The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  93. McLynn, Crime and Punishment, pp. 156–71. For James’s disdain for coining see RA Stuart, 101/110.

  94. Frank McLynn, Jews, Radicals and Americans in the Jacobite World-View (Royal Stuart Papers, 1987).

  95. For Jacobites and the world of espionage see Frank McLynn, The Jacobites (1985), pp. 171–87 and, at greater length, Hugh Douglas, Jacobite Spy Wars: Moles, Rogues and Treachery (1999).

  96. ‘The eighteenth century was developing towards a society in which politicisation was possible, and Jacobitism definitely promoted this trend; but it took the economic changes of the period after 1760, and the effects of the long and arduous conflict between 1792 and 1815, to mobilise huge segments of the population.’ Monod, Jacobitism, p. 264.

  97. A. Remond, John Holker (Paris, 1944); Albert Nicholson, ‘Lieutenant John Holker’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 9 (1891), pp. 147–54.

  98. RA Stuart, Box 1/454.

  99. In principle, there can be no definitive answer to this vexed question. For the issues involved see A. G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’, PP 164 (1999), pp. 198–243; Natasha Glaisyer, ‘Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth Century British Empire’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), pp. 451–76. For some other pointers see Nicholas P. Canning, The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 2001) and P. J. Marshall, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998).

  100. Robert A. Ferguson, ‘The Commonalities of Common Sense’, William and Mary Quarterly, 57 (2000), pp. 465–504. See also ‘Commonsense’, one of Bernard Bailyn’s essays in Bernard Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (NY, 1990).

  101. See McLynn, France, passim.

  102. Rosalind Mitchison, Essays in Eighteenth-Century History (1966), p. 263; Gerald B. Hertz, ‘England and the Ostend Company’, EHR, 22 (1907), pp. 255–79.

  103. John Miller, Charles II (1991) pp. 93, 99; Phyllis S. Lachs, ‘Parliament and Foreign Policy under the Later Stuarts’, Albion, 7 (1975), pp. 41–54.

  104. Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations in the Eighteenth Century (1986); H. Leclerq, Histoire de la Régence pendant la minorité de Louis XV, 3 vols (Paris, 1922); James Brock Perkins, France Under the Regency (1892).

  105. Pierre André O’Heguerty to Maurepas, 30 October 1745, Maurepas Papers, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; O’Heguerty to Comte d’Argenson, 4 October 1745, ibid.

  106. RA Stuart, 93/20, 189/95.

  107. The Calm Address to All Parties, Whether Protestant or Catholick, on the Score of the Present Rebellion (1745).

  108. T. B. Howells, A Complete Collection of State Trials, 34 vols (1828), 18, p. 499.

  109. Ministry of Foreign Affairs France, Quai d’Orsay, Archives Etrangères, Mémoires et Documents, Angleterre, 52, f. 38.

  110. Rohan Butler, Choiseul (1981), p. 624.

  111. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols (1783), iv, pp. 115–16.

  112. For Sir William Temple (1628–99) see Pierre Marambaud, Sir William Temple, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris, 1968). For Sir James Harrington (1611–77) see J. G. A. Pocock, The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977). Harrington famously argued (in pre-Marxist fashion) in his Oceana that property was the cause of political power, not vice versa.

  113. For his apologia for James II, including this point, see Nathaniel Johnston, The King’s Visitorial Power Asserted (1688).

  114. HMC, v. pp. 188–9.

  115. RA Stuart, 253/51.

  116. Jarvis, Jacobite Risings, ii, pp. 169–88.

  117. Walpole to Mann, 27 September 1745, in Lewis, ed., Walpole’s Correspondence, 19, p. 116.

  118. Carl L. Klose, Memoirs of Prince Charles Stuart, Count of Albany (1845), p. 238.

  119. C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England (Manchester, 1993).

  120. RA Stuart, 78/181.

  121. For Shippen (1673–1743) see Stephen W. Baskerville, ‘Shippen, William’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004), 50, pp. 381–3.

  122. Frank McLynn, ‘Ireland and the Jacobite Rising of 1745’, Irish Sword, 13 (1979), pp. 339–52.

  123. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, eds, The Works of George Berkeley (1957), vi, pp. 229–30.

