William Blake vs. The Soldier (Or: How to Get Arrested for Gardening)

If you think of William Blake as that floaty, spiritual guy who wrote about lambs and tygers, you are missing the best part: the man had a temper that could melt steel beams.
Before he was the visionary poet of the Industrial Age, he was a cranky gardener in Felpham who just wanted to be left alone.
In August 1803, Blake walked into his garden and found a dragoon soldier named John Schofield lounging there like he owned the place. Schofield had been invited in by a gardener, but Blake didn’t care. He hated the army, he hated the monarchy, and he definitely hated people stepping on his petunias.
Blake grabbed the soldier by the collar and physically threw him out into the road. But he didn’t stop there. According to the court records, Blake screamed:
“Damn the King! The soldiers are all slaves!”
Now, in 2026, yelling at a soldier is just a YouTube video waiting to happen. In 1803, amid the Napoleonic Wars, it was Sedition.
Schofield, humiliated by being tossed out by a poet, went to the magistrate and accused Blake of High Treason. Blake faced the death penalty. He had to stand trial at Chichester Assizes, where he was accused of inciting a revolution from his flowerbed.
He was eventually acquitted (mostly because the soldier’s story fell apart), but the lesson remained: Blake wasn’t a fragile flower. He was a man willing to risk the gallows just to get a soldier off his lawn.
Want to know why he was so angry at the system? Tune in Wednesday for The Unravelling.