Enemies of the State

by M. J. Trow

  But the Third Estate had changed since 1614. Fed by the liberal writings of men like the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the American Thomas Jefferson and the Englishman Tom Paine, the literate, pushy middle-class elements demanded a constitution along British lines in which the privileges and tax-exemption of the Church and Aristocracy should be swept away and the king drop the archaic notion of Divine Right. Calling itself the National Assembly, the Third Estate stood its ground against reactionary opposition and more and more of the Clergy and Aristocracy went over to its side. Noblemen like the Duke of Orleans and the hero of the American Revolution, Lafayette, joined the braying Deputies of the Assembly, as did the Abbé (Bishop) Sieyes, quickly assuming the role of oracle.

  In the first two weeks of June, the ‘grande peur’ took place. Hostile mobs encouraged by the extraordinary events in Paris, vented their spleen over local grievances and burnt down the chateaux that had dominated their lives and the lives of their grandfathers. Rumours flew everywhere and by 11 July Paris was in open revolt. On the 14th, the aim was not only to release the handful of political prisoners in the Bastille, but to steal the arsenal of weapons stored there. The Cato Street conspirators tried a watered-down version of the same thing thirty-one years later. The stubborn, but at the same time indecisive Louis XVI ordered the army back to the Champ de Mars and left the 110-strong Bastille garrison to its fate. When the mob trained stolen cannon on the prison’s walls, the governor, Bernard de Launay, was forced to surrender. The chanting, hysterical mob hacked off his head and carried it in triumph on a pole through the streets. It was quickly followed by that of the Intendant of Paris. Then, the Bastille was demolished.

  The storming of the Bastille was the outward symbol of a revolution that would shatter the peace of Europe for a quarter of a century. The most cultured and sophisticated nation in the world appeared to have gone mad, destroying forever the ancien regime and introducing a bizarre version of democracy which has never gone away. No matter that the greed and envy which characterizes human nature ruined the whole idealistic crusade, the original notions of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ struck a chord with liberal philosophers and starving peasants alike.

  The French Revolution was a defining event. In part it was a reaction to the ‘shot heard round the world’ which signalled events at Concorde and Lexington when American Minutemen exchanged musket fire with British infantry. The French lent their support to the American colonists, largely as a chance to win one military engagement against the British, but somehow the ideology too rubbed off. What was actually a self-centred and chauvinist squabble about trade was turned by the Americans into a just war in which the prize was freedom from tyranny.

  But the Revolution created armed camps. For some, tub-thumpers like Camille Desmoulins, military opportunists like Napoleon Bonaparte and plain psychopaths like Maximilien Robespierre, it was heaven-sent. For others, essentially the governments, landowners, churches and entrenched establishments of Europe, it was the end of civilization. In Britain, the aristocracy, the gentry and the church rallied around George III. Briefly, the ‘king who had lost America’ experienced a popularity he had never known before in his life and coming, as it did, on the heels of one of George’s inexplicable bouts of dementia,1 the Tory establishment saw all this as some sort of test.

  The Revolution became a party issue. Pitt hinted darkly that grim days lay ahead and he was echoed from an unlikely quarter. Edmund Burke, very much the philosopher and diarist of the Whigs, was known as the ‘dinner gong’ because his speeches were so dull that most of the Commons would file out to eat rather than listen to him. In 1790 however his Reflections on the Revolution in France was a runaway bestseller, perhaps because it was a ‘doom and gloom’ book of the type which still has huge readerships today. We like to be frightened by prognostications of disaster, especially if it is going to happen to somebody else. Burke also struck a nostalgic chord: ‘But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.’2 In taking this stand, which delighted Pitt and the king, Burke helped to split his own Whig party. His leader, the mercurial Charles James Fox, wholeheartedly supported the revolution, largely because he misunderstood it. He saw 1789 as a rather belated action replay of British events in 1688 when the wannabe despot James II was overthrown by his parliament and the timely defection of much of the army under John Churchill. On hearing of the fall of the Bastille Fox wrote: ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! And how much the best!’ 3

