The Years of Endurance (29 page)

On May 12, Hardy, the shoemaker Secretary of the London Corresponding Society, was arrested at this shop in Piccadilly by Bow Street runners. This was followed by the discovery—such discoveries are easy in time of national panic—of treasonable conspiracies at Sheffield and in Ireland. A few days later Parliament suspended the Habeas Corpus Act. Among those detained were the secretary of the radical Earl Stanhope—Pitt's brother-in-law— John Thelwall, the fashionable lecturer, and the genial ex-parson, Home Tooke, who over his cups at dinner at the Crown and Anchor tavern had declared that Parliament was a nest of scoundrels.
¹

As always in Britain in times of external danger, an overwhelming majority supported established authority. Even those who opposed the suspension of Habeas Corpus were outvoted by 261 votes to 42. As the Government spokesman put it, the country was driven to the necessity of imitating French violence in order to resist the contagion of French principles. Lenity could not be admitted when the constitution itself was at stake. For Jacobin sympathisers to hold seditious meetings under pretence of " parliamentary reform " could no more excuse their proceedings than the phrase " God save the King " at the foot of a seditious proclamation. But there is no doubt that the Government and its supporters went too far. Its theory of" constructive treason " disgusted even the King, never an enthusiast for freedom of opinion.
²

The absurdity of a labourer being sentenced to five years imprisonment for calling out " No George! " " No war! " proved too much for the English sense of justice. In October, 1794, the trials of Hardy, Tooke and Thelwall for high treason ended in acquittals, though sentences of imprisonment were awarded on lesser counts.

But the country as a whole wasted no sympathy on persecuted radicals. They were regarded at the best as misguided fools, at the worst as dangerous criminals. " If they are in truth acting upon principle," wrote the liberal Lord Spencer, " they would lead us, for all I know, to the horrors and miseries of France." The loathing felt at this time for Jacobin excesses transcended reason. Windham

¹
In the course of the dinner, attended by about 300 persons, the company were said to have toasted success to the French and " sung the Marseillaise treasonable hymn and
C
a Ira."—Times,
5th
May, 1794. This to the contemporary English mind was like singing the
Horst Wessel
song to-day.

²
" You have got into the wrong box, my Lord," the King told the Lord Chancellor, Loughborough, " you have got into the wrong box : constructive treason won't do, my Lord ; constructive treason won't do."—Lord Campbell,
Lives of the Chancellors,
XI, 267.

declared that the revolution was so diabolical that all who excused it were separated from him by an unbridgeable gulf. A leading Bristol merchant saw Fox as " a traitor with a firebrand at his tail " who was aiming at being " a second Oliver Cromwell."
¹
The newspapers described the Jacobins as " baboons in the woods of Africa," with " the savage ferociousness of wild beasts." Even the
gentle
and pious Hannah More wrote fiercely of " the mad monkeys of the Convention! " and interrupted her work of reformation among the Somerset miners to write popular tracts against Paine and his fellow " atheists." Her dialogue, " Village Politics by Will Chip," ran into innumerable editions, and was hailed by patriots of the more conservative kind almost as though it were holy writ. Many of them had special editions printed at their own expense and distributed among their poorer neighbours.

Such feelings were not confined to the possessing classes. Hatred of Jacobinism ran like an angry streak through the nation. The fearful tales of escaped prisoners fatally discredited any one professing revolutionary sympathies. Merchant seamen captured by French commerce raiders were pelted by the rabble of Brest as they marched through the streets and tortured by their gaolers. In the filthy holes into which they were thrown there was often no room even to lie down. At Quimper typhus-infected Britons were reduced to eating raw rats and mice, and some where murdered by their guards for asking for water.
²
Long after the Terror in Paris ceased, the prisons and lesser public offices in France were staffed by the sadistic scum whom revolutions bring to the surface of national life; and simple Englishmen, engaged in a life-or-death struggle, are to be forgiven if they confounded their bestialities with the revolutionary philosophy, and even the entire French race. Nor can the latter in that hour of intoxication be acquitted of intolerable national arrogance: the universal triumph of the " Great Nation " excited a popular Chauvinism outstripping the pride of the Grand Monarque. For having discarded religion as an offence against reason, victorious France had fallen into the most perilous of all heresies: that of self-worship.

¹
C. M. Maclnnes,
A Gateway of Empire,
324.

²
Many owed their lives to the noble firmness of their interned compatriot, Lady Ann Fitzroy—sister of the future Duke of Wellington—whose force of character overcame even the stubborn inhumanity of the Commissary in charge.—See
Long,
172-91.

Despite their follies and obtuseness the British people never lost their feeling for common morality, their contempt for blasphemy, arrogance and destruction. To the progressive and beneficent theories behind the Revolution nine out of ten of them were blind. But ruined abbeys, desecrated churches
¹
and murdered women and children aroused their unswerving sense of decency. In a crowded Greenwich stage waggon at the height of the treason trials a dispute arose between a recruiting sergeant, who maintained that Tom Paine was an atheist, and a Whig gentleman's coachman who denied it. The disputants stopped the co
ach and decided the matter, Engli
sh fashion, on the greensward. The sergeant won, and there is little doubt that the verdict, though technically wrong, was England's.
²

British anger at the Revolution was often brutal and crude. It struck out blindly at much that was good. A man of known democratic opinions could scarcely walk about his home-town without a demonstration of popular hatred.
³
Every liberal ideal came temporarily into disrepute: parliamentary reform, the movement against the slave trade, the infant Trade Unions, factory legislation. A Tory Bishop even accused the new evangehcal Sunday schools of teaching atheism and blasphemy, while good Mr. MacRitchie, seeing a shepherd reading a newspaper on the Pentland hills, breathed a curse on the French politics that were ruining the country. Classicism itself came in for suspicion owing to the fondness of democratic orators for allusions to Roman tyrannicides.
Plutarch's Lives
was the most popular book in revolutionary France, while the radical Thelwall in his lectures was in the habit of taking Greek and Roman history as his subject, and by an ingenious twist making it reflect on living persons and present events.
⁴
Cockburn afterwards recalled how his old schoolmaster, Dr. Adam of Edinburgh, was spied on by his pupils and harried by the authorities for his innocent remarks about the Tarquins. To fools—and brave and honest fools were plentiful in Britain—the very liberty for which the country was fighting came to have a " Jacobinal sound." Like bulls in Borodale, as Coleridge recorded, they ran mad with the echo of their own bellowing.

¹
Calvert,
79;
Malmesbury,
III, 268, 273.

²
Times,
5th Sept., 1794.

³
The Friend,
Section I, Essay V.
⁴
Crabb Robinson, 1,
66.

For all this there was a heavy penalty to be paid in division and bitterness. For the fury of national patriotism in the hour of danger shut the door on many young and generous spirits who had early espoused the cause of the Revolution. " To hope too boldly of human nature," wrote the wisest Englishman of his generation, " is a fault which all good men have an interest in forgiving." In the frenzy of that time, it was not forgiven. Once a Jacobin always a Jacobin, was the general verdict. The youthful Wordsworths were harried by their neighbours from Alfoxden, and the two major conservative prophets of the coming era were dogged on lonely rambles over the Mendips by Dundas's spies.

Unhappily neither of the great men who led the forces of Government and Opposition in the first years of the war was temperamentally fitted to give the nation the flawless internal unity she needed. Pitt was reserved and impatient: his nerves overstrained by his inherent inability to relax. He treated criticism with cold contempt. Sir George Beaumont—Wordsworth's patron—told Farington in November, 1795, that Pitt's personal deportment had become " dry and rejecting. . . . This manner seems to grow upon him." The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments. Pitt and his supporters never tried to draw the Opposition into the national effort: to disarm criticism by entrusting it with a task.

