Enemies of the State (4 page)

Over all this was the enigmatic figure of William Cobbett. From 1802, the pamphleteer had written a series of polemical, from-the-shoulder articles in his
Weekly Political Register
. As the essayist Charles Hazlitt wrote of Cobbett, he would take on everyone and anyone. As a writer, he is enormous fun to read, if only because he is so inconsistent. In one passage, he extols the courage and honesty of Sir Francis Burdett, the radical MP. In another, he fairly burns paper:

he is a sore to Westminster; a set-fast on its back; a cholic in its belly; a cramp in its limbs; a gag in its mouth; he is a nuisance, a monstrous nuisance in Westminster and he must be abated.

He attacked: Pitt and his paper money; Robert Peel, the War Secretary; Thomas Malthus, the population parson,
¹⁵
William Wilberforce, hero of the anti-slavers; Scotsmen; Americans; tea; corruption; Methodists; Quakers; Unitarians; and the landlord of the George Inn, Andover.

In fact, he was by no means so bold face-to-face with his opponents and, although he served time in prison for his views, was just as likely to run to the safety of America (whose towns he said at one stage should be burnt down) as to stay. Ironically, the thing that Cobbett hated most was hypocrisy and in this, he was as guilty as the next man.

Why is Cobbett so important in this story? Because the
Political Register
, especially in its cheaper form of the
Twopenny Trash
, reached thousands of the working class and was more of a Bible to them than any other radical tract.
¹⁶
Those who read it believed it. Those who could not read it had it read to them, and still believed. Oddly, Samuel Bamford, the radical weaver from Middleton who witnessed ‘Peterloo',
¹⁷
believed that Cobbett's works calmed the working class. This is difficult to accept; every line of Cobbett's is contentious – it was in his nature.

And the recurring dripfeed of the
Register
was how glorious it was in the good old days and how appalling things were now. This nostalgia is nonsense, but it is an all-pervading part of the human condition. For men, women and children, squatting in damp, freezing cellars, moving to the jar and grind of inhuman machines, to be told that their fathers and grandfathers had lived an idyllic, rural existence with roses twining around the door was hardly likely to instil a sense of contentment.

The loss of jobs, the change in taxation, the arrival of the Corn Laws, the overcrowding of an increasingly desperate people into foul-smelling tenements and dangerous workshops and mills – this was the reality in a nation that had just emerged victorious from a quarter of a century of war.
That there was economic distress and a discontented workforce in Lord Liverpool's England cannot be doubted. But was it this alone that led James Ings to get his swords sharpened and George Edwards to put the fuses in the grenades?

For that, there had to be something more.

Chapter 3

The Shadow of the Guillotine

The future Cato Street conspirator, William Davidson, was 3 when a ragged ‘army' of
sans-culottes
, carrying scythes and pitchforks, swarmed through the alleyways and avenues of Paris on its way to the Bastille, long the symbol of governmental tyranny. It was 14 July 1789 – a day to be remembered.

For three days Paris had effectively been in the hands of the mob – the terrifying peasantry whom the Whig politician Edmund Burke described as ‘the swinish multitude'. The rigid political structure in France – the three estates of Church, Aristocracy and Everybody Else – gave an unhappy country nowhere to go. Superficially, the list of complaints by the Third Estate (representing 96 per cent of the French population) against the first two were very much what the Cato Street conspirators would level at the Cabinet in 1820. The crucial difference was social mobility. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, was the son of an Earl (of Chatham) but the grandson of an official of the East India Company. In other words, in two generations the Pitt family had risen from the ‘middling sort' to the aristocracy and to holding the most important political position in the land. Such meteoric rises were impossible in France, or indeed anywhere else in Europe and liberals there looked with longing and envy at the relative egalitarianism of the British constitution.

Suffering prolonged economic difficulties, both in agriculture and industry, plagued by a series of failed foreign wars (mostly against the victorious British) and politically stagnant, the beleaguered Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates General for the first time since 1614. The distinctions with which the three estates were supposed to greet the king underlined everything that was wrong with France. The Clergy were to show him homage, the Aristocracy respect and the Third Estate ‘humble supplications'.

But the Third Estate had changed since 1614. Fed by the liberal writings of men like the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the American Thomas Jefferson and the Englishman Tom Paine, the literate, pushy middle-class elements demanded a constitution along British lines in which the privileges and tax-exemption of the Church and Aristocracy should be swept away and the king drop the archaic notion of Divine Right. Calling itself the National Assembly, the Third Estate stood its ground against reactionary opposition and more and more of the Clergy and Aristocracy went over to its side. Noblemen like the Duke of Orleans and the hero of the American Revolution, Lafayette, joined the braying Deputies of the Assembly, as did the Abbé (Bishop) Sieyes, quickly assuming the role of oracle.

