A History of Britain, Volume 3 (6 page)

But the centenary of that revolution – approaching in 1788 – was an unavoidable occasion for looking long and hard at both those justifications of the status quo. Such a critical re-examination was made to seem more urgent by the failure of William Pitt the Younger, first in 1782 as a 22-year-old MP and then in 1785 as a 25-year-old prime minister, to secure even a modest measure of parliamentary self-reform; and by Pitt’s active opposition, in 1788–9, to the repeal of the Test Act. Across the Atlantic, Tom Paine’s
Common Sense
(1775) had already taken an axe to most of the status-quo assumptions by asserting the right, in fact the duty, of the Americans to resist in terms of a defence of natural rights (for the taxed to be represented and free from forced billeting of British soldiers). The American lesson had, of course, not gone unheeded on this side of the Atlantic, especially by those who had always been critics of the war recently fought there. In the 1780s, proselytizing organizations like the Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information and the Westminster Association, who numbered among their members not just preachers, professionals and artisans but also the radical fringe of the Whigs (the 3rd Duke of Richmond, the 3rd Duke of Grafton and the playwright–politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who met at Holland House, home of their silver-tongued leader, that child of a permissive Rousseau-ite nursery, Charles James Fox), began to flirt with a potentially democratic justification of government, one that began with the right of the people to choose or change their own rulers. That right, moreover, was said to be rooted not just in nature but in history. According to that view all governments had originated with the unforced, voluntary agreement of the people to assign their authority to representatives (be they kings or parliaments) for the express purpose of protecting their freedom and security. This agreement had always been understood as a mutual contract. The people would give their allegiance only so long as the government to which they had provisionally entrusted the protection of their rights respected them. Should those same authorities be judged guilty of violating rather than upholding those natural rights, the sovereign people were at perfect liberty to remove them.

This was heady stuff: part regurgitation of old ‘Commonwealthmen’ doctrines left over from the radicals of the 17th century; part American republicanism with a dash of Rousseau added for extra force. But it was the essence of what a succession of speakers – James Burgh, Priestley,
Price,
Horne Tooke, Major John Cartwright – had to say to the discontented of the 1780s. That such opinions were far from being restricted to a tiny minority of agitators out of touch with the mainstream is borne out by the astounding sales of their often indigestibly severe opinions. Richard Price, for example, sold 60,000 copies (the kind of figure surpassed only by Tom Paine) of his daunting
Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty
(1776). The fact that many of these opinions had been aired before, not least by John Milton, was far from being a sign of weakness (as some modern historians have assumed) but actually the secret of its appeal. For the late 18th century was becoming obsessed with the British past, especially the ‘Gothick’ Middle Ages – not just its political history, but its architecture, dress, furniture and armour, all of which saw compendious and beautifully illustrated histories published. So when Alfred the Great, the wise, the strong, the good, was trotted out yet again (by the anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp, for example) as the paragon of a popular monarch who worked in benevolent mutual collaboration with that mother of all parliaments, the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, history was taken not as some obscure and arcane irrelevance but as the model of what truly native British government was supposed to look like. The sealing of Magna Carta, another mythical moment when ‘the people’ had, through their barons and burgesses, exercised their right to call a despot to account, was also celebrated as an episode pregnant with significance for the present and future. It was just at this time, moreover, that the militant vegetarian–antiquarian–tramper Joseph Ritson’s researches into Robin Hood were recasting that legendary character as a romantic popular hero (with wood engravings by Thomas Bewick).

Since the 16th century, the ‘88s’ had always been critical years for Britain and for the fate of the monarchy; each generation adopted the epic of the last ‘88’ as a touchstone for the next. The supporters of William III in 1688 claimed to be the heirs of Elizabeth’s resistance to Catholic tyranny in 1588, the year of the Armada. In 1688, the Catholic James II had taken leave of his throne; in 1788 George III (whom some critics had accused of aiming at a ‘Stuart’ absolutism) had taken leave of his senses. By the time he was restored to them, in 1789, the fate of monarchy had been transformed by the stupefying events taking place in France. And those who were celebrating the centenary of the Glorious Revolution naturally embraced this latest revolution as the logical consummation of what had happened 100 years before. Providence, they thought, worked to a meaningful calendar.

