A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Wollstonecraft’s view of the English working classes was nonetheless a deeply negative one, seeing them as degraded and brutalised by the tyranny of the rich: ‘I have turned impatiently to the poor … but, alas! what did I see! a being scarcely above the brutes … a broken spirit, worn-out body, and all those gross vices which the example of the rich, rudely copied, could produce.’52 A Vindication of the Rights of Men made Wollstonecraft a celebrity. She was fêted by fellow radicals – the Analytical Review wrote: ‘How deeply it must wound the feelings of a chivalrous knight [a reference to Burke’s mourning of the death of the ‘Age of Chivalry’], who owes the fealty of “proud submission and dignified obedience” to the fair sex, to perceive that two of the boldest of his adversaries are women!’,53 and it was seen as important enough to warrant vicious attacks in the loyalist press, some of which suggested that Wollstonecraft’s sympathy with the working classes was a result of her intimacy with a number of ‘honest mechanics’.54

  9

  RIGHTS OF MAN, THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN AND POLITICAL JUSTICE

  The attention given to Wollstonecraft’s intervention in the debate paled in comparison to that generated by Paine’s intellectual assault on Edmund Burke. Rights of Man, part one, utterly dwarfed the sales of Burke’s Reflections and of all the subsequent radical replies to it. It was published by Wollstonecraft’s printer Joseph Johnson on 21 February 1791, then withdrawn for fear of prosecution, before being published again in March the following year by J. S. Jordan. Paine’s leading English biographer, John Keane, has estimated that about one in ten literate people in England owned a copy (and this figure is probably an underestimate, as it does not include the many pirated editions of Paine’s work that were in circulation).1 Paine himself claimed that the sales of his work far exceeded the number of signatories to the loyal addresses that were produced in response, denouncing it as seditious.2

  Though he had considerable form as a phrase-maker, having coined the term ‘United States of America’, Paine was not the first English radical to speak of ‘the Rights of Man’. These words were first written down in English in a manmade cave in South Shields by the radical Newcastle schoolteacher and bookseller, Thomas Spence. Like Gerrard Winstanley, Spence had become politicised by local struggles over land rights – in this case, the Newcastle corporation’s attempts to make money by enclosing part of the Town Moor, thereby threatening the grazing rights of freemen. The dispute led Spence to develop his ‘land plan’, which for the rest of his life would constitute the core of his political philosophy. The plan was reminiscent of Winstanley’s thought, in that it identified the private ownership of land as the source of all inequality and evil in the country. However, rather than proposing, as Winstanley ultimately did, that this inegalitarian system should be replaced with a centralised, communitarian state, Spence – like most eighteenth-century radicals an opponent of ‘big government’ – argued that all land should be held in trust by each parish and apportioned by the parish for the benefit of each of its inhabitants. He first publicly discussed his ideas in a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society on ‘the real Rights of Man’ in November 1775. The lecture was not well received, and the Society subsequently stripped him of his membership for hawking printed copies of it on the streets of Newcastle.

  Nothing daunted, Spence continued his radical activities in the North East. He later recounted (in the third person) how he had first come to write the phrase that would become an integral part of political discourse by the 1790s:

  A man who had been a farmer, and also a miner, and who had been ill-used by his landlords, dug a cave for himself by the seaside, at Marsdon Rocks, between Shields and Sunderland, about the year 1780, and the singularity of such a habitation, exciting the curiosity of many to pay him a visit; our author as one of that number. Exulting in the idea of a human being, who had bravely emancipated himself from the iron fangs of aristocracy, to live free from impost, he wrote extempore with chaulk above the fire place of this free man, the following lines:

  Ye landlords vile, whose man’s peace mar,

  Come levy rents here if you can;

  Your stewards and lawyers I defy,

  And live with all the RIGHTS OF MAN

  With his wife, the former miner known as Jack ‘the Blaster’ Bates had excavated his new home in the rocks at the ripe old age of eighty. Marsden Grotto, as it became known, soon developed into a popular tourist destination and Jack and his wife supplemented their income by providing the visitors with refreshments which were often, not unreasonably, alleged to have been procured by smuggling. The grotto was taken over and greatly expanded in the early nineteenth century by a Whitburn publican, Peter Allan, also seeking, like Jack, a means of running a business without paying ground rent. Allan excavated a ‘ballroom’, a dining-room and a gaol in the rocks, extra space that was much needed as, besides his family, the grotto accommodated two pigs, a beehive, a greyhound, a one-legged raven called Ralph and a lovelorn sailor whose hermit-like existence and unkempt appearance led him to be known as ‘Peter Allan’s hairy man’. The Allan family were eventually forced to pay rent to the farmer who owned the land above the grotto. Despite these additional costs, it has continued to operate as a successful pub (claiming to be Europe’s only cave bar) to the present day.3

