Enemies of the State (5 page)

On the other hand, the ideologies of Paine stood firm. The man himself might be outlawed and his book illegal – from time to time booksellers' premises were raided, especially in London, by overzealous magistrates – but the ideas lived on. Radicals of every hue were now branded Jacobins after the more extreme French party. These were the warmongers whose proclamation in November 1792 had terrified all Europe, offering ‘fraternity and assistance' to anyone who wanted to overthrow their own governments.
¹²
Briefly, ‘Ça Ira', the revolutionary song whose words were actually written by Benjamin Franklin, became the theme tune of English revolution.

This was the heyday of the corresponding societies, the most famous of which was set up in London by men like the shoemaker Thomas Hardy, meeting in the Bell Tavern in Exeter Street. Letters and handbills flew backwards and forwards to similar groups in Sheffield and Norwich and to the Jacobin Club in Paris itself.

To counter these pseudo-revolutionary groups, James Reeves formed the Association of Property Against Republicans and Levellers. This was clearly how the forces of reaction saw Jacobins and tarred them all with the same brush, whether they wanted bloody revolution or cheap bread. Interestingly, there was nothing actually republican in the Cato Street conspiracy – the new king, George IV, in residence at Carlton House, was not among their targets. The Leveller charge is fascinating too. The name comes from the extraordinary time of the English Civil War, a time when men believed the world was ‘turned upside down' and all sorts of political and religious lunacy prevailed among the Puritan sects and elsewhere. The Levellers could be regarded as crypto-socialists because they wanted the hedgerows – symbols of private property – to be levelled and equality to
reign. They were the forerunners of the Spenceans and in their nostalgic longing for the old, forgotten but somehow better world, they had a belated champion in William Cobbett.

Some of the aims of the corresponding societies and Jacobins in general are hopelessly naive. Ex-naval captain Richard Brothers wrote
Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times
in 1794. The book was full of millennialist dreams and naïveté, the Thames red with human blood and ‘then shall there be no more war, no more want, no more wickedness; but all shall be peace, plenty and virtue'. Brothers was arrested by the Privy Council the following year and confined in a lunatic asylum.

Throughout the 1790s, the corresponding societies came and went in terms of action and membership. Some members never returned as they saw the French Revolution collapse in blood and ultimately, by 1799, a military dictatorship. Others fell apart because of internal bickering and constant squabbles over exactly what the English revolution should be about and how it should be obtained. Their greatest problem was that they had no obvious national leader around which to rally. Parliamentarians like Fox, Wyvill and later Francis Burdett were, when all was said and done, still gentlemen with large fortunes
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and had nothing in common with an agricultural labourer struggling to keep his family alive. At the lower end in terms of class hierarchy, men like Thomas Hardy in London, Francis Place the radical tailor of Charing Cross and, later, Samuel Bamford the Middleton weaver, did not command the respect of thousands, nor could they sway a mob. Somewhere in the middle came Joseph Gerrald and John Thelwall. Gerrald in particular tried to promote a National Convention along French lines, which would not only have had the effect of welding together the differing strands of Jacobinism in England, but would have included the reformers north of Hadrian's Wall and across the Irish Sea. That concept must have given Prime Minister Pitt and the entire Establishment many a sleepless night.

Like Muir, Gerrald was put on trial in Scotland in March 1794. As a lawyer, he conducted his own defence admirably and the judge, Lord Braxfield, was technically misdirecting the jury when he said to them

When you see Mr Gerrald . . . making speeches such as you have heard today, I look upon him as a very dangerous member of society, for I daresay, he has eloquence enough to persuade the people to rise in arms.
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Gerrald got fourteen years.