  The Cambridge undergraduate and future Lakeland poet William Wordsworth found himself on a walking tour of France in 1790 and wrote:

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!4

  But no one captured the spirit of the Revolution like Tom Paine – his ‘damnable works’ were quoted in the Cato Street trials as being the cause of the madness that led men there. Paine, the son of a Quaker from Thetford, Norfolk, was a born agitator. Variously a corset-maker, sailor and teacher, he was dismissed from his post as an exciseman5 for fighting for an increase in his men’s wages. Having met Benjamin Franklin in London in 1774, Paine settled in Philadelphia as a radical journalist and published Common Sense in the year that the colonies declared their independence. In 1781 he was in France helping to secure continued backing for the American cause and even served in the continental (i.e. American) army of George Washington. It was either the height of courage or folly then that he returned to England in 1787. Unable to stomach Burke’s lily-livered conservatism, Paine wrote the Rights of Man between 1791 and 1792, which both outsold Burke and, because Paine had advocated the overthrow of the British monarchy, brought charges of high treason against him. With a price on his head, Paine skipped to Paris where he was made not only a citizen, but a member of the National Convention.

  ‘[Burke] is not affected by the reality of distress,’ wrote Paine,

  touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird . . . 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.6

  He answered Burke almost line for line: ‘Man has no property in man. There is a dawn of reasoning in the world.’7 And he attacked privilege, courtiers, placemen, pensioners, borough-holders and party leaders which, presumably, included Fox.8

  In many ways of course, Paine heralded the democratic conventions and even the welfare state of the twentieth century. He advocated old age pensions, family allowances, free education and benefits for immigrants and the unemployed. No wonder Pitt’s government hated him and he became a hero to the downtrodden and the dispossessed.

  And the downtrodden and the dispossessed were now making waves. Before the war against Revolutionary France helped to define attitudes and opinions, there was a rising sense of alarm. By the time the second (and more radical) part of Paine’s Rights of Man was published, there was a general and growing discontent, as reported by magistrates and MPs throughout the country. In Sheffield, which was quickly becoming the most radical town in the kingdom, 2,500 men – ‘the lowest mechanicals’ – had formed a Constitutional Society, corresponding with villages in their own area and other towns and cities further afield. The reformer Christopher Wyvill described graffiti daubed on the market cross in Barnard Castle, Durham. It read ‘No King’, ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’. In North Shields, pitmen, keelmen, waggoners and sailors joined forces and were running opponents out of towns naked. William Wilberforce, the anti-slaver, heard that in Leeds Paine’s book was being given away free, having been précis-ed down to a sixpenny pamphlet. In Sheffield in November 1792, there were demonstrations to celebrate the victory of the infant French Republic’s army over the ancien regime powers at Valmy. The mob carried an effigy of Burke riding a pig and Henry Dundas, the Home Secretary, with the
bottom of a donkey.

  Nor were these riotous demonstrations one-sided. A pro-establishment ‘church and king’ mob went on the rampage for two days in Birmingham, and hit the Dissenting support for the Revolution by burning down a Baptist church and two Unitarian meeting houses before ransacking the house of the Dissenter and scientist Dr Joseph Priestley, burning his extensive library and dumping him in a pond. As with the Bastille, the town prison was thrown open and a great deal of looting occurred. In May, Mary Wollstonecraft rattled establishment cages still further with her publication A Vindication of the Rights of Women, based on the ideals being floated across the Channel – ‘Woman is born free,’ wrote Olympe de Gouges, ‘and remains equal to man in rights.’9

  In Scotland, by December, things were now more serious. The Friends of the People Society, meeting in Edinburgh, had 160 delegates. Not only were they jumping on the Revolutionary bandwagon by complaining about London’s failure to recognize their local grievances, they were composed of middle-class men, lawyers and merchants, even landowners, lending the considerable weight of education and money to the cause.

