Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775-1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis

Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis

Edited by

Michael T. Davis

Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848

This page intentionally left blank

Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis Edited by Michael T. Davis

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–74309–1 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22490–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Radicalism and revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 : essays in honour of Malcolm I. Thomis / edited by Michael T. Davis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22490–7 (cloth) 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1789–1820. 2. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Influence. 3. Great Britain—Politics and government—19th century. 4. Great Britain– –Politics and government—1760–1789. 5. France—History– –Revolution, 1789–1799—Influence. 6. Radicalism—Great Britain– –History—19th century. 7. Radicalism—Great Britain—History—18th century. I. Thomis, Malcolm I. II. Davis, Michael T., 1969– . DA520.R33 1999 941.07'3—dc21 99–22233 CIP Selection, editorial matter, Introduction and Chapter 8 © Michael T. Davis 2000 Chapters 1–7, 9–14 © Macmillan Press Ltd 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

9 08

8 07

7 06

6 05

5 04

4 03

3 02

2 01

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

1 00

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on the Contributors

viii

Introduction: ‘To Grow Gently Older and Wiser’ – Personal Reflections on Malcolm Thomis Michael T. Davis 1 ‘The Friends of America’: British Sympathy with the American Revolution H.T. Dickinson

xi

1

2 Two Doubting Thomases: the British Progressive Enlightenment and the French Revolution Jack Fruchtman, Jr.

30

3 The Political Showman at Home: Reflections on Popular Radicalism and Print Culture in the 1790s Jon Mee

41

4 The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794 Clive Emsley

56

5 John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence: Reform and Revolution Michael Scrivener

69

6 Wondering about Wonders: Paine, Constâncio and The Age of Reason, 1794–97 Hélio Osvaldo Alves

84

7 The United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment, 1798–1807 Michael Durey

96

8 ‘Good for the Public Example’: Daniel Isaac Eaton, Prosecution, Punishment and Recognition, 1793–1812 Michael T. Davis

110

9 A Loyal Englishman?: John Lloyd and Aspects of Oath-taking in 1812 133 Bernadette Turner v

vi

Contents

10 Spreading the Radical Word: the Circulation of William Hone’s 1817 Liturgical Parodies Kyle Grimes

143

11 Political Economy and Popular Education: Thomas Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute, 1823–8 157 Gregory Claeys 12 ‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution in Early Nineteenthcentury England 176 Ian Dyck 13 Whiggery and America: Accommodating the Radical Threat Paul Crook

191

14 Controlling the Riots: Dickens, Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution 207 Iain McCalman Malcolm I. Thomis: a Bibliography

228

Tabula Gratulatoria

230

Index

233

Acknowledgements As a festschrift this book is produced only by virtue of the collective efforts of individual contributors. For that reason I would like to thank each of the authors for their academic generosity, commitment and patience throughout the entirety of the project. Particular thanks are due to Harry Dickinson who has been a constant source of advice when, as editor, I needed some guidance. In compiling the tabula gratulatoria I was given invaluable and, for some time, necessarily clandestine assistance in obtaining contact names and addresses by Margaret Dawson, Noeline Hall, Mavis Little, Anne Nelson, Anne Palmer and Jackie Thomis. Many others were also privy to the progress of this work and were thus burdened with the difficult task of keeping a secret from the omniscient Malcolm. I am grateful and indeed impressed by their silence. The Department of History at the University of Queensland has also been supportive of this project from the moment of its inception, and Serena Bagley deserves special mention for her skills not only in word processing but also in tolerating my frequent interruptions to her duties. Finally, I would like to thank my editor, Ruth Willats, for her attention to the typescript, and Aruna Vasudevan, my commissioning editor, for her efforts in seeing the book through the publishing process and for enduring my moments of being overanxious.

vii

Notes on the Contributors Hélio Osvaldo Alves received his PhD from University College London. He is now Professor of British Studies at the University of Minho, Portugal, and has published the results of his research on cultural movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in several journals. His latest work includes editing a volume on William Morris, and The Eagle and the Mole, a Portuguese translation of poems by William Blake. He is currently preparing an extensive study of radical activity in Britain during the 1790s. Gregory Claeys was born in Paris in 1953 and educated at McGill University and the University of Cambridge. He has taught at the University of Hannover, Washington University, St Louis, and since 1992 he has been Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is the author of three books and editor of about thirty volumes of primary sources. Paul Crook recently retired from the Department of History at the University of Queensland. He is author of a number of works on Anglo-American history and Social Darwinism, including Diplomacy During the American Civil War (1975); Benjamin Kidd: Portrait of a Social Darwinist (1984); and Darwinism, War and History (1994). Michael T. Davis was an undergraduate and postgraduate student whose research was supervised at the University of Queensland by Malcolm Thomis. Since completing his PhD in 1995 he has been an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the University of Queensland and is currently writing histories of the London Corresponding Society and of the Scottish Martyrs of the 1790s (both forthcoming from Macmillan). H.T. Dickinson has taught at the University of Edinburgh since 1966 and has been Richard Lodge Professor of British History since 1980. He has published extensively on the parliamentary politics, popular politics and political ideas of eighteenth-century Britain and has edited the journal History since 1993. viii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Michael Durey was educated at the University of York and is currently Associate Professor of History at Murdoch University, Australia. His book on Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (1997) won the 1998 SHEAR Book Prize and he has subsequently edited Andrew Bryson’s Ordeal: an Epilogue to the 1798 Rebellion (1998). Ian Dyck is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. He is author of William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (1992) and of articles in History Workshop Journal, Social History and Rural History. He also edited Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine (1988) and co-edited (with Malcolm Chase) Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison (1996). Clive Emsley is Professor of History at The Open University in the United Kingdom. He was educated at the University of York and at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His publications include British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (1979); Crime and Society in England 1750–1900 (1987); and The English Police: A Political and Social History (1991). Jack Fruchtman, Jr., is Professor of Political Science at Maryland’s Towson University in America. He has published several studies on Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Reid, Helen Maria Williams, Thomas Paine and other eighteenth-century figures. He has most recently served as associate editor of Britain in the Hanoverian Age, 1714–1837: an Encyclopedia (1997). Kyle Grimes is a specialist in British Romanticism in the Department of English at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. His research focuses primarily on Regency period radicalism, covering especially the poetry of Shelley and Byron as well as radical publicists such as William Hone, Richard Carlile, Thomas Wooler and William Cobbett. Theoretically considered, his work focuses on the interchange between literary texts and other forms of more immediately topical writing and on the influence of censorship on literary form. Iain McCalman is Director of the Humanities Research Centre and Deputy Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. His book on the Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (1988) was republished in paperback in 1993. He has edited Horrors of Slavery: the Life and Writings of Robert Wedderburn (1992) and more

x

Notes on the Contributors

recently has served as general editor of The Oxford Companion to British Romantic Culture (1999). Jon Mee is Margaret Candfield Fellow in English Literature at University College, Oxford, and Lecturer in the Faculty of English, Oxford University. His Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992) is a study of William Blake in the context of the 1790s and until recently he worked as one of the editors of The Oxford Companion to British Romantic Culture (1999). He is currently writing a book-length study on the idea of enthusiasm as a structuring concept for the culture of the period. Michael Scrivener first became familiar with Malcolm Thomis’s work while in graduate school studying for his doctorate at the State University of New York at Buffalo and has continued to learn from Thomis’s writings ever since. He has taught at the English Department of Wayne State University in Detroit for over twenty years and has published two books, Radical Shelley (1982) and Poetry and Reform (1992). He is completing a study of John Thelwall’s writings. Bernadette Turner is a former PhD student of Malcolm Thomis. She has worked as a research assistant on projects with Malcolm Thomis and for the Brisbane City Gallery on social history exhibitions. She has recently co-authored a paper on Irish female orphans in nineteenthcentury Queensland with Dr L. Connors.

Introduction: ‘To Grow Gently Older and Wiser’ – Personal Reflections on Malcolm Thomis Michael T. Davis

For a student of any discipline nothing is more inspiring and gratifying than the kind of intellectual comfort that comes with the knowledge one is being taught and supervised by one of the best scholars in a chosen field. Such was my luck when, as an undergraduate ten years ago at the University of Queensland, I first entered a British history class given by Malcolm Thomis. Born in Bradford, England, in 1936, Malcolm received his tertiary education from the Universities of London (1954–9), Leeds (1959–60) and Nottingham (1960–4). His teaching career began in 1960 as Assistant History Master at High Pavement School, Nottingham, and then as a part-time Lecturer in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Nottingham. From there he moved to Magdalen College School, Oxford, where he served as Senior History Master between 1963 and 1967, before taking a lecturing post in history at the University of Stirling until 1976. It was then, in 1976, that Malcolm left his native Britain for the warmer climes of Australia and a professorship in the Department of History at the University of Queensland. From there his career continued in an upward spiral. He was appointed McCaughey Professor of History and was Head of the Department of History from 1978 to 1985. His ambitions then led him towards the administrative side of the university system and, after serving as Deputy President of the Academic Board (1988–90) and receiving a prestigious Doctor of Letters degree in 1989, Malcolm was appointed to the post of Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Humanities) in 1991. For several years he managed, with characteristic proficiency and professionalism, to juggle the responsibilities of his high appointment with a more casual teaching role in the Department of History and a continual stream of research students. xi

xii

Michael T. Davis

The University of Queensland, though, proved to be not only the scene of Malcolm’s career diversification, but it was during his time there that he also increasingly focused his research energies into the writing of Queensland institutional and local history. His accomplishments in this pursuit, like all others, are nothing short of significant. Commencing with Pastoral Country: a History of the Shire of Blackall published in 1979, Malcolm was to write a further nine books, on various aspects of Queensland history, in the fifteen years to 1994, which would acquaint him more intimately with his new home and which display a clarity of expression and thoroughness of research that is typical of all his historical writings. His crowning achievements include The Brisbane Club (1980), A Place of Light and Learning: The University of Queensland’s First 75 Years (1985), his two-volume A History of the Electricity Supply Industry: Queensland (1989–90), and most recently his study of The Brisbane Customs House (1994), a commemorative volume published to mark the reopening of the building under the custodianship of the University of Queensland. But, without discounting the scope of Malcolm’s historical contribution, for many students and scholars (and for me in particular) his most enduring and indeed his first publications were on the social and political consequences of industrialization, social protest and radical politics in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. His interest in these subjects was in some ways symptomatic of the 1960s and 1970s. A whole generation of remarkable historians, with intellectual tastes similar to Malcolm’s, emerged and developed following the publication of E.P. Thompson’s influential study of The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The fact that Malcolm could distinguish himself in a competitive field is alone a tribute to his scholarship. In 1968, his first book, Old Nottingham, was published, followed the year after by Politics and Society in Nottingham, 1785–1835. These books remain today essential reading for local historians, but it was in 1970 that Malcolm published on a subject that has virtually become synonymous with his name. The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (1970) was twice reprinted in the United States (1970 and 1972) and reissued in 1993 by Gregg Publishing as part of their ‘Modern Revivals in Economic and Social History’ series. The connection between Malcolm and the Luddites seems to have been a long time in the making. He apparently acquired a certain affinity with the Luddite cause or at least a sympathy for their perspectives some years before writing about Regency machine-breaking. In

Introduction

xiii

what could be interpreted as something of a Freudian slip, Malcolm recently recollected how, as a young history student, he worked for four summers as a bus conductor: Like my co-workers, I was suspicious when they introduced a ticket dispensing machine, the ‘setright’, which made writing skills redundant; it was even worse two decades later when one-personoperated buses made an entire occupational group redundant. This confirmed me in my attitudes to technological change and in my attachment to the Luddites, and I have never looked forward since those days.1 This understanding of the Luddite cause was faithfully captured and translated in Malcolm’s book, which continues to be well quoted and is a cornerstone for all who have since studied and wrote on the subject. Before moving from the University of Stirling, Malcolm published The Town Labourer and the Industrial Revolution (1974) and Responses to Industrialisation: the British Experience, 1780–1850 (1976), two works which confirmed his qualities as a historian who could critically analyse complex phenomena with an insightfulness and perception that was complemented by his ability to write a coherent and refreshingly simple, yet solid, argument. Although, as we have discussed, Malcolm was to devote less research time after 1976 to British history, he did co-author, with Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (1977), and, with Jennifer Grimmett, Women in Protest, 1800–1850 (1982). Both works are now out of print, but their arguments are far from out of date and still provide students with a useful synopsis of the subjects they cover and scholars with thoughtprovoking and still much debated ideas. Indeed, it is from Threats of Revolution in Britain that I have borrowed the general theme for this festschrift. The spectre of revolution and the nature of radicalism in Britain from the late eighteenth century through to the age of the Chartists has for some time engaged the interest of scholars and been the topic of much debate. Malcolm remains one of this subject’s most renowned and respected historians. When Threats of Revolution in Britain was published, it was a generally accepted term of definition to designate the years covered by this book as the ‘age of revolution’. British political history, however, is no longer confined to a historical vacuum and it is now more correct to describe these years as the ‘age of revolution and romanticism’. This is an indication of how the cultural and social history of British politics

xiv

Michael T. Davis

has taken a so-called linguistic turn and it is significant that Malcolm’s work on this topic moves with and continues to inform new historiography, a fact illustrated in itself by the scope of contributions and contributors in this collection. This volume, in fact, brings together a fine balance of literary scholars and historians, each acknowledging the influence on their work of Malcolm’s scholarship. This diversity of contributors, moreover, hints at another of Malcolm’s merits. He once wrote that the ‘individual chooses his own approach’;2 during my time as one of his research students, Malcolm maintained this philosophy, continually encouraging me to think independently and to make contact with other scholars in the field such that I would develop my ‘own approach’. In this way, then, the variety of contributors to this collection can be seen as a direct reflection of Malcolm’s approach to supervision and teaching. He may well have been my first role model, but never did he consider himself to be the only one. Even more of Malcolm’s classroom manner remains so vivid for me. As an undergraduate his tutorials were immensely stimulating, with Malcolm imparting his own charm on the characters and events we were discussing. If his skills as a conversationalist were not enough, then his conviviality and favourite biscuits or chocolate (although by personal choice I did not partake of the sweets) made classes an enjoyable experience. As a postgraduate under his supervision, Malcolm was always available for an hour or more of discussion, despite what must have been a very busy schedule as Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Humanities). He was at all times encouragingly critical and open to new ideas, a strict grammarian, and never once assumed an overbearing superiority. This book was initially conceived in 1995, after I submitted my PhD, as a means of showing my gratitude to Malcolm for his years of efforts and for suffering my split infinitives. I wanted something more enduring than any of the traditional thank-offerings and this festschrift seemed ideal. Since then, however, I have realized that the book is much more than a personal way of expressing my appreciation. Scholars from around the world (some of whom have never met Malcolm) have offered a piece of their ‘intellectual property’ to honour a colleague on virtue of his work and professional application. Malcolm’s modesty would perhaps lead him to downplay this aspect of the volume. But, like the radicals he once studied, Malcolm’s contribution to British history is undeniably much more than he may realize. At another level, this book has gained a certain poignancy and timely relevance to mark Malcolm’s retirement from university life in

Introduction

xv

1997 and it is interesting to note that the festschrift for Gwyn A. Williams was also published, nearly fifteen years ago, as something of a written bon voyage to another eminent historian of British radicalism. The sentiments expressed by the editors of that collection remain true in the case of Malcolm and deserve reiterating: In different times, or different societies, a man of such attainment – an historian of major eminence and a uniquely gifted teacher – would be cherished and encouraged to enhance the intellectual life of his institution. The loss of senior academics of such quality is little short of a tragedy for the intellectual well-being of ... universities.3 Fortunately, Malcolm has not completely severed all ties with academia and something of an intellectual ‘tragedy’ has, at least for the moment, been averted. He remains an honorary consultant in the Department of History at the University of Queensland and in 1998 was surely one of the most over-qualified tutors at an Open University summer school held at the University of York. In retrospect, it was only once I started to compile the tabula gratulatoria and began receiving warm notes of reflection on Malcolm that I realized just how far and wide was the respect for him, both inside and outside the world of universities. He is undeniably a man cherished by many. His distinguished profile and integrity as a historian brought him professional kudos; at the same time, his charm, timely humour, and friendly and hospitable character lured others to him. I have been fortunate enough to experience all his graces. At various times he has been my mentor, my advocate and, more recently, my personal tour guide in York. For those reasons and many more, it is my respectful wish, as I am sure it is also that of all the contributors and signatories to this book, that Malcolm (to quote his own words of desire for the modern generation of tertiary students) will, in the years to come, continue ‘to grow gently older and wiser’.4

Notes 1. University News (University of Queensland), 16 September 1997, p. 6. 2. Malcolm I. Thomis, The Town Labourer and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974), p. 3. 3. Artisans, Peasants and Proletarians 1760-1860: Essays Presented to Gwyn A. Williams, ed. Clive Emsley and James Walvin (London, 1985), p. 4. 4. University News (University of Queensland), 16 September 1997, p. 6.

This page intentionally left blank

1 ‘The Friends of America’: British Sympathy with the American Revolution H.T. Dickinson

Among other struggles, the American Revolution was a constitutional conflict between American patriots and British imperialists who disagreed sharply and fundamentally in their understanding of the liberties of British subjects and their interpretation of the British constitution. What can reasonably be regarded as a civil war within the British Atlantic empire in the later eighteenth century was not simply a conflict in which two British peoples, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, disputed about their constitutional interpretations of the past and over their constitutional visions for the future. The constitutional issues were so complex and the consequences of victory or defeat so grave that the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic were also divided internally on the wisdom and justice of the arguments put forward by the American patriot and British imperialist leaders. On both sides of the Atlantic some people were quite unable to make up their minds or feared making the wrong choice and so they tried to remain neutral and awaited the outcome of the conflict without being directly involved in it. But there was also, on both sides of the Atlantic, a minority that opposed the views and repudiated the actions of the majority. In the American colonies there were loyalists who did not believe that the colonial grievances justified armed rebellion. In Britain there were those who sympathized with the Americans, to varying degrees, and who protested at the British government’s coercive policies and its decision to compel by force the colonies to accept the sovereign authority of parliament. Only in recent decades have these minorities received the attention they deserve.1 This examination of those Britons who sympathized with the American colonies will first identify those groups inside and outside 1

2

H.T. Dickinson

parliament who campaigned against the British imperialist strategy. It will then look at both the arguments and the protests of these proAmericans, examining, in turn, their attacks on the wisdom and expediency of government policies, their claims that these policies were unjust and unconstitutional, and then their abortive efforts at conciliation. The concluding section will look at the impact of American success on these sympathizers with the American cause and will argue that this was greater than has generally been recognized.

The Friends of America and the ‘Conspiracy against Liberty’ Throughout the American crisis successive British ministries secured comfortable parliamentary majorities for their American policies. It was not difficult for most administrations to secure such majorities unless they alienated the king or ran into very serious problems abroad. It is impossible to know for certain, however, what most Britons thought about the American crisis since they did not express a view about it. In a largely rural and generally deferential society many were no doubt uninterested or neutral. Once Britain was at war, and especially when she was fighting France and Spain and even facing the real prospect of invasion, there was an inevitable patriotic response and a rallying around the flag. In 1775 there were many petitions to parliament and loyal addresses to the king, urging the government to take a firm line against the rebellious American colonies. Some petitions were no doubt spontaneous, but we do know that some were deliberately encouraged by the government and most were promoted by local MPs and signed by the local governing elite.2 Many historians have been too ready to believe that most of the British people supported the government’s policies. While the true position remains uncertain, there is evidence to suggest that there was some popular opposition to government measures. In 1775 Lord North admitted to George III that ‘the cause of Great Britain is not yet sufficiently popular’,3 and Lord Camden claimed that ‘the common people hold the war in abhorrence and the merchants and tradesmen, for obvious reasons, are likewise against it’, and he told the House of Lords: ‘You have not half of the nation on your side.’4 Benjamin Franklin believed that ‘the body of the British people are our friends.’5 In August 1775, John Wesley, who was a defender of the government’s policies and who had travelled round the country more than anyone else, was alarmed that the bulk of the people were

‘The Friends of America’

3

‘dangerously dissatisfied’ and highly critical of the king himself.6 Two months later Temple Luttrell, having returned from a tour of England, told the House of Commons ‘that the sense of the mass of the people is in favour of the Americans’.7 In the preface to the Annual Register for 1775 the editor confessed: ‘It indeed little becomes us to be dogmatical and decided in our opinions in this matter [the contest with America], when the public, even on this side of the water, is so much divided.’8 David Hartley wrote in June 1776: ‘The ministry have certainly not been able to raise any national spirit against America. The generality of the people are cold upon the subject; nine men in ten content themselves with an indolent wish for peace, but there are many zealous and principled friends to America.’9 Two years later he wrote: I am confident that there is no implacable hatred between the people of England and the people of America. The contention has been between the ministers of the Crown and our late fellowsubjects in America. They know that the people of England have been deceived, and that Parliament has been misled by ministers.10 Among modern historians a number have begun to question the assertion that the British people supported the government’s coercive measures. After examining the petitions of 1775, James Bradley concluded that: ‘the English people were politically informed, constitutionally astute, and deeply concerned about the authority of the British government on the one hand, and the rights of their American brethren on the other.’11 Linda Colley has claimed that ‘opinion in Great Britain was . . . seriously fractured’,12 while Kathleen Wilson has commented on ‘the intensity of the rifts in the nation’.13 Peter Thomas, the leading historian of British politics and the American Revolution, believes that most British people supported government policies, though he provides no hard evidence for this assertion and he concedes that a sufficient number of conciliatory petitions were submitted ‘to provide evidence that a substantial section of British public opinion in 1775 was opposed to the American War’.14 While we cannot be certain about the attitude of most Britons to the American crisis, because we simply lack sufficient evidence, we can prove that sympathy for the American cause was expressed by various groups, some of them quite influential and others quite popular. These included the colonial agents, the Rockingham and the Pitt groups in parliament, various Americans in London and their allies

4

H.T. Dickinson

among the popular radicals supporting John Wilkes, the leading Rational Dissenters, and a very vocal body of radical publicists. The American colonies had no direct representation in the government or parliament, but they had established a system of colonial agents in London, whose role it was to lobby ministers or inform parliament about American attitudes and grievances.15 This system did not give the colonies sufficient leverage in parliament and it began to collapse as war approached in 1774–5. There were difficulties long before that. Some agents acted for more than one colony, which gave them too much to do, and sometimes individual colonies appointed more than one agent which could confuse the messages being received in Britain and the colonies. Agents could be handicapped by being given rigid or unwise advice from the colonies and sometimes they received very little information and were uncertain what to do. These agents were also part-time and rather poorly paid. A few came over from America, but most were British, usually merchants, lawyers or backbench MPs. Few had much influence at Westminster, though Edmund Burke, agent for New York, was an exception. Only Benjamin Franklin, the agent for four colonies, had great success in putting the American case before parliament and the public. He had lived in London for many years, he was very well connected with politicians and publicists, and he himself was a veritable one-man propaganda machine. In general, however, the colonial agents had insufficient political influence to deflect government ministers from the fateful policies they pursued in the 1760s and 1770s. Within parliament there were no organized political parties at this time, only a significant number of backbenchers and several rival factions or connections competing for power, while sharing the same attitudes towards the Glorious Revolution, the Hanoverian succession, the British constitution and the Church of England. Mary Kinnear has detected some 207 pro-American MPs in the later 1770s and has found that many of these represented either county seats or the more populous boroughs.16 Some of these connections were however to show some sympathy for the American cause and sought political solutions to the crisis. The largest of these connections and the one struggling to develop as a party was led by the Marquis of Rockingham.17 Although this group was responsible for passing the fateful Declaratory Act of 1766, it was also the connection which repealed the Stamp Act and opposed most government measures against the colonies in the 1770s. Their greatest publicist was Edmund Burke, but they had several good speakers in parliament, and

‘The Friends of America’

5

they later won over several leading sympathizers with the American cause, including Charles James Fox, the Duke of Richmond and David Hartley. The other main pro-American group coalesced around William Pitt, later Earl of Chatham. Pitt was the rogue elephant of British politics and he prided himself on his political independence, but he had a number of influential admirers including Lord Camden in the Lords and William Beckford in the House of Commons. The Earl of Shelburne, who drifted into a pro-American position in the 1770s, was a loose ally of Pitt’s and he was closely allied to Isaac Barré in the House of Commons. Unfortunately, these parliamentary friends of America failed to cooperate fully in their opposition to the government’s American policies and they carried only limited influence in parliament in the 1770s. Outside parliament, the most active sympathizers with the American cause were found among the radical groups in London and other large cities, many of whom were merchants, tradesmen, professional men and Dissenters. A number of merchants trading with the American colonies sympathized with the American cause and organized protests against government measures. They included Barlow Trecothick, George Hayley, William Beckford and Capel Hanbury in London, Richard Champion in Bristol and Charles Goore in Liverpool. More active still were a number of Americans living in Britain. In London, Arthur Lee and William Lee, the brothers of the Virginian merchant Richard Henry Lee, and Richard’s trading partner, Stephen Sayre, were very active in the American cause, while others including Benjamin Rush, Charles Steuart in Liverpool and later Henry Cruger in Bristol, also promoted the American cause. Arthur Lee became influential in radical circles in London. He wrote pamphlets and a series of newspaper articles as ‘Junius Americanus’ in which he brought American issues and opinions before the public. In 1769 he persuaded the radicals to include the government’s American policy among their list of grievances and in 1771 he even became secretary of the radical Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights. His brother, William Lee, was also active in London radical politics. He and Stephen Sayre were elected as the two sheriffs of London in 1773 and they both unsuccessfully contested parliamentary seats in the general election of 1774. Sayre was arrested, though released, in October 1775 for allegedly plotting to kidnap George III and planning to start an armed insurrection.18 These Americans were closely linked to the burgeoning radical movement which grew around the charismatic John Wilkes from the

6

H.T. Dickinson

late 1760s. London was a huge metropolis, while the city itself possessed open representative institutions of local government, a very politically active body of citizens and a very powerful press. All were regularly involved in issues of national significance, all were generally critical of the aristocratic elite and all rallied to the support of John Wilkes in his many clashes with government and parliament. Wilkes gave consistent support not only to the liberties of Englishmen, but to the American cause. American grievances were regularly mentioned in Wilkesite petitions and protests. When he took his seat for Middlesex in 1774 John Wilkes became a fierce critic of the government’s coercive policies towards the American colonies and he regularly condemned the war. Whatever his personal morals, he was a determined and consistent friend to liberty, in Britain and in the American colonies.19 Even more important in developing and disseminating a wide range of arguments in support of the American cause were a number of Rational Dissenters and men engaged in the publishing industry. Benjamin Franklin was deeply involved with a group of radical thinkers (many of whom were Dissenters) who belonged to the Club of Honest Whigs in London.20 These were men who had been educated in the Real Whig or Commonwealthman tradition,21 who were committed to the campaign for greater religious toleration and who all adopted a pro-American stance. They included Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, John Jebb and James Burgh. Their views were also shared by Granville Sharp, John Cartwright and Catharine Macaulay in the capital and by radical Dissenting ministers in the provinces, such as Caleb Evans in Bristol, James Murray in Newcastle, Rees David in Norwich, Joshua Toulmin in Taunton and George Walker in Nottingham.22 The press propagated the views of all of these men as well as much other pro-American material. John Almon, the leading publisher in London, and Thomas Hollis,23 the most effective publicist, were both deeply involved in producing pro-American material for the reading public. Seventy-five of the main colonial pamphlets on the American crisis, including works by Otis, Dulany, Dickinson, Jefferson, Paine, and John and Sam Adams, were reprinted in London, as well as the proceedings of the Stamp Act Congress and the Continental Congress. Over one thousand separate pamphlets on the American cause, written by British authors, were also published in the years between 1764 and 1784 and a number of them were proAmerican. A pro-American stance was adopted by many leading newspapers, including the Political Register, the London Chronicle and

‘The Friends of America’

7

the London Evening Post in the capital and the Kentish Gazette, the Leeds Mercury, the Bath Journal and the Birmingham and Stafford Chronicle in the provinces. In 1776 a virulently republican magazine, The Crisis, circulated in the provinces until it was suppressed by the authorities.24 Most of the critics of the government’s American policies had been educated in the ideological tradition variously described as Real Whig, Commonwealthman or Country. So, significantly, had most of the American patriots.25 This shared ideological heritage had taught them to be fearful of arbitrary power, suspicious of the executive, concerned about the corruption of the constitution, mistrustful of the expanding financial interest, and vigilant in the defence of liberty. Alarmed at the expansion of the civil and military establishment, they feared that crown patronage, rather than the royal prerogative, now posed the greatest threat to the balance of the constitution and the liberties of the subject. Such fears had been widespread in the era of Sir Robert Walpole in the 1720s and 1730s.26 What brought them again to the forefront of political debate was the belief that a sinister conspiracy against liberty had sprung up since the accession of George III in 1760. It was a belief in this new conspiracy that persuaded some of the parliamentary connections, particularly the Rockingham group, to share the ideological concerns of long-standing government critics outside parliament. Modern historians now reject as a myth the claim that George III wished to increase the power of the crown by unconstitutional means and they insist that the alarm created by his political behaviour was exaggerated and unfounded. Yet there can be no doubt that the American colonists, the Rockingham connection and the Wilkesite radicals were all convinced that there was a sinister plot to undermine the constitution and to subvert the liberties of the subject. A myth that is firmly and widely believed is a potent force. Certainly, the American colonists could point to a long train of government policies that threatened their interests. The Rockingham connection had seen the removal of the Old Corps of Whigs from office, the promotion of the royal favourite, the Earl of Bute, to high office, the advance of new men referred to as the ‘King’s Friends’, and a succession of unstable administrations until the king was satisfied with the conservative and apparently subservient government led by Lord North.27 The Wilkesite radicals could point to the abuse of general warrants, attempts to muzzle the press, troop violence against crowds and, most serious of all, the refusal to accept the clear and repeated verdict of the voters in the Middlesex elections of 1768–9.

8

H.T. Dickinson

All of these alarming political and constitutional developments, in Britain and in the colonies, were seen as part of a coordinated campaign against liberty. A newspaper report in 1769 claimed: ‘the cause of liberty in England and America is one common cause . . . The attacks on both have been made and carried on by the same set of men, with the same views, and with the same illegal violence.’28 Arthur Lee could expect to be believed by the critics of government when he wrote: ‘the cause of America is the common cause of the realm . . . both countries have the same complaint, and therefore claim the same friends.’29 The American colonists coordinated their resistance to government policies. The people of Britain were urged to ‘show themselves Britons, and stand up in defence of their birthright; their liberties, which their fore-fathers purchased with seas of blood to entail to their posterity’.30 Unfortunately, the British opposition was never so united or as coordinated as that in the American colonies.

Attacks on the consequences of government policies Because a clear majority in parliament defended the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty – including the Rockingham and Pitt groups – those who challenged the government’s American policies in parliament or through petitions to parliament did not usually attack the government’s constitutional right to pass such measures. Instead, they condemned these measures as impractical, inexpedient or impolitic, and likely to produce disastrous results. The strength and unity of the American resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765 first warned Britain of the dangerous consequences of government policies. Not surprisingly, it was the British merchants and manufacturers engaged in the American trade who noticed the first adverse consequences of the colonial decision to hit out at British exports. Barlow Trecothick, a London merchant active in the American trade and a man who had lived many years in Boston, had founded the Committee of London Merchants trading to North America in February 1765.31 In early November, alarmed by evidence of a serious decline in British exports to the colonies, he contacted the Marquis of Rockingham, the King’s new chief minister. He referred to the American protests against the Stamp Act and pointed out that the ‘consequences must be very dreadful – they are too many and too terrible to describe’.32 The reduction in colonial trade, he warned, would mean that the colonists could not pay their debts to British merchants and the fall in demand for British exports would produce

‘The Friends of America’

9

widespread unemployment and distress in the manufacturing areas of Britain. Rockingham was soon convinced that the Stamp Act must be repealed, but he knew that parliament would be more difficult to persuade. A strategy was therefore devised to spread the merchants’ alarm to the backbenches of parliament.33 Trecothick called meetings of merchants in London, allied with the West India merchants, and sent circular letters to the mayors and merchants of about thirty ports and manufacturing towns to encourage petitions to parliament about the distress caused by the decline in the American trade. Some twenty-six petitions were sent to parliament warning of the adverse economic consequences of the Stamp Act. Parliament was even more impressed by the evidence provided to a committee it appointed to look into the consequences of the Stamp Act. Carefully briefed and rehearsed, Trecothick and about forty fellow merchants from London and provincial towns gave convincing evidence before parliament in February 1766 of the serious disruption to British manufacturing and the export trade to the colonies. Benjamin Franklin was also called to give evidence and he gave a most effective performance that had a considerable impact on the parliamentary committee and on public opinion (since it was widely reported in the press). All these witnesses spoke only of the economic consequences of the Stamp Act. The petitions were supported by a flood of press comment pointing out the urgent practical needs for repeal. Henry Cruger, an American merchant based in Bristol, wrote home to his father: ‘The Vox Populi now begins to gain ground, and I think since the legality of taxation is allowed, the Act will be repeal’d upon the grounds of expediency.’34 General Conway, however, who had served in the American colonies, went further. He warned his fellow MPs that the Stamp Act could not be enforced without civil war and this would give Britain’s European enemies an opportunity to intervene and seek revenge for previous defeats. While he conceded that parliament had the constitutional right to pass the Stamp Act and he believed the British army could eventually subdue a colonial rebellion, he pointed out that there were only 5,000 troops in the colonies at present and the Americans could probably raise 150,000 militia and could count on support from France and Spain.35 Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, a decision met with considerable rejoicing and public celebrations among the merchant and manufacturing communities in London and other towns across the country. Horace Walpole concluded that ‘it was the clamour of trade, of the merchants, and of the manufacturing towns that had borne

10

H.T. Dickinson

down all opposition. A general insurrection was apprehended as the immediate consequences of upholding the bill.’36 Unfortunately, to sweeten the bitter pill that parliament was being asked to swallow, the Rockingham ministry supported the Declaratory Act of 1766 which confirmed parliament’s authority over the colonies ‘in all cases whatsoever’. The great majority of those in parliament supported the Declaratory Act, though Isaac Barré thought it went too far and he made the prophetic comment: ‘All colonies have their date of independence. The wisdom or folly of our conduct may make it sooner or later. If we act injudiciously, this point may be reached in the life of many of the members of this House.’37 The scale and coordination of the British opposition to the Stamp Act were not matched by subsequent campaigns against government policies towards the American colonies, but there were still frequent complaints about the economic consequences of these measures. The Townshend duties soon produced complaints from merchants and backbench MPs that British exports were again suffering because of the Americans’ refusal or inability to buy taxed products from Britain. Lord Camden told the House of Lords in October 1768: ‘it is . . . inexpedient to tax the colonies, as we maintained, when the Stamp Act was repealed. After both sides are half ruined in the contest, we shall at last establish a right, which ought never to have existed.’38 Isaac Barré, in the House of Commons, was even more pessimistic. He accused the Townshend duties of being ‘contrary to all commercial principles’, and warned: ‘I say without repealing this law, you run the risk of losing America.’39 Petitions against the Townshend duties were submitted from London and Bristol and their economic arguments gave the government the excuse it was looking for and it agreed to repeal all the duties except that on tea.40 The tea duty was retained to uphold parliament’s right to tax the colonies. Despite being warned against encouraging the export of cheap tea in 1773, Lord North went ahead and provoked the colonial resistance which resulted in the fateful Boston Tea Party at the end of 1773. When Lord North’s government reacted to the violent American protests against the tea duty, his critics warned that his coercive measures and use of armed force would be counterproductive and would seriously damage Britain’s own interests. Rockingham insisted: ‘I can never give my assent to proceeding to actual force against the colonies.’41 Edmund Burke agreed: ‘There is no military remedy. . . . Popular government cannot be enforced by an army.’42 In opposing the Boston Port Bill of 1774, he added: ‘There is a combination not of

‘The Friends of America’

11

Boston but of all Americans against it . . . Observe that the disturbances are universal, that the people are almost unanimous.’43 Bishop Shipley was even more pessimistic: ‘The idea of governing provinces by force is visionary and chimerical. The experiment has often been tried, and it has never succeeded. It ends infallibly in the ruin of the one country or the other, or in the last degree of wretchedness.’44 When war broke out in 1775 John Wilkes condemned it as ‘fatal and ruinous’, Isaac Barré insisted that the present British forces had no chance of conquering the colonies, while Charles James Fox lambasted Lord North as a ‘blundering pilot. . . . He has lost a whole continent.’45 The alarm spread outside parliament. Early in 1775 London and many of the leading towns in the country (including Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich and Nottingham) petitioned in favour of a policy of conciliation towards the American colonies. John Wilkes led an impressive march through London, watched by large crowds, to present the petition of the Common Council of the city, urging the withdrawal of British troops from the American colonies. These petitions were part of a spontaneous popular protest against the drift to war. The American scholar who has closely examined these petitions, while not claiming that a majority of the British people opposed war, does challenge the claim that the nation rallied behind the government in this crisis.46 He was able to demonstrate that in many parts of the country the people were seriously divided over how best to deal with the American crisis. While the rash of petitioning activity fell well short of being an organized political movement, it was more impressive and more indicative of popular sentiment because it was so spontaneous. While petitions favouring the government’s coercive policy were encouraged by government ministers and sponsored by local MPs, magistrates and Anglican clergymen, the petitions in favour of conciliation were more often spontaneous, were signed by more people and won more support from the middling commercial interests. Some petitions even came from towns unrepresented in parliament and were sometimes signed by those not qualified to vote. The evidence clearly indicates that the nation was deeply divided on whether force should be used against the American colonies. A royal proclamation of August 1775 declared the colonies to be in a state of rebellion, but between July 1775 and March 1776 some thirty petitions from seven counties and many major towns again urged an end to the fighting. The March 1776 petition from the Common Council of London condemned the war and radical pro-Americans in the capital tried to block efforts to

12

H.T. Dickinson

recruit men into the army and to impress men into the royal navy. London radicals also collected funds to help Americans who suffered from British actions.

Support for American principles More principled and more indicative of genuine sympathy for the American cause were those speeches, writings and protests in Britain that condemned government policies, not because they were impractical or damaged Britain’s economic interests, but because they were unjust, oppressive and contrary to the principles of the British constitution and the liberties of the subject. There is a wealth of evidence to demonstrate that there was British support for every point of principle raised by the Americans themselves. Perhaps no single British commentator agreed with every single legal, constitutional and moral argument put forward in the colonies, but British sympathy could be found somewhere for every one of the American claims. There was support for the special privileges which the colonists claimed as migrants from England. Isaac Barré angrily denied that the colonies had been planted by English efforts and he asserted that the original colonists had fled from tyranny, had triumphed over great difficulties and owed nothing to their mother country: ‘They flourished not by our care but by our neglect. They have increased while we did not attend them. They shrink under our hand.’47 Most friends of America, however, preferred to argue that the colonists emigrated as free men, taking with them the full rights of Englishmen, under the common law and the constitution, and having their rights protected by their charters. The colonial charters were regarded as inviolable, not subject to change by parliament and as the colonial equivalent to Magna Carta.48 Among the liberties which the colonists possessed were the right to trial by jury, the right to a trial in the vicinity of the offence, the right not to have troops quartered on them and, indeed, all the rights of subjects in Britain.49 There was very considerable support for the American claim that they could not be taxed without their consent. This was widely regarded as one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the British constitution and many commentators claimed that the Americans were protected by fundamental laws such as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.50 John Wilkes condemned any ‘attempt to take their money from them without their consent, contrary to the common rights of all mankind, and those great and fundamental principles of the English constitution, for

‘The Friends of America’

13

which Hampden bled’.51 Some commentators insisted that the colonists could be taxed only by their own legislative assemblies,52 in which they were represented, and that parliament had no right to impose any internal tax on them or any external tax devised just to raise revenue from the colonies. Pitt and Camden told parliament that its authority over the colonies did not extend to the right of taxation.53 Pitt later explained his stance against taxing the colonies: ‘it is contrary to that essential, unalterable right in nature, engrafted into the British constitution as a fundamental law, that what a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but which cannot be taken from him without his consent’.54 Other commentators went further. They were critical even of some of the British attempts to regulate the colonial economy. They insisted that Britain gained major economic benefits simply by importing American products and exporting her own manufactured goods to the colonies.55 More important still, the American claim of ‘no taxation without representation’ and their belief that the colonies were not represented in parliament, whatever the theory of virtual representation might say, was widely accepted by British radicals. Even Pitt denied that virtual representation could include the colonies, while Lord Camden told his fellow peers: ‘taxation and representation are inseparable: – this position is founded on the laws of nature; it is more, it is an eternal law of nature; ... Taxation and representation are coeval with and essential to this constitution.’56 The pride taken in British liberties and the British constitution and the long-standing hostility to absolute, arbitrary authority, persuaded many British critics of the government to support the American attack on parliamentary sovereignty. While the doctrine had become an orthodoxy within parliament, many outside parliament held an older view of the constitution similar to that held by most American colonists. These men condemned parliamentary sovereignty on the same grounds as the Americans. Many appealed to older principles and claimed that the fundamental laws of the constitution (such as Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Act of Union with Scotland) put limits on what parliament could do.57 Obadiah Hulme expressed the fears of many when he wrote: There is not a more dangerous doctrine can be adopted in our state, than to admit that the legislative authority hath any right to alter, the first principles of our constitution, by acts of parliament. Upon this foundation, they may mould it into what shape they please; and, in the end, make us slaves, by law.58

14

H.T. Dickinson

Other commentators placed different constraints on parliament’s unfettered authority, including the law of God, the law of nature and the need to serve the welfare of the community.59 Finally, radicals such as Richard Price, James Burgh and John Cartwright stressed that the sovereign authority in the state lay with the people, not only when they set up government by the original contract, as John Locke had claimed, but forever thereafter. Cartwright, for example, insisted: ‘The rights of sovereignty reside in the people themselves; that is, they have a right to choose their own governors.’60 Throughout the American crisis British sympathizers with the colonial cause criticized the government for acting harshly and unjustly in supporting coercive measures which subverted the liberties of the subject and undermined the constitutional rights of colonial assemblies. Isaac Barré protested: ‘We have been the aggressors from the beginning, and like all other aggressors we shall never forgive them the injuries we have done them.’61 All the Coercive or Intolerable Acts of 1774 came in for very strong criticism inside and outside parliament. Critics pointed out that the Boston Port Bill punished only one guilty port out of many, punished more innocent people than guilty people, and punished the city without any defence being heard. In April 1775 John Wilkes encouraged a group of London aldermen and liverymen to petition for the repeal of the Coercive Acts and for the dismissal of Lord North’s administration.62 In July 1775 a petition from the Common Council of London urged conciliation and denounced the Boston Port Act as ‘the most merciless policy, of starving our fellow subjects into a total surrender of their liberties, and an unlimited submission to arbitrary government’.63 Edmund Burke urged the repeal of all of the Coercive Acts and a renunciation of parliament’s right to tax the colonies.64 In discussing the Massachusetts Government Bill it was argued that it was against natural justice to hold trials far away from the vicinity where the offences occurred. Bishop Shipley protested: ‘to change the government of a people without their consent, is the highest and most arbitrary act of sovereignty that one nation can exercise over another . . . The very idea of it implies a most total abject and slavish dependency in the inferior state.’65 John Sawbridge, the London radical, warned of the Administration of Justice Bill that it ‘is meant to enslave America; and the same Minister who means to enslave them, would, if he had the opportunity, enslave England’.66 Finally, the Quebec Act was condemned on several grounds: for denying the colony an assembly, the right of habeas corpus, and trial by jury in

‘The Friends of America’

15

non-criminal cases, and for extending Popery.67 In seeking to extend the colony’s boundary round the western border of many American colonies, the Act, in the words of Lord Camden, ‘could only be intended to extend the shackles of arbitrary power and of Popery over all the future settlements and colonies of America’.68 Camden justified American resistance to such coercive measures69 and so did the London petition of 1775.70 Even after serious fighting had broken out, British voices were raised to condemn government aggression and to justify the course the American rebels had adopted. The Marquis of Granby told the House of Lords that the Americans were justified in resisting the Intolerable Acts, by force if necessary: ‘If the peaceable part of mankind must tamely relinquish their property and their freedom, and submit to the yoke of the oppressor, merely to avoid the imputation of rebellion, where are your inherent and indefeasible rights, the glory and boast of Englishmen?’71 David Hartley was far from being alone when he told the House of Commons: ‘I shall always believe that our American fellow subjects have been driven to resistance in their own defence, and in support of those very claims which we ourselves have successfully taken up in former times, to rescue us from the violence and tyrannical pretensions of the House of Stuart.’72 Reverses in the war and first the prospect and then the reality of an armed alliance between America and France soon persuaded the friends of America in parliament that peace must be made, even at the price of conceding American independence. By November 1777 Charles James Fox, a recruit to the Rockingham party, insisted that ‘The idea of conquering America was absurd and . . . absolutely impossible.’ Three months later he was advocating a recognition of American independence.73 By March 1778 the Duke of Richmond was urging the withdrawal of British troops from America and, if necessary, a recognition of American independence.74 The Earl of Shelburne expressed the same views in April.75 The leading opposition party was, thereafter, ready to concede American independence, while still hoping to negotiate a favourable commercial relationship with Britain’s former colonies.

British attempts at conciliation The friends of America in Britain were horrified at the widening breach between the British imperialists and the American patriots. While sympathetic to the patriot position, however, they were most reluctant to see the colonies become a separate, independent state.

16

H.T. Dickinson

They longed for reconciliation and put forward schemes for reaching a constitutional settlement even after war had broken out and it was quite clear that both Britain and America were making demands that the other side would not concede. Not surprisingly, all these plans for conciliation failed. They all went beyond what the British government or parliament would contemplate and they all fell short of what the Americans demanded. The most active independent backbencher seeking a solution to the American crisis was Thomas Pownall, a former lieutenant governor of New Jersey and former governor of Massachusetts. Between 1764 and 1777 he produced six editions of his Administration of the British Colonies each one revised to meet the changing situation. In these works Pownall urged a new imperial relationship that would give the American colonies representation in the British parliament, would abandon British claims to levy internal taxes on the colonies, but would require the colonies to accept external taxes and the trade laws. He hoped that Britain and the Atlantic colonies could be formed into one dominion, of which Britain would be the commercial centre and the king-in-parliament would remain as the ultimate sovereign authority in imperial affairs. Although he was not prepared to abandon parliamentary sovereignty, he did allow the colonies extensive internal self-government and he maintained that parliament could interfere in the colonies only in an emergency when the colonies threatened the constitutional order of the empire. By 1774 Pownall had reluctantly accepted that American representation in parliament was not acceptable to either side. He believed that the only alternative was to return to the pre-1763 situation, with the colonies controlling internal taxation, but agreeing to levy revenues for the general costs of empire. He was still not prepared to reject parliamentary sovereignty over imperial affairs or to concede full legislative independence to the American colonies. Not until the end of 1777 had military failure persuaded him that American independence should be conceded, though he still hoped for a commercial treaty and a defensive and offensive military alliance.76 William Pitt was confident that he understood the American colonists and that he could find a solution to the crisis.77 He was prepared to concede Americans the same constitutional liberties and legal protections as British subjects, he insisted that parliament could not tax the colonies and he left this task to their own colonial assemblies, and he condemned all the coercive legislation of 1774. By the time he proposed his conciliatory bill, in early 1775, however, the

‘The Friends of America’

17

American demands had gone beyond the issue of taxation and representation. Pitt seemed unaware of this and held views that the Americans could not support. Pitt was still adamant that parliament had full authority to legislate for the colonies and to regulate the imperial trade. He saw the colonies as existing primarily for the benefit of Britain and he was prepared to restrict their full independence so that they would increase the power of Britain and enable it to compete successfully with France as an imperial, naval and commercial power. It was his ministry that had passed the Townshend duties and had temporarily suspended the New York assembly. Even as late as 1775 he hoped that Congress would make ‘a free grant to the King, his heirs, and successors, of a certain perpetual revenue, subject to the disposition of the British parliament’.78 He had no notion of what to do if the colonies refused to raise such revenues. It was too late in any case to offer such terms in 1775. Edmund Burke is also famous for his great speeches attacking Lord North’s policies and calling for the conciliation of the American colonies.79 Burke had carefully researched the subject and he was more conscious than most British politicians that the colonies had developed a different political, social and economic culture. He also admitted that Britain was wrong to stress the right to a constitutional authority which it had no intention of using and he tried to approach the crisis in a generous spirit. Unfortunately, while ready to abandon British efforts to tax the colonies, to return to a policy of colonial requisitions to meet some of the costs of imperial defence, and to accept that the colonial assemblies must be regarded as the local legislatures for all internal affairs in the colonies, Burke was one of the Declaratory Act’s greatest supporters and he would not abandon the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Like Pitt, he still expected parliament to regulate colonial trade and he hoped that the colonies would themselves raise money towards the costs of imperial defence. He did not see that trying to re-establish goodwill was not enough; it did not offer the Americans any guaranteed security for the lives, liberty and property. Not until 1778 was he prepared to abandon the Declaratory Act and to accept the reality of American independence.80 David Hartley eventually went a little further than Burke.81 He was prepared to give the Americans very considerable local autonomy and he did not support parliamentary sovereignty. He hoped for some kind of federal union which would allow Britain and America to benefit from the Atlantic trade and to share a common nationality and a common defence policy. What would happen in cases of

18

H.T. Dickinson

disagreement he did not say. By the time he put forward his proposals the war was well underway and the Americans had forged an alliance with France, which Hartley resented. At least he played a prominent role in the peace treaty that ended the war and recognized the independence of the United States of America. Radicals outside parliament, who were more sympathetic to the American cause, proposed more generous conciliatory schemes and were quicker to recognize the inevitability of American independence. In 1770 James Burgh had written eleven articles challenging parliament’s right to tax the American colonies and defended their claim to ‘no taxation without representation’. He hoped that the colonists might be allowed to send temporary representatives to parliament to set an agreed quota of taxes to be paid by the colonies for imperial defence or that they might be allowed to hold an inter-colonial convention to achieve the same end.82 John Cartwright acknowledged that the colonies had become self-reliant and he was prepared to give their assemblies full control of internal affairs. He rejected parliamentary taxation and parliamentary sovereignty and even opposed parliamentary control over the trade regulations of the empire. He did not believe that the colonies could be properly represented in parliament, but he believed that Britain and the American colonies shared a common heritage, constitution and customs and ought to share the benefits of the Atlantic trade. His proposals, however, included elements which the Americans were not likely to accept. He wanted all the colonies, from Quebec down to Florida, to become separate states, which would be loosely linked with Britain in the ‘Great British League and Confederacy’. While each state would have its own militia, the royal navy was to be the major defence force against enemy states. While all states would be independent, owing allegiance only to the crown, Cartwright expected Britain to arbitrate in any dispute between the other states, he expected imperial experts to operate from London and foreign policy to be decided by Britain. He had no suggestion to offer about how foreign policy issues should be decided in cases of dispute between the various states in the confederacy.83 Richard Price, the Rational Dissenter, urged the American colonists to resist all of the British government’s attempts to reduce them to a state of civil or spiritual slavery. He insisted that parliament had no right to tax the colonies and he feared that the crown was subverting their liberty. In his Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776), he maintained that America’s struggle for its liberties was a fight for Britain’s liberties as well. Like Cartwright, Richard Price was prepared

‘The Friends of America’

19

to give the American colonies full control over their internal affairs, but he still hoped to avert complete separation and he favoured some kind of federal union based on a strong sense of common interest, common loyalty to the crown, and a common council to discuss issues affecting all parts of the empire. He did not wish, however, to contemplate America becoming a completely separate nation with its own destiny, a destiny that might be quite different from that of Britain.84 By 1778, however, after he had learned of America’s military alliance with France, Price was prepared to recognize American independence, though he too still hoped for a commercial relationship between Britain and its former colonies.85 Although not a political radical, Adam Smith, the great political economist, reluctantly came to the conclusion that Britain might be better advised to concede independence to the American colonies. In his Wealth of Nations (1776), he demonstrated that Britain’s economic policy towards the American colonies was fundamentally flawed. He maintained that the colonies benefited more than Britain from the trade laws. While he acknowledged that these regulations might at some future stage become oppressive and insupportable, he claimed that British trade with Europe and the Mediterranean world would have been greater without the American link and that Britain’s economic growth was hindered by the burden imposed by the costs of imperial defence. In order to persuade the colonies to bear a fair share of the defence burden, Smith was ready to give the American colonists representation in parliament and, in effect, to create a unified Atlantic state.86 He was even ready to admit that the future seat of empire might cross the Atlantic if the American economy continued to grow at a faster rate than that of Britain.87 He soon recognized, however, that such an incorporating union was unacceptable to a majority on both sides of the Atlantic. He regarded the alternative, of imposing internal taxes on the colonies by force, as impractical and dangerous. He therefore concluded that Britain should withdraw from an armed confrontation with the colonies and recognize America as a separate, independent state. Although he acknowledged that it was unlikely that the British government could be persuaded to abandon imperial authority over the colonies without a fight, he did believe that a peaceful separation would soon restore the natural affection between America and Britain, and that trade between the two would soon revive. In his view, it was in America’s own interest to maintain and further develop its trade links with Britain.88

20

H.T. Dickinson

Paradoxically, the British commentator who first recognized that America must become a totally separate and independent nation was Josiah Tucker, a conservative Anglican clergyman, who as early as 1749 had predicted that when the colonies no longer needed the assistance of Britain they would seek their independence. In 1766 he defended the Stamp Act, parliamentary sovereignty and virtual representation. Although he was certain that Britain could coerce the colonies into obedience, he opposed this strategy and preferred to cast them off. If the Americans were represented in parliament, they would bring interminable wrangles to Westminster. If they had local selfgovernment, they would pursue interests contrary to those of Britain. By 1774 he had concluded that it was natural and proper for the colonies to seek their independence as soon as they could subsist without Britain. He regarded a war with the colonies as costly and inadvisable. No satisfactory relationship with the colonies could be reestablished by force. Even before serious fighting had broken out, Tucker was the first British commentator to take the plunge and advocate complete independence for the American colonies. He insisted that Britain could avoid a costly war, end interminable disputes with the colonies, allow a reduction in future defence costs and still be able to retain her valuable trade with an independent America. An expert in commercial questions and a firm believer in free trade, Tucker was convinced that Britain and America were natural trading partners who produced what the other most wanted to buy.89

The benefits of the American Revolution The American Revolution had a much greater impact on the British friends of America than has been generally recognized. Lord North resigned in 1782 and the Rockingham connection came to power. They did so determined to pursue their declared aim of reducing crown patronage and ending its pernicious influence on parliament and politics in general. In 1780 the group had backed John Dunning’s celebrated resolution in the House of Commons that ‘the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’.90 When they came to power in 1782 the Rockingham ministry quickly passed a series of Acts to reduce crown patronage, though these Acts had less impact than had been expected. None the less, the financial burdens of the American war persuaded William Pitt the Younger, when he became prime minister in late 1783, to pursue a consistent policy of economical reform to eliminate useless and wasteful places,

‘The Friends of America’

21

pensions and sinecures. Over Pitt’s long administration this policy had a significant effect in curbing the scale and the political influence of crown patronage.91 Failure in the American war also encouraged a major revival of radicalism. From 1779 Christopher Wyvill began to organize a nationwide association movement committed to economical and moderate parliamentary reform. In 1780 the radicals of the Westminster Association went much further. They put forward what became the radical programme for the next century or more: votes for all men, annual general elections, equal sized constituencies, the secret ballot, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs and the payment of MPs. Radical propaganda was widely distributed by the Society for Constitutional Information, many petitions for moderate parliamentary reform were organized by the Association movement, and a moderate parliamentary reform bill was even supported by the prime minister himself in 1785.92 A reform bill was not passed by parliament until 1832, but it was the American war that first put the issue squarely into British politics. In the long run, economical and parliamentary reform, both stimulated by the American war, but also by other factors, were to reduce the political power of the crown and the aristocratic elite. The American Revolution, however, had many more direct, immediate and profound effects on the reform programme and radical ideology than these; effects which too many historians have neglected.93 They have looked too much at the impact on British radicalism of the French Revolution rather than the American Revolution. The first shift in radical ideology came as a result of the intense debate generated by the American cry of ‘no taxation without representation’. Before the American debate most British campaigners for parliamentary reform were content to advocate a redistribution of parliamentary seats to the larger counties and more populous towns, and more frequent general elections. The American patriots, however, had shifted the debate to a prolonged discussion about who could vote and in favour of the conclusion that all taxpayers should be directly represented in the legislature. The American arguments were clear, direct and rational, and they had a profound impact on advanced thinkers in Britain. Picking up the American arguments they were able to protest that it was unjust that such towns as Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield were unrepresented and a large number of taxpayers were denied the vote. Since all men paid taxes – after all a large number of basic items of consumption were taxed – British

22

H.T. Dickinson

radicals soon reached the conclusion that all men should possess the franchise. John Cartwright, a friend of America, was the first to advocate votes for all men in 1776: ‘personality is the sole foundation of the right of being represented – property has in reality, nothing to do in the case.’94 By 1780 votes for all men was accepted as a legitimate aim by the more advanced radicals. The second major shift in radical ideology emerged because of the prolonged and profound American challenge to parliamentary sovereignty. The Americans had, at first, used appeals to older constitutional notions to dispute parliament’s authority. They had referred to the traditional principles of the constitution, to the concept of fundamental law and to the authority of natural law. Late in the American crisis, however, they had begun to base their objections to parliamentary sovereignty on the universal and inalienable rights of man to his life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness, and on the concept of the sovereign people. Their arguments were quickly picked up by British radicals. Richard Price, James Burgh and others led an important shift away from appeals to the historic rights of Englishmen and towards the natural rights of all men. God had given all men liberty and free will. The only way to establish a legitimate government was through the agreement of all men and the legislature remained accountable thereafter to the sovereign people. The people had given power to their governors as a trust, they must regularly judge the activities of their governors by elections, and they could reclaim all powers that they had conferred on the legislature and their elected representatives. James Burgh directly challenged William Blackstone’s strong defence of parliamentary sovereignty: ‘The truth is, therefore, that the learned judge has placed sovereignty wrong, viz. in the government; whereas it should have been placed in the people, next and immediately after God.’95 Richard Price claimed: ‘If omnipotence can, with any sense, be ascribed to a legislature, it must be lodged where all legislative authority originates; that is, in the PEOPLE. For their sake is government instituted; and their’s is the only real omnipotence.’96 The American patriots also taught British radicals that ancient civic virtues could be recovered and new constitutions could be established. Real Whigs had long admired the republican virtues of ancient Greece and Rome and had been convinced that they themselves lived in an age of luxury, decadence and corruption. The American patriots appeared to have recovered and revitalized ancient civic virtues and were using them to promote the general welfare of the people in their

‘The Friends of America’

23

new republic. Richard Price wrote admiringly that in America ‘every inhabitant has in his house (as part of his furniture) a book on law and government, to enable him to understand his civil rights; a musket to enable him to defend those rights; and a Bible to enable him to understand and practise his religion’.97 Once the Americans began to develop their own constitutions at state and federal level, British radicals were profoundly excited by the fresh paradigm and the many new examples they provided. Joseph Priestley observed: ‘the new governments in North America are so many new experiments, of which political philosophers cannot fail to make the greatest use.’98 The Americans rejected monarchy, aristocracy and all hereditary or life-long claims to political power, and they sought to establish cheap, honest and peace-loving governments. Forms of government were subordinated to written constitutions, ratified by the people, and they further safeguarded the rights of citizens with a more extensive Bill of Rights and a wider franchise than that in Britain. The Americans deliberately rejected an established state church and religious tests for admission to political office, and allowed a considerable measure of religious toleration. Richard Price described Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as ‘an example of legislative wisdom and liberality never before known’,99 and various British radicals supported every constitutional advance the Americans made. What impressed the British radicals even more was that the Americans appeared to have achieved major political changes without creating social instability or economic upheaval. The enemies of change in Britain had long claimed that radical political reform was a sure recipe for anarchy, mob rule and economic collapse. The Americans clearly demonstrated that this need not be the case and their success gave British radicals considerable confidence in advocating change and great optimism in the prospect of future success. America had put into practice principles that conservative thinkers had long condemned as visionary. British radicals could no longer have their arguments undermined by repeated appeals to the historical record because the Americans had rewritten the historical record and had proved that a move towards democracy did not bring social disorder or social levelling. For mankind in general, the American experiment had tested the empirical viability of a body of theoretical propositions and had emphatically proved that they could be put into practice. For the British in particular, the Americans had shown that the good parts of the British constitution might be retained, while the

24

H.T. Dickinson

corrupt parts were removed: ‘America is proof: throwing off the English dominion, she changed the other English forms, as not essential; but she preserved that English form, on which political liberty absolutely depends.’100 The successful American experiment, therefore, had the great advantage of working within an ideological framework that British radicals already possessed. The American Revolution established political models worth copying and constitutional ideals worth emulating. The British public was advised by John Cartwright, even before the War of Independence: ‘America is become both by precept and example your most faithful monitor, your best instructor, in the only possible means of preserving your own liberties; and of recovering from that state of corruption, of which the constitution is sick at heart.’101 After the Americans’ success in the war, Richard Price praised ‘the revolution in favour of universal liberty which has taken place in America, a revolution which opens up a new prospect in human affairs, and begins a new era in the history of mankind’.102 To radicals in Britain, America had become a beacon of hope and an asylum for those who were oppressed. Thomas Paine, that great American patriot and great British radical, declared: The independence of America, considered merely as a separation from England, would have been matter but of little importance, had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practices of governments. She made a stand, not for herself only, but for the world, and looked beyond the advantages herself would receive.103

Notes 1. On British supporters of the American Revolution, see Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1977); James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England (Macon, GA, 1986); John Sainsbury, ‘The Pro-Americans in London, 1769–1782’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 35 (1978), pp. 423–54; John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America 1769–1782 (Kingston and Montreal, 1987); Mary Kinnear, ‘British Friends of America “Without Doors” during the American Revolution’, The Humanities Association Review, 27 (1976), pp. 104–19; Mary Kinnear, ‘ProAmericans in the British House of Commons in the 1770s’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Oregon, 1973); Robert E. Toohey, Liberty and Empire: British Radical Solutions to the American Problem 1774–1776 (London, 1978); John Brewer, ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’,

‘The Friends of America’

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

25

in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Princeton, 1980), pp. 323–67; Jerome R. Reich, British Friends of the American Revolution (Armonk, NY, 1998); James E. Bradley, ‘The British Public and the American Revolution: Ideology, Interest, and Opinion’, in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H.T. Dickinson (London, 1998), pp. 124–54. Correspondence of King George the Third, ed. Sir John Fortescue, 6 vols. (London, 1927–28) [hereafter Corr. of George III], III: 255–6; B.D. Bargar, ‘Matthew Boulton and the Birmingham Petition of 1775’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 13 (1956), pp. 26–39; Peter Marshall, ‘Manchester and the American Revolution’, Bulletin of the John Ryland University Library, 62 (1979–80), pp. 168–86; Peter D.G. Thomas, British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis (Oxford, 1975), pp. 274–5. Corr. of George III, III: 249. Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, ed. W.S. Taylor and J.H. Pringle, 4 vols. (London, 1838–40), IV: 401; Bradley, Popular Politics, p. 6. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. W.B. Wilcox et al., 33 vols. (New Haven, 1959–97), XXII: 216. Bradley, Popular Politics, p. 207. Ibid., p. 6. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992), p. 137. George Herbert Guttridge, David Hartley MP: An Advocate of Conciliation 1774–1783, University of California Publications in History, 14 (Berkeley, CA, 1926), p. 254. Ibid., p. 255. Bradley, Popular Politics, p. 15. Colley, Britons, p. 137. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (Cambridge, 1995), p. 237. Peter D.G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence (Oxford, 1991), p. 276. Michael Kammen, A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics and the American Revolution (Ithaca, 1968); Jack Sosin, Agents and Merchants: British Colonial Policy and the Origins of the American Revolution 1763–1775 (Lincoln, NE, 1965). Kinnear, ‘Pro-Americans in the British House of Commons’. Paul Langford, ‘The Rockingham Whigs and America, 1767–1773’, in Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants, ed. Anne Whiteman et al. (Oxford, 1973), pp. 135–52; Frank O’Gorman, The Rise of Party in England: The Rockingham Whigs, 1760–1782 (London, 1975). Paul Langford, ‘London and the American Revolution’, in London in the Age of Reform, ed. John Stevenson (Oxford, 1977), pp. 55–78; John Sainsbury, ‘The Pro-Americans of London, 1769–1782’, pp. 423–54; Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots; John Money, ‘Taverns, Coffee Houses and Clubs: Local Politics and Popular Articulacy in the Birmingham Area in the Age of the American Revolution’, Historical Journal, 14 (1971), pp. 15–47; P.T. Underdown, ‘Bristol and Burke’, in Bristol in the Eighteenth-Century, ed. Patrick McGrath (Newton Abbot, 1972), pp. 41–62; Bradley, Popular Politics; H.T. Dickinson, Radical Politics in the North-East of England (Durham, 1979). Peter D.G. Thomas, John Wilkes, a Friend of Liberty (Oxford, 1996).

