The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  THE AVOIDANCE OF REVOLUTION, 1789–1820

  Just before the fall of the Bastille an English aristocrat in France mused upon the confusing scene before him, which included ‘the poor’s need to plunder because not provided for, ladies not daring to live in the country, evasion of taxes, enclosure of common land, venal corporations, trade and manufacturing overstrained, bankruptcies in every town, laws unenforceable being multiplied beyond comprehension’.37 He was not talking about France; he was talking about England. We tend to forget that in 1789 a revolution seemed just as likely to break out in England, where the bitter political battles of 1782–4 and the almost complete collapse of the monarchy in 1788–9 had indicated something approaching constitutional breakdown, as in France, which seemed to be well on the way to achieving some measure of peaceful reform of its finances and institutions. To what extent did Britain come close to revolution during the long and dangerous period from the outbreak of the French Revolution to that of Peterloo? After all, many regimes in Europe were overthrown, numerous ruling houses were expelled and the map of the continent was drastically redrawn in these years. There was nothing inevitable about Britain’s avoidance of revolution. Indeed, Britain did come very close to revolution, as the Irish uprising of 1798 reminds us.

  In what precisely did the threat of revolution consist and how might a revolution have occurred? Simply stated, the threat lay in the strains of over two decades of war, which coincided with unsettling and sometimes dangerous political situations and economic crises. Chronologically, there were a number of occasions when the regime found itself in difficulties. First in 1792–3 the expansionism of France, the execution of Louis XVI and the approach of war created a security crisis and an atmosphere of something near panic. Second, in 1794–6 a subsistence crisis coincided with an upsurge in popular radicalism, with military defeat and with widespread hardship and popular rioting. Third, in 1797–8 naval mutinies were a precursor to further military defeat, attempted French invasions and, finally, the Irish uprising of 1798. Fourth, in 1799–1801 yet further military defeat coincided with a serious crisis of subsistence, precipitated by the harvest failure of 1799, and with the political crisis of the fall of Pitt. Fifth, in 1811–12 the Orders in Council and the Continental System caused an economic crisis, accompanied by an upsurge of machine-breaking known as Luddism. Finally, the return to peace in 1815 inaugurated a period of almost constant uncertainty, economic hardship, radical mobilization and popular unrest which lasted down to 1821. Three basic issues intersect at the above junctures of crisis: the strains of war, the pain of widespread economic hardship and the challenge of popular reform.

  For many periods in the years of its long duration, the war against France was dramatically unsuccessful and thus bitterly hated, most spectacularly in 1793–4, 1795–6, during the invasion scare of 1797 and in 1799–1801. At such periods Pitt’s government plumbed the depths of unpopularity and public contempt. His military failures and the severe taxation which was necessary for the continued prosecution of the war hit the middling as well as the lower orders. If the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were not total wars as the twentieth century has come to experience them, they penetrated more deeply and more comprehensively into the experiences of the nation than any previous wars had done.

  Moreover, Britain had to endure economic hardship on a scale that had not been known during the eighteenth century. It has been estimated that between 1789 and 1815 there were over 1,000 crowd demonstrations and protests against economic hardship.38 The grain crisis of 1795 led to a 70 per cent increase in the price of wheat compared to 1791, to trade depression, to unemployment and to a rash of strikes which raised the temperature of radical agitation and fed the huge outdoor meetings of that year. The ugly public mood –in part, at least, a response to an increase of 30 per cent in the cost of living between 1790 and 1795 – which was seen in the mobbing of the king in October 1795 led to the passing of the Two Acts. The harvest failure and grain crisis of 1800 was even more threatening in its consequences. Extensive food shortages and a severe trade depression led to unemployment, riots and strikes. It was noticeable that the authorities were reluctant to enforce maximum price regulations, a failure which led to disorder in London, Nottingham and Oxford. It was against this dangerous background that the Despard conspiracy was played out. This was an attempt to organise an armed uprising in London in conjunction with a similar attempt in the industrial north of the country. Had it come to fruition, and if Napoleon’s intended invasion in 1803 had occurred, then there could have been some challenge to Britain’s security. The authorities made a pre-emptive strike and Colonel Edward Despard, an officer on colonial service who had been unjustly suspended, was arrested in November 1802 and subsequently executed. Finally, any prospect that the return of peace in 1815 would remove the threat of revolution was dashed by the speed with which the artificial stimulus to the economy lent by the war was removed. Although the worrying possibility of international conspiracy did not exist after 1815 there remained, nevertheless, massive distress and unemployment allied to popular radical agitation, sometimes of a republican and revolutionary character.

