Partly as a response to his critics, Priestley gave a sermon in 1785 that was subsequently published as a pamphlet called The Importance and Extent of Free Enquiry. This would be the second tremor that presaged the eventual quake. It included a rallying cry for the Unitarian movement: “Let us not, therefore, be discouraged, though for the present we should see no great number of churches professedly Unitarian,” he wrote. “It is sufficiently evident that Unitarian principles are gaining ground every day.” But Priestley recognized that something more than mere optimism was warranted here, given the political realities of the time. He needed a metaphor for cultural change that could account for long periods of relative stability, followed by sudden revolutions. At first, he turned to the seasonal energy flows of agriculture: “We are now sowing the seeds which the cold of winter may prevent from sprouting, but which a genial spring will make to shoot and grow up; so that the field which to-day appears perfectly naked and barren, may to-morrow be all green, and promise an abundant harvest.” But the steady cycle of the seasons were perhaps too tame for this story; in the next sentence, Priestley reached for a more intense energy metaphor: the earthquake, volcano, or vortex. “The present silent propagation of truth,” he wrote, “may even be compared to those causes in nature, which lie dormant for a time, but which, in proper circumstances, act with the greatest violence.”
And then Priestley took one fateful step up the ladder: from the energy flows of sunlight and vegetation, to the sudden eruptions of natural disasters, all the way up to the man-made explosions of war:
We are, as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, which a single spark may hereafter inflame, so as to produce an instantaneous explosion; in consequence of which that edifice, the erection of which has been the work of ages, may be overturned in a moment, and so effectually as that the same foundation can never be built upon again.
Sparks, flames, explosions: the capture and release of energy remained central to Priestley’s career, even rhetorically. Josiah Wedgwood had advised Priestley to cut the “gunpowder” line, predicting, accurately enough, that the phrase would incite too much controversy and distract from the sermon’s otherwise more reasonable message. It didn’t help matters that Priestley delivered the sermon on November 5, the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s failed 1605 attempt to blow up Parliament to protest the anti-Catholic laws of the day. The address became forever known as the “Gunpowder Sermon,” and among his enemies, Priestley’s nickname became “Gunpowder Joe.” Incensed by the remarks, Horsley launched a new attack on Priestley and Lindsey, arguing that both had neglected to sign documents necessary for the legal recognition of their Meeting Houses. Priestley, in particular, posed a direct threat to the state, Horsley argued; in one ominous sentence, he encouraged the “trade of the good town of Birmingham . . . to nip Dr Priestley’s goodly projects in the bud.”
The final of the three tremors originated across the Channel, in the opening act of the French Revolution, which Priestley and most of the Lunar Society greeted with intense interest, seeing it as the logical continuation of the enlightened progress that had begun with the American uprising the previous decade. Priestley’s old friend from the Honest Whigs, Richard Price, delivered a sermon that enthusiastically linked the two revolutions. Priestley immediately wrote to congratulate Price, celebrating “the liberty, both of that country and America, and of course of all those other countries that, it is to be hoped, will follow their example.” Shortly thereafter, Edmund Burke penned his classic Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceeding in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event. It was a direct rebuttal to Price and Priestley, and to the radical Whig groups that had embraced the news from France with such enthusiasm. Burke dismissed the group as a pack of naïve idealists, “unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with such confidence.” He playfully alluded to Priestley’s Observations on Air and his soda-water invention in one oft-quoted line:
The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface.
Events would ultimately prove Burke right, at least about the difficulty of making sense of the Revolution’s initial froth. But Priestley reacted with unusual hostility in a pamphlet published shortly after Price’s. “Your whole book, Sir, is little else than a vehicle for the same poison,” he wrote, “inculcating, but inconsistently enough, a respect for princes, independent of their being originally the choice of the people as if they had some natural and indefeasible right to reign over us, they being born to command, and we to obey.”
TO PRIESTLEY, ever the optimist, the controversies of the 1780s seemed like an indisputable sign of progress, both personal and societal. His ideas on religion and politics had reached the level of influence that his natural philosophy had attained during the Leeds years a decade before. That there was resistance to the grains of gunpowder being laid was inevitable; the central, undeniable point was that change was on the march. Yet almost all the core elements from this period of Priestley’s life—the coal deposits, the new factory system, the empowered dissenting churches, the revolutions abroad—conspired to produce a kind of dialectical monster that would rise up to take its vengeance on everything that Priestley and his coterie stood for. This was the “Church and King” movement, a reactionary band of largely working-class men, incited by the conservative elites, hostile to change in all its diverse forms: the dissenters undermining the Church of England; the industrial magnates that had destroyed the agrarian tranquillity of rural England; the aspiring regicides overseas who sought to put an end to all forms of monarchy, aided and abetted by their allies on British soil. With his mix of religious radicalism, Francophile tendencies, and membership in the Birmingham elite, Gunpowder Joe was the ultimate nemesis for the mobs of Church and King.
