The Years of Endurance (13 page)

These events, reinforced by Burke's constantly reiterated plea, thundered in the Commons, broadcast in pamphlets and repeated in every company, " to fly the French Revolution," not only split his own party but awoke the instinctive suspicion of innovation of the English people. He himself had praised their " sullen resistance of innovation,' " their unalterable perseverance in the wisdom of ancient prejudice." The dumb Tory majority, which had hitherto regarded Burke with profound distrust, now praised him with more vehemence than intelligence. The more viofent the proceedings in France, the more tightly did they shut their minds to anything savouring of novelty. The liberal tide which had been flowing in England since the American war began to ebb fast. A modest measure of electoral reform—no more than Pitt himself had advocated a few years earlier—was rejected by the Commons at the instance of the charming but alarmist William Windham, hitherto an ardent Liberal, on the ground that it was insanity to repair one's house in the hurricane season. Even Wilberforce's annual motion for the abolition of the slave trade—now at last on the verge of triumph—was unexpectedly defeated in 1791 owing to the panic caused by the rising of the French slaves in Santo Domingo.

These alarms were fanned by th
e uncritical enthusiasm for the
Revolution of a small but very voc
al minority which identified it
with its own hopes and ambitions.
In England it was drawn mainly
from the middle-class urban Dissenters who welcomed the French
doctrine of civil and religious eq
uality and were more accustomed
to—and therefore less suspicious o
f—abstract generalisations than
the mass of their rustic countrymen.
In imitation of Parisian models these
worthy people formed " Constitutional" and " Cor
respond
ing " Societies in various parts of
the country which earnestly de
bated French principles, urged their adoption in England and exchanged fraternal greetings with their apostles across the Channel. They did little harm beyond encouraging the more foolish French politicians to imagine that they represented British opinion. But the topic
s they discussed so loudly -dee
ply alarmed their conservative neighbours. With 'King Louis a prisoner in his palace and French seigneurs and priests fleeing for their lives from-
mob violence, it was disturbing to learn that Mr. Price, the eloquent Dissenting
preacher, had told the London Revolutionary Society that the British people might also depose their King and nobles and remodel the Church an
d State. The religious strifes o
f the seventeenth-century were not wholly forgotten: there were still men living
whose grandfathers had suffered proscription for
the Anglican
faith. They viewed the harmless
D
issenting controversialists
of their-own day as descendants o
f the fanatics who had sent the
King to the scaffold, plundered the ca
thedrals and set up the ugly
tyranny of the Saints and Major Generals.

Feeling was aggravated by a
spate of pamphlets. Burke's
Re
flections
provoked no less than thirty-eight replies.
¹
The most famous of these
was
The Rights of Man,
the wo
rk of an ex-staymaker named Tom
Paine who had taken part in the American rebellion and had now thrown in his lot with the French. Forcibly argued and lucidly-written, it was-suited to simple intelligences unable to grasp
Burke's profounder points, with
which—particular
ly with his high-flown passages
—it made admira
ble sport. Much of it was good
sense: " the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave," Paine wrote of Burke's historical polemics,
"is
the most ridiculous a
nd insolent of all tyrannies." O
ne of his great points was that the Revolution, being directed not against persons but against principles, had been attended by very litt
le bloodshed: " -among the few that
fell there do not appear to be any that were intentionally singled out.
...
.Whom has the National Assembly brought to the scaffold ? "; he- asked.

Circulated by the Constitutional Societies at 6d. and-even
¹
less, and-dedicated to the great though—in England—suspect name-of Washington,
The Rights of Man
had an immense sale and helped to

¹
The most important was Sir
:
James Mackintosh's scholarly
Vindiciae Gallicae
in which he prophesied that an attempt of foreign kings to crush the revol
ution in France would recoil on
their own heads.

stimulate the formation of radical clubs in a lower strata of society than had hitherto been touched by political controversy. The appearance of a workmen's club in a Westminster alehouse at the beginning of 1792 and of another at Sheffield caused a stir utterly disproportionate to the numbers engaged.
¹
Here, solid Englishmen reflected of Paine's attack on the Constitution, was a fellow—a Radical, an atheist and perhaps worse—preaching that every violent act committed by a lot of excitable, bloodthirsty Frenchmen was right and demanding that England should throw over the sober gains of centuries, which he had the impertinence to refer to as badges of Norman servitude. The insular hackles rose.

The unreflecting multitude, in whom anti-Gallican feeling was never far from
the
surface, was quick to respond. When on July 14th, 1791, some middle-class sympathisers with France organised public dinners to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, there were riots in the provincial towns. At Birmingham, where provocative handbills had been scattered through the streets and a church chalked " This barn to let," the mob rose in all its ignorant savagery, wrecked Dissenting meeting houses and burnt the house and library of the famous scientist, Dr. Priestley. For four days the whole of the loyal, royal west midlands was in a tumult, till the 15th Dragoons, covering fifty-six miles in a day, rode into Birmingham amid multitudes shouting " Down with the Rump ! " " No philosophers
!
" " Church and King! " The Government, faced by that infectious violence which revolutionary ideology always provokes in both sides and wishing to preserve order at home and peace abroad, abhorred the idea of an ideological front against the Revolution.
²
But the danger of such a front, with its threat to the tranquillity of Europe, was growing.

