A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  After disastrous liaisons with the Swiss bisexual painter Henry Fuseli and the American fraudster, adventurer and novelist Gilbert Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft had become one half of the most celebrated radical couple in London. William Godwin had become entranced with Wollstonecraft, after an initially frosty meeting five years earlier, through reading her Letters from Norway: ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.’47 Their love affair developed first through writing, enabling the inexperienced Godwin to overcome his social awkwardness. In July 1796, he wrote to Wollstonecraft: ‘I love your imagination, your delicate epicurism, the malicious leer of your eye, in short everything that constitutes the bewitching tout ensemble of the celebrated Mary.’48

  When their relationship did finally come to be consummated, the methodical Godwin recorded their love-making via a code of dashes and dots in his journal. Nonetheless, in keeping with his belief in the evils attendant on cohabitation, they continued to live, work and socialise more or less separately. Yet despite both writers’ public condemnation of the institution of marriage, Godwin and Wollstonecraft did eventually marry, on 29 March 1797. The impetus was almost certainly Wollstonecraft’s pregnancy: though a doughty flouter of convention herself, Mary had no wish for another of her children (she already had a daughter by Imlay) to endure the stigma of bastardy.

  Their living arrangements remained essentially the same. Although they now rented a house together at 29 Polygon Buildings, Somers Town, London, Godwin also rented rooms to work in near by and stayed there until dinnertime each day; this arrangement, he said, combined ‘the novelty and lively sensation of a visit, with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life’. Mary, for her part, teased Godwin: ‘A husband is a convenient part of the furniture of a house … I wish you, from my soul, to be riveted in my heart, but I do not desire to have you always at my elbow.’49

  On 31 August 1797 she gave birth to a daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The pregnancy and the birth had been uncomplicated, but during labour a small part of the placenta had broken off in the womb. Attempts to remove it led to bleeding and infection. Wollstonecraft developed a high fever. Godwin sought the best medical advice he could get, including consulting John Gale Jones, the man-midwife and LCS member. But it was too late. Eleven days after giving birth, Mary Wollstonecraft died. Godwin told a close friend that he never expected to find happiness again.

  Godwin’s grief could not even be endured in private. Loyalist writers crowed that Wollstonecraft’s death was punishment for an immoral life. The Reverend Richard Polwhele, in his Unsex’d Females: A Poem (1798), wrote:

  I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence is visible … [in the way] she was given up to her ‘heart’s lusts’, and let ‘to follow her own imaginations’, that the fallacy of her doctrines and the effects of an irreligious conduct, might be manifested to the world; and as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the disease to which they are liable.50

  Godwin threw himself into the effort of writing a memoir in vindication of his wife. His work remains the starting point for all subsequent biographers; but it was not an easy task, nor one for which Godwin was praised. Fuseli callously refused Godwin’s request for letters that Wollstonecraft had written to the painter, taunting him by showing him the drawer in which they lay, many unopened, and then shutting it again with a sneer. Godwin’s readiness to detail his wife’s earlier affairs also brought criticism from friends that he was only further tarnishing her reputation. Southey felt that Godwin’s memoir had stripped ‘his dead wife naked’; Roscoe accused him in poetry of mourning her ‘with a heart of stone’. Godwin’s frankness about his wife’s previous sexual relationships was lapped up gleefully by the anti-Jacobin press, which used Wollstonecraft’s example to demonstrate the connection between ‘promiscuity’ and revolutionary politics.51 Godwin’s own status as the leading philosopher of radicalism was on the wane. He wrote several novels after St Leon, but these became increasingly conventional in substance and tone. By 1812, his future son-in-law, Percy Shelley, was surprised to find that Godwin was still alive.

  In the twenty-first century, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Paine have all been rehabilitated: Paine as the tireless advocate of the rights of man; Godwin as the intellectual founder of modern anarchism and brilliant novelist of human psychology; and Wollstonecraft as a proto-feminist in both her life and her writings. The most remarkable turnaround has been in the reputation of Paine, now transformed into the darling of both the right and the left, especially in the United States, where to date, through the efforts of the Friends of Thomas Paine, no fewer than nine state legislatures have declared ‘Thomas Paine Days’.52

  The tributes to each of them represent a combination of half-truths and convenient appropriations. Thomas Spence was labelled an early socialist because of his concern with the redistribution of landed property. Yet Spence, like most eighteenth-century radicals, fundamentally distrusted the idea of the ‘big state’ that appeals to many modern socialists. The distrust was hardly surprising. In the eighteenth century the so-called ‘fiscal-military’ state had no interest in the welfare of its subjects: its essential concerns were waging war and raising and collecting the taxes to pay for it. Similarly, Tom Paine was in favour of measures to assist the young and the old, paid for by redistributive taxation, but he was no opponent of emergent capitalism or of the acquisition of personal wealth from trade and commerce. Wollstonecraft was certainly a fierce advocate of the equality of the sexes but her notion of equality, with its emphasis on the exercise of republican virtue, has little in common with modern feminism. Nevertheless, these eighteenth-century radicals remain tempting sources for political inspiration. Their writings seem so deceptively modern – shorn, we wrongly think, of the religious preoccupations of the seventeenth century. But Godwin genuinely believed in the possibility of immortality and Joseph Priestley thought the French Revolution heralded the Second Coming. The ‘Age of Reason’ had not yet come to pass (nor, perhaps, has it ever).