26

H.T. Dickinson

20. Verna Crane, ‘The Club of Honest Whigs: Friends of Science and Liberty’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 23 (1966), pp. 210–33. 21. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, MA, 1959). 22. James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1–46, 91–158; John Seed, ‘Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Political Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s’ Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 299–325; C.C. Bonwick, ‘English Dissenters and the American Revolution’ in Contrast and Connection, ed. H.C. Allen and Roger Thompson (London, 1976), pp. 88–112; Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism (London, 1990), chapters 2 and 7; Bonwick, English Radicals. 23. Caroline Robbins, ‘The Strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 7 (1950), pp. 407–53. 24. C.C. Bonwick, ‘An English Audience for American Revolutionary Pamphlets’, Historical Journal, 19 (1976), pp. 355–74; Bradley, Popular Politics, p. 111; John Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1800 (Manchester, 1977), pp. 52–79; Wilson, Sense of the People, p. 242. On the press in the war years, see Alfred Grant, Our American Brethren. A History of Letters in the British Press during the American Revolution, 1775–1781 (Jefferson, NC, 1995). 25. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967). 26. H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), pp. 163–92. 27. John Brewer, ‘Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument’, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), pp. 188–201; John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 77–95. 28. Political Register, 4 (1769), p. 176. 29. [Arthur Lee], The Political Detection; or, the Treachery and Tyranny of Administration, Both at Home and Abroad (London, 1770), p. 150. 30. John Phillip Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 4 vols. (Madison, WI, 1986–93), I: 186. 31. Bryce E. Withrow, A Biographical Study of Barlow Trecothick 1720–1775, Emporia State University Research Studies, 38 (Emporia, KS, 1992), p. 11. 32. Ibid., p. 12. 33. Ibid., pp. 11–30; Paul Langford, The First Rockingham Administration 1765–1766 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 109–14, 119–24; Nancy F. Koehn, The Power of Commerce: Economy and Governance in the First British Empire (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 19–21, 56, 186–91; Thomas, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 145–49, 187, 216–21. 34. Koehn, Power of Commerce, p. 191. 35. Thomas, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 208, 230. 36. Ibid., p. 248. 37. Ibid., p. 198. 38. Peter D.G. Thomas, The Townshend Duties Crisis (Oxford, 1987), p. 97. 39. Ibid., p. 188. 40. Ibid., pp. 123–4, 132, 143.

‘The Friends of America’

27

41. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1958–78), II: 516. 42. Peter D.G. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence (Oxford, 1991), p. 41. 43. Ibid., p. 58. 44. English Defenders of American Freedoms, 1774–1778, ed. Paul H. Smith (Washington, DC, 1972), p. 36. 45. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence, p. 279. 36. Bradley, Popular Politics. 47. Thomas, Stamp Act Crisis, p. 93. 48. Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, I: 59, 199, 222; II: 29, 187. 49. Ibid., II: 57; III: 47–59; IV: 32–3; Thomas, Stamp Act Crisis, pp. 103–8. 50. James Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 3 vols. (London, 1774), II: 274, 310, 328. 51. London Magazine, 44 (1775), p. 565. 52. Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, II: 186. 53. Ibid., II: 85–6. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., II: 75–9. 56. The Debate on the American Revolution, ed. Max Beloff (London, 1949), p. 121. 57. William Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England (London, 1813) [hereafter Parliamentary History], XVII: 176, 256; XIX: 380, 570; Granville Sharp, A Declaration of the People’s Natural Right to a Share in the Legislature (London, 1774), pp. 16–17, 197–283. 58. [Obadiah Hulme], An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (London, 1771), p. 141. 59. Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, III: 83; Parliamentary History, XVI: 168; Sharp, A Declaration of the People’s Natural Right, p. 11. 60. John Cartwright, American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great Britain (London, 1774), p. 9; Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, 7th edn (London, 1776), pp. 15–16. 61. Thomas, Tea Party to Independence, p. 81. 62. Reich, British Friends of the American Revolution, p. 62. 63. London Magazine, 44 (1775), p. 209. 64. Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments respecting North America 1754–1783, ed. R.C. Simmons and P.D.G. Thomas, 6 vols. (White Plains, NY, 1982–7), VI: 264–7. 65. Smith, English Defenders of American Freedoms, p. 39. 66. Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, IV: 260. 67. Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, IV: 23–6, 34–7. 68. Scots Magazine, 37 (1775), p. 240. 69. Simmons and Thomas, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments, IV: 421. 70. Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, IV: 53. 71. Gentleman’s Magazine, 45 (1775), p. 627. 72. Guttridge, David Hartley MP, p. 249; and Reich, British Friends of the American Revolution, pp. 127–38.

28

H.T. Dickinson

73. 74. 75. 76.

Parliamentary History, XIX: 431–3, 671–83. Ibid., XIX: 839–44, 912–14, 918–22, 958–62. Ibid., XIX: 1224–55. John A. Schutz, Thomas Pownall: British Defender of American Liberty (Glendale, CA, 1951); G.H. Guttridge, ‘Thomas Pownall’s The Administration of the Colonies: The Six Editions’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 26 (1969), pp. 31–46; John Shy, ‘Thomas Pownall, Henry Ellis, and the Spectrum of Possibilities, 1763–1775’, in AngloAmerican Political Relations, 1675–1775, ed. Alison Gilbert Olson and Richard Maxwell Brown (New Brunswick, NJ, 1970), pp. 155–86. John Derry, English Politics and the American Revolution (London, 1976), pp. 131–7; Reid, Constitutional History of the American Revolution, IV: 120–6. Parliamentary History, XVIII: 198–200. Derry, English Politics, pp. 135–51; Frank O’Gorman, Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (London, 1973), pp. 67–79. Parliamentary History, XIX: 1010–12, 1080–8. Guttridge, David Hartley MP, pp. 242–320. Reich, British Friends of the American Revolution, pp. 40–3. Ibid., pp. 15–19; Cartwright, American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great Britain; Toohey, Liberty and Empire, pp. 36–52; Derry, English Politics, pp. 167–8. Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America (London, 1776); Toohey, Liberty and Empire, pp. 90–102; Derry, English Politics, pp. 168–70; D.O. Thomas, Richard Price and America (Aberystwyth, 1975); Reich, British Friends of the American Revolution, pp. 90–104. The Correspondence of Richard Price, ed. Bernard W. Peach and D.O. Thomas, 3 vols. (Durham, NC, 1983), I: 273–5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V, iii: 68; Book IV, vii: 77. Ibid., Book IV, vii: 79. Andrew S. Skinner, ‘Adam Smith and America: The Political Economy of Conflict’, in Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 148–62. Josiah Tucker, A Letter from a Merchant in London to his Nephew in North America (London, 1766); Tucker, The True Interest of Britain (London, 1774); Tucker, The Respective Plans and Arguments of the Mother Country Distinctly Set Forth (London, 1775); Tucker, Four Letters on Important National Subjects (London, 1783); Derry, English Politics, pp. 162–7; George Shelton, Dean Tucker and Eighteenth-Century Economic and Political Thought (London, 1981); Reich, British Friends of the American Revolution, pp. 10–15. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, p. 208. A.S. Foord, ‘The Waning of the Influence of the Crown’, English Historical Review, 62 (1947), pp. 484–507; Philip Harling, The Waning of “Old Corruption”: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford, 1996). H.T. Dickinson, ‘Radicals and Reformers in the Age of Wilkes and Wyvill’, in British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt 1742–1789, ed. Jeremy Black (London, 1990), pp. 123–46.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

‘The Friends of America’

29

93. Brewer, Party Ideology, pp. 201–16; Bonwick, English Radicals; Colin C. Bonwick, ‘Contemporary Implications of the American Revolution for English Radicalism’, The Maryland Historian, 7 (1976), pp. 33–58; Arthur Sheps, ‘The American Revolution and the Transformation of English Republicanism’, Historical Reflections/Réflections Historiques, 2 (1975), pp. 3–28. 94. John Cartwright, Take Your Choice! (London, 1776), p. 22. 95. Burgh, Political Disquisitions, III: 278. 96. Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, pp. 15–16. 97. Bonwick, ‘Contemporary Implications’, p. 43. 98. Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy (Birmingham, 1788), p. 14. 99. Price produced an edition of Jefferson’s statute in 1786. 100.John Cartwright, The Constitutional Defence of England (London, 1796), p. 49. 101.Cartwright, American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great Britain, p. 16. 102.Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (London, 1785), in Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution, ed. Bernard Peach (Durham, NC, 1979), p. 182. See also Carl B. Cone, ‘Richard Price and the Constitution of the United States’, American Historical Review, 53 (1948), pp. 726–47. 103.Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (Harmondsworth, 1988), p. 159.

2 Two Doubting Thomases: the British Progressive Enlightenment and the French Revolution Jack Fruchtman, Jr.

And Thomas, called the Twin, said to them, ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails . . . I will not believe’. John 20:25 Like the sceptical Thomas of old, two eighteenth-century Thomases were also doubters: Thomas Spence and Thomas Hardy. Each in his own way advocated radical changes in the political, social and economic structure of British government and society. But during the mid-1790s they doubted whether they could achieve their goals through revolution or insurrection. Spence and Hardy’s scepticism was rooted in their assessment about what they might realistically accomplish once the government cracked down on radical activity in the autumn of 1792 and once the revolutionary Terror broke out in France in the spring of the following year. The 1790s saw practically all of Europe at war with republican France when Paineite ideas of political and social transformation flowed into Britain from France. In turn, the government attempted to quash those ideas through its police spies, show trials, and ultimately, if it could, the execution of the guilty for high treason, or at the very least their transportation to Botany Bay.1 Yet, the position of Hardy and Spence was no less radical despite their shared doubts about revolution. Their ideas went beyond the political radicalism of the 1770s and 1780s which had concentrated primarily on the reforms which would turn England into a true republic.2 With its long history of political opposition to the crown and ministry, British radicals emphasized a programme of political reform which demanded annual parliaments, universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, the end to property qualifications for 30

Two Doubting Thomases

31

Members of Parliament and equal representation.3 Spence and Hardy made those same demands.4 But their radicalism possessed a ‘progressive’ cast in that they stressed political change to achieve even greater, far-reaching socio-economic transformations. This progressivism encompassed their programme of socio-economic ideas which were ignored until almost 100 years later when government began to recognize its responsibility to provide social welfare and equal opportunity to its less fortunate, impoverished citizens. Certainly some people in Britain in the 1790s advocated revolution, and several, Edmund Burke among the most prominent, feared that revolution might soon reach Britain.5 Some members of the London Corresponding Society (LCS), which Hardy organized in 1792, wanted Britain to emulate the French example.6 One unnamed delegate, whose words a spy reported in early 1793, claimed that LCS communication with the French National Convention proved ‘that they wished to have the French laws here’, and the United Irishman John Binns reported that ‘the wishes and hopes of many of its [LCS’s] influential members carried them to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic’. Henry Redhead Yorke, the young firebrand who met Thomas Paine and other English-speaking radicals in Paris in 1792, predicted that the spark created by a French invasion of Britain would ignite a revolution leading to a British republic.7 The orator, poet and radical John Thelwall in November of 1794 told the tale of the farmyard execution of a tyrannical cock named King Chanticleer in an act the authorities assumed was the metaphorical beheading of George III. When Daniel Isaac Eaton published the tale, he was arrested and charged with sedition. Although acquitted, he served three months in prison awaiting his trial. Later, the spy John Groves reported that when, in a tavern, Thelwall blew the froth from his porter, he proclaimed that ‘this is the Way I would serve Kings’.8 But not all members of the LCS, other organizations or individuals (even well-known personalities) advocated the violent end of the British government.9 As H.T. Dickinson notes, the evidence does not really ‘support the contention that a violent revolution was really planned or even desired by more than a handful of madcap conspirators’.10 In the 1790s, Spence and Hardy certainly were not such people. This is not to say that they never once toyed with the idea of revolution. Spence, for example, often remarked that he believed that an insurrection was the only means to achieve true social and economic transformation in Britain. Such ideas were, however, secondary to their central ideas about progressive social reform. Their

32

Jack Fruchtman, Jr.

doubt about revolution thus gave their views a more moderate cast than those of radicals such as Binns, Yorke, Thelwall or their French revolutionary counterparts. Spence and Hardy transformed the terms of British radicalism in the 1790s by using the political reform of parliament to achieve social and economic change. Spence’s infamous short-lived journal, One Pennyworth of Pig’s Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, and other works were designed as much to edify as to shock, and Hardy is best known as the principal organizer of the LCS.11 In the 1790s, with the revitalization of groups such as the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), new progressive organizations, such as the LCS (Spence was a member of its Division 30), appealed directly to people of all classes. The ‘British Progressive Enlightenment’ was the focus of this new style of radicalism, which abjured revolution. In no way did it show itself more clearly than in the works of Spence and Hardy, two doubting Thomases.

Spencean economic reform Thomas Spence outdistanced the radical ideas of Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man he sold in cheap editions in the early 1790s and for which he stood trial for selling seditious material.12 Spence’s father, a netmaker in Newcastle, taught his son the virtues of communal property ownership, and young Thomas worked with his mentor, the Reverend James Murray, to oppose the enclosure of Newcastle’s town moor.13 From these experiences, he developed his ideas that private property was not merely illegal (the few had stolen it from the majority), but immoral, because it was the source of all poverty. Spence doubted the moral grounds for private property and he often wondered how revolution could be used to resolve social ills.14 His commitment to revolution and insurrection developed only after 1801 following his conviction for seditious libel for publishing The Restorer of Society to its Natural State.15 Spence first presented his views on social equality to a wide public when his pamphlet, The Rights of Man, was published in 1793. Originally given as a lecture to the Philosophical Society at Newcastle twenty years earlier, he hawked copies of it on the street, an action for which, as he put it, ‘the Society did the Author the Honour to expel him’.16 Such lectures and essays, according to the Society’s rules, were not to be published. In this lecture, Spence outlined the proposition, which would become the hallmark of his career, that land had been misappropriated by few people, who then forced others to do their

Two Doubting Thomases

33

will and the only way to overcome this inequality was for the many to reclaim their share. This could be done only if the land were held in common. Spence reserved his harshest attack for the aristocracy which came not in his celebrated The Rights of Man, but in a conversation between a woman and an aristocrat in The Rights of Infants which was published in 1797. There he allows the woman to condemn the aristocrats ad hominem with words which he did not wish to place in either his own mouth or the mouth of another man: aristocrats are Molochs, oppressors, villains, Sophists, beasts of prey. Outraged when the aristocrat suggests that his ancestors legally acquired land through purchase or conquest, the woman demonstrates the full power of female emotion: ‘Well confessed, villains! Now out of your own mouths will I condemn you, you wicked Molochs.’ She goes on to warn the aristocrat that this state of affairs cannot continue: ‘Your drinking the blood of infants is at an end’ – an indisputable image of Saturn devouring his children. The ‘infanticide’ will now be halted, once society is reorganized, with the cessation of private property.17 Spence’s views were based on the presumption that society would continue to have an agricultural base: the common ownership of land was the universal panacea. He had no conception, even in the 1790s, of the emergence of capitalism and the beginnings of an industrial urban society, even though after 1792 he lived in London until his death in 1814. Once his plan to redistribute the land was organized, he thought it would last for all time. ‘After this empire of right and reason is thus established, it will stand for ever. Force and corruption attempting its downfall shall equally be baffled, and all other nations, struck with wonder and admiration at its happiness and stability, shall follow the example: and thus the whole earth shall at last be happy and live like brethren.’18 Spence was never clear about how to accomplish redistribution. Although he never tired of advocating the end of private property to overcome poverty and its attendant inconveniences, his views of revolution were ambivalent.19 The closest he came to accepting revolution was in a small pamphlet published in 1795 for which he soon recanted because he feared prison. His recantation was not willingly given, hence his denial may be dismissed. The pamphlet recounts a conversation between an old man (obviously Spence) and a young man. In it, the young man observes that Paine never advocated the end of private property. The old man agrees, and says that Spence’s ideas were more advanced because Spence believed in the redistribution of land. Only at the end does Spence suggest that

34

Jack Fruchtman, Jr.

armed force may be necessary to wrest the land from the property owners: ‘let us suppose a few thousands of hearty determined fellows well armed and appointed with officers, and having a committee of honest, firm, and intelligent men to act as a provisionary government and to direct their actions to the proper object.’20 But this action does not necessarily presume revolutionary violence, because the goal is to change the social and economic relationships of the people. Two years later, in 1797, Spence suggested that perhaps those well armed fellows were ‘not to be depended upon’, because, ‘to their indelible shame’, they are ‘woefully negligent and deficient about their own rights’. Thus, he turns to the womenfolk, who ‘mean to take up the business ourselves, and let us see if any of our husbands dare hinder us. Wherefore, you will find the business much more seriously and effectually managed in our hands than ever it has been yet.’21 Does he advocate bread riots here with women in the forefront? Spence was not clear. The suggestion itself reflects his scepticism about the potential success of revolutionary action to bring about progressive changes. For Spence, it was not until four years later that he preached a more radical tune.

Hardy and social progress Thomas Hardy tells us in his Memoir that his introduction to politics occurred in 1776 when everyone was talking about the American Revolution, although he had no real concept of what transpired in the colonies. That year, he read Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, in which the author argued the cause of human rights. Hardy claimed that he immediately adopted Price’s liberal principles and that it was now time to reclaim that lost historic liberty and the rights of Englishmen. If Price’s pamphlet introduced Hardy to political debate, his introduction to social inequality and class conflict took place in 1791. A shoemaker and the grandson of a shoemaker (his father died when he was eight years old), Hardy was a lower-class artisan who earned a modest income. In 1791, living in London, he was invited to enter a partnership as a leather cutter and currier, but the business quickly went bankrupt, leaving him with all the debts and taxes to pay from his own pocket after his partners disappeared. He says he knew that England was a country of plenty – the soil was rich, the people very industrious – but now he questioned the causes of poverty and the financial and economic divisions among men.

Two Doubting Thomases

35

While he did not fully understand these causes, Hardy decided that the nation could only free itself from ‘this intolerable load’ when the people were informed of the true nature of English social inequality, although unlike Spence he never advocated the redistribution of land. For Hardy, the London Corresponding Society was to serve ‘as a means of informing the people of the violence that had been committed on their most sacred rights, and of uniting them in an endeavour to recover those rights’. Through annual parliaments and universal manhood suffrage, economic rights would be restored as discussion focused on ‘the hardness of the times and the dearness of all the necessities of life’.22 The means to accomplish these ends, that is to insure that all men had equal access to economic opportunity and advantage, was through parliamentary reform. After all, ‘the restoring the right of voting to every man, not incapacitated by nature for want of reason, nor by law for the commission of crimes, together with annual election, is the only reform that can be effectual and permanent’.23 This call for the reform, not the replacement, of parliament led Hardy to correspond with the Reverend William Bryant of the Sheffield reform society and John Horne Tooke of the SCI. In one of his first addresses to the public in 1792, Hardy charged that parliament lacked true representation. The result was that a combination of ‘oppressive taxes, unjust laws, restrictions of liberty, and wasting of public money’, which would change if there were true equal representation rather than by insurrection and revolution.24 In line with this, the LCS made it clear that its members’ duty was to inform themselves of the state of representation in the nation ‘for obtaining a peaceful but adequate Remedy to this intolerable Grievance’.25 Calling for political reform was radical enough without threatening revolution: he later recalled in his Memoir that it was quite difficult to decide who in the LCS could afford to sign these addresses without facing retaliation from their employers, their business associates, or the government. ‘Some objected because they were serving Masters who might perhaps discharge them from employment – others that if their names appeared to any Address and resolutions of any society for a reform of parliament, they might lose their Customers.’26 One 1792 address ended with an outright rejection of revolution: ‘Resolved, that this Society do express their abhorrence of tumult and violence ... reason, firmness, and unanimity are the only arms they themselves will employ, or persuade their fellow citizens to exert, against Abuse of Power.’27 In the autumn of 1792, the crown countered Jacobin activity like Hardy’s Corresponding Society in London, Bryant’s in Sheffield and

36

Jack Fruchtman, Jr.

Tooke’s SCI by organizing John Reeves’ Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers along with its various county branches.28 The response of the LCS, drafted by Felix Vaughan, a radical barrister, was to deny that the Society had any revolutionary intentions at all. ‘Whoever shall attribute to us (who wish only the restoration of the lost liberties of our country) the expressions of No King! No Parliament! or any design of invading the property of other men, is guilty of a wilful, an impudent, and a malicious falsehood.’29 While Hardy did not write these remarks, he signed the document along with Maurice Margarot, a wine merchant, who served as the Society’s president.30 This address recounts the differences between Britain and France. Because France possessed an absolute monarchy, revolution had to take place in France. England was different: it needed only political, followed by social and economic reform. ‘As we have never yet been cast so low at the foot of despotism, so is it not requisite that we should appeal to the same awful tribunal with our brethren on the Continent.’31 In November 1793, several LCS members (including Margarot, but not Hardy) travelled to Edinburgh to foster unity between English and Scottish radicals in a British Convention.32 The crown regarded any large gathering which smacked of a challenge to parliament’s legislative power as a threat to king and country.33 Scottish authorities, under orders from the crown, found the Convention too dangerous and disbanded it. As Hardy recalled, ‘the Magistrates of Edinburgh, attended by a posse of constables, thief catchers, and others, armed with bludgeons, pistols, and hangars, invaded the Convention’.34 The government convicted most of the participants of sedition: Margarot, seized along with the rest, was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation to Botany Bay. While this spectacle frightened several LCS members, Hardy was not convinced that the crown had entered a new phase of repression. He soon issued several circular letters to the provincial societies calling not for revolution, but for another British Convention. These letters were to become key evidence in Hardy’s later prosecution for treason. A month and a half later, meeting at Chalk Farm, the most radical LCS resolution was passed over Hardy’s signature. Still stinging from the Edinburgh trials, the members pointedly accused the crown of violating the British guarantee of due process of law. They resolved that any further violations ‘ought to be considered as disolving [sic] entirely the social compact between the English Nation and their Governours; and driving them to an immediate appeal to

Two Doubting Thomases

37

that incontrovertible maxim of eternal Justice, that the safety of the People is the SUPREME, and in cases of necessity, the ONLY Law’.35 The government perceived this appeal to the origins of the law in the people, not king and parliament, as a direct threat to the status quo. Was this a call for revolution or merely a restatement of the obvious conventions of the ancient constitution? To the crown, the document was treasonous. It stimulated official action, this time against Hardy himself, a man who had never once acted in a revolutionary manner against his government. One month later, on 12 May 1794, he was charged with high treason and imprisoned in the Tower, without trial, for six months. In November 1794, he was tried but acquitted, thanks to the legal and oratorical skills of yet another Thomas, this time Thomas Erskine, who led the brilliant defence of Hardy, John Horne Tooke, Thomas Holcroft and John Thelwall.36

Two doubting Thomases What, then, might we say about these doubting Thomases? They advocated the reform of government – its parliamentary representation, in particular – holding that a renewed government could restore the proper relationship between the state and its people. In addition, and more importantly, they were progressive thinkers who condemned the deleterious effects of poverty, social inequality and private property. Their reforms were designed to overcome the social and economic problems that the current political system promoted. In their advocacy of social and economic change in the mid-1790s, however, they doubted that insurrection or revolution could bring the new social and economic order into being. However naive they may have been about the realities of political change, they thought that the British system of government, though corrupted, could yet be reformed through strong action, short of violence and terror. As Hardy argued, Britain and France were different. The British monarchy was already limited, and parliamentary reform, once in place, guaranteed that parliament, especially the Commons, would address the social welfare of its citizens. In France, the king, until he called the Estates General, was absolute. Moreover, British temperament was, with few exceptions, simply non-revolutionary. Even the Glorious Revolution was practically bloodless. To preach revolution now missed the main point, namely to reconstitute the political, social and economic rights of Englishmen. Certainly, the spectacle of the French Revolution’s decline in 1793 into Terror added to their own scepticism and doubt.

38

Jack Fruchtman, Jr.

Perhaps, in their fear that they were powerless, they concluded that the safest course was not revolution but advocacy, not violence but progress – yet another step that preserved not only their lives, but took them into the modern age.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

On the trials, see Alan Wharam, The Treason Trials, 1794 (Leicester, 1992). The definitive collection continues to be A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T.B. Howell and T.J. Howell, 33 vols. (London, 1809–26). See Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge, 1983) [hereafter Selections from the LCS Papers]. The literature on this radicalism is immense. See Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford, 1994); J.R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850 (London, 1992); Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988); H.T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford, 1985); J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982); Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: the English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). Clive Emsley, ‘The Impact of the French Revolution on British Politics and Society’, in The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. Ceri Crossley and Ian Small (Oxford, 1989), pp. 31–62; and John Stevenson, ‘Popular Radicalism and Popular Protest, 1789–1815’, in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815, ed. H.T. Dickinson (London, 1989), pp. 61–81. See Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, pp. 169–94; and George Woodcock, ‘The Meaning of Revolution in Britain, 1770–1800’, in Crossley and Small, The French Revolution and British Culture, pp. 1–30. On the prospects for revolution in Britain, see also Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford, 1984), which argues against such prospects; and Roger A.E. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983), which takes an opposing view. See Iain McCalman, ‘Prophesying Revolution: “Mad Lord George”, Edmund Burke and Madame La Motte’, in Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison, ed. Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (Brookfield, Vt., 1996), pp. 52–65. For a longer version, see Iain McCalman, ‘Mad Lord George and Madame LaMotte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), pp. 343–67. The LCS was one of the first radical groups consisting of not only middleclass merchants and industrialists, but also tradesmen (including journeymen) and even a few aristocrats (Lord Daer, for example, joined). See Political Writings of the 1790s, ed. Gregory Claeys, 8 vols. (London, 1995). Selections from the LCS Papers, pp. 42, x, 90–1. The first was reported by the spy George Lynam, 10 January 1793; the second is quoted from John

Two Doubting Thomases

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

39

Binns, Recollections of the Life of John Binns (Philadelphia, 1854); the third refers to a November 1793 speech in Sheffield by Henry Redhead Yorke, a member of Division 29 of the LCS. See Wharam, The Treason Trials, pp. 76–7. See The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, PA, 1995), pp. xix–xxxiii, on Thelwall’s radical views. See also Selections from the LCS Papers, p. 140; and Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty, pp. 318–22. See Claeys, Political Writings of the 1790s, I: xxxiv; and Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, pp. 184–5. For a review of the varieties of British thought during the Revolution, see Gregory Claeys, ‘The French Revolution Debate and British Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, 11 (1990), pp. 59–80. H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1977), p. 264. Dinwiddy points out that Spence’s views concerning revolution were ambivalent and that he meant, in his 1795 Pig’s Meat, only to foster a rebellious spirit among the people (Radicalism and Reform in Britain, p. 185, n. 49). See also T.M. Parsinnen, ‘Thomas Spence and the Origins of English Land Nationalization’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 34 (1973), pp. 135–41; T.M. Parsinnen, ‘Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848’, English Historical Review, 88 (1973), pp. 504–33; and Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 104–7. For Hardy, see Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty, pp. 188–98. See Malcolm Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 45–77; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, pp. 478–80; T.M. Parsinnen, ‘Thomas Spence’, in Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, ed. Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Gossman, 3 vols. (Sussex, 1979), I: 454–8; and Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, p. 94. Chase’s work is the most extensive study of Spence and his contribution to English agrarian thought. See Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’, pp. 39–44; P.M. Kemp-Ashraf, The Life and Times of Thomas Spence (Newcastle, 1983), pp. 17–25; and Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, pp. 65–8. See Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’, pp. 23–5; and Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty, p. 480. Although there are inklings in Spence’s End of Oppression (1795) that violent acts might have to be undertaken to achieve reform, one wonders how widely distributed the pamphlet actually was because he was not prosecuted (as he was on so many other occasions) for words which could most likely have been considered treasonous. See Hone, For the Cause of Truth, p. 88; and Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, pp. 190–1. Thomas Spence, The Rights of Man (1793), in Pig’s Meat: The Selected Writings of Thomas Spence, Radical and Pioneer Land Reformer, ed. G.I. Gallop (Nottingham, 1982), p. 59. Spence, The Rights of Infants (1796), in ibid., pp. 116–17. Spence, The Rights of Man, in ibid., p. 66. Chase writes that ‘Spence was moved to endorse explicitly the right of just

40

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

Jack Fruchtman, Jr. resistance’, but resistance and revolution are two quite different means to an end. Besides, he recanted his more extremist views after the publication of The End of Oppression. See Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’, p. 62. Thomas Spence, The End of Oppression (1795), in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H.T. Dickinson (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1982), p. 36. See Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’, pp. 63–4. Spence, The Rights of Infants, in Gallop, Pig’s Meat, p. 118. Thomas Hardy, Memoir of Thomas Hardy (1832), in Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians, 1790–1885, ed. David Vincent (London, 1977) [hereafter Memoir of Thomas Hardy], pp. 43, 45. Hardy to the Reverend Bryant, 8 March 1792, in Memoir of Thomas Hardy, p. 46. Selections from the LCS Papers, p. 10. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 10. The best treatment of this subject continues to be Dickinson, Liberty and Property, pp. 270–318; and Eugene Carlton Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization, 1769–1793 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 233–74. Memoir of Thomas Hardy, p. 53 (emphasis in the original). On Margarot, see Michael Roe, ‘Maurice Margarot: A Radical in Two Hemispheres, 1792–1815’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 31 (1958), pp. 68–78. Memoir of Thomas Hardy, pp. 54–5. See also Selections from the LCS Papers, pp. 32–3. For the day-to-day work of the Convention, see Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty, pp. 295–306. See Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, pp. 178–9; and Black, The Association, pp. 233–74. Memoir of Thomas Hardy, p. 56. Hangars were short swords. Selections from the LCS Papers, p. 133 (emphases in the original). Joseph Gerrald attended the Edinburgh Convention and, like Margarot, was sentenced to transportation. See Wharam, The Treason Trials, pp. 143–93; and Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, p. 38. Vicary Gibbs served as cocounsel with Erskine.

3 The Political Showman at Home: Reflections on Popular Radicalism and Print Culture in the 1790s Jon Mee

On 24 September 1792 George, the Prince of Wales, wrote to Queen Charlotte, his mother, in a state of high anxiety: Beleive [sic] me, my ever dearest mother, if this is not taken up in a very serious manner by Government & prosecuted as a libel upon the King, yourself, & the constitution, there will be no end to these atrocious publications, as they are not only intended to be sold but are studiously distributed amongst the common people, as the motives to instigate everyone to adopt the principles of the French Revolution, & those very emissaries who I have already mention’d before as attending all the pot houses they can gain entrance into, distribute these very pamphlets in order to enforce the language they hold.1 His alarm at the circulation of ‘the principles of the French Revolution’ among the lower classes was a widespread one among the ruling elite in 1792, but George had his personal reasons for being disturbed. He was writing out of a particular concern with the distribution of Charles Pigott’s The Jockey Club, a pamphlet which was full of malicious scandal about the Prince and his circle. Nevertheless, George was right to see that Pigott’s pamphlet was not simply a scandal sheet. Pigott was a republican whose collection of aristocratic scandal was framed by the warning that ‘a revolution in government, can alone bring about a revolution in morals’.2 A very popular part of eighteenth-century print culture for some time, royal scandal was here being hitched to republican politics in a dangerously new way. After George told the Queen that it was ‘the most infamous & shocking libellous production [yet] . . . ever disgraced the pen of man’, Pigott’s 41

42

Jon Mee

book was forwarded to Pitt’s government and played an important part in the decision to issue the second Proclamation against seditious writing that year. Treasury solicitors instructed magistrates to prosecute its publishers wherever they could. Within two weeks of the Prince Regent’s letter prosecutions were underway against James Ridgway, who was to spend two years in Newgate, and H.D. Symonds, who spent three years in prison. Pigott himself was to die in Newgate on 24 June 1794.3 The Jockey Club is an important if neglected text in the struggle over issues of reform which dominated British culture in the 1790s, but, like the other texts that I wish to discuss in this essay, it was not framed as an exposition of political principles as such. It illustrates the fact that the well-established idea of there being a ‘debate’ over the French Revolution is misleading, especially by 1792, if it neglects the extent to which there was a struggle over words and images in which radicals defined their positions by undercutting the authority of the traditional rituals and symbols of politics.4 ‘Debate’ also suggests some kind of exchange between stable, well-defined subject positions, but the ‘author function’, to use Foucault’s term, was often dissolved into parody and other protean forms circulating in popular print culture which suggested that cultural authority lay with a new kind of readership.5 Certainly Pitt’s government became convinced that there was something unprecedented about the rising tide of popular political activity in 1792. The Royal Proclamations of May and December of that year urged magistrates to prosecute seditious writings. In November, with Prime Minister Pitt’s tacit support, John Reeves had set up the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers to alert the nation to the mischief being done by the radical press and to encourage loyal citizens to inform on radicals. He received a stream of letters, such as the one dated 9 December, telling him about ‘those Clubs very numerously attended by the Lower Classes, where each Member pays one Penny per Week for Newspapers and inflammatory periodical publications, which are read to them and expiated upon at the Meeting’.6 It is to meetings such as these that the Prince presumably imagined Pigott’s account of his follies being read aloud. This kind of panic about popular forms of reading is not usually associated with Pigott’s book, but with the publication of the second part of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in February 1792. It is Paine’s book which is most often regarded as the bible of the popular radical movement and credited with being the first book written about politics in English for ‘the people’ in a

Popular Radicalism and Print Culture

43

language they could understand.7 While the importance of Rights of Man is unquestionable, a certain kind of understanding of it continues to distort historiographical perspectives on the popular literature which came in its wake. The nature of this distortion has been twofold. First, it has privileged certain aspects of Paine’s own text over others and, second, that privileging has tended to blind historiography to the sheer variety of popular radical literature published in the revolutionary decade. Let me begin by saying something about Paine’s book, although my primary concern in this paper is with texts which subsequently developed its example. Over the last decade or so there has been a new interest in the rhetoric of Rights of Man, among literary critics as well as historians, but scholars are still apt to present Paine as an instrumentalist in his thinking about language. Critics such as Steven Blakemore, for instance, contrast the appeal to the authority of precedence and tradition in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) with Paine’s invocation of a reality which lies beyond the mystifications of aristocratic representation.8 Thus Paine writes: [Burke] pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird. Accustomed to kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself, he degenerates into a composition of art, and the genuine soul of nature forsakes him. His hero or heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon. This theatrical metaphor recurs in the Rights of Man, but, as Gillian Russell has recently shown, Paine does not simply oppose the natural man to the inauthentic theatricality of aristocracy. When Paine later speaks of the ‘open theatre of the world’, he is conjuring with the idea of a theatre of consent or democratic representation, that is, if the anachronism may be allowed, a Brechtian theatre rather than the Aristotelian tragedy staged by Burke.9 In the ‘open theatre of the world’, the audience are knowing participants in the spectacle of representation, self-consciously consuming fiction, rather than passive observers or dupes. From this point of view, when Paine writes of Burke being ‘innured within the Bastile of a word’, his point is less that Burke privileges representation over nature than that he reifies representations into fixed metaphysical categories. Paine, in contrast, treats the language of politics as a usage constantly open to revision by its speakers. In these respects, my understanding of the

44

Jon Mee

attitude to representation in Rights of Man concurs with Steven Goldsmith, who sees in Paine the emergence of the classic democratic valorization of representation precisely because it opens up debate about the meaning of words (although, I should add, Goldsmith also writes interestingly of the concurrent danger of assuming textual subversion necessarily equates to actual changes in power). Burke, on the other hand, as Goldsmith points out, regards discussion as one of the scandals of the age: ‘it has been the misfortune (not as these gentlemen think it, the glory) of this age, that everything is to be discussed’. The people had no right to debate the high drama of the constitution according to Burke, whereas for Paine the meaning of key terms in the political lexicon, such as ‘constitution’ itself, are to be determined by the spectators of the theatre of state. Previously the constitution had been a sublime mystery, an idea that escapes representation, now it is open to representation and discussion as if, to quote Paine himself, it were ‘something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to open, and the company sees what it is, they burst into laughter’. Later, I will suggest that this idea of the theatre of state not as high drama but as a species of popular entertainment, open to interruption by its audience, as many eighteenth-century theatrical performances often were, was to become an important thematic metaphor in the literature of popular radicalism.10 More commonly thought of as Paineite by modern historians and critics is Richard Carlile’s view ‘that corruptions and delusions of the day required to be attacked with something stronger than squib and pasquinade, which, however it might annoy the subject of attack, or amuse the reader, must be confessed to be ill adapted to convey principles of the mind.’ According to Carlile, who was imprisoned for selling Paine’s Age of Reason in 1817, the mysteries of the ancient regime needed only the clear light of reason to disperse them: ‘Correct principles require nothing but a clear and forcible statement to have them adopted and admired.’11 Carlile’s point of view corresponds, of course, to the idea of a ‘debate’ about the principles of reform which I mentioned in my introductory comments. The problem with this idea is that there was no level cultural playing field on which Paine’s supporters could articulate their ideas. The theatre of politics was not an open one in the 1790s. To articulate one’s ideas in the open could mean prosecution, harassment and bankruptcy. In another essay I have discussed the ways in which what Carlile disdained as ‘the

Popular Radicalism and Print Culture

45

disguise of metaphor’ was necessary to what Thomas Spence called ‘the art of safe printing’, an art which Spence based on fable, allegory and parody.12 It was also the case that not all forms of expression were judged equally valid for political purposes. Burke made it clear that the theatre of politics was a high drama which had no place for the low comedy of the crowd: They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act amid the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them; and sometimes mix and take their seats among them.13 An important part of popular radical culture in the 1790s and after involved the contestation of such judgements, that is, the articulation of politics through forms which Burke would have identified with ‘the comedians of the fair’. Most of this essay will concentrate on an example which represents parliamentary politics as the plaything of comedians and political hucksters. From August 1794 a series of squibs appeared ferociously attacking Pitt as Signor Gulielmo Pittachio, a political mountebank controlling and corrupting parliament through his ‘magic lantern’ and other tricks. Unusually for this kind of ephemeral literature, it seems that its author can be traced. Robert Merry, already well known by his contemporaries for his achievements as a serious poet, seems to have provided this squib for the radical press. Intriguingly the author does not fit the bill of the artisan radical usually associated with the advent of the newly popular politics which came in the wake of Paine. Merry was a gentleman, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, but one who, like Charles Pigott, left aside his elite identity and gave himself up to the promiscuous circulation of popular radical texts.14 Merry is best known to literary scholars as Della Crusca, the focal point of a group of poets, the so-called Della Cruscans, who corresponded via pseudonyms in the pages of The World newspaper and created a popular sensation with their mannered emotionalism in the late 1780s and early 1790s. Della Cruscanism has recently been rediscovered as an important precursor of British literary Romanticism by J.J. McGann who describes it as a ‘distinctly urban project . . . committed to extreme displays of stylistic artifice’.15 Originating among a group of British exiles in Italy in the early 1780s, there was always a political current in the group, focused on Merry, concerned

46

Jon Mee

with the liberation of the Florentine republican tradition from Austrian despotism. Given this pedigree, it is no surprise that Merry rushed to Paris at the news of the destruction of the Bastille. On his return to England in the spring of 1790, Merry set out to become the English bard of the Revolution, publishing a long poem on events in Paris, The Laurel of Liberty, and moving into dissenting circles sympathetic to the Revolution associated with Ralph Griffiths’ Monthly Review.16 He travelled regularly backwards and forwards across the Channel until after war broke out between Britain and France. August 1790 saw him welcomed in Paris by the Journal de la Société de 1789 as one of ‘the two best poets of England’.17 His experiences in France formed the basis of The Picture of Paris, a Christmas pantomime for December 1790, staged at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. In 1791 he was asked to provide an ode to be recited at the dinner held by the Society of the Friends of the People to celebrate the anniversary of 14 July. The Society were keen that their sympathy for the Revolution not be misconstrued as seditious. No contentious resolutions were proposed and the diners dispersed at nine in the evening, but The Times noted that Merry did not stay to hear his ode recited at this genteel gathering but went to a tavern with John Horne Tooke and Thomas Paine (who had been denied entry to the dinner). Here was a portent of Merry’s transformation from Della Crusca into a radical hack.18 The phenomenon of Della Cruscanism had been a drama of sensibility in which readers had been able to overhear a private conversation between feeling individuals. The ‘author function’ of Della Crusca and others of the group was the means by which a certain kind of refined sociability was confirmed in the reader. Its creation of a group of poetic correspondents would seem to be part of the more general cultural process, recently described by Clifford Siskin, in which literary discourse came to be constructed in terms of a private conversation, but for many contemporary commentators the nature of the Della Cruscan conversation seemed dangerously unregulated.19 Its ‘extreme displays’, to use McGann’s phrase, seemed too dramatic, histrionic even, for intimate conversation between an author and the private reader. Similarly the possibility of an infinity of correspondents exploiting pseudonyms such as ‘Della Crusca’, ‘Anna Matilda’, and so on to parade their inner feelings all over the pages of The World offered the prospect of a conversation running out of control. The fury of William Gifford’s famous attack on the group in The Baviad (1791) stems from his sense that the political development of

Popular Radicalism and Print Culture

47

Robert Merry and others in the group, such as Mary Robinson, was the natural fulfilment of a democratic logic deep within phenomenon of the Della Cruscanism. When Gifford described his poetry as a ‘Moorfields whine’, Merry was being accused of belonging to the Cockney School long before the same charge was placed against the name of John Keats, but he was also to go much further towards the East End than his attacker can have realized in 1791.20 Drinking in a tavern with Thomas Paine prefigures Merry’s movement away from the poetry of sensibility and even genteel radicalism towards a democratic populism. By 1792 he was writing neither the exquisite sonnets of Della Crusca, nor even emotive political odes for the Society of the Friends of the People, but squibs and satires for radical newspapers such as the Argus, the Courier and the Telegraph. Obituarists and former friends represent the change in Merry as a loss of self amounting almost to madness. John Taylor claimed Merry had ‘imbibed all the levelling principles of the most furious democrat; having lost his fortune, and in despair, he would most willingly have promoted the destruction of the British Government, if he could have entertained any hopes of profiting in the general scramble for power’. The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1799 considered him one of the victims of the French Revolution; for his mind was deeply tainted by the principles upon which that detestable event was founded . . . before the lamentable disorders of France, he was highly esteemed by numerous and respectable friends, who admired him for his knowledge, humour, and companionable qualities; but the change in his political opinions gave a sullen gloom to his character, which made him relinquish all his former connexions, and unite with people far beneath his talents, and quite unsuitable to his habits. James Boaden picked up the familiar theme in his Memoirs of John Philip Kemble published in 1825: ‘He was one of the most original and captivating men whom I have ever known. But unhappily for himself and his former associates, he now became perfectly rabid with the French revolution; associated himself with the radical press, and spoke its furious and disgusting language . . . the poet and the gentleman vanished together.’21 While these records stress his brilliant wit and his love of company, they also underline the scandal of this sociability transmuting into something altogether too convivial, the scandal of his surrendering of his elite identity and poetic persona to the radical

48

Jon Mee

press, but for me something more fundamental is at stake here than simply laying aside one author function for another. It is not just that Merry moves past the feeling sociability of Della Crusca. The author function itself, what Foucault calls ‘the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work’, which was becoming increasingly essential to the institution of literature, is being abrogated.22 By contributing anonymously to the newspapers, he was giving his authorial self up to the demands of a world of promiscuous circulation where texts were often tied neither to particular authors nor, as I shall show, particular forms. Here was an idea of literary exchange not as an intimate conversation nor even a public debate (both of which seem to predicate a stable author function), but as a contest between texts for cultural authority. Let me return to the Pittachio squibs that I mentioned earlier to illustrate my point more fully. In 1799 one of the few obituaries sympathetic to Merry, published in the Monthly Magazine, remembered this squib as ‘a most happy production of keen satire, unsurpassed by anything in ancient or modern times’. An extravagant claim maybe, but twenty years after the squib first appeared it was remembered well enough in the same magazine to be compared favourably with William Hone’s The Political House that Jack Built (although by now the reviewer – not presumably the same one – was misremembering Merry’s first name as William). Merry’s text also endured as a template for later radicals, reappearing in Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf in 1817, with the figure of Pittachio (a parody of Pitt) replaced by Signor Iscariot Stewart (a parody of Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh).23 In fact, Merry’s satire was transmuting into other forms soon after its publication. The most popular of the Pittachio squibs seems to have been written to celebrate the acquittal of Merry’s friend Horne Tooke, who along with other members of the radical movement had been on trial for high treason. It first appeared in the Courier on 28 November 1794. By publishing such a squib in the newspapers, Merry was releasing a virus into print culture and abandoning any hope of authorial control or any claim to intellectual property. The newspaper version was republished as a broadside, which shows Pitt as a bellman advertising his wares, ‘sold by all Newscarriers’: WONDERFUL EXHIBITION!!! SIGNOR Gulielmo Pittachio The SUBLIME WONDER of the World!!! Condescends to inform the Public at large, and his Friends in

Popular Radicalism and Print Culture

49

particular, that he has now opened his Grand Hall of Exhibitions at Westminster, with a grand display of his ASTONISHING AND MAGNIFICENT DECEPTIONS; Which has been approved by all the Crowned Heads in the Universe. This version was also republished in Thomas Spence’s Pig’s Meat and Daniel Isaac Eaton’s Politics for the People, two examples of the kind of cheap periodicals complained of by the Prince of Wales, which were largely made up either of readers’ contributions or old, out of copyright texts from the past favourable to republicanism. Politics for the People was particularly taken with the figure of Pittachio and published variants under the title ‘More Wonderful Wonders’, though whether or not these were by Merry is not known.24 Not that the radical implications of the texts were always so obvious as when they were published in such journals. Published in a newspaper like the Courier, it would not have been easy to tell Pittachio apart from the genuine advertisements surrounding it. Posted on a wall as a bill, it was similarly difficult to identify. Indeed radicals seem to have used such camouflage to their own political advantage. One of the letters to Reeves’ Association speaks of the tricky practice of radicals covering the Associations’ bills with their own, but leaving the original titles showing so as to reduce the likeliness of them being pulled down by the magistrates.25 It was precisely this ability to circulate beyond any recognizably fixed form which so alarmed the government. It suggested a whole world of readers of which they had no knowledge. Cheap publications, Paine recognized, would ‘embarrass the Court gentry more than anything else, because it is a ground they are not used to’. The government only moved to prosecute Paine’s Rights of Man when it began to circulate in myriad cheap forms, beyond any model of reading as polite conversation, even taking the form, remarked the Attorney-General with disgust, of children’s sweet papers. The government claimed it would have allowed an exchange between determinate subjects, in which ‘the judicious reader’ could have refuted Paine as ‘he went along’, but popular radical literature now threatened to offer a different model of reading and the spectre of a readership ‘whose minds [thought the Attorney-General] cannot be supposed to be conversant with subjects of this sort’.26 Although it first appeared in a newspaper, Pittachio was also cast in a form which was not usually read in private, as the bellman at the top

50

Jon Mee

of the broadsheet versions suggests. Pasted on a wall, it offered a very public idea of reading, where a crowd could gather and even the illiterate could hear what was on the bill read aloud. In fact, spy reports indicate that versions of mock playbills, preceding Merry’s, were read aloud at meetings of the London Corresponding Society. The spy Taylor tells of a handbill advertising ‘The Comical Tragedy of Long Faces’ for the ‘Benefit of the tax and Tythe Club’ being read at a meeting on 28 February 1794 to ‘great applause’. In April, at the York Assizes, a Mr Hardley was sentenced to two years in jail for publishing the handbill. The second example, ‘La Guillotine; or George’s Head in a Basket’, seems to have been the source of some disagreement in the LCS when some members objected to its bloodthirsty content. Hardy’s defence lawyer at the Treason Trials in 1794, Thomas Erskine, claimed that it had been written by a spy, but the evidence of the spy Lynam in the Treasury Solicitor’s papers identifies a Mr Cruden as its author.27 Clifford Siskin has described the author function as a sort of ‘outing’ which ‘helped to facilitate and control the flow between print production and knowledge consumption’. When it came to popular radical literature the connection was nakedly clear. The government wished to ‘out’ the authors of popular radical literature (or more often their publishers) so that they could identify the sources of sedition and prosecute them, but prosecution, as I’ve already made it clear, was more likely to be sought when the text was circulating widely beyond any private relationship between author and reader.28 Part of the promiscuity of these kinds of texts was the way they occupied a variety of cultural spaces with parodic effect. As I pointed out at the beginning of this essay, popular radical literature was involved in a symbolic struggle over cultural space in which, as James Epstein puts it, ‘keys terms in England’s political vocabulary were called into question, destabilized, or transvalued’.29 Publications such as Charles Pigott’s Political Dictionary (1795) provided ironic redefinitions of such terms as king – ‘the abbreviation of cunning or crafty, the usual distinction and epithet for knaves’ – and church – ‘a patent for hypocrisy; the refuge of sloth, ignorance and superstition, the corner-stone of tyranny’ – picking up on Paine’s contestation of the meaning of the received language of politics in Rights of Man, but also appropriating the cultural authority of the dictionary form for a popular radical point of view.30 The effect of such strategies was both to mock the authority that was being travestied and to take over its cultural space for radical ends. Linda Hutcheon defines parody as ‘a form of imitation, but imitation characterised by ironic inversion, not

Popular Radicalism and Print Culture

51

always at the expense of the parodied text’.31 Pittachio mocks Pitt as a political huckster who can make ‘upwards of two hundred automata, or moving puppets . . . rise up, sit down, say Yes, or No, Receive Money, Rake among the Cinders, or do any Dirty Work he may think proper to put them to’, that is, as someone who can make the unreformed parliament do anything he wishes. He is reduced to the status of a mountebank or popular showman at a fairground, but the form which Merry and others adopted to make this point was not one with any cultural authority. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Addison had complained in The Tatler of the way that newspapers ran together the elite world of state politics with the low world of trade when they published advertisements: An advertisement from Piccadilly goes down to posterity with an article from Madrid; and John Bartlet of Goodman’s fields is celebrated in the same paper with the Emperor of Germany. Thus the fable tells us that the wren mounted as high as the eagle by getting on its back.32 By taking over the space of the advertisement and using it for political purposes, radicals in the 1790s were asserting the right of a print medium which could be posted on walls for crowds to read or even read aloud to the illiterate to a place in political life. This idea was already being worked out in the dispute between Burke and Paine. Burke believed, as we have seen, that the audience of popular entertainments had no business with public affairs, whereas Paine represented the constitution as a kind of comic show which depended on the response of a popular audience for its meaning.33 In fact, Merry had written such a comic show in 1792, The Magician No Conjurer, a burlesque on Pitt which ran for four nights at Covent Garden before government pressure forced the management to withdraw it.34 In Pittachio, which develops the same basic joke as The Magician No Conjurer, Pitt is put on display for the popular audience of London’s shows. At the trials which were the occasion for Merry’s original version, William Pitt, embarrassingly called as a witness for the defence, had made a poor showing of explaining away his own reformist opinions of the 1780s. The joke about Pittachio’s ‘marvellous Experiments upon his own memory’ mocks Pitt’s performance at the trials, but the broadsheet saves the most shocking of its many humiliations of the Prime Minister till last when it announces that ‘Signor Pittachio will close his Wonderful Performances by exhibiting

52

Jon Mee

his own Person on the tight rope’. The same joke had been made in ‘La Guillotine, or George’s Head in a Basket’ which had ended with the announcement of ‘Tight Rope Dancing, from the Lamp-post, By Messrs. CANTERBURY, YORK, DURHAM etc’. The meaning of such phrases is open to question, which would have been a defence in case of prosecution, but they are also open to determination by their readers. The meaning of this representation depends on the reading practices of the kind of audience which Burke regarded as having no business with the affairs of state, the audience for the low comedy of burlesque, tightrope walking, or, for that matter, public executions. Such representations of the theatre of state were a recurrent part of popular radical literature. Another striking example is The Death, Dissection, Funeral Procession, and Epitaph of the Right Honourable William Pitt which first appeared in the Telegraph over three days in August 1795, before being issued as a separate pamphlet soon afterwards (apparently the pamphlet went into six different editions with different sections being added). Adopting the popular genre of ‘The Last Dying Speech’, Pitt’s death of ‘a violent diarrhoea’ is recorded in great physical and scatological detail in the satire, giving him ample time to confess all his crimes against the people before being subjected to the indignity, which so outraged the London crowd at the end of the eighteenth century, of dissection. Whereas the government exercised its power through public trials for seditious libel and other official theatres of operation, not to mention by dissecting the bodies of criminals and the poor, the radical press offered a counter-theatre, a conception of Paine’s ‘open theatre of the world’, in which Pitt’s body was offered for public display and humiliation in print.35 In this essay I have been using Pittachio to represent an aspect of radical literature in the 1790s which abrogated the idea of the author function fundamental to the formation of modern literary institutions. As the weight of print culture pressed ever more heavily on the cultural scales, literature was being defined as a special kind of conversation whose propriety could be guaranteed by a knowledge of the author. As Della Crusca, Merry produced an author function amenable to the idea of literature as a private conversation, even though it remained too open and too demonstrative for some conservative commentators. By writing squibs such as Pittachio he was entering into a world where the text transmuted beyond Foucault’s ‘solid and fundamental unity of the author and the work’. The text appeared in different places, it was rewritten into variant forms, and it could be read aloud and performed by others. Parody above all other forms

Popular Radicalism and Print Culture

53

abrogates the author function, adopting the disguise of other texts to mask its own intentions. To Merry’s former friends this kind of promiscuous textuality was ‘disgusting’. As a historian of literariness, it intrigues me that William Wordsworth, like Merry, was in France during the early 1790s and he too returned eager to contribute to the Revolution controversy. Yet where Merry dissolved ‘the poet and the gentleman’ in a world of promiscuous textuality, whose meanings were open to the determinations of a potentially raucous and unruly crowd, Wordsworth contributed powerfully to the development of the Romantic idea of the author which had been ongoing throughout the century. In his ‘Preface’ (1800) to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth presented his poetry as a ‘conversation’ which would be an antidote to the quantitative explosion of print culture and its ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’. Essential to this idea was the production of the author as a stable subject. So strong was Wordsworth’s sense of connection with his writing, for instance, that he seems to have regarded parodies as a form of theft, ‘a violation both of private property and personal identity’, in the words of David Kent and D.R. Ewen, no different from plagiarism. The relationship between author, text and reader were quite different in the literary world in which Pittachio functioned. The author disappeared into the text, the text itself could transmute into multiple forms, and the reader could well be a crowd in which anyone could stand up and perform the text. In the 1790s limits were being placed on the reading public which were the limits of what qualified as literature. Robert Merry’s dissolution into the history of popular radical literature was not necessarily the loss of self that his former friends considered, but, forced into exile in the United States in 1796, where he died two years later, a sacrifice to a different idea of what the writer, writing and its reader might be.36

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

George, Prince of Wales, to Queen Caroline, 24 September 1792, in The Correspondence of George Prince of Wales 1770–1812, ed. Arthur Aspinall, 8 vols. (London, 1963–71), II: 287. Charles Pigott, The Jockey Club, or a Sketch of the Manners of the Age, 2nd edn (London, 1792), no pagination. Aspinall, Correspondence of George Prince of Wales, II: 285–6. For details of the prosecutions which followed, see L. Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England, 1792–1793 (Lincoln, 1967), pp. 234, 236, 268, 279. See Mark Philp, ‘The Fragmented Ideology of Reform’, in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 50–77.

54

Jon Mee

5. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader: an Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 101–20. 6. British Library, Add. MSS 19921, fo. 51. 7. See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984). 8. See Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: the French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover and London, 1988). 9. See Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 51, 182; and Gillian Russell, The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society 1793–1815 (Oxford, 1995), p. 24. 10. See Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca and London, 1993), pp. 173–81; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 188; and Paine, Rights of Man, p. 182. 11. The Republican, 29 December 1820. 12. See Jon Mee, ‘“Examples of Safe Printing”: Censorship and Popular Radical Literature in the 1790s’, in Literature and Censorship, ed. Nigel Smith (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 81–95. 13. Burke, Reflections, p. 161. 14. The first of the series of squibs seems to have appeared in the Telegraph, 25 August 1795. Merry knew Pigott and seems to have contemplated fleeing the government with him due to political harassment at the end of 1793. See W.N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, The English Della Cruscans and their Time, 1783–1828 (The Hague, 1967), p. 263. 15. J.J. McGann, ‘Introduction’ to The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, ed. J.J. McGann (New York and Oxford, 1993), p. xx. See also J.J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford, 1996), pp. 74–93. On Merry’s career, see Hargreaves-Mawdsley, The English Della Cruscans. 16. R. Merry, The Laurel of Liberty, a Poem (London, 1790). For the relationship with Griffiths, see Hargreaves-Mawdsley, The English Della Cruscans, pp. 217, 223. 17. Quoted in D.V. Erdman, Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in Paris, 1790–1793 (Columbia, 1986), p. 104. The other poet was William Hayley. 18. See R. Merry and Charles Bonnor, The Airs, Duetts, and Chorusses, Arrangement of Scenery, and Sketch of the Pantomime, entitled ‘The Picture of Paris’ (London, 1790); R. Merry, Ode for the Fourteenth of July, 1791, the Day Consecrated to Freedom: Being the Anniversary of the Revolution in France (London, 1791). See also The Times, 16 July 1791. 19. Clifford Siskin, ‘Eighteenth-Century Periodicals and the Romantic Rise of the Novel’, Studies in the Novel, 26 (1994), pp. 26–42. 20. See W. Gifford, The Baviad and Maeviad, 8th edn. (London, 1811), p. 24. 21. John Taylor, Records of My Life, 2 vols. (London, 1832), II: 274–5; Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (1799), p. 254; James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq., 2 vols. (London, 1825), II: 47. 22. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, p. 101. 23. See Monthly Magazine, 7 (1799), p. 258; Monthly Magazine, 48 (1819), p. 453. For the attack on Castlereagh, see The Black Dwarf, 10 February 1819.

Popular Radicalism and Print Culture

55

24. For the broadside version, see British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, no. 8500. Copies can also be found in the British Library, shelfmark 806.k.1(26); 1889.d.3(73); and 649.c.21(6). The squib appears in Pig’s Meat, 3rd edn (1795), III: 5–7; and Politics for the People, II: 388–9. ‘More Wonderful Wonders’ appears in Politics for the People, II: 406–7. 25. British Library, Add. MSS 16919, fos. 127–8. 26. Paine, cited in E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 111; A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T.B. Howell and T.J. Howell, 33 vols. (London, 1809–26), XXII: 381. 27. See Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 83, 118–19; The Genuine Trial of Thomas Hardy, 2 vols. (London, 1795), II: 442–4; A Complete Collection of State Trials, XXIV: 680–4. 28. Siskin, ‘Eighteenth-Century Periodicals and the Romantic Rise of the Novel’, p. 32. 29. James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994), p. 7. 30. Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words (London, 1795), pp. 9, 65. 31. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: the Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York and London, 1985), p. 6. 32. The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1987), III: 166. For a fuller discussion of radical propaganda and attitudes to advertising, see Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822 (Oxford, 1994). 33. The diary of Samuel Rogers shows that as early as 1791 Merry was alive to this dimension of Paine’s prose and specifically his representation of Burke as a ‘tragedian’. See P.W. Clayden, The Early Life of Samuel Rogers (London, 1887), p. 174. 34. See Hargreaves-Mawdsley, The English Della Cruscans, p. 254; Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England, pp. 92–3. 35. See A Faithful Narrative of the Last Illness, Death, and Internment of the Rt. Hon. William Pitt, 6th edn (London, 1795), p. 3. 36. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’, in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones (London, 1971), p. 249; , Romantic Parodies, 1797–1831, ed. David A. Kent and D.R. Ewen (Cranbury and London, 1992), p. 17.