In May, 1790, the new rulers of France professing peace and retrenchment—principles which naturally endeared them to Pitt—

¹
These were trifling. As Burke pointed out in his
Reflections,
the attention drawn to themselves by the agitators was misleading. " Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field."

²
Grenville, the Foreign Secretary, wrote : " I do not admire riots in favour of government much more than riots against it."—
Pitt and the Great War,
19.

solemnly renounced war and aggression for ever. One deputy, Maximilien Robespierre, went so far as to declare
that
France regarded her existing frontiers as fixed by an eternal destiny. But those who, relying on this, hoped that the Revolution was not for export were soon disillusioned. That autumn at Avignon—a
little
enclave of Papal territory surviving from
the
Middle Ages—the people, catching the reforming fervour, rose and offered themselves to France. The Assembly accepted the offer and sent troops to take over the territory. It was argued that
there
was no " conquest" since the consent of the inhabitants had been secured. Yet it was significant that that consent had been expressed not by ballot but by a riot. It was still more so that the foreign sovereign dispossessed was never consulted.

Thereafter " ambassadors of the human species "—in other words
gentle
men who for some reason or another were at divergence
with
their own rulers—began to arrive in Paris and to offer their respective countries to France. The Assembly in its mood of boundless benevolence towards humanity applauded their flattering confidence. It all seemed innocent enough: statesmen, it was felt, need not take these Gallic ebullitions very seriously.

Yet there were many who did. The strictures of the revolutionaries against princes and nobles were too sweeping to be comfortably received in a monarchical and aristocratic continent. Paris was not a remote academy for the discussion of abstract principles but the capital of the first military power in Europe. In Germany in particular, with its innumerable petty Courts and principalities, the democratic frenzy was regarded with acute distrust. Many of the Imperial princes, who still possessed estates in former German provinces conquered by France, had been directly hit by the abolition of feudal dues. All had a lively recollection of the French invasions of Germany during the past hundred and fifty years. It was all very well for France to renounce aggression, but Teutons brought up on stories of the Thirty Years War and the ravages of Louis XIV's armies asked incredulously if the tiger could change his stripes.

The largest Teuton rulers, better able to protect themselves, took a calmer view of the situation. The Emperor Leopold and the King of Prussia had nothing to fear from an army whose officers were daily fleeing their country and whose discipline had been undermined by the folly of their civil rulers. As a concession to the smaller princes of the Reich and to the hysterical French refugees who were sheltering from the revolution on German soil they made a vague agreement to keep an eye on their volatile western neighbour. But they were far more distrustful of one another and interested in the situation which was developing on their eastern frontiers. For here the ancient kingdom of Poland, long torn by feudal dissensions, was on the verge of final collapse. Fifteen years before, Austria, Russia and Prussia had helped themselves to the outlying parts of its territories. Now under the lead of the Empress Catherine of Russia they were contemplating a new partition. Alarmed by an eleventh-hour attempt of the more patriotic Polish nobles to save their country by reforming its anarchical constitution, the insatiable old woman affected a violent horror of the French Revolution whose subversive influences she pretended to see at work in Poland. It was as the alleged champion of order against anarchy that she prepared to invade that country while urging Austria and Prussia to do the same thing in France.

Such was the position at the time of the flight to Varennes in the summer of 1791. The insults to his sister, Marie Antoinette, placed Leopold of Austria—a sensible and moderate man—in a dilemma. Wishing to be free to watch Russia and Prussia, he did not want to become embroiled with France. On the other hand, he could not wholly ignore what was happening in the west. For Leopold was not only hereditary ruler of the twenty million inhabitants of the Hapsburg dominions in Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Belgium and Lombardy. He was also as Holy Roman Emperor the elected protector of the three hundred and fifty-eight minor German States in the centre of Europe. He could not wholly ignore the wishes and fears of their rulers. He was also a Catholic sovereign, subject to the influence of the Pope, who was deeply hurt by the annexation of Avignon, the disestablishment of the Church of France and the expulsion of his Legate from Paris. Under these influences Leopold issued on July
6th
a circular letter to his fellow-sovereigns suggesting some kind of joint European action to secure the release from restraint of the Most Christian King and his Queen.

The British Government, as was expected, declined this invitation.

It expressed, sympathy with the French Royal Family but made the possibility of British co-operation dependent on a general European settlement guaranteeing the future integrity of Poland and Turkey —both threatened by Russia and Austria—and the restoration of the balance of power. Britain was not interested in ideological fronts or the internal affairs of other countries.
¹
Under these circumstances the furthest step which Leopold would take was a joint Declaration with Prussia, issued at Pillnitz on August 27th, expressing the hope that the European nations would act together to place the King of France in a position in harmony with the rights of sovereigns and the well-being of his people. But as Britain would not co-operate, the Declaration was a mere farce.