  By the time of Wollstonecraft’s death, the sense of millenarian excitement and feverish anticipation that had marked the early 1790s had dissipated, to be replaced with feelings of dread and terror. The political gains of British radicalism appeared minimal. Fewer men, as a proportion of the population, now enjoyed the vote than in 1640. Attempts to get reform bills through Parliament had repeatedly failed. The government’s power had been consolidated through repressive legislation. Working-class political organisations disintegrated, torn between desperate insurrectionary splinter groups and the more respectable reform organisations established to fill the corresponding societies’ place.

  Even to historians sympathetic to the aspirations of radicals, it has often seemed hard to pick out real radical achievements from the era of the French Revolution. E. P. Thompson famously claimed that this decade was seminal in the formation of working-class identity, but organisations like the LCS were dominated by a Whiggish ideology of gradual reform that was largely bereft of the language of class. Their membership, too, was heterodox and some of their most prominent members came from wealthy landed or professional backgrounds. Some historians have sought consolation in the argument that radicalism was only beaten by the resort to an appeal to the people through popular loyalism. Yet, loyalism did not emerge out of thin air. Loyalist rhetoric and loyalist organisation – via addresses and associations – had been a key feature of political life for nearly a century. The Paine burnings, Reevesian associations and loyalist chapbooks and pamphlets hardly constituted the creation of a new ‘public sphere’ for rational debate.

  The 1790s were nonetheless a critical period in the history of English radicalism. The decade saw as bright a florescence
of radical thought as had been witnessed during the civil wars. It also saw the formation, in the form of the corresponding societies, of the first working-class-initiated and -dominated political organisations. These societies would establish many features of the radical agenda over the next half-century: agitation for parliamentary reform and an expanded franchise by means of mass political meetings, political parties and a radical press. It was the working-class radicals in particular who pushed the issue of the vote to the forefront of British radical politics. In contrast, in the writings of the radical luminaries of the revolutionary era, Paine, Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the issue of the franchise had been largely neglected. Yet the 1790s also represented a missed opportunity. The success with which loyalists had attacked the ‘levelling’ and ‘republican’ principles of radicals during that decade meant that social reform, the redistribution of wealth and thoroughgoing constitutional change, the most radical elements of the agitation of the 1790s, were now marginalised. This was despite the fact that the early decades of the nineteenth century saw a steep decline in the living standards of the poor. Reform had become more respectable, but also distinctly less ‘radical’.

  PART FIVE

  THE MASK OF ANARCHY: RADICALISM FROM WATERLOO TO THE GREAT REFORM ACT

  For reets o’mon, for liberty to vote, an’ speak an’ write, an’ be eawrsels [ourselves] – honest, hard-workin’ folk. We wanted to live eawr own lives an’ th’ upper classes wouldn’t let us. That’s abeawt it, lad.

  Handloom-weaver and Peterloo veteran Joseph Wrigley speaking in the 1870s to journalist James Haslam about the St Peter’s Fields meeting1

  11

  A ROPE OF SAND

  The term ‘radical’ began to be used in its more modern sense, meaning relating to thoroughgoing progressive constitutional reform, during the French Revolutionary Wars. This was a period of intense popular political agitation, a time when mass meetings, marches and demonstrations became key components of public life. Yet, though this was the first time that the term ‘radical’ was actively appropriated by contemporaries, rather than fastened on groups and individuals by subsequent historians, it was also arguably in this period that the British radical agenda narrowed, to focus predominantly on electoral reform.

  The issue was undoubtedly pressing: the electoral system had noticeably failed to keep track of population growth, such that the electorate had declined as a proportion of the population from 5.2 per cent in 1715 to 3.2 per cent on the eve of the Great Reform Act.1 Nonetheless, the character of British radicalism overall was undoubtedly changing. In the face of the ongoing threat (until 1815) of French invasion, pressure from the loyalist press and government censorship, radicalism took on a more patriotic, more ‘Anglo-Saxon’ hue. The Painite emphasis on universal human rights, and on the need for social as well as political reform, now smacked too much of French influence or dangerous ‘Levellerism’. Talk of inalienable natural rights and interventionist social policy on the part of government, except with regard to prisons, was also anathema to the emerging radical philosophical creed of utilitarianism, founded by Jeremy Bentham. At the same time the anticlericalism of English radicalism became more subdued. The mainstream of radicalism thereby became paradoxically less ‘radical’ just at the moment that it began to embrace the term enthusiastically.

