Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

Religious instruction, which had been banished from it by Joseph II, was brought back into the school curriculum. The imperial resolution of 10 March 1796 established a school police, whose job it was to invigilate ‘the moral and orderly behaviour’ of pupils at primary and secondary schools, and to keep watch over the morals as well as the political attitudes of their teachers. Just as actors were forbidden to ad-lib, teachers were forbidden to ‘improvise’. They were to use only approved textbooks, and avoid touching on political subjects even if they took an orthodox line, since they might inadvertently give their pupils the wrong idea. The Court Decree of 17 December 1794 stipulated that the text of any proposed lecture must be shown to the authorities not less than four weeks before it was to be delivered. Saurau pointed out that the state ‘pays public teachers to teach that which is agreeable to the Church and the government of the state, and it is a dangerous fallacy for a teacher to believe that he can teach the youth which has been entrusted to him along the lines of his own convictions and his own views’.21 (#litres_trial_promo)

The surveillance of foreigners was taken over by the Fremdenpolizei or foreigners police. Embassies were infiltrated by agents in the guise of servants, who were to report the most banal goings-on, scour the wastepaper baskets and fireplaces for ‘chiffons’, scraps of paper that might prove of interest, and purloin letters and other documents, which were passed to what was popularly known as the Schwarze Kabinette, the Black Cabinet. Here, letters would be expertly opened, copied and resealed in a matter of minutes so they could be replaced before anyone noticed their disappearance. The Fremdenpolizei was also to make use of informers belonging to every social sphere, who could be rewarded with money, but were preferably motivated by the conviction that they were working for the good of the empire.22 (#litres_trial_promo)

This was now under serious threat, and not only from the ‘errors’ of the Enlightenment and the ‘poison’ being manufactured in France. During a meeting in the magnificent baroque palace of Pillnitz in Saxony in August 1791, Francis’s father Leopold and Frederick William II of Prussia had issued a joint declaration in which they warned the French not to allow any harm to come to Louis XVI and his family. They also agreed to make common cause if either were to be attacked by France. Taken together, these amounted to a challenge, and it was taken up. Within the year France had issued a defensive declaration of war on Francis.

There was little enthusiasm in Austria for this war, still less when it led to the loss of the Austrian Netherlands, present-day Belgium. Rather than provoking a desire for revenge, the French successes were accepted with resignation, and officers as well as soldiers discussed the Revolution in a way that suggested Francis’s prophylactic measures had been of little use in keeping the ‘poison’ out. There were instances of his troops fraternising with French prisoners, and when these were marched across Habsburg dominions they aroused the sympathy of the population. They would give away their brass buttons, stamped with the slogan ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, which were accepted with reverence by the emperor’s subjects. The police carried out frantic searches for these unholy relics and confiscated them as though they were dangerous weapons.23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Baron Johann Amadeus Thugut, who took over the direction of Austria’s foreign policy in 1793, quickly realised that this was no conventional war. He had spent some time in Paris in 1791, and understood that the Revolution represented a powerful new force and a menace unlike any other. The French had, in the words of one of his advisers, ‘made a discovery more menacing to human existence than powder’. ‘If they had invented some new war machine, we could have made one just like it,’ but by galvanising citizen-soldiers fighting for their own cause, not that of some crusty ruler, they had done something that ‘no one dares copy’.24 (#litres_trial_promo)

The slogan of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity proclaimed by the French appealed to those living under oppressive regimes, and paved the road to victory for their armies, which seemed to be inspired by an entirely novel zeal. ‘[The French generals] Custine and Dumouriez, at the head of troops that know the value of victory, seem to be inflamed with a kind of zeal like that of Omar, and hitherto they have preached this new species of Mahometanism with a degree of success equal to that of the Arabian,’ wrote William Augustus Miles, the British minister in Frankfurt. ‘If the fury of these modern Caliphs is not successfully & speedily checked, every sceptre in Europe will be broken before the close of the present century, and the Jacobins be everywhere triumphant.’ The analogy was not misplaced. While conservatives shuddered at the implications of the various conspiracy theories, the paladins of revolution, far from being ordered about by occult sects, were fired by a message which some referred to as their ‘Khoran’.25 (#litres_trial_promo)

