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

In a second, more detailed report, the committee sought to justify this conclusion. It insisted that the Edinburgh Convention had been modelled on the French, and that since the model had brought about the fall of the monarchy, confiscated Church property and judicially murdered the king and thousands of others, that must also have been the intention of its Scottish emulators. The committee picked out of the Convention’s recorded proceedings words such as ‘struggle’ as proof of violent intent. The phrase ‘it would appear that’ recurs with numbing frequency throughout the report, and much of the evidence consists of ‘certain persons’ having overheard statements or had sight of documents of a seditious nature, attributed to people who were members of one of the societies, or had attended their meetings, or knew people who had. The report quotes as evidence a letter from Dundas to Pitt reporting that ‘Paisley is in particular alluded to as being in a state of great readiness [for revolution]; and there has been positive information received through other channels, that within these three weeks persons of that description have assembled themselves to a very considerable number in the night-time, for the purpose of practising the use of arms.’ No corroboration of this assertion is provided in the report, and there is none to be found among the papers delivered to the committee.30 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘From what has been stated it appears, that the design of arming, as far as it has yet proceeded, has been conducted with great secrecy and caution, and, at the same time, with a remarkable degree of uniformity and concert in parts of the kingdom remote from each other,’ the report asserted. ‘The weapons principally provided seem to have been peculiarly calculated for the purposes of sudden violence, and to have been chosen in conformity to the example of what has recently passed in France. The actual progress made in the execution of the design, during the short period of a few weeks, sufficiently shows what might have been expected, if the societies had proceeded, without interruption, in increasing the number of their members, and the fund for providing arms.’ No arms were actually listed, and nowhere in the papers seized was there any mention of them, but such details were not allowed to stand in the way of the committee’s convictions. ‘It also appears to your Committee,’ its report pronounced, ‘that subscriptions had been opened for the purpose of providing musquets.’ Needless to say, neither muskets nor money were found.31 (#litres_trial_promo)

The committee covered itself against accusations of failing to provide evidence for its assertions with the excuse of confidentiality. ‘Your Committee have, for obvious reasons, omitted to annex to their Report the evidence of particular witnesses, by whom the facts above stated are supported; and, for the same reasons, they have studiously forborne to mention the names of persons and places in all cases in which they could be omitted,’ it concluded.32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Faced with this ‘traitorous conspiracy’ to overthrow the government and introduce French anarchy, Pitt proposed the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, which was done on 17 May. Although he as good as admitted that the government was overreacting, he justified this by the argument that it was better to err on the side of caution and by the need to appease opinion throughout the country, which was now in a state of near-panic. Further arrests were made, and John Thelwall, his fellow radical John Horne Tooke and others were committed to Newgate or joined Hardy in the Tower. In a celebration of the Glorious First of June naval victory against the French, a mob attacked Hardy’s house and ill-treated his pregnant wife, who later died in childbirth.33 (#litres_trial_promo)

In the space of less than two years, Pitt’s government had radically changed its position, and by the summer of 1794 it was at war with subversion at home and with France abroad. At home, it sought to root out the supposed conspiracy and decapitate its leadership. Abroad, it hoped, by landing troops in France, to assist royalist rebels in overthrowing the French government. It justified both policies with the alleged threat of revolution, and almost any evidence was used to support this. Riots against the press gangs were represented as being politically motivated; reports from spies that military drilling was taking place on the outskirts of London and that the prisoners in the Tower were in communication with accomplices outside were made much of. In Edinburgh, while searching the house of a bankrupt, officers of the law found weapons apparently made to the order of a secret committee of the radical ‘Ways and Means’ society. Further investigation revealed that this had drawn up a plan of insurrection, supposedly at the instigation of the London Corresponding Society. The trial of the two ringleaders opened with eighteen pike-heads and four battle-axes laid out as the evidence for the prosecution. One of the accused, Robert Watt, turned out to have been the government’s principal informer in Scotland, and it remains unclear whether he had turned radical or had had the weapons made in order to fabricate evidence for the government, as he was hanged on 16 October.34 (#litres_trial_promo)

In September, the Home Office was informed by a Thomas Upton of a plot to kill the king by firing a poisoned dart at him from a brass tube disguised as a walking stick while he was in his box at the theatre. Two members of the London Corresponding Society were hauled in for questioning. One of them was James Parkinson, a surgeon of Hoxton Square who had published a pamphlet entitled Revolutions without Bloodshed, and who would later identify a form of ‘shaking palsy’ as a disease which would in time bear his name. The questioning yielded no evidence, and it subsequently transpired that Upton had invented the whole story. A long-standing member of the London Corresponding Society, he had been asked to resign when it was discovered that he had defrauded its funds, and sought to avenge himself.35 (#litres_trial_promo)

