by Simon Schama
The mix of stormy passion and tenacious argument, heart and head working like a right and left punch, which was already Mary Wollstonecraft’s trademark, would have made her especially indignant at Burke’s savage onslaught on the great and good Dr Price. But it was much more extraordinary that she should make the move from indignation to publication. Although her Vindication of the Rights of Men has been overshadowed by the more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), published two years later, as well as by Paine’s blockbuster Rights of Man (1791–2), Mary’s intervention was not just the earliest counter-attack on Burke but one of the cleverest. Instead of doing what would have been expected (not least by Burke) of a woman and writing in a primly sanctimonious manner, Mary used Burke’s own weapon of venomous irony to attack his credentials as the guardian of traditional institutions. If he were so deeply exercised about the sanctity of hereditary kingship, she wondered out loud, was it not rather peculiar that when King George had gone mad Mr Burke had been in such indecent haste to replace him (with the Prince Regent, Burke’s patron’s patron)? ‘You were so eager to taste the sweets of power, that you could not wait till time had determined, whether a dreadful delirium would settle into a confirmed madness; but, prying into the secrets of Omnipotence, you thundered out that God had hurled him from his throne …’ Was not that the very same dissolution of the bonds of loyalty that Burke had found so shocking in the French? The goal was to make Burke look not just wrong-headed but ridiculous, mocking his pet obsessions; his comical gallantry towards Marie Antoinette (‘not an animal of the highest order’); his infatuation with the escutcheoned past; the myopia (more fun with Burke’s famous eye-glasses, even though Mary used them herself) in not seeing that the ‘perfect Liberty’ was only perfect for those who had the property to enjoy it. More seriously, if the sanctity of the ‘ancient constitution’ were never to be tampered with, were we not then doomed to ‘remain forever in frozen inactivity because a thaw that nourishes the soil spreads a temporary inundation?’
Mary was the sniper; Tom Paine the heavy artillery. In the early days of the French Revolution Paine had assumed that Burke, as an old ‘friend of Liberty’, would be sympathetic, and had actually sent him a cordial letter from Paris. The Reflections disabused him. Gripped by anger and urgency, in just three months Paine produced 40,000 words of Part I of Rights of Man (1791), his demolition job on the ‘bleak house of despotism’. Much of it had been said before, by John Milton, Algernon Sidney and, indeed, by Paine himself: the rights of men, including their natural equality as well as individual liberty, are God-given at birth and, since they precede all forms of government, cannot be surrendered to those governments. On the contrary, governments were instituted to protect those rights, and are obeyed on the condition of such protection. But Paine added an extra note of sardonic ridicule at the mere idea of hereditary governments – aristocracies as well as monarchies. To entertain such a notion, much less defer to it, was no less absurd than believing in, say, inherited lines of mathematicians.
More important than what Paine said, however, was the way in which he said it. His own origins as a maker of stays and corsets in Norfolk, where he had grown up on a bare hill known as ‘The Wilderness’ facing the local gallows and had been taken to Quaker meeting houses, meant that Paine was not among those whom Burke wrote off as radical playboys with more money than morals or sense. Before his burst of fame in America, Paine had known what it had meant to be poor, itinerant, almost entirely self-educated. His real schooling had taken place amidst the bawling arguments of pipe-smoking tavern politicians. The rough-house clamour of American politics had added another string to his crude but powerful bow. And closeness to the language of the inns and the streets served him well in the combat with Burke since he understood, with an almost 20th-century shrewdness, that a battle of ideas was also necessarily a battle of language. Burke had deliberately chosen the most high-pitched vocabulary, alternating between Gothic histrionics when describing (at second hand) lurid scenes of mayhem in France and lordly grandiloquence when lecturing the ‘swinish multitude’ on their richly merited exclusion from public affairs. Paine called those set-piece performances ‘very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show’. In calculated contrast, as if to make Burke’s worst nightmare – the political education of ordinary people – come true, Paine chose to write with aggressive simplicity: ‘As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand … I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in a language as plain as the alphabet.’ Many polite readers who picked up Rights of Man were shocked less by the predictable twitting of the monarchy and the aristocratic establishment than by the coarseness of his language. As if anticipating the crinkling of noses and the fluttering of fans, Paine virtually belched his ideas in their faces.
