A Radical History Of Britain
Page 27
Also, the membership of the committees was drawn almost exclusively from the gentry.4
Similarly, questions surround the genuine popularity of the ‘Paine burnings’ that took place in towns across England and whose timing coincided neatly with Reeves’s association movement. It has recently been estimated that close to half a million people attended these burnings of effigies of Paine, approximately one-sixth of the total adult population of England and Wales at the time – making them probably the most witnessed public events of the eighteenth century. It is worth noting, though, that the local committees that organised them, again mainly drawn from the wealthier sections of the community, laid on large amounts of free food and alcoholic drink to ensure good attendance. At Shrewsbury, members of the crowd were even paid to shout ‘Church and King’.5 The most recent study of these political carnivals has also concluded that they were less common in major towns and cities, where the authorities were more wary about their ability to control crowd behaviour.6 In any case, it is a moot point as to how far attendance at a ‘Paine burning’ should be seen as representing genuine commitment to Church and King. Besides the obvious draw of complimentary food and drink, these were pieces of political theatre that cleverly aped the form of a much older type of popular festivity, the charivari. Descriptions of the burnings point up the parallels:
The Effigies of Tom Paine having been Burnt at Wooburn, Bedford, Ampthill etc; I believe put it into the Heads of the Wheelwrights Apprentices and Journeymen and some shoemakers and other Lads in Silsoe to do the same, they carried him round the Vilage, and to Flitton, siting upon an Ass, with his Face to its Tail, and when they Returnd they Hung him and then shot at Him, afterwards Burnd Him they Beggd round the Vilage and got a five shillings which they Expended in Gun Powder and Beer – the meeting was quite orderly, and without any Riot, the Fire-Arms they had were no other than three or four old Fowling pieces they borrowed in the Vilage.7
Rather than being a ringing endorsement of the government of George III or of a modernising commercial society, these public performances might, in fact, be evidence of the survival of a more traditional worldview, in which moments of licensed disorder had an important place.8
Equally, the government’s extensive propaganda efforts acknowledged that they required public support to resist the radical threat, and that such support could not be won simply by bribery or intimidation. In the first years of the French Revolution, the government was funding loyalist periodicals to the tune of £5000 a year, including a new daily newspaper, the Sun, from October 1792.9 Nor were the arguments of loyalist writers, as is sometimes alleged, simple appeals to the hearts of the people over their heads. In fact, rather like the appeal of Thatcherism to some sections of the British working class in the 1980s, loyalism succeeded by suggesting that radicals threatened an English constitution that defended not only liberty, but also property. In adopting this line, loyalist writers fixed on a small portion of radical writing, the so-called ‘social chapter’ of the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man, and the arguments of Thomas Spence and William Godwin, ignoring the essentially Whiggish rhetoric of the corresponding societies.
