Latest / Revisionist History / Guns Part 1: The Sudden Celebrity of Sir John Knight

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Guns Part 1: The Sudden Celebrity of Sir John Knight · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Bushkin. Over the next stretch of revisionist history, we have
0:21
Speaker 1: a special treat for you, six episodes, all devoted to
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Speaker 1: one theme, an examination of the many, weird and strange
0:29
Speaker 1: corners of the American obsession with guns. It's about what
0:33
Speaker 1: we don't know, what we get wrong, how we screwed up,
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Speaker 1: and how utterly bizarre things get in a country where
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Speaker 1: guns stand at the center of our culture. Our journey
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Speaker 1: begins in seventeenth century England with a mysterious merchant named
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Speaker 1: John Knight, who inexplicably has become a twenty first century
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Speaker 1: legal celebrity. Then on to the New York City subways,
0:55
Speaker 1: the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court, a little town
0:58
Speaker 1: in rural Alabama, the south side of Chicago, and the
1:01
Speaker 1: wild wob West Dodge City. To be exact, I'll show
1:06
Speaker 1: you what it means to get out of Dodge. We'll
1:09
Speaker 1: consider a what if involving the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
1:13
Speaker 1: I'll shoot assault rifles in a range in the woods
1:16
Speaker 1: of North Carolina and sit in the basement of the
1:19
Speaker 1: University of Chicago Hospital as an er doc pours out
1:23
Speaker 1: his heart to me. Now, as you may already know
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1:50
Speaker 1: All right, here we go. It's sixteen eighty six in Bristol,
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Speaker 1: a major port and manufacturing center on the southwest coast
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Speaker 1: of England. A local merchant named John Knight, Sir John
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Speaker 1: Knight is riding up a steep road outside the city
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Speaker 1: to an Anglican church, Saint Michael's on the hill greystone
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Speaker 1: slate roof sturdy walls built during medieval times to withstand
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Speaker 1: the full brunt of hostile force. The city of Bristol
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Speaker 1: spread out below. Sir John Knight bursts in and then,
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Speaker 1: oh my god, John Lone. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
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Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
3:00
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. In this episode, I invite you to descend
3:05
Speaker 1: with me into the deep and bottomless historical pit. That
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Speaker 1: is Sir John Knight, the irrepressible Englishman who has achieved
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Speaker 1: more than three centuries after his death, a sudden and
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Speaker 1: extraordinary celebrity. How was it that the John Knight case
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Speaker 1: came to such a promise? Who uncovered it? It doesn't
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Speaker 1: sound like this wasn't a case that was in There
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Speaker 1: wasn't a famous case name at the time.
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Speaker 2: I don't.
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Speaker 3: I hate to say.
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Speaker 4: It's like, you know, if you talk about history, like
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Speaker 4: you know, you can go to Africa and find a
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Speaker 4: rock with somebody's name on it. This is, you know,
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Speaker 4: founded by white guy in nineteen eighteen. No, it was existent, right,
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Speaker 4: it was there, It's always been there.
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Speaker 1: So I wanted to explain how that happened and why
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Speaker 1: he matters. And I know that this is something you've
4:12
Speaker 1: thought about, so I naturally wanted to call you. First
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Speaker 1: question sulled for me. Who is the first modern legal
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Speaker 1: scholar to reference Sir John Knight?
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Speaker 5: Depends on what you mean by William Hawkins into seventy
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Speaker 5: six in his seventeen sixteen treatise.
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Speaker 1: I mean last fifty years his most recent celebrity.
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Speaker 5: Who well, I mean he was around in case law,
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Speaker 5: you know, not as common as he's been in the
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Speaker 5: twenty first century. But he was. He was always around
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Speaker 5: in case law to some degree. You know, shows up
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Speaker 5: in a major eighteen forty three case in North Carolina
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Speaker 5: and then another nineteen sixty eight North Carolina case, among others.
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Speaker 1: So yeah, I think, I you know, I was. I
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Speaker 1: got really interested in the way the Second Amendment debate
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Speaker 1: has been transformed, and instead of focus on history and
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Speaker 1: got the reason I got into is that I got
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Speaker 1: really fascinated by the Sir John Knight case.
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Speaker 6: Now oh, yes, right.
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Speaker 1: And everyone says, oh, the person you have to talk
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Speaker 1: to is Joyce Malcolm. So here I am, and here
5:26
Speaker 1: you are.
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Speaker 5: Here I am.
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Speaker 1: When you were doing your book, your original work on this,
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Speaker 1: how did you come across the Sir John Knight case.
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Speaker 7: Ah, well, it's a long time gone out.
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Speaker 1: John Knight's name is spoken first only in the smallest
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Speaker 1: of historical circles. Then it gets repeated again and again
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Speaker 1: with increasing frequency in bigger and bigger rooms.
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Speaker 8: I was at a conference in d C where they
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Speaker 8: were discussing Second Amendment issues, and they had people giving
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Speaker 8: papers from all perspectives, and I was just there to
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Speaker 8: offer some historical input and I found myself having to
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Speaker 8: clarify some of the basic details and mis assertions have
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Speaker 8: been made about what had actually happened. So I said,
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Speaker 8: I happened to know about this because I've read a
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Speaker 8: lot of the sources.
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Speaker 1: Do we know what Sir John looked like, his family life,
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Speaker 1: his personal circumstances, Not really, but we do know something
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Speaker 1: of his character, principled to a fault, contentious, possess of
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Speaker 1: a steadfastness of mind.
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Speaker 6: Indeed, so he was a Bristol merchant, he was from
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Speaker 6: quite an important Bristol mercantile family, and perhaps because his
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Speaker 6: father had been a sugar maker, Sir John Knight appears
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Speaker 6: to have gone out to the West Indies and spent
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Speaker 6: a period of time there, apparently rather controversially, because when
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Speaker 6: he then applied a couple of years before we're deinning
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Speaker 6: with to be the governor of the Leeward Islands, he
6:55
Speaker 6: appears to have been vetoed by the people there saying
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Speaker 6: that from their experience of him, he was the last
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Speaker 6: person that they wanted to come out as the governor,
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Speaker 6: and it may have been partly his resentment at that throwback,
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Speaker 6: people have suggested may have been one reason why he
7:12
Speaker 6: turned against the government of James the Second, which up
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Speaker 6: until that point he had been very strongly supporting. So
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Speaker 6: he appears to have been a man of a short
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Speaker 6: tempera much disliked by many other people, highly manipulative.