On the face of it, the position of the two kings on opposite sides of the Channel in 1789 could not have been more different. While Louis XVI
was
being dictated to by the National Assembly and suspected (rightly) of planning a military coup to regain his absolute authority, George III was recovering his grip both on his sanity and on the nation. At the same time that Louis was obliged to leave Versailles for Paris to put the best face on his predicament and pretend, at least, to fold himself in the tricolour of the Revolution, George went on a tour of the West Country to recuperate. Everywhere he went he was regaled with booming choruses of ‘God Save the King’; at Weymouth, indeed, he was surprised, while taking the waters, by a small but evidently loyal band concealed in the next bathing machine.

But none of these noisy demonstrations of loyalty deterred the true believers in a great British alteration from thinking that, if the walls of the Bastille could be stormed by the people of Paris, a day of reckoning with Old Corruption was not far off. In 1785 Joseph Priestley earned himself the nickname of ‘Gunpowder Joe’ by comparing the work of the radicals to ‘laying gunpowder, grain by grain under the old building of error and superstition which a single spark may hereafter inflame so as to produce an instantaneous explosion’. When the Bastille fell, they hoped that its spark might carry right across the Channel. Glasses were hoisted at Swarley’s Tavern; in the Bishop’s Palace at Lichfield; in aristocratic Holland House. Charles James Fox celebrated it as ‘much the greatest event that has ever happened in the history of the world and how much the best’. Although it was awkward to have the French, jeered at for generations by Whigs and Tories alike as the hopeless lackeys of despotism, complete what had begun in 1688 as a British revolution, it was after all the Americans who had already made the point that the ‘true’ spirit of Liberty, although born in Britain, had evidently migrated elsewhere. The fact that it had now returned across the Atlantic with the French General Lafayette, who had fought so ardently for the Americans, was only proof that the irresistible urge for popular self-government was the indivisible natural right of all mankind.

Yet the unfortunate Frenchness of the event did, for all their higher feelings, make the ‘new Whigs’ (the most radical of the party, committed to broadening the franchise, to secret ballots, to pay for MPs and the like) defensive. In 1789 they felt obliged to argue that cheering on the French revolution was not incompatible with true patriotism, but rather a sign of its good health. That was the message of Dr Richard Price’s sermon on ‘The Love of Our Country’, preached, significantly, on 4 November 1789, almost to the day the 101st anniversary of William III’s landing at Torbay, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution at the Unitarian meeting house in Old Jewry, London. ‘Country’ properly considered,
Price
argued, was not just ‘the soil or the spot of earth on which we happen to have been born; not the forests and fields, but that community of which we are members; or that body of companions and friends and kindred who are associated with us under the same constitution of government, protected by the same laws, and bound together by the same civil polity’. In other words, it is our politics and not our topography that gives us our true national allegiance. All the rest is just selfish bluster. And the politics of the great and glorious French Revolution, he said, were unmistakably connected with our own; were indeed the completion of what we had begun. Had not the meaning of 1688 been that the people had the right to resist tyrannical rule, get rid of the unlawful ruler and restore to themselves their undoubted right to self-government? And was that not precisely what the French were now doing? Their lesson was timely, for in Britain the representation of the people had become a bad joke; a ‘shadow’ freedom, the reality of which was corrupt oligarchy and a ministerial government that worked its will through paid yes-men in parliament.

If the fall of the Bastille and the transformation of the monarchy in France from an absolute to a popular monarchy was shocking, surely the shock was healthy; good for the constitution, like a cool dip at Weymouth or an excursion in the Lakeland drizzle. Price bridled at the craven ‘servility’ of the congratulations offered to George III on the recovery of his wits, ‘more like a herd crawling at the feet of a master, than like enlightened and manly citizens rejoicing with a beloved sovereign, but at the same time conscious that he derives all his consequence from themselves’. They, in other words, were the true sovereign, and if he had been in the position of addressing the king, Price said, he would have spoken up thus:

I rejoice, Sir, in your recovery. I thank God for his goodness to you. I honour you not only as my King, but as almost the only lawful King in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people. May you enjoy all possible happiness. May God shew you the folly of those effusions of adulation which you are now receiving, and guard you against their effects. May you be led to such a just sense of the nature of your situation, and endowed with such wisdom, as shall render your restoration to the government of these kingdoms a blessing to it, and engage you to consider yourself as more properly the
Servant
than the
Sovereign
of your people.