4

War on Terror (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

‘It cannot be denied that the intoxication of the French in these unfortunate times is a real fanaticism, and that those who are styled patriots really do form a sect,’ noted the young duc de Richelieu, who was in Germany at the time. But he did not join the other aristocrats forming a royalist army at Koblenz. ‘It will be with this one as it has been with all those which have agitated the world. If it is left to itself it will die and vanish into the void from which it should never have emerged; if, on the contrary, it is persecuted, it will have its martyrs, and its lifespan will be prolonged far beyond its natural term.’ Thugut took a less relaxed view. As far as he could see, Austria now faced ‘a nation which has not only become utterly fanatical but which tries to drag along with it other people and which has prepared its current efforts for a long time in all of Europe through the voices of its prophets’. The Habsburg monarchy ruled a great many ‘other people’, and some were highly receptive to the message ringing out from France.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

That message had already taken effect in neighbouring Poland, which had, in May 1791, passed a new constitution embodying many of the ideas of the Enlightenment. It was in no way revolutionary, having been drawn up by the king and voted in by the nobility, led by the greatest aristocrats in the land. It enshrined Catholicism as the religion of state, and the king asked the pope to bless it, which he did. It had been praised by Edmund Burke, the most stalwart defender of the monarchical order in Europe.

This did not satisfy the Empress Catherine II of Russia. She concluded that Warsaw was ‘a brazier of Jacobinism’ and sent in her armies, which quickly overwhelmed the small Polish forces. She then set about rooting out all traces of ‘Jacobinism’: those involved in passing the constitution had their estates confiscated and were stripped of their rank, houses of prominent figures were searched and their private papers scrutinised for dangerous material, and everyone had to sign a declaration abjuring the ideals enshrined in the constitution and giving thanks for her intervention. The principal Polish constitutionalists had taken refuge in Dresden, where, through the good offices of the King of Saxony, they tried to negotiate a compromise, to no avail.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Catherine’s intransigence had the effect of leaving them with nowhere to go but France, where they began to plot a real revolution in Poland. This broke out in March 1794 when the veteran of the American War of Independence Tadeusz Kościuszko proclaimed an act of insurrection in Kraków’s market square. If his intentions were no more radical than those of the American colonists with whom he had fought in the 1770s, those of the Warsaw mob which rose in support went a great deal further. After two days’ fighting it expelled the Russian troops from the city, set up a Jacobin Club and began lynching assorted aristocrats, labelled as ‘traitors’ to the nation.

‘The whole business in Poland is the same as the French Revolution,’ reported the Austrian minister at Warsaw, Benedikt de Caché, adding that there were French advisers, French officers and French money involved. An Austrian spy code-named ‘Cézar’ reported from Warsaw that the Poles were receiving arms and money as well as military advisers, particularly artillerymen, from France (there is no evidence of this). Thugut and Francis ignored the fact that far from being molested or harmed in any way the King of Poland had associated himself with the national cause, and even donated his jewels and plate to it. They were greatly relieved when Catherine sent in her troops, which prevailed over the Polish army and retook Warsaw, putting an end to the insurrection.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Pergen had been more preoccupied with some Hungarian Jacobins who in the early summer of 1794 hatched a plot to overthrow the Habsburg dynasty, led by the former secret police operative and one-time Franciscan friar Ignác Martinovics. Martinovics may or may not have been working for the police, but one of his accomplices, Joseph Degen, certainly was. The conspiracy, such as it was, was nipped in the bud, and ended in seventy-five arrests and seven executions. Whether it had been initiated by his agents or not, it vindicated Pergen’s policies, and the prestige of his police system was enhanced. ‘Our Police safeguard our physical health,’ the minister of justice Count Clary wrote to Francis, ‘and I do not think that I am taking excessive liberties if I lay at Your Majesty’s feet my humble suggestion that the Secret Police, this essential pillar of the Throne and our general security, should be entrusted with the task of looking after the spiritual and moral welfare of our citizens too.’4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Pergen and his deputy had identified a number of ‘suspects’ in Vienna itself, but had no case against them. In June 1794 Saurau’s agents began spreading the rumour that there was a plot to set various buildings alight and in the ensuing confusion assassinate the imperial family and selected notables. Agents provocateurs were set in motion to elicit less than loyal responses, and the first suspects were arrested. Pergen urged the emperor to bypass legal process and have them tried by a special tribunal, in effect by the prosecution, but several highly placed persons, led by the eminent jurist Karl Anton von Martini, protested vigorously. The ensuing trial fell apart. All that could be proved against the ‘Jacobins’ was that one of them had written a bad poem in which there was a phrase about all men being equal, and others had made inflammatory statements of one sort or another.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