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Speaker 1: But do we need to make friends of our heroes, No,
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Speaker 1: we don't. What we demand of our heroes is that
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Speaker 1: they serve some larger cause, that they stand for something
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Speaker 1: that their name would be uttered with reverence on some
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Speaker 1: grand stage.
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Speaker 9: I know you've had a substantial debate with your friends
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Speaker 9: on the other side about the Statute of Northampton.
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Speaker 1: Do you know who that is? Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court Justice,
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Speaker 1: during oral arguments in November of twenty twenty one, posing
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Speaker 1: a question to the legendary appellate lawyer Paul Clement.
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Speaker 9: We haven't heard about that today, and I just wanted
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Speaker 9: to give you a chance.
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Speaker 10: Thank you, Justice Gorsich. I'd say just a couple of
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Speaker 10: quick things about the Statute of Northampton.
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Speaker 1: Wait for it. Wait for it.
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Speaker 10: First of all, I think that it was very clear
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Speaker 10: from the Knight's case and the treatises that this Court
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Speaker 10: relied on in Heller that by the time of the
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Speaker 10: framing of the Knight's Case.
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Speaker 1: When the final accounting is done of the twenty first century,
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Speaker 1: a handful of Supreme Court cases will stand out as landmarks.
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Speaker 1: The Citizens United Case from twenty ten, for example, which
8:52
Speaker 1: freed corporations to spend enormous amounts of money on political candidates,
8:56
Speaker 1: the decision to overturn abortion rights, and very high on
9:01
Speaker 1: that list, a pivotal gun rights case that came before
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Speaker 1: the Court in late twenty twenty one.
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Speaker 10: We will hear argument this morning in case twenty eight
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Speaker 10: forty three New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin.
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Speaker 1: New York Rifle and Pistol otherwise known as the Bruin Case.
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Speaker 1: Broome was about the Second Amendment to the Constitution, a
9:28
Speaker 1: well regulated militia comma being necessary to the security of
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Speaker 1: a free state Comma the right of the people to
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Speaker 1: keep and bear arms comma shall not be infringed. What
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Speaker 1: does that sentence mean? For years and years scholars have
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Speaker 1: argued about that. We even weighed in on it here
9:46
Speaker 1: at Revisionist History. If you remember in season three's Divide
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Speaker 1: and Conquer episode with an investigation of the significance of
9:54
Speaker 1: the commas that surround the phrase being necessary to the
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Speaker 1: security of a free state. But then along comes the
10:03
Speaker 1: Bruin Case. For one hundred years, a law has been
10:07
Speaker 1: on the books in New York State that says you
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Speaker 1: can only get a handgun if you prove you need
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Speaker 1: one for some specific purpose. And the gun lovers of
10:16
Speaker 1: New York are unhappy about this. They sue. The Supreme
10:20
Speaker 1: Court agrees to take the case, and in November of
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Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, lawyers for both sides gather for what
10:27
Speaker 1: is the first stage in all Supreme Court cases, oral arguments.
10:31
Speaker 1: They're in the Court's Central Chamber on First Street, across
10:35
Speaker 1: from the Capital, an imposing room in the grand Neoclassical
10:39
Speaker 1: Revival style, forty four foot ceilings twenty four ionic columns
10:43
Speaker 1: in marble shipped from Liguria, Italy. The justices are sitting
10:48
Speaker 1: all in a row behind a long curved Mahogany table,
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Speaker 1: there to hear the lawyers on both sides of the
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Speaker 1: Bruin case present their oral arguments. The room's packed, A
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Speaker 1: sense of anticipation is in the.
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Speaker 10: Air, mister Chief Justice, and may it please the Court
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Speaker 10: the text of the second Amendment in Shrine's aright, not
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Speaker 10: just to keep arms, but to bear them, and the
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Speaker 10: relevant history and tradition exhaustively surveyed by this Court in
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Speaker 10: the Heller decision confirm that the text protects an individual
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Speaker 10: right to carry firearms outside the home for purposes of
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Speaker 10: self defense.
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Speaker 1: Paul Clement, lawyer for the gun rights group.
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Speaker 11: I'm happy to continue by point I missed a Clement,
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Speaker 11: I'm sorry to interrupt you.
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Speaker 1: That's Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Thomas would go on
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Speaker 1: to write the Court's majority opinion in the case. This
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Speaker 1: is the moment where he tips his hand shows us
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Speaker 1: where he's leaning.
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Speaker 11: If we analyze this and use history, tradition texts of
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Speaker 11: the Second Amendment, we're going to have to do it
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Speaker 11: by analogy. So can you give me a regulation in
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Speaker 11: history that is a base that would form a basis
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Speaker 11: for legitimate regulation today. If we're going to do it
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Speaker 11: by analogy, what would we analogize it to? What would
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Speaker 11: that look like?
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Speaker 1: If you were a law student armed with a yellow highlighter,
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Speaker 1: you would underline the words history and tradition. Why Because
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Speaker 1: Thomas is telling us something crucial here. He doesn't care
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Speaker 1: about the commas in the Second Amendment. He doesn't care
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Speaker 1: about the arcane theories of the legal scholars. He doesn't
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Speaker 1: even care about what the citizens of New York State
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Speaker 1: may or may not think about restricting handguns. He cares
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Speaker 1: about what the Founders thought when they wrote the Second Amendment.
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Speaker 1: And when he says you're going to have to do
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Speaker 1: it by analogy, what he means is the only way
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Speaker 1: to decide whether a restriction on guns is valid, is
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Speaker 1: consistent with the Second Amendment? Is did the Founders way
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Speaker 1: back when ever, consider a restriction that looks like this
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Speaker 1: New York law, would they have been okay with it?
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Speaker 11: And Clement agrees, So can you give me a regulation
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Speaker 11: in history that is a base that would form a
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Speaker 11: basis for a legitimate regulation today.
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Speaker 1: Yes, that's what this case is about. We're arguing history here.
