Welsh Journals

they have frequent opportunities to corrupt the principles of that description of men, by infusing into their minds the pernicious tenets of Paine's Rights of Man, upon whose book, I am told, publick lectures are delivered to a considerable number in the neighbourhood of Wrexham, by a Methodist. The bad effects of them are too evident in that parish.65 As A. H. Dodd remarked, 'one can hardly imagine him going to the pains of unsettling the political principles of his own workpeople'.66 However the assignats were withdrawn from circulation, as a note in the handwriting of Lord Kenyon indicated at the bottom of Whitehall Davies's letter: 'This letter occasioned the Act of Parliament, passed in January 1793, for preventing the negotiation of French paper money in England.' In the face of such opposition from so many quarters, it is hard to imagine how John Wilkinson continued so defiantly to carry on his trade so successfully. It was at this time that he quarrelled with his brother, William, one of whose two daughters had married the son of Mathew Boulton. William exposed the piratical practices of his brother John to Boulton & Watt. John had constructed numerous steam engines for various companies without paying the royalties due to Boulton & Watt; perhaps he was envious of the success of the steam engine patent, knowing how he had been denied his own patent rights for the solid cannon. John was a wealthy man and payment of overdue royalties presented him with no problems. Gilbert Gilpin, his former clerk at Bersham, became a close friend of William, and aided him in his conspiracy against his brother. Many letters passed between them, and in one written soon after 1800, by Gilpin at his old home of Plas Grone, near Wrexham, he remarked: Like Franklin, and other great men, J.W. has written his epitaph, and I have been promised a copy of it. I have not heard its substance, and am at a loss to devise what he can say in favour of himself. He reads it to all who visit him. In short the epitaph is now the order of the day! Perhaps by making his own epitaph, he conceives he shall avoid a part of the calumny which he would be subject to were he to leave it to the world to make for him. He may say with Peter Pindar. 'Perhaps a pretty devil I'm portray'd, The world's free brush deals damnably in shade' .67 In view of the many injustices committed against John Wilkinson, especially by the Board of Ordnance, Peter Pindar's verse was apocalyptic in its unconscious irony. IFOR EDWARDS Wrexham 65 Palmer, op. cit., p. 26; Hist. MSS. Comm., 14th Report, Pt. IV, p. 536. « A. H. Dodd, The Industrial Revolution in North Wales (2nd ed., Cardiff, 1951), p. 140. 67 1. Edwards, 'Gilbert Gilpin: Clerk to the Wilkinsons at Bersham Furnace', T.D.H.S., 29 (1980), 93.