4 The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794 Clive Emsley

Plots, ’tis well known, are necessary tools To lift up knaves, and scare believing fools! Then marvel not why Courtiers, in this season In Truth find Libel, and in Pop-Guns – Treason. Alarms and Panics ever must await Those whom corruption lifts to haughty state; But should Reform a People’s Rights restore, Pop-Gun Reports would fright Great Men no more.1 On 19 September 1794, the loyalist press in London reported that an alarming conspiracy had been uncovered. Two days before, three men, all members of the London Corresponding Society (LCS), had been arrested on a charge of high treason. They were named as Paul Thomas Lemaitre, a gold-watchcase maker, a native of Geneva and only eighteen years old; George Higgins, a shopman at a medicinal warehouse at 95 Fleet Market; and John Smith, a bookseller of Lincolns Inn Fields. A fourth man, Thomas Upton, a lame watchmaker, was also in custody. Upton, a party to the alleged conspiracy, had given information of what was afoot to the authorities. The plotters, according to these official reports, intended to assassinate George III at the theatre by means of a poisoned dart fired from an air-gun. Fears of treason, conspiracy and armed rebellion by British Jacobins were very real in the summer of 1794. In May that year the government had taken action against the leaders of the popular radical clubs which had first appeared in Britain during the winter of 1791–2. The Habeas Corpus Act had been suspended and Thomas Hardy, founder and secretary of the London Corresponding Society, accordingly found himself arrested and charged with high treason along with 56

The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794

57

several other members of this Society, together with reformers of a more genteel background from the Society for Constitutional Information, like the Reverend John Horne Tooke. Other arrests had been made in Norwich and in Sheffield, where popular radical societies claimed memberships of hundreds of artisans and craftsmen – a membership which, like that of the LCS, strongly resembled the sansculottes of the Paris Sections.2 The popular societies demanded a reform of parliament, universal manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. The great majority of members do not appear to have considered any means other than peaceful persuasion and demonstrations to achieve these ends. But their similarity to the sans-culottes, their condemnation of the war against revolutionary France as a coalition of monarchs against a free people, their demands for a British Convention (a particularly suspicious title given the French regicide example established in 1792) to set reform in motion, and the inflammatory language of a few, all served to sow fear and suspicion in the minds of established political society in Britain and to aggravate rumours of arming and drilling. A genuine revolutionary plot was, in fact, uncovered in Edinburgh and however pathetic and ineffectual it was in reality the discovery of Robert Watt’s battle-axes and pikeheads confirmed the worst fears of British loyalists. In August 1794, furious London crowds had taken to the streets to protest against the practice of crimping – a practice little short of kidnapping – for raising recruits for the army. The rioting had spread across the metropolis and lasted for several days. Patrick Colquhoun, subsequently hailed by Whig historians of the English police as a founding father of that institution and who was at the time of the crimp riots then acting as a police magistrate at the Worship Street Police Office in Shoreditch, believed that the LCS were behind the outbreaks. He warned his colleagues in the seven other London police offices accordingly,3 though he probably was not alone in his beliefs. The revelation of the Pop-Gun Plot was further evidence for the loyalists of the revolutionary intent of the popular radicals. Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins were interrogated before the Privy Council on 30 September and 1 October 1794 and they were then committed to prison. Soon after, Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and John Thelwall, the radical lecturer, were brought to trial at the Old Bailey for high treason, and acquitted. Understandably the government decided not to prosecute the other members of the popular societies who had been arrested on similar charges. Lemaitre, Higgins and Smith, however, did not fall into this category, but in

58

Clive Emsley

May 1795 they were granted bail of £200 each with two sureties each of £50. Smith returned to his bookshop, promptly renaming it ‘The Pop-Gun’, and continued to publish and sell radical literature. Before the year was out, he, Higgins and Lemaitre had all contributed to this literature by printing accounts of their arrests, their interrogations and the ill-treatment which they received in prison.4 At the end of August 1795 a fifth man, said to have been involved in the conspiracy, though not named in the initial newspaper reports, was detained in Cornwall. At the time of this arrest, Robert Thomas Crossfield had only just returned from France as an exchanged prisoner. The Pomona, a whaler on which he had been acting as ship’s surgeon, had been captured off Brest in February 1795 shortly after leaving Falmouth. Lemaitre subsequently claimed that he had never seen Crossfield before January 1796 when the four accused Pop-Gun conspirators were indicted together.5 He further maintained that Crossfield was only named as a conspirator because he was known to be out of the country and that it was an embarrassment to the government when he turned up in 1795. Lemaitre, however, is contradicted by correspondence in the Privy Council papers.6 The authorities were convinced that Crossfield was in London in January 1795. In fact, Bow Street officers were searching for him and both they and Richard Ford, who was then in the process of resigning as a Bow Street magistrate to take over the management of police matters for the Home Office, were suspicious of one Peregrine Palmer, an attorney of Barnards Inn, who was believed to be advising Crossfield and helping him avoid arrest. According to Lemaitre, the arrest of Crossfield only followed information from a friend who gave him away for the sake of a £200 reward. This, however, is incorrect since the Cornish magistrates who detained Crossfield actually received their information from seamen who had been prisoners with him at Brest. These seamen stated that they had heard Crossfield boast of being involved in the Pop-Gun Plot and they claimed that he had changed his name on the cartel ship returning to Britain. At the subsequent trial these men gave evidence to this effect. In January 1796, Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins surrendered themselves at the Old Bailey when a bill of indictment was found against them and Crossfield for high treason. All four pleaded not guilty to the charge, but prevailing circumstances were once again unfavourable to the radicals. On his way to and from the opening of parliament, on 29 October 1795, the coach in which George III had been travelling was mobbed by angry crowds demanding peace with

The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794

59

France and bread at a price which they could afford. On the outward journey a projectile, probably a stone thrown by a member of the crowd, broke the carriage window and on the return journey a man opened the coach door and tried to pull the king out. These attacks, which followed hard on the heels of a mass meeting called by the LCS, were the cue for the government to introduce new legislation restricting public meetings and extending the law of treason.7 Of the accused Pop-Gun conspirators Crossfield was the first to be brought to trial on 11 May 1796.8 The prosecution brought witnesses who described Upton attempting to procure a hollow brass tube in company with two other men identified as Crossfield and Peregrine Palmer. All the witnesses testified to Upton doing most of the talking. Palmer, who was called as a prosecution witness, admitted to being a member of the LCS with Crossfield, but Palmer presented his evidence in such an evasive and hesitant fashion that, according to the New Annual Register, the Lord Chief Justice intervened to observe that this entirely destroyed his credit as a witness. Since Palmer was an attorney such a performance in the witness box was, to say the least, odd. Two crew members of the Pomona, John Le Briton, a boatsteerer, and Thomas Dennis, the chief mate, testified to boasts made by Crossfield on board ship and at Brest that he had been involved in a plot to kill George III with an airgun and a projectile similar to a whaler’s harpoon. Other men imprisoned with Crossfield at Brest gave similar testimony. Edward Stocker, one of the two parish constables who took Crossfield from Fowey, where he was arrested, to Bodmin, testified that Crossfield had offered to bribe them and to shoot the driver of their post-chaise if they lent him one of their pistols and then let him escape. The defence was able to call witnesses to testify to Crossfield’s good character, including two respectable gentlemen, John Cleverton (William Cleveling according to the New Annual Register), a company agent in the Canary Islands, and Anthony Collins, a sea captain, both of whom had messed with Crossfield while imprisoned at Brest. The most damaging blows to the prosecution, however, was its inability to prove for what use the brass tube procured by Upton was intended and, above all, its failure to produce Upton himself, the key witness in the case. In his opening address to the court the Attorney-General stated that unfortunately Upton was dead. Elizabeth Upton, his wife, when called as a witness, testified that he had gone out one night and that she had not seen him since; a friend had returned his hat. The jury deliberated for an hour and forty minutes, which was exceptional in this period (in felony cases, even when the sentence was potentially

60

Clive Emsley

capital, juries commonly appear to have reached their verdict in a matter of minutes).9 At the end of their deliberations the jury found Crossfield not guilty. When, the following week, Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins were brought to the bar at the Old Bailey the Attorney-General announced that he did not intend to proceed with the prosecution because of Crossfield’s acquittal and Upton’s death. The prisoners were discharged, but denied their request to address the court. The day following their acquittal, 20 May 1796, Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins published a printed address which sold for one penny. They regretted that their poverty would not permit them to institute criminal proceedings against the people who had caused them to be arrested, but they promised that they would stand ready to impeach these men ‘if ever an infamous cabal of Boroughmongers shall be forced to give way to the sense of the nation’. The address concluded with a message to George III: Your ministers have deceived you; we could not harbour a thought against your life – your death could not be profitable to us – our only wish is, that the sense of the people may come faithfully to you; and, for your interest, as well as our own, that the present system of boroughmongering may be destroyed, and that you may hear the voice of your faithful Commons from a House of Commons elected by the people of Great Britain. We have been imprisoned and cruelly treated, but we do not impute this to you, but to your Majesty’s ministers.10 Such expressions of loyalty to the king mixed with complaints that he had been separated from the majority of his people and deceived by corrupt borough-mongers and ministers were typical of radical rhetoric during the early 1790s. But particularly interesting in the address were the comments about Upton. The three men protested that the story of Upton being dead, which was accepted by the court, was in fact false. They claimed to have proof that Upton was still alive and they maintained that Upton was paid to keep out of the way during the trial. The evidence which survives concerning Upton and the details of the Pop-Gun Plot in the Home Office, Privy Council and Treasury Solicitors’ papers does not substantiate these assertions, but it raises many questions about Upton’s character and the involvement of Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins in any plot. Like all the accused, Upton had been a member of the LCS during 1794. He was a member of the committee set up to collect and

The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794

61

administer subscriptions for the families of Hardy and the other members of the Society who had been arrested under the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. When, however, it was discovered that Upton had been indicted for attempting to defraud an insurance company by firing his own house, the Society suggested that Upton resign from the committee. He refused, protesting that the Grand Jury had thrown out the bill of indictment. There were furious debates at the meetings of the LCS during August and early September 1794 in which Smith, Higgins and particularly Lemaitre were involved arguing against Upton. According to the account which Lemaitre gave to Francis Place in 1833, Smith and Higgins were both directed to enquire into Upton’s character. William Metcalfe, an attorney, clerk to the Tallow-Chandlers’ Company and a spy for the Home Office, informed the Privy Council that it was Smith who investigated Upton and who reported to the LCS General Committee that, as Upton had said, the indictment for fraud had been rejected by the Grand Jury.11 Also, according to Metcalfe, Upton subsequently wrote a letter under the name of Pasquin on the subject of charges being brought against members of the Society with insufficient proof. The letter was so intemperate that it offended many members of the LCS and a motion was proposed to expel Upton. In the ensuing arguments Upton challenged Lemaitre to a duel, though this was never fought. Lemaitre’s account, published in pamphlet form in 1795, as well as that drafted in 1833, tallies with Metcalfe’s evidence up to this point, but then there is a divergence. Metcalfe reported that since the final dispute Lemaitre and Upton appeared to be on more friendly terms and conversed more familiarly than before. Metcalfe, however, did not believe that Lemaitre was on good terms with Smith and Higgins. In fact, many members of the LCS, he explained, including Smith and Higgins, spoke of Lemaitre with suspicion because of his friendship with the suspected spy, John Groves.12 According to Lemaitre, on 25 September, two days before his arrest, he had presented evidence to the Society of the presence of government agents within the LCS. In his pamphlet he maintained that he had named both Metcalfe and Groves to the General Committee and that Upton had opposed his action, from which action Lemaitre concluded that Upton was also a spy. In his later account to Francis Place, Lemaitre maintained that he had named Upton, Groves and Metcalfe as spies and he concluded here that the Pop-Gun Plot was concocted by the spies to get him out of the way before he could expose them fully to the Society. Both of Lemaitre’s accounts were

62

Clive Emsley

written after the spying activities of Groves and Metcalfe had been exposed to the public. Furthermore, it is apparent from these accounts that he revelled in describing what a defiant figure he had cut before the Privy Council. Like many of the English Jacobins, he appears to have been prone to self-dramatization. Metcalfe remarked that Lemaitre always had something to say at LCS meetings and it seems reasonable to conclude that Lemaitre was reluctant to admit that he had been taken in by Groves, as this would have tarnished his image. Also, if the spies had, as Lemaitre suggested, wanted to get him out of the way by accusing him of involvement in a plot, Metcalfe would surely have given more conclusive evidence about the plot to the Privy Council – in fact, he did not mention it – and he would have been at great pains to emphasize the connections between Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins instead of pondering the latters’ suspicions of the former. But no matter how the various accounts may differ, in all of them Upton emerges as a rather sinister figure with a possible motive for revenge against the LCS in general and against Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins in particular. The fact that, apart from the reports of conflict inside the LCS, there is no other evidence of any connection between Upton and those accused of the Pop-Gun conspiracy further suggests that Upton charged the others with complicity in the plot out of revenge. The question then arises, was there a plot at all or was it entirely the fabrication of Upton? With hindsight it is possible to argue that the assassination of George III was unlikely to begin a revolution or to bring about the kind of changes which the most radical of the popular society membership dreamed. But that said, it is not necessarily the case that political assassins think rationally about the outcome of their actions and, of course, they do not have the benefit of hindsight. Moreover, George III was not yet the popular figure that he was to be later in the wars against France and the attacks on his coach and person in October 1795 certainly bear testimony to this fact. Yet the statements made by several brassfounders and other workmen and craftsmen who were approached by Upton and two accomplices during September 1794 suggests that he was up to something, irrespective of the perceived outcome. But there is only Upton’s evidence to the authorities and the testimony of Le Briton and Dennis of what Crossfield had said during his captivity in France which assert categorically that the weapon which Upton ordered was an air-gun designed to kill the king. Cleverton described Crossfield as ‘of a turn of mind inclining to mirth’. Collins commented that Crossfield had ‘a

The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794

63

levity about him that might give cause of suspicion.’13 Francis Place became acquainted with Crossfield after his acquittal and described him as ‘a man of learning and talents, both of which were most miserably misplaced, he was as his tombstone in Hendon churchyard describes him a drunken harum scarum fellow.’14 Possibly Crossfield’s stories to Le Briton and Dennis were the product of his so-called ‘inclination to mirth’, after all he did report the story long after the press had been full of it. This, of course, does not account for his deliberate evasion of the authorities at the end of 1794 and the beginning of 1795, but since Crossfield was avoiding arrest at the time of the Treason Trials and before the verdicts of acquittal were passed on Hardy, Horne Tooke and Thelwall, it might be that his flight was not because of involvement with a failed, foolish plot, but rather because he was concerned that he might be arrested under the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. Crossfield’s subsequent radical involvement muddles the case further. In 1798, some elements of the LCS were dabbling in conspiracy. They had links with the United Irishmen, had formed their own shadowy United Englishmen and United Britons, and appear to have been prepared to form links with the French. Crossfield was then president of the Society and wrote the flamboyant address to the French Directory suggesting that a French invasion would be popular – a crucial document in the prosecution for treason of Arthur O’Connor, James Coigley and several others. In 1802, Crossfield was also involved in meetings with Colonel Despard shortly before the latter’s arrest, conviction and execution for treason.15 Perhaps Crossfield can be given the benefit of doubt for his involvement in any Pop-Gun Plot in 1794, but his actions later in the decade suggest that if anyone was likely to have been involved with such a conspiracy then he would be a possible candidate. The lack of detailed domestic secret service accounts for most of the 1790s makes it difficult to follow up the government’s spies and informers. The situation is further complicated by the fact that some spies worked through the London Police Magistrates and some through William Wickham’s Alien Office which appears to have been responsible for the co-ordination of domestic secret service work. Lemaitre insisted that Upton was a spy, yet there is no evidence that he ever sent in reports like Groves and Metcalfe. In January 1795, David Cuthbert, a mathematical instrument-maker, gave information to Richard Ford concerning an occasion on which he showed Upton an air-gun. Cuthbert’s deposition suggests something of the provocateur in Upton before the revelations of the Pop-Gun Plot. Cuthbert reported that Upton had

64

Clive Emsley

asked him to contribute to the subscription for the families of Hardy and the others, and that he had refused when Upton told him that attempts were being made to win over the army and that pikes were being made in Sheffield.16 Higgins, moreover, claimed to have told Richard Ford: That calling on Smith one of the nights of illuminating for the 1st June ie. the celebrations for Admiral Howe’s victory of the Glorious First of June, Smith says to me, ‘What do you think? Why Upton came running up to me last night like a madman, saying, he wondered the Society was not called out, as they might, by taking advantage of the general confusion, strike a grand stroke.17 None of this proves that Upton was in touch with the government, let alone in the pay of the authorities, before he gave his information on the Pop-Gun Plot. Nor indeed does he appear to have been the first man to have given information on the plot. At Crossfield’s trial a barrister named Wood claimed to have seen a drawing for the pop-gun at Upton’s house and promptly to have reported this to William Pitt.18 After he had been taken into custody Upton received financial assistance from the Treasury solicitor between 26 September 1794 and 25 May 1795 ‘for the maintenance of his family’.19 One month after the final date of these payments the Privy Council received a petition from Thomas John Upton: I have lost my business by confinement. I have no money whereby to reinstate it. I therefore humbly request Your Lordships will be pleased to grant such an indemnity as Your Lordships may deem requisite to enable me to establish a trade: and your petitioner as in duty bound will be truly thankful.20 Whether the petition bore any fruit is not recorded. Subsequently, Upton disappears from the archives. Whether he was dead at the time of Crossfield’s trial or whether he deliberately kept out of the way remains a mystery. Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins claimed to have proof that he was still alive at the time of the trial, but they never made this proof public, or if they did it has not survived. In his printed petition of 1846, Lemaitre claimed to have seen Upton in Holborn some months after the trial, but in trying to arrest him, Upton managed to escape in the ensuing turmoil.21 Where does all this leave the reality of the Pop-Gun Plot? While the truth is unlikely ever to be unravelled, some speculation on the

The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794

65

evidence is warranted. There is plenty to suggest that Upton was involved in trying to arrange for the construction of some kind of airpowered weapon while engaged in collecting money for the support of the families of radicals in the early summer of 1794. Peregrine Palmer and perhaps also Crossfield were involved with him; Crossfield’s later career suggests that he was not averse to extreme action, though reports of his drinking and general behaviour do not suggest that he was the ideal person to take an important role in any political organization or activity, let alone any assassination attempt. There is no evidence to suggest that Upton was involved with the government while the weapon was being designed and made, nor is it clear what initially brought him into contact with the authorities. Possibly he gave information without any prompting, either out of panic, because the authorities were already suspicious of his activities, or out of malice. Exposing the plot provided him with an opportunity for paying back people who had publicly and forcefully criticized him before other members of the LCS. Turning King’s evidence meant that he would be safe, while his critics, who could have been quite oblivious of the plot as they always insisted, would face the full terror of the law. Palmer similarly made his situation secure by agreeing to become a prosecution witness, though he never emerged as a key informant. But why, then, did Upton not appear at the trial? Perhaps he really was dead. Alternatively, as the trials took place almost two years after the alleged offence, perhaps by then his temper had cooled or he did not wish to incur the odium of being a witness who sent men to the gallows – especially if he knew them to be innocent. During the eighteenth century it was not unknown for witnesses and prosecutors to fail to turn up for criminal trials for the latter reason. Like Upton, many of the characters involved in the Pop-Gun Plot disappear from both the records of the government and the LCS after the failure of the 1796 prosecutions. Crossfield and Lemaitre, however, remained politically active, the former more than the latter. Crossfield, as noted above, became president of the LCS and was involved with ultra-radical elements in the last years of the 1790s. In April 1798, both he and Lemaitre were present at a meeting of the LCS General Committee which had been called to discuss whether or not the Society should organize an armed corps of volunteers to oppose a French invasion. In his petition of 1846 Lemaitre claimed that he had given up politics long before this meeting but had gone to oppose the motion since, he believed, it would make the LCS look ridiculous.22 But whatever the truth of Lemaitre’s claim the debate was never

66

Clive Emsley

resolved; the meeting was broken up by Bow Street officers and both Lemaitre and Crossfield were to spend the next three years in custody under a further suspension of Habeas Corpus. The Pop-Gun Plot is a footnote to the history of British radicalism and its repression during the 1790s. The plot, had it been successful, would have been sensational, but it was not likely to produce political change. Of course, a group of conspirators may have deluded themselves into thinking otherwise – though it is unclear whether the men who were prosecuted for the plot were all such a group of conspirators. The authorities were equally deluded, at least in thinking that there was sufficient evidence to make the charges stick and this was a fault which Pitt’s government committed on more than one occasion. Over the quarter of a century following the Pop-Gun Plot trials there were revelations of other plots, other sinister informants and treason prosecutions which did not always result in acquittals – the most celebrated being the Cato Street affair of 1820, an alleged plot to assassinate the cabinet at dinner, which was driven by an agent provocateur named George Edwards and which resulted in the public hanging and subsequent decapitation of five radicals.23 Active conspirators were in a minority among English radicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they were not always as divorced from the majority as the traditional Whig historiography has argued. The PopGun Plot does not seem to have been a government invention, nor does it seem to have been the invention of someone who from the outset was a government employee. Rather it may have been devised by some rather simple, fevered brains within the LCS, with the principal instigator turning government informant when the story was exposed both to save his own skin and to pay back his critics within the Society. If this is not the stuff that the heroic politics of constitutional or class struggle are made, so be it. There can be fools and knaves on both sides.

Notes 1. Advertisement located in Cambridge University Library for John Smith, Assassination of the King! An Account of the Arrest, Examination and Imprisonment of John Smith and George Higgins (London, 1795). 2. For the comparison, see Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-Culottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution, 2nd edn (London, 1989); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980) provides a thorough survey of English popular radicalism during the French Revolutionary period, and the LCS

The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

67

itself is best followed up in Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge, 1983). John Stevenson, ‘The London “Crimp” Riots of 1794’, International Review of Social History, 16 (1971), pp. 40–58. Colquhoun’s voluminous reports are in Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office papers, HO 42/33, 21–23 August 1794. The spy William Metcalfe reported a proposal to the General Committee of the LCS suggesting that a handbill be published denying the Society’s involvement in the riots. The initial proposition was rejected: ‘One citizen whose name I could not learn, declared that he considered it would be honourable for the Society, if they were at the bottom of the existing Riots, or at all contributing to the demolition and extirpating of the infamous practise of Crimping and Kidnapping, and that he should feel no difficulty whatsoever in heading a Mob for such a purpose’. PRO, Treasury Solicitors’ papers, TS 11/956/3501(1), reports of William Metcalfe, 21, 27, 29 August and 5 September 1794. Subsequently, however, a handbill entitled Reformers no Rioters was published by the Society. P.T. Lemaitre, Narrative of the Arrest, Examinations before the Privy Council and Imprisonment of P.T. Lemaitre (London, 1795); John Smith, ‘Assassination of the King!’ (London, 1795). There are two accounts by Lemaitre in the Place Papers in the British Library, Add. MSS 27808, fos. 123–31 (manuscript dated 27 September 1833) and fos. 133–6 (printed petition dated 14 August 1846). The following text is based on material from these accounts. See especially PRO, Privy Council papers, PC 1/28/A62, Ford to Fawkener, 15 January 1795; PC 1/28/A62, Palmer to Ford, 19 January 1795; and, Miller to Ford, 27 January 1795. See Clive Emsley, ‘Repression, “Terror” and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution’, English Historical Review, 100 (1985), pp. 801–25. There are several reports of the trials of Crossfield, Lemaitre, Smith and Higgins. Among the fullest are the somewhat dry, verbatim accounts in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, 1796, nos. 316 and 317, and the more discursive narrative in the New Annual Register (1796), pp. 26–31. There is a modern account of the trials in Alan Wharam, Treason: Famous English Treason Trials (Stroud, 1995), pp. 100–14. J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 396–7. Address of Smith, Higgins and Lemaitre, Apprehended on a Charge of High Treason, September 27th 1794, Acquitted May 19th 1796 (London, 1796), p. 1. PRO, HO 42/33, examination of Metcalfe, 1 October 1794. Although both Groves and Metcalfe were government spies it is by no means certain that Metcalfe was aware of Groves’ status at the time. For these spies see Clive Emsley, ‘The Home Office and its Sources of Information and Investigation 1791–1801’, English Historical Review, 94 (1979), pp. 532–61. In his report on the debate in the LCS General Committee over whether the Society should disassociate itself from the crimp riots Metcalfe wrote: ‘It was observed by Citizen Groves, Lemaitre and others that what the members of the Society did individually was no concern of the Society’. PRO, TS 11/956/3501(1), report of Metcalfe, 21

68

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

Clive Emsley August 1794. Groves and Lemaitre were both members of Division two of the Society and served respectively as delegate and sub-delegate to the General Committee. New Annual Register (1796), p. 30. In the account in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, pp. 531–2, Cleverton agreed that Crossfield was ‘jolly’ and drank ‘hard’. British Library, Add. MSS 27808, fos. 105–6. Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982), pp. 180–1; J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 56–9, 106, 109, 112–13, 117; Roger A.E. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983), pp. 121–3, 244–5. Ann Hone suggests that Crossfield may even have been a government informer from 1801 to his death in 1802. See Hone, For the Cause of Truth, p. 397. PRO, PC 1/28/A62, deposition of Cuthbert, 14 January 1795. Smith, Assassination of the King!, p. 14. New Annual Register (1796), p. 29; Old Bailey Sessions Papers, 1796, pp. 515–16. PRO, HO 42/45, White to Wickham, 6 November 1798. PRO, PC 1/28/A62, petition of Upton, 24 June 1795. British Library, Add. MSS 27808, fo. 134. British Library, Add. MSS 27808, fo. 135. See Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (Folkestone, 1979), pp. 127–31.

5 John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence: Reform and Revolution Michael Scrivener

The parliamentary reform movement in Britain would seem to be an obvious antithesis to revolution, but in fact, as Malcolm Thomis and Peter Holt observed in their study of Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848, this movement’s intentions were ‘invariably open to misinterpretation, unintentional or deliberate’.1 There were times when reform seemed to mean revolution, not just to overly anxious governments but to the reformers themselves. Thomis and Holt nicely capture the nature of revolution in Britain as not primarily a movement but rather as ‘an idea . . . [that is] elusive in its location in time and space, elusive above all in its shape and form’.2 If we have difficulty keeping discrete the conceptual boundaries between revolution and reform as we try to understand the early democratic movements in Britain, that is in part due to the ambiguity, unintentional or deliberate, which the early democrats themselves realized in their political rhetoric. John Thelwall is a good example of someone from the parliamentary reform movement who made equivocal use of the terms and ideas of revolution and reform. Indeed, Thelwall’s ambivalence towards both concepts was not idiosyncratic but typical of the democratic movement from the French Revolution to the Reform Act of 1832. The most effective orator from the London Corresponding Society (LCS), Thelwall was the third man, after Thomas Hardy and John Horne Tooke, acquitted of treason in 1794. After his release from seven months’ imprisonment, Thelwall continued to lecture on politics until the Gagging Acts of 1795 forced him to conform to the letter, if not the spirit, of the law by lecturing on classical history. His very successful lecture tour of 1796–7 in East Anglia and nearby areas was halted only by successive violent disruptions. These interventions 69

70

Michael Scrivener

enjoyed government protection or even instigation so that Thelwall had little choice but to retire from political lecturing or risk being killed. As a man of letters, speech therapist and professor of elocution, Thelwall prospered outside radical politics until 1818 when he purchased the moderately reformist Champion weekly newspaper and turned it into a proponent of radical reform. He also participated energetically in the daily political struggles of radical Westminster until 1822, when a threatened prosecution for seditious libel brought by the Constitutional Association drove him from political activism although he continued to promote democratic ideas in the cultural sphere as editor of the Monthly Magazine between 1824 and 1825 and his own Panoramic Miscellany in 1826.3 Although Thelwall, from beginning to end, spoke against revolution and political violence there are two reasons why he cannot be viewed as free of equivocation and ambivalence on this issue. In the first place, the example of France provided supporters and opponents of democracy in Britain with what can be called the ‘slippery slope’ phenomenon whereby seemingly innocuous, minor reforms became bloody revolution within a shockingly short amount of time; a small group of political leaders with no apparent following became the ruling party of the revolutionary government months later; and large, non-violent demonstrations one day turned into even larger violent ones the next day. There were two ‘slippery slope’ issues, in particular, that affected the meaning of reform: first, promoting universal manhood suffrage in many contexts from the 1790s to the 1830s was deemed tantamount to promoting revolution and, second, sustaining and expanding the non-violent democratic public sphere in the 1790s and later decades through the press, lectures, meetings, correspondence and demonstrations was looked upon by the government and other political opponents as violent and threatening and as leading inevitably to revolution and therefore worthy of repression. Moreover, Thelwall and other democrats sometimes seemed truly ambivalent about revolution. The use of certain violent and regicidal metaphors and symbols by Thelwall and other radical propagandists, for example, could be and was construed as revolutionary despite the assertions by these men that such usage was innocently figurative and merely emphatic. Similarly, Thelwall condemned political and verbal ‘intemperance’, but at the same time celebrated political and verbal ‘energy’ that seems indistinguishable from intemperance. He weakened his credentials as an anti-revolutionary by invariably situating insurrectionary violence as conditioned and mitigated by systematic

John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence

71

injustice, the greater evil, exemplified by Thelwall’s view of the Cato Street conspiracy in 1820 as not simply negative.

Slippery slope A key issue in the 1794 Treason Trials was the meaning of the term convention and whether the political convention planned by the democratic radicals was a non-violent meeting to make popular protest more effective or an incipiently violent form of intimidation modelled after the French example. At what point, if any, does the exercise of free assembly and free speech pass over into the early stages of revolutionary action? The Pitt government presented considerable evidence to the Treason Trials that suggested the Scottish Convention of 1792 and the planned convention for the next year both imitated the French revolutionary example and employed rhetoric and symbols that could be construed in a revolutionary context. According to Alan Wharam, in his recent study of these trials, the treason charge was not unreasonable given all the evidence. Had the defendants been charged with sedition they surely could have been convicted. The Pitt government, then, was not exercising excessive zeal in its prosecution of the political radicals whose behaviour and words could be construed to infer treasonable actions.4 In the speech he prepared to deliver at his trial but instead gave later and published after his acquittal as The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons, Thelwall addressed the convention issue directly. He turned the tables on the prosecution by claiming that no convention of any sort could have been responsible for revolutionary violence: ‘It was not the Convention of France that begot the anarchy in France; but the anarchy that begot the convention.’ The revolutionary violence that accompanied the French Convention’s seizure of power was likened by Thelwall to natural processes beyond moral and political judgement: ‘Like thunder storms and convulsions of nature, which men gaze and tremble at, but whose explosion is necessary to clear the clouded and infectious atmosphere.’5 Thelwall’s stance on the convention issue is a vivid example of equivocation. Does convention, whether in its Scottish, English or French version, lead to revolution? Thelwall says yes, no and maybe. Yes in France, he suggests, but only in the sense that it actually followed upon rather than caused the collapse of the old regime. Strictly speaking, the answer for France would have to be no. The Scottish and English conventions, on the other hand, could not have caused revolution except in the sense

72

Michael Scrivener

that they could occasion the governing elite to rebel against popular rights and freedoms and such rebellion against popular liberty would indeed parallel the revolutionary events across the channel. So, in the end, convention may lead to revolution if the ruling elite represses democratic ideas and practices. The ambiguity of reform Thelwall sometimes expresses figuratively. In one such passage he claims: ‘For if you will treat us only like beasts of burthen, what wonder if we sometimes break the yoke and become beasts of prey! If you wish the people to be humanized, restore them to the privileges of humanity – restore to every individual that liberty without which he may sometimes be a spaniel and sometimes a tyger, but never can be a man.’6 In other words, if the ruling elite does not grant annual parliaments, universal suffrage and unrestricted freedoms of speech, assembly and association, then it can expect dehumanized servility or revolutionary violence. For the aristocracy, however, there could be no political catastrophe worse than these supposedly non-violent reforms that would constitute, if fully realized, an extraordinarily radical revolution. Thelwall and his colleagues in the LCS seize the high ground rhetorically by claiming ancient rights, non-violent reforms, restoration of constitutional procedures and blaming their opponents for violence, rebellion and repression. Nevertheless, in actual political terms that were understood clearly at the time, Thelwall’s very rhetoric carries with it the threat of revolution. William Godwin understood this when he quarrelled with Thelwall in 1795 over the proposed Gagging Acts. Godwin argued that popular political lectures and associations were in fact dangerous and violent, thus undermining non-violent reform that would indeed depend upon patient, gradual educational efforts only. ‘The collecting of immense multitudes of men into one assembly,’ Godwin asserted, ‘particularly when there have been no persons of eminence, distinction, and importance in the country, that have mixed with them, and been ready to temper their efforts, is always sufficiently alarming.’7 Godwin opposed government repression but argued as well against the provocation of popular democratic politics. Provoking, however, Thelwall finds Godwin’s ‘cold abstraction and retirement’, his ‘feebleness of spirit’ and his ‘solitary vanity’. Unwilling to risk the public scrutiny of his ‘singular speculations’ that would occur in a popular assembly, Godwin in effect betrays the reform movement and effectively joins its enemies.8 The democratic public sphere, then, safeguards against cold abstractions and rationalistic monstrosities. Repression, as advocated by Edmund Burke and

John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence

73

put into effect by the Pitt government, and elitist assumptions concerning public rationality, as proposed by Godwin, actually produced inclinations to social and political violence by constraining the only process that can guarantee whether political and social ideas have been adequately tested and probed. The difference between Thelwall and Godwin was not over the ultimate political goals of greater democracy, but rather the dispute focused upon methods and timing. This dispute, however, was so decisive as to be fundamental. For Godwin the evils of revolution were so enormous that any action that might lead to it was to be avoided, even if this meant making enormous concessions to those in power. For Thelwall popular politics leading to non-violent reform was the only way the worst evils of revolution could be avoided. Thelwall defends the democratization of the public sphere itself and not just democratic ideas. He defends the process of publicity, inquiry and debate as inherently rational. To constrain this process, he argued, is to be violent, and to sustain this process is to promote truth. Indeed, any kind of public discourse promotes the social good ultimately: ‘If he will but write, take whatever side he will, I am sure that truth will be derived from his labours’ because, as Thelwall suggested, any kind of energetic writing will produce an equally energetic reading and interpretation, leading eventually to truthful conclusions. Thelwall goes on to argue that, with their writing, authors intend certain effects that are foiled by a social process that produces something quite unlike the original idea. Thelwall’s favourite example is Burke’s own Reflections on the Revolution in France which initiated a process that extended ‘the boundaries of science beyond the narrow pale of opulence’ and ‘carried the invaluable discussion of political principles and civil rights to the shopboard of the artificers, and the cottage of the laborious husbandman’.9 Thelwall upholds the democratic public sphere, then, as an instrument of social rationality and not as the product of isolated philosophers spinning out abstract and foreign ideas.

Intemperance and energy One of the ways in which reform seemed like revolution was when Thelwall’s political rhetoric was intemperate and energetic despite his non-violent commitments. Thelwall’s oratory has what amounts to a Romantic theory of creative inspiration that entails the risk of occasional intemperance.10 In The Tribune Thelwall writes of the ‘universal

74

Michael Scrivener

interest and agitation’ occasioned by an unusually intense ‘passion’ and ‘more of that fire of expression, and that rapid energy of conception and arrangement, which constitute the soul of oratory’.11 The passionate nature of oratory, risking moments of intemperance, calls for some revision when it is translated into print. Thelwall never delivered a speech of any kind from a written text and relied instead on a few notes that would prompt his extemporaneous composition. Regardless of revision for print, the printed versions of his lectures invariably include moments of intemperate expressions that punctuate the oration and that provide occasions for qualification and revision. At Thelwall’s treason trial in 1794 he had to contextualize various intemperate expressions that spies had reported his speaking or that government agents had found in seized letters. Intemperance was an object of contentious interpretation between Thelwall, for whom it was innocent hyperbole as well as an organizing feature of his oratory, and the prosecuting attorneys, who saw it as treason. High treason, according to John Barrell, being defined as compassing or imagining the king’s death, was in effect a crime of the mind, not of the body, so that the defence in 1794 could exploit the looseness of the very process of imagination to undermine the credibility of the charge.12 Indeed, the prosecution went to great lengths to find external signs of Thelwall’s inner thoughts that would in turn assist the jury in interpreting ambiguous words and actions. Although not mentioned directly at Thelwall’s own trial, two external signs of Thelwall’s political convictions were cited earlier in Hardy’s trial. The seditious songs that Thelwall wrote for the London Corresponding Society, and that were widely distributed and sung, and a seditious comment he made at a tavern after a Corresponding Society meeting were cited as clear indications of Thelwall’s beliefs. According to the spy report on the latter occasion: ‘Mr. Thelwall took a pot of porter and blowing off the head, said – “This is the Way I would serve Kings”.’ Corresponding Society members challenged this report by recalling the word ‘tyrants’ rather than ‘kings’.13 Whether the word used was kings or tyrants is not crucial because if by tyrant he meant King George then the words were dangerous anyway. Thelwall handled this embracing piece of evidence in several different ways. In the Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons published in 1795, he referred four times to ‘ridiculous toasts’ and over ten times to intemperate expressions in general.14 The fact that he made the ridiculous toast hardly seems in doubt, although he hinted that perhaps the spies suggested the toast to him first and that

John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence

75

he only reiterated it. Nevertheless, in either case, he spoke the words of the toast ‘in the hour of conviviality, without thought or meaning’.15 At his trial, Thelwall’s lawyer, Vicary Gibbs, conceded that the defendant ‘was warm tempered’ and ‘sometimes apt to speak his sentiments in stronger terms than his sober judgment would approve’.16 Thelwall’s other lawyer, Thomas Erskine, made an even more damaging confession, saying that if his client were guilty of anything it would be at worst sedition.17 The eleventh and twelfth chapters of The Life of John Thelwall published in 1837 give a detailed rebuttal of the treason charges. One episode, however, that came out of the trial and that was especially difficult to explain was an intemperate letter Thelwall had written, but had not sent. This letter declared his republican sympathies, supported the Jacobin Mountain in Paris and criticized America for having ‘too much veneration for property – too much religion – too much law’. He had given vent to his anger, according to Thelwall himself, because he had just barely escaped yet again from being indicted by the grand jury. At the trial itself and in his print defence there is the apology that ‘Thelwall was subject to great irritability of temper, a quality which he, in after life, in a considerable degree corrected, and in these moments, for they seldom exceeded a few seconds, of excitement, would say and do things, of which, after a short reflection, he would repent’.18 It is a rich irony that he inserted the inflammatory letter into Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, a symbol of cultural sobriety if anything was. At Thelwall’s trial the prosecuting attorneys dramatically highlighted the letter since it was more damaging than the seditious toast. Whereas one could ascribe a toast to the effects of enthusiasm enhanced by alcohol, a private letter suggests sincere expression of one’s thoughts. The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons provides a defence of the letter that was lacking at the trial. He conceded he was, ‘in private speculations, a Republican’, but in public he always maintained that violence cannot enforce private speculations.19 He admitted also that parts of the letter cannot be wholly defended and should instead be extenuated as a result of exasperation. As to his remarks on America, he defended himself in ambiguous phrasing: ‘I both disavow, and approve it.’ Since he was writing to someone who, in his words, ‘knew my heart’ and required ‘no commentator’, he could phrase words elliptically, taking for granted an innocent interpretation. Wrenched out of the context of a private letter, those same words are politically extreme. He provided a politically moderate interpretation for his words on America, but this very example

76

Michael Scrivener

reinforced the cogency of what Wharam and Barrell have discussed in identifying the court procedures as being applied to discover the meaning of mental operations. Thelwall protested against having ‘to answer at the bar of the Old Bailey for every intemperate expression’ he might utter or every ‘crude imagination’ he might put on paper, but oral and written texts are signs of subjective intention and precisely the site for the discourse of treason and of revolution.20 The psychological explanation for intemperance, made by Thelwall and his lawyers, is not persuasive and seems even cynical, but intemperance is indeed a feature of his orations. The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons employs the fiction of speaking before a jury that has the power of life or death over Thelwall and is therefore designed to make appropriate a heightened rhetoric. One of the recurrent points of punctuation in the text are moments of intemperance, usually signified by apostrophes, that bring the readers to a high pitch of emotion in order to bring them back down to some kind of rational equilibrium. Such is the pattern and structure of the essay. Similarly, he uses himself and his situation to dramatize the compelling case for the radical reforms spelled out in the title of the pamphlet – annual parliaments and universal suffrage – principally by means of refuting the treason charge by redefining treason and rebellion. Throughout the text of this publication there are eight major apostrophes, only one of which will be examined here. Near the end of the essay he accumulates examples of the government’s exercise of arbitrary power from suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act to jury-packing, concluding thus: ‘Was it not time for Britons to rouse from their lethargy, and enter their serious protest against innovations so tyrannical, and encroachments so decisive?’ Precisely at the point he appeals to the audience to take action, he heightens the rhetoric even more with the use of the following apostrophe: O miserable country, indeed, if thy legislature could meditate so many fatal stabs! and thy sons can be arraigned for treason for crying to the parricides to forbear! O miserable country! whose rulers not only demand obedience to their laws, but implicit reverence also to the crude conceptions of their brains – their hints – their threats – their contemplations – the shapeless embrios of their legislative imaginations!21 In line with the principal rhetorical strategy of the essay in refuting the charge of treason by redefinition, Thelwall makes the Jacobins

John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence

77

themselves the loyal sons victimized by the parricidal traitors of government. Thelwall inverts the treason charges in a chiasmus: from ‘the State charges Thelwall with treason’ to ‘Thelwall charges the State with treason’. Government, being the ‘legislature’, is kept separate from the nation or ‘country’ so that he can demonize his persecutors without seeming to attack the nation. The monarch is sublimed entirely into, but is not identical with, the concept of country. Inverting the charge of conspiracy, Thelwall makes the government a source of intemperate, emotional, irrational, extreme, irresponsible and arbitrary expressions that demand not just obedience but reverence. The apostrophe convicts the government of treason, a crime punishable by death. Having demonized his accusers and brought the audience to a high pitch of excitement with the intemperate rhetoric that protests against the government’s intemperance, Thelwall has to modulate the discourse to a more moderate level. The next paragraph is a sequence of four rhetorical questions that decompress the concentrated energy of the apostrophe; then the legislature of the apostrophe is materialized in two subsequent paragraphs on Henry Dundas and William Pitt. Finally, a long paragraph redefines the politically explosive concept of convention as ‘peaceful assemblies of the people for the purposes of political investigation’. The only danger from conventions, as Thelwall argued, was the legislative prohibition on political meetings. Such repression creates conspiracy and violence.22 The rhetorically violent apostrophe, then, punctuates a series of political evils that demand action, but the violence of the apostrophe, so to speak, is followed by a sequence accenting rational analysis and peaceful discussion, not storming the barricades. To use Thelwall’s own phrasing, he simultaneously ‘disavows and approves’ his own intemperate rhetoric. In a lecture reprinted in The Tribune, Thelwall continues to refute and invert the charges of treason by redefining the concept.23 The government, he says, has betrayed the country by serving the interests of an oligarchy rather than the nation as a whole. He distinguishes between rebellion and treason, defending the former as removing treasonous usurpers.24 There is a wonderful moment of intemperance which provoked an interruption from the audience and a Thelwall rebuttal. Playing treason and rebellion against one another, Thelwall used the example of Louis XVI being victimized by his evil, ‘treasonous’ advisers whose wicked guidance provoked the ‘rebellion’. Near the end of this line of development Thelwall exclaims: ‘I should be

78

Michael Scrivener

almost inclined to say – that they [Louis and his family] deserved the fate which they eventually met.’25 Precisely at that point someone hissed, forcing Thelwall to address the objection to his apparent support for regicide. Thelwall quickly modulates his discourse to a more moderate note that stresses the evil of the advisers rather than of the king. He apologizes later in the speech for being again intemperate, this time in relation to his outraged feelings at the treatment of Joseph Gerrald who was being transported to Botany Bay for the crime of sedition and to whom he had just bid farewell: ‘But let me not lose again the tranquillity of my soul! . . . Let me not, when the sting of indignation and consciousness of injury urges my temper – let me not inflame your minds with similar feelings.’26 This undulating rhythm of intemperance and moderation is not an occasional accident that is different from the ordinary structure of his writing but, on the contrary, it is the ordinary structure of his writing and thinking. The ambiguity of Thelwall’s language is also beautifully illustrated by his behaviour at Covent Garden during a performance of Otway’s Venice Preserved in 1794. He led a round of vigorous applause after the Pierre-Jaffeir dialogue early in Act I where the conspirators speak lines that were construed, because of the applause, to have immediate political reference. The applause would have stopped the play temporarily at the end of Pierre’s speech: We’ve neither safety, unity, nor peace; The foundation’s lost of common good. Justice is lame, as well as blind, amongst us; The laws (corrupted to the ends that make ‘em) Serve but for instruments of some new tyranny, That every day starts up t’ enslave us deeper.27 The intervention of Thelwall’s applause at such an early part of the play recontextualizes the entire drama. After two more nights of similar political applause at the same lines, the play was stopped. Thelwall remarks that the play, despite its original intentions to ‘pay court’ to Charles II and satirize the Shaftesbury conspiracy, ‘was, at this time, converted into a provocative, not an antidote to jacobinism, and the following year, during the discussion of the “Convention” bills, was played nightly, at Covent-garden Theatre, to thronged houses, who loudly applauded its popular sentences’.28 Recontextualization inverts the meaning of the Otway play just as redefinition inverted the charge of treason. By this means Thelwall

John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence

79

enacts his political ambivalence, which is apparent as well in his numerous comments on energy. On one occasion he counters the charge that reform caused violence by offering an alternative history of the French Revolution. As long as this revolution was led by philosophers and literary men, according to Thelwall, it prospered for the most part non-violently. The foreign invasion by the European monarchs, however, introduced something the literati could not control. Only the Mountain was energetic enough to maintain an adequate defence against the invasion, as the ‘philosophical party’ – the Brissot and Girondin faction – was not ready for action. The September massacres of 1792 were not caused by ‘cannibal philosophers’, to use Burke’s notorious charge, but rather the Duke of Brunswick’s manifesto provoked the violence.29 Thelwall does not endorse the revolutionary violence, but does provide a narrative that explains – but does not excuse – it. As he argues: ‘Inhuman oppression generates inhuman revenge.’30 If anything can be called a quintessential Jacobin narrative, it is that insurrectionary violence is caused by tyranny, not anything immanent within the revolutionary project itself. Thelwall’s perspective here is the standard Jacobin viewpoint and, understandably defensive, he does not seem to think that there was something genuinely disturbing, even unprecedented, about the violence of the French Revolution. In Thelwall’s writing about the French Revolution, energy is a word that frequently occurs. A typical paragraph in Sober Reflections on the Seditious and Inflammatory Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, to a Noble Lord that deals with this event has five uses of energy or one of its cognates. In the first instance, the philosophical party is described as lacking sufficient energy for decisive action in the crisis precipitated by the invasion of France in 1792. The philosophers needed more than ‘fine-spun theories and speculations’ to counter the reactionary violence. Then Thelwall criticizes the Mountain, ‘the more energetic party’, for ‘the ferocious barbarity’ and ‘cruelty’ by which they abused their power in acting justifiably against the invasion. He then contrasts the philosophers, ‘deficient in the powerful energies of manhood’, and the Mountain, ‘energetic’ but ‘destitute of the humanising temperament of philosophy’. Finally, he compares the ‘imbecility’ of the philosophical party with the ‘ferocity’ of the ‘energetic party’.31 The best things, according to Thelwall, are thus confused to ill, as the energetic Mountain is filled with passionate intensity and the philosophers lack enough conviction to be politically effective.

80

Michael Scrivener

While unusual, Thelwall’s use of energy is not unprecedented. Consider William Blake’s energy in the 1790s. ‘Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.’ Blake concludes the fourth plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell thus: ‘Energy is Eternal Delight.’32 Thelwall’s energy, then, seems to be similar to what one finds in Blake’s writing: energy signifies the actual power by which unreasonable restrictions on desire will be destroyed. In turn, intemperance is as unfortunate but as necessary and inevitable as violence and energy. Reform can hardly survive meaningfully without its connection with things that seem revolutionary.

Cato Street conspiracy What Thelwall wrote in his fifty-sixth year in the pages of the Champion about the Cato Street conspiracy, perhaps the clearest symbol of Regency radicalism’s moment of revolutionary excess, might have decisively aroused ‘Dr Slop’, John Stoddart of the New Times, to call for Thelwall’s prosecution and the closing down of the newspaper he edited. The story of Cato Street is too familiar to repeat, but it seems that a significant minority of the radical movement after Peterloo was willing to take up arms against what it deemed a murderous and illegitimate government. Just how large this group was or how widespread the revulsion against the government is difficult to determine, but it is indisputable that in Scotland, Yorkshire and London some radicals did indeed take part in risings. It is also not in dispute that government spies acted as agents provocateurs, but whether Thistlewood and his colleagues would have gone as far as they did, without the assistance or encouragement of spies, towards trying to assassinate the cabinet is not at all certain.33 After a perfunctory trial, five of the conspirators – Thistlewood, Ings, Tidd, Brunt and Davidson – were hanged as traitors; others were transported. The lead article in the Champion for 26 February 1820 was on Louvel’s recent assassination of the Duke of Berri, an unpopular member of the royal family. Thelwall phrases his condemnation of the assassination in such a way as to cast more moral blame on the ‘murderers’ of Peterloo. If Berri’s assassination was bad, Peterloo was worse. Moreover, the murder of the Duke of Berri is symptomatic of ultra-royalist social evil in which England too is complicit. Political violence, however unjustifiable, is nevertheless understandable as a symptom of social injustice. ‘There is no safety for princes, or for governments, but in their respect for the principles of liberty, or in the

John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence

81

affections and veneration of their people’.34 Even without Cato Street Thelwall’s lead article was a bold gesture after the Six Acts when many prominent reformers, including Henry Hunt, Francis Burdett, John Hobhouse, Richard Carlile and Thomas Wooler were indicted, jailed or on trial. The year 1820, with the passing of the Six Acts, was resembling 1795 and the Gagging Acts of that year. Cato Street and the immediate prospect of new treason trials evoked for Thelwall his own treason trial in 1794. Thelwall, however, does not waver from the approach he takes initially. He condemns political assassination but encourages his readers to be sceptical of the government and its use of spies and agents, while at the same time he does not let his readers forget Peterloo, the 1794 Treason Trials or what he calls the ‘true’ origins of political violence. However fearful of prosecution, Thelwall acted boldly, addressing in April 1820 two letters in lead articles to the Lord Chief Justice Abbott, the principal magistrate for the Cato Street trials, immediately before and during the trials. The most important feature of the letters is their absolute moral disapproval of using spies and agents provocateurs. Thelwall was trying to influence the outcome of a trial whose result was doubted by almost no one from the time the men were arrested. To realize just how provocative Thelwall himself was by writing in this vein one must remember that the non-radical press simply portrayed the Cato Street conspirators as subhuman monsters – atheists and deists – who deserved the worst kind of punishment.35 That these letters did not immediately lead to Thelwall’s prosecution suggests Abbott chose to ignore them. After the Cato Street convictions Thelwall strongly criticized the government in his summary of Thistlewood’s case. Thelwall portrays Thistlewood as more humane than the spy Edwards who orchestrated the plot for the government. In this sketch, Thistlewood refused to blow up parliament as Edwards suggested because in the explosion innocent people would die. He also refused Edwards’ suggestion that they attack a party given by the Spanish ambassador because women present might be harmed. The overall point of his essay is that the government immorally employed spies and that Peterloo has degraded the popular morality to the extent that now, but not before Peterloo, assassination is an openly expressed political option. Peterloo has ‘metamorphosed poor starving wretches from sufferers into fiends: not many, however, we trust, into such fiends as these’.36 After the executions of the five men on 1 May 1820, Thelwall displays more sympathy towards them than the ‘fiend’ imagery would suggest

82

Michael Scrivener

possible, but the brief comparison of Thistlewood and Edwards already humanizes the former while it demonizes the latter. Truly fiendish is the government. Thelwall contrasts the punishment of these five men with the complete exoneration of the men responsible for Peterloo. Instead of joining the chorus of condemnation of the rebels, he directs the moral outrage at the government. An apostrophe early in the essay calls attention to the Manchester magistrates, yeomanry and government ministers who perpetrated and sanctioned Peterloo, the greater crime than the spy-engendered plot.37 He develops further his idea about popular morality being corrupted by Peterloo, saying that ‘the bruising matches of the street vulgar have had always a sort of chivalrous honour and generosity in them’, even during the Gordon Riots of 1780 when ‘not an assassination was perpetrated’. If the popular morality has become bloodier, the government is mostly to blame.38 In the end, to call Thelwall simply a proponent of reform and an opponent of revolution is to ignore the full complexity of his political position and the subtle nuances of threat and equivocation that were typical of the parliamentary reform movement between the time of the French Revolution and the 1832 Reform Bill.

Notes 1. Malcolm I. Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848 (Basingstoke, 1977), p. 2. 2. Ibid., p. 1. 3. On Thelwall’s political life and thought, with bibliographical sources, see E.P. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, Past and Present, no. 142 (1994), pp. 94–140; Michael Scrivener, ‘The Rhetoric and Context of John Thelwall’s “Memoir”’, in Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods, ed. G.A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins (London and Toronto, 1990), pp. 112–30; and Michael Scrivener, ‘John Thelwall and the Press’, in Romanticism, Radicalism and the Press, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit, 1997), pp. 120–36. 4. See Alan Wharam, The Treason Trials, 1794 (Leicester, 1992). 5. The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, PA, 1995), p. 13. 6. Ibid., p. 33. 7. William Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills (London, 1795), rpt. in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (London, 1993), II: 130. 8. Claeys, The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. 382. 9. Ibid., p. 332. 10. An interesting parallel is Thomas Wooler’s practice of spontaneous

John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

83

composition for the Black Dwarf, lending his print-culture essays the style of orations. See Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1996), pp. 72–3. The Tribune, 3 (1796), p. 322. John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 122–3, 139. Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge, 1983), p. 140, n. 113. Claeys, The Politics of English Jacobinism, pp. 4, 5, 8, 10, 17, 20, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 54, 55, 56, 61. Ibid., p. 17. John Newton, The Trial at Large of John Thelwall for High Treason (London, 1795), p. 39. Ibid., p. 47. Mrs [Cecil Boyle] Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall (London, 1837), p. 282. Claeys, The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. 54. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., pp. 44–5. Ibid., pp. 45–6. See The Tribune, 1 (1795), pp. 279–300. The Tribune, 1 (1795), p. 284. The Tribune, 1 (1795), p. 289. The Tribune, 1 (1795), p. 299. Six Restoration Plays, ed. John Harold Wilson (Boston, 1959), p. 255. Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall, p. 286. Claeys, The Politics of English Jacobinism, pp. 359–62. Ibid., p. 375. Ibid., pp. 361–2. Quoted from William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford, 1975). Still a useful source that contains the newspaper reports, the trial transcripts and other materials is George Theodore Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato-Street Conspiracy (London, 1820). Also see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), pp. 700–6; and David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Detroit, 1992), pp. 187–200. Champion, 26 February 1820. Wilkinson in his An Authentic History of the Cato-Street Conspiracy consistently stresses the irreligious character of the conspirators and assumes that only those who were not Christians could have acted as they did. Champion, 29 April 1820. Ibid., 7 May 1820. Ibid., 7 May 1820.

6 Wondering about Wonders: Paine, Constâncio and The Age of Reason, 1794–971 Hélio Osvaldo Alves

William Shadgett, the editor of the Weekly Review that bore his name, the most successful of the periodicals defending Church and King during 1818–19, declared himself to be, and against the opinion of all his adversaries, a relentless defender of the cause of truth which, he asserted, could never be injured by fair discussion. This declaration was prompted due to the probable effects of the prosecution filed against Richard Carlile for publishing Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and other similarly impious tracts, a political move which would, in Shadgett’s view, bring about more harm than good.2 In postwar Britain, towards the beginning of 1819, the year of Peterloo, the public seemed to hold to the belief that no person in authority was to tell them they should not think or read, and at least four thousand copies of The Age of Reason printed by Carlile were sold during that year alone, despite, and perhaps also because of, the harassment and prosecution of booksellers, vendors and hawkers throughout England.3 Somewhat prophetically, soon after the publication of the first British edition of The Age of Reason in 1794, the Analytical Review had warned its readers that it would be in vain to expect that ‘either contemptuous silence or coercive prohibition’ could prevent the pamphlet from being read.4 Carlile, however, had more ambitious plans. In order to widen the scope of his intervention in civil society and to swell the tide of free thought, he had decided to publish a weekly journal, soon to appear irregularly, which was intended to propagate a ‘genuine spirit of philosophy and free inquiry’ and to be a repository of ‘writings of the most celebrated authors in ancient and modern times’. Consisting of reprints of anonymous British freethought tracts and of translations – some appearing for the first time – of Baron d’Holbach and Voltaire, The Deist also included tracts by 84

Paine, Constâncio and The Age of Reason

85

Elihu Palmer, the American deist, and Samuel Francis, reputedly an Edinburgh physician and author of Watson Refuted.5 Samuel Francis’s pamphlet stands out from the whole collection of the journal for being the only one specifically to take Paine’s side on his controversy with Watson in the mid-1790s. This fact alone indicated that Carlile thought highly of this book, originally published in 1797, which denounced the Bishop of Llandaff as a hopeless bigot and became, therefore, ‘a combative defence of Paine’s deist views’.6 Watson Refuted, however, was not the work of Samuel Francis. Indeed, the Biographie Universelle et Portative des Contemporains, published in Paris in 1834, clearly identifies the author of this pamphlet not as Francis, but as Francisco Solano Constâncio who used that name as a pseudonym. The latter’s collaboration elsewhere in the Biographie, published some twelve years before his death, gives ground to the belief that Constâncio himself filled in the details in his biography concerning some of the lesser known aspects of his past7 and extensive studies undertaken by Albert Silbert, Machado de Sousa and Victor de Sá have established a firm basis for understanding his life and works in the context of the Portuguese and wider European politics of the time. Yet Watson Refuted never attracted the undoubtedly deserved attention of scholars. According to the Biographie a second volume had been in preparation to serve as its sequel, this time with a commentary on the New Testament. However, faced with the refusal of the printers of Edinburgh, under pressure from the powerful Presbyterian clergy of the city, neither this second volume nor another book announced by Constâncio himself, intended to discuss religion in general, ever saw the light of day.8 Like Paine in 1792, Constâncio it seems was advised by a friend to leave Scotland immediately after the publication of the book since his name as a prominent foreign radical was already becoming too well known – an uncomfortable situation, to say the least. He accepted the advice and arrived in Hamburg in July 1797, departing immediately for Paris where he stayed for eighteen months until advised that he could return safely to Portugal in 1799.9 He was then only twenty-two years old. How did this young man attain such notoriety in such a short period of time? Constâncio, the son of a prominent Portuguese surgeon, had arrived in London in October 1791 when he was barely fourteen years of age. Thanks to his father’s interest and influence, Constâncio had been included in a group of six older medical students sent to England with a view to improving their knowledge

86

Hélio Osvaldo Alves

and consequently to reforming the study and practice of medicine in the Portuguese universities and hospitals.10 Constâncio soon became a fluent English speaker and immersed himself in the torment of ideas of London in 1792–3. In view of his later extensive display of knowledge, it is reasonable to suppose that he was an interested witness of the social and political agitation in London at the time, even if he was to pay more attention to his duties as a medical student, which involved attending at St Thomas’ and Guy’s Hospitals, as well as following courses in anatomy, physiology, dissection and surgery. Nevertheless, as proof of his interest in politics, the Portuguese ambassador was anxious to share his own alarmed views in relation to a city that offered ‘many possibilities of dissipation’, and suggested that Constâncio should write weekly reports concerning his activities as a student. This would not only keep him occupied and away from temptation, but more importantly his whereabouts would be known at all times.11 Despite the restrictions on his activities and movements, Constâncio’s interests widened into the fields of philosophy and natural history, and a character in his later writings, the ‘Natural Philosopher’, considered his kind as the true foundation of nations and therefore above both the ‘haughty ruler’ and the ‘bigoted preacher’ whom he despised.12 Fascinated by the study of medicine and the natural sciences, Constâncio applied to the Portuguese government to attend the University of Edinburgh, a wish that was duly granted. He arrived there in mid-1794 and started attending the university the following December, but he soon found the lectures ‘tedious, uninteresting, and disgusting’, an attitude that would soon be the source of no small trouble.13 In 1794, Edinburgh was still recovering from the shock caused by the trials of some of the audacious delegates of the self-assumed British Convention. The last of these trials, that of Joseph Gerrald, a delegate from the London Corresponding Society and a promising young man, had taken place in March. The scurrility of the presiding judge, Lord Braxfield, as well as the arguably unlawful punishment of transportation imposed on this young man for a matter of opinion would no doubt still be fresh in the collective memory of the students. Before the meeting of the British Convention, Edinburgh had abounded in political and debating societies and, in spite of the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act the following May, they continued to meet, even if more circumspectly.14 Revealingly, the debates on scientific themes in the meetings of the students’ societies

Paine, Constâncio and The Age of Reason

87

that Constâncio attended were imbued with a passion very similar to political argument.15 These societies and the discussions they gave rise to ‘gave grounds to the hatred that [Constâncio] already possessed against hereditary privileges and priestcraft,’ as he himself confessed in the Biographie.16 As a result of all this, on 25 April 1796, barely a year and a half after Constâncio had arrived in Edinburgh, a new periodical entitled The Ghost appeared in print with the principal author and editor, ‘Felix Phantom’, none other than Constâncio himself.17 His avowed intention was ‘to continue the progress of knowledge, to attack error, whether in manners, science, or any other branch of human knowledge; so that the empire of the evil genii [might] be farther curtailed.’18 Although the first volume of The Ghost19 hints at the main intellectual interests of ‘Felix Phantom’, it is the second volume20 which carries the bulk of the short essays on more serious themes. Of these, some essays on politics and religion by Constâncio are the work of a keen observer of English and Scottish societies as well as of the institutions of the day. Furthermore, for a young man of just nineteen years of age, they are the reflections of a promising and brilliant mind. For someone who had ‘breathed the principles of liberty’ in England,21 Constâncio felt he had a duty to express his unrelenting opposition to the social system of a people he had looked up to ‘as the first in the world’.22 Having heard Englishmen boast abroad of ‘the astonishing knowledge of their philosophers and the general instruction of their nation’, Constâncio had decided to investigate the state of education in England, colouring this study, at the same time, with a heavy tint of sarcasm which is a continuous theme throughout the whole journal. Following Paine in this respect, as in several others, he warmly defended a national education system, surprised, as he showed himself, at hearing ‘many learned men’ declare against such a system.23 At the same time, there should be no doubt as to the inalienable duty of government ‘to put in the power of the poorest man to give his son as much information as possible’. Pursuing this theme he asked: ‘Is not the poor man effectually prevented from becoming of the utmost use to his family, or from advancing his station, by the unpardonable neglect of the Legislature?’24 He concluded that the government ‘will never be able to blot out the disgrace they deservedly merit for their contempt of the education of every individual in the kingdom.’25 His sarcastic comments on the social value of physicians, lawyers

88

Hélio Osvaldo Alves

and statesmen could very well have passed unnoticed if Constâncio had not increased in number and depth his virulent remarks on members of the Church and Christianity in general, pre-announcing his major work of the period, Watson Refuted. Not unlike ‘Mr Spectator’ and his snooping around early eighteenth-century London cafés,26 Constâncio met the so-called ‘Dr Exorcism’ at a salon of ‘a very eccentric gentleman’ of Edinburgh. This violent divine ‘exorcised’ the present times of ‘corruption, Atheism, and Infidelity’, deprecated the emptiness of the churches and complained that even those few who frequented them were not at all firm in their belief. Besides, he also longed for the happy times ‘when mankind produced only saints and martyrs; when the ignorant dutifully obeyed their spiritual guides’.27 Like any other man of the cloth, the first object in the life of ‘Dr Exorcism’ was, in Constâncio’s opinion, merely to look holy since he was ‘to say holy things. . . . But as to these, he is an utter stranger, and knowing only that mysteries are like nothing else, he contrives to look like no other person, and endeavours to render his gestures as difficult to be unriddled, as some of the doctrines he teaches.’28 From that time on, it became quite clear that Constâncio was on the dangerous path that led to religious controversy and free thought. His main concern in Watson Refuted, which had already been expressed in The Ghost, was to show the public how important it was ‘for men to employ their faculty of reason, and not to yield it to those whose profession is to teach things they acknowledge to be above reason, and incomprehensible.’29 Having, as well, the good of the general public in mind, who were taught to have faith in books which contained ‘nothing but blasphemies’, Constâncio also aimed at contributing to their enlightenment by making them ‘less devout, and more useful citizens’ and contesting the idea propagated by the Church that ‘human learning produces nothing but pride, and the poor in spirit gain the kingdom of heaven’. He believed that by the exercise of reason alone one can discover the true limits of one’s intellectual faculties and all the ‘reveries’ in science and in religion stemmed from ignorance of this principle. Wisdom, being the gift of God, should not be controverted, Constâncio warned, ‘by endeavouring to make the enlightened people of the eighteenth century so credulous as in the former days of ignorance’ and to bring back the ‘reveries of dark ages’ by establishing a system of history and religion based on ‘such spurious books’ as the Old Testament contained, filled with the most unlikely events, could only have that purpose in mind.30 But science – Constâncio’s only and permanent redeemer – had taken away from priests the power to persuade mankind

Paine, Constâncio and The Age of Reason

89

that prests alone were in communion with God. On listening to their ‘usual senseless and unintelligible language’, a man like Constâncio was forced to conclude that all they said was either ‘to dazzle the ignorant multitude’ or ‘the consequence of dire superstition, the first effect of which is to make us unacquainted with ourselves, under the imposing aspect of familiarizing us with imaginary beings.’31 Although mankind should humanely forgive those who were in error, the ‘long sway of superstition’ and its danger to all could not be overlooked and a cogent decision had to be taken ‘in favour of that system which is conformable to reason, and has the greatest tendency to improve society’.32 It did not, however, seem possible for Watson to prove that the great majority of people were not the gullible victims of impostors or that they were disposed to and capable of examining the truths of reports spread about prodigies. Therefore, the Bishop of Llandaff’s reasoning had to be exposed and his ‘career of errors’ stopped. He would never be able ‘to persuade men of sense, that events impossible [were] to be believed upon the testimony of those who not only are, but have constantly been, the slaves of credulity in all countries.’33 The power of the mind bent on scientific reasoning required proof and not assertion, and would not relinquish ‘in obedience to the despotic mandates of the credulous’. If the Bishop of Llandaff could not disprove that God had been formed after the image of man alone, if he could not reconcile God’s infinite power, wisdom and goodness with the malevolent despot or the contemptible, impotent and secondary being that the Bible showed him to be, then the only reasonable thing for him to do was ‘to let unbelievers hold their opinions in peace’.34 Even if Constâncio did not see eye to eye with Paine, as we shall see, he started his book by accusing Watson of having uniformly passed over the ‘weighty arguments’ of The Age of Reason and at having stopped only to ponder a ‘few immaterial inaccuracies’.35 Besides, as soon as the Bishop endeavoured to corroborate the miracle respecting Joshua and the sun and moon standing still in the sky, Constâncio took immediate advantage to show that a doctor of divinity, who had fallen so low as to ‘bring forward facts from profane history to prove the truth of so bare-faced a lie’, had no right to ridicule Paine for his supposed ‘little learning’. The truth was that anybody who believed such an absurd story should be the object of pity.36 Therefore, Constâncio’s position on the subject of miracles, which he was ‘ashamed to have inveighed so long against’ in his book, placed him on the same footing as Paine, since both believed these ‘fancies’ to be

90

Hélio Osvaldo Alves

against the order of nature and, consequently, no testimony could be strong enough to prove them.37 Science was the only antidote to all kinds of superstitious belief and Constâncio again followed Paine in believing that a measured, scientific analysis of the Old Testament could only bring to the surface a collection of ‘barbarous stories that if they did not excite laughter by their improbability, they would freeze the blood in the veins of any man endowed with humanity.’ Furthermore, Constâncio acknowledged, like Paine, the Old Testament to be a mixture of history and prophecy, which left all at a loss to know which was which, leading to the conclusion that Christianity was a corruption of the mythologies of the nations they branded with the name of infidel. 38 Constâncio not only concurred with Paine’s conclusions on the Book of Genesis – ‘a book of stories, fables, traditions, or invented absurdities or downright lies’ – as well as with the strength of his irrefutable objections to the Book of Joshua, but he also took an unusually violent stand against Watson for treating Paine with ‘malevolence’ and for misrepresenting ‘his just aspersions on the conduct of Moses’, whose crimes were the more outrageous the more the Bishop considered him a mild man.39 Constâncio also shared Paine’s revulsion at the massacre of the Canaanites, an episode which always roused the passions of writers defending The Age of Reason. But Constâncio, the citizen of a country with a long history of colonialism, expanded these sentiments into a public rejection of what had been done, and was still being done, by every colonizing power in the world – a recurrent theme in his book.40 Thus the myth that Christianity had not been established by the sword was dismissed. Denouncing this claim had also been one of the main aims of Paine’s book and once more the confluence of opinion between the two writers was complete.41 Nor was either writer in any doubt about the necessity to liberate men from the belief that the world was a place in which one should live like a hermit, alone revering priests ‘and ready to sacrifice victims of credulity’. For Paine, living as a devotee meant that man was consumed in a life of grief and as such should be freed from the constraints of religious devotion to find leisure, as Constâncio advocated, in this world rather than trembling ‘at ceremonies invented’ by priests.42 As to the principal problem concerning revelations, prophecies and prophets, Constâncio and Paine were yet again of the same mind. The former believed that revelation was but a fancy of clergymen, unsupported by any proof, while Paine held that: ‘It is a

Paine, Constâncio and The Age of Reason

91

contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication.’43 None of the prophecies found in the Bible, Constâncio asserted, was ever direct and the ambivalent meaning they always possessed was explained away to suit the events which had happened. Paine similarly rejected the credibility of prophecies due to their being passed on ‘in such a loose and obscure manner’ that they were incomprehensible to those who heard them and so equivocal as to fit almost any circumstances that might happen subsequently.44 As to the prophets, Constâncio’s opinion is best expressed by once again defending Paine against the ridicule heaped on him by Watson: ‘It is in vain you attempt to turn Mr Paine into ridicule for his definition of a prophet. He most justly calls them strolling-poets, fortune-tellers; being in Judea what the gipsies, the augurs, and the astrologers have been in other nations.’45 The respect which Constâncio showed Paine throughout his book did not prevent him, however, from openly declaring himself not to be a Deist. Furthermore, he acknowledged, with Watson, that many Deists admitted the existence of a Supreme Being to be as inconceivable as any religious mystery: a God whom the Deists called just, ‘when nothing but a concatenation of causes and effects’ could be perceived in the world, and a God whom they proclaimed benevolent, ‘while the world is full of vice, while millions perish in misery, and continual calamities befall mankind’. In Constâncio’s view, these were the true mysteries that still awaited an urgent but unforeseeable solution.46 The deistical notions that Paine defended were, therefore, unquestionably against his own nature and, consequently, did not accord with his ‘reasonable tenets’. The outlook of both Paine and the Bishop of Llandaff could only be considered absurd on this count and the controversy was about ‘the comparative absurdity of two opinions’. It was regrettable that religious people of all kinds were prone to believe anything and ‘the greater the inconsistencies, the more sublime the system’. In the circumstances, Constâncio found this was especially unfortunate in Paine’s case.47 There is another deep difference of opinion between Paine and Constâncio as to the character of Christ himself. Whereas Paine revered him for preaching ‘most excellent morality, and the equality of man’ and for expostulating against ‘the corruption and avarice of the Jewish priests’, Constâncio thought otherwise. Christ was responsible for ordering his followers to reject the reason he had given them and ‘to avoid pleasure, to hate the world, and to love pain, to pray and

92

Hélio Osvaldo Alves

to spend their lives in continual mortification, and in gazing over unintelligible mysteries to acquire his kingdom’. And if his followers did not follow his precepts, whether from ignorance or from conviction, he remorselessly punished them with eternal damnation.48 It is not surprising, then, that a clear difference from Paine should emerge in Constâncio’s text itself and did so in two separate passages.49 The first appears on page 3 of Carlile’s edition and, not unlike Paine’s profession of faith made at the beginning of the first part of The Age of Reason, it served the same purpose, as Constâncio for lack of a better measure, uses Paine to evaluate his own position: I differ in my philosophical opinions from Mr Paine; my principles extend so much farther than his, that I suspect I come under the class which you are pleased to call madmen, and every clergyman would affect to despise, but dare not argue with, before an unprejudiced tribunal.50 In this respect, then, the disciple differs from his master. To define himself as a madman in religious terms could perhaps signify that his ideas on religion bordered on atheism, if they did not already embrace it, a conclusion which is corroborated by his explicit position way beyond Paine’s religious tenets, as well as by remarks such as this: ‘In Catholic countries, all who dare think are heretics; among Protestants, they are atheists.’51 Defining his principles to be ‘so much farther’ than Paine’s, is prophetic of the development of his future political interests, for Constâncio would later cross over the threshold of socialism, something Paine never did.52 A further expression of this idea, his second declaration, which appears later in the book, was again meant to underline his distance from Paine. It almost boasts of his audacity at any cost: ‘I am ready to grant that several of Mr Paine’s objections are not valid, and often trifling; but I declare, once for all, that I do not think myself bound to follow Mr Paine in every instance.’53 These two declarations are much more than the simple, vainglory of a young man seeking to assert his own personality. They are, rather, the peak of Constâncio’s intellectual development in England and Scotland, anxious to interpret the world and to change it for the better along the ideological lines introduced by the French Revolution and, in spite of all the denials, by the ever present influence of Thomas Paine. The ‘contemptible reasoners’, among whom he was proud to find himself, never tyrannized mankind, and distinguished

Paine, Constâncio and The Age of Reason

93

themselves from priests, politicians and lawyers, among others, by believing that the objective of leading men was based on diminishing the inducements to vice and in increasing the temptations to virtue. ‘Dreamers of fancies’, the sarcastic epithet of their critics, these thinkers (among whom Constâncio had proudly placed himself) were adamant in their belief that the knowledge of man was the first step to all truth.54 But it was through the strength of independent reasoning alone that, in the end, man could be led to knowledge. Perhaps the best summing up of his aim in the beginning of his adult life was written by Constâncio in Watson Refuted: ‘He that will believe one wonder has no plea for doubting the rest.’55 During his life, Constâncio believed in and fought for the realisation of many ambitions, including independence for Spanish America, the reform of institutions so that the end of inequality might be achieved faster, Owenite cooperativism and the redistribution of landed property. Some of these became realities in his own lifetime; others still await the future. Nevertheless, they were feasible ‘fancies’ even while the struggle for freedom of thought was raging. Nowadays, at a time when so-called civilized nations continue to ignore their own poor and homeless, the victims of the irrational society that has created them, Constâncio comes to mind when, in his later years, exercising the independence of his reasoning, he publicly asked for dignity for adult workers, education for the young and support of the old and sick. Having spurned Paine’s influence, it is interesting to note his having come full circle by the late 1830s. But that is another story.56 These are some of the main reasons why Constâncio, not unlike Paine in his later days, was more a citizen of the world from his youth than a citizen of his own country.