Fox, on the other hand, with his generous sympathy with the rebel and under-dog, showed no sign of realising the overwhelming danger of the country and the magnitude or the Government's problems. In the delightful riverside retreat to which he had withdrawn after the excesses of his youth and the turmoil of Westminster, he seemed to loose touch with reality. He allowed his followers to indulge in irresponsible and unpatriotic faction that did their Party and the nobler causes for which they stood infinite harm. Instead of pleading for the poor and ignorant, the Foxites— as Coleridge said—pleaded to them. At the moment that their country, forsaken by false allies, was facing the greatest military force the world had seen, they never rose in the House without denouncing Ministers as tyrants and robbers. In their hatred of
the
Government their radical proteges even had inflammatory pamphlets piled on the backs of asses to be scattered about the highways, thrown into cottage windows and down
the
shafts of coalpits.

A crisis was reached in October, 1795. On the 27th the London Corresponding Society held a mass meeting in Copenhagen Fields, at which an Address was passed virtually calling for civil war. A hundred and fifty thousand persons were present, and though only a fraction of them were anything more than curious spectators, the violence of the speakers, the example of France and the known roughness and ignorance of the London mob were sufficient to occasion alarm in an unpoliced city. Two days later the King on his way to open Parliament was hooted by organised rowdies in the Mall. Parson Woodforde, on one of his rare visits to London, was in the crowd, the greater part of which was as loyal as himself, just before the King reached Old
Palace Yard, showers of stones
were flung at the royal coach and a bullet from an air-gun broke one of the windows. " My Lords," announced the intrepid old man as he entered the Chamber, " I have been shot at."

The outrage provoked an outburst of passionate loyalty. When next night the King attended the theatre at Covent Garden the audience rose and sang the national anthem six times over. The Government, striking while the iron was hot, introduced Bills against Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings. Promoters of all political gatherings of more than fifty persons were to give notice to the magistrates, who were empowered to attend and arrest on the spot for seditious speech. Second offences could be punished with transportation. The passage of these measures— which, however, left the freedom of the Press inviolate—was attended by bitter debates in the Commons and by efforts to arouse popular tumults. Three large meetings were held in Mary-le-bone Fields—the site of the present Regent's Park—and Burke, now a confirmed alarmist, hourly expected to see a guillotine set up on Tower Hill. But the Bill passed by an overwhelming majority, and when Wilberforce went down to his native Yorkshire to oppose
2
Whig appeal to the freeholders he was greeted by thousands of "West Riding weavers calling themselves " Billymen" to mark their support of Pitt, and shouting, " Twenty King's men for one jacobin!

After the new Act became law open political agitation died away. The radical clubs confined their assemblies to forty-five members and their membership dropped quickly. Within a year even the Lo
ndon Corresponding Society was
£185 in debt. Pitt

was much amused by the report of one society whose members met in muzzles and conversed only by signs.
¹
The parliamentary Opposition went still further in absurdity, for it presently withdrew for long periods from Westminster altogether, leaving its constituents unrepresented and the Government unopposed. Only beneath the surface the sullen discontent of a dissentient and embittered minority remained.

Yet the young Prime Minister, prematurely aged by his struggle against the revolutionary hydra, was no reactionary. Under the cold, chilling surface which he displayed to a world whose common joys and sorrows he had never wholly shared, beat a heart boyish in simplicity, native tenderness and virtue. There was a side of Pitt's early-arrested nature which was unintelligible to contemporaries like Fox, who had been experienced men of the world before they had reached their twenties. About this time he began to display interest in Hannah More's tracts with their studies of humble life. Towards the end of 1795 he went down to stay with a friend in Essex and, after talking one evening of the good fortune which an industrious and virtuous labourer could enjoy in Britain, was taken by his host to view the dwellings of the poor in the town of Hal-stead. " The Minister," Lord Rosebery has written, " surveyed it in silent wonder, and declared he had no conception that any part of England could present a spectacle of such misery."
²