In the first two weeks of June, the ‘grande peur' took place. Hostile mobs encouraged by the extraordinary events in Paris, vented their spleen over local grievances and burnt down the chateaux that had dominated their lives and the lives of their grandfathers. Rumours flew everywhere and by 11 July Paris was in open revolt. On the 14th, the aim was not only to release the handful of political prisoners in the Bastille, but to steal the arsenal of weapons stored there. The Cato Street conspirators tried a watered-down version of the same thing thirty-one years later. The stubborn, but at the same time indecisive Louis XVI ordered the army back to the Champ de Mars and left the 110-strong Bastille garrison to its fate. When the mob trained stolen cannon on the prison's walls, the governor, Bernard de Launay, was forced to surrender. The chanting, hysterical mob hacked off his head and carried it in triumph on a pole through the streets. It was quickly followed by that of the Intendant of Paris. Then, the Bastille was demolished.

The storming of the Bastille was the outward symbol of a revolution that would shatter the peace of Europe for a quarter of a century. The most cultured and sophisticated nation in the world appeared to have gone mad, destroying forever the ancien regime and introducing a bizarre version of democracy which has never gone away. No matter that the greed and envy which characterizes human nature ruined the whole idealistic crusade, the original notions of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité' struck a chord with liberal philosophers and starving peasants alike.

The French Revolution was a defining event. In part it was a reaction to the
‘shot heard round the world' which signalled events at Concorde and Lexington when American Minutemen exchanged musket fire with British infantry. The French lent their support to the American colonists, largely as a chance to win
one
military engagement against the British, but somehow the ideology too rubbed off. What was actually a self-centred and chauvinist squabble about trade was turned by the Americans into a just war in which the prize was freedom from tyranny.

But the Revolution created armed camps. For some, tub-thumpers like Camille Desmoulins, military opportunists like Napoleon Bonaparte and plain psychopaths like Maximilien Robespierre, it was heaven-sent. For others, essentially the governments, landowners, churches and entrenched establishments of Europe, it was the end of civilization. In Britain, the aristocracy, the gentry and the church rallied around George III. Briefly, the ‘king who had lost America' experienced a popularity he had never known before in his life and coming, as it did, on the heels of one of George's inexplicable bouts of dementia,
¹
the Tory establishment saw all this as some sort of test.

The Revolution became a party issue. Pitt hinted darkly that grim days lay ahead and he was echoed from an unlikely quarter. Edmund Burke, very much the philosopher and diarist of the Whigs, was known as the ‘dinner gong' because his speeches were so dull that most of the Commons would file out to eat rather than listen to him. In 1790 however his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
was a runaway bestseller, perhaps because it was a ‘doom and gloom' book of the type which still has huge readerships today. We like to be frightened by prognostications of disaster, especially if it is going to happen to somebody else. Burke also struck a nostalgic chord: ‘But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.'
²
In taking this stand, which delighted Pitt and the king, Burke helped to split his own Whig party. His leader, the mercurial Charles James Fox, wholeheartedly supported the revolution, largely because he misunderstood it. He saw 1789 as a rather belated action replay of British events in 1688 when the wannabe despot James II was overthrown by his parliament and the timely defection of much of the army under John Churchill. On hearing of the fall of the Bastille Fox wrote: ‘How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! And how much the best!'
³

The Cambridge undergraduate and future Lakeland poet William Wordsworth found himself on a walking tour of France in 1790 and wrote:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
⁴

But no one captured the spirit of the Revolution like Tom Paine – his ‘damnable works' were quoted in the Cato Street trials as being the cause of the madness that led men there. Paine, the son of a Quaker from Thetford, Norfolk, was a born agitator. Variously a corset-maker, sailor and teacher, he was dismissed from his post as an exciseman
⁵
for fighting for an increase in his men's wages. Having met Benjamin Franklin in London in 1774, Paine settled in Philadelphia as a radical journalist and published
Common Sense
in the year that the colonies declared their independence. In 1781 he was in France helping to secure continued backing for the American cause and even served in the continental (i.e. American) army of George Washington. It was either the height of courage or folly then that he returned to England in 1787. Unable to stomach Burke's lily-livered conservatism, Paine wrote the
Rights of Man
between 1791 and 1792, which both outsold Burke and, because Paine had advocated the overthrow of the British monarchy, brought charges of high treason against him. With a price on his head, Paine skipped to Paris where he was made not only a citizen, but a member of the National Convention.

‘[Burke] is not affected by the reality of distress,' wrote Paine,

touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird . . . His hero or heroine must be a tragedy victim, expiring in show and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon.
⁶

He answered Burke almost line for line: ‘Man has no property in man. There is a dawn of reasoning in the world.'
⁷
And he attacked privilege, courtiers, placemen, pensioners, borough-holders and party leaders which, presumably, included Fox.
⁸

In many ways of course, Paine heralded the democratic conventions and even the welfare state of the twentieth century. He advocated old age pensions, family allowances, free education and benefits for immigrants and
the unemployed. No wonder Pitt's government hated him and he became a hero to the downtrodden and the dispossessed.