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Speaker 12: Mister Chief Justice, and may it please the court.
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Speaker 1: Then the attorney for the other side stands up, Barbara Underwood,
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Speaker 1: Solicitor General of the State of New York.
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Speaker 12: For centuries, English and American law have imposed limits on
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Speaker 12: carrying firearms in public and the interests of public safety.
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Speaker 12: The history runs from the fourteenth century Statute of Northampton,
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Speaker 12: which prohibited carrying arms in fairs and markets, and other
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Speaker 12: public gathering places to similar laws adopted by half of
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Speaker 12: the American colonies and states in the Founding period.
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Speaker 1: The Statute of Northampton. That's the third time we've heard
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Speaker 1: it mentioned in a case heard in the twenty first
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Speaker 1: century about a law passed in the twentieth century. The
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Speaker 1: court has asked for insight into how the Founders felt
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Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century, and the lawyers said, well, then
14:12
Speaker 1: we need to look to the fourteenth century. Thirteen twenty
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Speaker 1: eight to be precise, your honor, during the reign of
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Speaker 1: Edward the Second, the English Parliament passed the Statute of Northampton,
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Speaker 1: which says that no man shall disturb the peace by
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Speaker 1: riding armed night or day, without quote forfeiting their bodies
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Speaker 1: to prison at the King's pleasure. The Statute of Northampton
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Speaker 1: is part of English common law. English common law is
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Speaker 1: what the first English settlers brought with them on the Mayflower.
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Speaker 1: English common law is what the Founding fathers learned in school.
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Speaker 1: You want an analogy from history, you want to play
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Speaker 1: early history, I give you a crucial law from thirteen
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Speaker 1: twenty eight, which absolutely the Founders knew about, that restricts
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Speaker 1: guns way more than anything. We're talking about in this court,
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Speaker 1: your honor cases are chess. This is check. The only
15:13
Speaker 1: way the gun rights crowd can win is if they
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Speaker 1: can find their own bit of ancient history that trump's
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Speaker 1: the Statute of Northampton, and incredibly they do. John Lowe, Yeah, yeah,
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Speaker 1: going back to when you were doing your book, your
15:35
Speaker 1: original work on this, how did you come across the
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Speaker 1: Sir John Knight case.
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Speaker 7: Ah, well, it's a long time ago now, but I
15:44
Speaker 7: looked through all of the cases and there are these
15:47
Speaker 7: little handbooks on what the law was at different times
15:50
Speaker 7: that were published is to help justices of the peace
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Speaker 7: and judges. I looked through the laws. I did a
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Speaker 7: lot of manuscript reading and really investigating what Parliament was doing,
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Speaker 7: what was happening at that time.
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Speaker 1: Joyce Malcolm the Patrick Henry Professor of Constitutional Law and
16:11
Speaker 1: the Second Amendment at the ntonin Scalia Law School at
16:14
Speaker 1: George Mason University in Virginia. In a world where history
16:19
Speaker 1: matters more than law or public sentiment, historians become heroes.
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Speaker 1: The magazine National Review once described Joyce Malcolm as the
16:29
Speaker 1: nice girl who saved the Second Amendment. She quote looks
16:33
Speaker 1: nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun control wars. Small,
16:38
Speaker 1: slender and bookish. She's a wisp of a woman who
16:41
Speaker 1: enjoys plunging into the archives and sitting through panel discussions
16:46
Speaker 1: at academic conferences. Malcolm felt the argument over gun rights
16:51
Speaker 1: had been set adrift from history. If we didn't know
16:54
Speaker 1: what the founders thought, how would we know what we
16:57
Speaker 1: should think. In her most famous book, To Keep and
17:00
Speaker 1: Bear Arms, The Origin of an American Right, she set
17:03
Speaker 1: out to answer that question, and while pouring through case
17:06
Speaker 1: books from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, she found it
17:10
Speaker 1: the key that unlocked the whole mystery. No more than
17:14
Speaker 1: a handful of paragraphs and a short summary, but the
17:17
Speaker 1: story it told was riveting. It's sixteen eighty six. England
17:25
Speaker 1: is overwhelmingly Protestant, legally and officially dominated by the Church
17:29
Speaker 1: of England, but for a brief period in the sixteen eighties,
17:33
Speaker 1: the king was James the Second, who was Catholic, and
17:37
Speaker 1: Church of England loyalists were outraged by the possibility that
17:41
Speaker 1: the king might try and empower his fellow Catholics, and
17:44
Speaker 1: one of those outraged Church of England loyalists was a
17:48
Speaker 1: merchant from the coastal town of Bristol, a man named
17:53
Speaker 1: Sir John Knight. One day, Knight rides up a steep
18:03
Speaker 1: road outside Bristol to the Anglican Church of Saint Michael
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Speaker 1: on the Hill Sin the story goes waving his guns,
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Speaker 1: gives an impassioned speech. James the Second hears of it
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Speaker 1: and has Knight arrested charges him under the Statute of Northampton.
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Speaker 8: The information sets forth that the defendant did walk about
18:28
Speaker 8: the straits armed with guns, and that he went into
18:30
Speaker 8: the Church of Saint Michael in Bristol in the time
18:32
Speaker 8: of divine service with a gun to terrify the King's subjects.
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Speaker 1: And what happens. The jury decides not guilty. Joyce Malcolm
18:42
Speaker 1: reads this and it takes her breath away. Everyone thinks
18:46
Speaker 1: that English common law, on which the American legal tradition
18:49
Speaker 1: is based was hostile to people walking around with guns.
18:53
Speaker 1: But that is not true. John Knight was acquitted. John
18:57
Speaker 1: Knight goes up against the Statute of Northampton and John
19:01
Speaker 1: Knight wins. One side says the Statute of Northampton. Check
19:07
Speaker 1: The other side counters Night checkmate.
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Speaker 7: So there's been this big debate about what the Statute
19:16
Speaker 7: of Northampton meant. But I can say that if it
19:19
Speaker 7: was archaic by the seventeenth century, it was certainly archaic
19:24
Speaker 7: by the eighteenth century, when we've got the Second Amendment,
19:27
Speaker 7: and for sure the twenty first century.
