In the final days of May 1824, Governor Somerset can be forgiven any feelings of complacency he might have entertained. With no foreknowledge of the constitutional anxieties his ‘illegal’ actions had unleashed at the Colonial Office, he had apparently prevailed against the ‘Radicals’. In the wake of the disastrous outcome of the prize slave libel trials, he had suppressed the newspaper that had been giving such damaging publicity to the allegations against his regime. Its creators had helpfully closed their own paper rather than submit to what they described as ‘censorship’. Its proprietor was temporarily silenced under threat of banishment. The necessary legal actions had been frustratingly protracted, but the insults by which Edwards had undermined the authority of the Cape government had eventually been brought to an end. Under sentence of transportation, the miscreant was safely in jail awaiting a ship to take him to New South Wales. Unfortunately for Somerset, the respite that followed Edwards's final conviction would last a scant three days.

‘A suspicious Paper sticking upon the wall’

Without the South African Commercial Advertiser at its disposal, Cape public opinion could no longer be so easily transmitted beyond the boundaries of the colony. But it was by no means silenced. The city remained plastered with commentary on the recent libel cases and the government's actions against its critics, ‘truly expressive of the indignation of the generality of the people’. The Heerengracht (now Adderley Street) was a prominent place for posting such attacks upon authority. In his memoir of the period, the former printer's apprentice Louis Meurant described the canal that then ran down its length as fringed with trees and ‘affording cover to spies’. It also afforded excellent cover for those wishing to fasten papers while remaining undetected, with the posts of the small bridges that spanned the canal presenting a suitable surface. At the corner of the Heerengracht and Longmarket Street was a spot known as ‘Dreyer's Corner’, after a large house that had once belonged to a gentleman of that name. The house boasted a high stoep and a rounded corner. Both smooth and high enough to avoid the papers being easily torn down, it offered a perfect canvas for the ‘political squibs’ that appeared there almost daily.