by Simon Schama
Since the 16th century, the ‘88s’ had always been critical years for Britain and for the fate of the monarchy; each generation adopted the epic of the last ‘88’ as a touchstone for the next. The supporters of William III in 1688 claimed to be the heirs of Elizabeth’s resistance to Catholic tyranny in 1588, the year of the Armada. In 1688, the Catholic James II had taken leave of his throne; in 1788 George III (whom some critics had accused of aiming at a ‘Stuart’ absolutism) had taken leave of his senses. By the time he was restored to them, in 1789, the fate of monarchy had been transformed by the stupefying events taking place in France. And those who were celebrating the centenary of the Glorious Revolution naturally embraced this latest revolution as the logical consummation of what had happened 100 years before. Providence, they thought, worked to a meaningful calendar.
On the face of it, the position of the two kings on opposite sides of the Channel in 1789 could not have been more different. While Louis XVI was being dictated to by the National Assembly and suspected (rightly) of planning a military coup to regain his absolute authority, George III was recovering his grip both on his sanity and on the nation. At the same time that Louis was obliged to leave Versailles for Paris to put the best face on his predicament and pretend, at least, to fold himself in the tricolour of the Revolution, George went on a tour of the West Country to recuperate. Everywhere he went he was regaled with booming choruses of ‘God Save the King’; at Weymouth, indeed, he was surprised, while taking the waters, by a small but evidently loyal band concealed in the next bathing machine.
But none of these noisy demonstrations of loyalty deterred the true believers in a great British alteration from thinking that, if the walls of the Bastille could be stormed by the people of Paris, a day of reckoning with Old Corruption was not far off. In 1785 Joseph Priestley earned himself the nickname of ‘Gunpowder Joe’ by comparing the work of the radicals to ‘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’. When the Bastille fell, they hoped that its spark might carry right across the Channel. Glasses were hoisted at Swarley’s Tavern; in the Bishop’s Palace at Lichfield; in aristocratic Holland House. Charles James Fox celebrated it as ‘much the greatest event that has ever happened in the history of the world and how much the best’. Although it was awkward to have the French, jeered at for generations by Whigs and Tories alike as the hopeless lackeys of despotism, complete what had begun in 1688 as a British revolution, it was after all the Americans who had already made the point that the ‘true’ spirit of Liberty, although born in Britain, had evidently migrated elsewhere. The fact that it had now returned across the Atlantic with the French General Lafayette, who had fought so ardently for the Americans, was only proof that the irresistible urge for popular self-government was the indivisible natural right of all mankind.
Yet the unfortunate Frenchness of the event did, for all their higher feelings, make the ‘new Whigs’ (the most radical of the party, committed to broadening the franchise, to secret ballots, to pay for MPs and the like) defensive. In 1789 they felt obliged to argue that cheering on the French revolution was not incompatible with true patriotism, but rather a sign of its good health. That was the message of Dr Richard Price’s sermon on ‘The Love of Our Country’, preached, significantly, on 4 November 1789, almost to the day the 101st anniversary of William III’s landing at Torbay, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution at the Unitarian meeting house in Old Jewry, London. ‘Country’ properly considered, Price argued, was not just ‘the soil or the spot of earth on which we happen to have been born; not the forests and fields, but that community of which we are members; or that body of companions and friends and kindred who are associated with us under the same constitution of government, protected by the same laws, and bound together by the same civil polity’. In other words, it is our politics and not our topography that gives us our true national allegiance. All the rest is just selfish bluster. And the politics of the great and glorious French Revolution, he said, were unmistakably connected with our own; were indeed the completion of what we had begun. Had not the meaning of 1688 been that the people had the right to resist tyrannical rule, get rid of the unlawful ruler and restore to themselves their undoubted right to self-government? And was that not precisely what the French were now doing? Their lesson was timely, for in Britain the representation of the people had become a bad joke; a ‘shadow’ freedom, the reality of which was corrupt oligarchy and a ministerial government that worked its will through paid yes-men in parliament.
If the fall of the Bastille and the transformation of the monarchy in France from an absolute to a popular monarchy was shocking, surely the shock was healthy; good for the constitution, like a cool dip at Weymouth or an excursion in the Lakeland drizzle. Price bridled at the craven ‘servility’ of the congratulations offered to George III on the recovery of his wits, ‘more like a herd crawling at the feet of a master, than like enlightened and manly citizens rejoicing with a beloved sovereign, but at the same time conscious that he derives all his consequence from themselves’. They, in other words, were the true sovereign, and if he had been in the position of addressing the king, Price said, he would have spoken up thus:
I rejoice, Sir, in your recovery. I thank God for his goodness to you. I honour you not only as my King, but as almost the only lawful King in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people. May you enjoy all possible happiness. May God shew you the folly of those effusions of adulation which you are now receiving, and guard you against their effects. May you be led to such a just sense of the nature of your situation, and endowed with such wisdom, as shall render your restoration to the government of these kingdoms a blessing to it, and engage you to consider yourself as more properly the Servant than the Sovereign of your people.