  124. John Wells and Douglas Wills, ‘Revolution, Restoration and Debt Repudiation’, Journal of Economic History, 60 (2000), pp. 418–41 (at p. 424).

  125. P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (1967).

  126. Wells and Wills, ‘Revolution, Restoration and Debt Repudiation’, p. 423.

  127. Calm Address; cf. also RA Stuart, 169/19.

  128. A Full Collection of the Proclamations and Order issued by Order of Charles, Prince of Wales (Glasgow 1746) p. 29.

  129. O’Heguerty in Maurepas Papers.

  130. RA Stuart, 278/129.

  131. Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century (1997), p. 154.

  132. HMC, 15, vii, p. 333.

  133. Sedgwick, History of Parliament, i, pp. 515–17.

  134. K. G. Feiling, The Second Tory Party, 1714–1832 (1959), p. 17.

  135. A. F. Steuart, ed., The Woodhouseless MSS (Edinburgh, 1907), p. 89; British Magazine, 1746, p. 192.

  136. Add. MSS 35, 886, f. 60. For acknowledgement of the correlation between Jacobitism and financial ruin by a hostile observer see G. C. Mounsey, Carlisle in 1745 (1846), p. 232.

  137. Hughes, North Country Life, i, p. xvii.

  138. RA Stuart, 130/133.

  139. RA Stuart, 205/16.

  140. Daniel Defoe, ‘The Fears and Sentiments of All True Britons with respect to Public Credit’, in Walter Scott, ed., The Somers Collection of Tracts (NY, 1965), pp. 8–9; David Hume, ‘Of Public Credit’, in Hume, Philosophical Works (1826), pp. 196–203. See also Eugene Rotwein, ed., Writings on Economics by David Hume (Madison, 1955), pp. 207–14; Stephen Copley and Andrew Eiger, eds, Hume: Selected Essays (NY, 1993); John Christian Lanssen and Greg Coolidge, ‘David Hume and Public Debt: Crying Wolf?’, Hume Studies, 20 (1994), pp. 143–9.

  141. Wells and Wills, ‘Revolution, Restoration’, esp. pp. 430–4. See also R. B. Ekelund and R. D. Tollison, Political Economies: Monarchy, Monopoly Mercantilism (Texas, 1997); Larry Neal, ‘Integration of International Capital Markets: Quantitative Evidence from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, Journal of Economic History, 45 (1985), pp. 219–26; Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990).

  142. C. Douglas North and Barry Weingart, ‘Constitutions and Commitments: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of Economic History, 49 (1989), pp. 803–32.

  143. Pittock, Myth of the Jacobite Clans, pp. 2, 64.

  10 The Advent of the Chartists

  1. For some very different estimates of Wilkes and his movement see George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (1982); D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (1996); Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Liberty (Yale, 2006).

  2. John Nicholson, The Great Liberty Riot of 1780 (1985); George Rudé, ‘The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters and Their Victims’, TRHS, 5th series, 6 (1956), pp. 93–114.

  3. There have been almost as many answers to this question as there are books on the French Revolution. A good starting point is George Rudé, The French Revolution (1988).

  4. See Clive Emsley, ‘Repression, Terror and the Rule of Law in England During the Decade of the French Revolution’, EHR, 100 (1985), pp. 801–26.

  5. Robert Reid, The Peterloo Massacre (1989), pp. 186–7; Joyce Marlow, The Peterloo Massacre (1969); pp. 150–1; Michael Bush, The Casualties of Peterloo (2005), passim.

  6. Bush, Casualties, pp. 31, 73, 103–5.

  7. Reid, Peterloo Massacre, p. 78.

  8. Eric J. Evans, The Great Reform Act of 1832 (
1983). There is superb background information on the rotten boroughs and much else in Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Elector System of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989).

  9. D. Hirst, The Representatives of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975), p. 105.

  10. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, p. 217.

  11. See, for example, Norman Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1951), p. xii; E. A. Smith, Reform or Revolution? A Diary of Reform in England, 1830–1832 (Stroud, 1992), p. 141. The quote from Giuseppe di Lampedusa is from The Leopard (1960), trans. Archibald Colquhoun, p. 40.

  12. N. C. Edsall, The Anti-Poor Law Movement, 1834–44 (Manchester, 1971); G. C. and E. O. A. Checkland, eds, The Poor Law Report of 1834 (1970); M. Blang, ‘The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New’, Journal of Economic History, 23 (1963), pp. 151–84.