  As we shall see, there continued to be a violent, insurrectionary strain to radicalism, though the strength of the ‘physical force’ wing was exaggerated by the activities of government agents provocateurs. That aspect of radical activity could look more threatening when combined with serious industrial unrest – the waves of machine-breaking that occurred mainly between 1811 and 1814, and which, in the North West in particular, betrayed the influence of radical political ideas and rhetoric. The government responded with a swift, severe and largely effective repression, utilising both the law and force of arms. In negative terms, the most significant impact of popular radicalism may have been in eventually convincing the Whig Party in Parliament (and some moderate Tories) to support reform in order to consolidate power and stave off the threat of revolution.

  But this period was significant in the history of English radicalism for more positive reasons too: it largely established the platform of political reform – universal male suffrage, secret ballots, annual parliaments, and equal electoral districts – advocated later by the Chartists; it established, too, the methods for achieving this goal – mass political meetings, petitions and propaganda disseminated through pro-reform newspapers. It saw the emergence of the first women-only reform organisations and the increasing public involvement of women in politics, as well as the first thoroughgoing critiques not simply of the unreformed constitution, but of the capitalist economic system that was driving British industrialisation.

  Early nineteenth-century radicalism, then, set the agenda for reformers for much of the next fifty years. Its most enduring and powerful legacy, however, came from its greatest tragedy: the massacre by yeomen cavalry and professional soldiers of unarmed demonstrators on 19 August 1819 that came to be known as ‘Peterloo’. This atrocity created a powerful memory of working-class political activism that inspired not only future British radicals but liberation movements the world over.

  Although popular radical movements had not been completely snuffed out (especially in the capital), during the first decade of the nineteenth century efforts were targeted at Westminster and at achieving reform through parliamentary means. Hopes in this regard peaked when Pitt resigned in 1801, ostensibly over the issue of Catholic emancipation, but perhaps also because of his increasingly poor health (not helped by his daily consumption of six bottles of wine). Radical hopes within Westminster were fastened upon Sir Francis Burdett, a gentleman reformer whose father-in-law Thomas Coutts, founder of the banking dynasty, had bought him the pocket borough of Boroughbridge.

  Despite owing his place in the House entirely to the corrupt nature of the unreformed constitution, Burdett was one of the most outspoken figures in the Commons in opposing the repressive measures of the first Pitt ministry – the Combination Acts,* the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the exclusion of reporters from the House. In the general election of 1802 he was invited to stand as candidate for the county of Middlesex; he won the contest, but the election was voided on the grounds of voting irregularities. However, as his opponent William Mainwaring had also engaged in electoral sharp practice, ‘treating’ (bribing) voters, a new election was called in 1804.

  William Cobbett, one-time author of the anti-Jacobin periodical the Porcupine, now turned his new journal, the Political Register, to the cause of reform, partly out of personal pique for having been convicted of libelling the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. More important, though, was Cobbett’s belief that the victory of the banker Mainwaring would represent a triumph of parasitic ‘new money’ over a man of unimpeachable noble lineage. (Here Cobbett overlooked the fact that most of Burdett’s money came from his banker in-laws.) Though Burdett again triumphed in the popular vote, the action of the sheriffs in discounting all votes cast after 3 p.m., even though the poll itself closed at five, gave the seat to Mainwaring. Burdett took pleasure in the sheriffs’ decision, sensing an opportunity to turn this contested election into a wider controversy over the fairness of the electoral system itself. With the help of the veteran reformer Major John Cartwright, Burdett’s disgruntled supporters had by November 1804 formed the Middlesex Freeholders’ Club to raise funds for his campaign to overturn Mainwaring’s election. The campaign ultimately proved successful; but only a year after taking his seat, Burdett was voted out, unable to bear the costs of another election campaign.2

  Nonetheless, hopes that the parliamentary road to reform might prove successful remained high. The death of Pitt in January 1806 had brought Charles James Fox into government, a change that veterans of the radical struggles of the 1790s such as Thomas Hardy viewed with optimism. In this, his last year, however, Fox was preoccupied with other issues beyond elector
al reform, namely Catholic emancipation – the same cause over which George III had blocked Pitt – and the abolition of the slave trade. Fox’s focus on these concerns was seen as something of a betrayal by London radicals, even though he had, in fact, always expressed ambivalence about electoral reform.

  The Whig Party as a whole, including its more progressive wing, existed in a rather uneasy relationship with popular radicalism. The ‘people’ were often invoked in Whig rhetoric, but this did not make it a party of democrats. For the Whigs, parliamentary, not popular, sovereignty was what was important. Indeed, public opinion, in the shape of popular anti-Popery, seemed a threat to some cherished Whig objectives – most obviously, Catholic emancipation. These differences between Whiggery and radicalism emerged in distinct attitudes towards the monarchy and British history. Whigs believed in constitutional monarchy, in which a legally bound Crown worked in partnership with Parliament. Most radicals, on the other hand, were not republicans, but believed in a form of popular monarchism which saw a direct, even emotional, connection between monarch and people. That link could prove very important when Parliament was deemed to be deaf to the people’s wishes. So whereas Whigs continued to venerate the supposedly bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 as a key moment in British constitutional history, radicals could favour more violent episodes, like the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when the aristocracy was bypassed and politics consisted of a negotiation between King and commons.3