This was already daring enough. But at the end of his remarks Price abandoned all pretence of deference and unleashed a thunderclap of apocalyptic revolutionary prophecy: ‘Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! Take warning all ye supporters of slavish governments, and slavish hierarchies!… You cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights, and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.’
It was the two central assumptions of Price’s remarks – that the French Revolution was the continuation of the British (an assumption epitomized by one of the celebratory toasts, ‘To the Parliament of Britain – may it become a National Assembly’) and that the monarchy of Britain was, or ought to be, not an hereditary succession but accountable to the sovereign people – that provoked the Irish writer, orator and MP (for a pocket borough) Edmund Burke to write his devastating and vitriolic Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). As much as anything else, it was Price’s timing that so appalled Burke. He had greeted the French spring with cautious optimism, which by the autumn had turned to horrified disbelief. Everything that had happened after 14 July – the lynchings; the château burnings; the careless abandon with which the nobility liquidated their own privileges; and above all the expropriation of Church property to fund the national debt – struck him as a perverted act of national self-dismemberment. Most preposterous of all for Burke was the fiction that Louis XVI was an enthusiastic sponsor of all this demolition when he was, in fact, just the prisoner of the wrecking-gang. In November 1789 – precisely when Price had seen fit to lecture George III on his duty to consider himself the ‘servant of the people’ – the true state of Louis XVI’s position had been exposed in the most brutal way. A march of Parisians to Versailles, led by the market women demanding bread, had degenerated into an attack on the palace as the marchers penetrated the private apartments of the royal family. Before it was over two Swiss guards were dead – although neither was, as Burke wrote, a sentry – and the king and queen, after making a nervous appearance o
n the Palace balcony at Lafayette’s urging, were ignominiously taken back to Paris in a coach. Preceded by heads stuck on pikes, the royal couple did their best to put a brave face on their captivity and pretend to be ‘united’ with the people. ‘This king… and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people)’, wrote Burke, laying on the sensation with a trowel, ‘were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.’
How was it possible that Dr Price – who was the butt of Burke’s acid sarcasm – should celebrate such events as though from them flowed the milk of human benevolence? And how was it that he could have the audacity to claim kinship between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and what for Burke were the utterly inglorious deeds of a century later? Only by utterly falsifying what that first, altogether British revolution had been about in the first place.
It was only in defiance of historical truth, he said, that Price could claim it had been licensed by the people’s right to choose their own form of government and hire or fire kings at their pleasure, or as they judged those monarchs protected the ‘natural rights’ of individual liberty. That had been the view of the men not of 1688 but of 1648 – of Milton and the king-killing generation. William III had been invited to England, not as the people’s choice, much less to make a fresh government from any sort of abstract principles, but to defend a form of law, Church and government that had always been there; the ‘ancient constitution’ violated by James II. It had thus been the most conservative of revolutions; hence its bloodlessness, hence its glory. And above all, Burke insisted, the ‘ancient constitution’ had the authority of countless generations – from Magna Carta, perhaps even Anglo-Saxon England – as its weight; pinning it to the earth of Britain rather than letting it be borne dangerously aloft by the hot-air balloon speculations of political philosophers like Rousseau. Governments could not simply be dreamed up from imagined first principles. Such ‘geometric’ or ‘arithmetical’ constructions were, by definition, lifeless. ‘The very idea of the fabrication of a new government’, Burke wrote, ‘…is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.’ Governments, legitimate governments at any rate, drew their authority from the immemorial experience of their practical use. That, at any rate, was Britain’s native way of doing things. ‘This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity’ So the ‘spot of earth on which we happen to have been born’ made light of by Price was, in fact, of the utmost importance in giving us a sense of our community. ‘In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty.’ Our territorial ancestry, complete with what Burke – heavily in love with heraldry – called ‘armorial bearings’, was our birthright, our political constitution. We damaged it at our peril.
As the prophets of international peace and understanding sang hymns to the coming universal communion of humanity, Burke thundered back, in effect: Nature! I’ll tell you about Nature. You imagine it’s all the same, daisychains and hands across the seas and songs of fraternity. But what you’re talking about is the brotherhood of intellectuals who sip from the same little cups of chocolate, chatter away the same clichés and dream the same puerile dreams. But nature, my friends, is lived, not thought. Nature is familiarity, a feeling for place. Nature is a patriot.
