When Great Britain took over Malta in 1813, it inherited a country in which censorship was the rule, and the rule had no exceptions. The Order of Malta was generally a benign but wholly autocratic sovereign which exercised total control over anything the people were authorised to know and repeat. The ruler only allowed the public to know what the state believed it should be allowed to. Within Malta, the Order achieved this by licensing only one printing press, and permitting this to print solely what the Grand Master, the Bishop and the Inquisitor jointly certified to be harmless and printable.

The 1838 pamphlet by George Percy Badger which reproduces in detail the trial of James Richardson.

To control what was published outside Malta, the Order resorted to various quite creative methods. It would either send its agents to foreign bookshops where the offending literature was being sold, to purchase the whole stock and pulp it, as the Order did when the jurist Giandonato Rogadeo in 1780 published in Lucca his scathing critique of the legal establishment in Malta. Or when it went all out to buy copies of Carasi’s scandalous exposé of the Order of Malta, published in Lyons in 1790.

Less expensively, it achieved the same purpose by convincing the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to place the work on the Index of Prohibited Books, as it did when the Abbé de Vertot printed his bestselling history of the Order of Malta in Paris in 1726. Or when Michele Acciard published in Naples his chilling account of the sadistic torments to which Grand Master Pinto subjected the conspirators of 1749. This ensured that good Catholics would not read or own those books under threat of the gravest spiritual sanctions.

And to control the dissemination of unorthodox books published abroad and smuggled into Malta, the Order and the Inquisition resorted to severe prohibitions and criminal penalties against those in possession of banned seditious or heretical literature.

The indictment of James Richardson for criminal libel.

This restrictive legacy sat very awkwardly with the new liberal rulers and with those Maltese fired by the new continental enlightenment and by cravings for the new British democratic freedoms. A reformist movement gathered momentum, by the confluence of both free-thinking British and progressive Maltese currents, to establish formally, by law, the freedom of the press. This met various degrees of opposition, mostly from the conservative elements who believed that any change must, of necessity, be a change for the worse, and who predicted the opening of the floodgates of sedition and irreligious outrage.

Things came to a head in 1837 when the Royal Commission of Enquiry reported favourably on the introduction in Malta of freedom of printing and publishing and actually annexed to their report a draft ordinance to regulate the new freedoms. Ordinance IV of 1839 formally came into effect on March 15. This established the freedom of the press, with some important restrictions and reservations, considered advantageous or acceptable by the imperial authorities.

The new ordinance was instantly put to the test.

The number of newspapers exploded. From long being the exclusive monopoly of the Government Gazette, the dissemination of information and opinions was now open to all. Many jumped on the new media platform: political, cultural, patriotic or merely entertaining. Very vociferous were the opposing religious mouthpieces, the traditional Catholic voices faithful to the Roman papacy on the one hand, and on the other, the aggressively proselytising Protestants who, notwithstanding the support of the rulers and the resources at their disposal, had so far made negligible inroads into the religious allegiances of the fiercely Catholic majority.

Spearheading the Protestant movement was James Richardson (1809-1851), an earnest and highly vocal, if intemperate, scholar. Richardson, a converted Jew, believed passionately in two missions: the spreading of Christianity and the abolition of slavery. He came to Malta under the auspices of the British Anti-Slavery Society, and on the island dedicated himself to both, studying Arabic in preparation for his intended missions to Africa.

The Harlequin, the newspaper that published the article which gave rise to the first case of criminal libel in Malta. Courtesy of the National Library

His stay in Malta coincided with the granting of freedom of the press. He started editing a periodical which not only promoted Protestantism but actively rubbished the Catholic religion. He touted his own brand of faith as “the purest and best of which we have knowledge”, and damned Roman Catholicism as “a system of religion the most detestable the world ever saw! – a system which leaves the mind at a loss to determine whether it is better than any religion at all”.

This appeared in the issue of The Harlequin, or Anglo-Maltese Miscellany of March 21, 1839, barely six days after the dramatic liberalisation of the press. The Harlequin became the mouthpiece of the most imperialist, anti-Catholic, anti-Maltese-rights faction in Malta. It opposed granting any political liberties to the people, holding that the interests of the British empire should be the only relevant consideration. The paper acknowledged the utter destitution of the population, and as remedies proposed mass migration and birth control – not investment or commercial enterprise. London and British residents subsidised the paper.

The Harlequin became the mouthpiece of the most imperialist, anti-Catholic, anti-Maltese-rights faction in Malta

Richardson’s frontal attack on the traditional faith shocked and scandalised the more devout and traditionalist natives. The Maltese Attorney-General (the Crown Advocate) Dr Giacomo Pantaleone Bruno, was not intimidated by the fact that his superiors were, like Richardson, British, arrogant and Protestant. He felt it his duty to defy them to safeguard the rule of law, and immediately started criminal libel proceedings against the British author and against Franceso Naudi, printer, and a Giuseppe Mula, reason unspecified. He charged them with having contravened Section 6 of Chapter 3 of the new Press Ordinance which protected all Christian creeds and churches from being reviled, ridiculed or insulted.