Notes 1. I should like to thank Professor Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa of Universidade Nova, Lisbon, for having called my attention to Solano Constâncio’s Watson Refuted, a result of her own doctoral research, thus allowing me to investigate further the intervention of a Portuguese thinker in the debate concerning Paine’s The Age of Reason. 2. Shadgett’s Weekly Review, no. 57 (1819), p. 57. 3. See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980), pp. 105–7; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979), pp. 483–5; J.H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in NineteenthCentury Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, 1983), pp. 34-7. 4. Analytical Review, 19 (1794), pp. 159–60.

94

Hélio Osvaldo Alves

5. Samuel Francis (pseud.) [Francisco Solano Constâncio], Watson Refuted: Being an Answer to the Apology for the Bible. In a Series of Letters to the Bishop of Llandaff (Edinburgh, 1797; rpt. London, 1819). 6. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain, p. 35. 7. M.L. Machado de Sousa, The Ghost e Francisco Solano Constâncio (Lisboa, 1978), p. 3. 8. Ibid., p. 3; Francis, Watson Refuted, p. 4. 9. Sousa, The Ghost e Francisco Solano Constâncio, pp. 54–5. 10. Ibid., pp. 9–10, 34. 11. Ibid., pp. 35–7. 12. The Ghost, part II, no. 30 (1796), p. 19. See Sousa, The Ghost e Francisco Solano Constâncio, p. 37. 13. Ibid., pp. 38–9, 46. Constâncio was denied a degree in medicine by the University of Edinburgh and had to go to the University of St Andrews to be granted one. This plunged him into conflict with the University of Edinburgh, causing him to write a pamphlet, An Appeal to the Gentlemen Studying Medicine at the University of Edinburgh (London, 1797), which deprecated the scientific knowledge of some of the professors as well as their personal attitudes regarding Constâncio himself. 14. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 135–42; Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, pp. 282–306. 15. Sousa, The Ghost e Francisco Solano Constâncio, pp. 41–2. 16. Ibid., p. 40. 17. M.L. Machado de Sousa, ed., The Ghost. Edição Crítica (Lisboa, 1976), p. xiv. 18. The Ghost, part I, no. 1 (1796), p. 3. 19. The first volume ran from 25 April to 20 July 1796. 20. The second volume ran from 27 July to 16 November 1796. 21. The Ghost, part I, no. 20 (1796), p. 83. 22. Ibid., part II, no. 39 (1796), p. 54. 23. It seems evident that Constâncio is referring to William Godwin and his antagonism towards the idea of a system of national education about which he had expanded in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). For Paine on education, see The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. M.D. Conway, 2 vols. (1894–6; rpt. New York, 1972), II: 486–93. See also my article ‘National Education as a Radical Political Issue in England in the 1790s’, in Actas do V Encontro da Associação Portuguesa de Estudos AngloAmericanos, ed. H.O. Alves (Braga, 1985), pp. 81–91. 24. The Ghost, part II, no. 43 (1796), p. 70. 25. Ibid., part II, no. 43 (1796), p. 72. 26. Constâncio claimed on one occasion to being an admirer of Addison’s The Spectator. See ibid., part II, no. 27 (1796), p. 8. 27. Ibid., part II, no. 30 (1796), pp. 17–18. 28. Ibid., part II, no. 36 (1796), p. 43. 29. Francis, Watson Refuted, pp. 3–4. 30. Ibid., pp. 5–9, 15. 31. Ibid., p. 42. 32. Ibid., p. 57. 33. Ibid., pp. 19–20. 34. Ibid., pp. 56, 66.

Paine, Constâncio and The Age of Reason 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

95

Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., pp. 46–7. Ibid., pp. 15, 17–19, 46–7; Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, IV: 78–9. Francis, Watson Refuted, pp. 31, 41, 68, 81. Ibid., pp. 31–5. See Volney, The Ruins (London, 1792), pp. 279–80, for a similar opinion on Moses. Francis, Watson Refuted, pp. 40, 88, 89. As a natural consequence of this early interest, the independence of South America – another of Paine’s favourite themes – was later a subject of great interest for Constâncio who, as a Portuguese, was well aware of the situation in Brazil at the time. For a discussion of this subject, see A. Silbert, ‘Autour de Francisco Solano Constâncio’, Bulletin des Études Portugaises et de l’Institut Français au Portugal, 14 (1950), pp. 136–41; Sousa, The Ghost e Francisco Solano Constâncio, pp. 71–6. For Paine’s ideas about South America, see Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, II: 511. Ibid., IV: 185–8; Francis, Watson Refuted, pp. 8–10. Ibid., pp. 7–8, 58; Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, IV: 44. Ibid., IV: 24; Francis, Watson Refuted, p. 12. Ibid., p. 62; Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, IV: 82. Francis, Watson Refuted, p. 80. Ibid., pp. 11, 14. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 84; Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, IV: 27. Francis, Watson Refuted, pp. 7, 22. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 12. See Victor de Sá, A Crise do Liberalismo e as Primeiras Manifestações das Ideias Socialistas em Portugal 1820–1852 (Lisboa, 1969), pp. 211–17. Francis, Watson Refuted, p. 22. The Ghost, part II, no. 30 (1796), p. 20. Francis, Watson Refuted, p. 14. In 1837, Constâncio became the editor of Armazém dos Conhecimentos Úteis nas Artes e Officios, published in Paris between January and April of that year. A new edition of this journal issued in 1855, after his death, shows important cuts mainly regarding his articles on social and political themes. One of these, Da Ciência Social, where Constâncio expostulates on many of his ideas concerning the welfare of society, was entirely eliminated. See Sá, A Crise do Liberalismo, pp. 211–12.

7 The United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment, 1798–18071 Michael Durey

In 1807 the old Federalist leader Rufus King was defeated when he stood for election to the New York assembly on a nativist ‘American ticket’. Significant opposition was raised against him by a number of Irishmen who had recently settled in New York City and who were able to manipulate the considerable Irish voting bloc in the state. Among these new Americans were Thomas Addis Emmet, William James MacNeven, William Sampson and George Cuming, all former United Irish leaders, who in 1798, among a large group of state prisoners, had reached an accommodation with the Irish government by which, in return for giving information regarding their treason in the 1790s, they were not brought to trial, but banished from the British empire for life. According to the state prisoners, their desire to emigrate to the United States in 1798 had been thwarted by an unholy alliance between Rufus King, then American ambassador to the court of St James, and the Irish and British governments.2 King’s defeat in 1807, and a subsequent defeat in the gubernatorial election of 1816, were thus acts of political revenge by former Irish rebels. To this day the United Irish accounts of this episode retain considerable force, but this essay seeks to show that they are at least partly a deliberate distortion of the facts, promoted by the United Irish leaders’ understandable desire to mask the political defeat they suffered when they sought to negotiate with the Irish government in July 1798.

I Under orders from Lord Lieutenant the Earl Camden, on 12 March 96

United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment

97

1798, town major Henry Sirr and a file of Dublin constables burst into the house of Oliver Bond in Bridge Street and arrested many members of the Leinster Executive committee of the United Irishmen, who were seated around a table plotting revolution. In the next few hours, in raids in other parts of the city, most of the remaining leading United Irishmen – including Thomas Addis Emmet, Henry Jackson, John Sweetman and William James MacNeven – were apprehended and carted off to prison. Thanks to the information provided by Thomas Reynolds, himself a member of the Leinster Executive, the United Irish conspiracy had been severely damaged. However despite these arrests, and a similar sweep in Ulster in early June which netted many more suspected leaders, and despite the dragooning of southern counties by government forces under the command of General Gerard Lake, a new United Irish national executive was cobbled together and the rebellion broke out on 23 May.3 The initial successes of the insurgents in Wexford were not, however, sustained and by 20 June, when the Marquess Cornwallis arrived in Dublin to replace Camden as Lord Lieutenant, the issue was no longer in doubt (although the rebellion was by no means over). Cornwallis’s immediate concern was to bring some semblance of order and normality to Ireland. Together with the young Irish Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, he was convinced that priority had to be given to returning the tens of thousands of rebels still in arms to their allegiance to the king. The strategy they adopted sought to bring the rebel leaders to justice, while exonerating the deluded rank-and-file rebels. Ordinary rebels not involved in murders or robberies were, on surrendering their weapons and taking the oath of allegiance, permitted to return unmolested to their homes.4 Providing amnesty to the rank and file was successful in the short term, but dealing effectively with the United Irish leaders was to be more intractable. Of perhaps greatest political concern was the fate of the group – numbering as many as 130 by the end of the rebellion – who were designated state prisoners, men in leadership positions who had been arrested either before or during the rebellion, but whose guilt in law was difficult to establish without the testimony of turncoats and informers.5 Cornwallis, who otherwise rigidly stuck to a policy of qualified leniency towards the rebels in 1798, had little compassion for the state prisoners; their treason had been the cause of the rebellion and they deserved severe punishment. Although Thomas Reynolds was used to convict some of the United Irish Leinster Executive, and one or two other prominent leaders in the South

98

Michael Durey

(MacNeven and Neilson, for instance) were vulnerable, it was felt, however, that juries would be reluctant to convict a large number on the basis of one man’s testimony alone. In the North, the evidence of Nicholas Magin (or Magean) could have brought ‘home guilt to every Leader of consequence in Ulster, most of whom are in custody’, but he refused to give testimony in open court.6 So too did John Hughes, another reluctant informer on whose evidence the authorities were reliant.7 For many weeks it appeared as if the government would have no way of dealing with the state prisoners, even though ultraconservative loyalists were loudly demanding their exemplary punishment.8 Ironically, the solution to the government’s problem came from the state prisoners themselves. Following the capital conviction of William Michael Byrne and Oliver Bond in July, but before their executions, feelers were put out to the government through intermediaries on behalf of the state prisoners. According to William James MacNeven, ‘persons not at all implicated in the insurrection’ took the lead, acting initially without the prisoners’ knowledge.9 This is not strictly true, for the process was instigated by Samuel Neilson, the Ulster United Irish leader then in solitary confinement in Newgate, in consultation with his solicitor, one Crawford.10 In the middle of July they considered the possibility of entering into some arrangement with the government. Neilson requested Crawford to contact Lord Charlemont, the elderly former commander of the Volunteers of 1779–84. Charlemont pleaded infirmity and passed the problem on to Francis Dobbs, a Whig MP and kinsman of William Sampson, one of the most prominent state prisoners.11 The first the government heard of the manoeuvres was on the morning of 23 July, when Dobbs sought an opinion from Castlereagh. The Irish Secretary was predictably cautious in his response, saying that nothing could be decided until the verdict in Oliver Bond’s trial (then underway) was known.12 But on the following day Neilson was permitted to visit Bond and Byrne in their cell, where he also found William Archer, a sheriff of Dublin, and Henry Alexander, MP for Londonderry, member of the Dublin parliament’s secret committee, and kinsman of Bond. At Alexander’s instigation, Neilson drew up a proposal seeking a stay of execution for Byrne and Bond, which Dobbs then undertook to take round the three prisons (Kilmainham, Bridewell, and Newgate) to obtain the assent of the state prisoners.13 That evening (24 July) Dobbs and Archer brought to Castlereagh a document signed by sixty-four of the state prisoners, which set out

United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment

99

their proposals for saving their necks and bringing the rebellion to a close.14 They agreed to acknowledge in general terms their treason in return for life banishment for themselves, the remittance of the sentences of Byrne and Bond, and an end to the prosecution of Neilson.15 This proposition had distinct political advantages for the more far-sighted ministers such as Cornwallis and Castlereagh. Not only did it offer a possible way of ridding the country of a great number of state prisoners, but it also gave the opportunity of manufacturing a massive propaganda coup, justifying the defensive actions of the government during the past few years. It would prove beyond doubt that a conspiracy involving the United Irishmen and the French had existed, as the government had repeatedly asserted. To convince the public of this (and to confound the opposition Foxite Whigs) was ‘a matter of much more consequence than the lives of twenty such men as Oliver Bond’, Cornwallis informed Portland, the Home Secretary.16 The problem was, however, that the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland was still baying for blood; to allow prominent rebel leaders to escape justice would only compound the intense irritation felt by loyalists at Cornwallis’s conciliatory policies. This attitude became apparent at a meeting held on 25 July by the Lord Lieutenant with most of his senior law officers (Lord Chancellor Clare, who was to prove sympathetic to the prisoners, was absent in the country). Cornwallis reluctantly rejected the offer. The execution of Byrne went ahead as planned that day.17 One of the factors influencing Cornwallis’s decision was the omission from the document of the signatures of a number of significant rebel leaders, including Arthur and Roger O’Connor’s, and William Sampson’s. Arthur O’Connor’s confession of treason was particularly sought, for he had greatly embarrassed the British government by being acquitted of that offence at Maidstone only a few months earlier (aided by the Whig opposition, who had attended in large numbers to give him a character reference).18 Unbeknown to the government, however, these rebel leaders had deliberately declined to sign the document. Both Sampson and Arthur O’Connor were confident that the government had no evidence with which to convict them, and were accordingly dismissive of Dobbs’s blandishments.19 The execution of Byrne therefore came as a shock, jolting them out of their selfish complacency. Next in line for the scaffold was Oliver Bond, to be followed, so it was thought at the time, by Neilson, against whom Cornwallis believed there to be sufficient evidence to

100

Michael Durey

convict capitally.20 Unsurprisingly, it was Bond who acted as catalyst for the next step, entreating his kinsman Henry Alexander to visit him on the morning of 26 July (the day of his execution). ‘In the plenitude of French conceit’ Bond made it plain that he was prepared to die if necessary, but wished government to know that: an opportunity might be lost not regainable if He was executed and that he conceived nothing could more lead to the tranquillity of the State than the communications and exertions of him and his associates. That his mind was reconciled to death and that he would not sollicit [sic] Life except as a man acting with a class of men anxious to save him. He added that He and they could give the only information capable of saving this Country from an aggravated Civil War. He proposed Banishment for some, Emigration for all.21 Although Alexander passed on this message to the Castle, he did so with some repugnance. Bond should certainly die, he suggested, if the state prisoners failed to offer enough information. Unwilling further to besmirch his reputation, he happily thereafter left negotiations to Edward Cooke, undersecretary at the Castle, and Dobbs.22 During the rest of that day Dobbs must have feverishly circulated the Dublin prisons, not only working on the recalcitrant prisoners but also persuading the majority to modify their previous requirements. By the evening, he and Alexander were able to inform Castlereagh that a revised set of propositions was being drawn up, acceptable to all the prisoners, which, in return for Bond’s life and an end to the trials, reiterated their willingness to confess their guilt and acknowledged their acceptance of banishment to any part of the world once the war ended. With the powerful support of Clare, Cornwallis was able to use these propositions as the basis for negotiation. In the meantime, Bond’s sentence was respited for a week.23 On Sunday, 29 July, MacNeven, Arthur O’Connor and Emmet, representing all the state prisoners, met Castlereagh, Clare and Cooke in the latter’s gothic rooms in the Castle,24 where they thrashed out a scheme acceptable to both sides. The rebels agreed to give full information on their previous activities, both within Ireland and with all ‘foreign states’, without implicating anyone by name.25 In return, the government confirmed that only those rebels guilty of murder or conspiracy to murder would thereafter be tried, and that at some future point the prisoners would be banished.26 On 4 August the state

United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment

101

prisoners presented a memoir to Cornwallis, in which they gave details of their treason.27 Naturally, they did not explain themselves in those terms; rather, they sought to justify their actions by blaming the government for rejecting their reform and emancipation programme. Cornwallis conceded that the memoir ‘admitted fairly enough the most material parts of their guilt, [but] was written (on the pretence of its being an apology for their conduct) in the style of a controversial pamphlet, and was in some parts rather inflammatory’. This made it impossible to publish the memoir under government auspices. Not that Cornwallis was particularly concerned by the memoir’s tone; it gave him an opportunity, on 6 August, of rejecting it with mock indignation. As he had anticipated, this led to the state prisoners’ representatives agreeing with alacrity to give oral evidence before the secret committee of the Irish House of Lords, which Cornwallis had particularly desired, for he would now be able to keep under wraps the information he had received from covert sources.28 Even allowing for their special pleading, both in the memoir and before the secret committee, MacNeven, O’Connor and Emmet fulfilled their side of the bargain. Understandably, other rebels and radicals not in their predicament were unhappy with this open confession by the Leinster leaders. Rumours began to spread that they had bribed government officials to save their lives, and even that they had secretly disclosed the names of their compatriots.29 Many state prisoners probably began to realise that they had been outmanoeuvred in the bargaining.30

II With both the Irish and British governments exulting in their propaganda victory, attention turned to the fate of the state prisoners. But what in July may have been viewed as an easily solved administrative problem, became in the next few months a political nightmare. To begin with, exclusive of the eighty-one state prisoners who signed the declaration in Dublin, there may have been as many as 300 more who were subject to banishment.31 Those who had been tried and sentenced, either to banishment in the first instance or after judicial review by Cornwallis, could be ordered out of the country with little compunction. Yet there still remained a large number in Dublin and at least thirty-six in Belfast who had not been tried. Under the terms of the agreement with the Dublin state prisoners, the Belfast prisoners could no longer come before the courts. Nor, however, could they be

102

Michael Durey

freed, even on security. Too many of them, such as Robert Simms, William Steel Dickson and Robert Hunter, had been too prominent in United Irish circles for loyalist public opinion to tolerate their immediate return to society.32 The Irish government was as anxious to rid themselves of this incubus as the prisoners themselves wanted to get out of prison. They were an enormous drain on the public purse, Castlereagh (with pardonable exaggeration) complaining that ‘the expence of this regiment of traitors exceeds five-fold that of the best regiment in the King’s service’.33 In a bid to force the Belfast prisoners voluntarily to accept banishment, on 23 August General Nugent offered them the same terms as had been accepted in Dublin.34 But only nine of the thirty-six were prepared to acknowledge their guilt.35 One was subsequently freed on bail; another, the County Antrim shopkeeper John Dickey, had already been tried (he was sent to the West Indies but escaped to America).36 The rest called the government’s bluff. In the authorities’ opinion, loyalist prejudice against the prisoners was in most cases unwarranted; only about twenty (fifteen in Dublin and five in Belfast) were ‘the active and intelligent heads of the party’. The remainder were ‘inferior, insignificant persons, very little formidable from their talents’.37 Nevertheless, Ireland would be better off if all were exiled. But where were they, especially the twenty incorrigibles, to be sent? What had been agreed in the July negotiations? In answering the last question, it needs to be remembered that there were several phases of negotiation; that intermediaries were involved whose private comments to both government and prisoners are not always known; and that the prisoners were dispersed in three prisons, receiving different information from different people at different times. Further complicating the issue is that Emmet, MacNeven, Sampson, Arthur O’Connor and Neilson subsequently published accounts of this episode, giving a disingenuous spin to their interpretation of the negotiations in order to claim that the government, and the American ambassador, Rufus King, had acted in bad faith by not allowing them to migrate to the United States in the autumn of 1798. Working in tandem, they insisted, King and the government had conspired to ensure that the United Irish leaders were kept in captivity in Scotland until 1802. In reality, however, neither the British and Irish governments nor King acted dishonourably over the fate of the rebel leaders, although in one respect at least the prisoners probably did not have the information to appreciate that at the time.

United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment

103

There exist a number of accounts, some from prisoners, some from government quarters, of what was agreed during the negotiations, which were spread over six days. Sampson was one prisoner who was kept in solitary confinement for most of the time; he did not have direct contact with the negotiators. His understanding was that the state prisoners could emigrate to any country ‘as should be agreed upon’ which was not at war with Britain. In his case, the country determined upon was Portugal, to which he was permitted to go in October 1798 on account of ill health and the recommendation of his county MP.38 Neilson, too, incarcerated in Newgate, had little or no contact with the ‘Kilmainham Directory’, as Emmet, MacNeven and O’Connor came derisively to be called.39 He understood the agreement of 29 July 1798 to be ‘that [the state prisoners] are ready to emigrate to such country as shall be agreed upon between them and Government, and give security not to return to this country without the permission of Government, and not to pass into any enemy’s country’.40 Nor did MacNeven, in his account published in New York in 1807, deny the main points made by Sampson and Neilson, although he claimed that the United States was the place of banishment accepted by both parties at the 29 July negotiations.41 Emmet also, in his attack on Rufus King in New York in 1807, made it plain that the state prisoners had expected to be allowed to go to America.42 If we are to believe the published accounts of the major state prisoners, therefore, they wished to go to America and they believed they could leave as soon as their examinations had been completed. This, of course, was what did not happen, at least to the twenty leaders sent to Fort George in 1799, and this later gave the state prisoners the opportunity of abusing both the Irish and British governments and Rufus King. Emmet even accused King of being instrumental in the death of his brother, Robert, who in 1803 was executed following his abortive twenty-minute insurrection in Dublin. If the state prisoners had been permitted to emigrate to America in 1798, he claimed, Robert would have accompanied him and thus would not have instigated his forlorn hope.43 It is true that on 13 September 1798 King informed Portland that the state prisoners would be unwelcome in America: ‘I certainly do not think that they will be a desirable acquisition to any Nation, but in none would they be likely to prove more mischievous than in mine, where from the sameness of language and similarity of Laws and Institutions they have greater opportunity of propagating their principles than in any other country.’44 But far from this announcement

104

Michael Durey

pleasing the government, allowing them to keep the prisoners in custody – as the rebel leaders asserted – it threw them into temporary confusion. Although they realized that, like Theobold Wolfe Tone and James Napper Tandy earlier, the leaders would easily be able to return to Europe across the Atlantic, ministers had, until King’s intervention, been prepared to send the prisoners to America. Significantly, however, and contrary to what was later suggested, when the prisoners were asked in August where they wanted to go, both MacNeven and Emmet said they wished to be sent to Germany, the former because he had relatives there, the latter – my destination ‘decidedly is not America’ – because of the yellow fever epidemic then raging and the hardships which his six children would suffer on the journey.45 That part of the Irishmen’s publications during the New York election campaign of 1807 which aimed at discrediting King by claiming he thwarted their wishes was thus not true, and can only be interpreted as political propaganda. At first glance, the leaders’ complaints that the timing of their leaving the country broke the agreement of July seems to have more validity. Cornwallis’s official dispatch to Portland immediately after King’s decision in September certainly implies that at the 29 July meeting the possibility of the state prisoners being banished before the war’s end was discussed.46 However the same dispatch also claimed that Dobbs, when he met Castlereagh three days previously, had said that the prisoners were prepared ‘to leave the time of their liberation so long as the war lasted to the discretion of Government’, and that the three rebel representatives subsequently agreed to this proviso.47 Whether this agreement was indeed made cannot now be ascertained, nor is it known if Dobbs ever told the leaders what he had promised on their behalf, but undoubtedly the government’s statement that they reserved the right to determine when the rebels could leave the country was buttressed in part by Dobbs’s commitment. Moreover, the rebel leaders’ protests ignored the crucial fact that by early 1799 the government had fulfilled its bargain with most of the state prisoners by ordering them out of the country. A large number of them migrated without trouble to America. So anxious had the government been to rid itself of all but a handful of the prisoners that in December they had given them one month to expel themselves; failure to do so would lead to trial (an empty promise). They had even threatened to make the prisoners pay their own mess bills.48 The key leaders also ignored the fact that once America was no longer seen as a viable refuge for the prisoners, the Irish government

United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment

105

made plans to send them to Hamburg, in conformity with their wishes. Unfortunately, the ghastly visage of Napper Tandy arose to thwart them. In September 1798, bearing the French rank of General of Brigade, and commanding a force of eighty seamen, marines and cannoneers, Tandy had landed on the north-west coast of Ireland from the Anacreon. He remained only long enough to discover that Humbert’s invasion had been a failure and that the Irish were unwilling to flock to his colours. After drinking himself into a semistupor, he returned to Norway and from Oslo made his way overland to Hamburg, where on 23 November he and three other Irishmen were arrested in their beds by the local police, at the behest of Sir James Crauford, the British ambassador.49 Tandy’s arrest and the call for his extradition to face a charge of high treason in Ireland caused a major diplomatic incident that lasted for months. Its most immediate impact was to shatter the government’s plans to ship all the state prisoners in a group to Hamburg.50 It was still hoped that, as happened with America, lesser lights among the prisoners might be allowed to travel to the Hanseatic port individually; but for the leaders, virtually no options were now left. The British government finally decided to take up a suggestion first made by Cornwallis in September, that the leading state prisoners be held in captivity in Fort George, Scotland, until the end of the war.51 In Dublin Castle, ministers favoured the scheme as the only one that would keep the prisoners, ‘this most inconvenient and dangerous possession’, secure during the war, and prevent them from continuing to stir up trouble in Ireland.52 Castlereagh admitted that the authorities had been unable to prevent the prisoners from communicating with their supporters outside, even when they had been kept in solitary confinement.53 This gave credence to information received in March 1799 that the ‘Kilmainham Directory’ had been the source of a plot for an insurrection in London as soon as the French landed, which included plans for training an assassination squad for the purpose of killing either George III or Pitt.54 On 19 March 1799, after twenty-four hours’ notice, fifteen state prisoners were embarked on a ship in Dublin harbour bound for Scotland. Arthur O’Connor, ever the bombastic showman, ‘was dressed in Green, and talked of Robespierrian cruelty’.55 En route, the ship berthed briefly in Belfast to pick up another five prisoners. The Dublin prisoners were to remain incarcerated in Fort George for more than three years; the more fortunate men from Belfast were freed on bail and allowed to return to Ireland in December 1801.56 Following the peace of Amiens fourteen

106

Michael Durey

southern prisoners were sent to Hamburg in June 1802 (Roger O’Connor was allowed to return to Ireland because of ill health). Perhaps surprisingly, neither Emmet, nor O’Connor, nor MacNeven made any immediate effort to emigrate to the United States (O’Connor never did so). Certainly, Emmet would have had time to take his family there, before his brother Robert embarked on his foolish plan of insurrection. Instead, as Castlereagh and other government officials had feared, they became immersed in further plans for an Irish revolution, to be assisted by the French.57 Only when it became clear that Napoleon was not keen to bring liberty to Ireland, and following a complete falling-out between Emmet and O’Connor (a mutual antagonism had flourished in Fort George), did Emmet, MacNeven and others cross the Atlantic to the United States, where a few years later they were to punish Rufus King for thwarting them in their supposed desire in 1798 to live in the asylum of the oppressed.

Notes 1. Research for this essay was financed by an Australian Research Council Large Grant, for which I am very grateful. 2. American Citizen (New York), 9 April 1807. 3. Thomas Pakenham, The Year of Liberty (London, 1969); R.B. McDowell, Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760–1801 (Oxford, 1979); Daniel Gahan, The People’s Rising: Wexford 1798 (Dublin, 1995); The Mighty Wave: The 1798 Rebellion in Wexford, ed. Dáire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (Dublin, 1996). 4. Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, ed. Charles Vane, Marquess of Londonderry, 12 vols. (London, 1848–53) [hereafter Castlereagh Corr.], I: 149–50; Cornwallis to Portland, 8 July 1798, in Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis, ed. Charles Ross, 3 vols. (London, 1859) [hereafter Cornwallis Corr.], II: 359–60. 5. Castlereagh to William Wickham, 29 October 1798, in ibid., II: 426. 6. Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office papers, HO 100/77, Castlereagh to Wickham, 22 June 1798; National Archives (Ireland), Rebellion Papers [hereafter Reb. Pap.] 620/39/213, John Pollock to E. Cooke, 26 August 1798. 7. Reb. Pap. 620/4/29/30, John Pollock to Castlereagh, 26 August 1798. 8. See, for example, Hampshire Record Office, Wickham Papers 38M49/8/14/5, Colonel Robert Craufurd to Wickham, 25 July 1798. 9. W.J. MacNeven, ‘An Account of the Treaty between the United Irishmen and the Anglo-Irish Government in 1798’, in Pieces of Irish History, ed. William J. MacNeven (New York, 1807), p. 172. 10. Neilson to Castlereagh, 12 September 1798, cited in Arthur O’Connor’s Letter to Lord Castlereagh (n.p., n.d. [December 1798/January 1799?]), p. 17. 11. ‘Neilson’s Account of the Negotiation’, in R.R. Madden, The United

United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

107

Irishmen: Their Lives and Times, 2nd edn (Dublin, 1858), I: 153–4. Ibid., I: 149, 155. Ibid., I: 155–6. The list of signatories can be found in PRO, HO 100/77, fo. 305. Castlereagh Corr., I: 347; Cornwallis to Portland, 26 July 1798, in Cornwallis Corr., II: 372. Ibid., II: 374. Byrne, as a former member of the Mount Kennedy yeomanry cavalry, and thus a turncoat, was in one of the categories of offenders which few people thought ought to be shown clemency irrespective of the negotiations. For Byrne’s trial, see A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T.B. Howell and T.J. Howell, 33 vols. (London, 1809–26), XXVII: 455–522. For Clare’s view of the effect of O’Connor’s subsequent acknowledgement of treason on the reputation of the Foxites, see Kent County Record Office, MS U840 0183/12, Clare to Camden, 13 August 1798. William Sampson, Memoirs of William Sampson, 2nd edn (Leesburg, 1817), p. 37; Arthur O’Connor’s Letter to Lord Castlereagh, pp. 7, 21. Cornwallis Corr., II: 373. John Hughes could have condemned Neilson with his evidence. Cooke, who knew Hughes better, was sceptical. British Library, Add. MSS 33106, fos. 21–4, Henry Alexander to Pelham, 26 July 1798. British Library, Add. MSS 33106, fos. 39–40, Alexander to Pelham, 4 August 1798. Reb. Pap. 620/4/29/15, Francis Dobbs to Castlereagh, 28 July 1798; Cooke to Wickham, 28 July 1798, in Cornwallis Corr., II: 378. Cooke had a macabre collection of pikes and other irregular weapons festooning the walls of his office. If Arthur O’Connor’s Letter to Lord Castlereagh, which purports to be a letter seized from O’Connor while he was in prison, is to be believed, O’Connor dominated this meeting. MacNeven, ‘An Account of the Treaty between the United Irishmen and the Anglo-Irish Government in 1798’, p. 182. This applied only to those already in prison or who had been involved in the rebellion of June and July. It did not apply to those who joined the French invasion of August 1798. But even in the courts martial after August, Cornwallis was prepared to confirm death sentences only for those who were leaders or who were guilty of deliberate murder or robbery. PRO, HO 100/86, [Castle] to Nugent, 27 September 1798. Copies of this document can be found in Castlereagh Corr., I: 353–72 and MacNeven, Pieces of Irish History, pp. 207–30. Cornwallis to Portland, 7 August 1798, in Cornwallis Corr., II: 382–3; Kent County Record Office, MS U840 0183/12, Clare to Camden, 13 August 1798. British Library, Add. MSS 22106, fo. 40, Alexander to Pelham, 4 August 1798; Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982), p. 209. O’Connor realized that he had been outmanoeuvred. See Arthur O’Connor’s Letter to Lord Castlereagh, pp. 35–6. Castlereagh to Wickham, 29 October 1798, in Cornwallis Corr., II: 426.

108

Michael Durey

32. The most recent account of the rebellion in Ulster, in which the leaders’ roles are explored, is A.T.Q. Stewart, The Summer Soldiers: The 1798 Rebellion in Antrim and Down (Belfast, 1995). 33. Castlereagh to Wickham, 29 October 1798, in Castlereagh Corr., I: 414. 34. Freeman’s Journal (Dublin), 30 August 1798. 35. The names of those offered the deal and their responses can be found in Reb. Pap. 620/39/203. 36. For Dickey, see Andrew Bryson’s Ordeal: an Epilogue to the 1798 Rebellion, ed. Michael Durey (Cork, 1998). 37. Cornwallis to Portland, 29 October 1798, in Cornwallis Corr., II: 428; Castlereagh to Wickham, 29 October 1798, in ibid., II: 426. 38. Sampson, Memoirs, pp. 50, 52. 39. Portland to Cornwallis, 12 November 1798, in Cornwallis Corr., II: 438. 40. Madden, United Irishmen, I: 158. Thomas Russell’s views were the same. See Reb. Pap. 620/16/3, Russell to Dobbs, 14 September 1798. 41. MacNeven, ‘An Account of the Treaty between the United Irishmen and the Anglo-Irish Government in 1798’, p. 183. 42. Emmet to Rufus King, [8 April 1807], in The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, ed. Charles R. King, 6 vols. (New York, 1894–1900), V: 21–2. In a newspaper article at the same time, however, in which Emmet tried to ridicule Castlereagh for his apparent contempt for the United States, Emmet seems to admit that ‘in the commencement of our negotiation’ the government possessed ‘a negative in our choice’ of place to emigrate. American Citizen (New York), 9 April 1807. 43. The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, V: 19. 44. King to Portland, 13 September 1798, in ibid., II: 639–40. 45. Castlereagh made this point that the leaders did not wish to go to America (Castlereagh Corr., I: 414), but it is confirmed by MacNeven to Cornwallis, 11 October 1798, Reb. Pap. 620/15/5/34 and Emmet to Cornwallis, 11 October 1798, Reb. Pap. 620/15/2/13. 46. O’Connor claimed that this was definitely agreed at the meeting. See Arthur O’Connor’s Letter to Lord Castlereagh, p. 39. 47. Cornwallis to Portland, 14 September 1798, in Castlereagh Corr., I: 348–9. 48. Lord Londonderry to Castlereagh, 10 December 1798, in ibid., II: 40; Dublin Evening Post, 8 December 1798; Reb. Pap. 620/16/3, Hugh Wilson to Thomas Russell, 5 December 1798; ‘Neilson’s Account’ reprinted in American Patriot (Baltimore), 2 February 1803; Madden, United Irishmen, IV: 75. 49. Rupert J. Coughlan, Napper Tandy (Dublin, 1976), pp. 124–54; Ian Waterston, ‘The Political and Military Intelligence Role of Sir James Craufurd at Hamburg, 1798–1799’, unpublished Honours dissertation (Murdoch University, 1997). 50. PRO, HO 100/85, Castlereagh to Wickham, 2 January 1799; HO 100/85, Wickham to Castlereagh, 10 January 1799. 51. Cornwallis to Portland, 13 September 1798, in Cornwallis Corr., II: 405. 52. PRO, HO 100/85, Castlereagh to Wickham, 2 January 1799. 53. PRO, HO 100/86, Castlereagh to Wickham, 1 April 1799. 54. PRO, HO 100/86, Wickham to Cooke, 23 March 1799; HO 100/86, Wickham to Castlereagh, 26 March 1799. 55. PRO, HO 100/86, Alexander Marsden to Wickham, 19 March 1799.

United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment

109

56. PRO, PRO 30/9/156, 133; Trinity College Dublin, Sirr Papers, TCD MS868/2, 291, Russell to Miss Russell, 20 December 1801. 57. The best account is Elliott, Partners in Revolution.

8 ‘Good for the Public Example’: Daniel Isaac Eaton, Prosecution, Punishment and Recognition, 1793–18121 Michael T. Davis

To live as a radical in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an existence fraught with danger. Stigmatized as Jacobins, rabble-rousers, subversives and members of the so-called unruly ‘swinish multitude’, radical artisans and literati alike faced a barrage of conservative propaganda, official legal repression and government persecution, and the sometimes more frightening intimidation of loyalist associations and militant Church and King mobs. This proscription at times made life as a reformer a virtual living hell and ultimately ‘rendered disloyalty unfashionable, sedition dangerous and insurrection almost impossible’.2 The prospects for radicals were unpromising and uninviting, to say the least. As one contemporary noted: ‘From the hot regions of a Court of Inquisition to the cold dark confines of the miserable Tolboothe [sic]; from the close fetid air of the dungeons of Newgate to the cold damp breezes of the Ocean. ... These are the rewards and dispensations held out by our political Olympus to the swinish multitude.’3 John Thelwall, the talented political orator and writer of the 1790s, recalled in 1819 how he was ‘proscribed and hunted – driven like a wild beast, and banished, like a contagion from society’.4 In the pages of The Tribune in 1795 he spoke of the prevailing ‘persecuting fury’ under which the radical reform movement laboured,5 whilst two years earlier the radical publisher, Thomas Spence, in a poem called The Year NinetyThree, seemed just as familiar with the government’s ‘fury’: Now pillory, whipping post, British bastille, The loss of old times makes each Englishman feel: No spirit, no thought, now dare circulate free, For Pitt, Kenyon, Dundas, in curst Ninety-Three.6 110

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

111

For William Godwin, government repression and, in turn, the nervousness of booksellers were reasons enough initially to exclude the preface to his novel Caleb Williams (1794). As he stated unequivocally: ‘Terror was the order of the day.’7 Some years later, Ebenezer Elliott, the so-called ‘Corn-Law Rhymer’, reiterated Godwin’s sentiment when he reflected on this period as the time of ‘the English Reign of Terror’.8 With the mushrooming of reform activity in Britain during the decade after the French Revolution it is no surprise to find the government taking very noticeable and concerted steps against radicalism. Added to the unofficial means of coercion were no fewer than thirteen repressive measures enacted between 1792 and 1800.9 Starting with the royal proclamation against seditious writings of 21 May 1792, which targeted the publication of cheap political works in the wake of Thomas Paine’s success with the Rights of Man, various Acts were approved by parliament to suppress seditious and subversive enthusiasms, ranging from the rather ineffective Traitorous Correspondence Act of March 1793 to the more successful suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1794 and 1798 and the notorious ‘Two Acts’ of December 1795. As Malcolm Thomis and Peter Holt point out: ‘It was altogether a formidable array of repressive legislation.’10 For contemporary radicals it was this legislation which by and large constituted a ‘reign of terror’ and which more recently for E.P. Thompson exposed a government taking ‘halting steps’ away from legitimate control and venturing towards a regime that would ‘dispense with the rule of law, dismantle their elaborate constitutional structures, countermand their own rhetoric and exercise power by force’.11 The government’s covert operations go some way towards justifying Thompson’s suggestion and supporting contemporary perceptions. A network of spies and informers were the buttress of an efficient, albeit small, Home Office which kept a constant watch on suspicious persons.12 Despised as agents provocateurs, Charles James Fox believed the Home Office’s informants were employed merely to ‘depress the cause of freedom’,13 whilst Thompson sees the majority belonging ‘much more to the tradition of “blood-money” mercenaries’ than to any school of detectives or private investigators.14 Moreover, the intelligence activities of the Home Office were supported by Post Office and customs officials, as well as local magistrates, justices of the peace and the rudimentary, though active, London police office.15 Foreigners, too, were kept under surveillance by the Alien Office which was initially established under the auspices of the Home Office

112

Michael T. Davis

by the Alien Act of 1793 to keep an eye on visitors to Britain, especially the French. By the end of the 1790s, the Alien Office had extended its operations to include surveillance in Europe and significant domestic counter-intelligence.16 All in all, the government had established what was, according to William Wickham in 1801, a ‘System of Preventative Police’ by which, ‘without bustle, noise or anything that can attract Public Attention, Government possess here the most powerful means of Observation and Information’.17 With this extensive bureaucratic monitoring of radicalism and the legislative apparatus in place, political trials, largely for libels, showed a marked increase during the 1790s. In 1795, Lord Eldon believed ‘that there had been more prosecutions for libel within the last two years than there had been for twenty years before.’18 One scholar has recently shown that the Court of King’s Bench had conducted an average of just over two libel trials per year for most of the eighteenth century; in the decade after the French Revolution, however, this average figure increased fivefold.19 Clive Emsley, moreover, has counted some 200 prosecutions for sedition from this period,20 although he contends that this number ‘pales into insignificance beside the number of prosecutions for sedition during the Jacobite emergencies of 1715 to 1716 and 1745 to 1746.’21 Indeed, on this premiss Emsley and most historians agree that the number of prosecutions ‘hardly constitutes, of itself, a reign of terror’.22 Whilst it is difficult properly to define, and in fact near impossible to determine, the exact extent of ‘terror’ to which radicals were exposed, not least because the ‘ministry relied less upon official instruments of persecution than upon semi- and unofficial agents of deterrence’,23 it is the ‘official instruments’ which for the historian are the most tangible. On that count, then, Jennifer Mori has described Pitt’s repressive legislation, and in particular the ‘Two Acts’ of 1795, as ‘temporary and partial in conception and execution’.24 Even E.P. Thompson was prepared to concede ‘that the bark of the Two Acts was worse than their bite’.25 Although the government’s mechanisms and legislation for repressing radicalism were to some extent underemployed, they were still, as Harry Dickinson points out, ‘serious infringements of civil liberties and they were always a threat hanging over the heads of radicals and trade unionists.’26 This latter point has been described by Leon Radzinowicz as ‘the principle of suspended terror’.27 Deterrence, however, was only effective when backed by prominent examples and precedents. When implemented, the government’s instruments of

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

113

persecution proved statistically successful (though not necessarily or practically effective as we shall see) with the vast majority of defendants tried for political crimes being found guilty.28 The results could be devastating. Prison terms, confiscations, public punishment, punitive fines and the financial burdens produced by employing a defence counsel and maintaining a family and business during imprisonment could create personal and mental strains sometimes beyond the intentions of the law.29 Much of the government’s attention in making examples of radicals focused on those working in the book trades.30 With the vast array of statutes controlling the publishing industry31 it is no surprise to find one scholar claiming that ‘within the booktrade . . . a high proportion of personnel was involved in legal proceedings at some stage in their working life.’32 Periods of political turmoil coincided with a notable increase in press prosecutions and, with the more general proliferation of political trials, the decade after 1789 was no exception.33 The spotlighting of radical booksellers and pressmen was a deliberate and understandable policy. As Clive Emsley notes, publishing seditious libels ‘appeared far more serious [than uttering seditious words] in that a seditious writing could be read by many more people than the numbers who heard a few words spoken in the heat of the moment.’34 In fact, Britons needed only to look across the Channel to see the power of the popular press in a revolutionary situation.35 Jacques Pierre Brissot, the French republican, was certain of its importance: In order to prepare a general insurrection against absolutist governments, it was necessary to enlighten ceaselessly the minds of the people, not through voluminous and well reasoned works, because people do not read them, but through little works . . . which would spread light in every direction.36 It was in an effort to block the kind of light to which Brissot was alluding that motivated the British government in its ‘virtual declaration of war against the radical press.’37 It was in London that the most concerted and continual efforts were made against radical publishers. The metropolis represented the hub of both the book trade and radicalism and the authorities were predictably keen to purge their own backyards of what they saw as undesirables. John Reeves’ Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers led a semi-official disinfecting campaign in the early 1790s by enforcing and reinforcing

114

Michael T. Davis

the royal proclamation against seditious writings. In seeking to prosecute ‘not only the authors and printers of [radical literature], but those who keep them in shops, or hawk them in the streets for sale; or, what is much worse, are employed in circulating them from house to house’,38 individual householders were approached in some areas of London as registers were compiled of suspected Jacobins.39 Reeves himself was apparently putting together a 40–50-volume ‘Index Expurgatorious of all dangerous and seditious books’ and their publishers.40 As more and more radical booksellers faced the daily realities of surveillance and repression and became public examples of the law, their enthusiasm, self-commitment and altruistic motivations were put to the ultimate test.41 A patriotic publisher needed to be ‘in love with his trade and ready to die for the right word.’42

I One such publisher was the intrepid Daniel Isaac Eaton who entered the milieu of metropolitan radicalism in 1792.43 In the wake of the royal proclamations of that year the Stationers’ Company, to which Eaton belonged, recommended ‘all AUTHORS, EDITORS of Public Papers, PRINTERS, BOOKSELLERS, and whoever are concerned in the writing and Publishing of Opinions on Government, throughout the Kingdom, to declare with this court their determined Resolution utterly to Discountenance and Discourage all Seditious and Inflammatory Productions whatever’.44 On the request of the Master of the Company, a parchment roll was prepared for the signatures of those who approved of the resolution. Eaton, however, did not sign the roll and his status as a freeman and liveryman of the Stationers’ Company makes this omission all the more significant,45 not least because, as Harry Dickinson points out, ‘a refusal to sign [a loyalist petition], especially when these abstainers were in a decided minority in their community, obviously required considerable moral courage’.46 Eaton thus confirmed his sentiments from an early stage and, with his extensive programme of publishing cheap radical literature and his involvement with the London Corresponding Society, he established the ground for a direct confrontation with the law. Within months of opening his bookshop in London, spies were keeping an eye on Eaton’s professional and personal movements and the Treasury solicitors began compiling the first of several dossiers that led to litigations. The self-styled ‘Printer and Bookseller to the Supreme Majesty of the People’ was, in fact, to face no fewer than eight prosecutions between 1793 and 1812.

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

115

At his first trial on 3 June 1793 for publishing a libel in Paine’s second part of the Rights of Man (1792), the prosecution highlighted Eaton’s defiance as a radical bookseller despite ‘having the examples of . . . [libel] convictions staring him in the face’: ‘Why Mr. Bookseller, you deal in a very dangerous commodity.’47 Eaton was singled out in the government’s campaign to stifle the radical press and on this the Crown made no mistake about its position: Mr. Paine shall have my consent to sit down and write till his eyes drop out and his heart aches, provided he cannot find any body to publish it; but it is by means of persons like the defendant, giving vent to publications like the present, that injury has been done to society.48 The act of distribution was therefore considered more dangerous than the act of writing.49 As the Attorney-General stated at Eaton’s second trial in July 1793 for publishing Paine’s A Letter, Addressed to the Addressers (1793): ‘the man who mixes the poison, and does not distribute it, is less guilty than he who lends his hand to the distribution of it.’50 On the basis of this idea Eaton was over the years to become one of the leading radicals repeatedly targeted as an example to others. As Lord Kenyon commented, in his summation at Eaton’s trial in July 1793: I have heard that it was the perfection of the administration of criminal justice to take care that the punishment should come to few and the example to many; and surely there is no blame to be imputed to the executive government, when the offence was so disseminated, that a few, or that one only, for we treat of only one today, – that the punishment being inflicted upon one person, the example might come to many.51 The following February Eaton was again before the courts, this time for the infamous gamecock references published in his journal Politics for the People, with the prosecution reiterating Lord Kenyon’s comments and confirming the government’s commitment to making a public example of the defiant publisher: ‘the punishment which must follow the conviction of the crime, should only fall upon a few, and falling upon a few glaring offenders, that all should apprehend the danger of transgressing.’52 Even Eaton, in a characteristically heroic manner, recognized the exemplary measures of the law: ‘I can bear punishment, when I know it is good for the public example.’53

116

Michael T. Davis

Of course, in highlighting Eaton for prosecution the government not only looked to deter would-be offenders, but also to drive Eaton himself into submission and thereby deprive the radical movement of one of its most active protagonists and most intrepid publishers. It was generally expected that the process of prosecution, whether successful or not, would be such a harrowing experience that the defendant would at least have second thoughts about committing the same offence again. Indeed, with Eaton the government’s tactic of repeat prosecutions during the 1790s eventually seemed to work. Soon after his two trials in 1796, in which he was found guilty on both occasions, Eaton followed many of his radical colleagues into voluntary exile in America.54 After being exacted five times on the first conviction Eaton was subsequently declared outlawed on 29 May 1797 and a writ of capias utlagatum secured against his property.55 Upon returning to England in 1801–2 he was soon declared bankrupt and arrested on the outstanding charges from 1797. Added to the hardship of imprisonment was the enormous emotional and financial strains, as Eaton later explained: Books (not offensive) to the amount of two thousand eight hundred pounds, which were packed up for the American market, were burnt upon the premises, and I was obliged to pay two hundred and eighty-six pounds to preserve my household furniture. These acts of humanity were performed amidst the tears of my wife and children (myself in prison) when the late Spencer Perceval was Attorney-General, by an order given to Mr. Solicitor White.56 After serving fifteen months behind bars Eaton received a royal pardon on 4 February 1805, reputedly on the basis of some family connection with the monarchy,57 and as such entered into a promise to forgo his patriotic exploits. In 1812 he recalled how, in the years following his remission, ‘he had designed in future to desist wholly from the publication and sale of political pamphlets’.58 The government had seemingly managed to silence the ageing Jacobin publisher, with the seven years leading up to 1812, although distinguished by one historian as ‘a period of great bustle and clamour’ in the reform movement,59 marked by decided quietness for Eaton. He had abandoned his role as printer for the people and began dabbling in the relatively safe world of the apothecary by manufacturing what was known as ‘Eaton’s Antiscorbutic Orange Soap’.60

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

117

II Although Eaton’s radical enthusiasm was clearly (and, as it turned out, temporarily) dampened by the continual legal attention, prosecution was, as E.P. Thompson once observed, ‘a two-edged weapon’.61 At the same time that it might stifle some defendants and deter some would-be offenders, it also encouraged others, gave some radicals who were prosecuted even greater determination, and ironically publicized a cause it was meant to suppress. John Thelwall acknowledged this when he wrote that ‘persecution does indeed make converts; but it is from, not to, the cause it endeavours to uphold.’62 In an age when repressive legislation was closing many avenues open to radicals, prosecution became in some ways a legally sanctioned and certainly unintended means of sustaining and propagating the radical movement. The trial itself offered the radical opportunist a unique chance to seek converts and legitimize and reiterate the call for reform.63 As such, court appearances became an essential means of expression, where an actual bringing together of the state and radicals promoted a head-on collision between the dominant public sphere and what Terry Eagleton has described as the emerging counterpublic sphere.64 This clash between polite and popular political worlds in the courtroom had been an important aspect of the radical movement from at least the mid-seventeenth century and it became something of a tradition inherited and perfected by later generations of radicals including Eaton, Spence, William Hone and T.J. Wooler.65 Political trials throughout the years generated the kind of ‘potential excitement of the battle between David and Goliath’,66 as the prosecution and the prosecuted engaged in a crucial, yet ‘curious dialogue’.67 Against a criminal justice system supported by biased, intimidating judges,68 packed juries and experienced Crown prosecutors, radicals participated in a direct dialogical confrontation with the government. A defining moment of this kind of confrontation was enacted before Lord Ellenborough on 6 March 1812 as Eaton presented his defence to the court on charges of publishing a blasphemous libel in the third part of Paine’s Age of Reason: [Eaton] It seems it was to Abraham that a Messiah, or Christ (as our Bibles have it) was promised. Let us examine, and if possible discern the God, who is supposed to have made this promise – Lord Ellenborough – You are evidently coming to something reprehensible, and it is necessary you should be checked.

118

Michael T. Davis

Defendant – My lord, I have only two or three sheets more to read. Lord Ellenborough – It is not the length of the address which constitutes the offence, but the matter of which it is composed. It is shocking to me, and to every Christian present. Defendant – When the address is heard out, it will be found relevant to my defence. Lord Ellenborough – You must omit those passages which cast any reflection on the Scriptures. Eaton continued with his harangue but was soon interrupted by the judge who proclaimed: ‘You must see that this is unfit for yourself to read, and for us to hear . . . I tell you once more, that I will not permit the Christian religion to be reviled. Look a little at each passage before you read it, and do not insult the Court with offensive matter.’ Despite the judge’s sentiments, Eaton went on defiantly to complete his address, with Ellenborough conceding not to ‘miss a syllable’,69 thus succeeding, in at least a small way, in challenging the authority of the court. Such a success becomes even more significant and gallant in the formal environment of the courtroom where strict and dramatic protocols were adhered to for reasons of dignity, solemnity and legality.70 Actions and language were contained within expected boundaries and commonly accepted formalities regulated who said or did what, when and how. Yet, for defendants like Eaton, to transgress these embedded limitations was part of the greater challenge to authority. At his trial in 1812, Eaton was late for the start of proceedings, entering just in time to hear the Attorney-General’s address to the court, and at one point he seems deliberately to provoke the presiding judge: ‘Defendant – I do not hear what your lordship says / Lord Ellenborough – I speak clearly and distinctly.’71 Still later in the proceedings Eaton was stopped by the court officers as he approached the jury box with twelve copies of the third part of the Age of Reason intended for each member of the panel. As a forum for political expression trials also presented radicals with unique opportunities for more obvious and provocative challenges to the government. Expurgated passages from books considered libellous were routinely read at length during trial proceedings and Eaton, like all radicals, made use of his time before the public to repeat and reassert the very ideas for which he was prosecuted. Whether conducting his own defence as in 1812 or acting through a lawyer, trial proceedings afforded Eaton the chance both to deride the state

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

119

and articulate radical sentiments which in other public assemblies would have been suppressed. At his trial in 1812 the judge’s toleration was tested as Eaton offered the court fresh deistical reflections purportedly as part of his defence. Furthermore, in February 1794, John Gurney, Eaton’s lawyer on that occasion, targeted the very merits of the libel charge and reviled the ‘industry of that numerous herd of spies, informers, and inquisitors’. In a manner befitting Thomas Paine, he entered into a rhetorical argument about the rights of man and the notion of a political nation: Whom are politics for, but for the people? Are politics for placemen and pensioners only? Are they alone blessed with understandings fitted to the investigation of this sublime and mysterious science? Or is it not, or at least ought it not to be, a subject within the comprehension of every man? . . . If it be a crime to sell a political pamphlet cheap, Mr. Eaton must plead guilty to that charge, but so far from confessing it as a crime, I state it as a merit, I challenge for him applause.72 What made such expressions potentially even more provocative was the fact that trial proceedings were being transcribed in shorthand and as such were often, in edited form, published by radicals.73 ‘Fair, plain, and honest’ accounts of trial proceedings were exempt from prosecution74 and Eaton took full advantage of this legal loophole by printing narratives of his successive trials in 1793, the so-called ‘gamecock trial’ of 1794, and his appearance before Lord Ellenborough in 1812. The sale of these pamphlets, of course, furnished men such as Eaton with some much needed money after their expensive legal engagements. But as a legally untouchable genre of radical literature, trial accounts also performed an essential role in sustaining the propaganda campaign at times when other forms of political writings and speech were being censored. Through published trial narratives political messages could be heralded across the country without the threat of prosecution. Richard Phillips, the radical bookseller of Leicester, for instance, after Eaton’s court appearance in June 1793, wrote to the intrepid London publisher requesting copies of his trial: ‘send me twenty-five, they will go off here.’75 Phillips also sold accounts of Eaton’s following two trials, as did booksellers in Cambridge, Sheffield, Edinburgh and Glasgow, whilst the narrative of the ‘gamecock trial’ was reprinted in New York by John Buel with a vignette on the title-page of George III and a bantam suggestively juxtaposed.