On 28 October, the state trial of Hardy and twelve others on charges of high treason opened in London. Looking through the available evidence, the Treasury solicitor had advised the government that there were no grounds for believing that the accused were intending to use violence, bring down the government or kill the king. There were inflammatory statements in the papers seized referring to the cabinet as ‘Placemen’, ‘Plunderers’ and ‘Neros’, and even calls for the overthrow of the monarchy, but that hardly amounted to high treason. Nor did the correspondence with French political clubs and revolutionary leaders. But the government went ahead regardless.36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Hardy was the first to be brought to the bar, and after nine days in the course of which the case for the prosecution fell apart for lack of evidence, the jury threw out the charge of treason, arguing that there had been no attempt on the life of the king, and that whatever plots might have been laid were aimed at Pitt’s ministry. Hardy was taken back to his lodgings in a coach drawn by an enthusiastic crowd. After three more of his colleagues had been similarly acquitted, the rest were discharged. It was a terrible loss of face for the government. But it was the state that had suffered most.

While the government battled to protect the country against the revolutionary bacillus supposedly threatening society, it succumbed to a far more serious infection itself. During these first five years of the French Revolution, almost every state in Europe built up intelligence-gathering networks and the surveillance of individuals to unheard-of levels, introduced or expanded the use of informers, spies and even agents provocateurs, encouraged denunciation, made use of dishonest propaganda, branded those it did not like as ‘enemies of the state’, tarred them with the brush of ‘immorality’, and repeatedly tried to use legal processes for political means. Since all of these had been either initiated or elaborated by the government of revolutionary France, it could be said that contagion was far greater at government level than among the ordinary people of whom they were so scared. While the virus of revolutionary upheaval had proved only moderately contagious, those of state control over the individual and the politicisation of the legal process had made serious ravages.

5

Government by Alarm (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

The war with France dragged on, with little to show in return for the expenditure in men and money. Most people had forgotten, or never understood, what it was about, and by the summer of 1794 its growing unpopularity was compounded by food shortages which threatened to become acute as an unpromising harvest drew near. In July, as the government deliberated on measures of relief, an angry crowd invaded Downing Street clamouring for cheaper bread.

The suspension of habeas corpus had expired in June, and the London Corresponding Society exploited the situation by holding a meeting at St George’s Fields in London which brought together a crowd estimated variously (and probably with considerable exaggeration) at 50,000 to 100,000. Another meeting, at Copenhagen House Fields outside Islington on 26 October, brought together an even greater crowd than the first, possibly as many as 150,000. This emboldened the discontented, and three days later a mob assailed the king’s coach as he was being driven to the state opening of Parliament.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

The government responded with a speed that suggests it had only been waiting for an excuse to act. On 6 November Lord Grenville introduced a Treasonable and Seditious Practices Bill in the House of Lords. This redefined the law on high treason, introducing the notion of ‘constructive treason’ and thereby extending it to cover the intention of bringing about a situation in which the king’s life might be placed in danger, the direct or indirect intimidation of the monarch, and by extension of his ministry. Seditious practices were broadened to include composing or distributing material, printed or spoken, inciting hatred of the king, the constitution or the government. In the Commons four days later, Pitt introduced the Seditious Meetings Bill, which prohibited more than fifty people assembling without a magistrate’s licence (and reclassified halls in which they took place alongside brothels as ‘disorderly houses’). This ruled out the Corresponding Society’s principal activity and ensured that nobody would allow it to use their premises. The Two Acts, as they became known, effectively closed the only legal means of advocating constitutional reform.