19:30
Speaker 1: The nice girl who saved the Second Amendment. And if
19:34
Speaker 1: you read through the briefs file before the Supreme Court
19:36
Speaker 1: in Bruin, what do you find John Knight. Everywhere we
19:41
Speaker 1: hear about the famous case of Sir John Knight, we
19:44
Speaker 1: get history lessons on John Knight. We learned that the
19:47
Speaker 1: legal entanglement he found himself in after he burst into
19:50
Speaker 1: the church at Saint Michael's on the Hill is the
19:53
Speaker 1: most quote significant precedent quote in understanding a crucial turn
19:58
Speaker 1: in Second Amendment law. During oral arguments, Neil Gore sutch
20:03
Speaker 1: lobes as softball Paul Clement about the Statute of Northampton.
20:07
Speaker 9: I know you've had a substantial debate with your friends
20:12
Speaker 9: on the other side about the Statute of Northampton, and.
20:15
Speaker 1: Paul Clement knocks the question out of the park John
20:19
Speaker 1: Knight Baby. Then six months later comes the final ruling
20:29
Speaker 1: in Bruin. Just as Clarence Thomas promised, It's all about history.
20:35
Speaker 1: Eight pages on the perier between twelve eighty five and
20:38
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six, five pages on colonial America, nine pages
20:43
Speaker 1: on seventeen ninety one to the Civil War, six pages
20:47
Speaker 1: on the Path to reconstruction. One of the most important
20:50
Speaker 1: cases of our generation, a landmark that once and for
20:54
Speaker 1: all clarifies the most controversial of all the amendments to
20:58
Speaker 1: the US Constitution. The debate is over now we know
21:02
Speaker 1: with the founders under the sway of the Statute of Northampton. No,
21:06
Speaker 1: they were not, the court rules history teaches us. Otherwise,
21:10
Speaker 1: the founders would have frowned on the way in New
21:12
Speaker 1: York State tried to regulate handguns. And we know this
21:15
Speaker 1: because of one man's heroic acquittal. If you read the
21:20
Speaker 1: brew and ruling, John Knight looms over it like a colossus.
21:26
Speaker 1: John Knight, John Knight, John Knight. He pops up again
21:29
Speaker 1: and again like a late seventeenth century whack them all.
21:34
Speaker 1: I've been really drawn effect this morning. I was reading
21:37
Speaker 1: over again this stuff about the Rex v. Knight, the
21:41
Speaker 1: John Knight case. I call up a second amendment scholar
21:44
Speaker 1: named Patrick Charles. Before long talk swung to John Knight.
21:49
Speaker 1: Of course it did. There's no quitting John Knight. Once
21:52
Speaker 1: you catch John Knight Fever, But you know that it's
21:55
Speaker 1: a totally fascinating history taken in itself, but in context.
22:00
Speaker 1: The idea that you know, in the middle of a
22:04
Speaker 1: contemporary debate about how to handle the possess of dangerous
22:10
Speaker 1: weapons in America, that we're spending our time obsessing about
22:15
Speaker 1: a case from the seventeenth century in Bristol and England
22:19
Speaker 1: is hilarious.
22:20
Speaker 3: Yes, on the one level, you're you're absolutely critic.
22:23
Speaker 1: Patrick Charles and I agreed that it was hilarious to
22:26
Speaker 1: spend so much time on John Knight. And then what
22:28
Speaker 1: do we do? We continue talking about John Knight. John
22:32
Speaker 1: Knight is the groundhog who emerges from his musty English
22:36
Speaker 1: lair every spring to cast a shadow across twenty first
22:39
Speaker 1: century jurisprudence, the beaver who stealthily builds a legal edifice
22:44
Speaker 1: out of mud and sticks. The constitutional scholar and a
22:49
Speaker 1: founding member of the John Knight fan Club. David Copple
22:53
Speaker 1: once combed through the library of an eighteenth century law
22:56
Speaker 1: professor named George Wythe who taught law to a Supreme
22:59
Speaker 1: Court justice, a couple of presidents, some founding fathers, and
23:03
Speaker 1: he found that John Knight's name was all over law
23:06
Speaker 1: books back then. Surely this is all all the founders
23:09
Speaker 1: were talking about over a good pipe and a bottle
23:12
Speaker 1: of claret in the drawing rooms of colonial Philadelphia. You
23:17
Speaker 1: were in Bristol not long ago.
23:20
Speaker 5: I was my wife and I were on vacation, and
23:23
Speaker 5: as we were on our way from Cornwall to Wales,
23:27
Speaker 5: I we did stop at Saint Michael Church in Bristol
23:32
Speaker 5: where all this stuff happened, because I wanted to see it,
23:36
Speaker 5: maybe see if Sir John Knight was buried in that graveyard.
23:39
Speaker 1: David Copple, on vacation, says to his wife, we cannot
23:43
Speaker 1: quit this storied isle without paying homage to the man
23:47
Speaker 1: whose brave example saved America from the tyranny of restrictive
23:52
Speaker 1: gun laws.
23:54
Speaker 5: And it was interesting. It's not a huge cathedral type church.
23:57
Speaker 5: It's a medium sized church, but it's up on the hill.
24:01
Speaker 5: As I learned the hard way, because I was driving
24:04
Speaker 5: a stick shift and getting up that very steep hill
24:07
Speaker 5: was quite a challenge.
24:09
Speaker 2: Yeah.
24:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you're in the area and you couldn't resist
24:12
Speaker 1: to stop by. And actually I kind of want to
24:15
Speaker 1: see Saint Michael's myself.
24:16
Speaker 5: Go ahead, tell me why you want to You want
24:18
Speaker 5: to see it too.
24:19
Speaker 1: Of course I do. I mean, who wouldn't want to
24:21
Speaker 1: learn of this giant in the place of his birth
24:24
Speaker 1: and death. But then, just as I was packing my
24:28
Speaker 1: bags for Bristol, I thought, wait, let me check in
24:31
Speaker 1: with a more disinterested historian of that period. I called around.
24:36
Speaker 1: Someone recommended a man named Jonathan Barry of the University
24:40
Speaker 1: of Exeter. When you, as a historian of this period,
24:44
Speaker 1: see the way that John Knight has suddenly popped up
24:48
Speaker 1: in American gun rights discourse, what's your reaction?