120

Michael T. Davis

The definition of a ‘fair, plain, and honest’ account of a trial was, of course, sometimes stretched by radicals. Eaton’s first trial pamphlet came embellished with a letter to the Morning Chronicle and the second with an advertisement for his stock of radical literature. With the narrative of his 1812 trial Eaton included a preface which boldly denounced the Attorney-General’s prosecution as consisting ‘in sophistry and declamation only, from which he draws false conclusions’ and declared Ellenborough’s conduct to be ‘a most memorable instance of his Lordship’s liberality and disinterestedness’.76 By publishing an account of his trial, Eaton wished ‘it may assist in some respect or other to remove the calcined rubbish of bigotry and superstition’,77 whilst at the same time advertising the very pamphlet for which he was prosecuted. Indeed, as far as sales of Paine’s third part of the Age of Reason were concerned, Eaton’s tactic proved entirely successful, with William Cobbett recording that the pamphlet was ‘making great progress’ and being ‘bought with great eagerness’ despite an increase in price.78 Clearly, then, as Kevin Gilmartin has recently pointed out, printed trial accounts ‘held a special status [in the reform movement], in part because they allowed defendants to turn the machinery of repression against itself’.79

III The published trial held even greater propaganda value when printed after the defendant was found not guilty. An acquittal was every radical’s hope and primary objective, with such a verdict not only ensuring the freedom of the individual, but also asserting ‘a claim to an expanded concept of who possessed the right to act within the public sphere of letters and politics, of who constituted “the people”.’80 Realizing both these aspects of his first three acquittals, Eaton published the narratives of his legal encounters as something of a celebration of personal and political victory. For the government his first two exonerations were humbling and humiliating experiences, compounded by the opportunities seized by members of the radical fraternity to publicize and savour Eaton’s triumphs. In the autumn of 1793, for instance, ‘A Republican’ wrote an impromptu poem celebrating Eaton’s acquittal in July and extolling the virtues of the jurymen at that trial: In initials of Gold, Let these Names be enroll’d,

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

121

And plac’d in the Temple of Freedom; And may Millions be found, Thus honest and sound, For, Faith, these are Times when we need ‘em.81 Another anonymous writer, upon considering the verdict of ‘guilty of publishing, but not with a criminal intention’ given in Eaton’s first trial, felt cause to announce that the defendant was a hero and undoubtedly and fully exonerated if there was no criminal intent in his actions.82 By the end of 1793 Eaton’s radical reputation was reaching a crest as the wave of his legal successes made a complete mockery of the law and its deterrent effect. As George Stead Veitch stated: [Eaton’s acquittals] showed that, whilst the adventurous publisher of contraband pamphlets ran the risk of conviction, he stood at least a ‘sporting’ chance of acquittal, and they showed also that the probability of conviction was by no means proportional to the seditious character of his publications. Just as a bad tariff and a spice of danger attract bold men to engage in smuggling, so the unequal enforcement of the law tempted the adventurous or irresponsible publisher to risk the publication of works which administration regarded as contraband.83 Eaton was undeniably adventurous and following his trials in June and July 1793 he openly declared his determination ‘to publish for the benefit of his fellow Citizens . . . such political and literary pieces as the favour of his Friends may supply him with, and which CORRUPTION, and DESPOTISM, of Party would banish from the Daily Press.’84 He followed this announcement with two pamphlets individually denouncing the war with France and propagating the ideas of equality and popular sovereignty, as well as his journal, Politics for the People. In the pages of this latter publication the government once more found cause to prosecute Eaton, this time for a farmyard anecdote once told by John Thelwall which seemed to equate a gamecock tyrant with George III. The bold publisher, however, was again exonerated and it was this courtroom victory which proved to be Eaton’s greatest success. With the Crown’s suit resting on legally ridiculous, yet logically rational, innuendoes, the government surely knew it ran the risk of exposing its case, whether successful or not, to the kind of ‘seditious laughter’ which parodists of the Regency period encouraged and in part relied upon during their legal battles.85 The verdict of not

122

Michael T. Davis

guilty ensured the government’s humiliation on its own stage, as the courtroom filled ‘with a burst of applause, expressed by a general clapping of hands’.86 The government was also apparently beaten at its own game. Packed juries were a feature of Crown prosecutions, yet it seems that Eaton managed to turn things around. As in his trial in June 1793 when two members of the London Corresponding Society were jurymen,87 the foreman of the jury at the ‘gamecock trial’, Joseph Stafford, was also a radical sympathizer. He and Eaton were two men who shared a night of celebration at a soirée of the Corresponding Society four days after the trial88 and as Thomas Hardy later revealed, ‘some pains were taken to get some friends on Eaton’s Trial’, adding that ‘the people who told me so seemed much pleased that he had got off’.89 John Thelwall, as author of the gamecock fable, was particularly delighted with the result of Eaton’s trial, enjoying the ensuing conviviality and exploiting its political value through his lectures and a poem entitled, John Gilpin’s Ghost; or, the Warning Voice of King Chanticleer (1795). John Towill Rutt, a drug merchant by trade and regular contributor to the Morning Chronicle, was also poetically inspired by Eaton’s victory. In his ‘Lines to the Jury’, Rutt offered testimony that In such degenerate – such polluted days, Pure genuine virtue merits noble praise; Such are your merits, such the praises due From all who love the human race, to you. In Eaton’s case you saw Oppression stand, Threat’ning with vengeance this devoted land; And, with a virtuous patriotic zeal, You gave a verdict for your country’s weal; Justice your end, integrity your guide, You bravely check’d corruption’s foulest tide.90 Radicals from all quarters relished the opportunity to remind the government and the public of Eaton’s success. The London Corresponding Society ordered a silver medal to be struck in honour of Eaton’s counsel and jury ‘to remind posterity of the History of as singular a prosecution so truly ridiculous, at no other period than the present, could [it] have gained admission into an English Court of Justice.’91 The Society proclaimed it was ‘always happy in recording Events, which can in any respect accelerate the progress of knowledge,

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

123

& establish . . . the Liberty of the Press’.92 Another celebratory token was minted in 1795, presenting on one side a profile of Eaton and the inscription: ‘D.I. Eaton Three Times Acquitted of Sedition’.93 On the other side is the depiction of a farmyard scene, reminiscent of Thelwall’s tale, in which four pigs feed from a trough while a rooster, perched on a fence, crows dominantly above them. As propaganda this token was well received, a fact illustrated by a letter sent to Eaton from a confessed ‘Jacobin Revolutionist and Leveller’. This correspondent mentioned that during a business trip to the north of England he ‘gratified several of the Friends of Liberty with the Effigy of a THRICEACQUITTED FELON. They said they received more pleasure in having a Medal of the Printer to the Majesty of the People, than they would have done in a Coronation Medal of G – III.’94 Such expressions were indeed deliberately provocative and contemptuous and, amongst radicals, certainly indicative of their mood. Thomas Lloyd, the Anglo-American republican, for instance, wrote in his diary, on the day Eaton stood before the Old Bailey, that ‘Eaton was tried for cockadoodle doo and acquitted’ – a snide and laconic comment which smacks of disdain for the legal and political system.95 Eaton, too, displayed a similar disregard and a distinct lack of remorse following his acquittal. As well as publishing the narrative of his trial, he also reproduced the indictment as a separate pamphlet, embellished with a suggestive engraving on the cover of a domineering gamecock.96 Eaton was even bold enough to print a squib of a proclamation by George III in which the usual reverent ending of ‘God save the King’ was replaced with the impertinent ‘God save our cock’.97 With such popularization of the ‘gamecock trial’ there emerged an almost inseparable association between Eaton’s name and the political symbolism of the pullet. Thus, when Charles Pigott compiled A Political Dictionary (1795) the entry under ‘gamecock’ refers to ‘a sanguinary, cruel tyrant. Vide the Bill of Indictment preferred against D.I. Eaton, where the attorney-general compares a game-cock to a cruel, sanguinary tyrant, and says that it must mean our most gracious sovereign George III.’98 Eaton himself publicly promoted this link by daringly and unashamedly dubbing his bookshop as the ‘Cock and Swine’ and less frequently as the ‘Cock and Hog-Trough’.99

IV An acquittal, then, was clearly most valuable in promoting the radical cause and giving recognition to the successful defendant. It could

124

Michael T. Davis

not, of course, be depended upon and a verdict of guilty brought with it the strains of imprisonment, fines and public punishment. In the early years of the Regency period, the government was again focusing its attention on the radical booktrades100 and Eaton was soon facing the realities of publishing a libel in part three of Paine’s The Age of Reason. On 15 May 1812, he received his harshest sentence ever – eighteen months’ imprisonment in Newgate and to stand in the pillory for one hour. Such penalties, however, were not enough to silence a determined and experienced opportunist like Eaton. Iain McCalman has recently shown how a term of imprisonment in Newgate, despite its adversities, could in fact prove to be a valuable and energizing experience for radicals.101 Eaton by all counts would have revelled in the republican and fraternal atmosphere of Newgate just as he had in the mid-1790s.102 As gaol ‘encouraged radical synergies’,103 Eaton found the spirit to petition parliament on the conditions of prison, write his final pamphlet on the Extortions and Abuses of Newgate (1813), and lay the publishing plans for the polemical Ecce Homo (1813). It was Eaton’s stint in the pillory, however, which ultimately turned apparent defeat into the bitter-sweet taste of recognition. The pillory had for centuries been a prominent feature on London’s urban landscape and a very effective means of corporal punishment.104 The offender was not only subjected to the discomfort of being placed in the pillory itself, but also faced the humiliation of being exhibited, in a compromising position, before the public. ‘The criminal’, as Francis Place recorded, ‘was to be punished by disgrace and exposure.’105 Peltings were potentially the most dangerous aspect of exposure, with mud, rotten eggs, decaying vegetables, stones and faeces amongst the most favoured projectiles that could cause injury or even death. Charles Dickens thus observed in A Tale of Two Cities that the pillory ‘inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent’.106 For all of this the crowd played a central role. The pillory was a legally sanctioned form of street-theatre and one of the most important aspects of any theatre performance is the audience. In a carnival-like atmosphere, people crowded the streets and surrounding buildings in an attempt to get a clear view of the offender’s punishment. These events were true crowd-pleasing spectacles,107 but they were not merely a kind of theatre sport. Indeed, as Clive Emsley points out, ‘it was didactic theatre . . . the pillory [was meant] . . . to provide lessons and warnings for other would-be transgressors of the law.’108 Crowd participation in a pillory event was, moreover, an extension of

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

125

the political sophistication that scholars such as E.P. Thompson and George Rudé have given to English crowds.109 Those that gathered around the pillory were participating in a quasi-legal ritual which was expected to denounce the offender and protect the moral standards of the community as well as a quasi-political ceremony intended to uphold the status quo. Crowds thus became, in the final instance, both judge and jury and their decisions were absolute. In 1816, the use of the pillory was restricted by law and completely abolished in 1837. In part this change reflected the gradual change in criminal justice theory away from public punishment, towards an emphasis on rehabilitation. Concurrently there was a general rejection of violence in society, with the pillory seen by some contemporaries as an endorsed form of mob violence, anarchy and barbarity.110 As early as 1780, Edmund Burke observed, soon after a man was killed in the pillory, that at these events ‘the Mob from wantonness or Malice, begin to be unruly.’111 Francis Place, fifty years later, noted how the pillory ‘tended to barbarise the people . . . promoted every species of blackguardism, and the increase of crimes’.112 Charles Dickens had similar thoughts when he declared that it was ‘bad for a people to be familiarised with such punishments’.113 The unpredictability of punishment in the pillory also contributed to its demise. It had made criminal justice something of a lottery, but the authorities of the early nineteenth century were no longer prepared to gamble. Unlike those convicted of homosexuality and bestialism, political prisoners in the pillory were generally received favourably by the crowd and their punishment could prove more of a triumph than a deterrent. In this way, the moral authority of the law was undermined as public prosecution turned into public recognition. One of Eaton’s radical colleagues from the early years of the Regency, George Houston, later claimed that the former’s stint in the pillory ‘was found to be so great an outrage on the public mind, or the London public, that it led to its abolition in the ensuing session of parliament’.114 It is unlikely, however, that Eaton’s one hour in the pillory was the sole issue in the minds of the parliamentarians who made the decision to restrict punishment by the pillory. That it actually contributed in some way, though, cannot be denied. The events that unfolded on 26 May 1812 could not be ignored and were a perfect example of how radical opportunism flourished at a time of impending doom. Eaton was brought to the pillory in the middle of the day when the streets were crowded and when it was expected the largest assembly could be drawn. The scaffold was assembled opposite

126

Michael T. Davis

Newgate prison in the first instance to provide an example to other prisoners who dared watch as well as to provide a quick escape for Eaton in the event that the crowd turned excessively violent. As Francis Place explained: ‘The Court thought that this was an offence which would excite the popular indignation’. What transpired, however, fell short of the court’s expectations: The day was warm, the continued circular motion and the rays of the sun falling on his bald head induced profuse perspiration, and distressed the old man; this was evident to the spectators who called to him to stand still with his back towards the sun, that the pillory might in part shade his head . . . Mr Eaton occasionally addressed the crowd, who shouted and cheered him . . . Some respectably dressed men were at intervals admitted within the cordon formed by the constables, who going to the edge of the platform conversed with Mr Eaton, who conducted himself with great decorum, and never once lost his cheerfulness.115 William Cobbett recorded a similar dramatic sequence, adding that Eaton was received with ‘the exclamation of “brave old man!” . . . followed by an universal mark of applause after the manner of the Theatre’. Before a large audience, Eaton was hailed with ‘every possible mark of compassion and of applause . . . To crown the whole, no sooner had he descended from the scaffold, than a GAME COCK was, by some one, put on it, typical, I suppose, of the courage he had displayed, as complimentary of the commencement of his career in politics’.116 Henry Crabb Robinson, the lawyer, also made mention of Eaton’s triumphant reception in the pillory. As he saw things, the ‘whole affair was an additional proof of the folly of the Ministers, who ought to have known that such an exhibition would be a triumph to the cause they meant to render infamous.’117 With time, Robinson’s recollection of this event became even more cynical and bitter, but he could not deny that Eaton ‘was made the hero of the day’.118 The Monthly Repository even went so far as to claim that on the day ‘any one who had offered him the accustomed insults, would have run a great risk of being torn to pieces.’119 Lord Ellenborough apparently insinuated that such sympathy for Eaton was owing to the fact that the crowd was filled with infidels. Lord Lauderdale, on the other hand, believed this popular reaction was a ‘consequence of . . . mistaking the nature of the offence’.120 On the contrary, Eaton had ensured the crime for which he was punished

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

127

was well publicized to the crowd. The narrative of his trial was sold at the scene and those who were interested but had missed out ‘flocked to Eaton’s shop’ to purchase a copy.121 A handbill, headed with the words Behold the Man in large, bold print, was also distributed among the observers. Since he had been convicted of a blasphemous libel, this bill was particularly daring with its heading an obvious allusion to the Biblical incident where Pontius Pilate paraded Christ in a crown of thorns before the Jews, exclaiming ‘behold the man’. In an indirect and irreverent manner, then, Eaton was comparing himself to Jesus Christ or, at least, to his public suffering. The government was certainly aware of this contempt and made some initial efforts towards prosecuting those involved in publishing Behold the Man. On discovering the printer Charles Mitcham was involved, the authorities apparently dropped the matter – perhaps realizing, at last, that prosecution would only give further publicity to a cause they wanted to suppress.122 In the end, Eaton’s hour in the pillory proved a rallying point for the radical and free thinking press and the focus of Percy Byshe Shelley’s Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812).123 After stepping onto the scaffold as a political miscreant, Eaton stepped off as a public hero. Indeed, for many years, such a metamorphosis was typical of Eaton’s fate as he managed to turn the negatives of prosecution and punishment into positive recognition. It was, as Henry Crabb Robinson pointed out in 1812, a seemingly never-ending case of Eaton’s ‘punishment of shame’ turning into ‘his glory’.124 He became, as one historian has said, ‘a legend in his own time’125 – a status built upon his own shrewd and bold opportunism. Ironically, it was the government, in seeking to silence this intrepid publisher, which provided Eaton with many of his public opportunities. In this light, then, it was more a case of government error than it was a case of government terror.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Harry Dickinson for his comments on a draft of this essay. 2. Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office papers, HO 50/46, printed paper dated 2 July 1799. 3. PRO, Treasury Solicitors’ papers, TS 11/951/3495, ‘Historical Strictures on the Trials of Sydney and Russell, and other Champions of Liberty’ [1794]. 4. Cited in E.P. Thompson, ‘Hunting the Jacobin Fox’, Past and Present, no. 142 (1994), p. 102. 5. The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, PA, 1995), p. 315.

128

Michael T. Davis

6. Thomas Spence, The Year Ninety-Three (1793), in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H.T. Dickinson (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1982), p. 121. 7. William Godwin, Things As They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (Oxford, 1982), p. 2. 8. Cited in E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980), p. 199. 9. See James S. Measell, ‘Repression in Great Britain: 1792–1795’, in Free Speech Yearbook, 1975 (Falls Church, VA, 1975), pp. 60–1; and Clive Emsley, ‘Repression, “Terror” and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution’, English Historical Review, 100 (1985), pp. 801–25. 10. Malcolm I. Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 17891848 (Basingstoke, 1977), p. 16. 11. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 269. 12. See R.R. Nelson, The Home Office, 1782–1801 (Durham, NC, 1969); Clive Emsley, ‘The Home Office and its Sources of Information and Investigation 1791–1801’, English Historical Review, 94 (1979), pp. 532–61; and Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: a History of Political Espionage in Britain 1790–1988 (London, 1989), pp. 29–31. 13. Cited in ibid., p. 38. 14. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 533. 15. On the espionage activities of the Post Office, see Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1958), pp. 68–9. On the London police office in this era, see Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Political and Social History (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), pp. 15–22. 16. J.R. Dinwiddy, ‘The Use of the Crown’s Powers of Deportation under the Aliens Act, 1793–1826’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 104 (1968), pp. 193–207; J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 73–82; Elizabeth Sparrow, ‘The Alien Office, 1792–1802’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 361–84; Elizabeth Sparrow, ‘The Swiss and Swabian Agencies, 1795–1800’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 861–4. 17. Cited in Porter, Plots and Paranoia, p. 29. 18. Cited in Frederick Knight Hunt, The Fourth Estate: Contributions Towards a History of Newspapers and of the Liberty of the Press, 2 vols. (London, 1850), I: 261. 19. Michael Lobban, ‘From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing Face of Political Crime c. 1770–1820’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 10 (1990), p. 309. 20. Clive Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”: Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s’, Social History, 6 (1981), pp. 155–84. 21. Emsley, ‘Repression, “Terror” and the Rule of Law in England’, p. 822. 22. Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”’, p. 174. Also see H.T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 37, 40. 23. Jennifer Mori, William Pitt and the French Revolution 1785–1795 (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 278. 24. Ibid., p. 279. 25. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 161.

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

129

26. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution, p. 41. 27. Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1780, 5 vols. (London, 1968), IV: v. 28. Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”’, p. 172. 29. Ibid., p. 173. 30. See Alan Booth, ‘“The Memory of the Liberty of the Press”: The Suppression of Radical Writing in the 1790s’, in Writing and Censorship in Britain, ed. Paul Hyland and Neill Sammells (London, 1992), pp. 107-22; and Jon Mee, ‘“Examples of Safe Printing”: Censorship and Popular Radical Literature in the 1790s’, Essays and Studies, 46 (1993), pp. 81–95. 31. See John Feather, ‘The English Book Trade and the Law 1695–1799’, Publishing History, no. 12 (1982), pp. 51–75. 32. Michael Harris, ‘Trials and Criminal Biographies: a Case Study in Distribution’, in Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oxford, 1982), p. 3. 33. Donald Thomas, ‘Press Prosecutions of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: the Evidence of the King’s Bench Indictments’, The Library, 5th series, 32 (1977), pp. 315–32; Lobban, ‘From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly’, pp. 321–4. 34. Emsley, ‘An Aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”’, p. 172. 35. See Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Revolution in Print: The Press in France 1775–1800, ed. Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche (Berkeley, 1989); and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ‘The Tribune of the People: a New Species of Demagogue’, Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 287 (1991), pp. 145–59. 36. Cited in Pamphlets, Periodicals and Songs of the French Revolutionary Era in the Princeton University Library, ed. Carla Hesse and Laura Mason (New York, 1989), p. xi. 37. Donald Read, Press and People 1790-1850 (London, 1961), p. 68. 38. Cited in Robert R. Rea, ‘“The Liberty of the Press” as an Issue in English Politics, 1792–1793’, The Historian: A Journal of History, 24 (1961), p. 30. 39. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 126. 40. Morning Chronicle, 10 December 1792. 41. The altruistic motivations of radical publishers has been mentioned in relation to the Parisian and American presses during different periods of history. See Jack Richard Censer, Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press 1789–1791 (Baltimore, 1976), p. 5; and Laureen Kessler, The Dissident Press: Alternative Journalism in American History (Beverly Hills, CA,1984), p. 114. 42. Howard Fast, Citizen Tom Paine (London, 1945), p. 179. 43. On Eaton’s life and career, see Michael T. Davis, ‘Behold the Man: The Life, Times and Circle of Daniel Isaac Eaton, 1753–1814’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Queensland, 1995). For an overview, see Michael T. Davis, ‘Daniel Isaac Eaton’, in British Reform Writers, 1789–1832, ed. Gary Kelly and Edd Applegate (Detroit, 1996), pp. 94–102. 44. British Library, Add. MSS 16930, fo. 60. 45. Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, Roll of Association, Subscribing Declaration of Loyalty, 12 December 1792. I am grateful to Robin Myers, Archivist of the Stationers’ Company, for her advice regarding this manuscript.

130

Michael T. Davis

46. H.T. Dickinson, ‘Popular Conservatism and Militant Loyalism’, in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815, ed. H.T. Dickinson (Basingstoke, 1989), p. 118. 47. A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T.B. Howell and T.J. Howell, 33 vols. (London, 1809–26) [hereafter State Trials], XXII: 764. 48. Ibid., XXII: 765. 49. See David Saunders and Ian Hunter, ‘Lessons from the “Literatory”: How to Historicise Authorship’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991), pp. 479–509. 50. State Trials, XXII: 818. 51. Ibid., XXII: 820. 52. Ibid., XXIII: 1018. 53. Ibid., XXII: 784. 54. See Davis, ‘Behold the Man’, pp. 249–97. 55. PRO, King’s Bench records, KB 28/377, Easter term 1796; KB 29/456, Easter term 1797. On the legal complexities of London outlawry proceedings, see R.B. Pugh, ‘Metropolitan Outlawries’, The Law Quarterly Review, 99 (1983), pp. 268–80. 56. Daniel Isaac Eaton, Address of D.I. Eaton, Now Under Sentence of Eighteen Months Imprisonment in Newgate ([London], 1812), broadside. 57. See Davis, ‘Behold the Man’, pp. 307–8. 58. Trial of Mr Daniel Isaac Eaton, for Publishing the Third and Last Part of Paine’s Age of Reason (London, 1812), p. 68. 59. Hone, For the Cause of Truth, p. 147. 60. See Davis, ‘Behold the Man’, pp. 310–13. 61. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 141. 62. Claeys, The Politics of English Jacobinism, p. 318. 63. On the importance of political trials for radicals in the early nineteenth century, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 176–201; James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York, 1994), pp. 32–69; and Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1996), pp. 114–27, 139–43. 64. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, from the Spectator to PostStructuralism (London, 1984), p. 36. 65. See James Epstein, ‘“Our Real Constitution”: Trial Defence and Radical Memory in the Age of Revolution’, in Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century, ed. James Vernon (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 39, 49–50. 66. Smith, The Politics of Language, p. 177. 67. Epstein, Radical Expression, p. 33. 68. See J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 347–8. 69. State Trials, XXXI: 940, 942. 70. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, p. 316. 71. State Trials, XXXI: 941. 72. Ibid., XXIII: 1031–2, 1034. 73. See Gilmartin, Print Politics, pp. 139–43; Smith, The Politics of Language, pp. 177–8. 74. Francis Ludlow Holt, The Law of Libel (London, 1812), pp. 287–8.

Eaton, Prosecution and Recognition

131

75. [Daniel Isaac Eaton], Extermination, or an Appeal to the People of England, on the Present War with France (London, [1793]), p. 34. 76. Trial of Mr Daniel Isaac Eaton, for Publishing the Third and Last Part of Paine’s Age of Reason, p. iii. 77. Ibid., p. iv. 78. Cobbett’s Political Register, 20 June 1812, col. 791. 79. Gilmartin, Print Politics, p. 139. 80. Epstein, Radical Expression, p. 35. 81. Politics for the People, vol. 1, part 1, no. 7, p. 92. 82. Ibid., vol. 1, part 1, no. 13, pp. 182–9. 83. George Stead Veitch, The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform (London, 1964), p. 272. 84. [Daniel Isaac Eaton], Eager to Abolish the Aristocracy of the Press ([London, 1793]), broadside. 85. See Joseph M. Butwin, ‘Seditious Laughter’, Radical History Review, 18 (1978), pp. 17–34. 86. Morning Post, 25 February 1794. 87. PRO, TS 11/960/3506(2), examination of John Edwards, 26 May 1794; Davis, ‘Behold the Man’, p. 107. 88. PRO, TS 11/955/3499, report from John Taylor, 28 February 1794; TS 11/960/3506(2), evidence of John Williams, 11 June 1794; TS 11/953/3497, report from William Metcalfe, 28 February 1794. 89. PRO, Privy Council papers, PC 1/21/A35, examination of Thomas Hardy, 13 May 1794; PC 2/140, fo. 58. 90. Politics for the People, vol. 1, part 2, no. 12, p. 11. 91. PRO, TS 11/959/3505(2), LCS to John Gurney, [1794]. See Davis, ‘Behold the Man’, pp. 159–60. 92. PRO, TS 11/959/3505(2), LCS to Joseph Stafford [1794]. 93. See Davis, ‘Behold the Man’, pp. 160–1. 94. The Philanthropist, no. 13 (1795), p. 4. 95. Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Family Papers of Thomas Lloyd, diary of Thomas Lloyd, 24 February 1794. 96. London. December Sessions, 1793. The King Against Daniel Isaac Eaton. Copy of the Indictment ([London, 1794]). A copy of this pamphlet is located in PRO, TS 11/951/3495. 97. [Daniel Isaac Eaton], Proclamation. George R. Whereas Our Wise, Pure, and Uncorrupted Parliament Stands Prorogued (London, 1794), broadside. 98. Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary; Explaining the True Meaning of Words (London, 1795), p. 13. 99. Davis, ‘Behold the Man’, p. 163. 100. See Hone, For the Cause of Truth, pp. 197–9. 101. Iain McCalman, ‘Newgate in Revolution: Radical Enthusiasm and Romantic Counterculture’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22 (1998), pp. 95–110. 102. See, for example, PRO, TS 11/956/3501, Thomas Lloyd to John Horne Tooke, 30 January 1794. For Eaton’s contact with Newgate radicals and his dealings with Robert Southey in the mid-1790s, see Michael T. Davis, ‘“That Odious Class of Men Called Democrats”: Daniel Isaac Eaton and the Romantics 1794–1795’, History, 84 (1999), pp. 74–92. 103. McCalman, ‘Newgate in Revolution’, p. 98.

132

Michael T. Davis

104. See Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1991), pp. 282–5; Richard Byrne, Prisons and Punishments of London (London, 1992), pp. 179–81. 105. British Library, Add. MSS 27826, fo. 178. 106. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. George Woodcock (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 90–1. 107. For a discussion of crowd-pleasing events in the eighteenth century, see R.M. Wiles, ‘Crowd-Pleasing Spectacles in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Popular Culture, 1 (1967), pp. 90–105. 108. Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750–1900 (London, 1987), p. 215. 109. See E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), pp. 76–136; George Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in Popular Protest (London, 1970). 110. See Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, pp. 613–16; Alan Harding, A Social History of English Law (Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 359–67; and Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 93, 101–3, 111–22. 111. Edmund Burke to Alexander Wedderburn, 16 April 1780, in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T.W. Copeland et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1958–70), IV: 231. 112. British Library, Add. MSS 27826, fo. 175. 113. Cited in Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (New York, 1962), p. 255. 114. The Correspondent (New York), 5 (1829), p. 223. 115. British Library, Add. MSS 27826, fos. 178, 182. 116. Cobbett’s Political Register, 13 June 1812, cols. 748–50. 117. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), I: 201. 118. Dr Williams’s Library, Reminiscences of Henry Crabb Robinson (1812), fo. 26. 119. The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, 7 (1812), p. 405. 120. British Library, Add. MSS 27826, fo. 182. 121. The Examiner, 31 May 1812, p. 352. 122. PRO, HO 48/15, Thomas Plumer to H.C. Litchfield, 20 May 1812; HO 65/2, J. Beckett to J. Gifford, 1 June and 8 July 1812; HO 42/124, Gifford to Litchfield and Hobhouse, 29 June 1812; HO 49/6, Beckett to Litchfield and Hobhouse, 1 July 1812; HO 43/12, Beckett to Gifford, 10 July 1812. 123. See Davis, ‘Behold the Man’, pp. 335–42. 124. Sadler, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, I: 201. 125. Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and Sans-Culottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution, 2nd edn (London, 1989), p. 73.

9 A Loyal Englishman?: John Lloyd and Aspects of Oath-taking in 1812 Bernadette Turner

The significance of the Luddite disturbances in the northern counties of England in 1812 has engendered considerable debate, yet many aspects remain obscure.1 Despite E.P. Thompson’s contention that Luddism was a ‘quasi-insurrectionary movement, which continually trembled on the edge of ulterior revolutionary objectives’,2 the evidence on oath-taking, secret meetings and civilian arming remains perplexing, one fundamental cause being the reliability of the evidence of spies. In contrast to the scrutiny given to the ideology of the protesters, that of their chief persecutors has largely escaped attention.3 Yet, it may supply a clue to deciphering some of the extant evidence. Ralph Fletcher, a magistrate of Bolton, and John Lloyd, a solicitor and clerk to the magistrates of Stockport, were key figures. Fletcher’s informer, Bent, has been subjected to the scathing criticism of historians, but there has been little scrutiny of the crucial evidence of Thomas Whitehead and Joseph Taylor, employed by Lloyd, on the alleged Luddite oath.4 Others supplied evidence, but it was their information which was central to the case presented to the Secret Committees established by the government to inquire into the disturbances.5 Evidence presented before the 1835 House of Commons Select Committee inquiring into the Orange Institution in England proves that both Fletcher and Lloyd were active, ardent supporters of Orangeism during the Luddite disturbances.6 Orange Lodges were introduced to England in 1798, the first being established through an Irish warrant by members of Colonel Stanley’s regiment of Lancashire Militia. Subsequently, the manufacturing districts of the northern counties and, in particular, the areas around Manchester became the centre of English Orange Lodges for the first two decades of the nineteenth century.7 By 1808 their increase resulted in the formation of 133

134

Bernadette Turner

an English Grand Lodge in Manchester with Colonel S. Taylor as Grand Master and R. Fletcher as Deputy Grand Master.8 At the time, the English lodges drew most of their members from the working classes primarily, though not entirely, from men enlisted in military regiments and, especially, the militia.9 During the Luddite period many of Fletcher’s spies were members of the Bolton Local Militia, of which he was the commander, and Lloyd’s spy, Joseph Taylor was described as a sergeant in the first regiment of the Middleton Local Militia in his first recorded deposition to a magistrate of Royton on 23 March 1812.10 It seems a reasonable deduction to assume that fellow Orange Lodge members may have been recruited as spies by some in authority. Like their brethren in Ireland, the English Orangemen were committed to maintaining the Protestant ascendancy as understood by their definitions.11 Their allegiance to the Crown was not absolute. Until at least 1813 members were bound by a conditional oath of allegiance, sworn on a Bible, to support the King and his heirs ‘so long as he or they support the Protestant ascendancy, the constitution, and the laws of these kingdom’.12 Lodge meetings were characterized by a considerable degree of ritual with readings from the Bible utilized to justify and sustain the philosophy of Orangeism and fortify solidarity among members. Secret signs and passwords, employed to identify initiates from other lodges, reinforced notions that only Orangemen stood firmly in defence of the constitution threatened by Catholics, reformers and revolutionaries.13 The defensive cult mentality fostered by Orangeism raises questions regarding the impartiality of Fletcher and Lloyd and the reliability of the information they forwarded to the Home Office, and may explain the extent to which both were willing to ignore the rule of law in their intemperate pursuit of alleged Luddites. The parallels between Orange Lodge practices and the alleged Luddite use of oaths, Bible readings, secret signs and passwords may only indicate how widespread such arcane practices were in nineteenth-century society.14 But there is evidence from correspondence by R. Nixon, secretary of the Grand Lodge, indicating that Orangemen, using signs and passwords, were engaged in identifying the disaffected during the Luddite period.15 As men such as Lloyd and Fletcher were open in their pursuit of alleged Luddites, Nixon’s remarks suggest that others were involved in more clandestine operations, and Whitehead and Taylor may have been amongst Orangemen who did so. Even without definite proof that the spies were Orangemen, there are sufficient irregularities in the

John Lloyd and Aspects of Oath-taking

135

manner in which the crucial information was forthcoming to suggest that parts of their evidence were manipulated or fabricated, probably under the direction of Lloyd. Like radical and reformist groups such as the London Corresponding Society, Orange Lodges and their practice of taking oaths were rendered illegal under the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797 and the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799. To circumvent the latter, the English leaders sought to have the lodges registered as friendly societies.16 Yet the oath remained an essential element of the English Lodges until at least 1813 when William Wynn brought the existence of English Orange Lodges and their practices to public attention.17 The Times was quick to recognize the threat of Orangeism to social cohesiveness and argued that the ‘infatuated and ignorant Luddites’ were innocent in comparison.18 It is one of the great ironies of the period that Lloyd and Fletcher, both inveterate hunters of the disaffected, were themselves actively involved in an organization and in taking an illegal oath with treasonous overtones. There is very little unbiased evidence to demonstrate how the working classes viewed illegal oath-taking during this period or whether some of those involved in the Luddite disturbances may have been imbued with a revolutionary ideology. Apart from the information supplied by spies much of the extant evidence has come from alleged Luddites such as Humphrey Yarwood, a member of the Manchester secret committee, and those who took the oath of allegiance before Sir Richard Clayton, a magistrate of Adlington, on 7 October 1812.19 All of these men, having been implicated in various offences, had a stake in exculpating themselves, in accusing others or disguising their intentions.20 Unlike the oath of the United Englishmen, the wording of the alleged Luddite oath gives no real insight into the goals of the oath-takers.21 One element which lent credence to the suspicion that a revolutionary conspiracy may have re-emerged among sections of the working classes was the reappearance of the verses of Ezekiel associated with the taking of the United Englishmen’s oath. Significantly, the information relating to this came from Lloyd’s spies, Thomas Whitehead and Joseph Taylor.22 Because of the impact the spectre of illegal oath-taking had on the government of the day, the events leading to the discovery of the wording of the oath and the use of the specific verses of Ezekiel warrant detailed attention, particularly as the evidence suggests that the wording of the oath and Bible reference may have originated with Lloyd. How and when Taylor and Whitehead were employed by Lloyd is not clear. By 18 April 1812 Taylor had, fortuitously, met an alleged

136

Bernadette Turner

Luddite who introduced him to Humphrey Yarwood, who at his first meeting with the spies at the Prince Regent’s Arms in Manchester on 4 May, allegedly administered the oath to them and informed them of the committee’s revolutionary goals. In the initial depositions made by Taylor and Whitehead on 7 May in London before the Home Secretary, Richard Ryder, neither man provided the specific wording of the oath, although both alluded to the essential elements. In his deposition, Taylor stated that Yarwood had read verses 25, 26 and 27 of 21 chapter of Ezekiel or, as he phrased it, he thought these verses were read as ‘they were the same Words certainly as contained in those verses’.23 What Taylor appears to be implying is that Yarwood did not cite the particulars of the alleged Bible reading, but that Taylor had sufficiently detailed knowledge of the Bible to recognize an obscure passage from the Old Testament. This was the first occasion on which the reading of these verses is mentioned during the Luddite period. It is of some significance that Fletcher’s chief spy, the notorious Bent, who attended meetings with Yarwood and other members of the Manchester secret committee and had closer contact with the alleged revolutionaries than Taylor and Whitehead, also forwarded a version of the oath but did not mention any readings from Ezekiel.24 Why Whitehead and Taylor gave their initial depositions in London raises many questions. During this period the law required depositions to be sworn in the county where an offence was committed.25 According to the spies, after the unsuspecting Yarwood had revealed the purpose of the secret committee and administered the oath, others present, suspecting them of being Lloyd’s spies, threatened them, and it was only with difficulty that they managed to escape the meeting unharmed.26 Why men in Manchester should have suspected them of being spies for John Lloyd of Stockport is not stated. Manchester Luddites would more naturally have feared Joseph Nadin, the notorious Deputy Constable of Manchester, or the ultra-Tory Lancashire magistrate, the Reverend W. Hay, rather than Lloyd. Whatever the facts, Whitehead and Taylor maintained that it was extreme fear which led them to flee the county and make their deposition in London. To satisfy the requirements of the law, the spies returned north and on 18 June swore depositions before the Congleton magistrate, Holland Watson, an interesting choice as he was the brother-in-law of John Lloyd and an ultra-Tory.27 Where the depositions were made is unknown, although Watson was described as a magistrate of Lancashire and not Cheshire. Again, their depositions did not contain the specific wording of the oath. Only on the following day, in the

John Lloyd and Aspects of Oath-taking

137

presence of Lloyd, were the spies able to provide the precise wording of the oath. The preamble to this third deposition is revealing. It states: ‘Who on their oaths severally say that the following words which have been read over to them by Mr Lloyd this day as well as on the day after they were twisted in they are very certain were the Identical words made use of by Humphrey Yarwood.’28 This raises an important question of possible assistance by Lloyd in formulating the precise wording of the oath. Even though all their evidence regarding the oath contains the same elements, the precise wording is given only in their deposition on 19 June. Although the depositions do not identify where the spies gave their evidence, Lloyd was in Stockport on 17 June and may have been unable to assist their recollections prior to 19 June.29 More importantly, if, as the preamble would suggest, the spies met Lloyd on the day after the oath was administered by Yarwood, why were arrangements not made that day for them to give evidence before a Lancashire magistrate? The explanation that the spies fled to London because of their fear does not sound convincing. Lloyd’s position as clerk to the magistrates of Stockport and his relationship to Watson provided him with access to magistrates who could have secured protection for the spies if it was necessary. The ease with which Whitehead and Taylor appear to have had gained access to the Home Secretary seems curious and there is no record of their having initially presented their allegations to a London magistrate. Nor is there any evidence in the London depositions that they had met Lloyd on the day after they took the illegal oath. On balance the evidence suggests that the entire scenario was carefully planned. Yarwood later admitted giving an oath, but maintained it was limited to facilitating trade union goals.30 Whitehead and Taylor’s testimony concerning the revolutionary goals of the men at the meeting in Manchester on 4 May, the threats made by Yarwood’s accomplices and the reading of the verses of Ezekiel could generate an impression of a revolutionary conspiracy. To strengthen their evidence, shortly after having made their initial deposition on 7 May, both men told the London authorities that Yarwood and another had informed them ‘that the King & the Government were the ungodly and that those who took the oath & became thereby the Godly were to overturn’.31 This, of course, dovetailed with the reading from Ezekiel, appeared to demonstrate the revolutionary goals of the disaffected and supported Taylor’s previous report of one supposed Luddite asserting that ‘Manchester would soon be such a place or such a scene

138

Bernadette Turner

as was never witnessed since the French Revolution in July 1798’.32 Whether the date 1798 is a clerical error, an error on the part of Taylor or the Luddites or an indication of the preoccupations of Orangemen with the Irish rebellion is unknown. Some Luddites undoubtedly took oaths, and some may have been imbued with revolutionary tenets, but it would be fallacious to conclude that there was a widespread revolutionary conspiracy.33 Other aspects of their evidence seem more suited to the goals of the Orange Lodges rather than those of the Luddites. Whitehead alleged that Yarwood asserted the conspirators had sworn in officers and sergeants and one-half of the army would join the conspirators before the revolution. Rumours that the military could be induced to join the disaffected had gained some currency following the mutiny at the Nore in 1797, but there were never any serious concerns by the authorities that this was so during the Luddite disturbances. The Orange Lodges, however, did recruit their rank-and-file members from among the military. Most surprisingly, Yarwood is alleged to have stated that ‘he had no doubt that the Duke of York would become one, for they were not the least afraid but they should pluck him from amongst the ungodly’.34 Although there is tentative evidence to suggest that some Luddites hoped for support from radical politicians such as Francis Burdett or Lord Cochrane, for alleged revolutionaries to believe they could gain support from a royal Duke, notorious for his ultra-conservative politics and who had been reappointed as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in 1811, is totally ludicrous.35 Whether Yarwood and his coterie were deluded is debatable. What is clear is that in 1813 the Orange Lodge leaders were hoping to gain the open support of the ultra-conservative Duke and it is possible that the Duke was initiated into the Orange Institution.36 The implications of the reference to the Duke can only be speculative, but in 1812 it seems more likely that the Orange Lodges would have had more realistic expectations of gaining support from the Duke than working-class protesters. In an attempt to stem the tide of disaffection the government, on 5 May, introduced the Unlawful Oaths Bill in parliament. Whitehead and Taylor’s testimony was the first detailed, apparently independent evidence of a revolutionary conspiracy, and was part of the material scrutinized by the Parliamentary Secret Committees investigating the disturbances.37 On 8 July the House of Commons Secret Committee presented its report, and this, as well as the convictions for illegal oath-taking at the Cheshire and Lancashire Special Commissions, was

John Lloyd and Aspects of Oath-taking

139

instrumental in the passing of the Unlawful Oaths Bill. Moreover, as noted by H. Brougham, the report was then used as support for granting magistrates increased powers under the Preservation of the Public Peace Bill introduced in parliament on 10 July 1812.38 Lloyd was also involved in securing the only other indications that the verses from Ezekiel were used in conjunction with oath-taking in 1812. The first reference emerged during the examination of Joseph Barrowclough, a private in the Huddersfield Local Militia, whose rambling tale of revolutionaries was initially investigated by the military, but was later dismissed by General Maitland, the commander of the military forces policing the disturbances in the northern counties. When Maitland became sceptical, Lloyd maintained that Barrowclough’s evidence was reliable, though it is too far-fetched to persuade historians. There is considerable evidence to indicate Lloyd used physical violence in the examination of Barrowclough, who may have suffered an intellectual disability, and that the soldier assented to and elaborated upon any suggestions made to him. Lloyd’s professed conviction that Barrowclough was providing real information regarding a revolutionary conspiracy may have been sustained by the former’s belief, fostered by Orangeism, that a revolution was possible. Significantly, Barrowclough was taken up for questioning on the evidence of Whitehead and Taylor, who by that time were plying their trade in the Huddersfield region.39 Lloyd was also involved in the examination of John Walker, the only other person to give direct evidence of the use of the verses from Ezekiel. He was the father of the notorious Luddite informer, Benjamin Walker, and, given the nature of the illegal tactics employed by Lloyd in securing information from the Walker family, John Walker may have complied with whatever he thought Lloyd wanted to hear.40 The evidence that Yorkshire Luddism was informed by revolutionary ideology is scant and, when it emerges, Lloyd was usually involved in either the examination of victims or suspects. For example, the Huddersfield clothier and Luddite victim, Francis Vickerman, informed the authorities he had found cards with the words ‘Liberty, Equality & Humanity’ left near his damaged shears only some months after the incident when Lloyd had taken over the hunt for evidence in the West Riding.41 John Lloyd was fanatical in his pursuit of alleged Luddites and flagrantly employed illegal means to achieve his ends. These can be most clearly identified in his distant pursuit of Luddites in the West Riding of Yorkshire and included the unlawful detention of people, kidnapping, probably physical violence, and the threat of charging

140

Bernadette Turner

victims and witnesses with other offences in order to secure the type of evidence he sought. How he came to wield such power is unknown, but he had no hesitation in defying magistrates or informing the Home Office of his decision to implement illegal procedures.42 His fanaticism was that of an Orangeman. For Lloyd the end justified the means and his contempt for the rule of law sanctioned activities far more reprehensible than assisting spies in the fabrication of evidence. Whether there was a revolutionary conspiracy, Luddite or any other, remains to be proven, but the evidence of Whitehead and Taylor is of little use to historians. Perhaps the English Orangemen could supply more of the answers than the United Englishmen if thoroughly investigated. As The Times so astutely noted in June 1813, Orangemen were the ones with the greater potential to cause politics to degenerate into fanatical, conflicting groups which would destroy social cohesiveness and parliamentary government.43

Notes 1. See J.L. and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer 1760–1832 (New York, 1967); Frank Ongley Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (London, 1934); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980); Malcolm I. Thomis, The Luddites: MachineBreaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, 1970); and John Dinwiddy, ‘Luddism and Politics in the Northern Counties’, Social History, 4, 1 (1979), pp. 33–63. 2. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 604. 3. Ibid., pp. 536–7, 592, 633; Thomis, The Luddites, pp. 43, 147–9. For Lloyd, see Robert Glen, Urban Society in the Early Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), pp. 57–60, 73–5, 101–2, 223–4. 4. See J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, pp. 275–8, 336–9; Darvall, Popular Disturbances, pp. 183–95; and Thomis, The Luddites, p. 128. 5. The most detailed account of spies’ evidence is in Darvall, Popular Disturbances; and A.S. Campbell, ‘Government Spies and Informers, 1792–1822’, unpublished M.Phil dissertation (University College London, 1984). A Secret Committee was established in the House of Commons on 27 June 1812 and in the House of Lords on 29 June 1812. See Parliamentary Debates, vol. XXIII, cols. 795, 796. 6. R. Nixon to J. Stockdale, 11 June 1814, in Appendix 21, Orange Institutions in Great Britain and the Colonies, British Parliamentary Papers, 1835 (605) [hereafter Orange Institutions], XVII: 179–80. This letter is dated 1834, but internal evidence indicates this is a printing error. 7. Hereward Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain, 1795–1836 (London, 1966), p. 151; Nixon to J. Verner, 3 September 1808, in Appendix 21, Orange Institutions, XVII: 174.

John Lloyd and Aspects of Oath-taking

141

8. See the letters from Nixon in Appendix 21, ibid., XVII: 174–5; Report from the Select Committee, ibid., XVII: iv; and Minutes of Evidence, ibid., XVII: 121. 9 Evidence of C.E. Chetwoode, in Minutes of Evidence, ibid., XVII: 3; and letters from Nixon to militia lodges, in Appendix 21, ibid., XVII: 176–8. 10. For evidence that many of the spies were members of the Bolton Local Militia, see Hammond and Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, pp. 279–85; Darvall, Popular Disturbances, p. 196; and Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office papers, HO 42/121/430, J. Taylor, 23 March 1812. 11. See Report from the Select Committee, Orange Institutions, XVII: iv–xxvii. 12. Nixon to J. Brooke, 2 November 1808, in Appendix 21, ibid., XVII: 175. A copy of the oath taken in 1800 was included in the Report from the Select Committee, ibid., XVII: vi. For a copy of the rules and regulations in England, see PRO, HO 42/101/164–78, enclosure, J. Radcliffe to the Home Office, 29 June 1810. This oath was quoted in the Morning Chronicle, 14 June 1813. 13. Report from the Select Committee, Orange Institutions, XVII: vii-viii. These details refer to the ritual performed in 1832 when the earlier oath had been replaced with Bible readings, but these were not new elements. 14. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 557–60. 15. Nixon to Earl Yarmouth, 13 November 1813, in Appendix 21, Orange Institutions, XVII: 179. 16. Nixon to J. Giffard, 11 February 1811, and Nixon to Major Clutterbuck, 19 July 1811, in Appendix 21, ibid., XVII: 177–8. 17. Parliamentary Debates, vol. XXVI, 29 June 1813, cols. 976–7. 18. The Times, 9 June 1813. 19. PRO, HO 40/1/1/195–8, H. Yarwood, 19 June 1812; HO 42/128/409–23, depositions given before Sir R. Clayton, 7 October 1812. 20. For an analysis of why the evidence for these men cannot be taken at face value, see Bernadette Turner, ‘Luddism and the Law’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Queensland, 1993), pp. 77–80. 21. ‘Report from the Secret Committee on the Disturbed State of Certain Counties’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. XXIII, 8 July 1812, col. 954. For the House of Lords report, see ibid., cols. 1029–39. 22. PRO, HO 42/123/26–36, depositions of J. Taylor and T. Whitehead, 7 May 1812. 23. PRO, HO 42/123/26–36, depositions of J. Taylor and T. Whitehead, 7 May 1812. 24. PRO, HO 42/120/131–31r, report from Bent, 17 February 1812; HO 42/120/156–61, R. Fletcher to the Home Office, 25 February 1812. 25. PRO, HO 42/131/269–71, T. Plummer and V. Gibbs to the Home Office, 14 May 1812. 26. PRO, HO 42/123/26–36, depositions of J. Taylor and T. Whitehead, 7 May 1812. 27. PRO, HO 40/1/1/148, deposition of T. Whitehead, 18 June 1812; HO 40/1/1/125r, deposition of J. Taylor, 18 June 1812. On the relationship between Watson and Lloyd, see Glen, Urban Society, pp. 57–60. 28. PRO, HO 40/1/1/150, deposition of J. Taylor and T. Whitehead, 19 June 1812.

142 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

Bernadette Turner PRO, HO 40/1/1/134, J. Lloyd to the Home Office, 17 June 1812. PRO, HO 40/1/1/158–60, H. Yarwood, 19 June 1812. PRO, HO 42/131/256, Home Office to the Attorney-General, 14 May 1812. PRO, HO 42/123/26, report from J. Taylor, 7 May 1812. See Turner, ‘Luddism and the Law’, pp. 48–88. PRO, HO 42/123/35, report from T. Whitehead, 7 May 1812. PRO, HO 40/1/1/64, J. Stones, 6 April 1812; HO 40/1/3/5–6r, report from Bent, 6 April 1812. There were suggestions that the spy, John Stone, initiated this. See HO 42/132/731r, J. Greenhalgh, 17 July 1812; and HO 42/128/420, P. Gaskell, 7 October 1812. When the Duke became an Orangeman is unknown, however he briefly held the position of Grand Master in 1821. See Senior, Orangeism, pp. 172–6. There were public comments in 1813 indicating the Prince Regent and the Duke of York were Orangemen. See Parliamentary Debates, vol. XXVI, 29 June 1813, col. 984. The Morning Chronicle on 14 June 1813 also implied a senior royal was involved in the Orange Lodges. Parliamentary Debates, vol. XXIII, 27 and 29 June 1812, cols. 795–6. Ibid., vol. XXIII, 13 July 1812, col. 1014. Turner, ‘Luddism and the Law’, pp. 222–5; PRO, King’s Bench records, KB 8/91/1/25–8; HO 42/125/538–9, J. Lloyd to the Home Office, 7 July 1812. Turner, ‘Luddism and the Law’, pp. 85, 220–1, 226–7. Compare the evidence of ‘Mr V’ in PRO, HO 40/2/4/81 and that of Francis Vickerman, dated 16 March 1812, in HO 42/121/199. For information as to why Lloyd was hounding Vickerman and that he and ‘Mr V’ are the same person, see Turner, ‘Luddism and the Law’, pp. 231–5. Ibid., pp. 212–44. The Times, 14 June 1813.

10 Spreading the Radical Word: The Circulation of William Hone’s 1817 Liturgical Parodies1 Kyle Grimes

In December of 1817, the London bookseller William Hone stood trial before the King’s Court at Guildhall charged with three libels for having written and published three parodies based on passages from the Book of Common Prayer. The year 1817 marked one high point in the government’s efforts to stifle radical discourse – Habeas Corpus had been suspended, Cobbett had fled to America and many other prominent radicals had spent time in prison. As chief writer and publisher of the two penny weekly, The Reformists’ Register, Hone was making his influence felt in radical political circles. The liturgical parodies for which he was being tried are also manifestly political in character and Hone was accordingly charged with both blasphemy and sedition. The Attorney-General, however, thinking that it would be easier to secure guilty verdicts on charges of blasphemy against the Church rather than sedition against an already unpopular government, opted to pursue only the blasphemy charges in the courtroom. The scheme backfired miserably, for it put Hone in a most unusual and ironic discursive position. As Olivia Smith explains: ‘Inappropriately charged with blasphemy, Hone was probably the only radical in history who could legitimately defend himself by claiming that he had attacked the state.’2 In effect, Hone had to prove to the jury that parody, as a genre of public discourse, did not necessarily bring the original text into disrepute, that, in this instance at any rate, parody simply borrowed the form of the original in order to mount a satirical attack on the government. Hone’s defence worked brilliantly, and, amidst the riotous cheers of the crowded galleries, he was acquitted on all counts. The not guilty verdicts polarized Regency political thought. Most conservatives deplored them because they constituted a public humiliation 143

144

Kyle Grimes

of ecclesiastical and legal authority; liberals tended to see them as demonstrations of how a fair-minded and properly impanelled jury can check the autocratic impulses of political power; and radicals took them as cause for open celebration. But regardless of the particular interpretation, it was clear to Hone’s contemporaries that the acquittals were a kind of watershed in the establishment of an independent, critical press in England, and this view has been reaffirmed in the more recent writing of social historians of the Regency period. Olivia Smith sees Hone’s parodies and the published record of the trials as a direct challenge to officially constituted forms of public debate. The particular strength of Hone’s work rests in his ability to appeal to a wide variety of readers from diverse social and economic classes. In other words, unlike the more focused audience appeals of philosophical radicals like Shelley or working-class radicals such as Thomas Wooler, Hone’s writing was able to transgress long-established divisions within the British readership between the ‘refined’ and the ‘vulgar’. More recently, Marcus Wood has suggested that Hone’s trials can be understood in more specific historical contexts. He points out, for instance, how Hone’s parodic catechism takes part in a contemporary debate about the value and effects of this dogmatic pedagogical text. Likewise, Wood (following Smith) places the trials within a long tradition – a tradition that Hone consciously and strategically engaged – of comic/parodic opposition to the dominant structures of the British social order. Wood’s Hone is a knowledgeable historian and a crafty manipulator of language who knew very well how to undermine the elaborate linguistic forms and ritual practices in which the dominant discourses of Regency society were embodied.3 These historical and linguistic studies have made useful contributions towards mapping the discursive landscape of the later Regency period; the present essay extends their implications by demonstrating how both the textual strategies of parodic writing and the modes of publication, distribution and consumption of that writing served to further the reformist political agenda. Hone’s parodies of 1817 offer exemplary texts through which to examine this dynamic. This is partly because the arguments elaborated during the trials focused on the interesting formal problem of whether parody necessarily calls into question the authority of the parodied text, whether it necessarily undermines the authoritative ecclesiastical and governmental discourses of its society. Perhaps more important, however, enough historical evidence has survived regarding the distribution and readership of the parodies to demonstrate how they worked to extend popular literacy (and the political consciousness that goes with it) to a set of readers who had previously been excluded from

William Hone’s Liturgical Parodies

145

political knowledge and political discussion. The parodies, in other words, provide an unusually detailed picture of the intersections of literature and culture, and the parodies themselves make up a radical comic discourse having great potential to bring about the conditions necessary for social and political change – a potential perhaps even greater than the conventional radical rhetoric of committed and principled opposition.

I Hone produced The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism, The Political Litany, and The Sinecurist’s Creed in January of 1817, in the interim between the Spa Fields Riots and the suspension of Habeas Corpus. A few quotations from Wilkes’s Catechism – a satire on the pervasive servility of contemporary political practice – can serve to illustrate the stylistic tendencies of all three works. In this parody, a would-be ministerial placeman named ‘Lick Spittle’ answers questions put to him by an unnamed government minister. Having successfully repeated his ‘Articles of Belief’ (a declaration of Tory political commitments), Spittle is asked the set question: ‘What dost thou chiefly learn in these Articles of thy Belief?’ His answer: First, I learn to forswear all conscience, which was never meant to trouble me, nor the rest of the tribe of Courtiers. Secondly, to swear black is white, or white black, according to the good pleasure of the Ministers. Thirdly, to put on the helmet of impudence, the only armour against the shafts of patriotism. Shortly thereafter, Spittle’s questioner asks him to rehearse the ten ministerial commandments, and Spittle responds in part: VI Thou shalt not call starving to death murder. VII Thou shalt not call royal gallivanting adultery. VIII Thou shalt not say, that to rob the Public is to steal. Finally, when asked to repeat the ‘Minister’s Memorial’ – Hone’s version of the Lord’s Prayer – Spittle answers with: Our Lord who art in the Treasury, whatsoever be thy name, thy power be prolonged, thy will be done throughout the empire, as it is in each session. Give us our usual sops, and forgive us our occasional absences

146

Kyle Grimes

on divisions; as we promise not to forgive them that divide against thee. Turn us not out of our Places; but keep us in the House of Commons, the land of Pensions and Plenty; and deliver us from the People. Amen.4 The technique here is quite simple and it is not original with Hone.5 The parodist begins with a familiar cultural text; in this case, a wellknown section from the Book of Common Prayer. Next, he drains the ‘content’ from the original so that nothing remains but the empty yet still recognizable shell of its outward, ritualistic form. Finally, this shell is filled with a rather blunt satirical content calculated to expose and ridicule the corruption that, in Hone’s view, was eroding the legitimacy of British political institutions. It would be difficult for any reader or listener to miss the critique of bureaucratic sycophancy implicit in the name ‘Lick Spittle’ or the greedy self-interest reflected in the closing phrases of the ‘Minister’s Memorial’. Simple as this technique may have been, it proved highly effective as a way to circulate critical interpretations of the government. The reason for this stems partly from the nature of Hone’s audience – an audience that included semi-literate, hungry and discontented members of the working classes. While such readers could not be counted on to spell their way through elaborate philosophical arguments, they could be expected to know a number of the primary ‘texts’ – nursery rhymes, Christmas carols and English church liturgy, for instance – from a British oral tradition. One does not need to be fully literate, after all, to be able to take part in a church service or to tell nursery rhymes to one’s children. Hone consistently used these oral ‘texts’ as the formal bases for his parodies and the sheer familiarity of the borrowed forms apparently made the resulting parodies accessible even to those novice readers who might have stumbled over more abstract social and political analysis. More importantly, these same forms, even in their parodied versions, maintain enough of their oral quality to make them especially serviceable in various forums of communal reading such as coffeehouse and alehouse readings, street recitations and reformist meetings. This is significant both in terms of the circulation of Hone’s political thinking and in terms of the bonds of solidarity these texts established within particular readerships. During the Regency period, for example, one common way to distribute such ephemeral literature as ballads, broadsheets and topical political dialogues involved the use of street vendors. According to the Victorian ethnographer, Henry Mayhew, the

William Hone’s Liturgical Parodies

147

patterers (as they were called) would establish themselves on a street corner and then literally perform the works they were selling. The question and answer format of the catechism, like the call and response format of Hone’s Political Litany, made particularly apt scripts for this impromptu street theatre. In fact, one of Mayhew’s interviewees was an old patterer who recalled the popularity of Hone’s parodies, although he also admitted that Hone’s arrest and trial made such street-level performance somewhat risky: Though there was no new police in them days, there was plenty of officers and constables ready to pull the fellows up, and though Hone was acquitted, a beak that wanted to please the high dons, would find some way of stopping them that sold Hone’s things in the street, and so next to nothing was done in that way, but a little was done.6 The patterer’s comments demonstrate the sheer pervasiveness of government repression, but such anti-radical tactics were not nearly so effective as they might at first appear. Instead, the efforts of those who would silence the patterers served chiefly to drive them into alternative discursive venues. Mayhew describes, for instance, how purveyors of comic but politically suspect literature would often be invited into parlours and tap rooms where the door could be locked against unwanted interference and where the patterer would be well rewarded ‘for going through his catechisms’.7 Mayhew’s suggestive comments about the circulation of Hone’s works are substantiated by the Home Office correspondence from the early months of 1817. Alarmed by what they perceived as the signs of social and political unrest sparked by seditious and blasphemous publications, many local magistrates, clergymen and concerned royalists wrote to Lord Sidmouth to keep him apprised of the circulation of these tracts. The letters offer a remarkable documentary account of the dissemination of radical discourse in the Regency period, and frequently they emphasize an oral aspect to this dissemination. The following excerpt, from a letter dated 22 February 1817 and signed by one William Margette, is fairly typical: Having occasion to call at a public house this morning to enquire after a person who said he lodged at the Royal Oak in Huntingdon I called, in consequence of mistaking the sign, at the Spread Eagle, where in the common sitting Room about 8 oclock Henry Brown,

148

Kyle Grimes

who drives the mail coach from Huntingdon to London & back, was sitting in the window reading aloud the inclosed Pamphlet to 10 or 12 persons who were very merry on the occasion – Brown read the Book with some humour, & appeared to read louder while I was speaking to the landlord Mr Severs . . . I staid but a short time in the Room, yet long enough to hear that the Book was of mischievous tendency.8 The book in question here is Hone’s Sinecurist’s Creed and Margette goes on to report a conversation later that afternoon with Brown in which the coachman claims to have purchased from a bookshop in Ware some twenty-five copies of the work. At this point, he had already either sold or given away all twenty-five. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that the informal public house reading which Margette had accidentally overheard was hardly an isolated event. In any case, another letter, from a Charles Selby and dated 17 March 1817, offers a different glimpse of such theatrical public house performance: There is a Printer in Penzance, my Lord, named George Cock, a dissenter, who with one of the same persuasion, goes about from one public house to another reading to large parties this execrable parody [Hone’s Political Litany] . . . On these occasions, his companion with ridiculous mimicry groans, at every paragraph, an ‘amen,’ and ‘Glory be to God’.9 Two important points emerge from these instances of public sphere readings of Hone’s parodies. First, the collective, theatrical mode of reading touches upon one crucial source of power underlying the works – the ability to consolidate audiences through active participation in the oral performance of the text. Jon Klancher has argued that periodical publications in the same period established their readerships in part through their ‘letters to the editor’ sections; every reader of the journal could theoretically become a writer, and thereby a kind of virtual discursive community develops under the banner of that journal’s title.10 An analogous process occurs here in this oral context. Because the ritualistic cultural forms upon which the parodies were based demand an active response on the part of the listeners, those listeners would be collectively encouraged to take on the role of speaker and vice versa. Hone’s parodies were thus able to generate distinct audiences among the heretofore undifferentiated ‘masses’ of non-literate or semi-literate persons whose literature, until

William Hone’s Liturgical Parodies

149

this historical moment, had been primarily in the less overtly politicized form of chapbooks and popular ballads. In so doing, the parodies could also become instrumental in consolidating a nascent class consciousness among the British ‘lower orders’ and they could extend this consciousness to include persons whose educational or financial limitations had previously excluded them from the reading communities collected loosely around particular journals or newspapers. The social and political implications of this process are self-evident. Second, Hone was able to exploit a kind of informal, underground distribution system in order to disseminate his work throughout England. During the previous century, the country was blanketed by as many as 20,000 pedlars whose wares typically included among other cheap household items an array of chapbooks and ballads, and, though the chapbook industry was on the wane in the early nineteenth century, this network for the dissemination of cheap literature was still intact. The coachman Brown is a case in point. His primary motivation in marketing Hone’s parodies seems to have been economic rather than political. He could purchase a quantity of the parodies at a discount from the bookseller, and then, because his occupation took him into several public houses along his route, he could read the pamphlets aloud and resell them at a profit to his merry audiences. Others were more openly political in their intentions. Some Hampden Club members, for instance, were routinely charged a penny-per-week fee, the monies from which went to the purchase and dissemination of various radical tracts including Hone’s. Likewise, the Home Office papers contain reports of some dedicated reformers who literally threw copies of radical publications into the open windows of passing mail coaches, apparently in hopes that the works would be carried to the far corners of the nation. An avid collector of Black Letter and chapbook literature, Hone was well aware of these unconventional modes of textual distribution. After all, Hone had grown up largely in the publishing and bookselling districts near St Paul’s churchyard where, in 1817, he maintained his own bookselling shops in Fleet Street and the Old Bailey. He was or had been acquainted with many of the major figures in the book trades, and at the same time, Hone knew personally many of the prominent radicals of the day such as Thomas Evans and his son, Richard Carlile, Major Cartwright and Francis Place, the last of whom was working with Hone to produce his weekly Reformists’ Register. Given this circle of friends and associates, it is perhaps not surprising that Hone’s parodies were so widely and so quickly disseminated, but,

150

Kyle Grimes

whether out of political commitment or economic opportunism, the fact remains that the parodies almost immediately found their way to an astonishingly large audience. Indeed, by the end of February, no fewer than ten provincial printers – among them Marshall in Newcastle, Molineux in Manchester, Russell in Birmingham, Jackson in Boston and Arnold in Bristol – were producing their own editions of at least one of Hone’s parodies. What had begun as an ephemeral, topical squib from Hone had in effect touched off an enormous and decentralized system of production and distribution, and Hone’s parodies circulated widely and freely, leavening the British readership with their distinct ethos of comic irreverence.

II At this level of analysis, the issue turns from the politics of Hone’s parodies per se to the political implications of the circulation of radical writing and of the act of reading. Walter Ong, whose voluminous work in the theory of orality repeatedly stresses the communal quality of oral performance, claims at one point that ‘thirty persons simultaneously reading copies of the same book side by side in a library do not constitute a group of the sort formed by thirty persons listening to the same direct, live, oral presentation. . . . Sound forms community as reading alone cannot’.11 The controversy over Hone’s parodies – the controversy that led to Hone’s arrest and imprisonment – did indeed centre on a battle between these two modes of reading. During the trials, Samuel Shepherd, chief prosecutor and the Attorney-General, raised the usual arguments brought forth in blasphemous libel cases: that Hone had intended to bring the scriptures and the Church of England into contempt and that the low price of the parodies was calculated to make the texts available to the lower orders of society who were, in Shepherd’s view, incapable of judging the merits of the publications. Shepherd goes on to describe what he took to be the pernicious psychological and social effects of the parodies. ‘I ask you’, he argues to the jury, if it be possible, that after such publications are thus cheaply thrown among this [lower] class of people, they can, with the same degree of reverence that becomes the subject, look at the contents of the Sacred Book of our belief? Nay, even in better cultivated minds, the firmness of moral rectitude is shaken, and it often becomes necessary to make great mental exertion to shake off the

William Hone’s Liturgical Parodies

151

influence of these productions, and recal [sic] the mind to a true feeling towards sacred truths.12 In the following day’s trial Shepherd’s focus on the social dissemination of Hone’s work becomes more specific as he claims that The express purpose of the book is clear, from its being circulated at a cheap rate, so as to be within the reach of the common and ordinary people. . . . There may be many writings which sensible men may read in their closets; some of them may be highly improper for general circulation.13 Hone’s parodies, Shepherd contended, were decidedly in the latter category. Shepherd’s arguments set forth, at least by implication, what the Attorney-General took to be a ‘proper’ mode of reading: the ideal reader (of religious language, at any rate) should be deferential, even reverent to the ‘sacred truths’ encapsulated in the written text. In other words, readers should grant such texts their institutionally sanctioned status as, in Bakhtin’s terms, fully authoritative discourse. They are by definition self-sufficient nuggets of language which are not subject to the reader’s questioning presence and not subject to the dialogical intertextuality characteristic of more mundane forms of discourse. Furthermore, if authoritative discourse is brought into an oral context, as in a church service, it is not with the aim of opening that discourse to dialogical interrogation or critical understanding. Instead, the oral context merely provides a forum in which the authoritative word can be transmitted intact to a number of relatively passive recipients.14 Shepherd does allow for a more actively critical mode of reading, but this he figures as a decidedly private activity – a kind of genteel, intellectual pastime that ‘sensible men’ do ‘in their closets’ and not the kind of communal theatrics described by Mayhew, the Home Office correspondents and others. Thus Shepherd posits a hierarchical reading public made up, on the one hand, of the ‘lower orders’ whose reading material must be rigorously selected and controlled and, on the other hand, of the ‘sensible men’ whose superior education and social standing would enable them to grapple safely with the vicissitudes of the printed word. Hone’s parodies obviously undermine the principles of ‘ideal reading’ presented in Shepherd’s speeches to the jury. At the purely formal level, the parodies are anything but deferential or reverent toward their

152

Kyle Grimes

models. They take, for instance, the measured cadences of the English liturgy not as the untouchable authoritative language of ‘sacred truth’, but as an affected, ritualized form that had become more a matter of mindless repetition than an embodiment of anything ‘sacred’. Hone recognized immediately that such an ossified form could be just as useful in the service of the reformists’ political agenda as it is in the services of the English church. Similarly, the parodies challenge the notion that active, critical reading is essentially a private matter. The title-pages of the works announce that they should be ‘Said or Sung Throughout the Kingdom’ and the popularity of the various oral performances of the texts suggests that Hone’s tongue-in-cheek direction was largely followed. The result of this theatrical mode of reading was the consolidation of a mass audience, now seen as the participants in the text’s performance rather than a mere aggregate of closeted individuals. This newly forged audience was unified by a marked irreverence toward figures of social and political authority. The political repression to which Hone fell victim in 1817, then, was not merely the reflection of a controversy over conflicting theories of government – one a holdover from eighteenth-century social hierarchies and one projecting a more equitably representative parliament. It was also a struggle over conflicting theories of the power of the printed word and of textuality itself. The particular strength of Hone’s parodies in this context lay in their ability, despite official efforts to squelch radical discourse, to reach a huge and diverse audience via a decentralized network of distribution, a kind of samizdat which was the legacy of a waning eighteenth-century chapbook and ballad literature. It is hardly surprising that the government tried to stop this circulation; after all, Hone’s parodies were both available and accessible to readers of virtually all social and economic classes and they tended thus to level the hierarchies within the British readership that Shepherd sought to enforce. But it is also not surprising that the government’s repressive efforts failed. The cumbersome machinery of libel prosecution simply cannot stifle a text that circulates primarily through the countless face-to-face interchanges of popular culture rather than through the more localized and tangible channels of the mainstream publishing industry.

