Author: Kennedy, James
Biography:
KENNEDY, James (fl 1793-1800)
Declaring that he was "By persecution a poor Poet made," James Kennedy was a weaver of Paisley and a Paineite political activist. In 1793 he acted as Assistant Secretary to the British Convention of the Friends of the People in Edinburgh. After the abortive Pike Plot of 1794 led by Robert Watt, who was executed for it, Scottish working-class radicals were arrested, imprisoned, and transported. Kennedy fled the country and started publishing in London as a "Scotch Exile." He refers in his verse to the wife and children left behind. All his poems are "budgets": the fact that there are a first "weaver's budget" and then a No. 3 implies that there was a No. 2 between them, but no record exists. The last title in the series, Fragments of the Medeterranean Budget (sic), includes a poem dated from Leghorn (Livorno) on 17 Mar. 1800, which suggests that his exile had been extended. He might have been the son of Grizel (Lyndsay) and William Kennedy born in Paisley on 13 Oct. 1760 and might have married Margrat Love in a Low Church wedding in 1787, but corroborating evidence is lacking. (Goodridge; ancestry.com. 8 Apr. 2021; findmypast 8 Apr. 2021; Gordon Pentland, "Radical Returns in an Age of Revolutions," Etudes Ecossaises 13 [2010] 92-101)