Loyalists took Paine’s emphasis on the separation between government and civil society and transformed him from an enthusiastic advocate of trade and scientific innovation into a backwards-looking primitivist.10 Radicals like Paine, the loyalists alleged, wished to return a successful, commercial Britain to the ‘state of nature’. One parody of the Rights of Man, Buff, or a Dissertation on Nakedness (1792), claimed that ‘the more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has the human body for covering, because the more does it regulate its own affairs and govern itself’.11 Satirising Paine’s reading of English history as the story of successive conquests, Buff claimed that clothing had been imposed on men by nefarious sheep rustlers. By these criminals ‘the human mind was deceived into a belief of the utility of skins for a covering, and the bodies, and limbs of man till then, free and unrestrained, were doomed to imprisonment within walls of wool’.12 Similarly, Paine’s modest schemes for an inheritance tax on large estates were presented as a demand for the equalisation of all property.13
With the exception of Rights of Man, such loyalist publications outsold their radical competitors several times over. A telling comparison could be made between Wollstonecraft and her fellow writer, Hannah More. While A Vindication sold fairly well, its sales were dwarfed by More’s Cheap Repository Tracts – her antidote to the ‘fatal poison’ of Thomas Paine – which allegedly reached over two million people, a quarter of the whole population in the 1790s.14 More’s highly didactic work stressed the evils of idleness, drunkenness, gambling and atheism, each a sure path to hell. Her work stressed the need for order and obedience, and the role of marriage and family in forging social cohesion.15 The roaring success of these tracts was not quite evidence of wide popular endorsement, however, since multiple copies were often purchased by the gentry to distribute free to the poor. Along with her fellow abolitionist, William Wilberforce (who like More strenuously opposed working-class political emancipation at the same time as he fought for the freedom of slaves), More initiated a Christian mission against Jacobinism, in 1796 founding the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, which set up soup kitchens and gave information on producing cheap and nutritious food.16
Radicals were aware of the latent power of some of the loyalists’ charges. Godwin remarked: ‘No idea has excited greater horror in the minds of a multitude of persons, than that of the mischiefs that are to ensue from the dissemination of what they call levelling principles.’17 Awareness of this may have encouraged some radicals to steer clear of advocating ideas that would leave them open to charges of social ‘levelling’. Nonetheless, it was arguably the lack of caution demonstrated by the corresponding societies in their public activities that allowed Pitt’s government to step up its campaign against them. As the character of the French Revolution became more pronouncedly republican and increasingly violent, some English radicals, such as Blake, withdrew from direct involvement in politics. The corresponding societies, on the other hand, continued to offer addresses of congratulation to the fledgling French republic in its victories over its enemies, raised subscriptions for the ‘soldiers of liberty’ and praised the National Convention, the successor to the National Assembly. After France had formally declared war on Britain in December 1792, these activities allowed the government to portray the societies as not only seditious but also treacherous.
By late 1793, Scotland had become the focus of radical activity. Here, the franchise was even narrower than in England: one in a hundred men possessed the vote, compared with roughly one in ten south of the border. Scottish reformers met at a national convention in Edinburgh that was consciously modelled on French revolutionary practice and imitated Jacobin language, including referring to members as ‘citizens’. On 6 December 1793 the Edinburgh authorities closed the meetings. They had already prosecuted two members, Thomas Muir, a young lawyer, and the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, a Dissenting minister, before an openly hostile judge and a packed jury. Other leaders of the convention followed, including William Skirving, its secretary, and Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald, two delegates from the LCS, all of whom were found guilty and sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay in Australia.
The fate of the ‘Scottish martyrs’ became a cause célèbre. The LCS issued an address warning the English public that the judgement visited upon its members in Edinburgh might soon be extended to those who called for reform in England, too: ‘Can you believe that those who send virtuous Irishmen and Scotchmen fettered with felons to Botany-Bay, do not meditate and will not attempt to seize the first moment to send us after them?’18
The convicts’ voyage to Australia was packed with incident. Dissension arose among the fellow radicals. Palmer and Skirving allegedly participated in an attempt to kill the captain and take control of the ship. They then claimed tha
t Margarot had revealed their scheme to the captain, leading him to mete out severe punishments to Palmer and Skirving. Only one of the ‘martyrs’, Margarot, returned to England. Gerrald died of tuberculosis six months after landing in Australia. Skirving died of dysentery soon after, at his small farm in Port Jackson. Palmer died, also of dysentery, in a Spanish prison hulk off the island of Guguan in 1802, having been forced by a storm to make a landing there on his return journey to England – his sentence had expired in 1800 – though he knew that Spain and England were then at war.
Thomas Muir’s escapades were the most remarkable. He managed to escape from Australia on board an American trading ship, the Otter, in January 1796. After a series of voyages on various vessels up and down the coast of America, he finally secured passage to Europe aboard a Spanish frigate bound for Cadiz. On 26 April 1797, his ship was attacked by two British warships. Muir was severely and painfully disfigured when a wood splinter blown out by a cannon-ball blinded him in one eye and almost cut off his cheek. This mutilation proved, ironically, to be his salvation, ensuring that the boarding British troops did not recognise him and instead took him for another Spanish prisoner of war. Sent ashore, he was then detained by the Spanish authorities as a British prisoner, only to secure release eventually through the efforts of the French Directory later that year. Muir then moved to Paris, where he exaggerated the role he had played in British radical politics to secure funds from the French government. He died in Chantilly, north of Paris, in 1798.