  In contrast to Spence, Paine did not initially use the phrase ‘the Rights of Man’ to include economic or property rights. But he used part one of Rights of Man to undertake perhaps the most successful literary demolition job ever perpetrated in the English language. As the radical Manchester Herald neatly put it on 28 April 1792, ‘[Burke] was the flint to Mr Paine’s steel.’4 In the Reflections Burke had contended not only that the people (contrary to the assertion of Price) had no right to choose their own governors, but also that the English would resist the assertion of this right ‘with their lives and fortunes’. Paine revelled in exposing these Burkeian absurdities: ‘That men should take up arms, and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr Burke.’5 He then set about destroying the two main props of Burke’s argument: his conservative interpretation of the revolution of 1688 and his negative reading of events taking place in France. On the former, Paine took a quite different approach from that of Richard Price, not offering a radical reworking of the Glorious Revolution but instead arguing that both it and the idea of a tradition of British liberty were irrelevancies. He himself, he said, was ‘contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead; and Mr Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living’.6

  Paine asserted, quite wrongly as it turned out, that the Glorious Revolution would sink into insignificance as a world-historical event:

  As the estimation of all things is by comparison, the Revolution of 1688, however from circumstances it may have been exalted beyond its value, will find its level. It is already on the wane, eclipsed by the enlarging orb of reason, and the luminous revolutions of America and France. In less than another century, it will go, as well as Mr Burke’s labors, ‘to the family vault of all the Capulets’. Mankind will then scarcely believe that a country calling itself free, would send to Holland for a man [William III], and clothe him with power, on purpose to put themselves in fear of him, and give him almost a million sterling a year for leave to submit themselves and their posterity, like bond-men and bond-women for ever.7

  The ‘ancient constitution’ that Burke venerated was no more than a chimera, he claimed. England’s government was based upon naked power, the military conquest of the nation by Duke William of Normandy in 1066. Key elements of this English constitution, Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights (which Paine styled a ‘Bill of Wrongs’), were no more than ‘re-conquests’: they did not throw off the usurpation of popular sovereignty bu
t merely set new bounds to the exercise of royal tyranny. The much vaunted liberties extended by the Glorious Revolution offered the people no more than the largely useless right to petition their tyrannical governors.8 ‘Can then Mr Burke produce the English Constitution? If he cannot, we may fairly conclude, that though it has been so much talked about, no such thing as a constitution exists, or ever did exist, and consequently that the people have yet a constitution to form.’9 If any further evidence were needed, Paine went on, people had only to look at the ease with which the electoral arrangements put in place in 1688–9 had been largely obliterated by the ‘despotic legislation’, such as the Septennial Act of 1716, of the Whig oligarchy which fatally weakened the revolution settlement’s commitment to regular elections.10

  If Burke’s description of the English constitution were a fabrication, his narrative of the French Revolution, for Paine, was a histrionic travesty that chose to pity ‘the plumage [the French royal family]’ and forgot ‘the bird [the French people]’.11 Burke’s sympathies, he argued, were not only misdirected but rested on a misapprehension of the aims of the French Revolution. At this stage at least, Paine believed that Louis XVI was ‘favourable to the enterprise’: ‘Perhaps no man bred up in the style of an absolute king ever possessed a heart so little disposed to the exercise of that species of power as the present King of France.’ The revolutionaries were not aiming at the person of the King, but at the evils associated with the monarchical system: ‘The monarch and the monarchy were distinct and separate things; and it was against the established despotism of the latter, and not against the person or principles of the former, that the revolt commenced, and the Revolution has been carried.’12 If there had been, as Burke had keenly noted, atrocities committed by the revolutionaries, this was a consequence of the cruelties of the legal system under which the French people operated. It was these ‘sanguinary punishments’ that corrupted mankind: ‘In England, the punishment in certain cases, is by hanging, drawing and quartering; the heart of the sufferer is cut out and held up to the view of the populace.’ In France, under the former government, the punishments were no less barbarous. ‘Who does not remember the execution of Damien, torn to pieces by horses? The effect of those cruel spectacles exhibited to the populace, is to destroy tenderness, or excite revenge, and by the base and false idea of governing men by terror, instead of reason, they become precedents.’13

  The National Assembly had already made important moves towards correcting the evils of French law. Freedom of conscience was declared a natural right, which, Paine said, had abolished the ‘presumption’ inherent in the English Toleration Act of 1689, which perversely assumed that legislators could interpose themselves ‘between the divine and the worshipper’.14* The Assembly had also reformed the game laws so that farmers could take game caught on their land without prosecution, whereas in England ‘game is made the property of those at whose expense it is not fed’.16 Most importantly, the French constitution, unlike the English, was not illusory: it was the product of a convention of the people, not the usurpation of Norman conquerors.