A new offence of ‘impudent criticism’ was put on the statute books to facilitate future prosecutions, and the censors were instructed to make more imaginative use of their powers. The press was to be encouraged to ‘highlight the disorders provoked by the democratic system and demonstrate the beneficence of a monarchical system of government, to show up in all its sharpness the contrast between a good prince and a few hundred despots risen from the common people’.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Beethoven, himself under police surveillance as a potential revolutionary, wrote to a friend in Bonn that there was much talk of revolution in Vienna, but concluded that ‘as long as the Austrians have brown beer and sausages, they’ll never revolt’. Nonetheless, the struggle against ‘wild democratic aspirations’ and ‘revolutionary leanings’ did not let up – and brought ideology into every sphere. In Pergen’s view, economic development represented a danger, since it disrupted the desired calm and often involved contact with foreigners. He therefore imposed restrictions on trade and brought in legislation inhibiting the building of factories, in order to prevent the expansion of the urban working class. The numbers of journeymen allowed to become masters and thereby acquire the right to settle in the larger towns were also restricted, for the same reason.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

By the end of 1794, most European powers had accepted that the Revolution in France could not be crushed by military means and that, after the fall of Robespierre, it no longer posed an immediate threat. They were therefore prepared to recognise the French Republic and make peace with it. Austria was not. ‘The Directory in Paris pursues with an unheard-of energy the consummation of its projects to destroy Europe,’ Thugut explained. He stressed the sophistication of the ‘secret manoeuvres that they employ to seduce and to corrupt the multitude’ and warned that ‘a deplorable catastrophe will inevitably envelop all the thrones’ unless it was crushed. Austria would fight on. Saurau commissioned the words for a national anthem from Lorenz Leopold Haschka, a former Jesuit and member of the Illuminati, now a police informer. The music, composed by Joseph Haydn, is today better known as that of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’.8 (#litres_trial_promo)

The only other power which had not come to terms with the French Republic was Britain. It was the only European state to have, in the shape of the Channel, a clear line of defence against ‘contagion’, which should not in any case have posed the same problem as it did for the others. Systems of government such as the Austrian denied not just the mass of the people and the middle classes, but most of the nobility any say in how things were run. They were predicated on the principle that the monarch and his chosen advisers knew best, and the rest of society should not trouble their heads with anything other than their private concerns. Such systems had everything to fear from the French example.

Britain had been inoculated by its long tradition of representative government, imperfect as it was. The right to think, question and publish views on the governance of the country had been practised by significant sections of the population for decades. The calling of the French Assembly of Notables in 1787 and of the Estates General in 1789 had been followed with interest, largely because the system of representation at Westminster, with its restricted franchise and ‘rotten boroughs’ at the disposal of major landowners, was crying out for an overhaul. Many felt that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which had brought William of Orange to the British throne needed to be built upon: the Society for Constitutional Information, founded in 1780, and the London Revolution Society hoped to mark the upcoming centenary by reforming the constitution. The prime minister himself, William Pitt the Younger, made two attempts at improving the system, without success. The calling of the Estates General in France, followed by the fall of the Bastille, had as a result been welcomed by the majority of the articulate population of the British Isles. Political tourists trooped off to Paris to breathe the air of liberty and returned discussing constitutional issues. In March 1790 a group of Whigs brought a moderate Bill for reform before the House of Commons.