In May 1794, Pitt hit the corresponding societies. Leaders were arrested, habeas corpus (the law by which a man had to be charged with an offence to be held in prison) was suspended. Thomas Hardy's house was attacked by a loyalist mob celebrating Admiral Howe's victory of the ‘glorious first of June' and his wife, already on the brink of a nervous breakdown, died. Hardy himself was put on trial at the Sessions House of the Old Bailey (where the Cato Street trials would be held) in October on a charge of high treason. The lawyer John Horne Tooke stood in the dock with him and when asked the usual question as to whether he would be tried by ‘God and his country', shook his head and launched into a tirade against the latter. There was an ugly mood in the mob around the Bailey and Hardy's acquittal was met with undisguised joy.

In Tooke's trial, the Prime Minister himself was forced to attend and to admit that, before 1789, he too had been a reformer. Tooke was acquitted. John Thelwall, who increasingly had taken over from Hardy as the main thrust of the London Corresponding Society, was the last to be set free by an increasingly sympathetic jury. It was precisely this problem that led Robert Peel, as Home Secretary in the 1820s, to reform the penal system. Juries were increasingly failing to convict when the cause or circumstances of the case permitted, because of the ferocity of the sentence. Had Hardy, Tooke or Thelwall been convicted, they would, according to the law, have been dragged through London's streets on hurdles, hanged, their heads hacked off and their bodies quartered. Such an ass was the law on high treason that it had not been changed since 1605 and the Gunpowder Plot.

By 1794, Edmund Burke replaced James Reeves as the arch-champion of reaction. He believed that about one-fifth of men with the vote (i.e. men of property) and almost all those without were ‘pure Jacobins, utterly incapable of amendment; objects of eternal vigilance'.
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Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall were little better than assassins.

The success of these three not only encouraged the societies but created new leaders. Irishman John Binns, now a London plumber, became a leading light in the LCS and wrote that many of the members wanted the establishment of a republic. Three of them may have tried to put the theory into practice, although like Cato Street there was an air of farce about it.
Higgins, Smith and Lemaitre were held in the early months of 1795 on a charge of trying to kill George III with a poisoned dart fired from an air gun. Since the evidence against them relied solely on the word of an informer,
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the case was dropped.

At around the same time, tracts were disseminated from the British Tree of Liberty at 98 Berwick Street, Soho, with such titles as
King Killing
and
The Happy Reign of George the Last
. At the end of October, three days after a huge mass rally, perhaps numbering 100,000, took place at Copenhagen Fields, Islington, parliament opened and the king's carriage was attacked. The satirists had a field day, with cartoons showing wild-looking ruffians armed with cudgels, blasting the windows of George's carriage. In fact there was no such assault, the window being broken by a stone, but the reality of 200,000 Londoners chanting ‘No war! No king! No Pitt!' was enough to cause the wildest rumours. As a precaution when the king went to the theatre the next day, he had 100 infantrymen, 200 cavalry and 500 constables in attendance.

In January 1793, to the tune of ‘God Save the King', the American Joel Barlow, who had witnessed the execution of Louis XVI, wrote:

And when great George's poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The guillotine.

John Binns toured the country extensively, talking to sailors in Portsmouth where the future Cato Street conspirator James Ings was probably already an apprentice butcher.
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Francis Place, who had a rather well-developed sense of his own importance, said of the LCS:

It induced men to read books instead of spending their time at public houses. It taught them to think, to respect themselves and to desire to educate their children.
¹⁸

Place was anxious to distance himself from the lunatic fringe of the society and the mob, but he seems to have missed the point. A
thinking
working class that had respect for its own ideas was the last thing that Pitt's Establishment wanted. And their numbers were growing. Norwich, a town made rich by the worsted woollen trade, was one centre of Jacobinism. Sheffield, with its cutlery and plate, was another. Spitalfields, long the
weaving heart of London, was a third. Jacobinism was not yet to be found in the satanic mills; nor had it focused on Manchester and Birmingham. But there was a hint of revolution in the wind.

