A History of Britain, Volume 3 (8 page)

This courtly if emotional exchange disguised the polarization taking place, fast and furiously, in the provincial towns of England and even more ominously in Scotland. Certainly, London was also a storm-centre of both radical and loyalist politics. But the ‘new Britain’ – Manchester, Sheffield, Belfast, Birmingham and Glasgow, as well as older towns transformed by commerce and industry such as Derby, Nottingham and Bewick’s Newcastle – was experiencing a real baptism of fire. It was in those places that meeting house ‘rational religion’, debating clubs, the printing and publishing trades and radical newspapers were all tied together. In Sheffield the bookshop owner John Gales, also the editor of the
Sheffield Register
, was the prime mover of the city’s Constitutional Society, which rapidly acquired over 2000 members. The question of just how radical these organizations were to be often put a strain on their solidarity. Some wanted to follow the more ‘Friends of the People’, Fox-ite, constitutional line of pressing for parliamentary reform, perhaps even manhood suffrage as a ‘birthright of freeborn Britons’; others quickly became intoxicated with millenarian visions of the coming just society as outlined in the gospel according to Tom Paine.

Amazingly, 14 July – the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille – replaced 4–5 November – the anniversary of both the Gunpowder Plot
and
the Glorious Revolution – as a critical day in British politics. On that same day in 1791 a huge crowd in Belfast – both Protestant and Catholic – cheered the dawn of liberty, especially for Ireland, while another crowd in Birmingham was trashing the precious library and laboratory of Joseph Priestley in the name of Church and King. The ‘spark’ had indeed caught for ‘Gunpowder Joe’, but it had lit a fire under the wrong people. By the spring of 1794 Priestley had emigrated to America, settling in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he founded a cooperative community that at last corresponded, somewhat, to his social idealism.

Britain, on the other hand, seemed further off than ever from being converted into an Elysium of peace and freedom. Any ‘Friend of the People’ hoping to work some sort of miraculous constitutional change from within would have been sadly disenchanted when, on 6 May 1793, Charles Grey’s measure of parliamentary reform (more equal representation and more frequent elections) was defeated by 282 votes to 41. That was about the size of the Fox-ite ‘New Whig’ remnant in parliament. So when, in May, a royal proclamation was issued outlawing seditious assemblies, the government expected and got Whig support; Fox voted against but the Duke of Portland, and of course Burke, were in favour. However, since the parliamentary road seemed, for the moment, to be a dead end, Paine’s more revolutionary politics became more, not less, appealing. In January 1792, the shoemaker Thomas Hardy established the London Corresponding Society (the ‘mother of mischief’ according to Burke), with John Thelwall as its major theorist and spokesman; it was an overtly democratic Paine-ite organization pressing for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. To the government, fretting about national as well as social disintegration, it suddenly seemed sinister that Hardy was a Scot – all the more so when, in December, Edinburgh was the chosen meeting place for a ‘Convention’ of Scottish ‘Friends of the People’. Since the bloody change from a monarchy to a republic in France had produced a ‘Convention’ the very term (despite a quite different tradition of usage in Britain) seemed to presage a similar upheaval. The Edinburgh Convention numbered 160 delegates from 80 sister societies in no fewer than 35 towns. Government spies reported that there were Irishmen at the Edinburgh Convention – and for that matter Scots in Belfast and Dublin. When one of the conveners, the lawyer Thomas Muir, spoke of liberating ‘enslaved England’, the jump from Jacobite to Jacobin suddenly did not seem so fantastic. Part of the savagery of the government’s counter-attack – arresting its leaders, trying them for sedition and sentencing them to 14 years’ Australian transportation – was undoubtedly due to the fear that the Anglo-Scottish union was about to be subverted or that an attempt to
replace
parliament with a ‘British Convention’ might begin in some sort of northern democratic heartland stretching from Nottingham to Dundee.

