published a newspaper in Georgetown called the Washington Federalist not to be confused with the Federal Republican, Alexander Contee Hanson’s paper which was the center of the 1812 riots in Baltimore.[19]
To understand and hear Clementina’s voice, it is important to understand her family background, especially the role of her father in shaping her world view, and the nearly ten years she spent in Annapolis before moving to Williamsburg. She was as much a product of London and Annapolis as she was of Williamsburg, and should be accounted among those distinguished women of the Revolutionary era who Cokie Roberts refers to as the Founding Mothers.[20]
[1] email from Nicole Brown, Colonial Williamsburg, December 13, 2016; British National Archives, High Court of Admiralty, Mailbag of the Ship Enterprize, HCA 30/258/2
[3] British National Archives, High Court of Admiralty, Mailbag of the Ship Enterprize, HCA 30/258/2
[4] Maryland Gazette for April 29, 1756
[5] Rev. John Grierson; transported in 1756 for marrying in the Savoy Chapel. Etching | 15.5 x 12.3 cm (sheet of paper) | RCIN 655499. An etching of Revd John Grierson, shown head and shoulders, full face, in wig, gown and bands. Inscribed beneath image 'The Revd Mr Grierson who was Transported for Marrying at the Savoy Contrary to Act of Parliament 175”. The print is trimmed within the platemark, and the lower part of the date has been cut off. No artist was recorded by Henry Bromley in his 1793 Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits (p.277), which suggests that there was no information on the printmaker included at the bottom of the print. Perhaps the impression purchased by George IV when Prince Regent from Colnaghi and Co., 11 July 1811 (RA GEO/MAIN/27635, 'Revd Mr Grierson 5s'). https://www.royalcollection.
[6] Coldham, Peter Wilson. The King's Passengers to Maryland and Virginia. Westminster, Md: Heritage Books, 2006.
[7] https://www.locatinglondon.
[8] advertised for sale at $10,500 at https://www.emedals.com/an-
[9] see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
[10] London Daily Advertiser, 1755/12/24, indexed and available on http://newspaperarchive.com
[11] Maryland Gazette, July 22, 1762, July 29, 1762, and August 5, 1762, found through the index to the Maryland Gazette on http://newspaperarchive.com.
[12] New-York Mercury, February 23, 1761.
[13] there is no official record of the birth of William Alexander Rind, nor of the marriage of William Rind the printer and bookseller to Clementina, but the circumstantial evidence is irrefutable with regard to William Alexander Rind’s birth in Annapolis, and it is more than likely that William Rind and Clementina Grierson were married by an itinerant dissenting minister, possibly Robert Strawbridge (see: http://www.gcah.org/research/
[14] Maryland Gazette, October 10, 1765 and Virginia Gazette, May 30, 1766. The printing history of the Considerations is complex. Rind’s advertisement implies that he was the publisher in Williamsburg and perhaps printed it as a “North American” in competition with another edition offered for sale by his rival, the other Virginia Gazette published by Alexander Purdie.
[16] https://b-
[17] https://founders.archives.gov/
[18] https://b-
[19] My quest for information on William took me to Prince Edward Island and a delightful day at the Provincial Archives. For the Washington Federalist see: https://www.loc.gov/item/
<https://public.ebookcentral.
A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751-1800 by Marie Tremaine
Charlottetown, Island Of St. John
William Alexander Rind, 1790-1798
William Alexander Rind was born and educated in Virginia, the son of William and Clementina Rind. His father, printer of the Virginia Gazette, having died in 1773 and his mother the following year, young William and his brother John received their schooling at the expense of the Williamsburg Lodge of Freemasons and his father’s press in Williamsburg was operated for the benefit of Clementina’s Rind children by John Pinkney. William Rind came to the Island of St. John in 1788, according to his statement in the Washington Federalist, February 19, 1802. He worked as a journeyman in the printing office of James Robertson Sr. and when Robertson left the Island in the following spring, Rind completed the printing of the basic volume of the colony’s laws. As King’s printer he received an annual salary of £40 for the regular printing of the sessions law and Assembly Journal and produced a few other small pieces for the governor. Almost his only other publication probably was the Royal Gazette and Miscellany of the Island of St. John. Rind married on August 24, 1790, Elizabeth Bagnall, daughter of Samuel Bagnall, a loyalist from Philadelphia, who settled in Charlottetown in 1787. Four children born to the Rinds are recorded in the MS baptismal records of St. Paul’s Church, Charlottetown, 1791-1797. On November 9, 1797, a grant of twelve acres of wilderness land in the royalty of Charlottetown was made to Rind and that is the last record we have of his presence on the Island. In October 1798 Lieutenant Governor Fanning wrote the Colonial Office in London that the Printer having lately left the Island with his Family for the United States of America. . . I fear it will be with some delay at least in the future that I shall be able to procure and transmit printed copies of the Acts. Before he left, however, Rind is said to have taught printing to his nephew, James Douglas Bagnall.
Source: https://www.findagrave.com/
[20] Roberts, Cokie. Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. 2005.