24:54
Speaker 6: Well, I find it bizarre because nobody that's ever heard
24:56
Speaker 6: of him or the case, and it has no implication,
25:00
Speaker 6: you know, as far as I know. In the English
25:02
Speaker 6: jurist Britain's not the land of Drews. But you know
25:04
Speaker 6: it's it's of no significance.
25:07
Speaker 1: Huh, England, John Knight is a nobody, But in the
25:12
Speaker 1: hallowed halls of the Supreme Court three and a half
25:15
Speaker 1: thousand miles away, he's a superstar. It's a puzzle, and
25:21
Speaker 1: it is for puzzles like these that God invented revisionous history.
25:43
Speaker 1: One of the problems associated with the coronation of John
25:46
Speaker 1: Knight as the savior of the gun rights movement is
25:49
Speaker 1: that our understanding of the details of his arrest and
25:52
Speaker 1: acquittal was limited. We had the verdict, but not much else.
25:58
Speaker 1: After all, it happened in sixteen eighty six. It's not
26:01
Speaker 1: like there are digital records somewhere in the Bristol courthouse.
26:05
Speaker 1: What was known about the case came from legal catalogs
26:08
Speaker 1: from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the kind that a
26:11
Speaker 1: lawyer or a judge might subscribe to that offer brief summaries,
26:16
Speaker 1: news briefings of the goings on in various court houses
26:19
Speaker 1: around England. That's what Joyce Malcolm found in her Eureka moment,
26:23
Speaker 1: a brief write up from a long ago legal newsletter
26:27
Speaker 1: on a matter of Rex v.
26:28
Speaker 12: Night.
26:29
Speaker 1: It was about a paragraph long. But let's be honest,
26:33
Speaker 1: one paragraph in a legal digest is not exactly the
26:37
Speaker 1: strongest of foundations for completely overturning our understanding of the
26:42
Speaker 1: Second Amendment. And, perhaps more ominously, the newly inaugurated members
26:48
Speaker 1: of the Sir John Knight Fan Club tended to be lawyers,
26:51
Speaker 1: and lawyers deal in black and white hard facts, the
26:55
Speaker 1: letter of the law, tangible evidence. But now they had
26:59
Speaker 1: crossed over into the land of history, and history is
27:02
Speaker 1: not like the law at all. History is a living,
27:05
Speaker 1: organic thing that gets rewritten all the time. I mean,
27:08
Speaker 1: why do you think we call this podcast revisionist history
27:11
Speaker 1: because historians love to say, wait a minute, I found
27:15
Speaker 1: something new that makes me think we didn't quite realize
27:18
Speaker 1: what we were talking about before. And in the case
27:21
Speaker 1: of Sir John Knight, that something new was the Newsletter
27:26
Speaker 1: of the Intrepid Roger Morris Rojamoris Roger Morris was a
27:36
Speaker 1: journalist who wrote a private newsletter in the sixteen eighties
27:40
Speaker 1: for a variety of well connected clients. Roger Morris knew
27:45
Speaker 1: everyone and everything in late seventeenth century England. He passed
27:49
Speaker 1: on high end gossip. He told stories no one had
27:52
Speaker 1: ever heard before, about brothels and prostitutes and somebody bearing
27:56
Speaker 1: their breast to the Moroccan ambassador. He wrote about how
27:59
Speaker 1: the ice was so thick in the long cold winter
28:01
Speaker 1: of sixteen eighty four that people roasted an ox on
28:05
Speaker 1: the River Thames. He saw the King's baby and air
28:08
Speaker 1: a close and reported and you have to love this
28:11
Speaker 1: little bit of late medieval trolling. The child was a large,
28:16
Speaker 1: full child in the head and the upper parts, but
28:20
Speaker 1: not suitably proportioned in the lower parts. Roger Morris was
28:25
Speaker 1: a gold mine, but there were a few problems. The
28:31
Speaker 1: first was that Roger Morris's reputation did not extend beyond
28:35
Speaker 1: the late seventeenth century. His newsletters ended up in an
28:38
Speaker 1: obscure library in central London where no one paid attention
28:42
Speaker 1: to them for several hundred years. Second problem, Roger Morris
28:47
Speaker 1: was incredibly prolific. The Roger Morris archives extend into the
28:52
Speaker 1: millions of words, so if you wanted to find out
28:55
Speaker 1: what Roger Morris had to say about this or that,
28:58
Speaker 1: you had to make a commitment. Third, and maybe the
29:03
Speaker 1: biggest problem of all, Roger Morris's entire life work was
29:08
Speaker 1: written in code. I mean, if you're could have dissed
29:12
Speaker 1: the private parts of the heir to the throne, you
29:14
Speaker 1: have to take some precautions.
29:20
Speaker 8: There was an attempt by historian called Douglas Lacy to
29:24
Speaker 8: try and to start to work on a volume.
29:27
Speaker 1: That's the historian Tim Harris.
29:29
Speaker 8: He did a book in the nineteen fifties. He couldn't
29:33
Speaker 8: break the shorthand couldn't break the code. And it's too
29:36
Speaker 8: much for one person's take.
29:37
Speaker 1: On a cryptographer from Oxford had to get involved. Teams
29:41
Speaker 1: of historians volunteered, passing the job down from one generation
29:45
Speaker 1: to the next, until finally there it was a full
29:50
Speaker 1: shelf of encyclopedia sized volumes offering hitherto unknown insights into
29:56
Speaker 1: one of the most complex eras in British history. And
30:00
Speaker 1: Roger Morris, it turns out, had a lot to say
30:04
Speaker 1: about Sir John Knight.
30:05
Speaker 8: It's a seven volume edition and there was a team
30:09
Speaker 8: of us who did it, and now it's widely available.
30:12
Speaker 8: And because it's widely available, people are looking at it
30:14
Speaker 8: more and say, oh, there's not more we can find
30:15
Speaker 8: out about this is John Knight case. It's an incredible source.
30:20
Speaker 8: It has lots of very valuable information, and it's clearly
30:24
Speaker 8: well informed and if you could check his information against
30:27
Speaker 8: other sources, it's clearly accurate. But he also gives you
30:30
Speaker 8: additional information which you won't get elsewhere.