III Much recent work in cultural and literary studies has focused on the sociology of reading and listening audiences. Robert Hume, for

William Hone’s Liturgical Parodies

153

instance, has noted that the study of audiences offers a point at which a given work’s historical contexts can be activated and brought to bear upon matters of textual interpretation.15 In a similar vein, Roger Chartier has claimed recently that, to understand the history of a language, a literature, a discourse, even a society, one needs especially to attend to ‘ways of reading that have disappeared in our contemporary world. One of these is reading aloud in its dual function of communicating the written word to those who are unable to decipher it themselves but also of cementing the interlocking forms of sociability that are emblematic of private life in the intimacy of the family circle, in worldly conviviality, and in literary circles and spheres of scholarly sociability.’16 The particular form of sociability fostered by Hone’s parodies, I would like to suggest in closing, is the disarmingly radical bond of laughter. Hone’s parodies appeared at an extremely contentious moment in English history. There were any number of factors that led to the tense and sometimes violent rifts that threatened to shiver British society into a dangerous and explosive factionalism: the economic distress of the lower and middle classes, the inequities of parliamentary representation, the excesses of the Prince Regent, and so forth. To control the inevitable unrest, the Liverpool administration increasingly resorted to techniques of repression ranging from ex officio prosecutions of printers and publishers like Hone to an outright suspension of Habeas Corpus. Radicals tried none the less to communicate their political ideas to a sizeable and unified audience – amongst other things they organized groups like the Hampden Clubs in which to debate current political issues, they called large public meetings, they sent petition after petition to a parliament that typically ignored their pleas, and they published and distributed radical literature. To put the case simply, England in 1817 was split between the forces of repression and the forces of rebellion, between the forces that were struggling to protect the traditional aristocratic, ecclesiastical and monarchical hierarchies of British culture and the forces that were ever more stridently opposing the very legitimacy of these traditional centres of power. Of course, both sides of this broad social debate were marked by the high seriousness with which they took both the issues and themselves, and in this regard there is little difference between the ministerial tyrants and the reformist demagogues. Whether it is Lord Sidmouth arguing in parliament for ever more draconian measures to control the reformists or ‘Orator’ Henry Hunt haranguing a reformist meeting about the evils of the present parliament, both

154

Kyle Grimes

sides are distinguished by a kind of self-righteous and centralized rhetoric. Both sides, in fact, tend to define themselves specifically in opposition to the other, and both sides implicitly set up their own ideological agendas as the truth and their own persons as the rightful spokesmen of that truth. The Hone parodies, however, offer a completely different rhetoric and a completely different political statement, one that counters the high seriousness of conventional political discourse with a comic discourse of parodic laughter. Take, for example, this incident from the working-class poet and activist Samuel Bamford, who was in London in early 1817 as a reformist delegate from the Manchester area. While in the metropolis, Bamford and his friend Mitchell decided to visit some friends who were serving in the military: I and Mitchell had with us, and it was entirely accidental, a few of Cobbett’s Registers, and Hone’s political Pamphlets, to which we sometimes appealed, and read extracts from. The soldiers were delighted; they burst into fits of laughter; and on the copies we had being given them, one of them read the Political Litany through, to the further great amusement of himself and the company.17 Here, then, is a clear instance of Chartier’s ‘worldly conviviality’. It is true, of course, that Hone’s Political Litany offers a distinctly unflattering picture of the English government. It is also true that Bamford was a dedicated and locally influential radical voice. But what is even more striking here is the effect of Hone’s comic discourse in this ‘entirely accidental’ meeting. Most radical, anti-government rhetoric sparks the predictable responses of anger, outrage and a concomitant call for change; Hone’s parody elicits the unifying social bond of laughter. The difference is crucial. The followers of, say, Hunt or Cobbett did indeed constitute a radical audience in the sense that they made up a political constituency united around the discourse of their hero. But, like the dominant governmental and ecclesiastical institutions they opposed, they maintained a hierarchical structure with the speaker or writer at the top and the audience set firmly in their subordinate positions as listeners or readers. Hone’s parodies, as we have seen, collapse these hierarchically structured speaker/writer, listener/reader relations. As is evident in Bamford’s account of the parodies and the soldiers, listeners to the oral performance suddenly become speakers, speakers become listeners, and in the ensuing ‘great amusement’, the developing bonds of a common ideology are consecrated with collective ‘fits of

William Hone’s Liturgical Parodies

155

laughter’. Such laughter is more deeply and profoundly seditious than even the Attorney-General dared to imagine, for it is the mark of exactly the kind of immediate, collective and infectious anti-authoritarianism that he was trying to stamp out of the public discourses of England. In the face of parodic laughter, those who take themselves seriously as social or political powers must inevitably appear pompous, ridiculous and absurd. It is hardly surprising, then, that during Hone’s trials, the exasperated justices were frequently bedevilled by eruptions of laughter from the galleries. What was supposed to be the awe-inspiring pomp and dignity of judicial authority proved to be powerless, ineffectual and even comical in the parodic context of collective laughter. What is more, the courtroom was a microcosm of English society at large. While they might be perfectly capable of silencing a conventional oppositional discourse of the sort uttered by Hunt and Cobbett, the seats of institutional power could not withstand the levelling force of laughter. Finally, then, what Hone’s parodies most clearly exemplify is a movement beyond the punch and counter-punch of conservative and radical rhetoric within the arena of conventional political debate. They reveal, in fact, a far more fundamental shift in the very structures of the British popular readership: a shift from an audience constituted as an aggregate of the relatively passive and isolated ‘receivers’ of a text that emanates from some central author or authority, to an audience constituted as a set of persons who themselves enact and embody a virtually authorless and freely circulating text and whose ideological unity is signalled in their reflexive, immediate and contagious laughter. The shift – one is tempted to call it the birth of the body politic – has obvious and far-reaching implications. Indeed, from the romantic period it points forward towards a distinctly modern world in which authority is always provisional and the techniques of mediation are often of more significance than the specific content of the messages they convey.

Notes 1. The research upon which this essay is founded was made possible by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and by a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I have also received generous assistance from Paula Backscheider and Iain McCalman. I am most grateful for this support. 2. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), p. 180. 3. Ibid., pp. 1–34, 154–201; Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1832 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 96–154.

156

Kyle Grimes

4. William Hone, The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member (London, 1817), no pagination. 5. For a more thorough analysis of Hone’s technique, see Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, pp. 114–20, 272–90. 6. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (1861–2; rpt. New York, 1968), I: 236. 7. Ibid. 8. Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office papers, HO 42/160, Margette to Lord Sidmouth, 22 February 1817. 9. PRO, HO 42/162, Selby to Lord Sidmouth, 17 March 1817. Iain McCalman also offers examples of such radical theatrics involving Hone’s texts. See especially his Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 122–3. 10. Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison, 1987). 11. Walter Ong, ‘Reading, Technology, and Human Consciousness’, in Literacy as a Human Problem, ed. James C. Raymond (Tuscaloosa, 1982), p. 184. 12. The Three Trials of William Hone (London, 1818), First Trial, p. 5. 13. Ibid., Second Trial, p. 6. 14. This is why one is encouraged to get religious language – the Lord’s Prayer, the answers to the catechism – by heart. Such language does not allow for creative manipulation on the part of either speakers or listeners/readers. Bakhtin’s comments are instructive in this regard: ‘It is not a free appropriation and assimilation of the word itself that authoritative discourse seeks to elicit from us; rather, it demands our unconditional allegiance. Therefore authoritative discourse permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with its authority – with political power, an institution, a person – and it stands and falls together with that authority.’ Michael Holquist, ed., The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), p. 343. 15. Robert Hume, ‘Texts Within Contexts: Notes Toward a Historical Method’, Philological Quarterly, 71 (1992), pp. 69–100. 16. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, 1994), p. 8. 17. Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, 2 vols. (1844; rpt. London, 1967), II: 22–3.

11 Political Economy and Popular Education: Thomas Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute, 1823–81 Gregory Claeys

Mechanics’ institutes were developed in the first half of the nineteenth century to further technical and adult education in Britain. Beginning in the early 1820s in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds and London, there were about 700 mechanics’ institutes and similar associations in Britain by 1850, with a membership of some 120,000. Such figures are misleading, however, for while many of these institutions have not yet been carefully studied, they have often been accounted a failure, since they never taught factory operatives skills directly related to their work, nor even attracted an audience composed primarily of mechanics. The reasons for this are varied, but some historians have detected a relationship between efforts to teach political economy in the institutes and their inability to fulfil their original intentions. For while they did develop teaching on a larger scale than similar organizations in this period, the teaching of political economy in particular remained controversial, and often contested by working-class radicals. These hypotheses have given rise to a debate about the ‘social control’ versus the ‘social mobility’ functions of the institutes in early Victorian Britain: were mechanics’ institutes intended to enforce an ‘orthodox’ view of political economy? Did they, in fact, primarily serve as a means of self-improvement for the upper level of the artisanate, clerks and others? This chapter explores these questions by examining one of the few well-documented controversies of this type, that which surrounded the first set of lectures on political economy offered at the London Mechanics’ Institute, founded in 1823. Here the political implications of teaching political economy to artisans and operatives (though there were comparatively few of the latter in London) were greatly in evidence when the radical writer and journalist, Thomas Hodgskin, was blocked 157

158

Gregory Claeys

for several years in his attempt to present an alternative view of the reward owed to the labourer and the capitalist to a London audience. For reasons which are still unclear, Hodgskin was finally permitted to deliver his lectures in 1826. They were published in full the following year under the title of Popular Political Economy, and remain highly significant for the interpretation of popular radicalism and its attempt to formulate a critique of Ricardianism in this period.2 The implications of the Hodgskin case for such teaching at other institutes is also explored briefly below.

Popular education and the founding of the London Mechanics’ Institute The mechanics’ institute movement had its origins in the confluence of a rising wave of concern for educational reform (in infants schools, Sunday schools and secondary as well as university education) and an increasing demand for the availability of technical education for artisans and mechanics or machine-operators who required training for new and rapidly expanding forms of technology.3 Prototypical organizations were established as early as the 1790s, when an artisans’ library was founded in Birmingham which became the Birmingham Brotherly Society in 1796. In 1823 the movement proper began with the organization of the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute in July (when the mechanics’ class at the Andersonian Institute seceded), the opening of the Liverpool Mechanics’ and Apprentices’ Library, and the founding of the London Institute in the autumn. The following few years witnessed a rapid expansion, with some decline evident during the 1830s and a marked collapse of the movement after the 1850s. From the outset significant disagreements about their aims divided the new institutions. Interested artisans and labourers, aiming at upward social mobility,4 none the less lacked the funds to set up educational institutions of this size on their own account. The well-todo were happy to oblige, but conceived one of their primary goals as ensuring greater social stability. These divergencies of intention were translated not only into struggles over curricula, but also into organizational disagreements over funding, the constitution of committees, opening hours and the choice of library books. Originally, many institutions sought to avoid such problems by retaining working-class control. The Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute, which principally inspired the foundation of the London Institute, was at its inception intended to be controlled and managed entirely by mechanics. Taking up this

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

159

theme in the capital were the two editors of the London Mechanics’ Magazine, J.C. Robertson and Thomas Hodgskin, who at a time of artisan struggle against the Combination Acts sought to extend radical and trades’ interests into other areas. Supporting them were such prominent subscribers as the venerable radical Major John Cartwright, who insisted that the mechanics’ institute ought to ‘remain exclusively in the hands of the operatives alone, for insuring prosperity to the institution, or good to the public’.5 Yet such resolutions were to little avail. The audience for whom the institution was intended proved unwilling or unable to meet the conditions imposed by the founders. It is generally agreed that by the early 1830s most mechanics had ceased to attend lectures at the London Institute, with their places being taken by commercial and professional men and their families. On the committee overseeing the affairs of the institution, too, Robertson and Hodgskin were displaced by supporters of George Birkbeck, Henry Brougham and Francis Place, whose political economy was considerably more Ricardian than Hodgskin’s. Much the same pattern of struggle seems to have taken place at many other mechanics’ institutes, though, as Edward Royle has written, London was ‘above all’ probably the chief instance of this. The social function of the institutes thus shifted and they became chiefly vehicles for the social mobility and cultural integration of the artisan elite and lowest strata of the middle classes. Some later institutions, such as the Manchester New Mechanics’ Institute, were founded in order to try to reverse this trend, but do not seem to have been notably successful in attracting a new audience.6 Control of the institutes themselves included power over curricula, especially the controversial subjects of politics and political economy. The latter was widely understood as a means of teaching the rights of private property, and of that of the capitalist and master-manufacturer in particular. During an 1826 debate on the proper course of studies at the Haddington School of Arts near Edinburgh, for example, the committee argued that the diffusion of political economy would alter the existing state of strife between masters and men: Our mechanics do not sufficiently know the limits of their own, nor the extent of their masters’ just rights.... Only let the working classes be .. . made acquainted with that particular science, part of whose object it is to elucidate the nature of the relation in which capitalists and labourers stand to each other; and we shall be as little disturbed by the spirit of combination, as by a revival of the spirit of witchcraft.

160

Gregory Claeys

Similar hopes were expressed by the Quarterly Review in an assessment of the first year’s operations of the London Mechanics’ Institute in 1825, when it was proposed that if the working classes could be made to understand the principles of political economy They would then perceive that inequality does not originate in the encroachments of the rich or the enactments of the powerful, but has been necessarily coeval with society itself in all its stages; they would learn that the recompense of labour is governed by definite principles, and must be determined, on the whole, by the number of candidates for employ.7 Reactions to such teaching were not monolithic. Some conservative journals objected to the predominant teaching of Ricardian political economy, which was at the peak of its popularity in the mid-1820s, and which argued that the interests of the working classes and manufacturing middle classes were in many respects – especially with regard to the price of corn – opposed to those of the aristocracy. The debate which first emerged around the London Institute, however, involved Whigs, radicals and socialists more than conservatives. The first initiative for founding the London Institute came in October 1823, when, at the instigation of Robertson, Thomas Hodgskin published an appeal in the Mechanics’ Magazine to London mechanics and artisans to set up an institution for their improvement in science, arts and manufactures. Amongst those who quickly took up the idea were George Birkbeck, the Benthamite and radical tailor Francis Place, and a group of veteran working-class radicals which included John Gale Jones and John Cartwright. A series of public meetings was held in November at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, at which a set of resolutions drawn up by Robertson were approved with slight modifications. A code of laws was then proposed, officers appointed and the process of enrolling members and collecting subscriptions begun. When building commenced in February 1824 a preliminary list of members numbered 1,300, while the subscribers included most of the leading London radical Whigs, such as James Mill (who gave £5), Ricardo (who had died in late 1823), the utilitarian George Grote, the leading radical journalist William Cobbett (who gave his contribution to Hodgskin with a sneer at all who had put their names forward without offering financial assistance), Place, Bentham and the radical MPs J.C. Hobhouse and Francis Burdett. Birkbeck was the main organizer of the funds in London and was president from the beginning. Henry Brougham played a central role in popularizing the scheme

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

161

through both the Edinburgh Review and in his widely circulated pamphlet, Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, Addressed to the Working Classes and Their Employers (1825).8 Lectures at London in the first year covered such subjects as chemistry, mechanics, geometry, hydrostatics, astronomy, electricity, the application of chemistry to the arts, and French. The following year evening courses were added in mathematics, drawing and architecture, while occasional lectures thereafter touched on such topics as air-guns, alligators, ancient armour and arsenic, to cite only the beginning of their index.9 Not all, however, were convinced that the Institute sought merely the innocent dissemination of harmless knowledge. The predominance of Whig and Whig-radical politicians among the supporters of the London Mechanics’ Institute led some to suspect that it was a radical reform institution in disguise, for its founding coincided with a revival of that reform agitation which resulted in the 1832 Reform Act. Some patrons thus issued stern injunctions against political activity of any kind at the Institute, and no less a personage than the Duke of Sussex soon warned that ‘anything like debating upon political or theological topics would be at once seized on for their destruction as a body’.10 Few curricular problems arose, however, until Hodgskin proposed to offer a course of twelve lectures on political economy. Born at Chatham on 12 December 1787 as the son of an Admiralty storekeeper, Hodgskin became a naval cadet at the age of twelve, remaining for some dozen years with the fleet, until his complaints about naval discipline led him to be placed upon the retired list with half pay at the rank of lieutenant. In Edinburgh in 1815, Hodgskin began to work on a metaphysical work to be entitled ‘Of Mind’, but at the war’s end began a three year tour of Europe in order to investigate forms of government and their effects upon national character. Upon the advice of Francis Place, whom he had befriended before leaving, Hodgskin began to write down his reflections. On his return to England he also became acquainted with James Mill and through the efforts of the latter acquired a place on the Morning Chronicle, where he agitated for the repeal of the Combination Acts. Through his Travels in North Germany (1820) his vehement espousal of the principle of liberty was known at least to the London Benthamites with whom he was acquainted, though his distaste for all forms of government opposition was more extreme than that of any others in this circle.11 It is not, therefore, surprising that Hodgskin soon fell out with his new acquaintances. Not long after the London Mechanics’ Institute was first

162

Gregory Claeys

suggested, he led a revolt (along with Robertson and various mechanic members of the committee) against the incipient upper- and middleclass financial control over the Institute, arguing that this would ‘at once lessen the power of the mechanics and in the end introduce another description of persons who would deprive them of all control over what ought to be their own institution’. When announced, this proposal generated considerable applause from the working men present at an organizational meeting. Place, however, headed opposition to the move and after several lengthy sittings got his own set of rules passed. It was still agreed that two-thirds of the managing committee should be workingclass members, but both Hodgskin and Robertson failed to be elected to the first committee in December 1823 and we can surmise that this was largely Place’s doing. Robertson in particular continued to press his views on the trend he thought the Institute was taking, however, delivering a strong counter-attack at the anniversary dinner in December 1824. Especially repugnant, he felt, was the virtual dependence of the Institute upon a loan of £3,700 from Birkbeck himself.12 On this issue Robertson was supported by the radical press.13 Birkbeck did his best to reconcile existing divisions on the matter, however, and by 1825 there is some evidence that Hodgskin had begun to move towards Birkbeck and away from Robertson, who was now no longer employed by the Mechanics’ Magazine. It was at this time, in June 1825, that Hodgskin proposed a set of twelve lectures to the Institute. Place immediately wrote to Birkbeck warning him that Hodgskin’s opinions were decidedly peculiar and at the next meeting of the committee Hodgskin’s offer was declined, with the Benthamite William Ellis instead being invited to lecture on the same subject. The following year, however, Hodgskin was allowed to give four lectures on the produce of labour.14 Later he offered a further three lectures on the ‘physiology of mind’, three on language and four on the progress of society. Place did manage to persuade Hodgskin not to write a book criticizing Ricardo, but was later to complain bitterly about the nonsense of ‘the Hodgskinite doctrine – the destruction of property and the debasement of the intellect’. But for the time being Hodgskin wasted little of this splendid opportunity to distinguish between his own views and those of Ricardo and his followers.15

Hodgskin’s ‘popular’ political economy Several of the central principles contended for in Hodgskin’s lectures had already been proposed in his Travels in North Germany.16 There he

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

163

had argued that the general police of society could always be better performed by individuals than by governments. Human laws were largely superfluous, since ‘the doctrines of political economy have taught us that there exist laws made by nature which are eminently productive of prosperity. . . . individual industry is the source of wealth’. Furthermore, Hodgskin had already formulated his conception of value, which centred on the notion that the ‘landlord and the capitalist produce nothing. Capital is the produce of labour, and profit is nothing but a portion of that produce’.17 These views Hodgskin expanded upon considerably in an anonymous pamphlet printed by the Mechanics’ Magazine in 1825, called Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital. Here he wrote again that ‘all the benefits attributed to capital arise from co-existing and skilled labour’, now adding that ‘wages vary inversely as profits; or wages rise when profits fall, and profits rise when wages fall.’ All profits, in this case, were derived only ‘from the power which the capitalist has over the labourer who consumes the circulating, and who uses the fixed, capital’. If the capitalist were actually a designer or builder of the instruments of production, he merited a reward in proportion to his labour. But this reward ought not to be greater than that earned by the users of such instruments, while ‘he who neither makes nor uses them has no just claim to any portion of the produce.’ Masters and journeymen who themselves worked were thus entitled to a reward as productive labourers, while those who merely lent money or let land were not. Only the labourers ought to decide what the reward for labour should be, moreover, though Hodgskin also insisted that if all forms of labour were perfectly free, the ‘higgling of the market’ would settle wages justly. ‘Honest industry’ was, however, at war with ‘idle profligacy’ in the meantime, but Hodgskin opposed any violent solution to the problem and in a Godwinian vein was highly suspicious of all forms of political activity.18 His political economy, Hodgskin explained, aimed to expound principles ‘more agreeable to popular prejudices than those which have been made prevalent, though still unpopular, by the writings of Mr. Malthus’. Yet while Hodgskin did contend that the labourer merited a much greater proportion of his produce than he then received, he none the less opposed much radical opinion in condemning all forms of governmental interference, specifically disclaiming any practical programme of political reform at all and even stating that ‘as far as legislation is concerned, the book contains no practical applications whatever.’19 Equally important for Place,

164

Gregory Claeys

however, was certainly the growing influence of Owenism in London after 1825. Centred on the London Co-operative Society, the Owenites preached a doctrine of the relative rights of labour and capital similar to Hodgskin’s, but (with the partial exception of William Thompson) had little faith in the beneficial tendencies of natural economic laws. They therefore urged more interference to alleviate the distress of the poor and solve the problem of unemployment arising from new machinery. The Owenites had gained in strength sufficiently for the young John Stuart Mill and a few members of his Utilitarian Society to engage in a series of debates with them in 1824 and it is quite possible that Place in particular felt that Hodgskin could contribute to this counter-attack.20 Popular Political Economy, in fact, was principally a paean to the existence of immutable natural laws regulating and determining the production of wealth, which for Hodgskin had only to be recognized in order to be applied correctly. These laws, Hodgskin claimed, had been ‘that great man’ Adam Smith’s concerns after he had carefully distinguished between ‘the natural distribution of wealth from the distribution which is derived from our artificial right of property.’ His successors amongst the political economists, however – Ricardo and his followers were indicated – had not only failed to make such a distinction, but had argued that the consequences of a mere ‘artificial right of property’ had the status of ‘laws of Nature’. They thus sought to use the authority of the new science to defend a much greater inequality than Hodsgkin felt Smith had envisaged as resulting from commercial freedom. It was precisely this view which Hodgskin aimed to refute.21 Hodgskin’s conception of natural laws in Popular Political Economy was in fact much more strongly posed than Smith’s had been in the Wealth of Nations. No distinction was admissible between those laws analysed by political economy and those, for example, described in chemistry, since ‘the laws which regulate the production of wealth form a part of the system of the universe’. The origins of such laws were for Hodgskin clearly divine and their operations providential, and he insisted that ‘if the general welfare be not willed by him who created and governs the world, legislators cannot achieve it; if it be, their interference is useless’. The mode by which these laws operated, and with which political economy was centrally concerned, was through the principles of the ‘natural passions and affections’, interests and instincts which ‘not being suspended at any moment’, continued ‘to operate as powerfully when society is in its most

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

165

advanced state as at its commencement’. These laws were responsible for the natural progress of mankind through the stages of savagery, hunting, pasturage, agriculture and commerce, with their most important manifestation being man’s ‘natural but insatiable desire of providing for his wants and bettering his condition’, as well as the increase of population which throughout history had provided additional wants requiring satisfaction. By concerning itself exclusively with such laws, Hodgskin wrote, ‘political economy’ was a somewhat misnamed science, since it was ‘not a political science, prescribing regulations for society, or dictating duties to men’, but rather a ‘natural science’ which ascertained the natural circumstances which regulated wealth and the instincts by which mankind sought happiness and then left it as ‘a matter for private judgement. . . . left to private men’ as to whether industry was rendered productive or not.22 If Hodgskin’s views on natural law were capable of finding favour in many quarters, his attack on capitalists met the worse fears of Place and the Benthamites. It was again particularly Smith who Hodgskin invoked in emphasizing that ‘all wealth is created by labour, and there is no wealth which is not the produce of labour.’ But Hodgskin of course grounded his argument about the just distribution of wealth very differently from Smith. Unlike, for example, the Owenite John Gray, whose Lecture on Human Happiness had been published in 1825, Hodgskin did not seek to argue that only those who worked with their hands ought to be denominated ‘productive labourers’ and his use of the unproductive/productive distinction was even less hostile to unproductive labourers than Smith’s had been. Noting that those ‘who work chiefly with their hands may be apt to over-estimate their share in producing wealth’, Hodgskin in fact offered a spirited defence of the productive value of mental labour, concluding with respect to the general productivity of labour that ‘whenever labour is voluntarily paid for, or its products freely purchased, and the labourer can live by his labour, we must presume that it is productive both to him and the buyers. No industry is unproductive but that, the produce of which no person will buy, and which does not contribute to the individual’s subsistence or gratification.’ This was therefore not a particularly heterodox interpretation of this distinction, and was shared by J.R. McCulloch, James Mill and other Ricardians.23 But Hodgskin’s conception of productivity had two aims: to avoid the more radical ‘manualist’ definition by which mental labour appeared to merit no reward and to attack those who did not labour at all. Here the capitalist-as-investor and the inactive landlord who

166

Gregory Claeys

merely collected rent were the specific targets. What was crucial here, therefore, was the fact of work itself. Hodgskin had a vitalist or activist conception of productivity which was mainly inspired by (though it differed considerably from) Locke’s account of labour in the state of nature. Centrally, therefore, he distinguished between employers who worked in some way in their own enterprises, and ‘capitalists’ who did not, and here departed dramatically from the Ricardian tradition in identifying the capitalist (but not the manufacturer) as an enemy to the working classes: The capitalist being the mere owner of the instruments, is not, as such, a labourer. He in no manner assists production . . . the labourers must share their produce with unproductive idlers, and to that extent less of the annual produce is employed in reproduction. According to Hodgskin every attempt by the capitalist to take profit retarded the ability of the labourers to extend both their own comforts and their further production and use of the instruments of production, such that ‘accumulation of capital in the present state of society checks production, and consequently checks the progress of population, the division of labour, the increase of knowledge, and of national wealth.’ Here he virtually concurred with the socialists, though the latter saw ‘competition’ as the root cause of distress and chief limit upon the existing system of production rather than capital accumulation alone.24 The anarchistical and anti-capitalist elements in Hodgskin’s lectures distinguished him from most of the leading sponsors of the London Mechanics’ Institute, though his anti-statism was not so far removed from the political views of many fervent free traders. Nor did his hostility to the idle rich vary from radical prejudice (though they aimed more at the aristocracy). Most of the remainder of Hodgskin’s lectures did not depart markedly, however, from being a commentary upon the main themes in Smithian political economy. He devoted considerable effort to explaining the principles and operations of the division of labour, which had been assailed by most socialists, and to describing the way in which trade came about. But he also included a defence of the utility of retail traders (who were under attack by the Owenites as a burden upon the consumer) as well as wholesale dealers, arguing that in moving commodities to areas of greater demand, the dealer created wealth ‘as much as the man who, by converting wool into cloth, adapts it to the purposes of clothing.’ This was consistent

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

167

with his view of the productive/unproductive distinction. But again Hodgskin was at pains to distinguish between the ‘highly useful’ labour of merchants as a whole, and the activities of ‘gambling speculators’ who attempted to become wealthy through ‘effecting by various falsehoods and tricks, a turn of the markets, or a rise and fall in the price of the Stocks’. Such individuals might still themselves be productive labourers, but none the less deserved to be condemned. This left Hodgskin with a somewhat incoherent position, but he was clearly not a critic of ‘capitalism’ in the sense of a system of employing labour. Instead, he assailed not employers but rather only those who lived upon what we now term unearned income.25 Besides his consideration of the general effects of the accumulation of capital, Hodgskin’s lectures concluded with some analysis of both money and price. It is scarcely surprising that he was mainly interested in condemning all governmental interference with the manufacture and supply of money and lent his support instead to a system of private bank notes. In examining the distinction between what he termed ‘natural’ and ‘social’ price, Hodgskin concentrated on refuting Ricardo’s theory of rent and food prices by arguing that on the whole a decreasing amount of labour was required to produce food in the progress of society, such that its price in the long run ought to fall no matter what kind of land was brought into cultivation. Here it was the political power of the landed classes which enabled them to establish an artificial, monopoly price for corn, thus driving the actual price far above the natural price.26 These, then, were the main ideas outlined by Hodgskin in the first set of lectures on political economy offered to a mechanics’ institute audience whose details can be reconstructed. Hodgskin did not lecture on political economy again, but this was not by any means the end of his career as an economic writer. Five years later he published another extensive tract entitled The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, which concentrated on exploring Locke’s argument that property existed prior to the formation of government, strongly reaffirmed the right of individuals to the produce of their own industry (tying this to notions of individuality and personality), and placed great faith in the growing powers of the middle classes and their desire for freedom and equality, as well as in the laws of nature, assisted as these were by divine providence. Once again, he condemned the fact that, in contrast to the co-operative principles suggested by the division of labour, legislators continued to follow the logic of conquest, which originally underlay all government and legislation. Both here

168

Gregory Claeys

and during the 1840s, as a fervent advocate of free trade in corn, Hodgskin attacked governmental intervention in the economy as an affront to the laws of nature and retained an undiminished Lockean belief in the foundation of property in personal identity. He remained, thus, amongst the most radical liberals of his age. After the late 1820s, however, Hodgskin played little part in public activities, devoting himself mainly to journalism, assisting Hansard with his Parliamentary Debates, and working hard to support his seven children and frequently ill wife. In 1846 he joined the Economist, remaining twelve years but eventually breaking with its editor, James Wilson, apparently on the issue of prison reform and capital punishment. From 1848 to 1853 he was also in close contact with Herbert Spencer, at that time a sub-editor on the paper and busily engaged in developing his own semi-anarchist doctrine of economic and social liberalism. In this period Hodgskin’s views did not markedly alter; he waxed enthusiastically about the repeal of the Corn Laws and continued to condemn all socialistic schemes, but denied as well that industry was in any sense limited by the accumulation of capital.27 He gave a few poorly attended lectures on crime in the later 1850s, and died in obscurity on 21 August 1869.28

Political economy teaching at other mechanics’ institutes The circumstances surrounding Hodgskin’s lectures at the London Mechanics’ Institute reveal how highly politicized the teaching of political economy was and there is evidence of some alarm within the circle of London utilitarians at the possible effects of Hodgskin’s lectures. Place in particular thought Hodgskin’s ‘mad nonsense’ preached ‘with the zeal of perfect fanaticism’ had ‘induced thousands to believe that everything produced belonged to the individual producers each in his own right’.29 Perhaps feeling some pangs of conscience for having promoted Hodgskin in Whig-radical circles, Place now took it upon himself to undo some of the damage by an extensive letter-writing campaign in the London radical press.30 Other efforts to push Ricardian principles were also exerted. When Brougham and others founded the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) in the autumn of 1826, for example, the publication of strictly acceptable views on political economy was apparently seen as a principal aim of the Society. Besides publishing a tract by McCulloch and four volumes by Harriet Martineau on ‘Illustrations of the Poor Laws’, the SDUK also brought out in 1831 an anonymous

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

169

attack by Charles Knight on Hodgskin’s views of profit upon capital entitled The Rights of Industry, which apparently sold very well, though its condemnation of Hodgskin actually encouraged some to read Labour Defended. The Society’s Penny Magazine also zealously pursued the simple message, ‘Industry left free – this is indeed the whole lesson which political economy teaches’ – a sentiment which Hodgskin no doubt applauded.31 In the middle and later 1830s the Whig-radical ascendancy in the London Institute left working-class radicals irritated at the ‘Mechanics’ Institute Humbug’ of Roebuck and others. None the less the rooms of the Institute, at least, were left available for other organizations to use and by the end of the 1820s the Owenite British Association for the Promotion of Co-operative Knowledge was using the premises and a year later already attacking the lectures given at the Institute by Robert Wilmot Horton, who counselled emigration as a remedy for unemployment. Owen himself also commenced a course of lectures there, though these were cancelled by the management, no doubt alarmed by his opinions, after the first meeting.32 The experience of London doubtless made other institutions reluctant to touch on such subjects. This was true, in fact, for arts and humanities subjects generally. Sceptical as to all knowledge which was not directly related to the natural world, the Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine warned that ‘we know nothing of the nature of mind in itself, and possess only some questionable facts respecting its laws’, though when it did treat texts on political economy its editors fully accepted Malthus’ opinion that the only recourse labourers had in a state of falling wages was to restrict their numbers through voluntary population control.33 At Aberdeen in 1825 the Reverend Forbes warned its Mechanics’ Institute that belles lettres, political economy and history were dangerous subjects. Though Brougham cautioned against the total exclusion of both politics and theology in institutes, the latter commonly forbade their libraries to acquire works which dealt with either party politics or controversial theological topics, as did the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute. The intentional pursuit of ‘harmony’ led to some clear cases of deliberate censorship. The Warrington Mechanics’ Institute, for example, discontinued the liberal Monthly Chronicle in 1829 ‘on account of its being Party Political’, and first defaced and then destroyed some books sent from London because they were ‘filled with Owenism’. Similarly the Manchester Institute excluded Godwin’s Political Justice from its library in August 1834. Only in the case of Brighton, in fact, where the co-operator Dr William King was instrumental in founding the

170

Gregory Claeys

Mechanics’ Institute in 1825, is a clear link between an institute and even non-Owenite co-operative ideas evident and it is not known how far this affected teaching there.34 When political economy teaching was introduced, it frequently met what the Owenite New Moral World described as ‘the most determined opposition’. By the early 1840s, however, such resistance seems to have abated somewhat, or at least to have been simply ignored by those patrons willing to alienate some portion of their potential membership. Political economy thus became much more successfully integrated into the course of lectures at provincial mechanics’ institutes, albeit with a quite different audience than that originally intended to fill the seats of lecture halls.35 Instruction in political economy seems to have been part of most mechanics’ institutes at one time or another. One E. Mackenzie lectured twice on the ‘Effects of Machinery on the Condition of Mankind’ at Newcastle in 1825–6, emphasizing the comforts and happiness which further mechanization would bring. Brougham himself edited, though he never gave, a course of lectures in 1835, which were delivered at Manchester and Liverpool and made available for circulation elsewhere through the Yorkshire Union of mechanics’ institutes. One of the Baines family lectured at Keighley on ‘The Moral Influences of Unrestricted Commerce’, while at Stockport the leading free trader Richard Cobden offered book prizes for essays on the effects of machinery and on the relations between capital and labour.36 The course of lectures at the Manchester New Mechanics’ Institute in 1831–2 certainly included political economy, while at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institute eight lectures out of fifty-three in 1848 were devoted to the subject.37 One strongly Malthusian lecture on ‘The True Principles and Mutual Relation of Population and Wages’, which contained a sharp attack on trade unionism, was delivered at the Leeds Mechanics’ Institute in 1825, with four more offered in 1826–7. A plan for a course of lectures was enthusiastically proposed at Halifax in 1833, though for some reason it was never followed up. The library of the Bradford Mechanics’ Institute contained works by Babbage, Ure, McCulloch, Malthus, Martineau, Mill and Senior, though how often these were read remains unclear.38 What can be said about the effects of such teaching upon their audiences? No doubt members attending regularly were raised to a somewhat higher level of sophistication in their views of the science, such that there were fewer repetitions of the complaint voiced by a mechanic in 1825, who wrote that having been advised to read

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

171

Malthus and Smith, he ‘did not hesitate to acknowledge that such works are too learned and metaphysical for our comprehension’ and turned instead to the popular Dialogues on Political Economy.39 Politically it would seem that the essentially Whiggish bent of much of what was taught alienated both conservatives, who denounced the institutes as schools of radicalism, and radicals, who were equally convinced that acceptance of the existing political and economic system was the intended message of such lectures, even if there was supposedly no overtly partisan connection between political economy and politics. Nor should we discount the effects of the fact that the virtues enjoined in many natural science lectures before working-class audiences – extolling the perseverance, dedication and perhaps voluntary sexual restraint of the Watts, Arkwrights and other heroes of industry – also coincided with the moral teaching which accompanied many political economy classes and with the culture of low science generally.40 For those sceptical about the content of political economy teaching, it was advisable not to have any such lectures at all rather than to continue to mislead working-class audiences. The Leeds socialist James Hole argued in the first separate history of the mechanics’ institute movement written in 1853 that However valuable lectures on political economy would be . . . the time has not yet arrived when they can be offered with advantage; because the spirit of party is still too violent to give all views a fair chance. . . . This course has not been, and cannot be, adopted in mechanics’ institutes, and, therefore, any attempt to convey economic doctrine, ‘sound or unsound’, through their media must prove a failure. In fact, such alternative locations for the teaching of political economy had already been founded in the late 1830s, particularly in the form of the Owenite Halls of Science, where the socialists held lectures, teas and soirées. These institutions, in fact, can be understood as emerging in part directly from artisan dissatisfaction with the management of mechanics’ institutes. By 1841, £32,000 (much of it raised from small contributions from artisans) had been spent on halls which were capable of holding a combined audience of some 22,000. It was at the Manchester institution (which cost £6,000 and with a capacity of 2,000 had the largest hall in the city) in the following year that the young Friedrich Engels first became

172

Gregory Claeys

acquainted with the Owenite critique of political economy at the Sunday lectures of the highly popular John Watts. Since many Halls had both Sunday and day schools it is likely that in diluted form Owenite political economy was also integrated into juvenile instruction, for children especially were regarded as the harbingers of the new moral world. Some Chartist Halls and schools also included political economy teaching, though this was by no means as theoretically refined or central to their movement as it was for the Owenites.41 In a number of cases, too, Owenite organizers and lecturers were prominent in their local mechanics’ institute before becoming active in Halls of Science, and often expressed considerable disgust with the management of the mechanics’ institutes, as Isaac Ironside did at Sheffield. The Owenite associations, however, were even less successful than those mechanics’ institutes which had sought to retain exclusive working-class control. One at Bristol was destroyed by an anti-socialist mob anxious to eradicate the spread of infidelity. The others were sold off at great losses when the socialist movement began to collapse after 1841. A similar fate, however, befell many of their competitors. By 1849 only forty-three mechanics’ institutes remained (out of a total of some 204), which were supported primarily by operatives and mechanics. The teaching of political economy, and the political associations which such instruction often included, certainly assisted the decline of the mechanics’ institute movement after mid-century, at least in so far as working-class members were induced to form more independent institutions or abandon such educational efforts entirely. But so too did the upward social mobility of those artisans and lower middleclass supporters of the institutes in the 1820s and 1830s, who now went elsewhere for their further education. The changing character of the provincial scientific community and its interests was also a part of this process. With the founding of the civic universities, too, much of the former educational function of the institutes was finally removed.42 If mechanics’ institutes ‘failed’, therefore, it was primarily in their inability to adapt to popular demand, and particularly to provide courses of interest to the unskilled members of the working classes as well as a more precise and useful technical education for those above them. Mechanics’ institutes achieved the social function of helping to educate the ascendant lower middle and upper working classes, but then failed to become the educational adjunct of the industrialization process itself. And some of the blame for this failure, as we have seen, lies in the problem of political economy teaching.

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

173

Notes 1. I am grateful to Istvan Hont and Keith Tribe for comments on an earlier draft of this article. 2. See David Stack, Nature and Artifice: the Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin, 1787–1869 (London, 1998), pp. 62–88. 3. See J.W. Hudson, A History of Adult Education, in Which is Comprised a Full and Complete History of the Mechanics’ and Literary Institutions (London, 1851). The Midlands is well covered in Mabel Tylecote, The Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire Before 1851 (Manchester, 1957). Also see Ian Inkster, ‘The Social Conext of an Educational Movement: A Revisionist Approach to the English Mechanics’ Institutes, 1820–1850’, Oxford Review of Education, 2 (1976), pp. 277–302; Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, ‘Science, Nature and Control: Interpreting Mechanics’ Institutes’, Social Studies of Science, 7 (1977), pp. 31–74; and Edward Royle, ‘Mechanics’ Institutes and the Working Classes, 1840–1860’, Historical Journal, 14 (1971), pp. 305–21. The general educational background is outlined in Victor Neuberg, Popular Education in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1971); and Michael Sanderson, Education, Economic Change and Society in England, 1780–1870 (London, 1983). 4. See Richard Johnson, ‘Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England’, Past and Present, no. 49 (1970), pp. 96–119. 5. Thomas Kelly, George Birkbeck, Pioneer of Adult Education (Liverpool, 1957), pp. 74, 77; The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, ed. F.D. Cartwright, 2 vols. (London, 1826), II: 252. 6. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago, 1957), p. 191; Royle, ‘Mechanics’ Institutes’, p. 306. 7. Cited in Alexander Tyrrell, ‘Political Economy, Whiggism and the Education of Working-Class Adults in Scotland, 1817–40’, Scottish Historical Review, 48 (1969), p. 158; Quarterly Review, 32 (1825), pp. 420–1. 8. Mechanics’ Magazine, 16 June 1827, pp. 382–4; Leader, 15 January 1859, p. 85; Hudson, History of Adult Education, pp. 48–53; Kelly, George Birkbeck, pp. 76–98; Wooler’s British Gazette, 16 November 1823, p. 185; ibid., 7 December 1823, p. 211; Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, pp. 18–25. 9. Leader, 15 January 1859, p. 85; New London Mechanics’ Register, 2 vols. (London, 1827–8). 10. Cited in Hudson, History of Adult Education, p. 51. 11. See Kelly, George Birkbeck, pp. 76–98; C. DeLisle Burns, A Short History of Birkbeck College (London, 1924); and, on Hodgskin, Elie Halévy, Thomas Hodgskin (London, 1956). 12. British Library, Add. MSS 27823, fos. 254–5; Kelly, George Birkbeck, pp. 83–98; Halévy, Hodgskin, p. 91. 13. See, for example, Trades’ Newspaper, 17 July 1825, p. 7. 14. See Trades’ Newspaper, 2 October 1825, p. 177. 15. British Library, Add. MSS 35149, fo. 120. 16. On Hodgskin’s economic ideas, see Werner Stark, The Ideal Foundations of Economic Thought (London, 1948), pp. 52–103; and E.K. Hunt, ‘Value Theory in the Writings of the Classical Economists, Thomas Hodgskin and

174

Gregory Claeys

Karl Marx’, History of Political Economy, 9 (1977), pp. 322–45. 17. Thomas Hodgskin, Travels in the North of Germany, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1820), I: 73, 467; II: 97. On Lockean and Smithian socialism, see Noel Thompson, The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816–34 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 82–110; and my Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–60 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. xxii-xxvi. 18. Thomas Hodgskin, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (London, 1922), pp. 19, 27–8, 70–1, 85–6, 90, 103. 19. Thomas Hodgskin, Popular Political Economy (London, 1827), pp. xix–xx. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. xxii. 22. Ibid., pp. viii; 266; xi; 84–5; 38–9; 3. 23. Ibid., pp. 19; 46; 49–50. 24. Ibid., pp. 245–6. 25. Ibid., pp. 145–52; 173; 176–7. 26. Ibid., pp. 178–235. 27. Spirit of the Age, 3 March 1848, pp. 212–13; Economist, 1 March 1851, p. 235; ibid., 29 April 1854, p. 458; ibid., 18 November 1854, p. 1270. Hodgskin’s views on free trade are most clearly stated in A Lecture on Free Trade, in Connexion with the Corn Laws (London, 1843). Also see his Peace, Law and Order (London, 1842). 28. Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (London, 1832), pp. 16–17, 25–9, 148, 161; Spirit of the Age, 3 March 1849, pp. 212–13. On Hodgskin’s later career, see Halévy, Hodgskin, pp. 127–66. 29. British Library, Add. MSS 27791, fo. 263; Add. MSS 35149, fo. 120; Alexander Bain, James Mill, A Biography (London, 1882), pp. 364–5. 30. See, for example, Trades’ Newspaper, 29 January 1826, pp. 455–6. 31. [Charles Knight], The Rights of Industry, 2nd edn (London, 1831), pp. 56–8; Poor Man’s Guardian, 1 (1831), p. 220; Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 23 June 1832, p. 119. On the SDUK, see F.A. Cavenagh, ‘Lord Brougham and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’, Journal of Adult Education, 4 (1929), pp. 3–37; T.L. Jarman, ‘Charles Knight, an Educational Pioneer’, Journal of Adult Education, 6 (1932–4), pp. 176–85; William Kennedy, ‘Lord Brougham, Charles Knight and the Rights of Industry’, Economica, 19 (1962), pp. 58–71; and J.N. Hays, ‘Science and Brougham’s Society’, Annals of Science, 20 (1964), pp. 227–41. 32. Bonnet Rouge, 25 February 1833, p. 17; Lion, 15 May 1829, pp. 609–14; Penny Papers for the People, 31 December 1830, pp. 4–6; Edward Brynn, ‘Politics and Economic Theory: Robert Wilmot Horton, 1820–1841’, Historian, 34 (1972), p. 267. Owen did finally lecture at the London Institute in early 1840. See his Socialism, or the Rational System of Society. Three Lectures Delivered in the Mechanics’ Institute, London (London, 1840). 33. Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine, 1 (1824), p. 26; ibid., 5 (1826), pp. 217–21, 262–8, 285–8. 34. Hudson, A History of Adult Education, pp. 59, 131; H. Brougham, Practical Observations upon the Education of the People, 6th edn (London, 1825), p. 22; W.B. Stephens, Adult Education and Society in an Industrial Town:

Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

175

Warrington, 1800–1900 (Exeter, 1980), p. 53; Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, pp. 110, 134; T.W. Mercer, Co-operation’s Prophet: The Life and Letters of Dr William King of Brighton, and the Co-operator, 1828–30 (Manchester, 1947), p. 12. New Moral World, 24 November 1838, p. 72. The Third Annual Report of the . . . Mechanical Institute of Newcastle upon Tyne (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1827), p. 4; Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, pp. 117–18. R.G. Kirby, ‘An Early Experiment in Workers’ Self-Education: The Manchester New Mechanics’ Institute, 1829–35’, in From Artisan to Graduate, ed. D.S.L. Cardwell (Manchester, 1974), p. 92; Hudson, A History of Adult Education, pp. 79–80. J.F.C. Harrison, ‘“The Steam Engine of the New Moral World”: Owenism and Education, 1817–1829’, Journal of British Studies, 6 (1967), pp. 80–4; A.D. Garner and E.W. Jenkins, ‘The English Mechanics’ Institutes: The Case of Leeds, 1824–42’, History of Education, 13 (1984), pp. 139–52. Trades’ Newspaper, 6 November 1825, p. 257. Kelly, George Birkbeck, p. 226; Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, p. 43. James Hole, An Essay on the History and Management of Literary,Scientific and Mechanics’ Institutions (London, 1843), p. 66. On Owenism’s educational efforts, see A. Black, ‘Education before Rochdale: the Owenites and the Halls of Science’, Co-operative Review, 29 (1955), pp. 42–4; and Brian Simon, Studies in the History of Education 1780–1870 (London, 1960), pp. 235–53. There is a part-Owenite, part-radical critique of mechanics’ institutes in W.H. Smith, ‘On the Tendency and Progress of Mechanics’ Institutes’, The Analyst, 2 (1835), pp. 333–8. New Moral World, 30 January 1841, p. 70; ibid., 25 May 1844, p. 384; Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern British Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), p. 305; Royle, ‘Mechanics’ Institutes and the Working Classes’, p. 305; Inkster, ‘The Social Context of an Educational Movement’, pp. 298–9.

12 ‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution in Early Nineteenthcentury England Ian Dyck

The question of the missing revolution is a vexed one for historians of nineteenth-century England. For the British Left it has constituted the great enduring question of the twentieth century, fuelling much of the work of Edward Thompson and of historians associated with New Left Review and the History Workshop movement.1 But the question of the missing or lost revolution has not been the monopoly of the Left, for commentary on this great non-event has ranged across the ideological divides of Regency and Victorian historiography. The question has even figured prominently in the work of historians of conservative methodologies, including some who probably would not defend counter-factual or ‘virtual’ history in other contexts.2 If Marx patented the theoretical formulation of the missing revolution question, and Engels the empirical, it was the social democratic Hammonds – ready partisans of proletarian insurgents – who installed it at the centre of left-leaning interpretations of the Industrial Revolution. Why, they essentially asked, did the proletarian and artisanal English fail to overthrow a political-economic system that demolished workers’ living standards and crucified popular rights over a fifty-year period? The Hammonds did not offer much in the way of an express answer (partly because they were radical liberals rather than Marxists, and partly because they were unnerved by the claims of J.H. Clapham that living standards actually improved during this period) but one cannot read The Village Labourer or The Town Labourer without speculating about the requisites of revolution, particularly the capacity of England to remain a revolution-free zone during the Bleak Age.3 It took a contemporary and friend of the Hammonds, the Frenchman Elie Halévy, to tackle the question boldly and directly. 176

‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution

177

Always curious about the temperament of the menu peuple of England and preferring Cartesian deductive reasoning to Baconian induction, Halévy could not resist an elaborate formulation of the missing revolution question. Why, he asked, was continental Europe, especially France, so frequently engulfed in revolution during the century after 1789 whilst the English floundered with periodic and regional insurgence which proved comparatively easy to subdue? Halévy’s notorious answer, namely the Methodist ‘counter-revolution’, was somewhat reductionist and ill-conceived, but his deductive reasoning and counter-factual method of raising and then discounting other possible explanations, was an innovative, non-linear contribution to Englishlanguage historical methods.4 All of these strands – Marx’s revolutionary theory and imperatives, the humanist reflections of the Hammonds and Halévy’s bewilderment about English exceptionalism – haunted and inspired Edward Thompson as he composed The Making of the English Working Class – doubtless one of the longest preambles to a non-event in the history of English historical writing. Almost forty years since its publication, and a half dozen since Thompson’s death, much continues to be written about the influence of The Making upon a generation of leftleaning historians who looked upon Thompson’s work and entreaties as a commission to dissect and analyse the radical platform of the 1790–1832 period. Cobbled together, these monographs and biographies demonstrate the breadth and width of the radical platform of the Regency years, yet for all this Thompson and his followers have failed to convince historians such as Malcolm Thomis and Gertrude Himmelfarb that revolution was imminent in the Regency years. Himmelfarb seriously doubts whether there were any serious revolutionary threats during Thompson’s period and in the process reveals her own ideological colours (at least as vividly as Thompson revealed his) by implying that it was a good thing that England opted for gradualism rather than sudden, revolutionary change.5 Neo-conservative presentism of this sort is not as evident in Thomis’s work, but he shares Himmelfarb’s conviction that revolution was not as near as Thompson wished us to believe. Pursuing Thompson on methodological as well as political grounds, Thomis argues that the Luddites – who for Thompson were among the likeliest sponsors of the revolution – were not as single-minded or as politically motivated as Thompson claimed. Thompson, according to Thomis, overplayed his revolutionary hand by recruiting private imagination, folklore and probability theory to design a ‘revolution’ out of a series of disparate

178

Ian Dyck

and unconnected events. The Midlands of the Regency years might have been besieged by food riots, machine-breakings and instances of political activism, observes Thomis, but there is little conclusive evidence that these events were linked or even loosely related. In a word, Thomis wishes to see the conduits or purveyors of revolution who unified Luddism into a political and revolutionary movement. Needless to say, Thompson’s analogy with the difficulty of organizing dart tournaments – in effect a declaration of the improbability that machine-breakers, food rioters and political speakers could arise without co-ordination – failed to convince Thomis, whose advice to historians was to measure the evidence, employ imagination but never to invent.6 There are indeed problems with Edward Thompson’s arguments about revolutionary imminence in Regency England. It might be said, for example, that Thompson took liberties with his chronology by placing the Luddites towards the end of the book, plumbing for a prosaic revolutionary finale, even though the story of many of the post-Luddite counter-revolutionaries, including the Methodists, was narrated earlier in the volume. Second, Thompson did nothing to reduce speculation about the missing revolution when after The Making he defied all whiggish expectations by retreating into the eighteenth century instead of moving forward into the Victorian years. Thompson certainly left his mark on eighteenth-century studies, especially in the history of crime, popular custom and nascent class consciousness,7 but by default he left an imprint on nineteenthcentury studies as well, chiefly by not bringing his expertise to bear on the historiographical vacuum between the Great Reform Bill (save for Chartism, which has long had a good crop of students) and the arrival of socialism in the 1880s and 1890s. Is it reading too much into Thompson’s decision to say that he was afraid of what awaited him in the 1830–80 period? Perhaps not, for as some participants in the socalled ‘currents of radicalism’ school are now saying of these middle decades of the nineteenth century, liberalism had more staying power than historians have recognized, while on hand to reinforce this position is a buffet of postmodern theory which is designed to accommodate continuities rather than cleavages, or evolutionary instead of revolutionary change.8 If left to Patrick Joyce and his followers alone, there would doubtless be a swift ‘derevolutionizing’ of the Victorian working class,9 but the 1830–70 period is now stocked with historians of both right and left leanings, which is to say that the missing revolution question will doubtless be extended into the

‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution

179

middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, even in the face of the retreat of academic Marxism. Indeed, the debate might even expand into middle-class contexts in the manner of Martin Wiener’s look at the supposed retreat of Victorian industrialists from capitalist and entrepreneurial pursuits. On the face of it, Wiener’s work is not about the missing proletarian revolution but about the failure of the English middle class to maintain the industrial and bourgeois revolution. Yet curiously this neo-conservative argument that English capitalists gave up on capitalism has received some endorsement from parts of the British Left.10 Could it be that conservative and Marxist share a view that the English middle class inadvertently thwarted proletarian revolution by undermining the linear progressiveness of capitalism that Marx perceived and anticipated? The future direction of the missing revolution debate is difficult to predict, but the mere fact that Thompson could declare in 1963 that England came ‘within an ace’ of revolution, that John Stevenson should recently append a discussion of the topic when revising his influential volume on popular disturbances, that we are here celebrating the work of Malcolm Thomis who argued against a thesis of revolutionary imminence, and that Ross McKibbin can unequivocally say that ‘it is plain that the British working class was never a revolutionary one’ is perhaps a collective indication that the question of the lost revolution in England shall survive, even prosper, in the new millennium.11 The historiography of the missing revolution – whether supportive or critical – tends to assume that any significant revolutionary threat in nineteenth-century England would be conceived and implemented in London or the industrial towns. Jacobins, Luddites, Cato Street and Despard conspirators, United Irishmen, Hampden Clubbers, ‘physical force’ Chartists – indeed the entire pantheon of plausible or semiplausible revolutionaries – were almost all Londoners or townspeople, with agricultural workers earning token recognition for their efforts in the Captain Swing rising. This imbalance in the historiography of revolutionary endeavour has been long in the making, for after the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – an insurrection in which rural and town workers did collaborate – town and country seem to go their own way with respect to radical politics. As prosaic as it might seem, the murder of Wat Tyler by Lord Mayor William Walworth is a metaphoric memorial to the last great attempt at a jointly sponsored, town–country insurrection. Here and there rural voices are heard in the dissenting politics of the early modern period, such as those of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, but the record of rural protest

180

Ian Dyck

most accessible to historians is generally the word of an elite, whether rustic metaphors in Puritan sermons or the anti-enclosure rhetoric of the benevolent Commonwealthmen. Images of rural life and of the land appear in the Court and Country debates of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but after the Restoration even these decline as English culture – high as well as low – seems destined to a metropolitan identity. As Raymond Williams showed, there remained in circulation a sufficient stock of rural letters and images to invigorate a current of protest literature during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but these are not the deeds and thoughts of peasants or rural workers; they are chiefly the nostalgic and pining reflections of disenchanted town-dwellers.12 Part of the difficulty of envisaging a revolutionary programme that includes farm workers is owing to the farm workers themselves, for they tend to abstain from revolutionary endeavours by townspeople. The Levellers go one way and the Diggers another. In the eighteenth century the Wilkeite protesters and Gordon rioters were chiefly Londoners, while the food rioters or ‘moral economy’ crowds were usually from London or market and industrial towns. Even the rioters and protesters during the scarcities of 1795–6, 1800–1 and 1816 were chiefly townspeople – all of which is to say that at quick glance one cannot fault historians of protest and revolution for questioning rural workers’ capacity for riotous assembly.13 Yet there is something unsettling about this picture. First, we must bear in mind that in 1830–1, the time of the Captain Swing rising, agricultural workers were still the most numerous occupational group in England and Wales, and that their absolute numbers continued to rise, peaking in 1851 at two million. Even if farm workers are less conspicuous than are colliers, weavers and shoemakers, it is incumbent upon historians to resist the teleological magnet that causes too much English history to read as if the country workers are on borrowed time after 1500 and that the history of modern England should be seen as a forecast of the twentieth-century experience of the cultural and economic domination of towns and town-based industries. Demographics simply do not warrant this approach and perspective. Second, left-angling literature on ‘revolutionary threats’ is sometimes crippled by an abiding respect for Marx’s unfortunate fulminations about the inability of peasants or rural workers to develop a radical and class-based consciousness, or even to rise above the ‘idiocy of rural life’.14 The two greatest English Marxist historians of recent times, Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson, were

‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution

181

thankfully not indentured to Marx’s directives on peasants or rural life, but it deserves to be said that Thompson’s chapter on the farm workers in The Making does not effectively incorporate villagers into his artisan-dominated account of the rise and evolution of class consciousness in England. Indeed, Thompson himself might have sensed this when after his 1968 revisions he declared that his chapter on field workers remained ‘inadequate to its theme’ – words which might be interpreted to mean that it was not Thompson but the farm workers who fell short of the class consciousness that is the grand theme of the book. Even to describe the Captain Swing rising as ‘the last labourers’ revolt’, as the Hammonds did, is empirically and methodologically questionable, for even Marx, who despite having little good to say about the political capacity of agricultural workers, heralded the ‘revolt of the field’ of the 1870s as an achievement of great significance.15 And who is to say that even this was the ‘last’ labourers’ revolt? Even if farm workers seem quiet and docile for decades on end, it is important that they not be discounted in mainstream historical questions such as regards the lost revolution. If we mean by ‘revolution’ a broad level of violence and insurgence that undermines the stability of a state and brings lasting democratic changes to that state, we must have an eye to the countryside, if only because any lasting consequences of a revolutionary threat would require the collaboration and support of country workers. Since the seventeenth century, as John Stevenson remarks,16 revolutionary conspirators in England usually planned to seize public buildings in London, but for how long would the occupations have lasted without simultaneous revolution in the provinces? The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia might have begun in this fashion but in highly decentralized England such a revolutionary plan, even if perfectly executed, would at most have resulted in a temporary ‘London commune’, Paris 1870 style. Looking to France a century earlier provides another possible clue, as it was the Great Fear of 1789 that conducted the French Revolution from the Bastille and Paris to the provinces, thereby creating a national insurrection that instantly struck fear into the hearts of the First and Second Estates of the National Assembly. The French peasants were not willing allies of Parisians in 1789 (indeed they mistrusted them as much as ever); they also backed out of the Revolution soon after the nobility relinquished their claim to feudal dues during the night session of 4 and 5 August (henceforth turning to counterrevolutionary activity in some regions), but the Revolution of 1789

182

Ian Dyck

would have looked very different and been a good deal smaller in scope and fury without le grand peur of July and early August 1789. There was potential for a similar episode in England. Even if Thompson overplayed his hand in claiming that England in 1831 fell ‘within an ace’ of revolution, there was sufficient working-class and bourgeois unrest to oblige us to speculate about the events that might have been required to give England universal manhood suffrage, a new written constitution (not necessarily republican) that would enshrine individual popular rights as defined by Thomas Paine, as well as a modest redistribution of capital in land and industry. This is a vague and speculative game, of course, but perhaps not as wild and ‘unhistorical’ as it might at first appear. If we remember that peasants and rural workers – in most cultures and at most times – possess a non-revolutionary disposition (often underwritten by confidence that they will, if starvation stares them in the face, take food at will) and that they do not come easily to class consciousness, it is remarkable to observe the extent of class-based radicalism in the English countryside, particularly in the south, between the autumn of 1830 and the end of 1831.17 If the Swing rising had been more directly affiliated with the radical platform of the towns, or even accompanied by a round of Luddism in the manufacturing districts, English workers might (and admittedly ‘mights’ are always large in cases such as this) have been served with a more democratic reform bill than was eventually passed in 1832. Historians work a great deal from feel; they pride themselves in sensing when events such as revolutions are plausible or ‘in the air’. And if their intuitions fail them, they turn to what contemporaries sensed and felt, issuing feelers for feelers. Indeed, this is what counterfactual history chiefly is: the viewing of history through the eyes of contemporaries, who of course do not know the outcome of the events unfolding before them. Yet all this fails with the Captain Swing rising. The foremost students of the rising, Hobsbawm and Rudé, after charting ‘preliminary’ agrarian protests between 1790 and 1830, declare that ‘the observer of the southern English countryside would hardly have predicted a general outbreak of active discontent, because there was virtually nothing to announce it’.18 It would be correct to say that even many careful observers of the countryside were caught off guard by the Swing rising, including some correspondents to the Home Office who were not quite certain what they were seeing and how to report it. Simply put, the Wellington government, the majority of landholders and the non-rural community of England

‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution

183

were caught off guard by the rising, which in turn accounts for the harsh sentences meted out to the rioters by the Special Commissions. This surprise of contemporaries might seem to suggest that the Swing revolt was ephemeral and pre-political, that it was a local rising against material conditions rather than a revolutionary threat with substantial political motivations. Such claims might be warranted were it not for William Cobbett. Contrary to the observations of Hobsbawm and Rudé, the agricultural rising was indeed predictable from a contemporary perspective and it was Cobbett – a farm worker himself during his boyhood and a loyal student of southern agricultural workers – who shows this clearly. Upon returning from America in 1800 Cobbett gradually rediscovered his rural roots and sought to incorporate the concerns of farm workers onto the metropolitan radical platform. But few heeded his campaigns and by degrees he lost interest in London-based radical politics. The Political Register continued its steadfast criticism of Westminster but Cobbett’s heart and mind were increasingly devoted to his rural rides and to his audiences with farmers and farm workers. As a result some ‘town-centred’ historians lose track of Cobbett in these years, even suggesting that he ‘deserted’ the radical platform of the metropolis.19 Urban contemporaries, too, lose sight of Cobbett, ignoring his rural commentary but frequently taking him to task for his ill-informed descriptions of industrial towns and factory conditions – subjects about which he knew very little, chiefly because he disliked towns and entered but two factories (these being the unrepresentative mills of Robert Owen and John Fielden) during his entire life. For all his strength as a rural witness Cobbett was seldom in the habit of making predictions about the rural workers’ future – he was a journalist and it was the here and now that mattered. But this changes in 1827 and after. Having spent much of the previous decade on his rural rides and assorted rural journalism, Cobbett began to sense the development of something that he had not witnessed before in like degree, namely the breakdown of the traditional deference of farm workers towards their employers, whether farmer or landlord. In effect Cobbett was observing the development of class consciousness in the countryside, but it was a species or version of class consciousness that farm workers did not consciously share with their proletarian fellows in the towns. There was simply too much long-standing mistrust between villagers and townspeople to allow for a town–country axis to be forged on the basis of collective economic identity, which is to say that the farm workers were on their own, disassociated from farmers

184

Ian Dyck

and landlords but still possessed of a peasant’s love of the land and a desire to farm it for themselves. It was a disposition that Cobbett was well placed to document, chiefly because he shared in ‘peasantness’ and was also a class-conscious farm worker with suspicion and disdain for the ‘wen’ and industrial civilization. Patron and narrator of Swing (indeed some commentators claimed that Cobbett was Captain Swing himself), Cobbett studiously predicted the rising from two years in advance, which is to say that neither historians nor contemporaries can legitimately claim surprise or dismay at the rising. Cobbett knew, and said often, that the forthcoming revolt would have long-term causes, chiefly emanating from a ‘customary consciousness’ that stood at the heart of rural workers’ sense of rights and which entitled them, in their minds, to a rightful living out of the land. Right to land might have been temporarily commuted into wages and assorted common rights, but this did not undermine the labourers’ understanding that they possessed a core right to a decent living and failing that, they would help themselves to agricultural produce or even take physical possession of the land itself. It was this long-standing ‘customary consciousness’ that informed and codified the many short-term grievances of the rioters that Cobbett regularly recorded between the autumn of 1828 and the autumn of 1830.20 Chief among these were low wages, abuses of the Poor Law, irregular employment, the advent of the threshing machine as well as inequitable taxation schedules that caused many rural workers to forgo their traditional fare of bread, bacon and home-brewed beer. Cobbett had long maintained a catalogue of the labourers’ complaints and he knew these complaints better than anyone in the country, but he also knew that most of the labourers’ privations (with the possible exception of abuses of the Poor Law, such as the hitching of labourers to parish carts) were no worse in 1830 than at many times since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The central experience that enabled Cobbett to predict the Swing revolts with extraordinary accuracy was his perception of the rapid decline of deference – or the development of class-based tension – between farm workers and their employers after 1820. During the early 1820s the decline was gradual, but between 1827 and 1830 it was precipitous, with Cobbett observing a penultimate low point in the winter of 1828 and then a final bottoming out in the winter of 1829 after which he began a countdown to a large-scale insurrection in the winter of 1830.21 Cobbett did not want or solicit a rural rising until its eve. Throughout the latter half of the 1820s he warned farmers that they should make common cause with their workers if they intended to

‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution

185

avert a rising. A way forward, he informed them at numerous meetings, was to lead their workers in a campaign for parliamentary reform and as an example Cobbett himself assisted labourers with the composition of many pre-Swing petitions, including some for his own workers and one that was walked by a smallholder named Joseph Mason from north Hampshire to the king at Brighton, where it was bluntly refused by the staff of William IV, and which refusal did much to ignite the rising in parts of Hampshire.22 Cobbett often said – and many of the labourers knew – that landholders did not deserve to be the sole recipients of Swing’s displeasure. Time and again during the two years leading up to the rising he warned farmers that they would be the principal targets of Swing, partly because they were among the oppressors of the labourers and partly because they were closest to hand. Right up to the outbreak of the first fires in October 1830 Cobbett begged farmers to make common cause with their workers against Westminster, but upon the outbreak he did as promised and took up his place as the patron, leader and principal negotiator of the labourers’ revolt, representing them and their platform as he moved about the rural south delivering lectures in the villages, narrating the revolt in his Two-Penny Trash and ultimately standing trial as a leader and supporter of the insurrection. Cobbett had an opportunity to conduct the rising from the rural provinces of the south to Westminster and even the industrial towns. He even had a small base to work from in the form of the ‘linkmen’ identified by Andrew Charlesworth and Roger Wells, namely the radical political ‘ambassadors’ who transported radical political news along the London highways.23 Further, Cobbett was not without a direct metropolitan audience, some of it through the Political Register and some through his London lectures, including those that he delivered at the Rotunda on the eve of the rising. Yet Cobbett did not exploit these opportunities to their full potential and this accounts in part for the missing or lost revolution of 1830–1.24 Much of the foundation of Cobbett’s strength and relevance as a representative of the farm workers lies in his prejudice against the ‘wen’, the industrial towns and manufacturing industry itself. It might even be said that any greater sympathy and knowledge of townspeople would have exacted a price – at least a cultural one – from his association and bond with village workers. Suspicion between villagers and townspeople (for too long overshadowed by class-based inquiries in English historical writing) was Cobbett’s passport into village politics and culture, and yet it was also a barrier to the devel-

186

Ian Dyck

opment of a common radical bond between town and country. Even in his metropolitan lectures on the eve of the revolt Cobbett did nothing to solicit urban or industrial support for Swing by reprimanding town workers for their inattention to rural workers and for assuming that ‘Hodge’ was ignorant of politics. In effect he was saying that rural workers were superior to town workers.25 While it is certainly true that Cobbett sought to broaden the political aspects of the Swing rising, such as by invoking parallels with the revolutionary movement in Belgium and France, he heralded the entire Swing movement as England’s ‘Rural War’ and even went so far as to attribute the passage of the Reform Bill to Captain Swing alone – a position that inspired his grand festival for farmworkers (and a few liberal-minded farmers) in July 1832. For the rest of his days Cobbett repeatedly called upon town workers to concede that it was the farmworkers who brought about the Reform Act – a noble and understandable endeavour, perhaps, but not a sound strategy for building town– country collaboration.26 After 1832 Cobbett prayed for a parliamentary seat in the rural south, but a by-product of his compromise with the 1832 Bill was that farm workers remained without the vote, which meant an industrial and urban seat – in his case the borough of Oldham. Cobbett was at a loss about how to represent an industrial constituency, but his career in parliament was far from the disaster that it is sometimes said to be, for Cobbett was able to leave industrial and urban issues to his co-MP and running mate John Fielden, who in effect freed Cobbett to focus upon his specialty of rural and agrarian concerns. Although some of Cobbett’s industrial constituents grew frustrated with his inattention to their economic complaints, the Fielden–Cobbett tandem was effective in its way and the experience caused Cobbett to tone down his anti-urban, anti-manufacturing rhetoric. But it was too late for an ageing Cobbett to change his ways and he died in 1835 an ardent defender of rural workers and a frequent antagonist of town ones. Yet the fact remains that Cobbett was the best-placed and most plausible candidate to federate the radical platforms of town and country in 1830–1. His close work with the Swing rising remained a grave concern to the Duke of Wellington and Lord Melbourne, who henceforth kept a close eye on Cobbett’s rural activities.27 The main problem, perhaps, was that Cobbett’s principal contact with the radical platform of the towns in this period was through the middleclass reform association of Thomas Attwood. What Cobbett needed was closer association with the second generation of radicals, such as

‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution

187

Henry Hetherington, William Carpenter and John Cleave, and to be able to work with them more co-operatively than he had with his former colleagues of the first generation, such as Hunt and Place. It would have been an exceptional feat to represent a rural and urban platform with equal effectiveness, but more than other Englishman of his time, Cobbett had a capacity to unite all English workers in common radical vocabulary. As Thompson remarked, Cobbett brought ‘the weaver, the schoolmaster, and the shipwright, into a common discourse’,28 but he was also capable of achieving a muchneeded radical nexus between town and country. Perhaps what Cobbett needed was an industrial guardian who could have steered him away from cultural aspersions of the towns and have enlarged his appreciation of an industrial economy. It is not inconceivable, after all, that had the Swing rising coincided with an outbreak of Luddism (surely a godsend for all revolutionary hopefuls) Cobbett would have repeated the extraordinary and unhelpful advice that he had given to the ‘real’ Luddites in 1807, namely that they should abandon the loom and return to the land, spade in hand.29 Needless to say, this is not the language to solicit town–country collaboration. Cobbett’s problems were in some ways England’s problems as far as the missing revolution is concerned. The division between town and country in his sensibilities and representations, as well as in English culture as a whole, is doubtless a significant factor in explaining the lack of development of a class consciousness to connect workers of town and country. Perhaps not much was needed in terms of a shared consciousness and platform – indeed a French peasant in 1789 was probably as culturally distant from a Parisian sans-culotte as a Manchester factory worker or London artisan was from a Sussex field labourer in 1830 – and it might well have been that Cobbett came close to providing a common consciousness and platform that could have led to an English revolution akin to that of France in 1789. If Cobbett did come close in 1830–1, his chance would not come again. When the Tolpuddle Martyrs fashioned their primitive trade union in 1834, Cobbett was not at the ready, for while he defended the Martyrs, he lacked the energy and health to campaign for this great cause which in effect did more than the Captain Swing revolt to win support for farm workers from their brothers and sisters in the industrial towns. Cobbett saw this belatedly, even going as far as to suggest that the rural–urban collaboration might mark the start of ‘the Revolution’, but at this point he was following rather than leading, for Cobbett’s older view of the world was that he (and he alone) best

188

Ian Dyck

embodied the rural workers’ concerns and that he could effectively champion them in the press, in the villages and in parliament.30 The Martyrs, however, believed in a more direct and democratic style of representation and in this they received the sanction and respect of industrial workers. Ironically, town-based workers would do more than their rural fellows to preserve the memory of the Martyrs,31 but the event itself is a reminder that rural and urban workers could collaborate in areas of mutual concern. Such a bond was missing in the hard winter of 1830–1, but perhaps not by much.

