A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  The ‘English Jacobins’ have been accused of over-dramatising both their sufferings in the 1790s and the harshness of the measures used by Pitt’s ministry. A young member of the LCS and future parliamentary radical, Francis Place, described the late 1790s as Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’: ‘A disloyal word was enough to bring down punishment upon any man’s head; laughing at the awkwardness of a volunteer corps was criminal, people were apprehended and sent on board a man of war for this breach of decorum, which was punished as a terrible crime.’32

  Comments of this kind have been portrayed as histrionic by some historians. It is certainly true that fewer members of radical societies were executed for treason than ‘loyalists’ were condemned to death for their part in ‘Church and King’ riots. In broader terms, it has been argued that the radicals’ attack on the penal code of the time was misguided. The number of capital offences had increased since the Glorious Revolution to over two hundred by the late eighteenth century, but historians have pointed out that the exercise of pardons meant that only a small minority of those convicted were sentenced to death. Moreover, the so-called ‘bloody code’ was not a consciously developed system of judicial tyranny. Most penal legislation was constructed piecemeal and was very specific: catch-all statutes like the infamous ‘Waltham Black Act’ of 1723, which made it a hanging offence to appear with a blackened or disguised face in or near any park or warren, were highly unusual.33 In any case, many of those sentenced to death suffered under legislation drawn up by the Tudors and Stuarts: the inflation in the number of felonies was more a measure of more regular parliamentary sessions in the eighteenth century than of the intrinsic bloodthirstiness of the Hanoverian legislators.34 The law was not simply the tool of the ruling classes, but a ‘multi-use right’, frequently resorted to by a large proportion of the English population. By the Napoleonic era, the legal system was collapsing under the weight of the litigation being instigated by the public, and 90 per cent of those convicted of felonies were pardoned, turning justice into a lottery.35

  Yet the fact that the eighteenth-century penal code was less murderous than has sometimes been assumed does not detract from the fact that it was a remarkably efficient tool of the governing classes. Moreover, the ready use of the law by so many members of the public helped legitimise a system that was heavily weighted in favour of the propertied but which continued, successfully, to proclaim that its protections benefited all. The rhetoric used by supporters of the system was remarkably similar to that deployed to defend the unreformed constitution. As Hannah More’s carpenter sang:

  British laws for my guard,

  My cottage is barr’d,

  ’Tis safe in the light or the dark, Sir;

  If the Squire should oppress,

  I get instant redress:

  My orchard’s as safe as his park, Sir.36

  Again, the dream of sacrosanct personal property was held out to all, even though the reality was available only to a tiny minority of the population. Even the habitual use of pardons themselves, as William Godwin recognised, worked to foster loyalty to the monarchical state:

  A system of pardons is a system of unmitigated slavery. I am taught to expect a certain desirable event, from what? From the clemency, the uncontrolled, unmerited kindness of a fellow mortal. Can any lesson be more degrading? The pusillanimous servility of the man who devotes himself with everlasting obsequiousness to another, because that other, having begun to be unjust, relents in his career; the ardour with which he confesses the rectitude of his sentence and the enormity of his deserts, will constitute a tale that future ages will find it difficult to understand.37

  And, of course, not all criminals convicted of felonies were pardoned. A large number of men and women went to their deaths for what now seem trivial offences. The logic of the Hanoverian penal code was, as Judge Burnett reminded a horse thief at Hertford Assizes, remorselessly clear. When the plaintiff complained that it was hard to hang him only for stealing a horse, Burnett replied, ‘Man, thou art not to be hanged only for stealing a horse, but that horses might not be stolen.’38

  The undoubted gift of some British radicals for self-dramatisation should not obscure, either, the very real suffering of some of the leading ‘Jacobins’. Though Thomas Hardy was eventually acquitted of treason, his time in prison left him a broken man. While he was still in custody, his home was attacked by a loyalist mob. His pregnant wife managed to escape and seek the protection of friends, but two months later, with Hardy still in prison, she died giving birth to their child. The infant was stillborn. Hardy blamed the King and his ministers for his wife’s death and that of their child. His first act after his acquittal in November 1794 was to visit his wife’s grave. The Times reported:

  On approaching the grave [Hardy] immediately fell and embraced the cold earth … he was lost in the agony of his grief; it was with difficulty that he could be removed; and such was the effect upon his wounded feelings and dilapidated frame and most ‘constructively’ destroyed prospects, that for a considerable time there were entertained apprehensions regarding his own life.39

  Hardy’s imprisonment struck him financially as well as emotionally. Although he remained involved in radical politics, the seizure of his goods by the Crown – never returned, despite his acquittal – drove him to return to his former business as a shoemaker. When this proved unsuccessful, as a result of the attacks of loyalist mobs and the general depression of trade, he was forced to rely on the charity of fellow radicals, especially Sir Francis Burdett.

  Hardy’s fate demonstrated the success of the Pitt ministry’s tactics. Judicial punishments were arguably unnecessary when public intimidation, mass propaganda campaigns and restrictions on freedoms of speech and association wrought the same effects. By the mid-1790s, the membership of the LCS was in decline. Its leaders had attempted to reverse this trend by co-opting some of the tactics employed by the loyalists, moving from the medium of print to organising mass meetings. Also, like the loyalists, they employed a little bribery to encourage attendance: at the mass meeting held by the Society on 29 June 1795 at St George’s Fields, London, biscuits were distributed among the poor, stamped on one side with the inscription ‘unanimity, firmness and spirit’ and on the other, ‘freedom and plenty, or slavery and want’.40

  On 26 October 1795, somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 people gathered in a field in Islington to hear speeches by Thelwall, John Gale Jones, a surgeon and man-midwife, and John Binns, an Irish-born plumber. Three days later, George III’s coach was attacked as he rode in state to open Parliament. Pitt’s government responded with the ‘two bills’, or ‘Gagging Acts’. The first bill made actions against the King’s person or his heirs capital offences, and extended the law of treason to include inciting hatred of the King, his heirs, his government or the constitution, though the punishment for this lesser treason was transportation, not death. For the first time since the days of Henry VIII, treason had been turned into a ‘thought crime’.41 The second bill restricted public meetings to fifty people, unless a magistrate had given permission in advance; it also gave magistrates wide powers over the use of public lecture rooms, curtailing the activities of radical lecturers. LCS members soon fell foul of the new legislation, with Binns and Gale Jones arrested in 1796 for attempting to keep up correspondence with other societies. John Thelwall tried to continue his radical lectures, but found loyalist mobs ready to break up such gatherings, apparently with the tacit approval of local magistrates. In Great Yarmouth, he narrowly escaped being press-ganged by a hostile crowd and put on to a Russian ship to Siberia. Though he dodged their clutches, the repeated harassment that he faced on his lecture tours eventually led Thelwall to abandon politics.

  The LCS’s legal costs and declining membership were putting it into a financial tailspin. The government remained, nonetheless, in a state of high alert. Harvest failures, coupled with the impact of naval blockades on trade, led to serious food shortages, escalating prices, even famine. Agitati
on for reform looked as if it might also become a dangerous conduit for more general public disaffection. Anonymous letters and handbills were dropped in the street or posted on doors, threatening dire consequences if the price of food were not lowered. One found in Bath read:

  Peace

  and Large Bread

  or

  a King without a Head42

  Dissatisfaction was also brewing among the thousands of seamen cooped up below decks on the battle fleets. In April 1797, crews mutinied over pay and conditions. The mutiny at Spithead ended in May after concessions from the government, but crews at the Thames anchorage of the Nore, worried that they were excluded from this agreement, began their own action, which was much more militant and included a blockade of the river. Public declarations by the Nore mutineers betrayed the influence of radical ideas on the sailors:

  Shall we who have endured the toils of a tedious, disgraceful war [against the French], be the victims of tyranny and oppression which vile, gilded, pampered knaves, wallowing in the lap of luxury, choose to load us with? Shall we, who amid the rage and tempest and the war of jarring elements, undaunted climb the unsteady cordage and totter on the topmast’s dreadful height, suffer ourselves to be treated worse than the dogs of London Streets? Shall we, who in the battle’s sanguinary rage, confound, terrify and subdue your proudest foe, guard your coasts from invasion, your children from slaughter, and your lands from pillage – be the footballs and shuttlecocks of a set of tyrants who derive from us alone their honours, their titles and their fortunes? No, the Age of Reason has at length revolved. Long have we been endeavouring to find ourselves men. We now find ourselves so. We will be treated as such.43

  When the mutiny finally ended in mid-June, the government responded with ferocity: thirty-six men were executed, and ten times that number flogged or sentenced to transportation.

  Some of the Nore mutineers had spoken of sailing their ships over to the enemy, and by 1798 some English radicals also appear to have been flirting with the idea of using force to secure their goals. The Newcastle radical and LCS member Thomas Spence had already aroused suspicions by allowing members of the shadowy Lambeth Loyal Association to practise military drill in a large room above his London bookshop. By 1798, some radicals in England appear to have been corresponding with the United Irishmen, led by Wolfe Tone and by then engaged in a mass rebellion against English rule, and dabbling with plans for a domestic insurrection. On 28 February that year, John Binns was arrested in Margate seeking a ship bound for France. He was accompanied by four Irishmen, notably Arthur O’Connor, a fiery leader of the UI, and the Reverend James Coigley, a Catholic priest. A treasonable address to the French was found in Coigley’s pocket. All five men were tried for treason. Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and other leading Whigs appeared in court to act as character witnesses for O’Connor, who now shifted the blame on to Coigley, who was found guilty and executed. Binns was also acquitted, but, like many other radicals, fell foul of the second suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1798. In March the next year, he was arrested and imprisoned without charge in Gloucester Gaol. He would not be released until February 1801.

  Mass arrests of radicals in Manchester and London in the spring of 1798 had already crippled the corresponding societies. Finally, in July 1799, legislation formally outlawed the LCS and its more shadowy splinter groups, the United Scotsmen, United Britons and United Englishmen. Radical activity after this point took on a more underground existence, coming to the surface only occasionally in rumours of risings and in the anonymous bills posted featuring the language and imagery of the French Revolution.

  The ‘Despard conspiracy’, uncovered in 1802, set the tone for other early nineteenth-century plots in both its desperation and its extremely limited chances of success. Edward Marcus Despard, a former colleague of Horatio Nelson (who would give a character reference at his trial) and Superintendent of Honduras – dismissed under a cloud in 1790 – was arrested at the Oakly Arms, Lambeth, in November 1802, while apparently planning a coup designed to coincide with the opening of Parliament. During his trial the next year, the government preferred to present Despard as a maverick operator, largely so as to continue to conceal the depth to which its spies had penetrated London radical circles. Historians remain divided as to the seriousness of the conspiracy, but the government, despite pleas for clemency on the grounds of Despard’s earlier service, was committed to pushing for the full penalties of law. He was found guilty and on 21 February 1803 carried on a hurdle to his place of execution, the Surrey county gaol at Newington. From the scaffold, he told the waiting twenty thousand spectators that he was innocent of treason and had ever been ‘a friend to truth, to liberty, and to justice … to the poor and the oppressed’. Despard was hanged and then decapitated, his skull lifted for all the crowd to see: ‘This is the head of a traitor.’44

  The later 1790s were not kind to the leading lights of English radicalism. At the beginning of his French exile, Paine had been fêted by the Convention and in August 1792 he was named an honorary French citizen. The following month, he was elected as a deputy for Calais. However, the pace of revolutionary events in France was quickening, the orderly process that he hoped would lead to the creation of a new French constitution descending instead into violence and dictatorship. Paine, whose French was very limited, was left floundering.