There were warning signs. A self-described “button burnisher” with the alias John Nott penned a public letter to Priestley that included this not-so-veiled threat: “Now, prithee Mr. Priestley, how would you like it yourself, if they were to send you word that they had laid trains of gunpowder under your house or meeting-house?” In January of 1790, three men attempted to break into his house at Fair Hill, firing a pistol at a maid through an open window after their presence was detected. Nott published a coyly ominous note shortly thereafter: “Don’t you remember what a parlous taking you was in one Saturday, when one of our Birmingham gunners shot at a flight of sparrows in your garden thinking no harm.”
But the “wild gas” of Church and King in Birmingham would not fully break free until July of 1791, when the newly formed Constitutional Society—which numbered Priestley among its members—announced plans for a dinner on Bastille Day, welcoming “any Friend to Freedom” to join them at the Royal Hotel on Temple Row. When a second advertisement appeared in the Birmingham Gazette, a separate, anonymous note ran alongside it, threatening to publish an “authentic list of all those who dine at the hotel” that night. It was signed “Vivant Rex et Regina.” A succession of leaflets, handbills, and newspaper adverts rolled in over the next week, inciting tempers on all sides. The most incendiary was a veritable call to arms: “Whatever the modern republicans may imagine, or the regicidal propounders of the rights of men design, let us convince them there is enough loyalty in the majority of the inhabitants of this country, to support and defend their King.” By the morning of the 14th, there were various rewards offered for any evidence of the authorship of several of the leaflets on either side. The Constitutional Society itself took out an advertisement in the Gazette, reaffirming its belief in the three estates of King, Lords, and Commons, without backing down entirely from their support of the French revolt: “Sensible themselves of the advantages of a Free Government, the
y rejoice in the extension of Liberty to their Neighbours, at the same time avowing, in the most expicit manner, their firm attachment to the Constitution of their own Country.”
These last-minute concilitory gestures provide futile. In the long, diverse history of humans gathering together to celebrate over a meal, the Constitutional Society meeting on July 14 may well rank as the most politically explosive dinner party on record. And the irony of it is that the dinner very nearly didn’t take place at all. At some point in the morning of the 14th, the society called off the event, but the hotel proprietor—perhaps concerned about losing a lucrative booking—suggested an alternative plan: they carry on with the dinner, but leave early, before the inevitable trouble started. Priestley, however, took the counsel of his friends and remained at Fair Hill.
At three o’clock, roughly eighty men arrived at the hotel, showered by slightly confused jeers of “No Popery!” from a small Church and King crowd that had gathered by the door. A local artist had created a sculpture for the occasion: a medallion of King George, framed by two obelisks that symbolized “British liberty in its present enjoyment,” the second “Gallic liberty breaking the bands of Despotism.” The first toast of the dinner—somewhat defensively—was to the king and the Constitution, but it was followed shortly by glasses raised to the French National Assembly, among other Whig causes. By five the event was over, and the Constitutional Society disbanded rapidly under attack from the protestors, who had replaced their slogans with rocks. It seemed, at first, that a more serious conflagration had been avoided, until around eight p.m., when a much larger group of protestors emptied out of the pubs and arrived at the doorstep of the Royal Hotel, thinking that the dinner was due to end at that hour.
The discovery that they had missed their regicidal foes by three hours appeared to pique the mob’s anger; the windows at the front of the hotel were smashed before a cry went up to move on to the New Meeting House. Armed with crowbars and bludgeons, the mob reduced the entire structure to a smoldering shell within an hour, the gates, doors, pews, and books dragged from inside the church and piled up into an enormous bonfire on the front steps. Another faction marched to the Old Meeting House and lit another fire in the small cemetery next to the church; a blaze inside the church grew so intense that the roof eventually collapsed.
As the mob destroyed the Birmingham meetinghouses, at Fair Hill, on the outskirts of town, Joseph and Mary Priestley were engaged in a quiet game of backgammon, entirely oblivious of the chaos only a mile away. At ten p.m., Priestley’s friend Samuel Ryland stormed into the house, having raced from Birmingham by chaise, with news of the riots. The meetinghouses were destroyed, he reported to the startled couple, and the mob was now on the march. Priestley and Fair Hill were its next target.
WHAT IS THE INTERNAL chemistry of a mob? They are the waterspouts of social history: rare but powerful expressions of force, capable of erupting into existence with little warning, and dissipating just as quickly. Tellingly, mob behavior inevitably gravitates toward displays of intense energy transfer: the collective strength of a hundred enraged men pulling a building apart and unleashing the destructive, oxidizing force of combustion. In this sense, there is something truly primitive about a mob, not just in the sense of men—and it is almost always men—regressing to a precivilized state of unorganized violence, but also in the obsession with that most primitive form of energy release: fire itself.
