A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Cartwright, in any case, was on the ‘extreme’ wing of domestic reform in the 1770s and 1780s. The mainstream was represented by the ‘association’ movement of the clergyman and landowner, Charles Wyvill. He was no democrat: according to him, the British electorate should ideally be made up of independent men of property. Moreover, Cartwright and Wyvill, like many other eighteenth-century gentlemen reformers, essentially believed that reform constituted not the creation of a new political system but the restoration of an Anglo-Saxon political Arcadia. As Wyvill put it, the aim was ‘the preservation of our constitution on its genuine principles’.33 England’s ‘ancient constitution’ and key post-1066 reaffirmations of it, in the form of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights of 1689, which Paine had brusquely dismissed in Common Sense, were at least as, if not more, important to their conception of liberty as the example of the Americans and, later, the French. In broader terms, the backward-looking nature of their idea of reform was reflected in the developing interest in the history of English liberty, exemplified by Catharine Macaulay’s radical Whig History of England, the final volume of which was published in 1783.

  Macaulay had a direct connection with the reform movement. Her brother, one Alderman Sawbridge, promoted thirteen motions for annual parliaments in the House of Commons between 1771 and 1786 – efforts that first Lord North, then Pitt the Younger, were content to ‘conquer … by silence and by sleep’. Macaulay’s History was overtly republican in its sympathies, invoking the memory of hallowed seventeenth-century names such as Milton, Algernon Sidney and James Harrington, and late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century ‘commonwealthsmen’ including William Molyneux, Robert, 1st Viscount Molesworth, and John Toland (all men with Irish roots), as well as Walter Moyle, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon and Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.34 However, this republican strain was very much of the classical variety: the ideology of well-educated, literate gentlemen (and women). Moreover, eighteenth-century radical historians such as Macaulay and Godwin were uninterested in the Utopian imaginings of the English Revolution, whether plebeian (Winstanley) or aristocratic (Harrington). For them, figures like Milton and Sidney stood as examples of political virtue in an age of corruption, not as republican theorists. In any case, as we shall see, for most of the radical Whigs and some ‘country’ Tories, the true English Revolution had happened in 1688, not 1649.35

  If Paine was out of step with the reform movement in England, in America he proved an unerringly accurate political prophet. Events moved inexorably along the path that he had mapped out in Common Sense. The Declaration of Independence was finally agreed by Congress on 5 July 1776. While Paine had had no part in writing this or the constitution approved later that month, he demonstrated the strength of his allegiance to the new nation by volunteering for military service.* Though his military contribution to the Revolutionary War effort may have been minimal, his interventions in the propaganda campaign remained decisive. In The American Crisis he attempted to rouse the American public, at a low ebb after the retreat of Washington’s forces back to Philadelphia, and demand their allegiance to the cause of independence:

  These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sun-shine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country: but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered: yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.37

  Aside from such stirring rhetoric – legend has it that Washington ordered this passage be read to his troops before the Battle of Trenton – The Crisis offered glimpses of the mordant wit that would be so brilliantly displayed in the Rights of Man. Writing of George III’s face-saving speech in the wake of the humiliating defeat of the British forces at Yorktown on 19 October 1781, Paine remarked, ‘One broken leg is better than two, but still it is not a source of joy.’38

  In January 1784, after the peace had been concluded, Paine was rewarded for his literary efforts by the state of New York with the gift of a farm in New Rochelle. He decided to rent out this property, and instead took up residence in Bordentown, New Jersey, near his friend and fellow patriot Colonel Joseph Kirkbride. Supported by a cash gift of $3000 from Congress and a further £500 from Philadelphia, Paine spent much of his time in Bordentown furthering his scientific interests, in particular his plans to develop a single-span iron bridge. With the assistance of an English carpenter and mechanic, John Hall, his eventual design was modelled on a spider’s web. The model, however, was very expensive to produce and met with little enthusiasm when Paine displayed his designs to the Pennsylvania Assembly in December 1786. Convinced that the project would never get off the ground in America, and increasingly feeling that he was being inadequately rewarded for his war efforts, he decided to take his model to France in a bid to secure support and financial backing. He set sail in April 1787 with letters of introduction from the French court.

  Landing at Le Havre a month later, Paine soon made contact with Thomas Jefferson, then American minister in Paris. His bridge received a favourable response from the French Academy of Sciences, but despite the efforts of his friends Jefferson and Lafayette, no money was forthcoming. Having returned to England to visit his parents, Paine decided instead to concentrate on securing funding in his homeland. Between the summer of 1788 and that of 1790 much of his time was devoted to overseeing the construction of a 110-foot bridge, based on his model. The arch was forged in Rotherham and shipped down to London, eventually arriving in May 1790 to be assembled on a field somewhere between Paddington and Marylebone. Although the bridge attracted considerable public interest, and some public criticism, it quickly began to deteriorate as its wooden supports started to give way and the iron began to corrode.

