In addition to his religious duties, Bate Dudley edited one newspaper, The Morning Post and in 1780 founded another, the Morning Herald, courting controversy and enduring imprisonment as the "most notorious
editor in London."[5]
He wrote plays and was a close friend of both the actor
David Garrick and the artist
Thomas Gainsborough, who twice painted his portrait.[6] He was also a famous
duellist, gaining the nickname, "The Fighting Parson".[7] In 1781 Bate Dudley was imprisoned for a year for
libelling the
Duke of Richmond.[7]
Bate Dudley was a great supporter of,[8] and chronicled the life of the artist
Thomas Gainsborough . Much of this work was published in the Morning Herald which Bate Dudley owned and ran, and The Morning Post[9] with which he was also associated but had left to set up the Herald after a disagreement in 1780.[3] Much of this was republished in 1915 in Life of Gainsborough by William Whitley.[10]
After meeting
James Townley and being influenced by his farce High Life Below Stairs[11] Bate Dudley started writing scripts for comic operas. Following his The Rival Candidates, his libretto for The Flitch of Bacon (1778) was the first of his collaboration with the composer
William Shield, whom he assisted in bringing to prominence. The Shield and Dudley operas also included The Woodman (1791) and Travellers in Switzerland (1794), and were produced at
Covent Garden.[3][12]
For a time, between 1804 and 1812, Bate Dudley moved from
Essex to
Ireland due to financial difficulties and took up a rectory in Kilscoran and
Kilglass. He returned to England in 1812 to take up a rectory in
Willingham, Cambridgeshire.[3] In October of the same year he was created a
baronet, of
Sloane Street, Chelsea, in the County of Middlesex, and of Kilscoran House in the County of Wexford.[13]
Bate Dudley played a part in the suppression of the
Ely and Littleport riots 1816.[14] These were part of a more widespread discontent which affected
Norfolk,
Suffolk,
Huntingdonshire and
Cambridgeshire. It had its roots in discontent over the
enclosure of the
fenlands, but the high price of bread, poor pay of agricultural workers, and unemployment of soldiers returning from the
Napoleonic wars were also factors. Bate Dudley, who was a magistrate at
Ely at the time, organised opposition to the rioters at
Littleport, near Ely, where the insurgents were defeated, but only after troops opened fire on them.[15][16]
Comic operas
Sir Henry Bate Dudley, The Rival Candidates, 1775.[17]
Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia?: reflections on the threat of revolution in Britain, 1789-1848, Manchester University Press, 2000
ISBN0-7190-4803-6.
William T. Whitley, Art of England 1821-1837, Read Books, 2007
ISBN1-4067-5294-0.