  13. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), p. 567.

  14. J. V. Orthro, Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism, 1721–1906 (Oxford, 1991); M. Chase, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot, 2000).

  15. J. Marlow, The Tolpuddle Martyrs (1971).

  16. Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study of Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford, 1970); Joel Wiener, The War of the Unstamped: The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–1836 (Ithaca, NY, 1969).

  17. P. Richards, ‘State and Early Industrial Capitalism: The Case of the Handloom Weavers’, PP 83 (1979), pp. 91–111; Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007), pp. 20–2; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (1984), p. 19.

  18. George Howell, A History of the Working Men’s Association from 1836 to 1850 (Newcastle, 1973); D. J. Rowe, ‘The LWMA and the People’s Charter’, PP 36 (1967), pp. 73–86.

  19. See Joel Wiener, William Lovett (Manchester, 1989).

  20. Gregory Claeys, ed., The Chartist Movement in Britain, 1838–1850, 6 vols (2001), i, pp. 110–33.

  21. Asa Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies (1959), pp. 291–2.

  22. For a more modern analysis see Donald Read, ‘Chartism in Manchester’, in Briggs, Chartist Studies, pp. 29–64; J. F. C. Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leeds’, in ibid., pp. 65–98; Alex Wilson, ‘Chartism in Glasgow’, in ibid., pp. 249–87.

  23. David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (1982), pp. 159–218.

  24. See A. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995), pp. 220–47; E. J. Yeo, ed., Radical Femininity (Manchester, 1998), pp. 108–26; H. Rogers, Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot 2000), pp. 80–123.

  25. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Stedman Jones, Language of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90–183.

  26. D. Hay and N. Rogers, Eighteenth-Century Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford, 1997), p. 9.

  27. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, ii, pp. 205–95, 369–77; iv, pp. 49–70, 233–7, 287–92; v, pp. 47–53, 77–82.

  28. For Lovett’s view of his feud with O’Connor see W. Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett (1876), pp. 158–67.

  29. Eva Haraszti, Chartism (1978), pp. 78–90; Goodway, London Chartism, p. 41.

  30. Goodway, London Chartism, p. 57; Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, iii, pp. 197–200.

  31. See R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement (1854), pp. 55–62 and, especially, Haraszti, Chartism, pp. 19–40.

  32. For Stephens’s speeches see Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, i, pp. 175–356.

  33. Quoted in P. A. Pickering, ‘The Hearts of Millions: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s’, History, 88 (2003), pp. 227–48 (at p. 238).

  34. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, i, p. 214.

  35. Thompson, Chartists, p. 75.

  36. Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain (2009), p. 375. Cf. also M. S. Edwards, Purge This Realm: A Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens (1994).

  37. The three most significant biographies of O’Connor are Donald Reid and Eric Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor: Irishman and Chartist (1961); James Epstein, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–1842 (1982), and Paul Pickering, Feargus O’Connor (2009).

  38. Epstein, Lion of Freedom, pp. 39–53.

  39. H. Rickard, Memoirs of Joseph Sturge (1864), p. 313.

  40. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, ii, pp. 335–55; Reid and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, p. 35.

  41. W. J. Fitzpatrick, ed., Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, 2 vols (1888), ii, pp. 215, 222–3.

  42. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 45, 52, 246–7. The damning quote is from E. L. Woodward, The Age of Reform (1949), p. 130.

  43. G. D. H. Cole, Chartist Portraits (1941) pp. 300–36.

  44. Max Beer, History of British Socialism (1920), 2 vols, ii, pp. 9–11.

  45. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, p. 30–1.

  46. Ibid., p. 29.

  47. Chase, Chartism, p. 14.

  48. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, v, pp. 1–18; Haraszti, Chartism, pp. 97–100.

  49. For his biography see A. Plummer, Bronterre: A Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–1864 (1971).

  50. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, v, pp. 299–442; Haraszti, Chartism, pp. 68–77.

  51. W. J. Linton, Memories (1895), p. 42.

  52. Whether this was mental illness or alcoholism is discussed in Plummer, Bronterre. For the eccentric political thinking see Cole, Chartist Portraits, p. 262; Thompson, Chartists, pp. 101–4.