  While some British liberals played at revolution, wearing the scarlet ‘caps of liberty’ of the Parisian sans-culottes and addressing each other ostentatiously as ‘citizen’, war broke out in February 1793 and this forced a polarization. A man could sit on the fence no longer. If he supported the Revolution, he was, in effect, a traitor. To many, France had now gone beyond the pale because in January the Republican government publicly executed Louis XVI and his wife, the ‘Austrian woman’, Marie Antoinette. There was general horror, even among liberal reformers at this move and everyone conveniently forgot that we had done this to our king a century and a half earlier when a masked, anonymous executioner lopped off the head of Charles I.

  As British troops were despatched to India and the West Indies in the opening moves of the Revolutionary War, Pitt infuriated Fox and the extremist Whigs by extending the numbers of militiamen and introducing a new force – the yeomanry. These part-time cavalrymen would play a central and appalling role in the Manchester ‘massacre’ in 1819. Their job was to provide a second line of defence – the motto of many units was ‘Pro Aris et Focis’, for hearths and homes – in the event of French invasion. Fox and many others saw them as a private army, a return to the dark days of the Protectorate when Oliver Cromwell and the army effectively ran England.

  By the spring, there were disquieting voices from some at least of the Celtic fringe. The Catholic Relief Act, which gave Catholics some rights after two centuries in the wilderness was a hollow victory. Since voting was based on a rigid property qualification and the majority of Ireland’s Catholics were too poor to qualify, their ‘victory’ was useless. In June, Pitt’s Militia Act, attempting to raise 16,000 men for home defence, was causing widespread rioting throughout Ireland, with attacks being made on priests and gentry who tried to interfere.

  In September, Thomas Muir, leader of the Scottish Radicals, faced trial on charges of sedition. For over a year, new panicky legislation had outlawed various polemical writings, which is precisely why Tom Paine was an outlaw and William Cobbett spent time in prison. Muir’s background as a lawyer enabled him to make a good case, but he was found guilty anyway and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation to Botany Bay.10

  Burke was proved uncannily prescient when Robespierre’s terror struck between 1792 and 1794. The guillotine (probably, before lethal injection, the most humane method of execution11) was set up in the Place de Grèves in Paris and its victims were not merely aristocrats, but anyone who fell foul of the Revolutionary tribunals across France. Aristocrats had been flying out of the country for months, bringing tales of persecution and horror. Any English landowner, from George III downwards, turned pale at the stories of chateau burning, of previously loyal servants turning on their masters.

  On the other hand, the ideologies of Paine stood firm. The man himself might be outlawed and his book illegal – from time to time booksellers’ premises were raided, especially in London, by overzealous magistrates – but the ideas lived on. Radicals of every hue were now branded Jacobins after the more extreme French party. These were the warmongers whose proclamation in November 1792 had terrified all Europe, offering ‘fraternity and assistance’ to anyone who wanted to overthrow their own governments.12 Briefly, ‘Ça Ira’, the revolutionary song whose words were actually written by Benjamin Franklin, became the theme tune of English revolution.

  This was the heyday of the corresponding societies, the most famous of which was set up in London by men like the shoemaker Thomas Hardy, meeting in the Bell Tavern in Exeter Street. Letters and handbills flew backwards and forwards to similar groups in Sheffield and Norwich and to the Jacobin Club in Paris itself.

  To counter these pseudo-revolutionary groups, James Reeves formed the Association of Property Against Republicans and Levellers. This was clearly how the forces of reaction saw Jacobins and tarred them all with the same brush, whether they wanted bloody revolution or cheap bread. Interestingly, there was nothing actually republican in the Cato Street conspiracy – the new king, George IV, in residence at Carlton House, was not among their targets. The Leveller charge is fascinating too. The name comes from the extraordinary time of the English Civil War, a time when men believed the world was ‘turned upside down’ and all sorts of political and religious lunacy prevailed among the Puritan sects and elsewhere. The Levellers could be regarded as crypto-socialists because they wanted the hedgerows – symbols of private property – to be levelled and equality to reign. They were the forerunners of the Spenceans and in their nostalgic longing for the old, forgotten but somehow better world, they had a belated champion in William Cobbett.

