The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  All this was achieved with government connivance but without direct intervention. During the next few years, however, the government was to become more active in the campaign against reform. Already in May 1792 a proclamation had been issued bidding magistrates to be on their guard against seditious writings. In December a further proclamation called out the militia to safeguard the country from internal disruption. In 1793 the government began to use its massive legal resources against the reformers. In August 1793 a series of state trials in Scotland led to the imprisonment of a number of reformers. In May 1794 the government suspended habeas corpus, but the reformers were not silenced. The holding of a British national reform convention in Edinburgh in October 1793 caused a good deal of alarm in loyalist circles that reformers might be seeking to establish a rival Parliament. Consequently, conservative opinion greeted the State Trials of 1794 with approval. The leaders of the convention, Thomas Hardy, Home Tooke and John Thelwall,11 and ten other leading reformers were tried for treason. Amidst scenes of tumultuous rejoicing in London, the great Whig lawyer Thomas Erskine12 secured verdicts of ‘not guilty’ for his radical clients. This was a historic victory, but it did not dissuade the government from taking further measures against reformers. Their cause was aided by the economic deprivations caused by the war. Recent research has revealed that in London the real wages of skilled wages actually fell by around 15 per cent in the 1790s.13 Harvest failure made things even worse, and that of 1794 resulted in a steady rise in prices and a serious food shortage in many regions. In 1795 these problems were aggravated by yet further harvest failure. The price of wheat rose by a third over the price in 1794. Real distress combined with war weariness to produce serious rioting. At the opening of Parliament in October 1795 violent demonstrations against the king and Pitt horrified the government. These threatening scenes, coming so soon after the great radical demonstrations of St George’s Field on 29 June and the Copenhagen Fields meetings on 26 October, which are each said to have attracted up to 100,000 people, persuaded the government to strike. It passed the Two Acts, the Seditious Meetings Bill, which closely regulated the holding of public meetings, and the Treasonable Practices Bill, which extended the definition of treason to include any criticism of king or government. The pressure on radicals was remorseless. It matters little that the legislation was not much used. The Two Acts set an example and alerted the propertied classes to the potential danger in which the country stood. They increased the pressure on the radical societies which by the summer of 1796 were in serious decline, despite attempts by Horne Tooke to maintain some sort of unity between the reformers and the Foxite Whigs.

  These legal restrictions coalesced with the continuing force of loyalist action and example to inhibit radicalism. The Loyal Associations, perhaps as many as 2,000 of them, were founded in 1792–3 to act as a counter-radical force and to defend the status quo in church and state. Their meetings, dinners, processions, sermons and propaganda affected every community. The Loyal Associations were not simply the servants of the state. They were a broad church in which groups from many sections of society, and not simply the political and social elite, could cooperate. Furthermore, many Loyal Associations mobilized their resources to assist the war effort by raising money for the recruitment of troops and for the relief of the dependants of men killed or wounded in the war. They even became an active source of Volunteers. In March 1794 Pitt’s government authorized the establishment of Volunteer regiments, and they quickly became objects of local and civic pride. By the end of the century there were almost 300,000 Volunteers. During the invasion crisis of 1804 there were no fewer than 450,000.

  After 1795, in fact, radicalism was forced underground. The continuing suspension of habeas corpus enabled the government to keep suspects under lock and key, and it availed itself of the privilege. The societies fell into crisis. Indeed, the SCI had never managed to recover from the seizure of its papers during the period of the State Trials in 1794. The Society of the Friends of the People ceased to meet in 1796. The naval mutinies of 1797, with their overtones of Painite democracy and radical organization, and the resultant execution of thirty-six sailors, reminded an alarmed population that constant vigilance was needed against the radical threat from within. In April 1798 the papers of the LCS were seized, and the society was banned in July 1799. Many radical leaders emigrated or, like Francis Place,14 withdrew from active agitation for some years. Everywhere, the public organization of radicalism was snuffed out. Protests against repression persisted, exacerbated by a burning sense of injustice. But in private reform survived, and in many ways, even prospered. In London a radical underground had become by the end of the decade a cluster of groupings, some with links into the worlds of popular religion, of petty crime, of unconventional science and of other marginal groups. Such radicalism was popular, plebeian and theatrical, thriving on mockery and abuse of their loyalist opponents. If such a broad and amorphous ‘movement’ had a core, it was perhaps provided by the Spencean radicals, followers of the agrarian reformer Thomas Spence. These men kept the radical flag flying and created a seedbed from which the shoots of conspiracy, or even revolution, could spring.