  In contrast, England’s government remained the mishmash that Paine had described in Common Sense. The principle of hereditary succession, which Burke saw as largely unaffected by the events of 1688–9, was also savaged (though it would receive a more extensive mauling in part two of Rights of Man). Not only monarchy, but also aristocracy and, especially, the legislative role of the House of Lords were absurdities: ‘the idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate’. Legislators who were elected by no one were accountable to no one and, consequently, should be trusted by no one. Moreover, he continued, whatever qualities their distant ancestors might have had, they had been frittered away among the English aristocracy as a result of centuries of inbreeding.17 These monarchical and aristocratic elements of the government were essentially parasitic on its ‘republican’ parts. In a passage reminiscent of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century analyses of the English state, Paine argued:

  All that part of the government of England which begins with the office of constable, and proceeds through the departments of magistrate, quarter-session, and general assize, including the trial by jury, is republican government. Nothing of monarchy appears in any part of it, except the name which William the Conqueror imposed upon the English, that of obliging them to call him ‘their Sovereign Lord and King’.18

  However, though he made a frank criticism of the current electoral system in England, with its ‘pocket’ and ‘rotten’ boroughs, he did not yet extend this championing of republican government to call for universal male suffrage – perhaps because it would have embarrassed his French comrades, who at this point restricted the franchise to male property-holders.19

  The publication of the first part of Paine’s Rights of Man was a strong impetus to the formation in major British cities of the so-called ‘corresponding societies’, whose aim was constitutional reform. The first of these societies was established in Sheffield at the end of 1791. At its inception, it benefited from the support of men like Joseph Gales, editor of the Sheffield Register, a pro-reform, anti-slavery paper.20 The Sheffield Society also acted as a distribution centre for Paine’s work. In January 1792, it had sixteen hundred subscribers to the sixpenny edition of part one of Rights of Man. The dissemination of Rights of Man was greatly assisted by Paine’s own willingness to let provincial societies make their own copies, and by his readiness to allow the profits from sales to go to the corresponding societies themselves rather than be made over to the author.

  The London Corresponding Society was established in January 1792 and led by a forty-year-old Scottish shoemaker, Thomas Hardy (the LCS would retain strong Scottish connections throughout its history). Hardy’s own interest in reform had been piqued by the free pamphlets produced by the Society for Constitutional Information set up at the height of the gentry-led reform movement in 1780. Like Joseph Gales, Hardy also had connections with the movement for the abolition of slavery: Olaudah Equiano, a former slave turned abolitionist, wrote part of his autobiography while living in Hardy’s house.21 Together with the events of the French Revolution and the publication of Paine’s work, these radical abolitionist and SCI pamphlets convinced Hardy of the need for a political organisation to represent the ‘humble in situation and circumstances’.22 His aim was reflected in the minimal cost of subscription to the Society, a penny a week, affordable for the artisans and journeymen who came to make up the majority of the LCS’s membership. But though the corresponding societies have often been touted as ‘the first working-class political organisations’, it is important to note that there was a significant minority of members who came from gentry stock and the professional classes, and that this group played an influential role in the leadership of the LCS. Gentlemen reformers such as John Horne Tooke and Major John Cartwright gave advice and attended meetings. Its members also included barristers and lawyers like Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald, and even a Scottish peer, Basil William Douglas, Lord Daer.

  The championing of Paine’s work by the corresponding societies has sometimes obscured the differences between his arguments, based on the rejection of the notion of specifically Anglo-Saxon liberties and legitimised by appeals to reason and natural law, and those voiced in the LCS’s addresses to the nation. The declaration of the Society made on 19 December 1791 made clear that its aims were non-violent, and also expressed belief in an ‘ancient constitution’: ‘First, as our Constitution was, from the earliest periods, founded in Liberty, it should not be destroyed, as if it were the Government of Despotism.’23 Further addresses spoke of seeing ‘our liberties restored’, rather than established anew – these included social as well as political reforms – and as late as 1793 spoke of ‘the spirit of the Constitution … confirmed by the Revolution of 1688’.24 Even as the LCS beg
an to make common cause with more radical movements in Ireland and Scotland, its public pronouncements continued to ground its actions in the language of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.25 While Paine had argued for the English to follow the example of the French revolutionaries and replace Westminster with a truly representative National Assembly, the LCS continued to speak publicly only of a reformed Parliament, with elections on the basis of franchise for all adult males.26

  Moreover, some of the corresponding societies were inspired by local rather than national struggles, as in Sheffield. Here the catalyst had been the attempt by the Duke of Norfolk and other leading gentry such as the Reverend James Wilkinson, the fox-hunting squire of Broomhall, to enclose six thousand acres of common land, for which the poor were to be compensated with a derisory two acres in total. The men and women of Sheffield responded by breaking into the debtors’ gaol on 27 July 1790 and releasing the prisoners, then converging on Wilkinson’s residence, where they set his library on fire along with several hayricks. Although the riot was eventually suppressed by the swearing-in of many special constables, the following Friday the barn of Norwood Hall, owned by James Wheat, clerk of the town trustees and a prime mover in the enclosure acts, was also mysteriously burnt down. One William Broomhead, explaining the reason behind the setting-up of the Sheffield Constitutional Society when pressed by the prosecution during the treason trials of 1794 (see page 264), said its aim was