Blake's Trial for Sedition at Chichester

January 1804

In August 1803, William Blake became involved in an altercation with a soldier named John Scofield in the garden of his Felpham cottage. Blake ejected the soldier from the property after Scofield had entered uninvited, and Scofield subsequently accused Blake of uttering seditious statements against the King and the army. In wartime England, with the threat of Napoleonic invasion felt keenly along the Sussex coast, such charges were extremely serious and could carry the death penalty. Blake was arrested and committed for trial at Chichester Quarter Sessions in January 1804. The trial took place at the Guildhall in Chichester. Blake's defence was that Scofield had fabricated the seditious words entirely, and several witnesses from Felpham village supported Blake's account of events. The jury acquitted Blake, and he returned briefly to Felpham before moving back to London later that year. The trial was a traumatic episode that coloured Blake's later work and reinforced his lifelong distrust of authority and the institutions of the state. For Felpham and Bognor, the trial is a dramatic footnote to Blake's residence, connecting the quiet Sussex village to the political tensions and invasion fears of the Napoleonic era. The Guildhall in Chichester where the trial was heard still stands on Priory Park.