The trials of the ‘Scottish Martyrs’ were soon followed by legal proceedings against English radicals. On 12 May 1794, Thomas Hardy and Daniel Adams were arrested following reports from government spies of movements to arm the members of the LCS. A parliamentary committee of secrecy was formed to investigate the constitutional societies, while legislation was rushed through Parliament to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, thereby allowing the government to imprison radicals without charge. Henry ‘Redhead’ Yorke, a West-Indian-born mixed-race northern radical journalist and lecturer, was arrested on 16 June and gaoled for over a year before being tried and found guilty; he was sentenced to a fine of £200 and two years’ imprisonment.* In all, thirteen members of the LCS were indicted for treason, though only Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall were brought to trial. Ever the gourmand, Tooke supplemented his fellow prisoners’ diets with strawberries, peaches and artichokes from his garden, while his friends kept him supplied with essentials such as snuff, partridges, turtle soup, Madeira and hock.19 Tooke recorded in his diary that his time in prison only confirmed his radical politics: ‘I cannot find any one Action that I have committed, any word that I have written, any syllable that I have uttered, or any single thought that I have entertained, of a political nature, which I wish either to conceal or to recall.’20
Tooke believed that the government had miscalculated in trying the three men, instead having gifted a propaganda victory to the cause of reform. Hardy was tried first and acquitted on 5 November 1794. Tooke’s and Thelwall’s trials followed, with the jury taking just two minutes to acquit Tooke, who had leapt at the opportunity to grill prosecution witnesses with great gusto. The acquittals were wildly celebrated and seemed a public repudiation of the bullying tactics of Pitt’s ministry. The reasons behind the acquittals were almost certainly more complex than this, though. The juries were being asked to sentence these men to a grisly death not on the grounds of incontrovertible participation in treasonous conspiracies, but on a ‘constructive’ interpretation of treason (meaning that the general conduct or actions of Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall could be imputed to be treasonable). The prosecution’s case was also far less well presented than the radicals’ – the prosecutor’s opening speech took nine hours – whereas Thomas Erskine, the Foxite MP who acted for the defence, was widely praised for his brilliant performance. Furthermore, some of the evidence against the three had been patently tissue-thin: Tooke had been arrested on the strength of an intercepted letter which read ‘Is it possible to get ready by Thursday?’, which was almost certainly to do with the preparation of a pamphlet, but which the government presented as setting the timetable for an insurrection.21 Finally, the jury was almost certainly reluctant to sentence the men to the full punishments for treason merely on the grounds of the possible consequences of their actions.