While they may have taken heart from what was happening in Paris, the advocates for reform in England were firmly rooted in a home-grown political tradition defined by the Glorious Revolution, Magna Carta and mythical rights supposedly enjoyed by their Anglo-Saxon forebears. Several of the founders of the Norwich Revolution Society had witnessed the fall of the Bastille and the first days of the Revolution, but while they applauded the ends, they baulked at the very un-English means, and were disgusted by the sight of heads being paraded on pikestaffs. Over the past century Englishmen of all classes had defined themselves in contrast to the French, who were viewed with a rich mixture of mistrust, contempt and fear.

Some did have more radical designs. Thomas Spence, a Newcastle schoolmaster who had moved to London, voiced the view that all land should be held in common. William Godwin advocated the abolition of property and government, which placed him in the same camp as the Illuminati. Thomas Paine, the first part of whose Rights of Man was published in March 1791, was a republican, and some members of the various constitutional societies wanted to see monarchy ‘ripped up by the roots’. Others, such as the Welsh minister Richard Price, while stopping short of republicanism, derided the notion of Divine Right and saw the king as little more than the highest civil servant. Implicit in the thinking of many of these was the notion of a right to resistance to the abuse of power by the king, in effect the right to revolt, but, as many pointed out, this was well within the spirit of 1688. Most of the would-be reformers wanted to see only a rationalisation of parliamentary procedure and an extension of the franchise.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

The parliamentary elections in the summer of 1790 went off peacefully. In May 1791, only three months before the Austro-Prussian declaration of Pillnitz, Pitt, who felt that the events in France were the internal affair of that country and adopted a policy of guarded neutrality, told the Commons that he saw ‘no danger’ in the large number of pamphlets calling for reform of one kind or another, and that ‘he could not think the French Revolution or any of the new constitutions, could be deemed an object fit for imitation in this country by any set of men’.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

This did not reassure Burke. In his Reflections he set out to convince those who had given way to what he called ‘a juvenile warmth’ in welcoming the Revolution in France. Chiming with the Emperor Francis’s view of the great ‘swindle’, he argued that they had fallen for the ‘delusive plausibilities’ of the arguments of the ‘sophisters, oeconomists and calculators’ aimed at the established Church, the monarchy and ‘the manners of gentlemen’. He challenged those agitating for reform, disputing their contention that they were acting in the spirit of 1688, and fiercely attacked the likes of Price. He maintained that the English constitution was perfect in all essentials, and praised the ‘sullen resistance to innovation’ and the ‘cold sluggishness of our national character’ which he saw as both its inspiration and its safeguard. There was certainly nothing cold, sluggish or traditionally English about his own attitude. As the novelist Fanny Burney remarked, whenever the subject of reform came up, his face would assume ‘the expression of a man who is going to defend himself from murderers’. He also liked to equate the desire for change with the ‘ferocious dissoluteness in manners’ he saw in France, making a connection between reform and immorality.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Dissenters of every kind, be they Methodists, Wesleyans, Catholics or Jews, were generally associated with reform, as they had been campaigning throughout the 1780s for the repeal of the Test Act which placed civil disabilities on all those outside the Anglican Church. In one impassioned diatribe the Birmingham scientist and Unitarian theologian Dr Joseph Priestley had used an unfortunate metaphor, of laying gunpowder under the old edifice of error and superstition, and this was fastened on, leading to his being accused of plotting to blow up Anglican churches. Burke denounced Priestley and his ilk as revolutionaries whose real aim was not the repeal of the Test Act, but the overthrow of the English constitution.

Priestley and a number of prominent citizens, many of them Dissenters, used to meet at Birmingham’s city library to discuss anything from science to theology. In July 1791, on the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, they held a celebratory dinner. And although they dined under a portrait of the king, toasting him and the English constitution, they also drank to ‘the Majesty of the People’ and to the French Assembly. After they had retired, a crowd gathered and went through the town destroying Unitarian meeting houses and the homes of Dissenters. The crowd then set off for Priestley’s house, Fair Hill, which it sacked, destroying in the process one of the most important laboratories and collections of scientific instruments and specimens in Europe. In the morning the crowd forced open the city’s gaols and rampaged for a further two days under the slogan of ‘Church and King’, meting out rough justice to Dissenters and suspected reformers with the tacit approval if not the active encouragement of the city’s magistrates. This pattern was replicated in similar riots elsewhere. While the role of conservative magistrates was evident in some cases, the frenzy of the mobs was partly fuelled, as it was in similar explosions on the Continent, by undefined fears that the Revolution in Paris and its effects somehow threatened the traditional certainties of life.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

These disturbances alarmed Pitt and his cabinet, and in March 1792 he installed seven additional stipendiary magistrates in London, along with a complement of constables. He nevertheless persisted in his confidence that neither France nor the reformist agitation at home constituted a threat. In his budget speech of 17 February 1792 he prophesied that the country could expect at least fifteen years of peace. The outbreak of war in April 1792 between France and Austria, and the French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, did not alter this view.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

A Corresponding Society for the encouragement of discussion on the constitution was founded in January 1792 by Thomas Hardy, a London shoemaker, and it soon put out branches in Manchester, Sheffield, Norwich, Birmingham, Derby, Stockport and Leicester. In April, a group of noblemen founded an Association of Friends of the People, and societies of various kinds up and down the country discussed reform, published pamphlets and formulated appeals to Parliament. By the middle of 1792 the Norwich Revolution Society had scores of branches in surrounding towns and villages. In April, the prominent Whig Charles Grey launched a campaign for parliamentary reform in the House of Commons, which was vigorously supported by the various societies.

But the Whigs themselves were split, with Burke thundering his warnings against ‘the new and grievous malady’ sweeping Europe. He felt ‘great dread and apprehension from the contagious nature of these abominable principles, and vile manners, which threaten the worst and most degrading barbarism to every adjacent Country’. He was convinced that ‘no Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor any of the old Republics, can possibly be safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Center [sic] of Europe’. He equated the desire for change of any sort with revolutionary purpose, warning that the Dissenters were ‘preparing to renew 14 of July’ and that if they had their way Christianity would be ‘extirpated’. He bracketed anyone who did not hold the same views as himself as a ‘terrorist’, and accused English journalists of being in the pay of the Paris Jacobin Club. He contrasted sentimental notions of good old England with lurid references to the disgusting ‘French Pestilence’.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Many were beginning to think like him. On 10 August the Paris mob attacked the Tuileries Palace, massacring the Swiss Guards in a wanton display of savagery, and Louis XVI was imprisoned along with his family. In the first week of September the Paris prisons in which priests and nobles were being held were stormed, and thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered. Many of those who had welcomed the Revolution began to recant. ‘How could we ever be so deceived in the character of the French nation as to think them capable of liberty?’ wrote Sir Samuel Romilly, who had previously believed the Revolution to be ‘the most glorious event, and the happiest for mankind, that has ever taken place since human affairs have been recorded’. Their horror turned to alarm in October, when news of the French victory over the invading army of the Duke of Brunswick at Valmy reached England.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Public opinion polarised. Many welcomed the victory, holding public demonstrations in celebration. The London Corresponding Society and other reformist bodies sent congratulations and messages of support to the French Convention. But they were increasingly branded as ‘Jacobins’ and ostracised. Landowners threatened tenants with eviction if they held radical views, employers sacked workers, tradesmen and shopkeepers who belonged to reform societies were boycotted by their customers, and in some parts of the country house-to-house enquiries were conducted to check the loyalty of individuals. Landlords of public houses refused to rent their premises to reform societies for their meetings. The Cambridge University Court expelled one of its dons for having published a pamphlet approving of the French Revolution. A Regius Chair of Chemistry was deferred because the only candidate was a supporter of reform. In London, booksellers, authors and even ministers of religion whose sermons were considered seditious were sent to the pillory or to gaol. Flurries of pamphlets appeared denouncing ‘French liberty’. Booksellers who sold radical literature saw their shops torched, and effigies of Paine, often clutching a copy of Rights of Man, were burned – almost as many of him as of Guy Fawkes on the night of 5 November 1792.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Periodicals sprang up to combat the reformist tendency, first the British Critic, and later the Anti-Jacobin and the Anti-Jacobin Review. George Canning, founder of the Anti-Jacobin, commissioned the cartoonist James Gillray to produce images suggesting connections between the London Corresponding Society and the French revolutionaries. Other cartoonists joined in, taking considerable liberties with the truth and giving loose rein to their fancy, representing reformist Whigs such as Charles James Fox manning a guillotine or lynching members of the cabinet.