  Power was slipping out of the hands of his allies, the Girondins, into those of the Jacobins led by Marat and Robespierre. A key dividing line between the camps was their respective attitudes to the fate of Louis XVI. The Girondins reluctantly agreed to his trial on the strength of incriminating evidence found among the King’s papers, but Paine in particular argued in the Convention, in a speech read out in French translation, against passing a capital sentence. He was shouted down. Increasingly hostile noises were made in Paine’s direction: a delegation from Arras proclaimed that they no longer wished him to represent them in the Convention. On 27 December 1793, on the orders of Robespierre, he was arrested, and was given just enough time to hand over the English manuscript of his classic attack on organised religion, The Age of Reason, before being escorted to prison. There he languished for two years, at one point contracting a severe fever that left him in a state of semi-consciousness for several weeks.

  Paine was finally released in November 1794, through the intercession of the new American ambassador to Paris, James Monroe. Paine continued to be active in writing, publishing Agrarian Justice in 1796, which revisited, but in a more radical vein, the redistributive schemes of the ‘social chapter’ of Rights of Man. He also used his pen as an outlet for the bitter sense of betrayal he felt at his treatment in Paris, for which he held the American government responsible. From Paine’s perspective, his service to the American republic and his US citizenship ought to have afforded him better protection. An open letter to Washington, once the recipient of Paine’s highest praises, was filled with anger and bile. Monroe distanced himself from Paine and would not allow him to return with him when he was recalled to Washington in November 1797. Paine continued to write: he became embroiled in the intrigues aimed at facilitating a French invasion of the British Isles; but his heart no longer appeared to be in these struggles, his attentions increasingly reverting to his scientific and technological interests.

  In March 1802, peace between Britain and France finally allowed Paine to return to America, his adopted homeland. He was, though, no more warmly welcomed there than in France. Federalists saw him as a useful bogeyman with which to smear Jefferson by association: a tactic assisted by Paine’s own habit of making public private correspondence between himself and Jefferson. The Federalist press pulled no punches in its assault on his character, the General Advertiser calling him ‘that living opprobrium of humanity … the infamous scavenger of all the filth which could be raked from the dirty paths which have been hitherto trodden by all the revilers of Christianity’. The Baltimore Republican called him a ‘loathsome reptile’, the
Philadelphia Port Folio ‘a drunken atheist, and the scavenger of faction’; while Boston’s Mercury and New-England Palladium described him as a ‘lying, drunken brutal infidel, who rejoiced in the opportunity of basking and wallowing in the confusion, devastation, bloodshed, rapine, and murder, in which his soul delights’.

  The hostility was so great that Paine was forced to register under a pseudonym in order to secure a hotel room in Washington. When his whereabouts were discovered, one Federalist wrote: ‘He dines at the public table, and, as a show, is as profitable to Lovell [the hotel owner] as an Ourang Outang, for many strangers who come to the city feel a curiosity to see the creature.’ Equally, for those caught up in the religious revival of the Second Great Awakening, Paine’s deist views, frankly expressed in The Age of Reason, were unconscionable. A seed merchant who had deigned to shake the hand of the author of Rights of Man was suspended from singing for three months by his Presbyterian church.45

  In 1804 Paine retired to his farm in New Rochelle, but he was increasingly beset by financial problems, which he dealt with by selling portions of his property. The farm seems, in any case, to have become too much for an elderly man in need of company and care. From spring 1806 he lived in a series of inns and rented apartments, and was looked after by his remaining friends. In January 1809, he set out his will, leaving most of his remaining estate to the children of Mme Bonneville, the wife of a friend and now a close companion of his as well. In May, he and Mme Bonneville moved into his last residence, in Greenwich Village, New York. Paine died on the morning of 8 June 1809, resolutely refusing the attempts of local ministers to get him to acknowledge his sins and commit his soul to God. His will had instructed burial in the local Quaker cemetery but the Society of Friends, perhaps mindful of Paine’s attacks on the sect during the Revolutionary War, refused. Instead, his remains were interred on his New Rochelle farm. They did not rest in the ground long. In 1819 his former Federalist antagonist William Cobbett, now a convert to radicalism, dug up his bones and returned them to England for a more fitting burial, but the project was never fully realised and they were scattered, the skull supposedly finding its way to Australia.46