The swinish multitude ate it up. Joseph Johnson had agreed to publish it in time for George Washington’s birthday on 22 February (the general duly got a copy and thanked Paine). But on the appointed day Johnson, whose shop had already published attacks on Burke, including that of Mary Wollstonecraft, got an uncharacteristic attack of nerves. Paine was forced to shop around for another publisher, and when he found one hired a horse and cart to take the unbound sheets to the new premises. Johnson might well have regretted his panic, for Rights of Man sold out briskly and a second printing was needed three days after the first. By May there had been six editions and 50,000 sales of a book that, at three shillings, was not inexpensive. Even with foreign sales (for many copies undoubtedly went to Boston, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin), this made Paine’s work the most colossal best-seller of the 18th century, knocking Burke’s readership into insignificance. Part II, with its even more radical ‘welfare state’ agenda (which divided the reformers), redistributing national income through progressive taxation to fund government obligations towards children, the aged, the infirm and the poor, did even better, selling, according to Paine, between 400,000 and 500,000 copies in the first 10 years. Even allowing for an element of exaggeration the figures make nonsense of the claims of some modern historians that radical opinions at this time were confined to a small and unrepresentative minority. At a meeting of the suddenly revived Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information, a vote of thanks was passed to Paine in the sung form of a new version of the national anthem:
God Save the Rights of Man
Let Despots If they Can
Them overthrow …
By the summer of 1791, with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette caught at Varennes while trying to flee France, brought back in disgrace to Paris and held prisoner in their own Palace of the Tuileries, two sets of self-designated British patriots were at each other’s throats. In May, in the House of Commons, the erstwhile friends and allies Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox had had a bitter and irreparable falling-out. Goaded by Pitt, Fox remained defiant that the new French constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were ‘the most stupendous edifice of liberty’ that the world had ever seen. And in private he accused Burke of being no more than Pitt’s hired mouth, an accomplice to the dirty war of tarring him with the brush of being a republican. In the Commons on 6 May, a speech by Burke was a signal from Fox’s ardent young band of radicals, whom Burke called ‘the little dogs’, to howl and hiss. Burke publicly aired his anger that ‘a personal attack had been made upon him from a quarter he never could have expected, after a friendship and intimacy of more than 22 years’. Rehearsing other disputes that had divided them, but had neither compromised their closeness nor split the Whigs, Burke was about to say that this particular argument over the French Revolution was fatal to both. Fox interjected: ‘There is no loss of friendship.’ ‘I regret to say there is,’ responded Burke. ‘I have done my duty though I have lost my friend.’ Fox rose, became tearfully incoherent, but finally spoke unrepentantly of the disappearance of ‘horrid despotism’ in France. Burke responded again that he hoped
no one would trade away the British constitution for a ‘wild and visionary system’.
This courtly if emotional exchange disguised the polarization taking place, fast and furiously, in the provincial towns of England and even more ominously in Scotland. Certainly, London was also a storm-centre of both radical and loyalist politics. But the ‘new Britain’ – Manchester, Sheffield, Belfast, Birmingham and Glasgow, as well as older towns transformed by commerce and industry such as Derby, Nottingham and Bewick’s Newcastle – was experiencing a real baptism of fire. It was in those places that meeting house ‘rational religion’, debating clubs, the printing and publishing trades and radical newspapers were all tied together. In Sheffield the bookshop owner John Gales, also the editor of the Sheffield Register, was the prime mover of the city’s Constitutional Society, which rapidly acquired over 2000 members. The question of just how radical these organizations were to be often put a strain on their solidarity. Some wanted to follow the more ‘Friends of the People’, Fox-ite, constitutional line of pressing for parliamentary reform, perhaps even manhood suffrage as a ‘birthright of freeborn Britons’; others quickly became intoxicated with millenarian visions of the coming just society as outlined in the gospel according to Tom Paine.