  The radicals went underground at the same time as the nerve-centre of the radical movement was shifting away from London and to the north of England. In defiance of the Two Acts, a Manchester Corresponding Society was formed in 1796. It was one of the few largely proletarian bodies of the decade and it developed cells in cotton factories as well as spawning further branches outwards from Manchester. Echoes of similar groups were heard in the West Riding, in the Midlands and in the Glasgow area. It is not clear whether a national conspiracy was being organized, but many of these groups contained revolutionary elements. As its public influence declined, the LCS came to be penetrated by plotters and revolutionaries, including a number of members of the Society of United Irishmen, who dreamt of a united Anglo-Irish movement. An unlikely revolutionary conspiracy to organize simultaneous Irish and English risings in 1798 with French assistance was unearthed by British spies and one of its leaders, Father James O’Coigly, went to the gallows. The Irish Rebellion of 1798 had no English counterpart, but its failure caused many members of the United Irishmen to flee to England. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 banned workers’ combinations, driving protest even more emphatically underground. After 1800, however, there were still perhaps twenty divisions of the LCS active in London. The failure of the harvest in 1800 created a threatening situation which both alarmed the government and provided an ugly context in which plots and conspiracies could thrive. When the Two Acts expired in 1801 the revolutionary organization of the radical movement quickly revived and proceeded to launch mass protest meetings. The government did not hesitate to revive the acts. There were some disturbances and a certain amount of nocturnal plotting in Yorkshire, but London was now back at the forefront of this phase of the movement. A handful of arrests was sufficient to break the back of the conspiracy. This did not deter Colonel Despard’s plot of 1802, which planned to seize key points in London with the aid of disaffected elements in the army. Riddled with government spies and without a French invasion force to support it, the plot had no chance of success, and Despard was hanged in 1803. Thereafter underground radical activity continued, but without much coordination or confidence, and for almost a decade the cause of extra-parliamentary reform is almost entirely lost to the historian.

  Pitt has been roundly condemned for his repressive attitude towards reformers, but there is little doubt that public opinion, hostile to France in the middle of a great war and fearful of popular agitation, in general, supported most of his measures. However, these conspiracies cannot be dismissed as the actions of a lunatic fringe. They have to be treated as a serious and considered response of one section of the reformers. Furthermore, loyalist sentiments were not entirely comforting to the government. The immediate upsurge of loyalist opinion in 1792–3 had been impressive but it soon petered out. Further surges of patrio
tic activity came later in the decade with the establishment of the Volunteer regiments but these, too, had only partial success. In 1796 a supplementary militia had to be raised by compulsory ballot. Even though many towns proudly raised their own militia regiments in 1797–8, there were still dangerous, albeit patchy, signs of popular support for the cause of reform. With the benefit of hindsight historians have the luxury of knowing that this phase of conspiratorial radicalism was to be unsuccessful. Pitt’s government, fighting a dangerous and, to that point, largely unsuccessful war, could take no chances and had no way of knowing that victory would ultimately come. The years 1796–8 witnessed military defeat, naval mutinies, rebellion in Ireland and continued economic crisis. Nevertheless, there are few signs of a ‘reign of terror’. There were less than 200 political prosecutions between 1793 and 1801 and many trials resulted in acquittals. Indeed, there were fewer prosecutions for political offences between 1796 and 1800 than there were between 1792 and 1795. Furthermore, most proceedings were founded on sedition, not on the larger charge of treason. Nevertheless, the idea of a ‘reign of terror’ was reinforced by further repressive legislation between 1798 and 1800, particularly the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, further restrictions on the freedom of the press and the suppression of the LCS. In the early years of the new century, however, the situation had entirely changed. The Treaty of Amiens brought a blessed respite from the privations of war. When it resumed, loyalism seemed to be a natural patriotic duty against the threat of Napoleon’s schemes of personal aggrandisement and imperial ambition. Radical reform on any significant scale did not revive until after the invasion scare of 1804–5. The heavy hand of repression which had driven radicalism underground in the 1790s was, with the death of Pitt in 1806, removed. The Ministry of all the Talents of 1806–7 brought the Whigs back to power, and if the ministry accomplished little to please parliamentary reformers, its greatest achievement, the abolition of the slave trade, was both a testament to humane government action and an indication that the mood of the country was changing after the repressive days of the 1790s. In the period 1789–92 it had been the euphoria created by the French Revolution which had given reformers their audience. In 1795–6 and 1800–1 it had been the pitiful conditions created by famine and want. Now it was the unemployment and interruption to trade – what contemporaries termed ‘distress’ – created by the Continental System and the Orders in Council which drove merchants, manufacturers, artisans (skilled and unskilled), and now factory workers, into the arms of the radical leaders. Much of the moral and ideological force of this phase of radicalism was very traditional: distaste for corruption, suspicion of government and a reverence for the ancient constitution. It was no accident that several senior figures in the radical pantheon had been active a generation earlier in radical politics, including Major Cartwright, John Home Tooke, Christopher Wyvill and Capel Lofft.15

  In the period 1807–12 four distinctive strands of radicalism may be discerned: a revived metropolitan radicalism principally linked with the figure of Sir Francis Burdett16; a provincial ‘Hampden Club’ movement among the working-class communities of the new, and many of the old, industrial towns; a provincial, largely middle-class movement protesting against the war and the Orders in Council; and a wave of machine-breaking in 1811–12, popularly known as Luddism.