Agents also noticed that the corresponding societies were packed with rowdy, violently verbose types: a new generation of uppity weavers, godly nailmakers, republican tailors and, most ominously for those who felt the hairs rise on the nape of their neck when they read of the revolutionary horrors in Paris, Sheffield cutlers. Raids occasionally produced the odd cache of pikes or axes, which only fed the hysteria. In the Commons Burke poured on the paranoia, comparing something that he called the Revolutional and the Unitarian Societies to insects that might grow into huge spiders building webs to catch and devour all who stood in their way. Less phantasmagorically, William Pitt warned that if the opinions of Tom Paine were allowed to spread unchecked among the common people ‘we should have bloody revolution’.

With the connivance of the government, pre-emptive action was taken. The militia was called out in 10 counties, but they looked the other way when the target of the mob was the radicals. Presses were smashed; literature deemed ‘seditious’ taken and burned. Cartoonists like the genius James Gillray were hired to show, as graphically as possible, what would happen should a revolution happen in Britain. John Reeves, a sometime chief justice of Newfoundland now returned to Britain, was so disturbed by the brazenness of the clubs that in November 1792 he founded his own Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Levellers and Republicans ‘to support the Laws, to suppress seditious Publications and to defend our Persons and Property’. As well as arming loyalists, the Association promoted the publication of tracts specifically to disabuse credulous working men of the views of Paine. Once war with the French had broken out in February 1793 a whole new seam of neurosis about the consequences of a French republican invasion could be richly mined. One of the tracts featured a patriotic master taking the time and effort to explain to his gullible apprentice just how wicked and dangerous Paine’s opinions were. ‘Right Master,’ replies his journeyman, overcome with gratitude. ‘I thank you for explaining all this and instead of going to the Liberty Club I will begin my work for I should not like to see the Frenchmen lie with my wife or take the bread out of my children’s mouths.’ The evangelical Hannah More, whose reputation had been built on improving literature for children, now took it on herself to supply timely patriotic definitions for all ages. Her
Village Politics
(1793) has ‘Jack Anvil’ explain to ‘Tom Hod’ that a democrat was ‘one who likes to be governed by a thousand tyrants and yet can’t bear a king’. The
Rights of Man
prescribed ‘battle, murder and sudden death’ and a ‘new
patriot’
was ‘someone who loves every country better than their own and France best of all’.

If, despite all the intimidation and danger, you were a committed ‘Friend of the People’ in the stormy years of 1792–3 what were your options? If you were prudent, and mistrustful of the excesses of Paine-ite revolutionary enthusiasm, you might make Thomas Bewick’s choice and decide to button your lip, hunker down and hope that at some time, preferably in the not too distant future, British common sense, public decency and justice
would
prevail. In the meantime he would content himself with reading the local radical newspaper,
The Oeconomist
(distributed in London by, of course, Joseph Johnson); or relish the ferociously satirical attacks on Pitt in, say, his old friend Thomas Spence’s
Pigs’ Meat, or Lessons from the Swinish Multitude
(1793–5); get on with his birds and beasts, and smuggle, for those who wanted to look carefully between the illustrations, images of brutality, misery, daring and death. Or, from the relative safety of a Hepplewhite chair in your club, you might cheer on the dwindling band of ‘New Whigs’ in parliament – Fox, Sheridan, Charles Grey and Shelburne – who persisted in opposition to measures infringing the freedom of press or suspending habeas corpus and who refused to recant their benevolent views about the French Revolution. Or, if you were very brave, very angry or very drunk on revolutionary optimism you might take the plunge and join one of those artisans’ clubs where you could drink rounds to the health of Paine, the imminent realization of a British republic and the death of despots. Given the ubiquitousness of government spies, you would be putting yourself in jeopardy, even for unguarded toasts. When John Thelwall, now the prime orator of the London Corresponding Society, swiped the froth off a head of beer and remarked (according to a spy), ‘This is the way I would serve up kings,’ the joke would come back to haunt him in the Old Bailey.