And the downtrodden and the dispossessed were now making waves. Before the war against Revolutionary France helped to define attitudes and opinions, there was a rising sense of alarm. By the time the second (and more radical) part of Paine's
Rights of Man
was published, there was a general and growing discontent, as reported by magistrates and MPs throughout the country. In Sheffield, which was quickly becoming the most radical town in the kingdom, 2,500 men – ‘the lowest mechanicals' – had formed a Constitutional Society, corresponding with villages in their own area and other towns and cities further afield. The reformer Christopher Wyvill described graffiti daubed on the market cross in Barnard Castle, Durham. It read ‘No King', ‘Liberty' and ‘Equality'. In North Shields, pitmen, keelmen, waggoners and sailors joined forces and were running opponents out of towns naked. William Wilberforce, the anti-slaver, heard that in Leeds Paine's book was being given away free, having been précis-ed down to a sixpenny pamphlet. In Sheffield in November 1792, there were demonstrations to celebrate the victory of the infant French Republic's army over the ancien regime powers at Valmy. The mob carried an effigy of Burke riding a pig and Henry Dundas, the Home Secretary, with the bottom of a donkey.

Nor were these riotous demonstrations one-sided. A pro-establishment ‘church and king' mob went on the rampage for two days in Birmingham, and hit the Dissenting support for the Revolution by burning down a Baptist church and two Unitarian meeting houses before ransacking the house of the Dissenter and scientist Dr Joseph Priestley, burning his extensive library and dumping him in a pond. As with the Bastille, the town prison was thrown open and a great deal of looting occurred. In May, Mary Wollstonecraft rattled establishment cages still further with her publication
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
, based on the ideals being floated across the Channel – ‘Woman is born free,' wrote Olympe de Gouges, ‘and remains equal to man in rights.'
⁹

In Scotland, by December, things were now more serious. The Friends of the People Society, meeting in Edinburgh, had 160 delegates. Not only were they jumping on the Revolutionary bandwagon by complaining about London's failure to recognize their local grievances, they were composed of
middle-class men, lawyers and merchants, even landowners, lending the considerable weight of education and money to the cause.

While some British liberals played at revolution, wearing the scarlet ‘caps of liberty' of the Parisian
sans-culottes
and addressing each other ostentatiously as ‘citizen', war broke out in February 1793 and this forced a polarization. A man could sit on the fence no longer. If he supported the Revolution, he was, in effect, a traitor. To many, France had now gone beyond the pale because in January the Republican government publicly executed Louis XVI and his wife, the ‘Austrian woman', Marie Antoinette. There was general horror, even among liberal reformers at this move and everyone conveniently forgot that we had done this to our king a century and a half earlier when a masked, anonymous executioner lopped off the head of Charles I.

As British troops were despatched to India and the West Indies in the opening moves of the Revolutionary War, Pitt infuriated Fox and the extremist Whigs by extending the numbers of militiamen and introducing a new force – the yeomanry. These part-time cavalrymen would play a central and appalling role in the Manchester ‘massacre' in 1819. Their job was to provide a second line of defence – the motto of many units was ‘Pro Aris et Focis', for hearths and homes – in the event of French invasion. Fox and many others saw them as a private army, a return to the dark days of the Protectorate when Oliver Cromwell and the army effectively ran England.

By the spring, there were disquieting voices from some at least of the Celtic fringe. The Catholic Relief Act, which gave Catholics
some
rights after two centuries in the wilderness was a hollow victory. Since voting was based on a rigid property qualification and the majority of Ireland's Catholics were too poor to qualify, their ‘victory' was useless. In June, Pitt's Militia Act, attempting to raise 16,000 men for home defence, was causing widespread rioting throughout Ireland, with attacks being made on priests and gentry who tried to interfere.

In September, Thomas Muir, leader of the Scottish Radicals, faced trial on charges of sedition. For over a year, new panicky legislation had outlawed various polemical writings, which is precisely why Tom Paine was an outlaw and William Cobbett spent time in prison. Muir's background as a lawyer enabled him to make a good case, but he was found guilty anyway and sentenced to fourteen years' transportation to Botany Bay.
¹⁰

Burke was proved uncannily prescient when Robespierre's terror struck between 1792 and 1794. The guillotine (probably, before lethal injection, the most humane method of execution
¹¹
) was set up in the Place de Grèves in Paris and its victims were not merely aristocrats, but
anyone
who fell foul of the Revolutionary tribunals across France. Aristocrats had been flying out of the country for months, bringing tales of persecution and horror. Any English landowner, from George III downwards, turned pale at the stories of chateau burning, of previously loyal servants turning on their masters.