George Rex of Knysna : a civil lawyer from England and first marshall of the Vice-Admiralty Court of the Cape of Good Hope, 1797-1802
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In South African history and folklore, the often mythical story of George Rex is widely known. Popularly the man himself is better remembered for what he was not - royalty - than for what he actually was. From a legal historical point of view, two aspects of his life are of interest : his training and career as a civil lawyer in England, and his role as marshal of the Vice-Admiralty Court at the Cape of Good Hope. And it is on these aspects that I will focus here However, these are but two small pools of light on the broad and often dark canvas of Rex's life and some brief and general biographical and historical descriptions will be required to provide the necessary perspective. For many years, claims flourished both in England and in South Africa that George Rex was of royal descent. More particularly, it was suggested if not at times held out as fact that he was the son of a young Prince George of Wales, the future King George III of England (1738-1820), and the reputedly beautiful Quakeress and commoner, Hannah Lightfoot (1730-1759). Depending on whether or not they were taken to have been (secretly but legally) married at the time, George was described as the Prince's legitimate or at least his natural son, with concomitant claims to the throne. And hence, so the myth went, George was in 1797 banished to the Cape to avoid royal embarrassment, with Crown connections arranging a suitable appointment for him there and supporting him with an annual allowance of £1 000 and a grant of lands, on condition that he never married. These claims of royalty, for long vigorously believed, supported and spread by many despite the fact that objectively regarded they were based on circumstantial, undocumented, unsupported and untrustworthy evidence derived from often suspicious, sensationalistic, journalistic or anonymous sources, have now thoroughly been discredited. In 1975, already, an historian who traced Rex's genealogy could declare that [n]owadays academic historians give no credence to stories that George III, before he became king, had a romance with a Quaker girl who bore him children. And in 2003, the results of genetic tests on Canadian, New Zealand and South African descendants of George Rex failed to match the results of those on a descendant of George III, and appear to have proved finally that he was an ordinary commoner and not of royal descent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".