The ‘people’ whom the demagogues so freely apostrophized had been revealed in France to be ignorant, credulous and bloodthirsty. Democracy was mobocracy. ‘The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot’, Burke insisted, ‘be a matter of honor to any person. … Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they … are permitted to rule.’ But they didn’t know what they were doing. The unforgivable responsibility for giving them the illusion of their own importance and power lay with those who should have known better: class traitors, gentlemen or clergymen who toyed with democracy like a pastime and were rich enough to evade its lethal consequences, who fantasized about exchanging their allotted role in the political order for mere ‘citizenship’. In England it was the dukes and earls – Richmond, Grafton, Shelburne and, regrettably, his old friend Charles James Fox – who, by lending their voice to the destruction of their own nobility, were recklessly cutting the golden chain that tied one generation to the next, the past to the future. They imagined they could, like Lafayette, ride the tiger of the mobs to power and glory. But they would be the first to be devoured.
Burke’s Reflections was, by the standards of the day, a commercial success as well as a polemical tour de force, selling 17,000 in the first three months (at a time when a generous print run for a novel would be about 1500 copies). It was seen by some of the radical Whigs as an act of apostasy from someone who had the reputation (not quite accurate) of having been a friend to the Americans. (Burke had, in fact, sought Anglo-American reconciliation, but once the conflict began was a British loyalist.) But what distressed Price (who died in 1791, his voice hopelessly drowned out by the thunder of Burke’s rhetoric) was its parochialism: the insistence that the British political inheritance was unique; that at their birth Britons had received not ‘natural rights’ but a distinctly native inheritance, quite irreconcilable with universally applicable liberties. Nature, Burke seemed to be saying, could never be cosmopolitan.
In the humiliation of Marie Antoinette fleeing ‘almost naked … to seek refuge at the feet of [the] king’ Burke had seen and lamented the death of chivalry in France. Reverse chivalry – when a woman might spring to the defence of a violently abused man – would never have occurred to him. Such an occurrence he would certainly have characterized as ‘unnatural’. But that is precisely what did happen. Barely a month after the appearance of Burke’s Reflections, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had met Price when she opened a school in Newington Green, a stone’s throw from his chapel, published her counter-attack, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). She had obviously been stung to see Price the subject of Burke’s withering scorn. He had been her first real mentor when she had returned to London from Yorkshire, a self-taught bluestocking nobody, and had encouraged and befriended her as he had many other women writers, such as the children’s author (also a radical) Anna Letitia Barbauld.
Mary had needed all the help she could get, for she had led a gypsy life, constantly fretting about her siblings and never earning quite enough money from her reviews and essays. Her father, the son of a Spitalfields silk weaver, had tried a bit of this and a bit of that – farming in Essex, provincial swagger in Yorkshire – and had failed at each venture. Mary had perforce been mother hen to her sisters, even when one of them walked out on her husband for reasons unexplained but easily guessed. She had, of course, soaked herself in the tepid pool of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sentimental education and had got all warm and sticky with dreams of emotional purity and immortal friendship. But one of Rousseau’s truisms about nature – the nature of the sexes – struck her as monstrous. It was the philosopher’s assumption, set out in his novel, Emile, that girls had to be raised for one supreme purpose – to be a comfort and helpmate to their spouse and the mother (a nursing mother, naturally) to his children. Providence had ordained the sexes to be so unbridgeably different that any women who got it into their heads to be like, to act like, men were by definition biological and moral monsters, robbing their families of the quality that made an abode a home, tendresse.
Mary had seen her own mother’s sad attempts to lavish such tenderness on her prodigal, drunken husband, and she thought it over-rated. Partly inspired by the example of the growing number of women who seemed to live from their pen, she wrote a little treatise on the education of daughters, arguing, in spite of Emile, that girls had the pote
ntial to be every bit as educated as boys. And she sent it to the man who seemed to be the hub of all the free spirits and radical writers in London, perhaps in England: Joseph Johnson.
Johnson, a short, neatly wigged, Liverpudlian bachelor, held court above his business at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard, for centuries the favourite haunt of London’s book publishers. To radical London he was the Johnson who really mattered – not just publisher of the Analytical Review (between 1788 and 1799) but patron and good uncle to his ‘ragged regiment’ of disciples. He was someone who could find a review to assign, a job to fill (for Mary he found a position as governess in Ireland, but with mixed results), a short-term loan or even (again, for Mary) a roof. She ate with him several times a week and was a regular at Johnson’s famous Sunday dinners where the honest ‘patriot’ fare (a lot of boiled cod and peas) was spiced by interesting company: visionary artists like William Blake and Henry Fuseli; veteran stalwarts of the Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information like the Reverend John Horne Tooke and Major John Cartwright; celebrity democrats like the black-eyed, red-faced Tom Paine; and, invariably, a group of articulate, unblushing, intelligent women like Barbauld and the actress Sarah Siddons. Accounts of Mary’s appearances at Johnson’s dinners describe an ungainly, strong-minded, immensely animated woman, her long curly hair powdered when it wasn’t crowned with a beaver hat in the style of Benjamin Franklin or Rousseau. Self-consciously careless with her dress, she was a tremendous interrupter. The social philosopher William Godwin, who came to listen to Paine, found himself irritated by Mary talking incessantly over him.