  Some of the aims of the corresponding societies and Jacobins in general are hopelessly naive. Ex-naval captain Richard Brothers wrote Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times in 1794. The book was full of millennialist dreams and naïveté, the Thames red with human blood and ‘then shall there be no more war, no more want, no more wickedness; but all shall be peace, plenty and virtue’. Brothers was arrested by the Privy Council the following year and confined in a lunatic asylum.

  Throughout the 1790s, the corresponding societies came and went in terms of action and membership. Some members never returned as they saw the French Revolution collapse in blood and ultimately, by 1799, a military dictatorship. Others fell apart because of internal bickering and constant squabbles over exactly what the English revolution should be about and how it should be obtained. Their greatest problem was that they had no obvious national leader around which to rally. Parliamentarians like Fox, Wyvill and later Francis Burdett were, when all was said and done, still gentlemen with large fortunes13 and had nothing in common with an agricultural labourer struggling to keep his family alive. At the lower end in terms of class hierarchy, men like Thomas Hardy in London, Francis Place the radical tailor of Charing Cross and, later, Samuel Bamford the Middleton weaver, did not command the respect of thousands, nor could they sway a mob. Somewhere in the middle came Joseph Gerrald and John Thelwall. Gerrald in particular tried to promote a National Convention along French lines, which would not only have had the effect of welding together the differing strands of Jacobinism in England, but would have included the reformers north of Hadrian’s Wall and across the Irish Sea. That concept must have given Prime Minister Pitt and the entire Establishment many a sleepless night.

  Like Muir, Gerrald was put on trial in Scotland in March 1794. As a lawyer, he conducted his own defence admirably and the judge, Lord Braxfield, was technically misdirecting the jury when he said to them

  When you see Mr Gerrald . . . making speeches such as you have heard today, I look upon him as a very dangerous member of society, for I daresay, he has eloquence enough to persuade the people to rise in arms.14

  Gerrald got fourteen years.

  In May 1794, Pitt hit the corresponding societies. Leaders were arrested, habeas corpus (the law by whi
ch a man had to be charged with an offence to be held in prison) was suspended. Thomas Hardy’s house was attacked by a loyalist mob celebrating Admiral Howe’s victory of the ‘glorious first of June’ and his wife, already on the brink of a nervous breakdown, died. Hardy himself was put on trial at the Sessions House of the Old Bailey (where the Cato Street trials would be held) in October on a charge of high treason. The lawyer John Horne Tooke stood in the dock with him and when asked the usual question as to whether he would be tried by ‘God and his country’, shook his head and launched into a tirade against the latter. There was an ugly mood in the mob around the Bailey and Hardy’s acquittal was met with undisguised joy.

  In Tooke’s trial, the Prime Minister himself was forced to attend and to admit that, before 1789, he too had been a reformer. Tooke was acquitted. John Thelwall, who increasingly had taken over from Hardy as the main thrust of the London Corresponding Society, was the last to be set free by an increasingly sympathetic jury. It was precisely this problem that led Robert Peel, as Home Secretary in the 1820s, to reform the penal system. Juries were increasingly failing to convict when the cause or circumstances of the case permitted, because of the ferocity of the sentence. Had Hardy, Tooke or Thelwall been convicted, they would, according to the law, have been dragged through London’s streets on hurdles, hanged, their heads hacked off and their bodies quartered. Such an ass was the law on high treason that it had not been changed since 1605 and the Gunpowder Plot.

  By 1794, Edmund Burke replaced James Reeves as the arch-champion of reaction. He believed that about one-fifth of men with the vote (i.e. men of property) and almost all those without were ‘pure Jacobins, utterly incapable of amendment; objects of eternal vigilance’.15 Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall were little better than assassins.