30:33
Speaker 1: So much additional information. Oh my god.
30:36
Speaker 6: So he was a Bristol merchant. He was from quite
30:41
Speaker 6: an important Bristol mercantile family.
30:45
Speaker 1: Jonathan Berry, historian at the University of Exeter. The Knights
30:49
Speaker 1: ran sugar refineries, They had plantations in the Caribbean. They
30:53
Speaker 1: were politically well connected and their sympathies did not lie
30:57
Speaker 1: with the Catholic King of England, James the second, John
31:00
Speaker 1: Knight hated Catholics. One day he learns that a group
31:05
Speaker 1: of Irish Catholics are holding a secret mass in a
31:08
Speaker 1: house in he arranges to have the priest arrested.
31:13
Speaker 8: So he gets the Lord Mayor and other magistrates to
31:16
Speaker 8: raid this Catholic chapel. A couple of weeks later, there's
31:19
Speaker 8: an anti Catholic ritual in Bristol which the government suspects
31:24
Speaker 8: the magistrates to Bristol and maybe Sir John Knight were
31:27
Speaker 8: involved in encouraging. Where they parade through the city scoffing
31:31
Speaker 8: the mass. They hold a piece of bread up in
31:34
Speaker 8: the air, and they have someone dressed as a Virgin
31:37
Speaker 8: Mary and someone dressed as a monk, and the monk
31:39
Speaker 8: is fundeling the Virgin Mary.
31:41
Speaker 1: The monk is fondling the Virgin Mary.
31:43
Speaker 8: So the government is upset about this.
31:46
Speaker 1: The King of England is a Catholic, remember.
31:49
Speaker 8: And after that, Sir John Knight claims that he's threatened
31:52
Speaker 8: and he is beaten up by a couple of irishmen.
31:55
Speaker 8: So Sir John Knight was advised to retire to a
31:58
Speaker 8: house in the country, but because he was in fear
32:01
Speaker 8: of beaten up, he was quite They beat him and
32:05
Speaker 8: kicked him when they attacked him. When he came into
32:08
Speaker 8: Bristol subsequently, he came with a company of people carrying
32:13
Speaker 8: swords and muscus in front before him, but he left
32:18
Speaker 8: these at the walls of the city, because you're not
32:22
Speaker 8: allowed to carry arms into the city Bristol. Bristol had
32:25
Speaker 8: its own bylaws.
32:27
Speaker 1: Yes, you heard that correctly. He checks his guns at
32:30
Speaker 1: the gate. Now this is worth a slight digression.
32:34
Speaker 6: We tend to forget how violent and militaristic seventeenth century
32:41
Speaker 6: England in general, and a place like Bristol in particular were.
32:45
Speaker 1: Jonathan Barry Again.
32:46
Speaker 6: One reflection of the fact is that Bristol was a
32:49
Speaker 6: leading place for private tiering, where basically you capture the
32:53
Speaker 6: ships of your rival traders, as it were, so you
32:56
Speaker 6: load yourself up. Bristol is just beginning at this period
32:59
Speaker 6: to get involved in the slave trade with Africa, which
33:04
Speaker 6: of course both involved the use of military force, but also,
33:08
Speaker 6: as you may know, the chief one of the chief
33:10
Speaker 6: products that you actually took there to trade with was arms.
33:15
Speaker 6: And one of the things that Bristol and places around
33:18
Speaker 6: it were producing, in fact, were lots of arms. But
33:20
Speaker 6: also they needed weapons, cannons for their ships and so on.
33:26
Speaker 6: So we have to imagine the society in which there
33:27
Speaker 6: are a lot of people that are used to using weapons.
33:31
Speaker 1: So why would the nightcase represent some kind of turning
33:34
Speaker 1: point in British attitudes towards guns. Bristol was a washing guns,
33:39
Speaker 1: so much so that they were forced to put gun
33:40
Speaker 1: control measures in place that put anything in America today
33:44
Speaker 1: to shame.
33:46
Speaker 6: I mean, I think it's absurd to think that the
33:48
Speaker 6: crucial issue here was about whether a man was bearing
33:51
Speaker 6: arms or not because of lots of people wandering around
33:54
Speaker 6: bearing arms.
33:55
Speaker 1: Anyway, back to our story with Tim Herris.
33:58
Speaker 8: And then on one day he goes to church, and
34:01
Speaker 8: he does go with his attendant and goes with a
34:04
Speaker 8: gun and sort, but he leaves these. He says, he
34:08
Speaker 8: leaves these the porch with his attendant.
34:11
Speaker 1: The church is Saint Michael's on the hill, his church,
34:15
Speaker 1: the one overlooking Bristol. He gets off his horse, checks
34:19
Speaker 1: his weapons at the door. It's not enormously significant here.
34:24
Speaker 1: So here we have a case that Second Amendment types
34:27
Speaker 1: are claiming, is this enormously important precedent for the right
34:31
Speaker 1: of an individual to bear arms? But the individual in
34:33
Speaker 1: question checks his arms at the door of the church.
34:39
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like this is nothing to do. He's
34:44
Speaker 1: not even he's not waving his gun around or claiming
34:46
Speaker 1: he can wave his gun around. He he quite willingly
34:49
Speaker 1: adheres to local norms about where guns should and shouldn't
34:53
Speaker 1: be carried.
34:56
Speaker 8: Yes, that seems to be the case.
34:59
Speaker 1: Okay, So Night enters the church and he shouts out,
35:04
Speaker 1: the Catholics are trying to kill me, and they're going
35:06
Speaker 1: to try and kill you too. Another quick digression. I
35:10
Speaker 1: asked Jonathan Barry about that moment. One question before we
35:14
Speaker 1: go on with the story, I want to go back
35:17
Speaker 1: how Catholic was Bristol in this era?
35:20
Speaker 6: So if almost almost non existent?
35:24
Speaker 1: Oh wait wait, so wait, So John Knight is going
35:28
Speaker 1: into this parish church and saying we're all in danger
35:31
Speaker 1: of being God freed by the Catholics.
35:33
Speaker 6: Somebody, and the number of Catholics in Bristol to have
35:37
Speaker 6: conducted such a plot was minuscule.
