Lloyd, Edward
(fl.
He was involved with Impartial Occurrences until at least February 1706. After this date there appears to have been a six-year gap until February 1712, when the newspaper reappeared as Pue's Occurrences (under the sole management of Pue). Though it is possible that some editions have been lost, it seems more likely that after 1706 Lloyd withdrew his share in the newspaper to concentrate on much more controversial printed material. He was first and foremost a coffee house proprietor and no doubt viewed the newspaper as a means of providing printed material for his coffee drinkers while also being an advertising tool to attract new customers. Stiff competition among coffee houses, which had opened up in Dublin from the 1690s, meant that proprietors like Lloyd were keen to provide the latest novelties. He sold foreign and domestic newspapers, prints, books, pamphlets, and snuff, and in 1705 he even imported 100 alabaster statues from Italy and offered them for sale at his new coffee emporium on Castle St., Dublin.
He first courted controversy in 1707 when he published a Postscript to Mr Higgins (Francis Higgins (qv) (1669–1728)), often known as the ‘Irish Dr Sacheverell’ which was deemed to incite sympathy for the Jacobite cause. Lloyd was ordered into custody by the Irish house of lords but managed to abscond (presumably to London). His wife was examined by parliament, and copies of the pamphlet were burned outside the Tholsel, Dublin. By 1709 he had reestablished himself in Dublin and felt confident enough to take over the Union coffee house in a fashionable location on Cork Hill near Dublin castle. For the next five years Lloyd's coffee house acquired a reputation as meeting place for crypto-Jacobites and was often the scene of violent disturbances. The appointment of Constantine Phipps (qv), a tory, as lord chancellor of Ireland encouraged Lloyd to be much more outspoken in his views. In 1710 or 1711 he launched a twice-weekly newspaper, Lloyd's News-Letter (no editions survive prior to 1712), which was unabashedly anti-whig. There was a strong suspicion in parliamentary circles that Lloyd published his articles with the full backing and protection of the lord chancellor. One critic wrote that over a three-year period Lloyd's News-Letter caused ‘daily abuses and slander upon all persons in whatever station or business, who were acceptable to your Dr Phipps’ (The conduct of the purse of Ireland, 20).
Lloyd published a number of books and pamphlets which inflamed the tempers of those who had a grudge against the ‘high church’ tories. In 1711 the grand jury of the city of Cork attempted to take action against him for printing The memorial of the Church of England with an impartial account of the tryal of Dr Sacheverell. In the following year he caused outrage by publishing the Memoirs of the chevalier de St George. Whigs believed that this was all part of a sinister plot to promote the interests of the Jacobite pretender, and legal proceedings were initiated. But Phipps persuaded the lord lieutenant and the lords justices that Lloyd was a ‘fit object of mercy’, and a nolle prosequi was issued. This caused a political storm in the Irish parliament, as Phipps had been responsible in the same year for prosecuting Dudley Moore for reading out a pro-whig prologue at a play in Dublin. Such blatant bias was not becoming in a lord chancellor and there was a feeling that Phipps had acted contrary to the protestant interest in Ireland. In late 1713 the replacement of the duke of Ormond (qv) as lord lieutenant by the duke of Shrewsbury (qv) encouraged new demands for Lloyd to be prosecuted. Lloyd probably kept a low profile while his case was being debated and it seems likely that his wife helped to run his Dublin affairs while he was away. As late as April 1714 ‘Mrs Lloyd’ was taking in advertisements for Lloyd's News-Letter. But by May 1714 Lloyd had sold his interest in the coffee house and moved to London. When Phipps arrived in London in October 1714 it was noted by one Dublin newspaper that ‘your coffee man and newsmonger [presumably Lloyd] was at the head of the convoy’ (Dublin Intelligence, 2 November 1714).
Nothing is heard of Lloyd until 1732, when a curious pamphlet, A description of the city of Dublin, was printed on behalf of ‘Edward Lloyd citizen and silk thrower of London, who liv'd near 20 years in Ireland, and is lately come from Dublin’ [presumably the same ‘Jacobite’ Lloyd]. The aim of this twenty-eight-page work appears to have been to improve the state of the woollen industry in England through a change in the law, to allow English and Irish merchants to trade freely with each other. In the same year he published a twelve-page Description of the flourishing city of Corke. It is an early and lucid description of Cork and gives a good sense of how quickly it was developing, economically and socially. He noted that the ‘manner and way of living of the gentry, merchants, and citizens of Cork is much the same as London’ and that ‘the ground rent of the houses is dearer than in London, or any other city in England’. It is not known where or when Lloyd died.