Amazingly, 14 July – the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille – replaced 4–5 November – the anniversary of both the Gunpowder Plot and the Glorious Revolution – as a critical day in British politics. On that same day in 1791 a huge crowd in Belfast – both Protestant and Catholic – cheered the dawn of liberty, especially for Ireland, while another crowd in Birmingham was trashing the precious library and laboratory of Joseph Priestley in the name of Church and King. The ‘spark’ had indeed caught for ‘Gunpowder Joe’, but it had lit a fire under the wrong people. By the spring of 1794 Priestley had emigrated to America, settling in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he founded a cooperative community that at last corresponded, somewhat, to his social idealism.
Britain, on the other hand, seemed further off than ever from being converted into an Elysium of peace and freedom. Any ‘Friend of the People’ hoping to work some sort of miraculous constitutional change from within would have been sadly disenchanted when, on 6 May 1793, Charles Grey’s measure of parliamentary reform (more equal representation and more frequent elections) was defeated by 282 votes to 41. That was about the size of the Fox-ite ‘New Whig’ remnant in parliament. So when, in May, a royal proclamation was issued outlawing seditious assemblies, the government expected and got Whig support; Fox voted against but the Duke of Portland, and of course Burke, were in favour. However, since the parliamentary road seemed, for the moment, to be a dead end, Paine’s more revolutionary politics became more, not less, appealing. In January 1792, the shoemaker Thomas Hardy established the London Corresponding Society (the ‘mother of mischief’ according to Burke), with John Thelwall as its major theorist and spokesman; it was an overtly democratic Paine-ite organization pressing for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. To the government, fretting about national as well as social disintegration, it suddenly seemed sinister that Hardy was a Scot – all the more so when, in December, Edinburgh was the chosen meeting place for a ‘Convention’ of Scottish ‘Friends of the People’. Since the bloody change from a monarchy to a republic in France had produced a ‘Convention’ the very term (despite a quite different tradition of usage in Britain) seemed to presage a similar upheaval. The Edinburgh Convention numbered 160 delegates from 80 sister societies in no fewer than 35 towns. Government spies reported that there were Irishmen at the Edinburgh Convention – and for that matter Scots in Belfast and Dublin. When one of the conveners, the lawyer Thomas Muir, spoke of liberating ‘enslaved England’, the jump from Jacobite to Jacobin suddenly did not seem so fantastic. Part of the savagery of the government’s counter-attack – arresting its leaders, trying them for sedition and sentencing them to 14 years’ Australian transportation – was undoubtedly due to the fear that the Anglo-Scottish union was about to be subverted or that an attempt to replace parliament with a ‘British Convention’ might begin in some sort of northern democratic heartland stretching from Nottingham to Dundee.
Agents also noticed that the corresponding societies were packed with rowdy, violently verbose types: a new generation of uppity weavers, godly nailmakers, republican tailors and, most ominously for those who felt the hairs rise on the nape of their neck when they read of the revolutionary horrors in Paris, Sheffield cutlers. Raids occasionally produced the odd cache of pikes or axes, which only fed the hysteria. In the Commons Burke poured on the paranoia, comparing something that he called the Revolutional and the Unitarian Societies to insects that might grow into huge spiders building webs to catch and devour all who stood in their way. Less phantasmagorically, William Pitt warned that if the opinions of Tom Paine were allowed to spread unchecked among the common people ‘we should have bloody revolution’.
With the connivance of the government, pre-emptive action was taken. The militia was called out in 10 counties, but they looked the other way when the target of the mob was the radicals. Presses were smashed; literature deemed ‘seditious’ taken and burned. Cartoonists like the genius James Gillray were hired to show, as graphically as possible, what would happen should a revolution happen in Britain. John Reeves, a sometime chief justice of Newfoundland now returned to Britain, was so disturbed by the brazenness of the clubs that in November 1792 he founded his own Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Levellers and Republicans ‘to support the Laws, to suppress seditious Publications and to defend our Persons and Property’. As well as arming loyalists, the Association promoted the publication of tracts specifically to disabuse credulous working men of the views of Paine. Once war with the French had broken out in February 1793 a whole new seam of neurosis about the consequences of a French republican invasion could be richly mined. One of the tracts featured a patriotic master taking the time and effort to explain to his gullible apprentice just how wicked and dangerous Paine’s opinions were. ‘Right Master,’ replies his journeyman, overcome with gratitude. ‘I thank you for explaining all this and instead of going to the Liberty Club I will begin my work for I should not like to see the Frenchmen lie with my wife or take the bread out of my children’s mouths.’ The evangelical Hannah More, whose reputation had been built on improving literature for children, now took it on herself to supply timely patriotic definitions for all ages. Her Village Politics (1793) has ‘Jack Anvil’ explain to ‘Tom Hod’ that a democrat was ‘one who likes to be governed by a thousand tyrants and yet can’t bear a king’. The Rights of Man prescribed ‘battle, murder and sudden death’ and a ‘new patriot’ was ‘someone who loves every country better than their own and France best of all’.