  53. Tristram Hunt, The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009), p. 90.

  54. Haraszti, Chartism, pp. 90–7.

  55. F. G. and R. M. Black, eds, The Harney Papers (1969), pp. 241–2; A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney (1958); Epstein, Lion of Freedom, p. 90; John Bedford Leno, The Aftermath: With Autobiography of the Author (1892).

  56. Lovett, Life and Struggles, pp. 201–2; Thompson, Chartists, pp. 64–70; Haraszti, Chartism, pp. 105–21.

  57. Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, p. 302.

  58. Thompson, Chartists, p. 68.

  59. Edward Hoyle, Chartism (1986), p. 97.

  60. Haraszti, Chartism, p. 46.

  61. Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 24–37.

  62. F. C. Mather, ‘The Government and the Chartists’, in Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, pp. 372–405 (at pp. 379–80).

  63. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, i, p. 264.

  64. Chase, Chartism, pp. 75–84; cf. also P. A. Pickering, ‘“And your Petitions” etc: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics, 1838–1848’, EHR, 116 (2001), pp. 386–8.

  65. Thompson, Chartists, p. 60.

  66. Ibid., pp. 57–8.

  67. Chase, Chartism, pp. 63, 67.

  68. For the ‘sacred month’ see ibid., pp. 63–108 passim.

  69. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2000), p. 500.

  70. There are many biographies of Melbourne extant: Philip Ziegler, A Life of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1976); L. G. Mitchell, Lord Melbourne (1997); Dorothy Marshall, Lord Melbourne (1976). The hatred of Queen Victoria for the Chartists is in Cecil Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times, 2 vols, (1972), i, pp. 190–1.

  71. Haraszti, Chartism, p. 143.

  72. Mather, ‘The Government and the Chartists’, p. 378. For a full portrait of Russell see John Prest, Lord John Russell (S. Carolina, 1972).

  73. Chase, Chartism, pp. 95–6.

  74. Thompson, Chartists, p. 67.

  75. J. C. Hobhouse (Lord Broughton), Recollections of a Long Life, ed. Lady Dorchester (1909), v, p. 240.

  76. Chase, Chartism, pp. 100–6.

  77. A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of G. J. Harney (1958), pp. 80–1.

  78. Chase, Chart
ism, pp. 105–6.

  79. Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (1972), pp. 27–31.

  80. For the connection with Byron see William Napier Bruce, The Life of General Sir Charles Napier (1885), p. 94. For that with Burton: see Frank McLynn, Burton. Snow Upon the Desert (1990), pp. 35–6.

  81. W. Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles Napier, 2 vols (1857), ii, pp. 48–9.

  82. Ibid., ii, pp. 5–6, 8.

  83. Ibid., ii, pp. 7–15, 23–8, 32–3, 36, 39, 42–3, 45.

  84. Ibid., ii, pp. 42, 59, 89.

  85. Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars.

  86. M. Taylor, ‘The Six Points: Chartism and the Reform of Parliament’, in O. Aston, R. Fyson and S. Roberts, eds, The Chartist Legacy (1999), pp. 1–19.

  87. David Williams, ‘Chartism in Wales’, in Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, pp. 220–48; Thompson, Chartists, p. 133; A. J. Peacock, Chartism in Bradford (York, 1969).

  88. Chase, Chartism, pp. 106–10; Haraszti, Chartism, p. 148

  89. Since the Newport attack occasioned the most serious loss of life in the Chartist years, it is not surprising that every single major study of the movement has something to say about it. See, for example, Chase, Chartism, pp. 106–10; Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 16–63; J. West, The Chartist Movement (1920), pp. 143–4; F. W. Slosson, The Decline of the Chartist Movement (1916), pp. 195–200; R. P. Groves, A Narrative History of Chartism (1938), pp. 93–9.

  90. The best estimate of casualties is in D. J. V. Jones, The Last Rising: the Newport Insurrection of 1839 (1985), which is generally acknowledged as the classic work on the subject (at pp. 154–6). See also John Humphries, The Man from the Alamo: Why the Welsh Chartist Uprising of 1839 ended in a Massacre (St Athan, 2004).

  91. Chase, Chartism, p. 110.

  92. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 214–15.

  93. G. J. Holyoake, The Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens (1881), p. 165; see also Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, i, pp. 357–82.

  94. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, pp. 80–2.