Topic: John Reeves

John Reeves (20 November 1752 – 7 August 1829), was a British conservative.

Reeves was educated at Eton College and Merton College, Oxford, being elected in 1778 as a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. In 1779 he was called to the bar and held the public offices counsel to the Royal Mint; clerk and secretary to the Board of Trade and superintendent of Aliens. He was a Chief Justice of Newfoundland for a year until returning to England in 1792 to accept the post of paymaster of the metropolitan police (Receiver of Public Offices). He was also elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1789 and the next year was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1793 he was appointed as high steward of the Manor and Liberty of Savoy and the King's Printer in 1800.

Reeves campaigned against Jacobinism by founding at the Crown and Anchor tavern on 20 November 1792 the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. The Association was "staggeringly successful, outstripping even the Constitutional societies", with more than 2,000 local branches established before long. They disrupted radical meetings, attacked printers of Thomas Paine's works, initiated prosecutions for sedition and published loyalist pamphlets. The Crown and Anchor association met for the final time on 21 June 1793. These loyalist associations mostly disappeared within a year "after successfully suppressing the organizations of their opponents". The leading opposition Whig Charles James Fox denounced the Association's publications and claimed that had they been printed earlier in the century they would be prosecuted as treasonable Jacobite tracts due to their advocacy of the divine right of kings. In a speech on 10 December 1795 Fox described the Association as a system designed to run the country through "the infamy of spies and intrigues".