At the end of December 1796, international politics appeared to come to the aid of those determined to see reform. Capitalizing on the centuries-old hatred of England by the Irish, a half-baked alliance was concluded between the United Irishmen of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the French government of Paul Barras. Plans for invasion had existed since at least 1789 (
before
the Revolution), but Ireland would have provided an excellent springboard for invasion from the west and would effectively create a war on two fronts for Pitt. But the French navy had mistimed things and General Hoche's 14,000 strong army did not leave Brest until 15 December, by which time storms scattered the 43 ships and not one could land at Bantry Bay. One vessel, limping back home, landed by mistake in Fishguard in Pembrokeshire and its crew were ‘routed' by the arrival of a handful of shrieking fishwives and a troop of the Pembrokeshire Yeomanry. In that same month, Horatio Nelson won a spectacular victory over a Spanish convoy off Cape St Vincent, but elsewhere the news was not so good.

While virtual civil war was breaking out in Ireland with a Catholic population bitterly hostile to its puppet Protestant parliament, an alien church and serious economic problems, the cost of four years of war was laid bare. The country had run up a staggering £19 million of debt. The cartoonist Gilray showed Pitt desperately wooing the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England) in an attempt to squeeze yet more money out of her. In the Commons Henry Addington, the future Lord Sidmouth, suggested voluntary contributions and pledged £2,000 from his own pocket. While the banks wobbled and crashed and Pitt began to formulate his income tax, at Spithead near Portsmouth, the navy mutinied, to be followed by a similar act of defiance at the Nore, in the Thames estuary in May.

Conditions on board warships were appalling. Captain Thomas Hardy's
¹⁹
Victory
for example, which became the most famous of the first-rater ships of the line, had a crew (including marines) of nearly 800, all of them crammed into five decks with very little space. Wages had not risen for a century and the semi-legal use of the press gangs to find likely lads in the ports' taverns had created a class of literate, educated sailors who were
prepared to make a stand. What is difficult to say is how important John Binns's meetings were in Portsmouth in this context. Did he rouse the jolly tars of Old England to query something they had accepted meekly for 200 years?

The ending of the naval mutinies speaks volumes for the Establishment and how it dealt with rebellion. Nominally, the fleet's behaviour was treason – refusal to fight in time of war. At Spithead, the delegates from the mutinous ships met around a table with kindly old Admiral Howe, drank large quantities of rum and were promised better pay and conditions. At the Nore, delegates were hanged, perhaps because here violence had been offered to ships' officers. In both cases, the fleets sailed and the country could breathe a sigh of relief.

No sooner was the naval crisis averted however than trouble broke out in Scotland. The Militia Act, by which Pitt hoped to create a serious home defence force, was deeply unpopular, especially in the Celtic fringe. What it meant was that all able-bodied men between 18 and 23 were to be conscripted by ballot. These men could also be raised in the colonies, which led to racial issues and a rather irrational fear of outbreaks of yellow fever and other West Indian diseases. Teachers, whose unenviable job it was to compile ballot lists, had their houses burnt. Tranent in Lothian became the focal point for this unrest, where magistrates looked very closely at the colliers and weavers in the town. Rioting and looting in August was met by the yeomanry cavalry who charged the crowd, killing a 13-year-old boy in the process and leaving the dead in the cornfields ‘like partridges'.

The naval mutinies, ominous rumblings in Scotland and the rebellion of Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen the following year – ‘they're hanging men and women there for wearing o' the green'
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– show how precarious was the hold of authority on a country struggling under the double burden of uncontrolled industrialization and war. Secret societies – possibly the United Englishmen, itself a spinoff of Wolfe Tone's group – met after dark in places like Furnival's Inn in Holborn and Richard Fuller was sentenced to death for making inflammatory speeches to soldiers of the Coldstream Guards.

And Richard Parker, the Nore mutiny leader facing the rope, wrote: ‘Remember, never to make yourself the busy body of the lower classes, for they are cowardly, selfish and ungrateful'.
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Parker was talking about the
essential divide which existed among the Jacobins. At the heart of their movement, especially as the French Revolution itself led to disappointment and betrayal and the new France of Napoleon Bonaparte looked suspiciously like the old,
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was the need to keep their children fed. Increasingly, men turned to trade unions and friendly societies, advocating change by peaceful means, brought about by the extension of the vote.