As conservatives closed ranks, even abolitionists were denounced: the slave rebellion which had erupted in the French colony of Saint-Domingue appeared an evil omen. Although the only property to have been destroyed so far in England was that of reformists and Dissenters, it was conservatives who on 20 November formed an Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers, which rapidly grew into the largest political organisation in the country.

In the general panic, the Home Office and the Treasury Solicitor’s Office had begun employing spies to infiltrate reform societies and lurk in public places to report anything suspicious and gauge the mood of the public. In the second half of 1792 these began to send in reports of seditious talk, of expressions of discontent with the government and outbursts against the king, and even of people arming. One informer stated that bands of Frenchmen armed with daggers were disembarking at various ports and marching on London, and that ‘within two months there would be a great riot and there would be no king and it would be worse than in France’. A French royalist émigré, Dubois de Longchamp, warned the government that there were large numbers of Frenchmen in London, some of them soldiers, planning an insurrection. One of their alleged contacts, a Piccadilly hatter by the name of Charco, was arrested and found to possess three daggers and some firearms. An Italian was said to be suborning soldiers in their barracks, and a ‘dangerous’ man by the name of Cervantes was keeping suspicious contacts, along with an Irishman who was ‘the most dangerous of any’. The insurrection was allegedly to break out on 1 December.17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Pitt found ‘nothing to agree with’ in any of Burke’s writings, and was dismissive of the threat of popular revolt. ‘Tho there has lately been a disposition to a great deal of Alarm,’ he wrote to home secretary Henry Dundas in mid-November, ‘I believe the Bulk of the People here, and certainly the higher and middling classes, are still sensible of their Happiness and eager to preserve it.’ But he could not afford to be complacent. With the French occupation of the Austrian Netherlands, which would have been perceived, Revolution or no Revolution, as a direct strategic threat to British interests, the situation at home assumed a new significance. As a result, in the second half of November 1792 Pitt drew up plans for mobilisation, and on 1 December embodied the militia in several counties. This was accompanied by a Royal Proclamation stating that extreme measures were necessary in the face of the imminent threat of revolution.18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Pitt was attacked in the House of Commons, with Charles James Fox pouring scorn on his fears and the playwright and Whig politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan jeering that the danger existed only in his ‘foul imagination’. Replying to Fox, Burke pulled out a dagger and threw it to the floor of the House in a histrionic gesture that provoked hoots of laughter. ‘It is my object to keep the French infection from this country; their principles from our minds, and their daggers from our hearts,’ he bravely went on amid the guffaws. Pitt admitted that most of the evidence before him was ‘uncertain hearsay’, but argued that with levels of fear as high as they were around the country, prudence was justified.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

This was true enough, but the fear was largely the work of the government itself, which was spending some £5,000 a year in subsidies to newspapers and helped start the Sun and the True Briton, which fanned fears of French subversion. Its use of spies also contributed to spreading mistrust and fear: the notion of revolutionary France sending out agents to subvert enemy states before attacking them was gaining ground. An under-secretary at the Home Office, Evan Nepean, had already put together a system of surveillance of foreign undesirables who might be planning an insurrection.20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Seemingly alarmed at this possibility, Pitt introduced a Bill to deal with the threat. In the event, the Aliens Act of January 1793 was to prove anything but a defensive measure, and the Aliens Office to which it gave rise was soon paying more attention to infiltrating the London Corresponding Society than to foreigners living in London. Under the Whitechapel magistrate William Wickham, appointed ‘Superintendent of Aliens’ in 1794, it would go on to mount a number of attempts to overthrow the French government.21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Whether or not Pitt and his colleagues believed in the threat of revolution and French subversion, there can be no doubt it did provide them with a golden opportunity to split the opposition, by forcing the less radical to support him out of a fear of appearing to harbour revolutionary intentions. The Foxite Whigs who stuck to their guns were not only isolated, but made to look unpatriotic. It was also a heaven-sent opportunity to increase the powers of the government.

In December 1792 the Scots Association of Friends of the People held a Convention in Edinburgh. The delegates kept their speeches moderate and made frequent declarations of loyalty to the crown, but the very word ‘Convention’ was tainted by association with its French model, and the Home Office’s informer in their midst reported a number of seditious off-the-record utterances. Several of the more radical delegates were arrested in January 1793.22 (#litres_trial_promo)

The execution of Louis XVI on 21 January profoundly shocked Pitt and most of British public opinion, and provided the excuse for the expulsion of the French diplomatic representative in London. France’s subsequent declaration of war on Britain and the Dutch Republic on 1 February meant that enthusiasts of the Revolution and any kind of reform could now be represented as traitors. In Nottingham, encouraged by the mayor, crowds reinforced by navvies digging the Trent Canal attacked the houses of those thought to harbour revolutionary sympathies, on the pretext that they might be hoarding arms. Dissenters, be they Catholics or Quakers, were suspect, and despite repeated declarations of loyalty by John Wesley himself, Methodists were the object of particular suspicion and antagonism, as ignorance of what they actually stood for raised fears that they might be Levellers in disguise.23 (#litres_trial_promo)

The trial of the Edinburgh radicals was slow to get under way, and it was not until August 1793 that they were sentenced. The Vice-President of the Association of Friends of the People, Thomas Muir, was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation, and the others to shorter terms. The trial had been a travesty, and provoked numerous protest meetings. A new Convention met in Edinburgh in October, bringing together delegates of reform societies from across the whole kingdom. On the basis of reports that some members were talking of drilling and arming, and that quantities of arms were being manufactured in Sheffield, the government closed it down and arrested a number of the delegates, provoking yet more protests.

Since there were few restrictions to membership of the London Corresponding Society and the other associations, it was easy for government informers to be admitted as members, and all the pro-reform societies in the capital and the major cities had been infiltrated, with some informers holding high office. The founder of the Corresponding Society, Thomas Hardy, believed that secrecy was both counter-productive and might lead to their undoing. ‘We conceive that the permanency of a reform must be founded on the acquiescence of the public, who, after maturely deliberating on everything proposed, shall have found the plan the most useful and the best that could possibly have been laid down,’ he wrote. Generally, the reformists displayed a concern for due process and were profoundly offended by the government’s bending of rules and shocked by its use of spies.24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Hardy’s colleague John Thelwall could be more radical in his speeches, and drafted a resolution for one meeting in Chalk Farm to the effect that the compact between rulers and subjects was automatically dissolved if the laws securing the liberties of those subjects were violated. But he was opposed to violence. ‘True reason ought to be the only weapon of the friends of liberty,’ he declared. ‘The pen is the only artillery, and the ink the only ammunition, that the London Corresponding Society must ever use.’ Candidates for membership were in some cases obliged to make a declaration disavowing conspiracy and violence, and when some of the societies began to make more radical declarations, many members tendered their resignations, complaining that they had ‘deviated from the Pursuit of their original proposed object, viz. to obtain Parliamentary Reform’.25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Even if a significant number of radicals had intended to bring about a revolution, it is difficult to see where they would have found the means. There was much misery both in the countryside and in the manufacturing towns. Events in France had given encouragement to the nascent working men’s associations, and there was an increase in strikes, particularly around 1792. But these were almost entirely about wages and conditions, and restricted to a particular trade. They were conducted with a degree of ponderous legality, their aims set out in formally drafted petitions. Although the press occasionally pictured the strikes as being motivated by ‘Jacobinical’ ideas, the only one in 1792 with what might be construed as a political edge to it was that by Liverpool ships’ carpenters who threatened violence if the slave trade were abolished, as it would reduce demand for their work. The government on the other hand had over 2,500 troops at its disposal in London alone, and plenty more, as well as militia, stationed around the country.26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Yet reports kept reaching the Home Office from magistrates and its own agents that preparations were being made for insurrection. Magistrates were unreliable, as some reported every minor incident while others failed to inform the home secretary of actual riots. Some of the Home Office’s agents were capable and responsible, but they were outnumbered by opportunistic informers who were paid according to the importance and bulk of the intelligence they supplied, a recipe for exaggeration and invention, and sometimes provocation. Mostly they came up with no more than baseless gossip. Typically, Edward Gosling, a government spy who was a member of the London Corresponding Society, reported that John Baxter, a Shoreditch silversmith and chairman of the London Corresponding Society, had told him where he could obtain a gun and declared that a revolution could be effected in a few hours and blood would have to be spilt, particularly that of Pitt, Dundas and, unaccountably, Fox. Another report alleged that a Sheffield journeyman printer by the name of Davison bade a cutler make him ‘about a hundred’ pike-heads which were stored at the house of the secretary of the local Constitutional Society. One source revealed the existence of the ‘Lambeth Loyal Association’, an eighty-strong military force, but the only evidence further investigation yielded was that of a potential recruit, Frederick Polydore Nodder, ‘botanic painter to His Majesty’, who came to join them and found three men performing military drill with ‘an old rusty musket and a broomstick or two’.27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Dundas and his colleagues were on the whole critical of the reports they received, and took them with a pinch of salt. It seems unlikely that Pitt and his cabinet could really have believed that a revolution could be carried out by a few hundred steamed-up pike-waving radicals. In Paris, as was well known at the time, the fall of the Bastille had only come about because regiments of the regular army such as the Gardes Françaises had been involved, and behind the events leading up to it stood not some group of would-be reformers or foreign undesirables, but a large section of the middle class and the nobility, with members of the royal family such as the duc d’Orléans at their head. In Britain, there was no comparable leadership, and the mob had repeatedly shown that it was more interested in roughing up radicals and Dissenters than overthrowing the government. Yet the government acted as though it believed the threat to be real.

It made out that the self-important declarations of congratulation and solidarity addressed by the various reform societies, and particularly the London Corresponding Society, to French revolutionary clubs were evidence that the English radicals were under the influence, if not the control, of the French Convention. From papers seized, it was clear that there was a certain amount of correspondence between the various societies, both among themselves and with similar bodies in France and Ireland. While the actual correspondence had not been found (as it was scrupulously burned by the recipients), Pitt and his ministers assumed that its purpose must have been to coordinate action, from which they extrapolated that ‘a detestable conspiracy against our happy constitution’ was being hatched. The government’s informers were warning that violence ‘will be used very soon’, and in April 1794 a report compiled by Wickham convinced Pitt that what he called ‘a new era in the history of insurrection’ had dawned, and that he had enough evidence to act. In order to ensure greater support in Parliament he made an alliance with a segment of the Whig Party led by the Duke of Portland, who became home secretary.28 (#litres_trial_promo)

At 6.30 on the morning of 12 May 1794 a group of King’s Messengers and Bow Street Runners entered the house in Piccadilly of Thomas Hardy, founder of the London Corresponding Society. Without allowing him or his wife to dress in private, they ransacked the lodgings and carted away everything they could lay their hands on in the way of papers, as well as a large number of legally published books. Hardy himself was conducted to the Tower of London. The society’s secretary, Daniel Adams, was also hauled out of bed and arrested, and his home similarly searched.

The documents found were passed by the Home Office and the Treasury Solicitor’s Office, along with reports they had received from their informers, to a Committee of Secrecy specially convened by the House of Commons to assess the level of threat. After studying the material, this reached the conclusion that the London Corresponding Society and the Constitutional Information Society were dedicated to the subversion of the British constitution.29 (#litres_trial_promo)