Radicalism and reaction

'The Friends of the People' 15 November 1792
Isaac Cruikshank caricatures the radicals,
Joseph Priestley and Thomas Paine
Public domain.

The reforming societies

January and February 1792 had seen the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the very radical Part 2 of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Over the next six months, cheap editions of Rights of Man were sold throughout the country.

The winter of 1791/2 had witnessed a new development in extra-parliamentary politics with the foundation of a series of radical reform clubs organised by working men. The membership of these clubs consisted mainly of artisans, journeymen, mechanics, small shopkeepers and tradesmen -  skilled working men rather than the very poor. The subscription rate was low - a penny a week. One of the first of these societies the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, established late in 1791, soon had more than two thousand members and was distributing copies of Part 1 of Rights of Man at 6d. each. 

The Sheffield Society’s arrangement into divisions was copied by the most famous of the working-men’s associations, the London Corresponding Society, founded by Thomas Hardy a master-shoemaker and devout Dissenter, on 25 January 1792. 

The admission test was an affirmative reply to three questions of which the most important was: 

‘Are you persuaded ... that every adult person, in possession of his reason and not incapacitated by crimes, should have a vote for a Member of Parliament?’ 

The membership fee was one shilling, followed by a penny a week. Within a fortnight 25 members were enrolled, and the sum in the Treasurer’s hand was 4s.1d.  By late 1792 it was claiming over 800 members, each committed to manhood suffrage and parliamentary reform ‘by all justifiable means’. Members were organised into 29 cells spread across London. These local divisions also functioned as adult education classes, with regular ‘readings, conversations and discussions’. 

In response to plebeian radicalism, a group of Foxite MPs formed the Society of Friends of the People in April 1792.  Its leaders included Charles Grey and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Fox, for tactical reasons, did not join. The subscription was two and a half guineas and the policy adopted was deliberately moderate - more equal representation and more frequent elections. Manhood suffrage was not on the agenda.

For the first time Scotland was widely involved in political reform. 
In July 1792 the Lord Provost of Glasgow presided over a meeting in which representations in favour of equal representation, frequent elections, and universal suffrage were adopted. Edinburgh founded its own branch of the Society of Friends of the People. 

Paine in France

In the spring of 1792 Paine decamped to Bromley where he stayed incognito with an engraver named William Sharp. In June he was summoned to answer a charge of seditious libel. In August he was awarded honorary French citizenship along with Joseph Priestley and (to his great embarrassment) William Wilberforce. 

But by this time the French Revolution was turning violent. On 10 August the Tuileries, where the royal family were living, were attacked by the revolutionary sans-culottes, and many of the Swiss Guard were massacred. Between 2 and 6 September up to 2,000 people were killed in the prisons in what became known as the September Massacres. On 22 September the monarchy was abolished and in January 1793 Louis XVI was put on trial by the newly elected Convention. 

On 13 September, Paine had left London and taken a circuitous route to Dover. He was detained by a customs officer and searched before being allowed to leave. He was seen off by a hostile crowd, but greeted warmly in Calais. He had been elected as deputy to the new revolutionary Convention, though he spoke little or no French. He was outlawed in absentia and could not now return to England.

Mary Wollstonecraft in France

Mary Wollstonecraft was also in Paris at this time. Anxious to see the Revolution for herself, she arrived there in December 1792 - just as preparations were afoot to put the king on trial. She quickly became part of the Girondin circle and a lively bohemian group of British and American radicals, including Thomas Paine. 

The king executed

On 14 January 1793 the Convention voted 693/0 that the king was guilty of treason. On 15 January a translation of Paine’s address to the Convention, pleading for Louis to be spared was read out:

My hatred and abhorrence of monarchy are sufficiently known… but my compassion for the unfortunate, whether friend or enemy, is equally lively and sincere.

On 17 January he delivered his vote: it was ‘'for the confinement of Louis until the end of the war, and for his perpetual banishment [to America] after the war.’ His plea for clemency was defeated by one vote. 

Louis was executed on 21 January. Mary Wollstonecraft witnessed his journey to the scaffold, a sight that distressed her although she did not condemn his death.

After the execution, Paine retired to the village of St Denis to live quietly. On 1 February the Convention declared war on Britain. 

Mary Wollstonecraft began a relationship with Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American revolutionary soldier turned commercial adventurer. By the late summer of 1793 she was pregnant. As a British citizen, she was now an enemy alien, and for her own safety she registered at the American embassy in August as Imlay’s wife, though the pair never married. When Imlay left her to go on his commercial travels, she berated him for his abandonment and followed him to Le Havre, where she waited the birth of her child.  

The loyalists fight back

By this time public opinion in Britain had turned against the Revolution and crude caricatures depicted the sans-culottes as bloodthirsty monsters. Many now believed that Burke had been proved right.  In November 1792 the barrister, John Reeves, founded the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Levellers and Republicans, and he placed advertisements in the newspapers calling for the formation of loyalist bodies throughout the country. He received many letters of support and advice and some argued for the need to combat Paineite literature by circulating loyalist tracts.

Some of the first of such tracts to be published were the 'John Bull' tracts, which took the form of a dialogue between John and Thomas Bull and contained a good deal of knockabout abuse of Thomas Paine and the French. But the most effective was Hannah More's Village Politics, published in January 1793. This takes the form of a dialogue between a blacksmith, Jack Anvil and his friend, Tom Hod, a mason, who has picked up Rights of Man and learned from it 'that I am very unhappy and miserable, which I should never have known if I had not had the good luck to meet with this book'. Jack's function is to put him right, using Burke's arguments in a colloquial, down-to-earth fashion. (The full text has been digitized and can be downloaded.)

One of the many editions of the
very successful Village Politics
priced competitively as a
rival to
Rights of Man

The loyalist propaganda campaign can be seen as a success. In the short term, they won the argument that it was in the interest of the poorer classes to support the status quo. However, in bringing working people into what had begun as a debate among elites, they, in effect, conceded much of the the radicals' case.

Paine and Wollstonecraft

On 27 December 1793, following the execution of Paine's Girondin friends in October, the Committee of Public Safety ordered his arrest. He was escorted to the Luxembourg prison, where he  completed his latest – and very inflammatory – book, The Age of Reason, widely seen as an attack on Christianity.

While Paine was in prison, Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth on 14 May 1794 (25 floréal, Year II) in Le Havre, to a daughter, Fanny Imlay. It was there, too, that she completed her book on the French Revolution, which her publisher, Joseph Johnson published in London.

With the passing of the Law of 22 Prairial, Year II (10 June 1794) Paine’s life was in grave danger. On 24 July the prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, submitted his name among a list of those to be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal. He only escaped execution though an accident (the gaoler inadvertently chalked the cross on his door on the inside rather than the outside). But with the execution of Robespierre, the Terror was over and his life was saved, though he was not released until 4 November.

The Scottish trials

The full weight of the growing loyalist reaction was first felt in Scotland where a vigorous parliamentary reform movement had grown up in the course of 1792. Scottish societies, modelled on the London Corresponding Society, spread rapidly. In the late summer of 1793 two sensational trials for seditious practices were held in Edinburgh before Lord Braxfield, the Lord Justice Clerk, who expressed his political views with remarkable freedom. 

'Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield'
by Henry Raeburn
National Portrait Gallery of Scotland
Public domain

At the first trial, in August 1793, the lawyer, Thomas Muir, vice-president of a radical discussion group in Glasgow, was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. In September the English Unitarian, Thomas Palmer, then minister at Dundee, was sentenced to seven years.

Thomas Muir, by David Martin
National Portrait Gallery of Scotland
Public domain

In October 1793 the National Convention of British reformers met at Edinburgh to demand universal male suffrage and annual parliaments. The authorities broke up the meeting and placed two London delegates, Joseph Gerrald and Maurice Margarot and the Convention's Scottish secretary William Skirving under arrest. In January 1794 Margarot and Skirving were sentenced to fourteen years transportation. Gerrald received the same sentence in March - he had tuberculosis and died from it in Sydney.

Scottish Martyrs Memorial
Calton Hill, Edinburgh

The Whigs split

Although Fox asked shrewd questions about the purpose of the war and though his attacks on government repression were arguably ‘right’ he did not gain politically. His refusal to support the war eventually split his party. In June 1794 conservative Whigs, under the leadership of the Duke of Portland, agreed to go into a coalition with Pitt. In the new cabinet Portland became Home Secretary.

William Cavendish Bentinck
3rd Duke of Portland
by Matthew Pratt
Wikimedia Commons

Pitt intended the coalition to outlast the war and add to his security in any future regency crisis. The Foxites were reduced to a parliamentary rump of perhaps only fifty members of the Commons and a dozen peers. They were no longer a credible opposition. 

The London trials

Meanwhile, the government was moving against the English radicals.  In May 1794 the authorities arrested seven members of the London Corresponding Society. At the same time habeas corpus was suspended. In the autumn of 1794 three of its members  - Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall and John Horne Tooke -  were brought to trial in the Old Bailey, charged with high treason under the statute of 1351: ‘imagining the king’s death’.  In his defence of Hardy, his barrister Thomas Erskine insisted that though the London Corresponding Society had distributed the works of Thomas Paine, it had never intended to use force. After a short recess the jury found him not guilty. 

Report of the trial of the
English radicals
Public domain

The trial of Horne Took a fortnight later attracted more attention. He was an ex-parson who had been a well-known political figure since the days of Wilkes. The defence subpoenaed Pitt to show that many people in the 1780s had been advocating parliamentary reform. Tooke was also acquitted as was Thelwall after a trial of a day. 

The difference between the English and Scottish trials reflects the different legal systems. Ironically, the acquittals made the loyalist case - that England was a country where a man could have a fair trial. It contrasts with Paine’s treatment at the hands of the revolutionaries - arrested in December 1793 with his life was saved by mere chance.

The Gagging Acts

The hardships of 1795 gave a final lease of life to the embattled London Corresponding Society. A meeting near Copenhagen House, Islington on 26 October 1795 was followed three days later by a demonstration against the king on his way to the state opening of Parliament, when a stone was thrown through his coach window. 

At the end of the year the government brought in the acts known colloquially as the Gagging Acts.

1. The Treasonable Practices Act forbade the expression of views calculated to bring king or government into contempt.
2. The Seditious Meetings Act forbade assemblies of more than fifty persons without prior notice and gave the magistrates power to disperse the onlookers if seditious observations were being made.

These measures were bitterly opposed by the Foxites. Petitions poured into parliament for and against the bills - the majority against -  but they passed into law on 18 December. Round the country magistrates took action against radicals.

Postscript: Paine and Wollstonecraft 

Thanks to American intervention he was released from custody on 4 November 1794. In 1802 he sailed for America, but he was received coldly because of The Age of Reason. He died in New York on 8 June 1809. His bones were brought back to England in 1819 by William Cobbett but they subsequently disappeared.

Meanwhile, Mary Wollstonecraft's affair with Imlay turned into a disaster. She followed him to England in April 1795 and twice that year she attempted suicide. But in May 1796 she renewed her acquaintance with the philosophical radical, William Godwin and they became lovers. When she became pregnant, the couple  married on 29 March 1797. She moved into his house in Somers Town. On 30 August she gave birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin but the placenta failed to deliver spontaneously. She died of puerperal fever on 10 September.

Conclusion

1. By the end of the 1790s the radical movement had been snuffed out or driven underground.
2. The events of the French Revolution and the war with France created a considerable backlash. Loyalist pamphleteers mounted a successful counter-attack and government repression made it difficult for the radicals to organise.
3. But radicalism did not go away and it was to revive once the threat of a French invasion was lifted.