35:40
Speaker 1: So he goes into this church and he says he
35:43
Speaker 1: tries to kind of whip the church up into a
35:47
Speaker 1: frenzy about the Irish threat, and the government says, you've
35:50
Speaker 1: gone too far. He's implying that the Catholic king is
35:54
Speaker 1: somehow conspiring against his own people, and that's when he
35:58
Speaker 1: gets in trouble with the law. Yes, he doesn't sound
36:02
Speaker 1: very likable, Sir John Knight.
36:03
Speaker 6: Nobody appears to have liked Sir John Knight.
36:06
Speaker 1: No, the government goes out after John Knight because he's
36:10
Speaker 1: a jackass. He's running around conjuring up ridiculous conspiracy theories
36:15
Speaker 1: about Catholics.
36:17
Speaker 8: So the charge. All the newsletter accounts I've read emphasize
36:23
Speaker 8: that it's the words that he spoke in the church,
36:27
Speaker 8: which and therefore this was proof of his disloyalty. That
36:32
Speaker 8: was a key issue for why they wanted to arrest him.
36:35
Speaker 8: That I decide to get him on the Statute of Northampton,
36:41
Speaker 8: which is a statute from thirteen twenty eight, saying it's
36:44
Speaker 8: a breach of the peace, and he pleaded not guilty.
36:48
Speaker 8: He claims that he didn't take the gun or the
36:51
Speaker 8: sword into the church, he left it outside. And the
36:56
Speaker 8: church is actually just outside the wars of the city
36:58
Speaker 8: of Bristol, as it was back then. It's Protestant church obviously,
37:03
Speaker 8: and he leaves the gun and the sword outside, and
37:08
Speaker 8: the jury said, he's got a proven track record of
37:11
Speaker 8: being loyal to the government, and so they found him
37:15
Speaker 8: not guilty.
37:16
Speaker 1: Because he didn't brandish a gun in church. The jury
37:20
Speaker 1: didn't find him disloyal because they knew he'd been loyal
37:23
Speaker 1: to the previous Protestant king. He wasn't armed, so they
37:27
Speaker 1: couldn't get him on that. He just didn't like Catholics.
37:31
Speaker 1: And so what this is Bristol in sixteen eighty six.
37:34
Speaker 1: No one in Bristol in sixteen eighty six likes Catholics.
37:39
Speaker 1: The case against him is dead on arrival. And by
37:42
Speaker 1: the way, no one knows this better than the government.
37:45
Speaker 8: So they actually don't want to prosecute Knights. They actually
37:49
Speaker 8: want Knight to apologize, and then they try and bury
37:52
Speaker 8: the case. That seems to be what's implied in the
37:55
Speaker 8: newsletter accounts I've read. That doesn't happen. They would have
37:59
Speaker 8: preferred if he'd apologized, and they could have said, okay,
38:02
Speaker 8: we'll let it go.
38:03
Speaker 1: So to recap John Knight's episode in the Church of
38:08
Speaker 1: Saint Michael has become a heroic moment to the American
38:11
Speaker 1: gun rights movement, even though John Knight wasn't actually carrying
38:15
Speaker 1: a gun when he entered the Church of Saint Michael,
38:18
Speaker 1: even though the case against him had nothing to do
38:20
Speaker 1: with guns, even though Bristol in fact had gun control
38:23
Speaker 1: ordinances that puts every gun control ordinance in America today
38:27
Speaker 1: to shame, And even though the whole brew was just
38:31
Speaker 1: about him being a bigot who was terrified of a
38:34
Speaker 1: Catholic conspiracy taking over Bristol, even though there were hardly
38:38
Speaker 1: any Catholics in Bristol, and even though the whole case
38:43
Speaker 1: was dead on arrival, and Knight could have apologized and
38:46
Speaker 1: made it all go away, and just didn't feel like it.
38:50
Speaker 1: But the only way you would know all this is
38:53
Speaker 1: if you were willing to wade to the seven volumes
38:56
Speaker 1: of Roger Morris's coded newsletters. And who has time for that?
39:03
Speaker 1: I was reading the did you read there's a the
39:07
Speaker 1: historian Tim Harris essay on I was amused to see
39:11
Speaker 1: there was that. In his he talks about the Sir
39:14
Speaker 1: John Knight case, about how when he goes to the church,
39:19
Speaker 1: the Protestant church, to speak to what he thought of
39:24
Speaker 1: was the threat being posed by the Catholics and Bristol.
39:28
Speaker 1: He insists that he checks his weapons at the front
39:31
Speaker 1: of the church, and he also says that when he
39:34
Speaker 1: goes into Bristol, he abided by the bylaws of Bristol
39:38
Speaker 1: and didn't carry his weapons into the past the city's limits.
39:45
Speaker 1: I wondered how Joyce Malcolm made sense of all these
39:48
Speaker 1: new facts. The Roger Morris newsletters were finally decoded more
39:52
Speaker 1: than ten years after she wrote her opus to keep
39:55
Speaker 1: him bare arms. So I'm just curious, think, how do
40:01
Speaker 1: those sort of two facts fit into this story. So
40:04
Speaker 1: even if we have if the Sir John Knight case
40:07
Speaker 1: represents kind of affirmation of the individual right to peace,
40:13
Speaker 1: will carry So John Knight himself is complying with some
40:18
Speaker 1: pretty strict gun control laws, isn't he.
40:23
Speaker 7: I think, to be honest that I think that Professor
40:26
Speaker 7: Harris is wrong. First of all, because there was such
40:31
Speaker 7: a There was all of these duties and requirements to
40:33
Speaker 7: protect yourself. And in the in the judge's opinion in
40:37
Speaker 7: the in there Sir John Knight case, he says that
40:40
Speaker 7: the law allows gentlemen to go about with arms as
40:46
Speaker 7: long as they're not you know, unusual and the dangerous weapons.
40:50
Speaker 7: So the judge seems at odds with Professor Harris.
40:55
Speaker 1: But what do you what do you make of Sir
40:57
Speaker 1: John Knight's claim that he checked his weapons at the
41:02
Speaker 1: front of the church and didn't carry his weapons into
41:04
Speaker 1: the city of Bristol.