  Though preoccupied with his bridge, Paine had retained a close watch on the revolutionary events unfolding across the Channel, his interest fuelled by regular reports from Jefferson. He had also continued to write, producing Prospects on the Rubicon, which warned Britain of the dangers of renewing war with France. As his scientific schemes sank into the London mud, his attention turned back to political matters.

  A large number of Whig political clubs had long met to celebrate the birthday of William III and commemorate the achievements of the revolution that he had inaugurated. In 1788, the centenary of England’s own, allegedly bloodless, revolution seemed to prophesy that a similarly painless political transformation might occur in Bourbon France.*

  Attending the Revolution Society meeting on 4 November 1788 at the London tavern in Bishopsgate Street were Dr Andrew Kippis, a well-known Unitarian minister and William Godwin’s classics tutor at Hoxton Academy; Lord Stanhope, the Duke of Portland, the Marquess of Carmarthen and the Lord Mayor of London; and the MPs Henry Beaufoy, William Smith, Sir Watkin Lewes and Joshua Grigby.

  As they processed towards the tavern they bore King William’s original standard, flown when he landed at Torbay. In front of the tavern, a painting ‘emblematic of the glorious event’ carried the legend ‘A TYRANT DEPOSED AND LIBERTY RESTORED’. During the dinner forty-one toasts were drunk to desirable reforms, including the total abolition of the slave trade, the reform of the criminal law code, the abolition of the press gangs and the revision of the game laws. It was declared that the day on which the Bill of Rights was carried through Parliament, 16 December, should be made a day of national thanksgiving. In addition, the Society composed a statement expressing the hope for a rapprochement between England and France so that ‘two nations, so eminently distinguished in arms, and in literature, instead of exhausting themselves in sanguinary wars for no valuable purpose, may unite together in communicating the advantages of freedom, science and the arts to the most remote regions of the earth’.

  Dr Richard Price, Dissenting minister, pioneer of life insurance and supporter of the American Revolutio
n, had been invited to deliver the oration that year but had to decline, owing to illness.39

  However, the following year, as the Revolution Society met once again to celebrate King William’s birthday, Price did accept the invitation to speak. In the intervening twelve months, events in France had moved on apace. The Third Estate of the Estates-General, summoned in May of 1789, had by June of that year declared itself the National Assembly and sworn, on 20 June, the ‘tennis court oath’, not to dissolve until they had given France a new constitution. On 14 July, the Paris mob attacked the Bastille Fortress, great symbol of absolutist tyranny, storming its defences and killing the governor whose decapitated head was paraded around the city (though they freed only seven prisoners – four forgers, two noblemen and a murderer). On 26 August the National Assembly published The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, like the American Declaration of Independence a statement of general principles designed to pave the way for a full written constitution. The first article of the French Declaration stated that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’. (Women would not be placed on a par with men until the constitution of the Fourth Republic in 1946.)

  In his sermon, Price expressed his excitement at having lived to see these events unfold (he was only fifty but had been in poor health for some time):

  What an eventful period is this! … I could almost say, Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge which has undermined superstition and error. I have lived to see the rights of man better understood than ever, and nations panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it. I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice.40

  Price’s sermon, published as A Discourse on the Love of our Country, was a call for a radical reinterpretation of the values of patriotism. For him, patriotism meant not attachment to land or soil but loyalty to a community of shared values, ideals and traditions. True patriotism was not jingoism, the automatic belief that your country was inherently superior to all others. Only false patriots were content to value ‘their own liberty while idly allowing that precious condition to be crushed elsewhere – or happily celebrating conquest and domination if on the winning side’. Instead, people should consider themselves as ‘citizens of the world, and take care to maintain a just regard to the rights of other countries’.

  Price was not a republican and his sermon contained the wish that George III’s recovery from his recent bout of mental illness would be swift. However, his understanding of the values for which ‘true patriots’ should perish certainly did not include unqualified obedience to the monarch. For him, the legacy of the revolution of 1688–9 was threefold: it had guaranteed liberty of conscience, it had confirmed the right to resist power when it was abused and it had established that the people had the right to choose their governors. The right to resist unjust power included a clear legitimisation of the use of force:

  For it has oftener happened that men have been too passive than too unruly, and the rebellion of Kings against their people has been more common and done more mischief than the rebellion of people against their Kings … Civil governors are properly the servants of the public and a King is no more than the first servant of the public, created by it, maintained by it, and responsible to it.41

  The freedoms established by the Glorious Revolution needed to be not just maintained but also expanded. The Test Acts, which barred Dissenters from holding public office, needed to be repealed. The system of political representation needed to be reformed and the Tory doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance in the face of tyranny firmly repudiated. Heady with the excitement generated by Price’s sermon, the members of the Revolution Society adjourned to the London tavern, where Price moved that a vote of thanks be sent to the French National Assembly; another member, less cautiously, urged a toast to the ‘Parliament of Britain … may it become a National Assembly’.42

  Price’s sermon became the catalyst for the most celebrated British controversy of the French Revolution era. It was such a heated debate in no small part because his main opponent, Edmund Burke, had previously been seen as one of the most reform-minded Whig politicians in Parliament. Burke had been an opponent of the British war against the American colonists in the 1770s, a fierce critic of the impact of the court upon the independence of Parliament, and he had bitterly inveighed against the current form of British colonialism in India: ‘Were we to be driven out of India this day,’ he remarked in a 1783 parliamentary committee report, ‘nothing would remain, to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by any thing better than the ouran-outang or the tiger.’