If, despite all the intimidation and danger, you were a committed ‘Friend of the People’ in the stormy years of 1792–3 what were your options? If you were prudent, and mistrustful of the excesses of Paine-ite revolutionary enthusiasm, you might make Thomas Bewick’s choice and decide to button your lip, hunker down and hope that at some time, preferably in the not too distant future, British common sense, public decency and justice would prevail. In the meantime he would content himself with reading the local radical newspaper, The Oeconomist (distributed in London by, of course, Joseph Johnson); or relish the ferociously satirical attacks on Pitt in, say, his old friend Thomas Spence’s Pigs’ Meat, or Lessons from the Swinish Multitude (1793–5); get on with his birds and beasts, and smuggle, for those who wanted to look carefully between the illustrations, images of brutality, misery, daring and death. Or, from the relative safety of a Hepplewhite chair in your club, you might cheer on the dwindling band of ‘New Whigs’ in parliament – Fox, Sheridan, Charles Grey and Shelburne – who persisted in opposition to measures infringing the freedom of press or suspending habeas corpus and who refused to recant their benevolent views about the French Revolution. Or, if you were very brave, very angry or very drunk on revolutionary optimism you mig
ht take the plunge and join one of those artisans’ clubs where you could drink rounds to the health of Paine, the imminent realization of a British republic and the death of despots. Given the ubiquitousness of government spies, you would be putting yourself in jeopardy, even for unguarded toasts. When John Thelwall, now the prime orator of the London Corresponding Society, swiped the froth off a head of beer and remarked (according to a spy), ‘This is the way I would serve up kings,’ the joke would come back to haunt him in the Old Bailey.
There was another option, of course: leaving Britain altogether. You could cross the Channel to inhale some of that heady air of liberty, equality and – especially – fraternity, and work for the day when you might return in the vanguard of the forces of freedom. The French seemed to be treating British radicals as brothers and sisters. Tom Paine had been made an honorary citizen. To go to the fountainhead of freedom and to drink deeply would be more than a gesture of political tourism. It was the promise of a new life.
Try as they might, however, not everyone could make the leap. At some point in the summer or autumn of 1792 John Thelwall took a little time off from lecturing on the cause of freedom and justice (to bigger and bigger crowds) to walk through Kent. In the guise of his literary alter ego, the Peripatetic Sylvanus Theophrastus, he arrives at the White Cliffs of Dover and looks out at the ‘foaming billows’ separating him from the land of liberty. The place for him is the essence of British sublimity, but there is so much to look at that he cannot decide whether the beach or the clifftop provides the more breathtaking view. He wants it all and scrambles up and down ‘above a dozen times’. But then he gets too ambitious and tries to climb a near perpendicular rock ‘with no better hold than a spray of elder, or a fragile tuft of thyme’. Three-quarters of the way there, the Peripatetic is well and truly stuck: no way up; no way down. Which describes allegorically, of course, Thelwall’s political predicament. The Cicero of the corresponding societies, arch-republican demagogue to the authorities, he has no way up, no way down. So he perches ‘though my heart beat an audible alarm … with all the calmness I was master of, beneath the hanging precipice, and contemplated the beautiful serenity of the spangled sea’. He turns ‘a longing eye towards the distant cliffs of France; and could not but regret the impossibility of exchanging my present situation for the more honourable … danger of defending with the sword of justice, the gallant struggles of that brave people in the cause of their new-born Liberty’.