However, though the acquittals made Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall popular heroes, Tooke was almost certainly wrong in believing that it had been the radical societies rather than the government that had benefited most from the trials. Membership of the LCS continued to grow over the next year, but divisions within its ranks were increasingly evident. Many members, seriously frightened by the treason proceedings, retreated from political engagement. Others found the outspoken radicalism of some of the ‘acquitted felons’ (as William Windham, the pugnacious MP for Norwich, described them), especially John Thelwall, dangerous and repellent. The process of separating middle-class reformers from working-class institutions, which had already begun as a result of the injudicious congratulations the LCS had addressed to the French for their constitutional achievements, gathered pace. The Society broke into myriad splinter groups: among them, the London Reforming Society, the Friends of Liberty and the Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty, which advocated a more moderate and gradualist path to reform. Another group, the Friends of Peace, led by the Liverpool lawyer and later abolitionist William Roscoe, attempted to offer a middle way between loyalism and Jacobinism, advocating peace with France, moderate parliamentary reform and measures against political corruption.22
The terrible pressure put on radicals by the combination of loyalist propaganda and the threat of prosecution was reflected in William Godwin’s most famous novel, Caleb Williams (1794), or, to give it its more revealing, original title, Things as They Are. In contrast to Political Justice’s abstract theorising and cool rationality, Caleb Williams dealt with the faulty exercise of reason in the real, unjust, unequal world.23 The book’s bleak atmosphere was reflected in Godwin’s original preface, written in May 1794 but withdrawn from subsequent editions on account of ‘the alarm of booksellers’: ‘“Caleb Williams” [stepped into] the world in the same month [as] the sanguinary plot broke out against the liberties of Englishmen [the trials of Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall] … Terror was the order of the day: it was feared that even the humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor.’24
A brilliant novel of pursuit, and perhaps the first ‘thriller’, Caleb Williams tells the story of its eponymous hero’s flight, or attempted flight, from the clutches of his master, one Mr Falkland, a once noble gentleman turned tyrant by a dark personal secret. The book ruminates on the deleterious effects of social hierarchy on the human spirit, captured in Falkland’s famous speech to Williams: ‘Do not imagine I am afraid of you! I wear an armour, against which all your weapons are impotent. I have dug a pit for you; and, whichever way you move, backward or forward, to the right or the left, it is ready to swallow you. Be still! If once you fall, call as loud as you will, no man on earth shall hear your cries.’25 The novel also examines the English justice system at length, and attacks it.
In Political Justice, Godwin had already spoken of his opposition to gaol as an effective means of curbing criminal activity: ‘Jails are to a proverb seminaries of vice; and he must be an uncommon proficient in the passion and the practice of injustice, or a man of sublime virtue, who does not come out of them a much worse man than he entered.’26 In his novel he uses the central character, Caleb, as a fictional guinea-pig, forced to endure all the torments that the English system of trial and retribution can invent. The impressive detail that he marshalled in his account of Caleb’s sufferings in prison was built on extensive research in court records and his reading of the works of John Howard, the leading prison reformer.27 The state of English prisons was, to Godwin, a shameful monument to a nation that prided itself on having given liberty to the world:
We talk of instruments of torture; Englishmen take credit
to themselves for having banished the use of them from their happy shore! Alas! he that has observed the secrets of a prison, well knows that there is more torture in the lingering existence of a criminal, in the silent intolerable minutes that he spends, than in the tangible misery of whips and racks … Our dungeons were cells, 7½ feet by 6½, below the surface of the ground, damp, without window, light, or air, except from a few holes worked for that purpose in the door. In some of these miserable receptacles three persons were put to sleep together.28
In this dank and fetid hell-hole Caleb is forced to wait out the best part of a year before he is even brought to trial. When he finally does get his day in court, it is clear that the law is the servant of property, as the magistrate plainly tells him: ‘A fine time of it indeed it would be, if, when gentlemen of six thousand a year take up their servants for robbing them, those servants could trump up such accusations as these, and could get any magistrate or court of justice to listen to them!’29 The power of Godwin’s novel, though, lies in the fact that it offers no trite moral conclusions to comfort its readers. He does not offer a simple tale of a just, honest lad confounded by the forces of property and authority. The true dénouement of the work comes not with its rather implausible reconciliation of Falkland with Caleb – a dramatically unsatisfactory ending that Godwin had wisely left out of the original version – but in Caleb’s interview with his father. As the latter makes clear, Caleb’s experiences, on the run and in prison, have turned him into a sort of monster: ‘I regard you as vicious; but I do not consider the vicious as proper objects of indignation and scorn. I consider you as a machine: you are not constituted, I am afraid, to be greatly useful to your fellow men: but you did not make yourself; you are just what circumstances irresistibly compelled you to be.’30 Furthermore, Williams’s relentless desire to clear his reputation has not just crushed his own humanity – it also results in the destruction of another man, Falkland. As Caleb finally realises: ‘I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate.’31