Historians have long debated whether the mobs of the Birmingham Riots were a spontaneous expression of rage—leaderless and self-organizing—or whether they had been deliberately stoked by outsiders. (The evidence suggests that it was a little of both.) But by the time Church and King protestors arrived at Fair Hill, the madness of the crowd was beyond the direct control of the original ring-leaders, whoever they were. A later report claimed that the insurgents had brought a immense gridiron to Fair Hill, “where they said they meant to broil an anti-constitutional philosopher, by the blaze of his own writings, and light the fire with the Rights of Man.”
Mary and Joseph had retreated to Showell Green, the estate of William Russell, a close friend of the Priestleys and a prominent Birmingham merchant. They could see the Meeting House fires burning in the summer night sky as they rode through the dark. Russell himself left his family behind with Priestley’s and rode his horse toward the Birmingham center before friends forced him to retreat to Fair Hill. There, he joined the twenty-year-old William Priestley, who, along with a handful of servants, had stayed behind to protect the house and salvage the most valuable books and manuscripts. When the mob arrived at the Fair Hill gates, Russell urged them to disband, and for a few minutes his words seemed to have a pacifying effect. But before long, shouts of “Stone him! Stone him!” erupted from the crowd, and Russell and William Priestley were forced to return to Showell Green, with the somber news that the mob had taken control of Fair Hill. Fearing that the mob would venture to the Russells’ next, the two families set off near midnight for the home of Thomas Hawkes, a half mile away. They left a barrel of ale on the lawn as a peace offering to the rioters.
A small farce ensued on Fair Hill, as the mob was apparently incapable of starting a proper fire, their arson skills no doubt impaired by the gin and beer, along with the wine they’d discovered in Priestley’s cellar. (According to Priestley’s own somewhat derisive account, they had even attempted to extract flame from the electrical machine he had used to entertain the children in the upstairs library.) But eventually the mob stumbled across Priestley’s laboratory, which had been built at a distance from the main house and was amply stocked with tools for combustion. Within a matter of hours, Fair Hill was gone: the library where Priestley had performed magic lantern shows for the Lunar children, the drawing room where Mary and Joseph had played their backgammon, thousands of manuscript pages documenting decades of Priestley’s investigations, the laboratory he had lovingly built for himself, along with that unique collection of tools that his Birmingham friends had crafted for him over the years. All of it had been lost to the fire.
At three o’clock Russell ventured to Fair Hill and found the rioters dispersed across the lawn, most of them in a drunken slumber amid the smoldering rubble. He returned to the Hawkes’ house and informed the families that it was likely safe to return to Showell Green. The Russell’s daughter, Mary, later recalled:
Accordingly we set off, and never shall I forget the joy with which I entered our own gates once more. . . . A room was prepared for the Doctor and Mrs P. We all looked and felt our gratitude; but the Doctor appeared the happiest among us. Just as he was going to rest, expressing his thankfulness in being permitted to lie down again in peace and comfort, my father returned from Fair Hill with the intelligence that they were collecting again, and their threats were more violent than ever, that they swore to find Dr. P and take his life.
With dawn about to break, and the prospect of the riots growing in intensity, the group of refugees realized that they had no clear path of retreat. Eventually it was decided to leave the Birmingham environs altogether, and head to the outskirts of Dudley, almost ten miles away. After a day in Dudley, they traveled to Worcester, hoping to catch the postal carriage to London, but got lost in the rural darkness and spent a bleary night wandering across the commons between Bridgenorth and Heath Forge. Eventually they reunited with Ryland, who offered Priestley his wig and cloak as a disguise. Priestley declined. By the morning of the 18th, they had made it to Reverend Lindsey’s in the Strand. For several weeks, Priestley lived underground in London, an exile in his own country, not daring to show his face in public, just as Franklin had done fifteen years before.
Back in Birmingham, the inferno was slowly dying out. At the king’s request, three troops of Dragoons had arrived on the 17th to subdue the riot. (Many thought the response time was suspiciously slow.) By the time it was over, more than a dozen homes and churches had been razed by the mob, including Russell’s and Ryland’s. Dozens of rioters lost their lives, includin
g ten at Ryland’s home who were both buried and burned alive when a flaming roof collapsed on them in the cellar.
WHAT HAPPENS IN the mind of one of the world’s great optimists when his work inspires his fellow countrymen to rise up and destroy his home and the tools of his trade? On the exterior, Priestley was by all accounts a portrait of remarkable self-composure, given the devastation and the still-imminent threat to his life. Mary Russell would later describe his demeanor on that dark night:
Undaunted he heard the blows which were destroying the house and laboratory that contained all his valuable and rare apparatus and their effects, which it had been the business of his life to collect and use. . . . [H]e, tranquil and serene, walked up and down the road with a firm yet gentle pace that evinced his entire self-possession, and a complete self-satisfaction and consciousness which rendered him thus firm and resigned under the unjust and cruel persecution of his enemies. . . . Not one hasty or impatient expression, not one look expressive of murmur or complaint, not one tear or sigh escaped him; resignation and a conscious innocence and virtue seemed to subdue all these feelings of humanity.
The Invention of Air Page 14