This was already daring enough. But at the end of his remarks Price abandoned all pretence of deference and unleashed a thunderclap of apocalyptic revolutionary prophecy: ‘Tremble all ye oppressors of the
world!
Take warning all ye supporters of slavish governments, and slavish hierarchies!… You cannot now hold the world in darkness. Struggle no longer against increasing light and liberality. Restore to mankind their rights, and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together.’

It was the two central assumptions of Price’s remarks – that the French Revolution was the continuation of the British (an assumption epitomized by one of the celebratory toasts, ‘To the Parliament of Britain – may it become a National Assembly’) and that the monarchy of Britain was, or ought to be, not an hereditary succession but accountable to the sovereign
people
– that provoked the Irish writer, orator and MP (for a pocket borough) Edmund Burke to write his devastating and vitriolic
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790). As much as anything else, it was Price’s timing that so appalled Burke. He had greeted the French spring with cautious optimism, which by the autumn had turned to horrified disbelief. Everything that had happened after 14 July – the lynchings; the château burnings; the careless abandon with which the nobility liquidated their own privileges; and above all the expropriation of Church property to fund the national debt – struck him as a perverted act of national self-dismemberment. Most preposterous of all for Burke was the fiction that Louis XVI was an enthusiastic sponsor of all this demolition when he was, in fact, just the prisoner of the wrecking-gang. In November 1789 – precisely when Price had seen fit to lecture George III on his duty to consider himself the ‘servant of the people’ – the true state of Louis XVI’s position had been exposed in the most brutal way. A march of Parisians to Versailles, led by the market women demanding bread, had degenerated into an attack on the palace as the marchers penetrated the private apartments of the royal family. Before it was over two Swiss guards were dead – although neither was, as Burke wrote, a sentry – and the king and queen, after making a nervous appearance on the Palace balcony at Lafayette’s urging, were ignominiously taken back to Paris in a coach. Preceded by heads stuck on pikes, the royal couple did their best to put a brave face on their captivity and pretend to be ‘united’ with the people. ‘This king… and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people)’, wrote Burke, laying on the sensation with a trowel, ‘were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.’

How was it possible that Dr Price – who was the butt of Burke’s acid sarcasm – should celebrate such events as though from them flowed the
milk
of human benevolence? And how was it that he could have the audacity to claim kinship between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and what for Burke were the utterly inglorious deeds of a century later? Only by utterly falsifying what that first, altogether British revolution had been about in the first place.

It was only in defiance of historical truth, he said, that Price could claim it had been licensed by the people’s right to choose their own form of government and hire or fire kings at their pleasure, or as they judged those monarchs protected the ‘natural rights’ of individual liberty. That had been the view of the men not of 1688 but of 1648 – of Milton and the king-killing generation. William III had been invited to England, not as the people’s choice, much less to make a fresh government from any sort of abstract principles, but to defend a form of law, Church and government that had always been there; the ‘ancient constitution’ violated by James II. It had thus been the most conservative of revolutions; hence its bloodlessness, hence its glory. And above all, Burke insisted, the ‘ancient constitution’ had the authority of countless generations – from Magna Carta, perhaps even Anglo-Saxon England – as its weight; pinning it to the earth of Britain rather than letting it be borne dangerously aloft by the hot-air balloon speculations of political philosophers like Rousseau. Governments could not simply be dreamed up from imagined first principles. Such ‘geometric’ or ‘arithmetical’ constructions were, by definition, lifeless. ‘The very idea of the fabrication of a new government’, Burke wrote, ‘…is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.’ Governments, legitimate governments at any rate, drew their authority from the immemorial experience of their practical use. That, at any rate, was Britain’s native way of doing things. ‘This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity’ So the ‘spot of earth on which we happen to have been born’ made light of by Price was, in fact, of the utmost importance in giving us a sense of our community. ‘In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty.’ Our territorial ancestry, complete with what Burke – heavily in love with heraldry – called ‘armorial bearings’,
was
our birthright, our political constitution. We damaged it at our peril.