William Wilberforce, who had helped to draft the first of the Bills, insisted that it was no more than ‘a temporary sacrifice, by which the blessing of liberty may be transmitted to our children unimpaired’, but there was nothing temporary about it, and it was widely seen as a shameful abuse and extension of the government’s powers. Meetings in defence of free speech were held all over the kingdom, with the Dukes of Norfolk and Bedford turning out alongside John Thelwall and other working-class radicals. The government did not in fact make much use of these powers, but its actions did outrage large bodies of public opinion and widen the gulf between defenders of the status quo and would-be reformers of every hue, who now began to complain of Pitt’s ‘reign of terror’.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

The government had reason to feel embattled. The war with France, unpopular as it was, was not the principal cause of concern. The foreign secretary Lord Grenville believed that despite their early victories, the French were now ‘a People languid and exhausted’. Pitt too had a low opinion of France’s military potential. But he was alive to the threat of a French invasion prepared by a revolutionary fifth column. He possessed a copy of Barruel’s book, and while it may not have convinced him that there was a worldwide conspiracy at work, as he was himself involved in plots to overthrow the government in France, with the bankers Coutts providing funds through their agents in Paris, he might naturally have assumed that the French were planning something similar for London. And there were two, interconnected, areas in which Britain was vulnerable.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

In April 1797 a mutiny broke out in the fleet at Spithead. The sailors demanded higher wages (these had not been increased since the 1660s), better victuals and the abolition of harsh punishments. The new practice of lining ship’s bottoms with copper, which meant they did not need such frequent careening and extended the time they spent at sea, was another cause of discontent. The government granted most of their demands, but the mutiny then spread to the ships at the Nore, at the mouth of the Thames, whose crews took a more political line, although they too were principally concerned with pay and conditions (and demanded a higher share of prize-money). While they did fire salutes on the king’s birthday, they put pressure on the government by blockading the Thames, leading to a logjam of over a hundred merchantmen. They also threatened to take their ships over to France, which, they suggested, would know how to treat free men fairly. The mutiny then spread to Admiral Duncan’s squadron at Yarmouth, and it was not until June that it was pacified.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

The proclamations and addresses of the sailors abounded in words and phrases they would not have known the meaning of ten years before, suggesting that they were aware of what had been happening in France. But the likelihood of their sailing off to join the French was minimal, given that they had been fighting them with jingoistic enthusiasm for the past four years. In December a great Naval Thanksgiving, with thousands of sailors marching past the king in a frenzy of patriotic feeling, seemed to bear this out. Although investigators sent down to the Nore reported ‘with great confidence that no such connections or correspondence ever did exist’, the government could be forgiven for suspecting that the mutinies had been abetted, if not inspired, by London radicals. A more serious cause for anxiety was the possible connections with their homeland of Irish sailors, who made up well over 10 per cent of the total.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

The underlying political problem in Ireland was the divide between the small landowning Ascendancy, made up principally of originally English Anglicans, and the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population, almost entirely Catholic, which suffered a litany of disabilities and discrimination. This was aggravated by less than sensitive rule from London, which alienated not only the Catholics. Reforms had been introduced in the 1780s, giving more power to the Irish Parliament in Dublin. The outbreak of revolution in France encouraged many to consider further devolution, and while even the most radical continued to toast the king, the questions of reform and self-rule became entangled with notions emanating from Paris.

In October 1791 a group of young radicals, both Catholic and Presbyterian, including Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Hamilton Rowan and Theobald Wolfe Tone, set up the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast. Although, or perhaps because, its motives were confused and its membership inconsistent, it grew rapidly, with branches springing up in Dublin and many other places. The organisation was not sectarian in character, and the one sentiment common to the whole membership was resentment of the government at Westminster and its perceived arrogance. When that government took Britain to war against France at the beginning of 1793, it strained the island’s already weak sense of loyalty, and some began to see France as a more sympathetic partner than England.

Although Catholics were granted some additional rights in 1793, the sectarian gap widened, as a consequence of often entirely local factors. In Armagh, Protestants formed bands known as the Peep o’Day Boys to harass Catholics considered to be getting above themselves economically. The Catholics responded by founding the Defender movement, and the violence spread, with varying motivations and inspirations attendant on regional gripes. The situation was not improved by the irresolute and often panicky behaviour of the lord lieutenant, the effective viceroy of the island, ruling from Dublin Castle. France, which saw Ireland as a convenient place in which to make trouble for the British government and a potential back door through which to invade the United Kingdom, began to meddle.

The London government took the step of suppressing the Dublin United Irishmen and arresting their leaders, and sent out a new lord lieutenant, Earl Fitzwilliam, to resolve the crisis. Burke had been calling for the sweeping away of penal laws against Catholics, arguing that the one thing which could prevent the Jacobin pestilence spreading to the island and turning it against England was the Catholic Church. Fitzwilliam agreed, and moved energetically to bring in Catholic emancipation, but when he heard of this Pitt grew alarmed and promptly withdrew him. The disappointment felt by Catholics turned to anger, and sectarian animosities flared. Protestants who felt under threat founded the Orange Order, while United Irishmen re-organised along paramilitary lines and, under the leadership of Fitzgerald, began to seek French assistance to break away from English rule. Other United Irishmen, such as Wolfe Tone, had fled to Paris, where they began plotting a French invasion for the liberation of the island.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Irish Insurrection Act, passed in 1796, which gave magistrates sweeping powers and provided for the mobilisation of the militia, only led to further polarisation. A countrywide search for weapons resulted in the houses of Catholics being burned down and their owners arrested and flogged. At the same time, it was not at all clear where the loyalties of the militia and the yeomanry being raised by the Protestant landowners really lay. The situation was nevertheless under control, if the twenty-seven-year-old MP and colonel of the Londonderry militia, Robert Stewart, is to be believed. ‘Indeed I have no apprehension that the mischief existent within can ever be productive of any serious calamity, unless the enemy should pay us a visit,’ he wrote to Pitt on 17 October 1796.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

As it happened, the enemy were planning a visit, and two months later a force of 14,500 French troops under the command of General Lazare Hoche set sail from the port of Brest bound for the south-west of Ireland. Had they been able to land there the island might well have been lost to the British crown. Although there was a large standing army in Ireland, it was poorly commanded and equipped, and was scattered around the country. As it was, the French expedition was cursed from the outset. One vessel went down with its full complement of crew and troops in sight of the French coast, and over half of the others were blown out into the Atlantic by violent gales. Only a few reached Bantry Bay, with 6,500 men on board, and rode at anchor there for a week in fierce blizzards vainly waiting for the rest to join them before abandoning the enterprise and sailing back to France.

No armed bands of United Irishmen appeared on shore to support the French in the course of that week, but the British government could not be sure that they would not come out on some future occasion. The French actually landed some troops in the south of Wales in February 1797, but they re-embarked after a couple of hours, once they had realised that there was no wish by the local population to have anything to do with them. The Edinburgh radical Thomas Muir, transported to New South Wales in 1793, had escaped and was in Paris agitating for a landing in Scotland. There were reports of activity there by a secret association of United Scotsmen, and of the existence of some thousand United Englishmen in Manchester mobilising in sympathy with their Irish counterparts. There were certainly some among the English radicals who were ‘for putting an end to government by any means, foreign or domestic’.8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Another French invasion was planned for July 1797, this time with the use of the Dutch fleet. Although it was cancelled, the threat lingered. In March 1798 the government imposed martial law in Ireland, and magistrates took suspects into custody and impounded arms. Sympathisers of gaoled individuals would gather together to dig up their potato crops so they should not be lost. The authorities saw such activities as intended ‘to terrify the peaceable and well-disposed’, and as part of a pattern of meeting ‘under various pretences, such as funerals, foot-ball meetings, &c. with a view of displaying their strength, giving the people the habit of assembling from great distances upon an order being issued, and making them more accustomed to shew themselves openly in support of the cause’. The cause did not benefit much.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

In May, one faction of the United Irishmen started a rebellion near Dublin which spread rapidly, generating a rash of savage skirmishes of terrible intensity which cost some 30,000 lives before it was put down at Vinegar Hill in County Wexford on 21 June. A ‘Turn out’ in Antrim that same month proved hardly more effectual: after two days of random and mostly criminal violence, the insurgents melted away at the sight of small detachments of regular troops.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

In August, a French force of a thousand commanded by General Humbert did manage to land, at Killala. It marched inland, joined by a rabble of locals brandishing banners with inscriptions such as ‘France and the Virgin Mary’, but surrendered when confronted by a force of regulars. Another landing was made on the coast of Donegal in September, but for all his bluster, its Irish leader, Napper Tandy, was unable to muster support on the ground, and sailed away having achieved nothing. A third force, under the command of General Hardy and Wolfe Tone, was intercepted at sea and headed off. With plenty of regulars and some 50,000 yeomanry to defend the island from the French and their potato-digging allies, the only thing British rule needed to fear in Ireland was its own incompetence: unnecessarily bloody reprisals for the rising, followed by the imposition of a less than sensible Act of Union and the failure to emancipate the Catholics, would lead to further rebellion.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

That was not how the authorities viewed the situation. ‘Upon a review of all the circumstances which have come under the consideration of your Committee,’ ran the concluding paragraphs of the Report of the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons in 1799, ‘they are deeply impressed with the conviction – that the safety and tranquillity of these kingdoms have, at different periods from the year 1791 to the present time, been brought into imminent hazard, by the traitorous plans and practices of societies, acting upon the principle, and devoted to the views, of our inveterate foreign enemy.’ It went on to declare that although only the United Irishmen had actually risen, ‘the societies instituted on similar principles in this country had all an undoubted tendency to produce similar effects …’12 (#litres_trial_promo)

There was certainly some anti-government agitation, with Whigs and radicals holding meetings calling for reform and an end to the war. Charles Grey tabled a motion for parliamentary reform in the House of Commons, and in their speeches both he and Fox praised aspects of the French Revolution. On 18 May 1798, at a dinner for a thousand people at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand to celebrate Fox’s birthday, the Duke of Norfolk proposed a number of subversive toasts. In June, the Whig Club ostentatiously presented the Polish revolutionary Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had just been released from Russian captivity and was passing through London, with a sword of honour. In July the Corresponding Society, whose membership had reached a low of four hundred, held a rally in St Pancras Fields.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Home Office’s intelligence-gathering network had become more efficient by this time, and Wickham could claim that it possessed ‘without bustle, noise or anything that can attract the Public attention … the most powerful means of observation and information, as far as their objects go, that ever was placed in the Hands of a Free Government’ – which leads one to wonder about the government’s motives for the crackdown that followed these provocative but hardly menacing activites.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

It implemented what one of the Corresponding Society’s members, Francis Place, a London leather-breeches maker who had fallen foul of the authorities following a strike in 1793, called a ‘Reign of Terror’, arresting all those who had spoken at the St Pancras Fields meeting and hounding its critics. ‘A disloyal word was enough to bring down punishment upon any man’s head,’ according to Place; ‘laughing at the awkwardness of a volunteer corps was criminal, people were apprehended and sent on board a man of war for this breach of decorum, which was punished as a terrible crime’. A man in Gosport was sent to prison for having damned Pitt and the ministry. A bookbinder was given five years with hard labour for shouting ‘No George, no war!’ Innocuous debating clubs were investigated and their members placed under surveillance. The net of suspicion was cast wide. In August, the Home Office investigated reports of a French advance party which had holed up in a house at Nether Stowey near Bridgwater in Somerset, and who were walking around the countryside with portfolios under their arms, making plans of the area, often going out at night. An agent despatched from London ascertained that they were not French, but confirmed that the tenant of the house, a Mr Wordsworth, and his friends, who included a Mr Coleridge, were disaffected, dangerous, and needed to be watched.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Heterodox views were punished in extra-judicial ways, with writers and journalists being harassed, beaten and detained for long periods. They were gagged in various ways, by having their works seized and destroyed, their plays shouted off the stage by organised claques, or their writings damned with slanderous accusations of immorality or sexual deviancy by a host of government-funded hacks given generous amounts of space in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin and the True Briton. Writers such as Amelia Alderson Opie and Mary Wollstonecraft were represented as unnatural, and therefore immoral. Their arguments were dismissed as ‘weak’ and ‘womanish’, they were criticised for being intellectually out of their depth, labelled as promiscuous, shameless and immodest, the implication being that their literary urge was no more than a manifestation of their lust. Wollstonecraft’s husband William Godwin was ridiculed as a henpecked joke, the author of ‘obscene’ and ‘nauseous’ publications. Thomas De Quincey recalled that he was regarded ‘with the same alienation and horror as of a ghoul, or a bloodless vampire’.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

The government introduced further repressive measures, including effective censorship through the registration of printing presses and forbidding the printing of material originating abroad. It banned all associations and trade unions, outlawing the London Corresponding Society, whose leaders were already either in Newgate or in Coldbath Fields house of correction – the ‘English Bastille’ to the Whigs. The Unlawful Societies Act had originally been phrased so as to ban all societies which demanded an oath of their members, but the Freemasons, for whom the oath was crucial, intervened. On 30 April 1799 the Earl of Moira, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England, and the Duke of Atholl, his Scottish counterpart, went to Downing Street and persuaded Pitt to insert a clause which would permit them to keep their secret oaths.17 (#litres_trial_promo)

In the House, Lord Holland denounced the government’s use of the war and the threat of revolution in order to browbeat the people into submission, and challenged it ‘to produce substantial documents, rather than the suggestions of ministers, or the vague suspicions of individuals’ to justify its repressive measures. He accused it of employing ‘a system of government by alarm’, obtaining extensions to its power year after year ‘on the score of allegations, which subsequent events have disproved’.18 (#litres_trial_promo)

In his Letters on a Regicide Peace, written in 1796 and arguing the case for a war to the death with revolutionary France, Burke claimed that the war was not over a particular issue, but was a war on ‘evil’, and assured his readers that it was a life-and-death struggle, as the system of government adopted by France ‘must be destroyed, or it will destroy all Europe’. According to him, the French ‘system of manners’ was ‘at war with all orderly and moral society’, and he invoked the ‘Law of Neighbourhood’, the law of civil vicinity which gives a householder the right to protest at a nuisance put up by a neighbour, likening the state of revolution in France to someone opening up an ‘infamous brothel’ next door. ‘What in civil society is a ground of action, in politick society is a ground of war,’ he argued.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Burke calculated that there were some 400,000 active ‘political citizens’ in England. ‘I look upon one fifth, or about eighty thousand, to be pure Jacobins; utterly incapable of amendment,’ he wrote. ‘On these, no reason, no argument, no example, no venerable authority, can have the slightest influence.’ They represented a ‘great and formidable’ force, quite adequate to overthrow the government. He lamented that ‘our constitution is not made for this kind of warfare’. ‘It provides greatly for our happiness, it furnishes few means for our defence,’ he wrote, revealing a surprising lack of faith in democracy’s ability to defend itself by standing by its own values.20 (#litres_trial_promo)

He voiced the fear that if peace were signed, young Englishmen would travel to France, ‘to be initiated in all the infernal discipline of the place’ and ‘to be corrupted by every means of cabal and corruption’, and, having imbibed the pollution of atheism and Jacobinism, would return to gradually corrupt all aspects of English life by contagion, beginning with Parliament, followed by the courts, where criminals would end up becoming judges, then the press, then the army, and so on until the whole fabric of the nation was rotten.21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Burke’s fears seem curiously overstated, given that the overwhelming majority of even the most radical advocates of reform were firm believers in the fundamental merits of the English constitution. There undoubtedly were revolutionaries conspiring underground, but the very fact that we know little or nothing of them is eloquent testimony to their significance. And for all the agitation by the Corresponding and other societies, the lower orders were politically indifferent. A recent study of nearly five hundred documented riots and disturbances between 1790 and 1810 reveals that 39 per cent concerned food, 7.2 per cent labour conditions, 21.6 per cent recruiting methods, and only 10 per cent had any political or ideological basis. It is true that the percentage of politically motivated disturbances was higher in London. It is also true that as the participants were driven by a variety of often hazy grievances, any crowd could be manipulated into a revolutionary frenzy. But none were. As for the supposed threat of contagion, there is overwhelming evidence that even at moments of war-weariness and discontent, hatred and contempt for France and all things French persisted in every class of society.22 (#litres_trial_promo)

To be fair to Burke and those who shared his fears, it is worth remembering that similar alarms agitated the United States, which one might have thought more immune, if only on account of its geographical position. While Jefferson and the Republicans made light of the excesses of the Revolution in France, the Federalists were horrified to see America’s sister-republic and erstwhile ally descend into lawlessness. On the one hand, Louis XVI was guillotined in effigy and democratic societies were formed to protect the United States from counter-revolution. On the other, the September massacres in Paris were represented as a vision from hell, and some warned that if Jacobin ideas took hold in America bloody violence would sweep away the political and social edifice. Anti-Jacobin texts proliferated, feeding the fear that one of the many heads of the revolutionary hydra might appear on the American side of the Atlantic. William Cobbett, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Porcupine, labelled the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 ‘American Sans-cullotism’ and made out that the Illuminati were planning to subvert America. In his Detection of a Conspiracy, formed by the United Irishmen, with the evident intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France in Subverting the Government of the United States of America, he identified the ‘Parisian Propagande’ as the prime mover. ‘Like Lucifer, they carry a hell about with them in their own minds; and thus they prowl from country to country,’ he warned. George Washington himself feared the French influence. This fear culminated in the passing of the Alien and Seditious Acts in 1798, which provoked the Republicans into talk of a ‘Reign of Terror’ and much beating of the drum of English liberties. On the other side of the argument, fears aroused by the tales of revolutionary violence in France entered the political discourse and public discussion, fusing with the nightmarish trope of Red Indian savages scalping or roasting alive settler families, and their echoes have even been picked up in the early campaigns of the anti-slavery movement.23 (#litres_trial_promo)

An interesting aspect of Burke’s apprehensions is that of the potential moral pollution of the English by contagion from France. This chimes with less sophisticated expressions of the view that a French invasion, or even the example emanating from France, was bound to unleash social and moral mayhem. ‘The French rulers, while they despair of making any impression on us by force of arms, attempt a more subtle and alarming warfare, by endeavouring to enforce the influence of their example in order to taint and undermine the morals of our ingenuous youth,’ warned the Bishop of Durham in a speech to the House of Lords in 1798. ‘They have sent amongst us a number of female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes, and most wanton theatrical exhibitions, succeed but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people.’24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Much of the population of Britain was living in conditions of the utmost squalor, both physical and moral. London had for decades shocked foreign visitors by its poverty, dirt and immorality, and other cities were fast catching up, particularly the busy ports and the growing industrial centres, which drew in people from the countryside, tearing them away from the constraints and supports of village life, brutalising them with gruelling working conditions and leaving them defenceless in the face of urban disease and depravity.

This ‘national decadence’ in the physical as well as the moral health of the lower orders aroused fears that it might undermine the fabric of society. People such as the economist Thomas Malthus felt it might lead to the degradation of the whole nation, since there was much mixing of middle-class and even aristocratic youth with the low life of the larger cities. The consequent erosion of deference, greatly assisted by the example across the Channel, alarmed the government and the propertied classes alike.25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Religious observance had declined among Anglicans in the course of the eighteenth century, and a lukewarm Christianity verging on deism or even humanism prevailed in the higher echelons of society. This tendency was associated in the eyes of not just the Bishop of Durham with reformist views and a generally unsound attitude, both moral and political. Many advocates of reform regarded religion and ‘priestcraft’ with hostility, seeing in it an obstacle, since it kept the poor docile and blind to the ‘truth’. On the other hand, religious commitment of the wrong sort also aroused fears, and the Methodists in particular were viewed as dangerously fanatical. They preached millenarian prophecies which were inherently revolutionary, as the new Jerusalem of these mostly plebeian prophets had no room for king or aristocracy, or private property. The susceptibility of some Methodists to Antinomian concepts which liberated them from the moral law tainted the whole movement by association with licentiousness and immorality, and lurid tales circulated of their wild orgies. The prominent Methodist Robert Wedderburn, the illegitimate offspring of a Jamaican planter and a slave-girl, who stole, blasphemed, worked for a publisher of pornography and opened a bawdy house, only enhanced such an image in the public imagination.26 (#litres_trial_promo)

William Wilberforce was spearheading an evangelical revival with his writings, most notably A Practical View of Christianity, published in 1797. Hannah More had for some time been arguing that moral not constitutional reform was what the country needed, leading a kind of Christian mission against Jacobinism. A Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded in 1802. This was followed by the Bible Society, which sought to cure the evil through the evangelisation of the poor, by the Religious Tract Society and the Church Tract Society, by Sunday schools, and later by a surge in church-building in expanding cities. Others felt that the best way of thwarting the spread of revolution was by bringing assistance to the needy, and set up various relief organisations, such as the 1796 Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor. The followers of Jeremy Bentham expounded the virtues of the utilitarian approach and called for the reform of prisons and lunatic asylums; those of Thomas Spence propounded a vague form of communism. A group known as the Westminster Radicals saw education as the main motor of social and constitutional transformation, and promoted the system of free schools for the poor pioneered by the Quaker schoolmaster Joseph Lancaster.

But many preferred to see the situation in terms of good and evil, and this is much in evidence in the popular anti-Jacobin novels, large numbers of which were published in the late 1790s. These revelled in lurid descriptions of revolutionary Paris, where innocent beauty was the stock victim of coarse and lewd revolutionaries, and everything was ‘wild and licentious’, in the words of one author. ‘Order and subordination were trampled beneath the footsteps of anarchy,’ he wrote, ‘the streets were filled with terrifying spectacles; and the people seemed to be nearly frantic with the plenitude of dominion; while the excess of horror was strongly and strikingly contrasted by the vaunted display of boundless sensuality.’ In his novel The Vagabond, George Walker painted a picture of how a revolution might look in London, with ‘the rage of lust’ let loose on young ‘beauties’ more used to genteel courtship, and aristocrats floundering in their own blood ‘amidst the uproar the thunder of cannons, the whistling of bullets, the clashing of swords, the tumbling of houses, the groans of the wounded, the cries of the conquerors …’27 (#litres_trial_promo)

At the root of all this wickedness lay ‘the new philosophy’, or even just ‘philosophy’, denounced as a mess of ‘pernicious scepticisms and sophistical delusions’, pestilential doctrines combining atheism, levelling (this was titillatingly terrifying to the property-owning middle-class readership), undermining conventions, and leading women towards independence and depravity. In these novels this philosophy is propounded either by idiots or by wicked charlatans with names such as Edward d’Oyley and Judas McSerpent, usually with the purpose of getting innocent young women into bed. Even the paid or self-appointed agents of the French Revolution, whose aim is the overthrow of the English constitution, have a sideline in the seduction of virtuous women by preaching to them the new philosophy of equality and free love. ‘Can a priest muttering a few words, supersede the call of passion or give a higher zest to the affection of the heart?’ cajoles one such character. ‘In the heart are the issues of love, and where that leads, what institution of the church, what act of man, shall impede its progress? The time is passed for such superstitious restraints, and we revel in the full freedom of love, free in that as in all other respects.’28 (#litres_trial_promo)

The sense that society was somehow being attacked by a malignant disease of the mind or even of the moral sense was certainly not limited to bigots or the readers of popular novels. Thomas De Quincey remembered Barruel’s book being discussed everywhere. The papers of the Treasury solicitor include a pamphlet entitled Notes on the chief causes of the late revolutions of Europe, which delivers a critique of the Enlightenment and belabours the ‘Encyclopaedists’, lumping them together with Irish rebels, Freemasons and Illuminati. It explains the facility with which the French armies triumphed over their enemies by the fact that ‘the principles of the conquerors had been implanted in the countries which they overran long before their armies arrived there’, citing as evidence the publication of works by Paine, Campe, Paulus, Knigge and Gorani in their respective countries before hostilities commenced. It also asserts that the Grand Orient Masonic Lodge of Paris had issued a manifesto calling on their brethren all over Europe to facilitate French victory, which had also been assisted by the Illuminati. The London Corresponding Society and the other English reform movements were naturally involved too.29 (#litres_trial_promo)

In his Reflections on the Political and Moral State of Society at the Close of the Eighteenth Century, published in 1800, John Bowles asserted that modern philosophy was ‘corrupting the heart of Europe’, a view shared by many. Not far behind lurked the notion that this disease was being spread by a conspiracy. Burke admitted that people of intelligence and talent were naturally drawn towards what he termed ‘the Cloacâ Maximâ of Jacobinism’. But most preferred the metaphor of seduction, and in otherwise serious arguments about the evils of the Revolution writers would effortlessly fall into the imagery of French wolves preying on innocent sheep, of corrupt conspirators ensnaring the pure. The publication of Barruel’s book was followed by that of a number of others, most of them précis or derivations of it, which confirmed the existence of a ‘diabolical’ conspiracy. The Jacobins were fearsome, according to Bowles, as ‘the cultivation of their talents, the extent of their knowledge, their advancements in science, only enable them the better to pursue their projects of destruction, more effectually to attack Religion, Government, and Social Order, and to establish more firmly their horrid sway of impiety and vice’. More terrifying still, the Jacobins were not merely a group of people, they were a monstrous entity. Jacobinism, according to another tract, ‘is not merely a political, but an anti-social monster, which, in pursuit of its prey, alternately employs fraud and force. It first seduces by its arts, then subdues by its arms. For the accomplishment of its object it leaves no means unemployed which the deep malevolence of its naïve sagacity can devise. It pervades every department of literature and insinuates itself into every branch of science. Corruption is its food, profligacy its recreation, and demolition the motive of its actions, and the business of its life.’ In consequence, anyone who raised in some circles the subject of prison reform, abolition of the slave trade or the regulation of child vagrancy could expect to be accused of peddling ‘French philosophies’.

Like the politicians, the authors of these novels and tracts display what seems to have been a common instinct to avoid confronting the phenomenon of the French Revolution in the spirit of analysis. They prefer the parable of a mass explosion of every kind of wickedness, caused by the breakdown of the mesh of moral and social structures brought about by ‘philosophy’ concocted by the Illuminati and disseminated by Jacobins. It was a simpler explanation, and, implausible as it might appear, it was comfortingly understandable.