The case came up for hearing on Saturday, April 6, in the Criminal Court composed of Sir Ignazio Gavino Bonavita, president, and Dr Giovanni Battista Satariano and Dr Francesco Chapelle, judges. What we know of the case and the pleadings comes mostly from a 58-page pamphlet dated May 9, published shortly after the judgment. This was written, ostensibly, by the Rev. George Percy Badger (1815-1888), a fellow Protestant, later ecclesiastic, who had also settled in Malta. Badger authored in 1838 one of the first, highly sympathetic and informative guidebooks of Malta which went through at least nine editions and reprints until 1881.

Governor Sir Henry Bouverie, who refused to pardon Richardson.

I said ‘ostensibly written’ because the bulk of it consists in the word-for-word oral defence by Richardson’s lawyer, John Griffiths, who pleaded in Italian at considerable length, assisted by William Stevens, solicitor and notary. Griffiths, an American merchant with a good command of Italian, who had settled in Malta in 1809 and had later obtained from Governor Sir Thomas Maitland a warrant to practise law, was to appear in various high-profile cases. He died in Valletta in 1857. His overwrought efforts attempted to convince the court that the defendant had not reviled, ridiculed or insulted the Catholic faith, which the new law did not allow, but had condemned the system of the Catholic religion, which the ordinance did not proscribe. Not very persuasive hair splitting, so prolix and contorted that I cannot do justice to it in a few lines.

Griffiths’ interminable defence did not impress the three judges. “After retiring for a while” they returned, pronouncing Richardson guilty, and, as usual then in criminal cases, without giving any reasons.

In his comments, Badger suggests a “human rights” angle not stressed by Griffiths. How can a court composed entirely of Roman Catholic judges be considered “independent and impartial” when judging a Protestant accused of undermining Roman Catholicism? “It is both an injustice to the judges as well as to the accused.” Excellent point.

Prosecuting was Dr Bruno from Cospicua (1792-1868), a lawyer since 1814, then Crown Advocate, eventually judge in 1842. Though deemed a traitor to the patriotic cause, in this trial he exercised his prosecuting functions with humanity and discretion: when the court pronounced Richardson guilty, he pleaded for the minimum sentence possible. Neither advocate lacked forensic courtesy: Griffiths had praised Bruno – the prosecutor’s sentiments were known to be too liberal for him to nourish the idea of undermining the benefits of new press freedom law “which, if I remember well, was the object formerly of his most fervent desires”.

On the day of the hearing, Bruno withdrew the charges against Naudi and Mula (without giving reasons), and after the pleadings, the court proceeded to find Richardson guilty. Following submissions as to punishment, the court condemned him to six months’ imprisonment, with the faculty to convert this into a fine of 250 scudi (£20.16.8d), and discontinued proceedings against the other accused. The maximum penalty was one year.

The wardens led the convict to prison, “it being beyond his means to pay the fine”. “That such a sentence will be denounced as cruel and severe in the extreme,” Badger added, “we doubt not every lover of justice, every friend of constitutional liberty, will unhesitatingly admit… such a state of things might be consistent with the Tribunal of the Inquisition, but not with the free constitution under which it is our privilege to live”. To be truthful, the charges, the defence and the judgment all leave a questionable taste.

This was not to be the end of the story. The Malta trial raised a furore in the House of Lords on April 19, when an annulment of the sentence was demanded, but unsuccessfully. After a month’s jail, Richardson was released on May 4, probably crowdfunded by local Protestants.

The official secret files give a surprisingly different image to what fed the public perception. Richardson wrote three petitions, one from prison, and the others after his release. In them his bravado cracks, turning grovelling and apologetic, while Governor Henry Bouverie sides throughout with the Maltese, praising the judges as “extremely zealous and attentive”.

Richardson’s petitions, first to the local governor and then to the Colonial Secretary, the Marquess of Normanby, insist first on a miscarriage of justice, and later on redress and financial compensation for the “financial ruin” he suffered. His petitions are long and often contradictory. In the first one, Richardson concedes that “his intention was hostile to the Roman Catholic religion”, while his petition to London changes tune and he “expresses his contrition and ascribes his expressions to inadvertency and denies all intent to outrage the feelings of the Maltese people”. Bouverie stayed adamant that nothing at all was due to Richardson. He had a fair trial according to law and had only himself to blame.

Richardson paid a high price for his virtuosity in creating enmity in the local population. He was targeted with an attempt on his life in 1840, and the newspapers reported that suspicion had fallen on “members of the best families of the island”. All Malta seems to have known who they were, except the attorney-general and the police.

Richardson died in 1851 of a mysterious illness in the region of Lake Chad, Africa, where his vocation had driven him. He wrote some very valuable works after leaving Malta.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Leonard Callus, Ray Milller and Theresa Vella.