  On top of all this, the country was faced with an ideologically advanced radical challenge to the regime which derived in part from the French Revolution and in part from British philosophical and religious traditions. This radical movement was well organized, well patronized, articulate and capable of appealing to all classes of society. The writings of Paine aroused enormous excitement among the lower and middle classes and consequently created apprehensions for the security of property and the possibility of social upheaval. Interacting with the results of military failure and the social and economic hardship caused by harvest failure in the middle of the decade, the movement was driven underground. It could not, however, be eradicated. There followed after 1797 an extra-parliamentary radical challenge of unprecedented danger, as both Marianne Elliott and Roger Wells have recently shown, through an Anglo-Irish revolutionary conspiracy which in the latter 1790s was closely linked into French invasion plans.39

  How might a revolutionary situation have emerged from these conditions? There can be no question of the vulnerability of the regime. It did not possess national policing agencies, and the deference and respect which protected it came under severe strain on many occasions. As always, London, in particular, was potentially a weakness, as had been shown during the Wilkite disturbances and again during the Gordon Riots. A mounting sense of vulnerability was responsible both for that apocalyptic mood which occasionally swept over some sections of the reform movement in the 1790s and for that sense of impending panic which spread among the propertied classes, and which continued among them until the 1820s. That there were good reasons for their fears can be shown by the naval mutinies of 1797 and the Irish uprising of 1798. But it can also be seen in the occasional unreliability of the Volunteers at moments of local crisis and even, on some occasions, by instances of disloyalty among the militia and the regular army. Militiamen and soldiers were reluctant to turn their rifles on the people, and there are examples of desertion from and disobedience in their ranks. The vulnerability of the regime was further emphasized by the countless demonstrations of little less than hatred of the authorities, of the war and, on occasion, of the king, by the willingness of so many reformers to take to the streets and by the need to shore up ephemeral loyalist sentiment with the power of statute. Everything suggests that the mass of British public opinion was volatile, capable of being aroused and stirred by one side or the other.

  A revolution might have occurred in Britain as a result of external or of internal forces or some combination of the two. At its simplest, could the regime defend itself against a domestic insurrection at the same time as it was conducting the war against France in theatres in Europe and all over the globe and, perhaps, while Ireland was unreliable and diverting yet more British troops from home defence? The crucial issue was the likelihood of a French invasion. Had
the French launched a successful invasion, a number of serious possibilities would have opened up: divisions within the ruling order, the emergence of collaborationism, the disintegration of the army, the dissolution of the militia and, conceivably, a run on the banks – any of these would have had devastating consequences for the Hanoverian regime. However, a successful invasion was most unlikely. Britain had command of the seas. Even if an invasion force had landed successfully in this period it would probably have received even less support than the Jacobite invasions of 1715 and 1745 had done, in England, at least. There was one further crucial difference. George I and George II had not dared to arm their peoples because of their dynastic insecurity. In the 1790s George III and his government were quite prepared to arm the Volunteers. At the very least, a French invasion in the 1790s would have had a very different military reception from that of the leisurely Dutch invasion of 1688–9.

  What were the prospects of a purely internal collapse? Some of the elements of a mass protest and a mass rising undoubtedly existed: serious economic distress, outspoken public criticism of the regime and organized street demonstrations. Yet an uprising would have been unlikely to occur without united political leadership. There was never much concord among the different radical groups at any time and the ‘liberal’ aristocracy, under Fox, had no stomach for a coup d’etat. Fox, of course, was no democrat and boasted that he had not even read the second – and more notoriously radical – part of The Rights of Man. Moreover, there is no sign that the armed forces were likely to defect. The naval mutinies of 1797 were an alarming glimpse of what could happen when political disaffection (in the shape of the United Irishmen) combined with inadequate pay and economic grievances. However, as events showed, the elimination of the latter liquidated the threat of the former. The Despard conspiracy revealed only a handful of disaffected soldiers in one Guards regiment. Furthermore, all the military plots from Despard to Cato Street had the objective of a sudden strike on the capital. If their first strike had been successful, what would the rebels have done next? Would they have had the resources actually to take over the government, to say nothing of the physical agencies of the state?

  Indeed, no revolutionary conspiracy worth the name existed in the first half of the 1790s. The government and the propertied orders were too vigilant, being particularly alarmed at the rather eccentric behaviour which became popular among some radicals in the early 1790s, who revelled in French names, habits and manners. Yet they need not have worried. Almost all the reforming societies hated violence and renounced revolution. Indeed, French revolutionary ideology was of much less relevance to reform in the 1790s than traditions of native reformism. English reformers wished to restore the virtues of their old constitution, not establish a new one. Many of them had found the work of Paine inspirational in 1791 and 1792, but thereafter Painite influence is much more difficult to trace in the broad mainstream of radical reform. To some extent this was a consequence of the demonization of Paine in 1792–3, when something resembling a witch-hunt for Painite opinions was launched. More likely, however, it was a consequence of the inherent moderation of the native reform movement itself, its non-insurrectionary traditions and its ultimate repudiation of republican influences.

  In the second half of the 1790s there was a revolutionary fringe to the reform movement, particularly that associated with the United Irishmen, but it was not numerically extensive (nor could it be if the secrecy necessary for its effectiveness were to be maintained and if it relied for its success upon collaboration with France). Those involved in the plots of 1797–1802 were preoccupied with their own manoeuvres; they lacked any understanding of the broader organizational means by which different regions of the country might be synchronized into common support of the plots. This was painfully apparent in Ireland during the 1798 uprising. Just when the threat of revolution did appear, the radical movement had lost the bulk of such mass appeal as it had ever had. Popular hostility to Pitt, to the war and, indeed, to the regime existed in the 1790s. Such hostility did not, however, coincide with, and could not be drawn into, support for conspiracy with the United Irishmen and plots of a French invasion.

  After the ending of the war radical protest assumed momentous proportions and was far more extensive than anything that had been seen hitherto. Not only were the sheer numbers mobilized infinitely greater than had been the case in the 1790s. Protestors evinced a greater readiness to take to the streets and to indulge in direct action. The number of conspiracies, marches and risings speaks for itself. Nevertheless, the mainstream reformers like Cartwright, Cobbett and even Hunt did not advocate political violence. Those who did, men like Thistlewood, remained on the fringes. They lacked any sort of national organization and the resources with which to develop it. The real threat of revolution in these years appears to have existed chiefly in the mind of the governing classes. The reports of the Committees of Secrecy presented to Parliament in February 1817 (like those of 1794, 1799, 1801 and 1812) lumped together every conceivable expression of discontent into a gigantic radical conspiracy to organize a revolution. But it remained nothing more than an alarmist’s nightmare. The careless words of some radicals and the ability of some reformers to drift into the radical underworld of secret meetings and assemblies should not be taken as a commitment to the systematic and violent overthrow of the existing social order.

  On none of these occasions did the governments of Pitt and Liverpool either lose their nerve or fail to take measured action in support of their authority. Although their actions, whether the imprisonment of radicals, the passing of ‘repressive’ legislation, the encouragement of extra-parliamentary loyalism or the establishment of spy networks, can be, and were, criticized as being either too harsh or too lenient, the fact remains that there was never a vacuum of authority. Magistrates were able to feel that they had the firm backing of the government. The regime was neither too weak to permit the unrestricted advance of popular hostility to the regime, its representatives and its institutions, nor too authoritarian to drive reformers to arms. Both the forms and the practices of parliamentary government were maintained. Even when the legal system was drawn into service on behalf of the government, it quickly became apparent that there were legal and political limits to what the government could do. Military force was widely hated and condemned as a form of tyranny. Repressive legislation was sparingly used. No radical was prosecuted under the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act of 1795 and only two men were executed for treason in the decade of the 1790s. The danger to the state represented by the reformers could not be extinguished by military and legal force. It required the active support of public opinion. The mobilization of patriotic opinion in these years is just as important as the essential moderation of radical groups in explaining how Britain avoided revolution. Patriotism, hatred of the French, fear of the French Revolution – all of these sentiments created a rising tide of loyalty which served to inoculate people’s minds against the wilder assertions of radical spokesmen. Particularly, but not only, in 1792–4, in 1804–5 and in 1817–18, the country was swept by recurrent outbursts of loyalist sentiment. As historians have pointed out, the number of loyalists far exceeded the membership of the reforming societies. This may have been the case, but the membership of patriotic societies in the 1790s does seem to have been particularly unstable and, arguably, unreliable. (The Pitt clubs that proliferated rapidly after the death of the great statesman in 1806 were much more permanent structures than the earlier Loyal Associations.) Nevertheless, the importance of such bodies lies not merely in their numerical strength but in the fact that they acted as triggers for latent patriotic sentiment, acting both to support the government of the day and to rally loyal opinion around the monarchy and the church. Although there were different phases and types of Loyalism – political, reformist, religious, military – it is important to underline the fact that Loyalism, like the reformism of the period, was contested ground. Its purposes, personnel and even its language were c
apable of considerable variation. Indeed, in their patriotism, their determination to appeal to the people out of doors and in their love of organizational variety, the two have much in common.

  In Britain, unlike France, the ruling elite did not lose its unity either before or after 1789. In France an ‘aristocratic revolt’ (1787–9) acted as a precursor to the French Revolution. In Britain this did not happen. This achievement is frequently underestimated. In view of the great political divisions within the landed classes in the 1760s, between 1782–4 and during the Regency Crisis of 1788–9, there was certainly nothing inevitable about it. Pitt was always anxious to maintain political cohesion among the ruling class. His anxiety to conclude a coalition with the Portland Whigs can be interpreted in narrow terms of party competition and partisan advantage, but it may also have proceeded from his desire to maintain social and political unity. It is at this point that the positioning of the Foxite Whigs within the regime becomes of crucial significance. As Ian Christie has perceptively noted, ‘The Opposition could not give wholehearted loyalty to the system within which they were operating’ because the strength of their belief in secret influence disabled them from admitting the legitimacy of the regime.40 No wonder there were doubts about Fox’s loyalty. Did the Foxite Whigs secede from Parliament in 1797 in order to keep their distance from the Pittite regime? It is an intriguing speculation, albeit one that cannot be verified by the existing evidence. On the other hand, the reluctance of the Foxite Whigs to rally to the ranks of the poor and the underprivileged is a negative fact of some significance. Although they opposed Pitt’s repressive policy the Foxites in the end were unable to resist it. The power of the state that was mobilized in the 1790s was unprecedented. The attacks on habeas corpus, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly were merely the official set themes to a counterpoint of informal aggression directed against reformers, Dissenters and radicals at local level by the local magistracy. The Foxite Whigs were, and wished to be, involved in as little of this as possible.