Notes 1. For an excellent discussion of the subject of the missing revolution and the British Left, see Christopher Kent, ‘Presence and Absence: History, Theory and the Working Class’, Victorian Studies, 29 (1986), pp. 437–62; Christopher Kent, ‘Victorian Social History: Post-Thompson, Post-Foucault, Postmodern’, Victorian Studies, 40 (1996), pp. 97–133. On Thompson and the New Left, see Robin Blackburn, ‘Edward Thompson and the New Left’, New Left Review, no. 201 (1993), pp. 3–10. 2. For some recent examples of counter-factual inquiry, see Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson (London, 1997). 3. For a discussion of the politics of the Hammonds and their relationship with Clapham’s work, see Stewart A. Weaver, The Hammonds: a Marriage in History (Stanford, 1997). 4. See Elie Halévy, England in 1815, trans. E.I. Watkin and D.A. Barker (London, 1924), pp. 425–8, 590–1; Elie Halévy, The Birth of Methodism in England, trans. B. Semmell (Chicago, 1971), pp. 1–29. 5. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Victorian Minds (New York, 1968), pp. 292–9. 6. Malcolm I. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, 1970), pp. 26–30, 36–8; Malcolm I. Thomis, Responses to Industrialization: The British Experience 1780–1850 (Newton Abbot, 1976), esp. pp. 134–58; Malcolm I. Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848 (Basingstoke, 1977), pp. 29–61; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1980), esp. p. 630. 7. Much of Thompson’s work on the eighteenth century is reprinted in Customs in Common (London, 1991). 8. See Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914, ed. Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid (Cambridge, 1991). 9. See Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Class, ed. Patrick Joyce (Oxford, 1995), pp. 3–16; and Patrick Joyce, ‘The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History in Britain’, Past and Present, no. 158 (1998), pp. 207–35. Also see James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993); Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995); Margot Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge, 1993).

‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution

189

10. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge, 1981). Also see John Baxendale’s review of Wiener’s book in History Workshop Journal, no. 21 (1986), pp. 171–4. 11. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 898; John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1832 (London, 1992), pp. 326–32; Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), p. 295. 12. Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York, 1973); Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 1996); Culture and Civilization in Early Modern England, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Naylor (Leicester, 1992); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973). 13. See Roger A.E. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983); Roger A.E. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1801 (Gloucester, 1988); and Andrew Charlesworth, ‘Radicalism, Political Crisis and the Agricultural Labourers’ Protest of 1830’, in Rural Social Change and Conflicts since 1500, ed. Andrew Charlesworth (Humberside, [c. 1983]), pp. 42–54. 14. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works (London, 1968), p. 171; David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasant (Chapel Hill, 1951), esp. pp. 15, 24–5. 15. E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Peasants and Politics’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1 (1973), pp. 3–22; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 916; J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer 1760–1832 (1911; rpt. New York, 1978), pp. 201–43; Karl Marx to W. Liebknecht, 11 February 1878, in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Britain (Moscow, 1962), p. 554. 16. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, p. 327. Also see Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988). 17. On peasants and class, see Peasants and Peasant Societies, ed. Teodor Shanin (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 227–74. For the development of class consciousness in the countryside, see Roger A.E. Wells, ‘Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness in the English Countryside, 1700–1880’, in Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside, 1700–1880, ed. Mick Reed and Roger A.E. Wells (London, 1990), pp. 121–214; Howard Newby, The Deferential Worker: a Study of Farm Workers in East Anglia (London, 1977), esp. pp. 23–91, 366–440. 18. Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing: a Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New York, 1975), pp. 82–3. 19. Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge, 1992). On Cobbett and the ‘desertion’ of the London platform, see John Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford, 1985), pp. 133–4. 20. Dyck, William Cobbett, pp. 1–13, 45–75, 152–89; Roger A.E. Wells, ‘Mr William Cobbett, Captain Swing and King William IV’, Agricultural History Review, 45 (1997), pp. 34–48 [hereafter Wells, ‘Mr Cobbett’]. 21. On the importance of custom to rural workers, see J.M. Neeson,

190

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

Ian Dyck Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993). William Cobbett, Two-Penny Trash (July 1832), pp. 268–73; Alice Colson, ‘The Revolt of the Hampshire Agricultural Labourers and its Causes, 1812–1831’, unpublished MA dissertation (University of London, 1937); Dyck, William Cobbett, pp. 152–89. Also see my entry on Joseph Mason in the New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, forthcoming). Charlesworth, ‘Radicalism, Political Crisis and the Agricultural Labourers’ Protests of 1830’, pp. 44–5; Andrew Charlesworth, ‘The Spatial Diffusion of Rural Protest’, Society and Space, 1 (1983), pp. 251–63; Andrew Charlesworth, ‘A Comparative Study of the Spread of the Agricultural Disturbances of 1816, 1822 and 1830 in England’, Peasant Studies, 2 (1984), p. 108; Wells, ‘Mr Cobbett’, p. 47. Dyck, William Cobbett, pp. 152–68. See Cobbett’s Political Register for 1829 and 1830. See Ian Dyck, ‘The Town and Country Divide in English History’, in Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison, ed. M. Chase and I. Dyck (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 81–102. Roger Wells has uncovered a degree of dialogue between rural rioters and urban radicals. See his ‘Rural Rebels in Southern England in the 1830s’, in Artisans, Peasants and Proletarians, 1760–1860, ed. Clive Emsley and James Walvin (London, 1985), p. 134; Wells, ‘Mr Cobbett’, p. 47. Cobbett’s Political Register, 23 June 1832, pp. 754–7; 30 June 1832, pp. 791–2; 14 July 1832, pp. 65–86. See, for example, Lord Melbourne’s Papers, ed. Lloyd Sanders (London, 1889), pp. 147–52. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 820. Cobbett’s Political Register, 5 December 1807, pp. 835, 842; 23 November 1811, pp. 652–3; 30 November 1816, pp. 675–9; 14 April 1821, pp. 77–8, 85–92, 101–3. Cobbett’s Political Register, 12 February 1834, pp. 409–10; 29 March 1834, p. 52; Cobbett to John Fielden, 24 April 1834 (Rutgers University). On rural–urban collaboration during and after the events at Tolpuddle, see Wells, ‘Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness in the English Countryside, 1700–1880’, pp. 184–7; Roger A.E. Wells, ‘Tolpuddle in the Context of English Agrarian History’, in British Trade Unionism: The Formative Years, ed. John Rule (London, 1988), esp. pp. 184–7. Clare Griffiths, ‘Remembering Tolpuddle: Rural History and Commemoration in the Inter-War Labour Movement’, History Workshop Journal, no. 44 (1997), pp. 140–69.

13 Whiggery and America: Accommodating the Radical Threat Paul Crook

‘More powerful than the eloquence of Mirabeau or the sword of Napoleon, the democratic government of America has struck far and wide into the minds of the European people.’1 Thus observed the Tory historian Archibald Alison in 1833, a pretty apt moment for such a reflection. It is certainly true that British pro-democracy forces during the agitation for the Great Reform Bill made effective propaganda use of ‘the American example’. From 1817, for instance, Jeremy Bentham’s writings were littered with exhortations to emulate the example of the republican United States. He did so in his Plan of Parliamentary Reform in the Form of a Catechism (1817), in his Radicalism Not Dangerous (1820) – his title is surely emblematic for those exploring ‘revolutionary threats’ – in his address to his Fellow Citizens of France (1830), and in the first volume of his magisterial Constitutional Code (1830). Bentham’s praise of America was wildly exuberant, if historically uncritical: ‘there, all is democracy; all is regularity, tranquillity, prosperity, security . . . no aristocracy; no monarchy; all that dross evaporated’:2 There they are – living, and (oh horror!) flourishing – and so flourishing! flourishing under a government so essentially illegitimate! . . . Oh what a reproach, a never-to-be-expunged reproach, to our own Matchless Constitution – matchless in rotten boroughs and sinecures! Oh! had they but one neck – these miscreants!3 If we subtract the (not inconsiderable) utilitarian ideology to be found in Bentham’s rhetoric about America, his emotions and attitudes towards the United States seem largely representative of the radical, republican, reformist groups agitating for the Bill. These ‘friends of 191

192

Paul Crook

America’ were the ‘outsiders’ of British society, dissatisfied with the existing political order and their exclusion from it, and who thus ‘understood vicariously’ the American experience, which was one of uprooting, dissent and rebellion. Reformers, abolitionists, feminists, educationists, zealots of peace and temperance – crusaders of all colours drew moral support and propaganda from the new world.4 The American example was used, to the point of tedium and ritual, in campaigns for universal suffrage and the ballot, for cheap government, for free and secular education, a free press, separation of Church and State, and land reform. The chief priests of American ritual were the radical journalists and agitators, writing in Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian, Richard Carlile’s Gauntlet and Prompter, Beaumont’s London Dispatch, William Carpenter’s Political Letters and Pamphlets and Cobbett’s Political Register. From 1830 to 1832, resolutions praising American republicanism were passed by the National Union of the Working Classes and the National Political Union. In the troubled weeks following the Lords’ rejection of the Reform Bill in October 1831, Hetherington exhorted his readers to look to the American Revolution as precedent and guide to the enslaved people of England. Radical groups in February 1832 celebrated Thomas Paine’s birthday at Temple Bar, and drank their toasts to ‘the U.S.A. – may her republican institutions be imitated all over the world!’ The same enthusiasm was revived during the Chartist crisis of the 1840s. The Stars and Stripes was regularly unfurled at Chartist meetings. Long panegyrics on the American constitution appeared in the Chartist press.5 Thoughts of America as a ‘beacon of freedom’ sustained the Chartists even during the twilight years of their movement. This was despite occasional signs within radicalism of disenchantment with America’s acquisitive and inegalitarian capitalism, intensifying after the failures of 1848, especially on the part of Owenites, socialists and anti-capitalist Chartists.6 It is passing strange to me that the reformist use of America has been so neglected by historians of this period. After all, there seems a constantly recurring motif in the general history of revolutionary and reform movements in Europe and elsewhere for the idealists and apostles of change to invest their hopes and aspirations in another country or an imagined utopia. As Russia was the utopia of socialists after 1917, so the United States was the ideal commonwealth of early nineteenth-century radicals in Britain. In any case it seems instructive to treat early century Britain and the United States as part of a single Atlantic economy and world of ideas, including political ideas. I once

Whiggery and America

193

argued, at least as a possible hypothesis, that whereas conservatives eschewed extravagant faiths, theory and utopianism, the radical vision was far-reaching, their faith in mankind rather than the nation, their instinct often for abstract and comparative arguments rather than for purely domestic ones. Recent research has made me more chastened on this, and particularly on the last claim. Domestic traditions and customary values certainly had a resilience and persistence within radical mythology and propaganda that should not be underestimated.7 Utopian themes, however, such as the dream of an Arcadian democratic past, were intertwined with received tradition and tradition was not incompatible with a comparative approach. At the same time, as we shall see in this essay, the comparative approach was also compatible with cautious pragmatic politics. Indeed if we study the American example, we see that all political groupings managed to accommodate their images of America to their own traditions and framework of values. By studying the American comparison, British perceptions of America, we gain a novel and useful entry into domestic British political opinion. The writings of the time in fact tell us much less about the real America than about radicalism, Whiggery and Toryism. Not all of this was by any means simplistic. Once we shift our gaze away from the more predictable proand anti-Americanism of the ultra-radicals and the High Tories, we find a fascinating spectrum of views. This was particularly so within the broad church of middle-of-the-way Whiggery, mainstream moderate opinion and liberal to middle conservatism. Verdicts upon America revealed how the British interpreted and met their own history, political dilemmas and situation. Let me illustrate this by reference to the Whigs, who used America to further their 1832 reform agenda, but also accommodated it into their own safe pragmatic tradition. Ingeniously they discovered in the new world a vindication of the glorious principles of 1688. Although Whig opinion was complex, and varied with time and political circumstances, the Whigs on the whole approved of the United States.8 Francis Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, founders of the great Whig journal the Edinburgh Review, the avowed voice of Whiggery, thought the Americans to be enterprising, industrious, wise and virtuous.9 Edinburgh reviewers consistently praised the achievements of an Anglo-Saxon people carving out an empire greater than Rome: a stable political system (a much more useful example than that of revolutionary France, whose history since the Terror had been, to say the least, problematic for reformers); material prosperity; light taxes; a free press; religious toleration and

194

Paul Crook

unparalleled system of education. They were divided on the subject of democratic institutions, but, as good Whigs, sympathized with the broad characteristics of American liberalism. The Edinburgh’s staff, led by William Empson, castigated the literary detractors of the Republic – the Mrs Trollopes, the Basil Halls, the Captain Marryats who had ‘come across the Atlantic to quiz the rustics through an opera lorgnette’.10 Economists such as J.R. McCulloch emphasized the crucial importance of the Atlantic economy.11 Whigs tried to maintain, until the 1850s at least, a balanced view of tangled Anglo-American relations. Most deplored the prospect of a war occasioned over unimportant tracts of forest (for instance in Maine or Oregon), yet threatening the vast mutual interests of the two countries. This viewpoint reflected the needs of the financial and commercial groupings with whom Whiggism had long been in informal alliance. The American annexation of Texas in 1845, and the Mexican War of 1846–7, raised English hackles, but Whigs remained firmly opposed to war. The Whig appraisal was tempered by pragmatism and caution, unlike that of the radicals. Jeffrey remarked that no nation should desire a ‘constant cockering of praise’.12 ‘Where are their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys? – their Robertsons, Blairs, Smiths, Stewarts, Paleys or Malthuses? . . . In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?’13 In 1829 William Hazlitt complained that the genius of America was ‘essentially mechanical and modern’ (a foreshadowing surely of Carlyle’s Signs of the Times).14 The cultural rigour of Whig critics was in marked contrast to, say, Benthamite tolerance on such matters. (Bentham, however, notoriously had trouble telling prose from poetry, solving the problem by saying that prose went to the end of the line, and poetry did not.) The Whig attacks on American culture slackened as American letters and the American intelligentsia blossomed. Whigs, enjoying a traditional link with Dissent, applauded the voluntary system of religion in America, but were very often repelled by the excessive ‘enthusiasm’ of American sects. There was approval of freedom of the press from ‘taxes upon knowledge’, but Whigs recoiled from the low standards, partisanship and venality of the Union’s cheap newspapers. America was also a centre of literary piracy in matters of copyright and royalties, and this came under fire from reviewers with a bread-and-butter interest in the publishing trade. Most troubling ethically was the slavery issue. Whigs could rarely be prevailed upon to sympathize

Whiggery and America

195

with the south’s ‘peculiar institution’. Their cries for black emancipation, loudest in the mouth of Lord Brougham, swelled the chorus that provoked Calhoun and other southerners into increasingly dogmatic defences of their way of life after 1830. America had its faults; however, there was an overwhelming feeling at the centre of English Whiggery, until at least the 1850s, that these flaws were lesser matters, understandable in the circumstances of the frontier. Was there a political agenda in all this? It was of course not necessary for political implications to be drawn from observation of America. Such was the perceived pertinence of American experience to the British at this time, that scrutiny frequently did lead to political usage or commitment of some kind. That usage and commitment was to a relatively radical, but never revolutionary, idea, especially during the decade or so preceding the Reform Bill, when America was useful propaganda in the cause of change. Of course, reformist Whigs had been advocating some measure of parliamentary purification since at least Grey’s abortive move against patronage and corruption in 1793. By the 1820s many in the party (a very loose grouping by modern standards) favoured some redistribution of representation to redress imbalances created by historical change, including the population effects of nascent industrialization and urban growth. Forwardlooking Whigs, conscious of the effeteness of Old Whiggery, found a platform in journals such as the youthful, irreverent and relatively radical Edinburgh Review, founded by Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, Francis Horner and Sydney Smith in 1802. Through the Edinburgh pressure was brought to bear against recalcitrant Whigs in parliament, as well as against Tories. By 1831 most Whig MPs favoured, or tolerated, a franchise that admitted to the vote the bulk of the propertied middle class. The American example was very apt here. If universal suffrage worked in America without democratic anarchy or perpetual revolution, who could deny the feasibility of a moderate ten pound householder franchise in Britain? These years saw the closest approximation between radical and Whig language about America, although there were significant differences of political style and substance between militant radicalism and the moderate middle. It is worth remembering that in the years of Tory reaction after 1815, Whigs and liberals, as well as radicals, were influenced by an upsurge of internationalism, by feelings of sympathy with unfree peoples fighting for independence against autocracy and imperial masters: Greeks struggling against their Turkish overlords; Italian patriots against the Austrians; Poland in incipient rebellion.

196

Paul Crook

Expatriates from Metternich’s Europe flocked to England and encouraged pan-liberalism. As the Unitarian orator W.J. Fox put it in 1824: ‘The cause of liberty is one and indivisible. The sympathy of its friends is characteristic of the present age. The consolidation of their union may emancipate a future generation.’15 Francis Jeffrey, as editor of the Edinburgh Review until 1829, had much to do with giving the review a leading role in popularizing the United States before Reform. In an article of 1820 Jeffrey criticized the ‘scurrilous’ Tory misrepresentations of American democracy: ‘the very existence of such a country, under such a government, is a tower of strength, and a standard of encouragement, for all who may hereafter have to struggle for the restoration or the extension of their rights. It shows within what limits popular institutions are safe and practicable; and what a large infusion of democracy is consistent with the authority of government, and the good order of society.’16 This would have passed muster in a radical dissertation (despite the cautions about ‘limits’ and talk of ‘infusion’ only of democracy). Jeffrey asserted that the American experience ought to be viewed as part of a global contest between the principles of ‘Reform and Liberty’ versus ‘Established Abuse, Legitimacy, or Tyranny’. He apparently suppressed for the occasion some of his private misgivings about the United States and democracy. Before 1832 he had complained to his brother, and to his American friend Charles Wilkes, about party violence and vulgarity in America; and after 1832 Jeffrey opposed further extensions of the suffrage in Britain.17 The young John Stuart Mill publicly accused Jeffrey in 1824 of encouraging democracy, but in reality seeking only to rally support for what would prove to be a bourgeois reform.18 Jeffrey was ably supported by his son-in-law William Empson, a professor at Haileybury, a close friend of Macaulay and Malthus, and a later editor of the Edinburgh. Empson was no radical. Brougham once sneered at the ‘Lansdowne House tone’ of his writings.19 Empson had read American history and was not inclined to idealize it, but had nevertheless a high regard for the merits of Republican government – ‘the most striking object of hope and contemplation that modern politics have ventured to propose’.20 Empson’s assault on Frances Trollope’s Yankee ‘libels’ in her book Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) was altogether in the Whig interest as her work had been a threat to the successful use of American parallels in the clamour for the Bill. In Empson’s opinion, ‘Four and thirty chapters of American scandal are dished up with the immediate purpose of contrasting the graceful virtues of a borough-

Whiggery and America

197

monger with the profligate vulgarity of a ten pound franchise.’21 Even during the height of the Reform agitation, however, Empson resisted the temptation to advocate a republic in Britain. A republic, he said, might be admirably suited to America, but ‘in the present state of our general education, political morality, and starving population, we believe that a republic in England would not last twelve months.’22 It was inevitable that Whig enthusiasm for America should wane after 1832, as Whig politics dictated a consolidation of the status quo. Yet American institutions still had the power to capture the imagination. Brougham in 1837 could describe the Declaration of Independence as the most important event in the history of mankind.23 Even Nassau Senior, a severe critic of the United States, had to admit that ‘with the exception of our own, we know of no great country whose institutions we prefer; and we doubt whether there is one of our readers who would not rather be an Anglo-American, than a Frenchman, a Spaniard, an Austrian, a Russian, or even a Prussian.’24 To liberals of a new school, America of the 1840s and 1850s was the ‘land of progress’ in an age that was enshrining the values of progress. According to Herman Merivale, classical scholar and Under-Secretary for Colonies from 1847 to 1859, the advance of global technology was certain to accelerate the spread of democracy, because technology favoured unifying and centralizing political tendencies. These tendencies rendered free institutions workable. The United States was living proof of the fact that, in an increasingly interdependent world, ‘we must accustom ourselves to the contemplation of space and numbers as the greatest future elements of political greatness.’25 Whigs recognized that the transition to this state of affairs involved perils of dislocation, alienation and the rise of new vices in society. Transatlantic democracy, as James Spedding conceded, was ‘vehement, turbulent, over-bearing, and often overreaches itself.’ But, as he added, if self-government be the secret of society, ‘America is the land of promise, and the object of highest hope as well as of liberal curiosity.’26 Spedding, editor of Bacon’s works and a staunch liberal who moved freely in Whig intellectual circles, had been secretary to the Ashburton mission to the United States in 1842. He was impressed by the natural vivacity of American democracy, and found in it the answer to those critics who prophesied the disintegration of the Union over slavery. His hopes resided with the northern states, and with Tidewater culture, which he expected to civilize the south. Given that the decade to 1832 saw the height of the Whig flirtation with the American democratic idea, there was always a certain

198

Paul Crook

resistance on the part of Old Whigs like Sir James Mackintosh or aristocratic Whig MPs like the young Edward Stanley. Mackintosh accepted reform as the lesser of evil alternatives. He pointed to the American Revolution as a model of what happened when a country’s old guard refused to grant necessary concessions. But Mackintosh never approved of representative democracy as such, once describing it as ‘the most monstrous of all governments, because it is impossible at once to act and to control, and, consequently, the sovereign power . . . must be left without any check whatsoever.’27 Although the Whig party was under powerful pressure to extend the basis of power in Britain, most Whigs retained a vested interest in an hierarchical society. They were emphatically not attempting to create a new America in England, but simply using comparison to achieve immediate and limited ends. Hence the fading of ardour for American panaceas once those ends had been achieved. As the Chartist clamour rose for America’s ballot and universal suffrage, and then when reform was raised again in the politics of the 1850s, some of the Old Whigs became positively anti-American in their efforts to oppose change. There was a sign of things to come in 1829 from William Hazlitt, when he declared that American democracy imposed a straitjacket on independent thought. His argument foreshadowed some of de Tocqueville’s comments in his famous Democracy in America (1836).28 Even Jeffrey conceded that in America everything depended on the suffrage and favour of the sovereign people: ‘and accordingly it would appear, that they are pampered with constant adulation . . . so that no one will venture to tell them of their faults, and moralists . . . dare not whisper a syllable of their prejudice.’29 The consequence, as Emerson later observed, was the withdrawal of tender consciences from rough politics and social organisation. Whig doctrine firmly asserted the need for property and education as essential qualifications for office, but in the Republic such tests were not noticeably applied. Up to the Civil War many English observers became progressively disillusioned about the stature of public men in the Union. The Franklins, Washingtons and Jeffersons were being succeeded, it appeared, by demagogues and nonentities. Andrew Jackson made a poor impression, liberals fearing that he might suspend the Constitution and become a dictator. Jacksonian populism seemed committed to aggressive international and commercial policies. The names of Harrison and Taylor were unknown. Clay, Calhoun, and Webster were better known and respected, but why, it was asked, had none of these attained the presidency?

Whiggery and America

199

There were signs of Whig boredom with the indiscriminate praise of the radicals, with whom political relations were now strained.30 Laissez-faire economists spiked a favourite argument of the Chartists by refusing to credit working-class prosperity in America to democracy. Such blessings, said one reviewer, depended not on such ‘indefinite notions’ but on economics, ‘upon the proportion between the supply of labour and the remunerating demand for it’.31 Free traders, of course, found the cause of prosperity in America’s dismantling of internal customs barriers and only lamented that the United States was not free trade enough in its external tariff policy. Whig economists were also dismayed by the disastrous paper-money policies pursued by the various states and national administrations. McCulloch thought that this had contributed to the wild speculation and inflation that caused the panic of 1837, and disrupted AngloAmerican trade.32 The 1837 crisis created a great stir in London and resentment rode high against American defaulters in the great English merchant houses, some of which failed during the depression. If egalitarian democracy encouraged repudiation of debts, it was felt, then America was likely to lose many erstwhile friends. But American credit was basically sound and resentment in Whig commercial circles proved to be a storm in a teacup. Apart from this, many were finding American affairs, especially politics, confused: ‘In the whirl of “Know Nothings” and “Know Somethings” . . . of “Hards” and “Softs”, of “Fillmore Whigs”, and “Old Line Whigs”, and “Fremont Whigs”, and “Buchanan Whigs” and “National Democrats” . . . and “Abolitionists”, and “States Rights Men”, one is utterly at a loss whither to look for the representatives of tangible opinions.’33 The later years of Macvey Napier’s editorship (1829–1847) saw the Edinburgh Review become less rebellious, more closely connected with the Whig leaders – such as Russell, Lansdowne, Monteagle, Macaulay and Cornwall Lewis. As Walter Bagehot quipped, a younger generation now regarded the Review’s appearance ‘as a grave constitutional event’.34 During the 1840s its tone towards America became more caustic. This was largely due to Nassau Senior, the architect of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, an associate of the Benthamites and a pioneer in political economy. Senior came from a prosperous trading family with Tory sympathies, and (quite unlike Jeremy Bentham) he was strictly conservative in his approach to the problem of popular government, and little inclined to eulogize America, on which he wrote long and forceful articles. The majority in every nation, he believed, ‘consists of rude, uneducated masses; ignorant, intolerant,

200

Paul Crook

suspicious, unjust, and uncandid; without the sagacity, which discovers what is right, or the intelligence which comprehends it when pointed out, or the morality which requires it to be done.’35 Such a sovereign body, he said, would get the government it deserved. Senior ridiculed the suggestion (made in and out of season by the Benthamites) that the American system at least ensured the promotion of general interests, instead of those of a clique. Individuals and factions had, throughout history, exploited the people for selfish ends and America was no exception to the rule. Circumstances there were especially favourable for a trial of democracy – ‘their best men are equal to ours; the mass of the population is superior to any European population.’ Yet popular influence had been accompanied by ‘popular violence, by international litigiousness, by anti-commercial Tariffs, and by Repudiation.’36 Disillusioned by the actions of Americans in Texas and Oregon, appalled by accounts of slavery and political corruption, his faith shaken by their deviant approach to the sacred issues of political economy, Senior found little in the American example to confound his pessimistic analysis of democracy. Even the American constitution, with its safeguards against demagoguery, seemed to him to promote inflexibility and hinder adaptation of forms to new needs. Senior attacked the constant electioneering and presidential powers of patronage which had led to ‘the bluster, the vanity, the rapacity, the violence, and the fraud, which render her a disgrace to the Anglo-Saxon race’.37 Even the staunchest friends of America began to experience disenchantment. Spedding lamented that ‘there is an opinion that American democracy has outlived the virtues of its founders, and has become corrupt and acquisitive, envious, factious, and insensible to honour.’38 Free trade journals, such as The Struggle, urged artisans to stay in England, alleging that conditions in the United States were far more miserable.39 Even Richard Cobden, sarcastically dubbed ‘the MP for the United States’, the voice of the Manchester School, the man who wrote to educational reformer George Combe in 1848: ‘Was there ever in the history of the world a better government than that which plebeian Englishmen have organised without crown, coronets or mitres in the New England states, and New York?’40 had his moments of disillusion about the American tariff, negro slavery and Yankee expansionism. Thinking of American policy in Texas and Mexico, he wrote: ‘I am more jealous of their falling into the marauding and conquering propensities of the old world than anything besides.’41 If we are talking of accommodating radical threats, it needs to be said

Whiggery and America

201

that Cobden saw America essentially as a great free trade experiment, but he did not think that American democracy and republicanism – however praiseworthy in America – were panaceas for English problems. He was much slower than Bright to accept the idea of further franchise reform in England. Cobden held that universal suffrage was only possible in Britain in conjunction with universal education.42 As he had written in his first pamphlet in 1835: ‘Democracy forms no element in the materials of English character. An Englishman is, from his mother’s womb, an aristocrat . . . The insatiable love of caste . . . pervades every degree from the highest to the lowest.’43 During the 1850s pessimism about America was deepened by the apparently inexorable trend of events in the Union towards civil war.44 Indeed, one can detect something of an English reinterpretation of American history. The contemporary slavery issue was read back into the past, and its history was regarded – as it had never been regarded at the time – as the primary theme of American development. American abolitionists directly fostered anti-slavery opinion in England. To give an example, Nassau Senior, when preparing a leading article in the Edinburgh for 1855 on the negro question, obtained the assistance of John Chandler Bancroft Davis, who was secretary of the American legation to Britain from 1849 to 1852 and American correspondent of The Times from 1855 to 1861. Longmans, Green and Company’s archives reveal that Senior received £32 and Davis £20 for the article.45 The New York journalist William Henry Hurlbert had an anti-slavery article published in the Edinburgh in 1856.46 Davis and Hurlbert were from New York, and such articles imparted a strong northern and abolitionist flavour. The Old Whigs were politically interested in making such criticisms during the 1850s, for the issue of parliamentary reform had been revived and they were resolutely opposed to any pervasive change in the basis of representation. Through William Rathbone Greg this grouping more or less controlled the political policy of the Edinburgh Review during the first years of Henry Reeve’s editorship (1855–95). A rancid Americophobia was the result. Greg, commissioner to the Board of Trade from 1856, described himself to Gladstone at the time of the Second Reform Bill as a Liberal by early connection, but a thorough ‘anti-democrat’.47 He disparaged America in a savage article of 1857, which scorned ‘the promiscuous arrivals of Europe’s surplus’, and attacked machine politics.48 Moderate Whiggism had a more subtle agenda than that of the oligarchic Old Whigs – skilfully combining an apparent objectivity

202

Paul Crook

about America with quiet subversion of rival political images of the new world and rival political doctrines. Younger, more progressive Whigs like Merivale and Spedding were ready to acquiesce in de Tocqueville’s thesis that democracy was inevitable. Attention could then be devoted to the questions: Which was the most desirable form of democracy? And, how could it be best safeguarded against its natural weaknesses? how rendered compatible with liberty? America, seen in this light, could be read as a desirable evolutionary democracy enshrining basic Anglo-Saxon middle-class values. Unlike French, and other democracies, the United States respected freedom, authority and law. The radicals were mistaken in claiming that these virtues had been achieved by some deterministic working of the democratic principle. Success was due, rather, to the setting up of astute safeguards against the power of the masses. It was due to the doctrine of checks and balances endorsed by the Founding Fathers, to the constitutional division of powers, the principle of judicial review of a fundamental law insusceptible to rapid change, to the status as higher law of a document of human rights, and so on. This was all very Whiggish. While radicals looked to the Republic to vindicate democracy, the Whigs saw there a commendation of Whiggism. Another tactic was to explain American stability in terms of the ‘propitious circumstances’ of the nation. Much was said about the favourable conditions across the Atlantic: unparalleled natural resources, a small and scattered population of small or expectant capitalists, the safety valve of the frontier, the weakness of America’s neighbours, the traditions of law and order inherited from the British.49 The more intransigent deduction from the theme of ‘propitious’ or ‘peculiar’ circumstances was that which refused to propose the American model as in any ways relevant to a Europe with such different conditions. Yet even those liberals who conceded that the United States was an example of enlightened democracy, with lessons for all nations, saw there an excuse for only gradualist reform in England. They recognized that the American precedent (like that of 1688) was a revolutionary one, at least in appearance. But they emphasized that the American Revolution had been managed by responsible and propertied men, without recourse either to ultra-radicalism or to some authoritarian salvation from ruin. Few Whigs cherished the hope that England in the age of Chartism afforded nearly such ideal conditions or culture for root-and-branch changes in government. Jefferson himself had warned that freedom was best achieved by degrees: ‘ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of

Whiggery and America

203

self-government.’50 English Whigs embraced Jefferson as a most Whiggish democrat. ‘Jefferson’s own confidence, indeed, is in man only as he is found in America, and there only for a season,’ alleged Empson. This was in marked contrast to American tradition and to the Benthamites, the latter depicting him as a thorough-going democrat.51 The Whig conclusion from all this was that trust in the people must await their maturity, a slow and gradual matter, a question of evolution rather than revolution. It would depend upon the quiet piecing together in Britain of a religious and educational system akin to that of the Americans. Finally, one may detect political rhetorics used by Whigs that appealed to racial affinities across the Atlantic. Again, radical potential was accommodated into a safe Whig tradition. Even radicals might be tempted in their off-guard moments to agree that Americans and English were happily endowed with special aptitudes and excellencies in the art of politics. ‘Loathing abstract thought, looking with suspicion or contempt on all endeavours after scientific accuracy in moral or political questions, empiric, tentative, often blundering, always unsystematic’, both peoples were said to be sensible and cautious, suspicious about fundamental change, imbued with a real sense of public spirit and habitual regard for established law.52 This may have been mythology rather than real history. But it privileged certain pragmatic virtues. Upon such virtues (went the narrative) depended the success of the separate American and English brands of liberal government, to be contrasted with the disastrous failure of European experiments in popular politics (underlined in 1848). What was not acceptable to genuine democrats in this plausible thesis was the inference drawn from it – the inference that individuals, not systems, national character, not institutions, were the key elements in the political equation. It appeared as if the Americans, hitherto the heroes of reformers, were being clothed with the characteristics of the established classes in Britain as an argument for undoctrinaire change. Nevertheless, here was at least a macroscopic rather than insular vision of British and American politics. Here at least were the seeds of greater toleration of possible democratic forms of government, provided that they benefited from the fruits of AngloAmerican, rather than Continental, experience. * * * If I might be permitted a personal reminiscence, I took up my research on America in British politics at a time, in the 1960s, when Namierite history was the rage. If I had approached the period with the eye of a Namierite, or a psephologist, or perhaps the myopic

204

Paul Crook

pragmatism of some radical historians or the nihilism of recent fashions, I would no doubt have come up with an account dominated by factors of self-interest, place, number-crunching, local bread-andbutter motivations, even a painting of abstract fragmentation or postmodern meaninglessness. Luckily, I believe, I did my research at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and I was steered (mainly by that enlightened soul Bernard Crick) into the world of political ideas and opinion, into a field that bridged the gap between history and political theory, into a politically activist discourse to be found in periodicals and magazines, polemical books and pamphlets, tracts and newspapers. Here, in marked contrast to the implicitness of archival letters, the conditioning principles of politics were made explicit, the more so in debate about another country or comparative politics. Ideas could be rescued from the obsessive and reductionist pragmatism of the Namierites. Far from yielding fragmentation, anomie or meaninglessness, my study unearthed a surprising degree of doctrinal regularity, order and articulation within political groupings. Certainly there was variety, complexity and subtlety in existing images and usages about America. Indeed one encountered an unexpected sophistication of analysis as soon as one explored beyond the more predictable radical and Tory extremes. At the same time there was an identifiability and an order about respective accounts of America. Benthamite, Whig and Tory views and stances were recognizably distinct. This was mainly because cultural readings of America were subsumed into larger, and quite identifiable, doctrine systems and epistemes belonging to the main political groups. On the whole the effect was to reinforce English gradualism, to accommodate and reduce the threat to tradition or to the Victorian social balance. These sorts of findings seemed to me at the time a refreshing piece of revisionism, a restoration of pattern, vision and integration. This seemed important at a stage when, as E.P. Thompson complained, the reigning social and political history was becoming ‘a series of prints, snapshots, stasis upon stasis’, when there was a distinct danger of forgetting that the central concern of history ‘as a relevant humane study’ was ‘to generalize and integrate and to attain a comprehension of the full social and cultural process’.53

Whiggery and America

205

Notes 1. Archibald Alison, ‘America No. I’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 34 (1833), p. 285. For full documentation of themes explored in this essay see D.P. Crook, American Democracy in English Politics, 1815–1850 (Oxford, 1965). 2. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Published Under the Superintendence of His Executor, J. Bowring, 11 vols. (London, 1838–43) [hereafter Bentham, Works], III: 447. 3. Ibid., 437. 4. See Frank Thistlethwaite, The Ango-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1959), chapter 2. 5. See, for example, Chartist Circular, 30 January 1841. For radical use of America, see G.D. Lillybridge, The Impact of American Democracy upon Great Britain, 1830–1870 (Pennsylvania, 1954), chapters 1 and 2. Lillybridge is perfunctory on non-radical opinion. 6. On this, see Gregory Claeys, ‘The Example of America a Warning to England?: The Transformation of America in British Radicalism and Socialism, 1790–1850’, in Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison, ed. Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 66–80. 7. See, for example, E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth, 1993). 8. This was despite an American tradition to the opposite effect. See Robert Walsh, Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the U.S.A. (Philadelphia, 1819), pp. 211–305; Henry Cabot Lodge, One Hundred Years Peace (New York, 1913), pp. 43–63; E.D. Adams, ‘The Point of View of the British Traveller in America’, Political Science Quarterly, 29 (1914), pp. 244–64. 9. Edinburgh Review (hereafter ER), 66 (1820), p. 407; ER, 80 (1824), p. 432. Edinburgh Review articles were, like most periodical articles in this period, anonymous. For full documentation of articles on America in British periodicals, 1815–60, with attributions of anonymous authorship, see Crook, American Democracy, pp. 205–21. 10. ER, 110 (1832), p. 521. 11. J.R. McCulloch, A Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire, 3rd edn. (London, 1847), p. 532; ER, 112 (1833), article 7. 12. ER, 66 (1820), p. 430, by Jeffry; also ER, 80 (1824), p. 433, by Smith. 13. ER, 65 (1820), pp. 78–80, by Sydney Smith, later printed in Smith’s popular essays (1848). 14. ER, 99 (1829), p. 127. 15. Westminster Review, 1 (1824), p. 3. 16. ER, 66 (1820), pp. 399–400, 405. 17. See Lord Cockburn, The Life and Correspondence of Francis Jeffrey, 2 vols. (London, 1852), II: 49, 147, 183–5; and Jeffrey to Napier, 27 December 1837, in Macvey Napier, Selections from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, (London, 1877) [hereafter Napier Corr.]. 18. Westminster Review, 2 (1824), p. 513. 19. Brougham to Napier, 18 August 1837, in Napier Corr., p. 193. 20. ER, 98 (1829), p. 474. 21. ER, 110 (1832), p. 496.

206 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Paul Crook ER, 110 (1832), p. 497. ER, 131 (1837), p. 167. ER, 151 (1842), p. 11. ER, 167 (1846), p. 141. ER, 188 (1850), pp. 367, 341. See the speech in the Commons on second reading of the Reform Bill, 4 July 1831, in Miscellaneous Works of . . . Sir James Mackintosh, ed. R.J. Mackintosh (Philadelphia, 1847), p. 590; and Memoirs of the Life of . . . James Mackintosh, ed. R.J. Mackintosh, 2 vols. (Boston, 1835–6), I: 92. For Edward Stanley’s views, see his Journal of a Tour in America: 1824–1825 (London, 1930). ER, 99 (1829), p. 132. ER, 66 (1820), p. 430. See, for example, ER, 112 (1833), p. 481, by McCulloch. ER, 124 (1835), p. 385, possibly by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. ER, 122 (1837), article 9. ER, 212 (1856), p. 563, by William Henry Hurlbert. Walter Bagehot, ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’, in his Literary Studies, 2 vols. (London, 1879), I: 1. ER, 163 (1845), p. 29. ER, 163 (1845), p. 30. ER, 167 (1846), pp. 194–5; ER, 163 (1845), p. 35. ER, 188 (1850), p. 367. The Struggle, nos. 23, 25, 36 (1842). British Library, Add. MSS 43653, Part 4, Cobden to Combe, 17 July 1848. British Library, Add. MSS 43658, Part 2, Cobden to Henry Richard, 23 March 1852. Richard Cobden, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, ed. J. Bright and J.E. Thorold Rogers, 2 vols. (London, 1870), II: 522, 551–2. Richard Cobden, England, Ireland and America (London, 1835), p. 137. For the division of British opinion over the civil war, see D.P. Crook, The North, The South and the Powers, 1861–1865 (New York and London, 1974). ER, 206 (1855), article 1; information from the records of Longmans, Green and Company supplied by private correspondence. ER, 212 (1856), article 10. British Library, Add. MSS 44371, fo. 283. ER, 215 (1857), pp. 263–64, 267. For Greg’s combination of anti-Yankee and antislavery feelings during the civil war, see his ‘The American Conflict’, North British Review, 37 (1862), pp. 491–2. See, for example, ER, 61 (1818), pp. 199–201; ER, 80 (1824), pp. 438–9; ER, 196 (1852), pp. 463–4. Quoted by Empson in ER, 102 (1830), p. 517. Quote from Empson in ibid. See also ER, 112 (1833), p. 496; ER, 131 (1837), article 8; and, for a Benthamite view, Westminster Review, 13 (1830), article 3. ER, 188 (1850), p. 510, by Greg. E.P. Thompson cited in Bryan D. Palmer, E.P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions (London and New York, 1994), p. 95.

14 Controlling the Riots: Dickens, Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution Iain McCalman

Unusually for someone who was to become the century’s most fecund novelist, in the autumn of 1838 Charles Dickens was suffering from writer’s block, if not generally, at least with regard to one project which he had been planning and researching for more than two years. He was struggling to begin writing a novel based on the Gordon Riots of 1780 – ‘the time of terror’,1 in Dr Johnson’s words, that had visited more destruction on London in a week than Paris experienced throughout the Revolution. For this, his first intended novel, Dickens had chosen a theme rich in relevance to the mass political agitations of his time, for 1838 was the year of Chartism’s birth. Privately, Dickens wanted also to prove that he could write better historical fiction than the master of the genre, Walter Scott; indeed, he aimed to eclipse Scott on his own ground – the much-fêted Heart of Midlothian of 1818 had centred similarly on the destruction of a mighty prison, the Tolbooth, in the Porteous Riot of 1736–7.2 Perhaps because of the grandeur of these ambitions and the unfamiliar constraints of an historical framework, the book was not going well. It had already undergone changes of title and publisher3 when Dickens chanced to read a short coroner’s report in The Times of 22 November 1838. A down-at-heel 88 year-old Scotsman, Robert Watson, had strangled himself in an obscure London tavern the night after telling the landlord the story of his long and sensational revolutionary career. It included, Watson had claimed, having been Lord George Gordon’s secretary during the riots of 1780.4 It must have been an exhilarating moment for Dickens. He had stumbled upon the unknown author of his chief historical source, a substantial biography by Watson entitled The Life of Lord George Gordon: With a Philosophical Review of His Political Conduct. The work had in fact been 207

208

Iain McCalman

written and published from Newgate gaol in 1795, and was based, according to its author, on close personal friendship with Gordon, as well as on numerous prison interviews and extracts from Gordon’s copious correspondence. The following day The Times disclosed further tantalizingly gothic details about Gordon’s deceased biographer. He had shortly before been engaged in secret transactions in Boulogne, Bath and London. In his tavern room had been found a mysterious French message: ‘A man comes to give us the secrets of government.’ Still more dramatically, an examination of his body had revealed nineteen scars, the literal and lurid inscription of his revolutionary past.5 Lord Brougham, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, and Colonel Macerone, the famous European revolutionary, confirmed key aspects of the landlord’s story. The grisly inquest description also brought a stream of distinguished visitors to view the corpse. Dickens might well have been among them, for he was always at pains to experience the physical particularities of his fictional locales. He had, for example, made a special trip to Newgate the year before in preparation for writing the novel. But whether or not Dickens actually saw the scars, they inspired him to reincarnate Watson as the aptly named Gashford, Lord George Gordon’s unctuous and malevolent secretary, who in Barnaby Rudge largely engineers and orchestrates the riots. And although the novel took a further two years to materialize, this incident seems to have sparked a burst of composition early in the new year. At the same time Britain also erupted into social and political disorder, culminating in a serious armed insurrection at Newport in November 1839 which cost several hundred lives. Some modern historians have pinpointed the years 1839–42 as the potential flashpoint for a British revolution that might have been, and the thematic relevance of this troubled time was certainly not lost on Dickens’s contemporaries. Advance-release advertisements for the longgestating novel, which eventually appeared in 1841 in serial and collected form, hinted at dark political parallels. Yet notoriously Barnaby Rudge was and is regarded as one of Dickens’s few failures. From its publication to this day the structure, historicity, motivation and characterization of the novel has been questioned by baffled or alienated critics. Its earliest commentators, including Dickens’s best friend John Forster, could not understand why he had presented the mad and incendiary Lord George Gordon in such a charitable light.6 They suggested that Dickens had been seduced by Robert Watson’s partisan biography. Given the insurrectionary climate

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

209

of the day, Forster was worried, too, by Dickens’s rash willingness to flaunt his sympathies as a self-proclaimed ‘radical’. The last episodes of the novel castigated the Hanoverian legal system and openly exulted in the burning of Newgate. Dickens’s bitter recollection of the boyhood trauma of his father’s imprisonment for debt had surfaced in excited work-in-progress letters as he drafted the riot chapters: ‘I have just let all the prisoners out of Newgate,’ he wrote to Forster in June 1841; ‘I feel quite smoky when I am at work.’7 The first real critical interest in this long-dismissed work began with Andrew Lang’s revelation of the Watson–Gashford connection in a short Illustrated London Times piece of 1892,8 leading, after a lag, to a series of more scholarly articles published in the Dickensian through the 1930s and 1940s. The main contribution of this clutch of critics was to show how remarkably faithful Dickens had been to his historical records, particularly to Watson’s biography of Gordon, as well as to playwright Thomas Holcroft’s pseudonymous Narrative of the Late Riots and Disturbances, an eyewitness description with appended observations by the Whig journalist James Perry. Dickens was also shown to have drawn heavily and literally on the main daily newspaper descriptions of the June days.9 He had incorporated or adapted a welter of evocative details and rioter cameos, including, of course, major characters such as Watson, Gordon himself, his faithful servant John M’Queen (anglicized to Grueby in the novel), and Ned Dennis, Newgate’s real-life hangman. In the light of these discoveries, however, critics puzzled, first, why Dickens should have chosen to pivot his first historical novel on what they deemed a local and unportentous riot; and second, why, in the light of his evident historical knowledge, he should have ignored the extraordinary romance of Watson’s real-life revolutionary career, which seemed to cry out for fictional adaptation. A fresh ripple of Barnaby Rudge criticism from the 1960s to the present has concentrated mainly on reversing Dickens’s claims to have been a radical, seeing the novel instead as the work of an incipient reactionary. While conceding that in Barnaby Rudge ‘Dickens is, for the first time . . . concerned to anatomize a whole society’,10 modern critics tend, if anything, to reinforce the verdict of failure. In essence, Dickens is accused of having fatally damaged the novel’s plausibility through his typically Victorian middle-class dread of democracy.11 Like Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism of 1839, an undoubted inspiration, Barnaby Rudge worked to alert contemporaries to revolutionary threats. As a result, it is argued, Dickens was impelled to do

210

Iain McCalman

violence both to the historical records and to Walter Scott’s sound prescriptions for achieving a fully realized historical novel. Unlike Scott, several critics have observed, Dickens did not understand historical process. He tried to realize major historical events and movements through the fictional lives of isolated individuals divested of larger social contexts. Dickens also could not acknowledge, what Scott well understood, that human collectivities, even including rioters, generally possessed a coherent political, social or cultural consciousness.12 This blind spot, it is argued, led Dickens to choose the most atavistic example of riot in modern British history, despite its inappropriateness as an analogue for the articulate and disciplined Chartist movement. Dickens’s riots are powered by no political or social motive: they are the products of a mindless, bestial mob manipulated by evil conspirators and psychological misfits, all actuated by personal grievances. Critics contrast the sexual lusts, megalomaniac fantasies and gratuitous violence of Dickens’s leading rioters with the selfimproving civility and restraint of most Chartists. The dwarfish apprentice Sim Tappertit, modelled on the real-life artisan Thomas Taplin, stands for organized labour in the novel, and he is as rabid as he is ridiculous. Dickens’s political paranoia is held responsible also for the novel’s seriously flawed structure, creating a stark disjunction between the first 32 chapters which introduce his fictional characters and the remaining third of the book where the public and historical action is played out.13 Some of this criticism is persuasive enough, even if it is a shade heavy handed, but it does not explain why Dickens carefully retained specific parts of the historical record and changed others, and why he did so in such seemingly contradictory ways. If he itched to crush Chartism by analogy, why, for example, did he present so sympathetic a portrait of Lord George Gordon, the instigator of the riots of 1780 who eventually died in Newgate gaol because the government thought him an incorrigible fanatic and revolutionary? Why, conversely, did Dickens depict so committed and romantic a revolutionary as Robert Watson, whose flamboyant story he well knew, in such a brutally unsympathetic light? This essay does not specifically defend either Dickens’s politics or his historical accuracy, though it suggests incidentally that some of his supposed fantasies were historically better grounded than many critics have realized. Rather, it argues that Barnaby Rudge, for all its literary and historical faults, mounts a profound and sustained

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

211

analysis of the peculiarities of British revolution, particularly in its relation to romanticism. The subject of Gordon and the riots not only aroused Dickens’s highest literary, historical and political ambitions, it also deserved them. Barnaby Rudge modernizes, extends and renders into fiction the theme of the most famous British treatise on revolution ever written, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Because Dickens’s friends and critics failed to understand or appreciate the aims and achievement of Barnaby Rudge, he was forced many years later to undertake a more explicit fictional treatment of Burke’s theme in A Tale of Two Cities. But that is another story. If we wish to understand why and how this ambitious, visionary young man chose to tell the story of the ‘Riots of Eighty’ when writing his first historical novel, we need to interrogate the key historical sources and actors on which he drew, especially the life and writings of Robert Watson and Lord George Gordon.

I Why did Dickens choose to make the fictional Gashford so different from his historical prototype, the Scots doctor, Robert Watson of Elgin? True, there is a strong physical resemblance between Gashford and Watson: both are thin and foxy, with high forehead and jutting ears, suggesting that Dickens either saw Watson’s body or his portrait in Edinburgh painted by Carl Christian Vogelstein in 1817. But Dickens’s Gashford is an unredeemed villain, a cold, cringing coward, a fawning, flattering seducer, and a treacherous turncoat and government spy. Successively, he betrays his oldest friend, Haredale; his original faith, Catholicism; his trusting master, Lord George Gordon; and all his former associates. He foments violence solely out of festering personal rancour and envy. Even his eventual suicide is divested of any valour: like Watson he kills himself in a seedy London tavern, but it is by the unheroic and traditionally feminine means of poison14 instead of Watson’s considerable actual feat of self-strangulation with a necktie and poker. Although Robert Watson habitually exaggerated his own significance and achievements, independent historical records still tell a remarkable story. He may or may not have actually gained the medical degree he claimed, but he was certainly impressively educated. Son of an Elgin hirer, he was tutored in the village by presbyterian minister Robert Macfarlane, and won a bursary to King’s College, Aberdeen. He graduated from there as Master of Arts in 1787, steeped in the Celtic

212

Iain McCalman

romanticism of Ossian and the Scottish enlightenment ideas of Adam Smith and Frances Hutcheson.15 He may not have risen to the rank of colonel when fighting for the American revolutionaries against the English, but his battle scars, permanently lamed leg and award of land in America as soldier settlement were achievements enough. He was never Gordon’s secretary during the Riots as he later pretended, but he probably did meet Gordon in the mid-1780s, when a student radical in Aberdeen, and he definitely became the imprisoned Lord’s secretary and friend in Newgate during the early 1790s.16 He was not elected head of the London Corresponding Society, as he later boasted to French officials, but he did become president of one of its most militant divisions, a member of its executive committee and an editor of its journal, the Moral and Political Magazine, as well as of the influential radical periodical Politics for the People.17 And Watson’s credentials as a revolutionary conspirator were impeccable: he was imprisoned in Newgate for two years and three months from November 1794 for his role in fomenting the London anti-crimping riots of that year and he was deeply implicated in radical attempts to politicize the Nore naval mutineers in 1797;18 he was a leading spirit in plots to coordinate a United Irish and British revolutionary uprising; and in 1798 he fled as an outlaw to Paris with a heavy government price on his head. In Parisian exile he may not have been able to muster the Scottish revolutionary support that he claimed, but he was, with escaped transportee Thomas Muir, a longtime leader of United Scots and Irish émigré politics in Europe. His romantic-revolutionary address ‘To the Patriots of Scotland’, published in the Gazette Nationale ou le Moniteur Universel, 4 Frimaire, Year VII, appealed to the descendants of the immortal Ossian whose songs electrify the soul; will the nephews of the men who resisted the efforts of the valiant romans, remain tributaries of the faction of St James, destitute of virtue and courage. . . . Did Wallace fight for nothing? Did Buchanan and Fletcher write in vain? . . . Poor Scotland! a country more dear to my heart than my existence, you will acquire fresh importance and sit free among the Nations. Your abandoned villages, your heather covered mountains and your many songs will be a source of joy. Yes, the Scots will be free.19 Watson may not have become Napoleon’s personal friend and tutor, as he told the painter Vogelstein,20 but he provided an impressively

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

213

detailed invasion plan for Bonaparte in 1800,21 and he did, with the help of Abbé Sieyes, impress the emperor sufficiently to be given the well-paid presidency of the revived Scots College in Paris in 1801. He may not have been privy to dark Hanoverian-inspired plots against the exiled Stuarts, as he hinted in blackmailing letters to the Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, but he did in December 1816 unearth and acquire a huge cache of Stuart papers hidden in the Vatican, to the vast consternation of both British foreign officials and the Hanoverian monarchy.22 Dickens departed equally from Watson’s revolutionary political explanation of the origins of the Gordon Riots and of the motivations of its leader, Lord George. Watson’s biography stressed the crucible of Scottish nationalism, but Barnaby Rudge excised Scotland from the story. Watson represents the popular anti-papal agitations of 1779–80 as products of Scotland’s presbyterian republican traditions and smouldering resentments of economic and social exploitation. He depicts Lord George Gordon, the younger son of a ducal family once famed for Jacobite resistance, as having articulated – we might say invented – an ardent Scottish nativism in the mid-1770s. Having been raised in the Highland village of Elgin and nurtured on the sagas of Fingal, Watson was deeply impressed that the young Lord Gordon spoke Gaelic, wore a kilt, played the pipes and extolled Ossianic primitivism against ‘people of fashion’ like his place-seeking elder brothers. When the presbyterian kirk persuaded Gordon to lead a Scottish campaign in 1778 against the proposed Catholic Relief Bill, Watson noted that the young laird adopted the dress, manner and apocalyptic idiom of a seventeenth-century Scottish Covenanter.23 To Watson, the Covenanters – those ancient ‘enthusiasts in the cause of liberty’ – were the counterparts of the United Irish revolutionaries of his own day.24 In keeping with this rebellious tradition, Gordon had thus thundered against popery’s record of international tyranny and persecution, and developed a republican political and economic programme which gathered up diverse Scottish discontents.25 His campaign, he stressed, had been mobilized in the interests of political liberty not of religious intolerance. Watson’s writings represented Gordon as the heir to a heroic Scots republican tradition that ran from William Wallace, through George Buchanan and onto Fletcher of Salton. Watson’s flight to Paris had interrupted an attempt to publish Buchanan’s political works, but he did manage to complete an edition of Fletcher’s republican works. And it was Fletcher in particular, Watson believed, who had foreshadowed Gordon’s record of Scottish

214

Iain McCalman

and international libertarianism.26 Through all Gordon’s later vicissitudes, Watson’s biography argued, he never ceased to champion Scottish causes and Scottish aspirations for independence, including agitating, like Fletcher before him, for an independent Scots militia and against exploitative taxes and duties. Watson’s biography also shows how Gordon became a champion of international liberty and revolution. Like many contemporaries, Gordon had believed that Lord North’s government proposed the Catholic Relief Bill of 1779–80 solely to gain Highland and Irish Catholic military recruits to fight against the rebellious Americans.27 From the outset, therefore, Gordon’s anti-papal cause merged with a wider revolutionary ferment. In parliament he became a virtual oneman party seizing every occasion to savage the government war policy; out of parliament he cultivated a range of libertarian Dissenters, radicals, and pro-American revolutionaries. Many of these in turn joined his anti-papal agitation when he shifted his attention to London. Out of this political cauldron, Watson claimed, grew the republican commitment which inspired Gordon to agitate unceasingly against domestic and international tyranny until his death in Newgate from gaol fever after five years’ imprisonment. Watson reproduces Gordon’s speeches, writings and ardent prison correspondence with French revolutionaries Gregoire, Marat and Robespierre, and he proudly cites the radical noble’s string of letters to revolutionaries in Ireland, Poland, Bohemia, Holland, Switzerland and America. Gordon, he argues, helped make Newgate gaol a site of radical sociability and a cultural epicentre of British Jacobin resistance by bombarding the ancien régimes of Britain and Europe with radical counter-propaganda: His conduct ... had made his name known almost over the whole world and opened a correspondence with societies and individuals entertaining the same views in the surrounding nations; and by a mutual exchange of publications, free thoughts and essays upon civil and religious settlements of various governments, and of general candour and inquiry after truth which prevails among the people, he ... made an acquaintance with sentiments of many virtuous and well intentioned Revolutionists of every denomination.28 Until his death in 1793, Gordon had been unofficial leader of the distinguished band of radical state prisoners incarcerated in Britain’s Bastille for political sedition and treason. Such a position of leadership was, in Watson’s view, perfectly natural: Gordon’s public reputation

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

215

as an eccentric enthusiast was entirely misplaced, the radical lord had always adhered to the most strenuous libertarian principles of the rational enlightenment.29

II Though few if any modern critics have seen fit to endorse this assessment of Lord George Gordon as Jacobin revolutionary, most seem agreed at least in representing the Dickens of Barnaby Rudge as an antiChartist counter-revolutionary. Dickens supposedly aimed to use the moral and historical lessons of the Gordon Riots to depoliticize, demonize and defuse the social unrest of the 1830s. And there is no doubt that the novel does at one level come down heavily on the side of loyalism and order. Despite his dislike of prisons and of the bloody penal code, Dickens echoes Thomas Carlyle in berating the British ruling class for abdication of moral leadership. The legal restraints that initially prevented soldiers from firing on the looters in the opening days of the riots he depicts as evidence of a sad paralysis of nerve. Revolutionary energies are only brought under control in Barnaby Rudge by a personal and private reassertion of male authority and patriarchal dominance. The righteous forces of order are symbolized in the novel by the heroism of the former soldier Joe Willet, who, in an exact reverse of Robert Watson, has returned to London after having been seriously wounded and partly disabled when fighting against the American revolutionaries at Savannah.30 Dickens’s cheerful Pickwickian hero, master locksmith Gabriel Varden, is also a member of a loyalist London militia, and he embodies traditional English virtues of patriotism, leadership and virility.31 Ignoring pettifogging legal technicalities, Joe and his future father-in-law Varden restore order through manly action,32 a moment when Dickens seems to foreshadow the conservative stance that he and Thomas Carlyle will later take over the Indian mutiny and Jamaican massacre. Dickens even appears to muffle the historical record of the riots of eighty exactly when it appears most damaging to the credibility of the legal system that he so disliked: the novel has Newgate’s hangman-rioter Ned Dennis executed for his repulsive crimes33 when in reality he was pardoned so that he could hang his fellow rioters. Yet we need to be wary of making glib and anachronistic assumptions about Dickens’s motives. For example, he did not necessarily – as is often claimed – purge Lord Gordon and the Gordon Riots of their Scottishness solely in the interests of a reactionary ideology. It is easy

