by Simon Schama
At the end of the week’s proceedings Erskine responded for the defence with a mere seven-hour speech. Echoing a pamphlet published by William Godwin, he insisted that whatever had been said (by Hardy, for example – and he had said a lot) had to be proved to be an actual plot to kill the king in person, not just complaints about parliament or even the monarchy as an institution, since that had still been protected as free political debate. By such unconscionably elastic definitions of treason Hardy was being tried for his life on account of activities that were undoubtedly peaceful and lawful. ‘I hope,’ said Erskine, brilliantly throwing back at the prosecutors the imputation of disloyalty, ‘never to hear it repeated in any court of justice that peacefully to convene the people on the subject of their own privileges, can lead to the destruction of the king; they are the king’s worst enemies who use such language.’ At the end of his heroic oration he croaked to the jury: ‘I am sinking under fatigue and weakness,’ and then indeed sank. Appreciative of great theatre, the jury applauded. Hardy was acquitted and spoke to the roaring crowds outside: ‘My fellow countrymen, I return you my thanks.’ The crowd untethered the horses from the carriages of the accused and pulled them down the Strand, past the Palace of Westminster and along Pall Mall. When the subsequent trial of Horne Tooke opened on 17 November and that of Thelwall on 1 December, the verdicts seemed hardly in doubt before they got under way, although Horne Tooke played it safe and pleaded – disloyally but not incorrectly – that he had been a moderate compared to other indicted firebrands. Thelwall had prepared not so much a defence as a manifesto of British Rights of Nature and was about to give it his oratorical all until Erskine buttoned his lip. Miffed at the loss of an opportunity to address posterity he published it in 1796.
The bitter winter of 1794–5 only made Pitt’s government more feverishly defensive. The war was going badly. French armies occupied first the Austrian Netherlands; then the Rhineland and finally the Dutch Republic, where an old ally, the Stadholder William V, was deposed in favour of a new revolutionary Batavian Republic. Harvests were disastrous, sending the price of wheat rocketing by 75 per cent. At the same time an export slump caused lay-offs in the textile industry. In London, the population responded with violent action. The steam-powered Great Albion Flour Mill was attacked by rioters. In the summer mass meetings were held at St George’s Field. On 28 October 1795 another – said by the London Corresponding Society to be 200,000 strong, although others put it at between 40,000 and 100,000 – assembled in a field by the Copenhagen House tavern in Islington to hear the 22-year-old Irishman John Binns attack the war and denounce the Pitt government. The chant was ‘Peace! Bread! No Pitt! Down with George.’
On the following day the coach taking George III to open parliament was mobbed in the Mall by an angry crowd, some of them holding bread loaves wrapped in black crepe and shouting, ‘No war, no famine!’ In Parliament Street the coach was pelted with mud and stones, smashing its windows. At some point on the journey a projectile made a small hole that the king thought had been caused by a bullet. When he reached the House of Lords he is said to have stammered, ‘My Lords, I … I … I have been shot at.’ His route back to St James’s Palace was no friendlier, with more missiles and broken windows. The state coach was abandoned and torn to pieces when spotted in Pall Mall; one of the royal grooms fell under its wheels, breaking his thighs and dying of the injuries. When the king tried to reach Buckingham House in a private coach, he was recognized (no one else, after all, looked like George III). The coach ground to a halt in the mêlée, and it was said that someone opened a door and attempted to drag the king from it. Only the appearance of the Horse Guards riding to the rescue saved the situation from becoming even uglier. The threat to lay hands on the king was taken especially seriously, since the previous year there had been a ‘pop-gun plot’ (probably a fiction invented by spies) to fire a poisoned dart at him from a custom-designed air-gun. Stories were also rife of other plots for a revolutionary coup, to take place simultaneously in London, Dublin and Edinburgh, in which the magistracy and judges would be locked up, aristocrats put under house arrest and parliament liquidated.