  The first significant catalyst in the revival of metropolitan radicalism was the general election of 1806, at which a number of notable radical personalities fought noisy but unsuccessful campaigns. The ex-Tory William Cobbett17 stood at Honiton, Major Cartwright at Boston and Sir Francis Burdett at Middlesex. Burdett was an old-fashioned paternalist, believing in the ancient constitution and the gentry’s right to rule and advocating a moderate brand of parliamentary reform, reminiscent in some ways of Christopher Wyvill’s movement. He believed in the free-born Englishman, not the rights of man. At the general election of 1807 Burdett won Middlesex thanks to the energetic and populist campaigning of a revived Westminster committee, organized by Francis Place. The next few years witnessed continuing, if not always well coordinated, radical attacks on the governments of Portland (1807–9) and Perceval (1809–12), supported by new journalistic talents, William Cobbett and his Political Register, the Whig Edinburgh Review (1806) and the radical Examiner (1802) edited by Leigh Hunt. Such journalism was able to feed off a succession of minor wartime scandals, and one major one – that of the mistress of the Duke of York, Mrs Anne Clark, who had apparently used her position to sell army commissions. In effective alliance with the journalism of Cobbett and his Political Register, Burdett made a conspicuous success of drawing attention to himself and to his cause. In 1809 he moved for a householder franchise and the division of county constituencies, arguing significantly that only in this way would the ancient constitution be restored and recent abuses removed. His motion was defeated by 74 votes to 15. In 1810 he was thrown into the tower for denouncing a decision of the House of Commons to imprison a fellow London radical, John Gale Jones. This was a signal for mob activity and popular idolization of Burdett in the capital, reminiscent of the days of John Wilkes. Floods of petitions demanded reform of Parliament. In June 1811 radicals of all persuasions, including not only Burdett and Cobbett but also Christopher Wyvill and a dynamic new force, Henry Hunt,18 came together in a new society, the Society of Friends to Parliamentary Reform. It was by then too late to effect anything before the cause of metropolitan radicalism suffered yet another of its periodic collapses.

  Radicalism appeared once again in the provinces through the agency of the Hampden Clubs. The original Hampden Club was formed in 1812 with the purpose of enabling radical leaders to keep open their contacts with hesitant Whig politicians, who were at this time beginning to interest themselves once again in parliamentary reform. The Hampden was an extraordinarily exclusive club, restricted to people worth £300 a year and with a subscription of two guineas. Cartwright had by now reached the conclusion that parliamentary reform could only be achieved through mass support for a radical platform of universal suffrage. Believing that the exclusiveness of the Hampden was entirely the wrong strategy, he resigned in June 1812, formed the Union Society and proceeded in 1812–13 to visit many of the industrial towns of the country, politicizing local leaders and spreading the gospel of universal suffrage. It is difficult to measure exactly the effectiveness of Cartwright’s missionary tours, but the 1813 tour covered 900 miles in 29 days, visiting 34 towns and, ultimately, generating 130,000 signatures on 430 petitions. No immediate benefit to the radical cause was forthcoming, but it would be difficult to deny that the indefatigable and heroic Cartwright had laid some at least of the foundations for the wave of radical activity that flooded the country after the war.

  Meanwhile, it was not perhaps surprising that the unprecedented length and cost of the war, together with the unusual sacrifices to which it gave rise, should generate a peace movement, especially among provincial, middle-class Dissenters. In one of the earliest popular Nonconformist pressure groups, moral revulsion against war combined with solid economic discontent. Leading Dissenting manufacturers like William Roscoe of Liverpool, Josiah Wedgewood in the Potteries and William Strutt of Derby coordinated provincial opposition to the war which merged, in 1807, into a strongly organized protest against the Orders in Council. Its initial failure to change government policy did not daunt the organizers. An extra-parliamentary campaign, led by the Whig politician Henry Brougham19 and backed by 150,000 petitioners, ultimately achieved its objective in 1812. These agitations of the ‘Friends of Peace’ acted as a powerful vehicle for a thoroughgoing critique and condemnation not only of the war but also of the government and the social and political establishment. Certainly, middle-class Dissenters, unlike lower-class radicals, were not daunted by the repressive apparatus of the state. Possibly reacting against the revived Anglicanism of the 1790s, the peace movement marks a revival in the political self-confidence of Protestant Dissenters. Furthermore, this alliance of Whig politicians,
middle-class Dissenters and lower-class political agitation was a foretaste of the alliance which was to force Parliament to reform itself in 1831–2.