  Burke was now, though, an increasingly isolated figure: the fearless young scourge of the corrupt had slowly transformed into a grumpy old man. His conduct during the Regency crisis of 1788, as the allies of Charles James Fox pressed for the Prince Regent to be given full powers on account of the King’s mental incapacity, managed to alienate both his Foxite allies by suggesting that ‘Prinny’ needed to clean up his act before assuming the powers of a king, and the Crown, through his blunt assessment of George III’s state of mind. Previously sympathetic to the pleas for toleration from both Catholics and Dissenters, Burke had become increasingly disenchanted with the so-called movement of ‘Rational Dissent’, which men like Price represented. He viewed them as politically pusillanimous for their failure to support the Foxite Whigs in the wake of the court party’s massive victory in 1784.

  More importantly, by 1789 Burke was convinced that some spokesmen for Dissent were moving towards advocating sedition. Price’s assertion that the ‘first concern’ of true ‘lovers of our country must be to enlighten it’ evidently rankled with him. Instead of keeping within his proper sphere of activity, Price, thought Burke, was offering a dangerous incitement to mob violence. Dissenting ministers like Price, ‘debauched by ambition’, were no longer the mere instructors of the people: now they sought to be their masters. Burke felt that the result of Price’s intervention in public debate would be that learning would be cast ‘into the mire, and trodden down under the hoof of a swinish multitude’ (a comment that would later be wittily appropriated by radicals such as Thomas Spence in his Pig’s Meat, or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (1793–5)).43

  Where Price saw a France throwing off tyranny and moving towards liberty, Burke saw only a people who had shaken free from the ‘yoke of Laws and morals’; for him, The Declaration of the Rights of Man was a ‘digest of anarchy’.44 These public statements were already bringing Burke criticism from his old Whig allies before he published his Reflections on the Revolution in France: friends to whom he showed the manuscript warned him that its overheated prose and occasional forays into quixotic whimsy – most notably his fawning over the loveliness of Marie Antoinette – would ruin his reputation. Burke persisted nonetheless. Despite its title, the main target of his work was Price’s reinterpretation of the English Revolution of 1688, not the events that were unravelling in France. Burke denied that the Glorious Revolution had wrought the changes attributed to it by Price. In fact, it was not really a revolution at all, but a ‘small and temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession’. The leading men of 1688–9 had effectively given the kiss of life to an old constitution, not fathered a new one.

  [They] regenerated the deficient part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be suited to them. They acted by the ancient organised states in the shape of their old organisation, and not by the organic moleculae of a disbanded people.45

  In 1688–9, England had not exchanged a hereditary monarchy for an elected one: the hereditary succession had only been interrupted by the exceptional abdication of one monarch, James II, and his necessary replacement by anothe
r. There had been a reformation, not a revolution. Rejecting the Whig notion of a constitutional monarchy, Burke portrayed kingship as essentially depending on an emotional, even mystical, bond between ruler and people.46 He felt societies should follow Britain’s example: evolve gradually and organically, along lines dictated by custom and tradition. In this sense, the freedoms and liberties enjoyed by future generations would always be largely circumscribed by their historic predecessors. Though a slower process, this was a far safer way to progress than to build a constitution from scratch from abstract principles of reason and natural law.47

  Reflections was a best-seller, shifting seven thousand copies in its first week and going through eleven editions by September 1791. It has since been celebrated as a classic work of conservative political thought, invoked by Margaret Thatcher among others.48 At the time, however, it provoked a torrent of ridicule and abuse from radicals, with the loose-living gentleman reformer John Horne Tooke* calling it ‘the tears of the priesthood for the loss of their pudding’.49 The pamphlet provoked a paper war between reformers and loyalists, prompting over seventy hostile replies. One of the first of these came from a young novelist and educationalist, Mary Wollstonecraft, a friend and protégée of Richard Price. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men† railed against Burke’s obliviousness to the plight of the poor and his obsession with the sanctity of private property: ‘Where is the eye that marks these evils, more gigantic than any infringements of property, which you piously deprecate? Are these remediless evils? And is the humane heart satisfied with turning the poor over to another world, to receive the blessings this could afford?’