41:07
Speaker 7: I find that pery odd because if that were the case,
41:11
Speaker 7: if there was a law that he couldn't carry his
41:13
Speaker 7: weapons into the city of Bristol at all, that the
41:16
Speaker 7: whole city was what we would now call a sensitive
41:19
Speaker 7: place that no one could wear. It goes against your
41:22
Speaker 7: right to protect yourself. That I was against your right
41:25
Speaker 7: to protect yourself in your house. It goes against the
41:27
Speaker 7: judges ruling. And to be honest, Professor Harris is British.
41:35
Speaker 7: They don't think much of the right to be armed.
41:38
Speaker 1: The homicide rate in the United States, if you're wondering,
41:42
Speaker 1: is four and a half times higher than the United Kingdom.
41:46
Speaker 7: When I explored that right and told my British friends
41:52
Speaker 7: about it, most of them didn't even realize they ever
41:54
Speaker 7: had had a right to be armed. There's this whole
41:58
Speaker 7: history and that they haven't looked at. And I think
42:01
Speaker 7: it was because I said earlier, I asked an American
42:04
Speaker 7: question we were interested in that. They weren't particularly interest
42:09
Speaker 7: in a right to be armed, and so it wasn't
42:14
Speaker 7: something that they had studied or been even very curious
42:18
Speaker 7: about until I started to write about it.
42:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.
42:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, But if the British are interested in a right
42:24
Speaker 1: to bear arms, then why are we drawing on British
42:28
Speaker 1: Why is the British tradition relevant to the discussion of
42:32
Speaker 1: American individual gun rights.
42:35
Speaker 7: I think this was a history that was lost to them.
42:37
Speaker 7: I think modern British people have a different view of it.
42:41
Speaker 7: They're much more dependent on the state taking care of them,
42:45
Speaker 7: particularly since World War Two. This is earlier British history
42:51
Speaker 7: is the history that they really were not that familiar with,
42:56
Speaker 7: you know, they were looking at other things, and I
42:59
Speaker 7: think that one of I guess the contribution I made
43:02
Speaker 7: was that I was an American that looked at British
43:04
Speaker 7: history in English history with American questions, with the things
43:08
Speaker 7: we were interested in.
43:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what is the Supreme Court? How did the
43:14
Speaker 1: highest legal body in the land, in the landmark ruling
43:17
Speaker 1: of New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruin
43:20
Speaker 1: handle the fact that their hero has feet of clay.
43:24
Speaker 3: I know, I had a summarized summer.
43:26
Speaker 8: See, I think that is it.
43:33
Speaker 1: Yes, I asked Patrick Charles to read me the relevant section.
43:39
Speaker 3: To the extent that there are multiple plausible interpretations of
43:42
Speaker 3: Sir John Knight's case, we will favor the one that
43:45
Speaker 3: is more consistent with the Second Amendments command.
43:51
Speaker 1: Which, in other words, there's a whole long list of
43:55
Speaker 1: ways we can make sense of this. We're going to
43:56
Speaker 1: pick the one we like the most. Okay, that's exactly.
44:00
Speaker 1: That's the one that makes our life easiest. And arguing
44:03
Speaker 1: the case we've already decided we want to argue. It's like,
44:07
Speaker 1: it's like history is cherry.
44:09
Speaker 3: Oh, it's so chery picked.
44:12
Speaker 1: The Supreme Court decides to clear up the ambiguity over
44:16
Speaker 1: the Second Amendment. Let us leave the verdict to history,
44:19
Speaker 1: they declare. But then their hero turns out to have
44:22
Speaker 1: feet of clay. So they shrug and go on with
44:25
Speaker 1: the things that they had already made up their mind
44:27
Speaker 1: to do before they tried to convince us that they
44:30
Speaker 1: wanted to play historian and go to England and make
44:34
Speaker 1: their pilgrimage to Saint Michael on the Hill and pretend
44:38
Speaker 1: that the man whom they have chosen to symbolize the
44:40
Speaker 1: grand tradition of American gun rights is something other than
44:44
Speaker 1: a jackass. And after a far too many hours reconstructing
44:48
Speaker 1: the history of this jackass, I realized that I had
44:52
Speaker 1: fallen into the same trap that we've all fallen into
44:56
Speaker 1: in his country when it comes to gun violence. We're
44:59
Speaker 1: talking about the wrong things, telling irrelevant stories. And over
45:04
Speaker 1: the course of the next five episodes of Revision's History,
45:08
Speaker 1: I want to try and change that conversation. I'm going
45:11
Speaker 1: to take you to North Carolina to shoot guns, Visit
45:14
Speaker 1: an old man in Alabama with a crazy story to tell,
45:17
Speaker 1: Revisit the assassination of Robert Kennedy on a one but
45:22
Speaker 1: no more John Knight. I promise we've all had it
45:26
Speaker 1: with John Knight.
45:35
Speaker 8: What kind of person was he? Not sort of person
45:40
Speaker 8: I want to have a drink with. It was a
45:41
Speaker 8: nasty piece of work. Really, he was vindictive and spiteful.
45:44
Speaker 8: He's a biggot, He's a trouble maker. He's obviously deliberately
45:49
Speaker 8: going out to try and provoke trouble. In April sixteen
45:53
Speaker 8: eighty six, when he gets his priests arrested because he's
45:56
Speaker 8: staring things up. So yeah, not a nice piece of work.
45:59
Speaker 8: That's my basic view of him. He's involved in the
46:02
Speaker 8: slave traders, sugar refiner. I would hardly say that he
46:05
Speaker 8: was the sort of hero figure the champions of American
46:09
Speaker 8: liberty who wants to celebrate, although maybe that's not the point.
46:13
Speaker 2: Oh.
46:14
Speaker 1: Our revisionist history Gun series was produced by Jacob Smith,
46:35
Speaker 1: bend A DApp Haffrey, Kiara Powell, Tally Emlin, and Liam Gistoo.
46:41
Speaker 1: We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact
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Speaker 1: checking by Arthur Gomperts and Kashelle Williams. Original scoring by
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Speaker 1: Luis Garra, with vocals in this episode by the Magnificent
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Speaker 1: Ethan Herschenfeld. Mastering by Flon Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence.
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Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Gladwins.