216

Iain McCalman

to forget that throughout the planning and writing of the book he had to contend with the giant shadow of Walter Scott. Aware that the theme of Barnaby Rudge would provoke inevitable comparisons with Heart of Midlothian,34 Dickens simply could not afford to make his riot story hinge identically on Scottish cultural and political themes. Barnaby Rudge continually feeds on, yet recoils from, the motifs, characters and incidents of Scott’s famous story of the Porteous Riots and the storming of the Tolbooth prison. Intertextual as much as ideological considerations seem to have dictated many of Dickens’s creative decisions. We can imagine his chagrin on first reading Watson’s biography to discover that Gordon had actually espoused Cameronian Covenanter ideals uncomfortably like those Walter Scott had put into the mouth of Jenny Deans’s cranky father Douce David Deans.35 No wonder, then, that Dickens felt bound to purge Gordon of his thundering Cameronian rhetoric. Despite the fact that several prophetesses were known to have been implicated in the Gordon Riots, Dickens could not afford to incorporate such figures into his novel because Scott’s Midlothian had already featured a fey madwoman, Madge Wildfire.36 That the fiery riot leader in Midlothian, wild Geordie Robertson,37 bore a disturbing resemblance to the convicted riotinstigator Robert Watson must also have inclined Dickens to make his fictional Gashford into a less bold and glamorous figure. Perhaps, too, it was because Scott’s rioter-turned-gaoler, Ratcliffe, escaped the gallows in Midlothian38 that Dickens felt bound to inflict that penalty on his hangman-turned-rioter Ned Dennis in Barnaby Rudge. Moreover, many of Dickens’s supposedly personal and ideological interventions in the story of Gordon, Gashford and the riots seem actually to have derived from his historical sources. Even his depiction of the riots as the product of external manipulations and dark conspiracies had historical grounding. Eyewitness Thomas Holcroft, a radical himself, suggested that ‘the most dispassionate, and those least liable to be perverted by idle conjecture, could not help sometimes thinking they saw a wicked head directing the violent and rude hands of the mob’.39 Conservative contemporaries, including government ministers and officials of the Home Office, often saw American revolutionary plotters behind the violence, while liberals and radicals such as Watson and Gordon blamed the disorder on ‘the spies and emissaries’ of the Bourbons.40 This last claim was not completely outlandish: Bourbon spies were to play an undoubted role in bringing about Gordon’s later incarceration for libelling Marie Antoinette. And when in Barnaby Rudge Dickens has the lord mayor say, ‘there are

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

217

great people at the bottom of these riots’,41 he has lifted the words directly from London’s actual lord mayor, Brackley Kennett, as reported in the newspapers.42 Modern critics represent Dickens’s foppish, libertine conspirator and riot provocateur Lord Chester as a literary archetype derived from Lord Chesterfield’s Letters and ‘not based on any comparable figure from the time of the Gordon Riots’,43 but those who know their history must have little difficulty in recognizing Chester as also the notoriously cynical and devious Lord Shelburne, often known in his day as ‘Malagrida’ or ‘the Jesuit of Berkeley-Square’. In the 1780s Burke likened Shelburne, his most detested enemy, to a ‘perfidious Catilene or Borgia’, and he and others repeatedly accused the slippery noble of secretly encouraging Gordon’s anti-papal rioters,44 an accusation partly borne out in Watson’s biography. Even Dickens’s depiction of Watson as a spy and turncoat had a measure of historical support. While president of the Scots College, the deistical Watson was almost certainly being used by French authorities to keep an eye on the Catholic clergy in his charge.45 There is no doubt, too, that during the last twenty years of his life Watson became something of a conman who tried to enrich himself by promoting and commercializing the Jacobite cause that he had earlier abhorred. It even seems to have been Watson who engineered the spurious monarchical claims of two nineteenth-century Pretenders, the Sobieski-Stuart brothers.46 In one major instance, moreover, Dickens’s account of Gordon and the riots was more historical than Watsons. As a committed enlightenment sceptic, Watson simply could not cope with the embarrassing religiosity of Gordon and many of his followers. Although Watson rightly discerned the powerful motor of neo-Puritan enthusiasm behind the riots of eighty, and indeed, somewhat like Walter Scott, he diagnosed Scottish romanticism as a type of wistful cultural chiliasm which derived from the blocking of Puritan libertarian aspirations, he nevertheless sought to play down the effectiveness of religious enthusiasm as against a much more potent secular and political variant.47 Watson thus took care to emphasize his hero’s rational enlightenment disposition while playing down the fact that Gordon’s language and actions had increasingly resembled those of a millenarian prophet. When Dickens calls Gordon a ‘false’ or deluded ‘enthusiast’,48 however, it is religious Puritanism that is being invoked. Many of the nonconformist businessmen and radical intellectuals who initially supported the anti-papal agitations had subsequently been troubled by the emergence of this unexpectedly ferocious religious atavism,

218

Iain McCalman

especially when it was revealed that numbers of women, children, Irish and blacks had been netted by the military during the riots. It was thought axiomatic that such people were irrational and carried no entitlement to citizenship: ‘I cannot call a fortuitous assemblage of boys, beggars, women and drunkards the People,’ snapped Dissenting radical Vicesimus Knox. ‘The People’ were respectable, rational and generally propertied males, who demonstrated their civility in debating clubs, reading societies and formal radical organizations. Educated and enlightened male radicals like Watson also tended to associate the enthusiastic personality of the rioter with excessive and emotional sensibility, often figured as feminine attributes. The open, informal and inclusive character of millenarian religion was seen to act as a magnet for the poor and outcast, including prophetesses and feminine disciples from humble backgrounds. Gordon had been much struck in 1779 by the prophecy of an illiterate Sussex spinner, Martha Frye, that ‘The may bush of four score, shall set open the door – a young man of noble blood shall come out of the north . . . and he shall trouble the money changers and he shall fall by the hands of the Queen.’49 Prophetesses were drawn similarly to his London antipopery campaign; the Whig reformer Samuel Romilly was disgusted to hear one such plebeian woman haranguing the crowd on the eve of the riots.50 Five years later ministerial pressmen had a field day when Gordon publicly defended the sanity of Margaret Nicholson, a millenarian who had been locked in Bedlam in 1785 for attempting to assassinate George III.51 And Watson’s biography adopted a similar jeering tone when describing another prophetess who visited Gordon in Newgate to announce the birth of the new Shiloh.52 Whether Watson liked it or not Gordon took religious enthusiasm every bit as seriously as he did republican rationality. Gordon’s anger at the executions of women and children netted in the aftermath of the riots drew him increasingly to those urban underclasses who suffered most at the hands of the bloody penal code, and of course no cause could have been closer to Dickens’s heart.53 In 1786 newspapers had announced that Gordon was preaching to Newgate convicts. The same year the supposedly ‘mad’ lord had written an impassioned legal defence for a Newgate thief, Isabella Stewart: it denounced a penal system that flouted God’s word by taking human life for petty crimes against property, and that sent people into exile at the ends of the earth.54 Remembering 1780, the government became increasingly concerned at Gordon’s repeated attempts to circulate propaganda amongst prisoners awaiting execution or transportation. His

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

219

published petition of 1786 in support of Botany Bay transportees55 thus provoked one of the two libel prosecutions of 1787 which condemned him to join the felons of Newgate for the remainder of his life. His embarrassed biographer Watson glossed over this incident and made no mention, too, that Gordon had eventually to be transferred to the state side of the prison for continuing to preach sedition to the male and female convicts.56 By January 1787 The Times regarded Lord George Gordon as an underworld prophet and enthusiast: ‘Newgate prisoners, Botany Bay convicts and vagabond blacks solicit his undivided attention.’57 The press of 1780 had frequently linked the poor black and lascar communities gathered in London’s most notorious rookery of St Giles with the looting and violence of the Gordon Riots. Some blacks had indeed been involved. West Indian and American ex-slaves or sailors seem to have seized the opportunity in 1780 to strike out against their marginal status and economic deprivation.58 But blacks were also discursively useful as a means for loyalists to link popular protest with irrationality, alien savagery and social marginality. It was thus deeply embarrassing for Watson when Gordon began espousing their cause in 1786–7, deploying the ringing words of scripture to condemn British slavery and colonization abroad and racial discrimination at home. Loyalist prints enjoyed depicting the enthusiastic lord arm-inarm with ragged blacks and Botany Bay convicts. Gordon’s formal conversion to Judaism in 1788 completed this crossing into the world of the alien, particularly because he subsequently insisted on befriending poor Turkish and Polish Jews and having them dine with him and fellow radicals in Newgate.59 Since the seventeenth century a long tradition of Puritan enthusiasts had identified their own sufferings with those of Israel’s people, and had periodically felt themselves called to inaugurate the new millennium by restoring the Jews to a literal or spiritual New Jerusalem. With characteristic extremism, Gordon simply went one step further and had himself formally circumcised as a Jew.60 Nothing distressed Robert Watson more. He admitted in the biography to having discussed the subject in prison with Gordon a thousand times without being able to fathom his motives. Did Gordon perhaps see himself as a prophet destined to restore the Jews to their spiritual homeland and glory and so inaugurate the millennium that would overturn a fallen world? Many of the poor Jews who visited him in prison seemed to think so. Yet to Watson, Gordon’s conversion merely played into the hands of those who called his

220

Iain McCalman

master mad, and it fatally damaged the radical noble’s credibility with former Scots supporters, as well as with radicals and Jacobin revolutionaries. Watson clearly also recoiled from the strangeness and poverty of Gordon’s Jewish artisan friends. He could only conclude that his hero had been attracted to these outcasts by his personal sufferings, for ‘men in his state of mind generally love to associate with victims of persecution’.61

III Nearly fifty years later another self-styled, self made middle-class radical, Charles Dickens, worked to fashion the story of ‘Mad Lord George’ and the ‘Riots of Eighty’ into an appropriate moral exemplar. Unlike Watson, though, Dickens understood that it was precisely Lord George Gordon’s blending of religious enthusiasm and enlightenment rationality that had made him so dangerous. Edmund Burke, himself a target of the rioters in June 1780, made the same diagnosis, both in his Bristol speeches immediately after the event and in his several famous treatises attacking the French Revolution after 1790. Having been forced to defend his family and house with a drawn sword, Burke had no doubt that the Gordon Riots, with their apocalyptic razing of Britain’s Bastille, had been a revolution manqué. He reflected in 1796: had the portentous comet of the Rights of Man .. . crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the highway of heaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors and miseries of the French Revolution.... There was indeed much intestine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled around our streets in the name of Reform. Such was the distemper in the public mind, that there was no madman, in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might not count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs.62 However, as Burke consoled his readers in the Reflections, Newgate gaol had been rebuilt stronger than ever and Britain’s most dangerous madman, George Gordon, was securely tenanted within its mighty walls.63 In Barnaby Rudge Dickens wanted to match the masterpieces of both Walter Scott and Edmund Burke: he aimed to write a social parable and a historical fiction that updated, extended and refined their brilliant anatomies of British revolution. Dickens, like Burke, saw

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

221

enthusiasm and its inevitable corollary, personal and collective mania, as the core ingredients of British revolution. Enthusiasm and madness inform Barnaby Rudge from top to bottom, and it is these phenomena that bind the novel’s private and public components. While sketching the personal histories of the riot’s future leaders in the first half of the novel, Dickens is at the same time constructing a sophisticated typology of enthusiasm and madness, or perhaps we might better call it, a typology of romanticism and revolution. For Dickens clearly understood that in the sixty years that had passed since the riots of eighty, enthusiasm had evolved new and potent forms. By the 1830s the epistemology that now threatened to dissolve Britain’s personal and public sanity was, he believed, not Covenanter ranting, but romantic enthusiasm and to a lesser extent its modern religious affiliate, evangelicalism. At one end of Dickens’s romantic spectrum stands poor mad Barnaby Rudge, deliberately made to resemble William Wordsworth’s famous ‘Idiot Boy’, Johnny Foy.64 Barnaby, his reason smashed by the horrors of the past, has regressed, like Foy, to become an incoherent ‘natural’, someone deeply imaginative and in tune with the animality of birds and dogs but unable to distinguish between the world of nature and the world of man. In rioting for gold coins, Barnaby literally believes that he is reaching to grasp the golden sunset. Close to him, both in friendship and psychological type, is the wild man and ‘centaur’ Hugh. A Rousseauist primitive, Hugh has been reared entirely without parental and social love to civilize and humanize him. He, too, is locked in brute animality, but of a more savage type. Like the horses of his habitus, he is moved by primal drives. Fearless, agile and physically powerful, he wants only to drink, sleep, fornicate and smash. He is drawn to the riots by sheer existential joy in violence.65 By contrast, the meagre, gentle and melancholy Gordon is typologically closer to Barnaby. Similarly kind and sincere, he too is compulsively restless and haunted by distorted demons of the past.66 His ‘false enthusiasm’ naturally attracts the selfish and sanctimonious Mrs Varden, an evangelical who claims to be praising God but who in reality uses the Protestant manual to bully her daughter and husband. For delusions of grandeur, however, no one comes close to the narcissistic little apprentice and United Bulldogs leader, Sim Tappertit. Also using Gordon’s cause to attack his kindly locksmith master, Gabriel Varden, Tappertit fizzes with lust and megalomania: ‘A voice in me keeps whispering Greatness. I shall burst out one of these days and when I do, what power can keep me down? I feel my soul getting into

222

Iain McCalman

my head at the idea. More drink there!’67 Finally, there is the most warped and sickening enthusiast of all, Ned Dennis, who is moved to an ecstasy of excitement by his work of hanging the pitiful victims whom the state selects to execute.68 To Dennis, the literal thrill of the riots lies in their capacity to generate gallows fodder. It would be misleading to say that Dickens is blind to the positive psychological traits of the romantic enthusiast. Indeed, it was partly his admiration of romantic psychology, and particularly of the works of Wordsworth, that enabled him to probe the psychic interiority of the rioters. Romantic enthusiasts, he implicitly concedes, have important virtues: these include the gift of innocence and spontaneity in the case of Barnaby, and of courage and imagination in the case of Hugh. Elsewhere in a letter Dickens enunciates the essentially romantic principle that, ‘all people who have led hazardous and forbidden lives are, in a certain sense, imaginative; if their imaginations are not filled with good things they will choke themselves with bad ones.’69 On the brink of execution the disordered Barnaby discovers a curious dignity like someone ‘who might have graced some lofty act of heroism; some voluntary sacrifice, born of a noble cause and pure enthusiasm’,70 and the outcast Hugh similarly attains a pitch of greatness when, ‘like a savage prophet’, he stands at the scaffold and lashes the brutal social and legal system that ripens and feeds on gallows fruit like himself. ‘Upon this human shambles, I who never raised his hand in prayer until now, call down the wrath of God! On that black tree, of which I am the ripened fruit, I do invoke the curse of all its victims, past, and present, and to come.’71 Significantly, we hear in this last phrase an adaptation of the words of another famous prophet-enthusiast, Edmund Burke. Unlike Burke, though, Dickens sees the capacity for intense human sympathy and affinity with the outsider as genuine virtues of the romantic enthusiast, and in this respect he completely accepts Watson’s judgement of Lord George Gordon. ‘Say what you please about Gordon,’ he responded to his friend Forster in a letter of June 1841, ‘he must have been at heart a kind man, and a lover of the despised and rejected.’72 After all, this was the man who had gone out of his way to help the doomed and hopeless felons in Newgate and whose death was sincerely mourned by these rough prisoners. At the same time Dickens feared the romantic’s tendency towards personal and collective volatility; romantic enthusiasts in Barnaby Rudge tip easily, and perhaps, inevitably, into madness and excess. And it is significant that the novel which was originally planned to turn on the history of three

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

223

escaped lunatics from Bedlam ends up focusing primarily on three rioter-enthusiasts. Dickens clearly believed that one psychological corollary of the romantic character type was emotional dependence: each of his enthusiastic cast is thus subjected to manipulation by the strong and cynical. Accordingly, he fashions a complementary spectrum of cold, ruthless conspirators – the cruel aristocrat Lord Chester, the craven secretary Gashford, the blind criminal Staggs, and the snivelling, sadistic maidservant, Miggs. In Burke’s Reflections, written fifty years earlier, the Puritan religious enthusiast is similarly drawn to the abstract, cold rationalism of the Jacobin, but Burke did not explain what it was that created an elective affinity between two such seemingly opposite ideologies. It is part of Dickens’s genius as a social diagnostician that he is able to argue for the complementary needs of the rationalist and enthusiastic personality in a way that is psychologically plausible: the rationalist low on courage and the romantic low on forethought are drawn into mutual dependence. Thus it is, that even comparatively innocent and well-meaning romantics such as Gordon and Barnaby are drawn willy-nilly into brutality and violence. Dickens also finds a common psychological thread that weaves together the cold rationalist and the hot romantic. It is sexual lust that knits the two character types into common viciousness, and it variously takes the form of Chester’s and Gashford’s gloating libertine desires, Hugh’s and Tappertit’s fizzing animal lusts, or Miggs’s and Dennis’s warped sexual displacements. Imagination and feeling, as well as action and reason, were to Dickens deeply desirable human and social attributes, but he also believed that they were, at best, held in a fragile balance. In Barnaby Rudge it is the cheerful, kind and manly master-locksmith Gabriel Varden who embodies these traits and achieves this balance. Not surprisingly the novel was originally to be given his name. It is he who takes arms against the rioters and it is he who saves the bewildered Barnaby from the gallows. He is Dickens’s counterpart of Scott’s decent milkmaid, Jenny Deans. It is through the leadership of men such as Varden that, Dickens believed, democratic anarchy could be controlled and the social brutality of the law transformed. Significantly, Varden possesses in abundance one characteristic that most of the other characters lack. This is humour, and for Dickens in Barnaby Rudge, as in Pickwick earlier, it is a crucial psychological regulator and source of personal and social harmony. He sees it as a peculiarly English and democratic trait, locatable in every class

224

Iain McCalman

and confined to none. Poised somewhere between the logic of reason and the passion of enthusiasm, humour holds the human personality in equipoise. Humans without it are cruel like Gashford or soured like Haredale. In excess it can turn into the manic, Rabelaisian howls of Hugh, but held to a steady cheerfulness it is the supreme social virtue. In this respect we can see a strong resemblance between Dickens’s populism and that of radicals like William Cobbett and William Hone. By contrast, Edmund Burke, the conservative, and Robert Watson, the revolutionary, believed that riot was no laughing matter. Dickens, however, knew something they did not, that it is only in the company of humour that fully human and enduring social change can ever take place.

Notes 1. Dr Johnson to Mrs Thrale, quoted in J. Paul de Castro, The Gordon Riots (London, 1926), p. 154. 2. On the Porteous Riot, see H.T. Dickinson and Kenneth Logue, ‘The Porteous Riot: a Study of the Breakdown of Law and Order in Edinburgh, 1736–1737’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal, 10 (1976), pp. 21–40. On Scott and Dickens, see Alison Case, ‘Against Scott: the Antihistory of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge’, Clio, 19 (1990), pp. 127–45. 3. See the lengthy correspondence with Richard Bentley and others in The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1965) [hereafter Letters of Dickens], I: passim. 4. The Times, 22 November 1838. 5. The Times, 23 November 1838. 6. Dickens to Forster, 3 June 1841, in Letters of Dickens, II: 294–5. 7. Ibid., II: 385. 8. Andrew Lang, ‘A Wild Career’, Illustrated London News, 12 March 1892, p. 33. 9. See, for example, W. Forbes Gray, ‘The Prototype of “Gashford” in Barnaby Rudge’, The Dickensian [hereafter TD], 29 (1933), pp. 175–83; E. Kendall Pearson, ‘Facts about the Gordon Riots: Dickens’s Use of the Newspaper Reports’, TD, 30 (1933–4), pp. 43–7; J.H. McNulty, ‘The Tale of London’s Riots and London’s Forest’, TD, 30 (1934), pp. 97–103; and Frank A. Gibson, ‘Gashford and Gordon’, TD, 44 (1948), pp. 124–9. 10. Iain Crawford, ‘“Nature Drenched in Blood”: Barnaby Rudge and Wordworth’s “The Idiot Boy”’, Dickens Quarterly, 8 (1991), p. 44. 11. This is true of even sympathetic and nuanced accounts such as that of John Butt and Katherine Tillotson, Dickens at Work (Northampton, 1968), pp. 82–4. See also Peter Schenker, ‘Chartism, Class and Social Struggle: A Study of Charles Dickens’, Midwest Quarterly, 29 (1987), esp. pp. 103–4; Steven Marcus, Dickens. From Pickwick to Dombey (New York, 1965), p. 172; Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson, ‘Barnaby Rudge – a Historical Novel’, Literature and History, 2 (1973), esp. pp. 37–40; Thomas J. Rice, ‘The Politics

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

225

of Barnaby Rudge’, in The Changing World of Dickens, ed. Robert Giddings (London, 1983), pp. 51–73; and David Craig, ‘The Crowd in Dickens’, in ibid., p. 81. Case, ‘Against Scott’, pp. 134–6; Rice, ‘The Politics of Barnaby Rudge’, p. 67. See Stigant and Widdowson, ‘Barnaby Rudge’, pp. 3–4. Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, ed. G.W. Spence (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 773. Graham Bain, The Thunderbolt of Reason, Being the Story of Mr Robert Watson of Elgin (Elgin, 1996), pp. 1–7. Ibid., p. 48. For Watson in the London Corresponding Society, where he consistently associated himself with militant factions and schemes, see British Library, Add. MSS 27812, fos. 22–3; British Library, Add. MSS 27814, fos. 98–9; Public Record Office (PRO), Treasury Solicitors’ papers, TS 11/956/3501, reports of William Metcalfe; TS 11/958/3503 and TS 11/959/3505, reports of George Lynam; PRO, Privy Council papers, PC 1/23/A38, reports of James Powell. Extracts from most of these reports are reproduced in Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 20–4, 50–1, 73, 211–12, 235, 370–1, 392–7, 426–7. Watson wrote one article in the Moral and Political Magazine, 1 March 1797, and claimed his editorship of Politics for the People in his application to the Royal Literary Fund of 1836. See British Library, Archives of the Royal Literary Fund, ‘Case of Robert Watson’, no. 861 [3 August 1836]. For the role of Watson and Richard Barrow in the crimp riots, see The Times, 15 November 1794; PRO, Home Office papers, HO 26/6, Criminal Registers, Newgate; and HO 42/42. On his involvement in the mutinies, see James Powell’s deposition, c. April 1798, in PRO, PC 1/43/A152. Interestingly, Watson was also later consulted by the widow of the late leader of the Nore mutiny, Parker. See The Times, 29 September 1838. Reproduced in full in Bain, Thunderbolt of Reason, pp. 109–11. See A.P. Forbes, ‘Some Account of Robert Watson, with Reference to a Portrait of Him Painted by Prof. von Vogelstein, Now Presented to the Museum’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1867), pp. 324–34. Bain, Thunderbolt of Reason, p. 25. On Watson’s long and complex involvement with the acquisition of the Stuart Papers, see William Hone, Table Book (London, 1827), pp. 740–1; British Library, Add. MSS 41538, fo. 12, Watson to Lord Castlereagh, 19 January 1817; British Library, Add. MSS 38286, Liverpool Papers, Official Correspondence, fo. 336, 4 August 1820; F.J. Skeet, Stuart Papers, Pictures, Relics, Medals and Books (Leeds, 1930); A. Tayler and H. Tayler, The Stuart Papers at Windsor (London, 1939) [hereafter Tayler, Stuart Papers], esp. pp. 22–36. Robert Watson, The Life of Lord George Gordon . . . with a Philosophical Review of His Political Conduct (London, 1795) [hereafter Watson, Life of Gordon], pp. 4, 6, 10–12. He advances this thesis most elaborately in his commentaries in The Political Works of Fletcher of Salton, ed. Robert Watson (London, 1797)

226

Iain McCalman

[hereafter Watson, Fletcher], pp. 38–9. 25. See Iain McCalman, ‘Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), pp. 348–9. For some of the dimensions of Gordon’s cause, see PRO, PC 1/3127, ‘Examinations of Ralph Bowie, writer, and Rev. David Grant, taken from Public Advertizer, 6 and 11 October 1780’. 26. Watson, Fletcher, esp. pp. 103–7. 27. Watson, Life of Gordon, pp. 9–10. 28. Ibid., p. 88. 29. See Iain McCalman, ‘Newgate in Revolution: Radical Enthusiasm and Romantic Counterculture’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 22 (1998), pp. 95–110. 30. Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, p. 650. 31. Ibid., pp. 710–11. 32. Ibid., pp. 644–7. 33. Ibid., pp. 685–6. 34. All references in this paper are to Walter Scott, Heart of Midlothian, ed. Tony Inglis (1830; rpt. Harmondsworth, 1994). 35. Ibid., pp. 129–31, 471–2, 734. 36. Ibid., pp. 575–8. 37. Ibid., pp. 159–61, 338–42. 38. Ibid., pp. 141–2. 39. William Vincent, pseud. [Thomas Holcroft], A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Late Riots and Disturbances (London, 1780), p. 44. 40. Lord George Gordon cited in Watson, Life of Gordon, p. 27. For examples of the wide range of contemporaries who saw the riots as part of an organized revolutionary or foreign conspiracy, see Castro, Gordon Riots, pp. 216–37. 41. Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, p. 554. 42. Quoted in Castro, Gordon Riots, p. 51. 43. Rice, ‘The Politics of Barnaby Rudge’, p. 67. 44. Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: a Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (London, 1993), pp. 335–6; Robert Kent Donovan, ‘The Military Origins of the Catholic Relief Programme of 1778’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), p. 87; Watson, Life of Gordon, pp. 35–6. 45. Interestingly a Mr Ellis who met Watson at a Bloomsbury party in 1820 also made the claim in his diary that Watson had been a spy. See British Library, Add. MSS 36653, quoted in Tayler, Stuart Papers, p. 29. 46. See the entry on John Sobieski Stolberg Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sidney Lee (London, 1898), XV: 104–7. The Stuarts allege that a man calling himself Dr Beaton and fitting Watson’s description told them the story of their secret royal origins and promoted their cause. The brothers also lived for a time in the same Scottish parish as Watson’s former tutor and lifelong friend Macfarlane. 47. See especially Watson, Fletcher, pp. 38, 75, 92; Watson, Life of Gordon, p. 11. He later also conceded that religious libertarianism at least had the virtue of tending to foster aspirations for broader civil and political rights. See his anonymous introduction to Memoirs of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746, by the Chevalier de Johnstone, [ed. Robert Watson] (London, 1820),

Barnaby Rudge and Romantic Revolution

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

227

p. v. He also cites Walter Scott’s Border Minstrelsy in support of his explanation of how the lowlanders lost their proud martial traditions. Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii. Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, pp. 346, 446–7. Wonderful Prophecies, being a Dissertation on the Existence, Nature and Extent of the Prophetic Powers in the Human Mind (London, 1795), p. 63. Castro, Gordon Riots, p. 33. See for example, ‘The Two Lunatics: a Dialogue Between Lord George and Margaret Nicholson’, Town and Country Magazine (October 1790). Watson, Life of Gordon, pp. 127–8. Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, p. 698. [Lord George Gordon], The Prisoners’ Petition to the Right Hon. Lord George Gordon, to Preserve their Lives and Liberties, and Prevent Their Banishment to Botany Bay (London, 1786); Lord George Gordon, A Letter from the Right Hon. Lord George Gordon to the Attorney General of England (London, 1787), pp. 12–13. See PRO, TS 11/388/1212, ‘Botany Bay – King versus Lord George Gordon, Proofs for the Prosecution’. See PRO, PC 1/3127, Lord George Gordon to the Marquis of Buckingham, 17 July 1791, intervening in the case of Mary Nugent bought to Newgate for stealing two silver teaspoons. He had relieved her of her needs and was prepared to pay for the cost of the spoons. The Times, 12 January 1787. See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1993), pp. 333–70. Moses Margoliouth, The History of the Jews in Great Britain, 3 vols. (London, 1851), II: 122–4. See Iain McCalman, ‘New Jerusalems: Prophecy, Dissent and Radical Culture in England, 1786–1830’, in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 312–35. Watson, Life of Gordon, pp. 77–80, 89–91. Edmund Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord (London, 1796), in Burke on Revolution, ed. Robert A. Smith (York and Evanston, 1968), p. 234. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 179–80. See Crawford, ‘“Nature Drenched in Blood”’, pp. 38–47. Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, p. 369. Ibid., pp. 336, 346. Ibid., pp. 116–17. Ibid., pp. 355–6. Barbara L. Stuart, ‘The Centaur in Barnaby Rudge’, Dickens Quarterly, 8 (1991), p. 33. Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, pp. 692–3. Ibid., p. 695. Letters of Dickens, II: 295–6.

Malcolm I. Thomis: a Bibliography Books and booklets Old Nottingham. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1968. Politics and Society in Nottingham, 1785–1835. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969. The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1970; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970; New York: Schocken Books, 1972. (editor), Luddism in Nottinghamshire. London and Chichester: Phillimore, 1972. The Town Labourer and the Industrial Revolution. London: B.T. Batsford, 1974. Responses to Industrialisation: the British Experience, 1780–1850. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1976. Industrialization, History and Ideology: Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the University of Queensland, 18 October 1976. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977. (co-author with Peter Holt), Threats of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977. Pastoral Country: a History of the Shire of Blackall. Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1979. Lone Survivor: a History of Rocky Point Mill and the South Queensland Sugar Industry, 1879–1979. [Brisbane]: Queensland Cane Growers Publishing [1979]. The Brisbane Club. Brisbane: Jacaranda, 1980. (co-author with Jennifer Grimmett), Women in Protest, 1800–1850. London: Croom Helm, 1982. A Place of Light and Learning: The University of Queensland’s First 75 Years. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985. The University of Queensland Academic Staff Association: a Historical Outline. St Lucia: The Association [1985?]. (co-author with Murdoch Wales), From SGIO to Suncorp. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1986. A History of the Electricity Supply Industry: Queensland. 2 vols. Brisbane: Boolarong Press, 1989–90. The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England. Modern Revivals in Economic and Social History series. Aldershot: Gregg Publishing, 1993. Thynne and Macartney, 1893–1993. Brisbane: Boolarong Press, 1993. The Brisbane Customs House. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994.

Essays and articles ‘The Nottingham Election of 1803’. Transactions of the Thoroton Society (1961), pp. 94–103. ‘The Politics of Nottingham Enclosure’. Transactions of the Thoroton Society (1967), pp. 90–6. 228

Malcolm I. Thomis: a Bibliography

229

‘Gravener Henson: The Man and the Myth’. Transactions of the Thoroton Society (1971), pp. 91–7. ‘The Nottingham Reform Bill Riots of 1831: New Perspectives’. Transactions of the Thoroton Society (1973), pp. 82–3. ‘The Guilt of Thomas Bacon of Pentrich’. Transactions of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society, 94 (1974), pp. 41–4. ‘The Nottingham Captain: A Portrait of Jeremiah Brandreth, the Rebel’. Nottinghamshire Historian, 14 (1974), pp. 7–9. ‘Some New Ways of Examining the Consequences of Britain’s Industrial Revolution’. World Review, 15, 2 (1976), pp. 3–8. ‘Problems of Local Government in the Early West’. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 10, 2 (1976–7), pp. 145–55. ‘Conscription and Consent: British Labour and the Resignation Threat of 1916’. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 23 (1977), pp. 10–18. ‘Industrialization and the Speed of Technological Change – the First Industrial Nation and its Followers’. The History Teacher, no. 19 (1977), pp. 30–9. ‘The Social Novelists and Working-Class Politics in Early Victorian England’. Proceedings of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (1978), pp. 1–10. ‘Facts from Figures in Local History: Census Reports’. Queensland History Teachers’ Association Bulletin, 17, 2 (1979), pp. 19–21. (co-author with Jennifer Grimmett), ‘Rebecca and Her Sisters’. Hecate, 6, 1 (1980), pp. 98–101. ‘The Aims and Ideology of Violent Protest in Great Britain, 1800–1848’. In Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. W.J. Mommsen and G. Hirschfeld (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 20–31. ‘Zielsetzung und Ideologie Gewaltsamer Protestbewegungen in Grossbritannieu, 1800–1848’. In Sozialprotest, Gewalt, Terror, ed. W.J. Mommsen and G. Hirschfeld (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Sonderdruck, 1982), pp. 32–46. ‘The Dilemma of Colonel Brereton: Bristol, 1831’. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 29 (1983), pp. 318–27. ‘Oral History: Cautionary Tales’. The History Teacher, no. 32 (1983), pp. 1–5. ‘Self-Perceptions of a Small Country Town: Blackall’. Australian Cultural History, 4 (1985), pp. 24–32. ‘The Unthinkable Doctor of Laws’. Vestes, 28, 2 (1985), pp. 2–4. ‘J.D. Story: His Contribution to Tertiary Education Administration’. In Administrative History in Queensland, ed. Sir Douglas Fraser (Brisbane: Royal Australian Institute of Public Administration, 1986), pp. 13–17. ‘Queensland’. In Australians: A Historical Dictionary, ed. Graeme Aplin, S.G. Foster and Michael McKernan. (Broadway, NSW: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 1987), pp. 336–41. ‘The West Central Region’. In Australians: Events and Places, ed. Graeme Aplin, S.G. Foster and Michael McKernan (Broadway, NSW: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, 1987), pp. 336–40 ‘Terrick Terrick: The Casey Years, 1883–1892’. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 13, 2 (1989), pp. 389–400.

Tabula Gratulatoria Professor Philip C. Almond, Studies in Religion, University of Queensland Dr Anthony Arklay, Director, University Health Service, University of Queensland Dr Glen St. J. Barclay, Department of History, University of Queensland Ms Lisa Bellear, Department of English, University of Queensland Professor Geoffrey Bolton, Claremont, Western Australia The late Mr Clayton Bredt, Department of History, University of Queensland Professor Ted Brown, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Queensland Professor Margaret I. Bullock, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Queensland Ms Peggy Burke, Brisbane Ms Elena Carlino, Secretary and Registrar’s Office, University of Queensland Professor Emeritus Boris Christa, Department of German and Russian Studies, University of Queensland Dr Tanya Christa, Department of German and Russian Studies, University of Queensland Mrs Monica Clough, Inverness, Scotland Dr John Cole, Brisbane The Honourable Michael Connarty, MP, House of Commons, London Dr Libby Connors, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Southern Queensland Professor Robert Cribb, Department of History, University of Queensland Professor M. Anne Crowther, Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow Mrs Margaret Dawson, Faculty of Arts, University of Queensland Dr Marion Diamond, Department of History, University of Queensland Dr Don Dignan, Department of History, University of Queensland Dr Colin Dyer, Department of Romance Languages, University of Queensland Dr Raymond Evans, Department of History, University of Queensland Mr Denis Feeney, Personnel Services, University of Queensland Dr Rod Fisher, Department of History, University of Queensland Professor Alan Forrest, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York Associate Professor Anne Freadman, Department of Romance Languages, University of Queensland Dr Jonathan Fulcher, Brisbane Dr Lisa Gaffney, Dean of Students, Faculty of Arts, University of Queensland Professor Malcolm Gillies, School of Music, University of Queensland Mr Geoff Ginn, Department of History, University of Queensland Mrs Dorothy Greenald, Liversedge, West Yorkshire Mrs Noeline Hall, Department of History, University of Queensland Dr Jennifer Harrison, Department of History, University of Queensland 230

Tabula Gratulatoria

231

Mr John Harrison, Inverness, Scotland Mr John Harrop, Magdalen College School, Oxford Dr Peter Holt, Berne, Switzerland Dr Michael Hopkinson, Department of History, University of Stirling Professor Emeritus Leonard Ross Humphreys, Department of Land and Food, University of Queensland Ms Robyn Humphreyes-Reid, Office of the Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Queensland Professor Tor John Hundloe, Technology Management Centre, University of Queensland Dr Janet Irwin, Office of Gender Equity, University of Queensland Dr Ross Johnston, Department of History, University of Queensland Mr Gordon Kidd, Department of History, University of Queensland Professor Emeritus Ted Kolsen, Department of Economics, University of Queensland Ms Mary Kooyman, Department of History, University of Queensland Professor Emeritus John R. Laverty, Department of History, University of Queensland Ms Toni Lawson, Women’s Equal Opportunity Area, Student Union, University of Queensland Ms Carolyn Leach, Brisbane Professor Andrew Lister, Faculty of Engineering, Physical Sciences and Architecture, University of Queensland Mrs Mavis Little, Department of History, University of Queensland Professor Kam Louie, Department of Asian Languages and Studies, University of Queensland Professor Emeritus Harold Lovell, Gatton College, Queensland Mr James Mahoney, Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, University of Queensland Dr Mary Mahoney, Brisbane Dr Brian W. Martin, Magdalen College School, Oxford Ms Gay Mason, Office of Gender Equity, University of Queensland Dr Margaret Maynard, Department of Art History, University of Queensland Dr John McCracken, Department of History, University of Stirling Dr Robert B. McKean, Department of History, University of Stirling Mr D.R. Mercer, Brisbane Professor R.D. Milns, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Queensland Dr Clive Moore, Department of History, University of Queensland Dr John Moorhead, Department of History, University of Queensland Professor (Adjunct) John Anthony Moses, Department of History, University of New England Mrs Anne Nelson, Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s Office, University of Queensland Mrs Jennifer Noble (née Grimmett), Toowoomba Dr Helen M. Nugent, Director of Strategy, Westpac Banking Corporation, Sydney Ms Anne Palmer, Academic Board Office, University of Queensland Professor Ralph Parsons, Brisbane

232

Tabula Gratulatoria

Professor Christopher Peacocke, Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, University of Oxford Dr Chris Penders, Spence, ACT Professor John Phillips, School of Law, King’s College, London Dr Thomas Poole, Department of History, University of Queensland Professor Kamal Puri, Law, University of Queensland Mr Frank Redsell, University Garage, University of Queensland Dr Bill Richmond, Development Office, University of Queensland Dr John Riddy, Department of English and Associated Literature, University of York Mr John D. Rimmer, York, England Mr David Roberts, Liversedge, West Yorkshire Mrs Christine Roberts, Liversedge, West Yorkshire Mr Spencer Routh, Brisbane Dr Edward Royle, Department of History, University of York Ms Margaret Sampson, Surrey, England Mrs Janine Schmidt, University Librarian, University of Queensland Mr Frank H.F. Schofield, High Wycombe, England Professor Deryck Schreuder, Vice-Chancellor, University of Western Australia Dr Leo Launitz-Schurer, Department of History, University of Queensland Dr Joseph Siracusa, Department of History, University of Queensland Dr Peter Stachura, Department of History, University of Stirling Mr Mark Starkey, General Administrative Services, University of Queensland Dr John Stevenson, Worcester College, Oxford Miss June Stoodley, Brisbane Professor Martin Stuart-Fox, Head of the Department of History, University of Queensland Professor Roland Sussex, Centre for Language Teaching and Research, University of Queensland Mrs Helen Taylor, Brisbane Mr Michael Throp, Bradford, West Yorkshire Mr Jim Tolhurst, Business Services, University of Queensland Dr Neil Lionel Tranter, Department of History, University of Stirling Professor Graeme Turner, Department of English, University of Queensland Ms Ann Wallin, Brisbane Professor James Walvin, Department of History, University of York Mr and Mrs Roger Waterhouse, Nairobi, Kenya Miss Gay Westmore, Administration, University of Queensland Professor Emeritus Brian G. Wilson, Vice-Chancellor’s Office, University of Queensland

Index Aberdeen 211, 212 Aberdeen Mechanics’ Institute 169 Act of Union (1707) 13 Adams, John 6 Adams, Samuel 6 addresses to the crown 2 Adlington 135 Age of Reason, The 44, 84, 89, 90, 92, 117, 118, 120, 124 Alexander, Henry 98, 99–100 Alien Act (1793) 112 Alien Office 63, 111–12 Alison, Archibald 191 Almon, John 6 American colonies 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 34 American Revolution 1–24, 34, 192, 198, 202 Anacreon 105 Analytical Review 84 Andersonian Institute 158 Annual Register 3 Antoinette, Marie 216 Archer, William 98 Argus 47 Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers 36, 42, 49, 113–14 Association movement 21 atheism 92 see also free thought Attorney-General 49, 115, 118, 120, 143, 150, 151, 155 Attwood, Thomas 186 Babbage, Charles 170 Bagehot, Walter 199 Bamford, Samuel 154 Barré, Isaac 5, 10, 11, 12, 14 Barrell, John 74, 76 Barrowclough, Joseph 139

Bastille 46 Bath 208 Bath Journal 7 Beckford, William 5 Belfast 101, 102, 105 Belgium 186 Bent (spy) 133, 136 Bentham, Jeremy, and Benthamites 160, 161, 162, 165, 191, 194, 199, 200, 203 Berri, Charles Ferdinand, Duke of 80 Bill of Rights 12, 13 Binns, John 31, 32 Birkbeck, George 159, 160, 162 Birmingham 11, 21, 150, 158 Birmingham and Stafford Chronicle 7 Birmingham Brotherly Society 158 Black Dwarf 48, 83 n. 10 Blackstone, William 22 Blake, William 80 Blakemore, Steven 43 Boaden, James 47 Bolton 133 Bolton Local Militia 134 Bonaparte, Napoleon 106, 191, 212, 213 Bond, Oliver 96, 98, 99–100 Boston (Lincolnshire) 150 Boston (Massachusetts) 8 Boston Port Bill (1774) 10, 14 Boston Tea Party 10 Botany Bay 30, 36, 78, 219 Boulogne 208 Bradford Mechanics’ Institute 170 Bradley, James 3 Braxfield, Robert MacQueen, Lord 86 Brazil 95 n. 40 Brest 58, 59 Bridewell prison 98 Brighton 169, 185 Brissot, Jacques Pierre 113

233

234

Index

Bristol 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 150, 172 British Association for the Promotion of Co-operative Knowledge 169 Brougham, Henry 139, 159, 160, 169, 170, 195, 196, 197, 208 Brown, Henry 147, 149 Brunswick, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of 79 Brunt, John 80 Bryant, Reverend William 35 Buchanan, George 212, 213 Buel, John 119 Burdett, Francis 81, 138, 160 Burgh, James 6, 14, 18, 22 Burke, Edmund 4, 10, 14, 17, 31, 43, 51, 72, 73, 79, 125, 211, 220, 222, 223, 224 Bute, John Stewart, 3rd Earl of 7 Byrne, William Michael 98, 99, 107 n. 17 Cambridge 45, 119 Camden, Lord 2, 5, 10, 13, 15, 96, 97 Captain Swing rising (1830) 179, 180, 181, 182–3, 184, 185, 186, 187 Carlile, Richard 44, 81, 84, 85, 149, 192 Carlyle, Thomas 194, 209, 215 Carpenter, William 187, 192 Cartwright, John 6, 14, 18, 22, 24, 149, 159, 160 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Lord 48, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108 n. 42, 213 Catholic Relief Bill (1778–9) 213, 214 Cato Street conspiracy (1820) 66, 71, 80–82, 179 Champion 70, 80 Champion, Richard 5 Charlemont, Lord 98 Charles II 78 Charlesworth, Andrew 185 Charlotte, Queen 41 Chartier, Roger 153 Chartism 178, 179, 192, 198, 199, 202, 207, 210, 215

Chartist Halls 172 Cheshire 136, 138 Church of England 4 Clapham, J.H. 176 Clare, Lord Chancellor 99, 100 Clayton, Sir Richard 135 Cleave, John 187 clergy, Anglican 11, 20 Cleverton, John 59, 62, 68 n. 13 Club of Honest Whigs 6 Cobbett, William 120, 126, 143, 154, 155, 160, 183–8, 192, 224 Cobden, Richard 170, 200–1 Cochrane, Lord 138 Cock, George 148 Coercive Acts (1774) 14, 15 Coigley, James 63 Colley, Linda 3 Collins, Anthony 59, 62 Colquhoun, Patrick 57 Combe, George 200 Combination Acts 159, 161 Committee of London Merchants 8 Common Council (London) 11, 14 Commons, House of 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 37, 60, 138, 146 Commonwealthman tradition 6, 7, 22, 180 Congleton 136 Congress, American 17 Constâncio, Francisco Solano 85–93, 94 n. 13, 95 n. 40, 95 n. 56 Constitutional Association 69 Continental Congress 6 convention 36, 71–2, 77 Convention, National (France) 31 Convention, British (Edinburgh) 36, 40 n. 35, 86 Cooke, Edward 100, 107 n. 20, 107 n. 24 cooperative movement, see Owen and Owenism Corn Laws 168 Cornwall 58 Cornwallis, Charles, 2nd Earl of and Marquis of 97, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105 Courier 47, 48, 49

Index Covenanters 213, 216, 221 Covent Garden 46, 51, 78 Covent Garden Theatre 78 Crawford, Sir James 105 Crawford (solicitor) 98 Crick, Bernard 203 crimping and crimp riots 57, 67 n. 12, 212 Crisis, The 7 Crossfield, Robert Thomas 58, 59, 62–3, 65, 66, 68 n. 13, 68 n. 15 crowd demonstrations, see riots Cruger, Henry 5, 9 Cuming, George 96 Cuthbert, David 63 Daer, Basil William Douglas, Lord 38 n. 6 David, Rees 6 Davidson, William 80 Davis, John Chandler Bancroft 201 Declaratory Act (1766) 4, 10, 17 deism 91, 117–18, 119 see also free thought Deist, The 84–5 Della Cruscans 45–6, 48, 52 Dennis, Ned 209, 215 Dennis, Thomas 59, 62, 63 Despard, Colonel Edward Marcus 63, 179 Dickens, Charles 124, 125, 207–24 passim Dickensian 209 Dickey, John 102 Dickinson, H.T. 31, 112, 114 Dickson, William Steel 101 Diggers 179, 180 Dinwiddy, John 39 n. 11 discourse, radical 42–4, 50, 60, 69, 70–82, 117–23, 143–55 Dissenters 4, 6, 18, 194 Dobbs, Francis 98, 99, 104 Dublin 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 105 Dublin Castle 100, 105 Dundas, Henry 77, 110 Dunning, John 20 Eagleton, Terry 117 East Anglia 69

235

Eaton, Daniel Isaac 31, 49, 114–27 see also, Politics for the People Economist 168 Edinburgh 36, 57, 85, 86, 87 n. 7, 157, 159, 161, 211 Edinburgh Philosophical Institute 170 Edinburgh Review 161, 193, 194, 195, 196, 199, 201, 208 Edwards, George 66, 81, 82 Eldon, John Scott, Lord 112 Elgin 211, 213 Ellenborough, Edward Law, Lord 117–18, 119, 120, 126 Elliott, Ebenezer 111 Ellis, William 162 Emmet, Robert 103, 106 Emmet, Thomas Addis 96, 97, 100–101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108 n. 42 Empson, William 194, 196–7, 198, 203 Emsley, Clive 112, 113, 124 Engels, Friedrich 171, 176 Epstein, James 50 Erskine, Thomas 37, 40 n. 36, 50, 75 Evans, Caleb 6 Evans, Thomas 149 Falmouth 58 Fielden, John 183, 186 Fletcher of Salton 212, 213, 214 Fletcher, Ralph 133, 134, 135 Ford, Richard 58, 63, 64 Forster, John 208–9, 222 Fort George 103, 105, 106 Fox, Charles James 5, 11, 15, 110 Fox, W.J. 196 France 2, 9, 15, 17, 18, 19, 30, 36, 37, 46, 47, 53, 58, 59, 62, 70, 72, 79, 85, 181, 186 franchise 22, 23, 30, 35, 57, 70, 71, 76, 192, 195, 196, 197, 198, 201 Francis, Samuel (pseud.), see Constâncio, Francisco Solano Franklin, Benjamin 2, 4, 6, 9 free thought 88–93 see also deism

236

Index

French Revolution 21, 37, 41, 42, 47, 69, 79, 82, 92, 111, 112, 138, 181–82, 187, 207, 220 Frye, Martha 218 Gagging Acts (1795), 69, 72, 81, 111, 112 Gauntlet 192 Gentleman’s Magazine 47 George III 2, 5, 7, 31, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 74, 105, 119, 121, 123, 218 George IV (Prince of Wales, Prince Regent) 41, 42, 49, 142 n. 36, 153 Germany 104 Gerrald, Joseph 40 n. 35, 78, 86 Ghost, The 87, 88 Gibbs, Vicary 40 n. 36, 75 Gifford, William 46 Gilmartin, Kevin 120 Glasgow 11, 119, 157 Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute 158 Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine 169 Glorious Revolution (1688–9) 4, 37, 193, 202 Godwin, William 72–3, 94 n. 23, 111, 169 Goldsmith, Steven 44 Goore, Charles 5 Gordon, George, Lord 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213–15, 216, 217–20, 221 Gordon Riots (1780) 82, 180, 207, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216–17, 218, 219, 220, 221 Granby, Marquis of 15 Gray, John 165 Greg, William Rathbone 201 Griffiths, Ralph 46 Grote, George 160 Groves, John 31, 61–2, 63, 67–8 n. 12 Guildhall 143 Gurney, John 119 Habeas Corpus Act 56, 61, 63, 66, 76, 86, 111, 143, 145, 153 Haddington School of Arts 159

Halévy, Elie 176–7 Halifax 170 Halls of Science 171, 172 Hamburg 85, 104, 105 Hammond, J.L. and Barbara 176, 177, 181 Hampden Clubs 149, 153, 179 Hampshire 185 Hanbury, Capel 5 Hardy, Thomas 30, 31, 32, 34–7, 50, 56, 57, 61, 64, 69, 74, 122 Harrow 45 Hartley, David 3, 5, 15, 17 Hay, Reverend W. 136 Hayley, George 5 Hazlitt, William 194, 198 Hetherington, Henry 187, 192 Higgins, George 56, 57–8, 60, 61, 62, 64 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 177 Hobhouse, John C. 81, 160 Hobsbawm, Eric 180, 182, 183 Hodgskin, Thomas 157–8, 159, 160, 161–68, 169 Holbach, Baron d’ 84 Holcroft, Thomas 37, 209, 216 Hole, James 171 Home Office 58, 111, 134, 140, 147, 149, 151, 182, 216 Hone, William 48, 117, 143–55, 224 Horner, Francis 195 Horton, Robert Wilmet 169 Houston, George 125 Huddersfield 139 Huddersfield Local Militia 139 Hughes, John 98, 108 n. 20 Hulme, Obadiah 13 Hume, Robert 152–3 Hunt, Henry 81, 153, 154, 155, 187 Hunter, Robert 101 Hurlbert, Henry 201 Hutcheon, Linda 50 Hutcheson, Frances 212 Illustrated London Times 209 Industrial Revolution 176 Ings, James 80 Intolerable Acts (1774),

Index see Coercive Acts Ironside, Isaac 172 Italy 45 Jackson, Andrew 198 Jackson, Henry 98 Jebb, John 6 Jefferson, Thomas 6, 23, 202–3 Jeffrey, Francis 193–4, 195, 196, 198 Johnson, Samuel 75, 207 Jones, John Gale 160 Joyce, Patrick 178 Keats, John 47 Keighley 170 Kennett, Brackley 217 Kentish Gazette 7 Kenyon, Lord 110, 115 Kilmainham prison 98 King, Dr William 169 King, Rufus 96, 102, 103, 104, 106 King’s Bench, Court of 112, 143 King’s College (Aberdeen) 211 Kinnear, Mary 4 Klancher, Jon 148 Knight, Charles 169 Knox, Vicesimus 218 Lake, General Gerard 97 Lancashire 136, 137, 138 Lancashire Militia 133 Landsdowne, Marquis of 199 Lang, Andrew 209 language of politics, see discourse, radical Lauderdale, Lord 126 law, rule of 111, 134, 140 Le Briton, John 59, 62, 63 Lee, Arthur (pseud. Junius Americanus) 5, 8 Lee, Richard Henry 5 Lee, William 5 Leeds 11, 157 Leeds Mechanics’ Institute 170 Leeds Mercury 7 Leicester 119 Leinster 101 Lemaitre, Paul Thomas 56, 57–8,

237

60, 61–2, 63, 64, 65–6, 67–8 n. 12 Levellers 180 Lewis, Cornwall 199 Liverpool 5, 11, 170 Liverpool Mechanics’ and Apprentices Library 158 Lloyd, John 133–40 Lloyd, Thomas 123 Locke, John 14, 166, 167, 168 London 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 33, 34, 56, 80, 85, 86, 105, 113, 114, 124, 125, 136, 137, 154, 157, 158, 168, 180, 181, 185, 187, 199, 207, 208, 212, 214 London Chronicle 6 London Co-operative Society 164 London Corresponding Society (LCS) 31, 32, 35, 36, 38 n. 6, 50, 56, 59, 60–61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 72, 74, 86, 114, 122–3, 135, 212 Londonderry 99 London Dispatch 192 London Evening Post 7 London Mechanics’ Institute 157, 158, 159–67, 168, 169 London Mechanics’ Magazine 159 Lords, House of 2, 5, 10, 15, 192 Louis XVI 77 Luddites xii–xiii, 133–40, 177, 178, 179, 182, 187 Luttrell, Temple 3 Lynam, George 50 Macaulay, Catharine 6 Macerone, Colonel 208 Macfarlane, Robert 211 Mackenzie, E. 170 Mackintosh, Sir James 198 MacNeven, William James 96, 97, 98, 100–101, 102, 103, 104, 106 Magin (or Magean), Nicholas 98 Magna Carta 12, 13 Maidstone 99 Maine 194 Maitland, General 139 Malthus, Thomas 163, 169, 170, 171 Manchester 11, 21, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 150, 154, 170, 187

238

Index

Manchester New Mechanics’ Institute 159, 169, 170 Margarot, Maurice 36, 40 n. 35 Margette, William 147, 148 Martineau, Harriet 168, 170 Marx, Karl 176, 177, 179, 180, 181 Mason, Joseph 185 Mayhew, Henry 146–7, 151 McCalman, Iain 124 McCulloch, J.R. 165, 168, 170, 194, 199 McGann, J.J. 45, 46 McKibbin, Ross 179 mechanics’ institutes 157–72 Mechanics’ Magazine 160, 162, 163 Melbourne, Lord 186 Members of Parliament 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 31, 195, 198 Merivale, Herman 197, 202 Merry, Robert 45–9, 51, 52, 53, 54 n. 14 Metcalfe, William 61–2, 63, 67 n. 3, 67 n. 12 Mexican War (1846–7) 194 Mexico 200 Middlesex 6, 7 Middleton Local Militia 134 Mill, James 160, 161, 165 Mill, John Stuart 164, 170, 196 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de 191 Mitcham, Charles 127 Monthly Chronicle 169 Monthly Magazine 48, 70 Monthly Repository, The 126 Monthly Review 46 Mori, Jennifer 112 Morning Chronicle 120, 122, 161 M’Queen, John 209 Muir, Thomas 212 Murray, James 6, 32 Nadin, Joseph 136 Napier, Macvey 199 Napoleonic Wars 184 National Political Union 192 National Union of Working Classes 192 Neilson, Samuel 97, 98, 99, 102,

103, 107 n. 20 New Annual Register 59 Newcastle 6, 32, 150, 170 Newgate prison 42, 98, 103, 110, 124, 126, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 218, 219, 220, 222 New Left Review 176 New Moral World 170 New Times 80 New York 96, 103, 104, 119, 201 Nixon, R. 134 Nore mutiny (1797) 138, 212 North, Frederick, Lord 2, 7, 10, 11, 17, 20, 214 Norway 105 Norwich 6, 11, 57 Nottingham 6, 11 Nugent, General 102 O’Connor, Arthur 63, 99, 100–101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107 n. 25 O’Connor, Roger 99, 105 Old Bailey 57, 58, 60, 76, 123 Oldham 186 Ong, Walter 150 Orange Lodges 133–5, 138, 139, 140, 142 n. 36 Oregon 194, 200 Owen, Robert and Owenism 93, 164, 165, 166, 169, 171, 172, 183, 192 Paine, Thomas 6, 24, 31, 32, 33, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 84, 85–93, 95 n. 40, 111, 115, 117, 119, 120, 124, 182, 192 see also Age of Reason and Rights of Man Palmer, Elihu 85 Palmer, Peregrine 58, 59, 65 Panoramic Miscellany 70 parliament 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 32, 35, 36, 37, 45, 51, 58, 81, 111, 138, 139, 152, 153, 186, 188, 214 see also reform, parliamentary parliamentary representation, see reform, parliamentary patronage 20, 200

Index Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 179 Perry, James 209 Peterloo 80, 81, 82, 84 petitions 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 21, 64, 65, 114, 153, 185, 219 Phillips, Richard 119 Philosophical Society (Newcastle) 32 Pigott, Charles 41, 45, 50, 54 n. 14, 123 Pig’s Meat 32, 39 n. 11, 49 pillory 110, 124–7 Pitt, William, the Younger 3, 5, 8, 13, 16, 17, 20, 42, 45, 51, 52, 64, 77, 105, 110 Place, Francis 61, 63, 124, 125, 126, 149, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 187 Poland 195 Political Register 6, 183, 185, 192 Politics for the People 49, 115, 121, 212 Pomona (ship) 58, 59 Poor Law 184 Poor Man’s Guardian 192 Pop-Gun Plot (1794) 56–66 Porteous Riot (1736–7) 207, 216 Portland, William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, Duke of 99, 103, 104 Portugal 85, 103 Post Office 111 Pownall, Thomas 16 Preservation of the Public Peace Bill (1812) 139 press 6, 42, 45, 52, 56, 113–14, 115, 116, 119–20, 127, 144, 150, 162, 168, 188, 192, 193, 194, 219 Price, Richard 6, 14, 18–19, 22, 23, 24, 34 Priestley, Joseph 6, 23 Privy Council 57, 61, 62, 64 proclamations against seditious writings 42, 111, 114 Prompter 192 Quarterly Review radicals

160

4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 18, 21,

239

22, 24, 31, 36, 57, 58, 66, 71, 80, 110, 112–13, 122–3, 144, 149, 153, 157, 160, 169, 171, 186–7, 192, 194, 195, 199, 202, 203, 214, 216, 220 Radzinowicz, Leon 112 Real Whig tradition, see Commonwealthman tradition Reeve, Henry 201 Reeves, John 36, 42, 49, 113–14 Reflections on the Revolution in France 43, 73, 211, 220, 223 Reform Act (1832) 69, 82, 161, 178, 182, 186, 191, 192, 195 reform, parliamentary 21, 23, 30, 35, 36, 37, 57, 69, 72, 76, 145, 163, 185, 192, 195, 201 reform, social and economic 30–38, 145, 192 Reformists’ Register, The 143, 149, 154 revolution 30–38, 39 n. 11, 41, 57, 69, 70, 72–3, 80, 97, 106, 135, 137–8, 139, 140, 176–88, 195, 208, 212, 220, 221 Reynolds, Thomas 97 rhetoric, radical, see discourse, radical Ricardo, David 160, 162, 164, 167 Richmond, Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of 5, 15 Ridgway, James 42 Rights of Man 32, 42–4, 49, 50, 111, 115 riots 34, 57, 58–9, 67 n. 3, 178, 180, 210, 212 ritual, radical 42, 78, 121–22, 126, 144, 148 Robertson, J.C. 159, 160, 162 Robinson, Henry Crabb 126, 127 Robinson, Mary 47 Rockingham, Charles WatsonWentworth, 2nd Marquis of 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20 Romilly, Samuel 218 Rotunda 185 Royle, Edward 159 Royton 134 Rudé, George 125, 182, 183

240

Index

Rush, Benjamin 5 Russell, Gillian 43 Russia 192 Rutt, John Towill 122 Ryder, Richard 136 Sá, Victor de 85 Sampson, William 96, 98, 99, 102, 103 sans-culottes 57, 187 satire, radical 45, 47, 48–52, 54 n. 14, 123, 143–55 Sawbridge, John 14 Sayre, Stephen 5 Scotland 80, 85, 102, 105 Scots College (Paris) 213, 217 Scott, Walter 207, 210, 216, 217, 220, 223 Seditious Meetings Act (1795), see Gagging Acts Selby, Charles 148 Senior, Nassau 170, 197, 199–200, 201 September massacres (1792) 79 Shadgett, William 84 Sharp, Granville 6 Sheffield 21, 57, 64, 119, 172 Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information 35 Shelburne, William Petty FitzMaurice, 2nd Earl of 5, 15 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 127, 144 Shepherd, Samuel 150–1, 152 Shipley, Bishop 11, 14 Sidmouth, Henry Addington, Lord 147, 153 Sieyes, Abbé 213 Silbert, Albert 85 Simms, Robert 101 Sirr, Henry 96 Siskin, Clifford 46, 50 Six Acts (1819) 81 slavery 194–5, 197, 200, 201, 219 Smith, Adam 19, 164, 165, 166, 171, 212 Smith, John 56, 57–8, 60, 61, 62, 64 Smith, Olivia 143, 144 Smith, Sydney 193–4, 195

socialism 92, 160, 166, 171, 172, 178, 192 Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) 21, 32, 35, 36, 57 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 168–9 Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights 5 Society of the Friends of the People 46, 47 Sousa, Machado de 85 South America 95 n. 40 Spa Fields Riots 145 Spain 2, 9 Spedding, James 197, 200, 202 Spence, Thomas 30, 31, 32–4, 35, 39 n. 11, 39 n. 14, 45, 49, 110, 117 see also Pig’s Meat Spencer, Herbert 168 spies and informers 30, 31, 50, 61–2, 63–4, 74, 80, 81–2, 111, 114, 119, 133–40, 216 squibs, see satire, radical Stafford, Joseph 122 Stationers’ Company 114 Stamp Act (1765) 4, 8–9, 20 Stamp Act Congress 6 Stanley, Edward 198 Steuart, Charles 5 Stevenson, John 179, 181 Stewart, Isabella 218 Stockport 133, 136, 137, 170 Stoddart, John 80 Stoker, Edward 59 Struggle, The 200 suffrage, see franchise Sussex 187 Sweetman, John 97 Swing Riots (1830), see Captain Swing rising symbolism, radical 42, 50, 70, 78, 121–22, 123, 126 see also ritual, radical Symonds, H.D. 42 Tandy, James Napper 104–5 Taplin, Thomas 210

Index Tatler, The 51 Taunton 6 taxation 9, 10, 12–13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 35, 184, 193, 214 Taylor, Colonel S. 124 Taylor, John 47 Taylor, Joseph 133, 134, 135–40 Telegraph 47, 52, 54 n. 14 Texas 194, 200 theatre, radical, see ritual, radical Theatre Royal, Covent Garden 46 Thelwall, John 31, 32, 37, 57, 63, 69–82, 110, 117, 121, 122, 123 Thistlewood, Arthur 80, 81–2 Thomas, Peter 3 Thomis, Malcolm I. xi–xv, 69, 111, 177–8, 179 Thompson, E.P. xii, 111, 112, 117, 125, 133, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180–1, 182, 187, 204 Thompson, William 164 Tidd, Richard 80 Times, The 46, 135, 140, 201, 207, 208, 219 Tolbooth prison 110, 207, 216 Tolpuddle martyrs 187 Tone, Theobold Wolfe 105 Tooke, John Horne 35, 37, 46, 48, 57, 63, 69 Toulmin, Joshua 6 Townshend duties 10, 17 Traitorous Correspondence Act (1793) 111 treason 30, 36, 37, 56, 58, 63, 71, 74–5, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105 Treasonable Practices Act (1795), see Gagging Acts Treason Trials (1794) 48, 50, 57, 63, 69, 71, 74–5, 81 Trecothick, Barlow 5, 8, 9 trials, political 30, 36, 42, 52, 59–60, 81, 86, 100, 112, 113, 114–24, 143–4, 150–1, 153, 155 Tribune, The 73, 77, 110 Trollope, Frances 196 Tucker, Josiah 20 Tyler, Wat 179 Ulster

97

241

United Britons 63 United Englishmen 63, 135, 140 United Irishmen 63, 96–106, 179, 212, 213 United Scots 212 University of Edinburgh 86, 94 n. 13 University of St Andrews 94 n. 13 Unlawful Oaths Act (1797) 135 Unlawful Oaths Bill (1812) 138, 139 Unlawful Societies Act (1799) 135 Upton, Elizabeth 59 Upton, Thomas 56, 59, 60–1, 62, 63–5 Utilitarian Society 164 Vatican 213 Vaughan, Felix 36 Veitch, George Stead 121 Vickerman, Francis 139 Vogelstein, Carl Christian 211, 212 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 84 Walker, Benjamin 139 Walker, George 6 Walker, John 139 Wallace, William 212, 213 Walpole, Horace, 2nd Earl of Oxford 9 Walpole, Sir Robert, 1st Earl of Oxford 7 Walworth, William, Lord Mayor 179 Warrington Mechanics’ Institute 169 Watson, Dr Richard, Bishop of Llandaff 85–91 Watson, Holland 136 Watson Refuted 85, 88–93 Watson, Robert 207–24 passim Watt, Robert 57 Watts, John 172 Weekly Review 84 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of 186 Wells, Roger 185 Wesley, John 2 Westminster 4, 20, 70, 185

242

Index

Westminster Association 21 Wexford 97 Wharam, Alan 71, 76 Whitehead, Thomas 133, 134, 135–40 Wickham, William 63, 112 Wiener, Martin 179 Wilkes, Charles 196 Wilkes, John 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 14 William IV 185 Williams, Gwyn A. xv Williams, Raymond 180 Wilson, James 168 Wilson, Kathleen 3 Winstanley, Gerrard 179

Wood, Marcus 144 Wooler, Thomas 48, 81, 82 n. 10, 117, 144 Wordsworth, William 53, 221, 222 World, The 45, 46 Wynn, William 135 Wyvill, Christopher 21 Yarwood, Humphrey 135, 136, 137, 138 York, Frederick Augustus, Duke of 138, 142 n. 36 Yorke, Henry Redhead 31, 32 Yorkshire 80, 139