The mobbing of the royal coach was, of course, a godsend to Pitt’s government, so much so that suspicious radicals speculated Pitt and the Home Secretary, the Duke of Portland, might have orchestrated it themselves (although their coaches were roughly treated as well). Riding the tidal wave of loyal addresses of indignation and loyalist passion, in December Pitt introduced two bills for the protection and policing of the realm. The first made meetings of more than 50 people illegal. If an assembly refused to disperse when ordered, those present could be charged with a capital crime. The second enlarged the scope of sedition still more broadly to encompass any advocacy of changes to the government, other than by acts of parliament. In other words: no pamphlets, no petitions, no meetings, no reform. Wordsworth, who on returning to England had published in 1793, in the form of a letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, a ferociously Paine-ite assault on the hereditary principle, would now have to keep his peace. Up in Newcastle Thomas Bewick – no Paine-ite revolutionary democrat – gritted his teeth. Later he remembered this as a scoundrelly time when ‘Knaves and their abettors appeared to predominate in the land; and they carried their subserviency to such a length that I think, if Mr Pitt had proposed to make a law to transport all men who had pug noses, and to hang all men above 60 years of age, these persons … would have advocated it as a brilliant thought and a wise measure.’
Not surprisingly, the combination of propaganda, gang intimidation, genuinely patriotic volunteer militias, censorship, political spying and summary arrests succeeded in stopping the momentum of democratic agitation. Critics and reformers like William Godwin who had come to the aid of the accused in the treason trials now withdrew from direct political action, and tried to reflect on social utopias away from the furore. In any case, Godwin had come to mistrust any proposals that made the state the agency of betterment. His Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) was the perfect tract for the disillusioned, since it argued that the only obligation for reasoning individuals was the realization of their own freedom and happiness. Any institutions that got in the way needed removing; so no religion, no system of government, no criminal law (it was, Godwin believed, hypocritical for societies to punish crimes it had generated itself), no systematic education, no accumulation of property beyond what was required to satisfy individual needs, and especially no marriage, an institution that held couples hostage to their transient passions.
That last sentiment was perhaps the only opinion that he held in common with Mary Wollstonecraft. He remembered her, not particularly warmly, as the person who wouldn’t shut up when he had wanted to listen to Tom Paine at one of the Johnson dinners. But when Godwin read the Scandinavian letters he declared that ‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.’ Love and Mr Godwin, short, earnest, pedantic, almost inhumanly cerebral, had not kept close company. Yet women – actresses, writers whom he called ‘the Fairs’, some of them hot with romance – set their cap at him. But it was Mary who melted his chilly soul. And he in turn made her a more reflective, quieter person. After all the miseries she had inflicted on herself through the years of torment with Imlay, Godwin’s mixture of coolness and clumsiness seemed positively winning. She relaxed in the growing certainty of his feeling, and the woman who had gone on record as mistrustful of sex now took shameless pleasure in initiating Godwin, reassuring his anxieties: ‘If the felicity of last night has had the same effect on your health as on my countenance, you have no cause to lament your failure of resolution: for I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections – very dear, called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.’
Mary became pregnant. In March 1797 William Godwin, the sworn enemy of marriage and churches, got married to ‘Mrs Imlay’ (her first union being considered merel
y a republican civic convenience and thus not binding) at St Pancras Church. Mary was satisfied that she had not ‘clogged my soul by promising obedience’, and the two of them let it be known that they would not continuously cohabit, but continue to respect each other’s independence and see others of the opposite sex, sharing lodgings some of the time but keeping their own respective places. It was bravely said. But as Mary’s belly grew, Godwin found himself unaccountably enjoying the small pleasures of domesticity and companionship. Theirs was growing into exactly the kind of intimate conjugal friendship that Mary – without ever having experienced anything like it – had prescribed as the formula for enduring married happiness.
Which is what made the end so unbearably sad. When the time came for her labour, on 30 August, she called a local midwife. But after the baby, another girl (the future author of Frankenstein), was born, the placenta failed to descend down the birth canal, threatening sepsis. A physician, hurriedly summoned from Westminster Hospital did what he could, but the placenta ruptured in fragments as Mary lay haemorrhaging in agony.
Eventually the bleeding stopped. Mary was strong enough to tell Godwin that she would never have survived had she not been determined to continue sharing her life with him. The next day she felt much better and was happy to have her old, best mentor, Joseph Johnson, visit. The following day she seemed better still and Godwin thought it was safe enough for him to take a walk. When he got back he found her convulsed with shivering fits and obviously running a high fever. She never got better. A week later, on 10 September 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia.
She was 38. Godwin, the supreme rationalist, was distraught. He wrote to a friend, ‘My wife is now dead … I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.’ It was the best and most unlikely epitaph: that she had been the bearer of happiness to the man who had declared war on marriage. Through Mary, the thinker had learned to feel. Through Godwin, the creature of feeling had recovered her power of thought. Wollstonecraft is properly remembered as the founder of modern feminism; for making a statement, still powerful in its clarity, that the whole nature of women was not to be confused with their biology. But nature, biology, had killed her.
On 17 October 1797, the Austrian Empire gritted its teeth and made its peace at the Italian town of Campo Formio with a 28-year-old Corsican called Bonaparte, whom no one (in Vienna at any rate) had heard of a few years before. Napoleon did so without waiting for permission from his civilian masters in the Directory. But since much of Italy, including some of the greatest cities and richest territories, now passed either into French control or under its influence, the Directors were hardly likely to repudiate their military prodigy. The ending of the war with Austria now allowed France to redeploy a large number of troops to a different theatre and its one remaining enemy. Within a month more than 100,000 of them were camped between Rouen – William the Conqueror’s old capital – and the Channel coast. The point of the massive troop concentration was not lost on Pitt’s government. Suddenly the world seemed a more dangerous place.
Since the war with the French Republic had begun in 1793 it had been an axiom in Westminster that, sooner or later, the revolutionary origins of that state would prove its military ruin; that an army built from rabble would, after an initial burst of self-deluded energy, collapse in on itself. The Terror’s habit of guillotining its own generals, should they be careless enough to lose the odd battle, only confirmed this diagnois. But with Bonaparte’s Italian campaign, so shocking in its speed and completeness, and with the French tightening their grip on a whole swathe of continental territory from the Netherlands down through the Rhineland, threatening even the Swiss cantons, it seemed that this bandit state had done the unthinkable and actually created a formidable fighting machine. Its troops did not run away. It seemed to manufacture more and more guns; and it obviously knew how to transform conquest into workable military assets, taking money, horses, wagons and conscripts as it rolled along. James Gillray might be starting to draw caricatures literally belittling this Bonaparte as a scrawny scarecrow wearing plumed hats a size too big. But William Pitt and his intelligent, inexhaustible secretary of war, the Scot Henry Dundas, knew he was no joke. Tom Paine, for one, believed he would be the long-awaited Liberator of Britain; urging him to prepare a fleet of 1000 gunboats, he did his best to persuade the future Emperor that in the event of an invasion there would be a huge uprising, for ‘the mass of the people are friends to liberty’. Initially, at any rate, Bonaparte was impressed enough with Paine to appoint him leader of a provisional English Revolutionary Government to travel with the invasion fleet when the order was given to sail. But the order never came, Bonaparte turning his attention instead to Egypt.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars between England and France, 1793–1815.
The prospect of Paine’s return was not, however, high on the list of the British government’s concerns. Even before the magnitude of Bonaparte’s victories in Italy had sunk in, something happened in the spring of 1797 that did indeed seem to turn the world upside down: mutiny in the Royal Navy. The base at Spithead in the Solent, off Portsmouth, had been the first to go; then the Nore in the Thames Estuary. At one point the mutineers managed to blockade the Thames itself. Their demands were pay and the cashiering of some officers, not any kind of radical agenda. But the commonplace was that a third of the navy’s 114,000 manpower was Irish, and since Ireland had apparently become a breeding ground for revolutionaries and known agents of the French, the mutinies suddenly took on the aspect of a conspiracy. In fact, the ‘Irish third’ was a myth. Irish sailors – often the victims of impressment – numbered no more than 15,000. But even this was enough to scare the Lords of the Admiralty, who had had a frighteningly narrow escape the previous December. A fleet of 43 French ships and 15,000 troops, commanded by the general thought to be the most dangerous of all, Louis-Lazare Hoche, and the Irish republican Theobald Wolfe Tone, had been prevented by foul weather from making a landing at Bantry Bay on the southwest tip of County Cork.
Ireland was, as always, the swinging back door to Britain. Had Hoche managed to land his troops, they would have had an immediate numerical superiority over the defending British garrison of at least six to one. For a country known to be so vulnerable it was, as Wolfe Tone had correctly pointed out to the Directors in Paris, complacently defended. There were perhaps only about 13,000 regular British troops stationed there, who in wartime might be reinforced by another 60,000 militia. And even these estimates of the defence were based on the loyal turn-out of the Volunteer movement during the American war; since then, especially in the last few years, the political situation in Ireland had drastically changed.
If it had changed for the worse, moreover, it was largely the fault of Pitt’s own mishandling of the situation; his refusal to act on his own intelligent instincts. Since the creation of an Irish parliament in 1782, an articulate, energetic political class – both Catholic and Protestant – had been able to air its grievances against the narrow ascendancy of the Protestant oligarchy who ruled from Dublin Castle. The American lesson of the risks of imposing taxation without representation seemed even more pertinent in Belfast than in Boston. A meaningful degree of political devolution and electoral reform – not least the enfranchisement of the Catholic majority – was urged. But for all the flamboyant rhetoric of the lawyer Henry Grattan, the leader of this movement, there was no thought of a revolutionary break-away. A freer Ireland was supposed to be a more, not a less, loyal Ireland – and the hope was that George III would in fact be less, not more, of an absentee. When the French Revolution broke out, Pitt’s first thought was that the natural conservatism of Irish Catholics could be used to tie the Irish reform movement closer to Britain and make sure they did not enter some sort of unholy alliance with the nonconformist Dissenter radicals, especially in Bel
fast. The Dissenters’ sympathy for the Revolution was only too clear, not least from their jubilant celebration of the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. But the precondition of a rapprochement between the Catholics and the British government was, obviously, their emancipation, or at the very least the relief of their legal and civic disabilities, limiting their rights to vote and hold political office.
It was in the mid-1790s, then, that a scenario to be repeated time and again over the next two centuries miserably played itself out. The prospect of a British government selling out the Protestant ascendancy threatened a backlash to the point of a complete breakdown of the Dublin Castle system of government. And the leaders of the ascendancy were able to use the generalized social panic spread by the Revolution – and apparently confirmed in the violent acts of armed militias, such as the Catholic ‘Defenders’ and the Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys, in Irish country towns and villages – to persuade Pitt that this was no time to be toying with liberalism. In 1795 a new Whig viceroy of Ireland, Earl Fitzwilliam, came to the point rather more abruptly than Pitt cared for, peremptorily dismissing a number of high officers of the Castle and making known his plans for a sweeping emancipation of the Catholics that would give them equal rights with Protestants. He was recalled after only seven weeks in office.
The Irish rebellion, 1798.
The removal of Fitzwilliam – however clumsy his tactics – was a true turning point in the swift downhill ride of Irish politics towards sectarian misery, terror and war. For it finally disabused the ‘United Irishmen’ – an organization formed in 1791 with many Protestant as well as Catholic members – of any remaining optimism that fundamental justice and reform would be gained from continued collaboration with the British government. Increasingly, as wartime conditions began to pinch, the question of precisely what quarrel Ireland had with France became voiced. Young Irish republicans like Lord Edward Fitzgerald (the cousin of Charles James Fox) and Arthur O’Connor had been in Paris invoking a connection between the two causes that went back to 1689, attempting to persuade the French government to extend its ‘liberation’ strategy of revolutionary assistance to their own country. But the conversion of Wolfe Tone, the Protestant secretary of the Catholic Committee, from a mainstream constitutional reformer into a full-fledged republican nationalist, prepared to wear the uniform of a French general, was symptomatic of the line Irish politicians were now prepared to cross to realize their dream of national self-government. Once, not so long ago, Tone had hoped to work with the British government to move towards autonomy. But after that government broke up the United Irishmen (forcing its members into Britain itself, to make contact with Scots and English revolutionary radicals), and following Fitzwilliam’s removal, Tone’s public utterances defined the enemy oppressor and conqueror as ‘England’.