There was another option, of course: leaving Britain altogether. You could cross the Channel to inhale some of that heady air of liberty, equality and – especially – fraternity, and work for the day when you might return in the vanguard of the forces of freedom. The French seemed to be treating British radicals as brothers and sisters. Tom Paine had been made an honorary citizen. To go to the fountainhead of freedom and to drink deeply would be more than a gesture of political tourism. It was the promise of a new life.

Try as they might, however, not everyone could make the leap. At some point in the summer or autumn of 1792 John Thelwall took a little time off from lecturing on the cause of freedom and justice (to bigger and bigger crowds) to walk through Kent. In the guise of his literary
alter ego
,
the
Peripatetic Sylvanus Theophrastus, he arrives at the White Cliffs of Dover and looks out at the ‘foaming billows’ separating him from the land of liberty. The place for him is the essence of British sublimity, but there is so much to look at that he cannot decide whether the beach or the clifftop provides the more breathtaking view. He wants it all and scrambles up and down ‘above a dozen times’. But then he gets too ambitious and tries to climb a near perpendicular rock ‘with no better hold than a spray of elder, or a fragile tuft of thyme’. Three-quarters of the way there, the Peripatetic is well and truly stuck: no way up; no way down. Which describes allegorically, of course, Thelwall’s political predicament. The Cicero of the corresponding societies, arch-republican demagogue to the authorities, he has no way up, no way down. So he perches ‘though my heart beat an audible alarm … with all the calmness I was master of, beneath the hanging precipice, and contemplated the beautiful serenity of the spangled sea’. He turns ‘a longing eye towards the distant cliffs of France; and could not but regret the impossibility of exchanging my present situation for the more honourable … danger of defending with the sword of justice, the gallant struggles of that brave people in the cause of their new-born Liberty’.

He can’t do it. Ultimately he knows he is, in his way, a British patriot. His feet have to be on its ground. So somehow ‘I contrived to let myself down, from precipice to precipice, till I arrived at last in safety on the beach, together with a fleck of chalk, and a sprig of thyme … Trophies purchased with more innocence … than all the sanguinary honours of the plunderers and destroyers of the world: the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Edwards and the Henrys, by whom the peace of mankind has been so repeatedly disturbed.’ Poor Thelwall – who would end up trying to be a farmer in the Black Mountains of Wales at Llyswen before turning to elocution teaching in London – would always be on the verge of happiness.

IN THE SPRING
of 1792, and of his life, William Wordsworth had none of John Thelwall’s paralysing anxieties. Going to France was ‘pleasant exercise of hope and joy!’

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, us who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven!

That, at any rate, was the way he remembered it 12 years later even when he was feeling a lot less charitable towards the French Revolution. The chronicle of his journey in and out of revolution forms part of
The Prelude
, the greatest autobiographical poem in English (or perhaps any other European language); the first section of which was written in 1798–9, exactly at the point when Wordsworth was undergoing a deep change of heart.

The momentous theme of
The Prelude
is the struggle to hang on – through memory – to the instinctive life of childhood, even while being pulled inexorably towards an adult sense of individual self-consciousness. Immersion in nature is the great ally in this war against the inevitable erosion of innocence by time and social experience. Nature is freedom; the business of the world a prison. The mature Wordsworth becomes a child of nature again through the act of intense recollection. What he describes is a Cumbrian childhood spent escaping from, fighting against,
what
we would now call ‘socialization’: against the rote-learning, fact-packed lessons at his school in Hawkshead. Instead, nature was his tutor and his playground:

Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,

In a small mill-race severed from his stream,

Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;

Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again

Alternate, all a summer’s day …

or when rock and hill,

The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,

Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone

Beneath the sky, as if I had been born

On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut

Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport

A naked savage, in the thunder shower.

At St John’s College, Cambridge, Wordsworth was in no hurry to oblige his father’s expectation that he enter the Church or the law. Nor was he particularly enthralled with learning:

Of College labours, of the Lecturer’s room

All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand