THE CLOSE OF 1795 provided Coleridge with the occasion to apply certain of his general political principles to specific questions of policy and legislation. During his Bristol Lectures in February 1795 and throughout his revision and publication of those lectures as Conciones ad Populum in December 1795, Coleridge methodically anatomized the connections between historical process, public opinion, and political change. As a consequence, he was able to set his attacks on the Pitt administration, charged as they were by the crisis of the war, within the context of the long-standing Whig tradition of oppositional loyalism. This “patriot” loyalism, pairing the attack on government with the defense of the realm, constituted Coleridge’s first efforts at distinguishing between the uses of a small “s” state, connoting government, and a larger idea of the “State” as nation and realm comprising the activities, interests, and communal histories of the commonwealth.
A close reading of the antiministerial pamphlet The Plot Discovered (1795) suggests it was precisely this characteristically Whig preoccupation with the constitutional crisis of the moment that characterized Coleridge’s early career as a journalist, social critic, and political thinker. The constitutional crisis, which began with the State Treason Trials of September 1794 and culminated in the passage of the antisedition laws in December 1795 implied, in Coleridge’s estimation, a threat to British juridical freedoms through the creation of what amounted to a form of ministerial prerogative. Coleridge described Pitt’s wartime creation of emergency powers as “Ministerial Treason.” Portrayed in this light, the prime minister’s treachery consisted of transferring the executive power from the Crown to the cabinet. By doing so, Coleridge argued, Pitt exerted an increasing and unconstitutional legislative control in the House of Commons over King George’s Crown authority. But beyond the parliamentary usurpation of the king’s constitutional role in the house, Coleridge also regarded the tentacles of Pitt’s conspiracy as reaching beyond Parliament. The passage of the two acts against seditious practices extended legislative despotism (in the form of corrupt statute) out of doors, beyond the Commons, to regulate thought and to censor the voice of public opinion expressed in print and in the speech of public lectures such as Coleridge’s own. Such censorship amounted to more than mere legislative tyranny. In Coleridge’s estimation, Pitt’s plot operated on a deeper level by gagging the “authentic” voice of the people of which the monarch, or lex magestis, was the purest constitutional embodiment.
Coleridge’s neo-Polybian analysis of the British Constitution was not an inherently radical one. Rather, it worked well within the mainstream of an older Whig polemic portraying the constitution as a sublime and ancient instrument of historical and organic refinements. While the ancient constitution had suffered recent perversions and deformities and was in need of remedy for these corruptions, extending the democratical powers of the British parliament was not, in Coleridge’s estimation, the proper remedy—not the proper means of restitution and reform.
Like Montesquieu and Bolingbroke, Coleridge was an advocate of a system of checks and balances moderated by gradual adjustments. While his oppositional writings were hostile to the “aristocrats” they were vehemently protective of the landed interest. Certainly this was the case where the term “aristocrat” stood as a factional label for despotic baronacy corrupted by money and the term “landed interest” was identified with virtuous and independent gentry. While these distinctions may have contained “radical” associations in a seventeenth-century context, they must be placed within a more moderate and far less “revolutionary” framework in later eighteenth-century political discourse.
Coleridge’s earliest political debt was to Burke’s revolutionary writings on the American War. Although his own antiministerial writings of 1795 were decidedly antiwar and so parted company with Burke’s position on the French Revolution, Coleridge’s opinions were strongly Burkean with regard to the proper course of English parliamentary reform. This would require a delicate tuning of the existing powers of king, Lords, and Commons and not some comprehensive, far-reaching democratic republican reform founded on the unchecked popular power of a single unicameral assembly. The British Constitution could only be tempered by gradual and organic (or natural) historical change and through the mediating force of traditional institutions such as the Common Law. One could not tune such a sensitive instrument by severing the monarchy and aristocracy, as Robespierre had done in France. But equally, a constitutional balance could not be achieved, as Pitt wished to do in Britain, by stifling and silencing the voice of the common people. According to Coleridge, all efforts to rapidly change the constitution of the realm through “plots” without consulting the mediated consent of its people—whether undertaken by “radicals” such as Robespierre or “conservatives” such as Pitt—were equally heinous.1 Indeed, both the background to the passage of the “Two Acts” and Coleridge’s pamphlet response, The Plot Discovered, underline the volatile combination of glass houses and thrown stones in the war-torn and famine-strapped Britain of 1795.
On 16 October 1795, unknown individuals in an immense crowd threw stones at George III’s carriage as that monarch rode toward the houses of Parliament in order to open their session.2 This endangerment of the king in itself was nothing new; previous British kings had confronted far greater dangers from trained assassins3 or well-aimed enemy guns4 than George III did from amateurish rock-lobbing malcontents. However, in the climate of 1795—in the aftermath of the repeated humiliations of Louis XVI by the Parisian mobs in the years leading up to his execution—the stone throwing took on much larger dimensions than it would have in safer and saner years. The king, whose popularity had soared in the wake of his mental illness and recovery in 1788 and 1789, was now perceived by many to be deeply hated.5 Indeed, the symbolism of the thrown stone suggested that there was a new and profound disrespect, of national proportion, for the institutions of king, church, and aristocracy. Conservative thinkers depicted this disrespect as emanating from a volatile combination of two elements. The first of these was the French, or Jacobin, theory that was carelessly parroted by the ambitious “radical” intelligentsia and the “revolutionary” rich, the second was the consequence of the hunger and resentments of the angry plebeian mob.6
William Pitt responded to, or perhaps used, the isolated episode of the hurled stones as the pretext to introduce two new pieces of legislation. The two bills against “seditious writings” and public meetings passed into law on 18 December 1795. Those oppositional presses and pamphleteers who were the ostensible targets of these laws quickly nicknamed the legislation the “gagging” acts. The first of the bills limited the freedom of the press. The “Treason Bill” expanded the old treason laws of 1336 (25 Edward 3) well beyond the sphere of overt actions.7 The new definition of “treason” would even include works of theory or imagination, either spoken or printed, which seemed to cause disaffection between the subject and the monarch. The new treason law aimed to constrain or silence the rising tide of writing, publication, and circulation of “seditious” literature, such as The Rights of Man. Such books, which had become popular in their cheap editions, were presumed by conservative critics to inflame the minds and hearts of Britons towards rebellion.
The second bill restricted the right of assembly. The “Convention Bill” stated that no more than fifty people were allowed to be in the audience of any public political meeting.8 This aimed to put an end to the sort of large, crowded meetings and monster rallies favored by London “radicals,” numbers that the Gordon Riots and the French Revolution had proven were essential to form the nucleus of a powerful mob. The law was described as a moderate measure toward the prevention of riot, but the “radicals” considered it to be a strategy for crippling their access to the ears of the people at large and as such an impediment to their purported plans for the mobilization of the unpoliticized masses.
“Radical” organizations, such as the London Corresponding Society, complained that Pitt’s legislation constituted a direct persecution of the reform societies and was not the sincere and reasonable response to the threat of revolt that it claimed to be. Significantly, the meetings of both the Whig club and the London Corresponding Society on 10 November 1795 to protest against the two bills suggest the disproportionate nature of the government response.9 While the reaction of the LCS was to be expected, even moderate Whig critics such as the Earl of Lauderdale dismissed the theory that there was a clear or present “Jacobin” danger to the realm. Lauderdale maintained that the new legislation was in truth designed for the Pitt government’s own nefarious purposes of expanding administration and Crown powers at the expense of the traditional rights of Britons.10 Whig Parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan went so far as to contend that the final objective of the legislation was to be the consolidation of what amounted to executive powers in cabinet.11
Critics of the Pitt Administration during the winter of 1795 murmured that the government’s new legislation laid the groundwork for a grander scheme by the prime minister and his cabal to stifle the popular press. By silencing the press, they claimed, Pitt hoped to dampen the public objections to the war policy that had thwarted, or at the least nipped at the heels of, Crown and administration powers. Coleridge launched his own critique of the bills in the midst of the violent and accusatory paranoia of the debate. Pittites, who viewed those who opposed the bills as Jacobins who would murder the king if they could, clashed with “patriots,” who viewed the proponents of the bills as absolutists who would murder the constitution if given the chance.
The pamphlet The Plot Discovered was the result of an earlier lecture that Coleridge had delivered on 26 November 1795. The advertisement ran in the Bristol Gazette that same morning, giving notice that “On Thursday evening next, seven o’clock …, S. T. Coleridge” would “deliver an address to the inhabitants of Bristol on the two bills now pending in parliament.” The performance took place in “the Great Room, at the Pelican Inn, Thomas Street” in Bristol. The price of admittance was one shilling.12At the time of the lecture, the Treason Bill had passed its third reading in the Lords and its second in the Commons. The Convention Bill had passed its second reading in the Commons and had not yet been heard in the Lords. There was, therefore, a degree of urgency behind Coleridge’s intervention. It was essential that the address in Bristol deliver a decisive rhetorical blow to the atmosphere of panic that the government had so carefully constructed. For this reason, The Plot aimed at a careful rhetorical balance between moderating reasonability and persuasive passion. Coleridge for his part believed that the bills marked a new attempt by a small self-interested group in Parliament to destroy the British liberties guaranteed in the constitution and to institute a new form of absolute power grounded in the first minister rather than the king.
In his own theory of what was taking place in 1795, Coleridge saw King George as the pawn of the younger Pitt. It was Pitt, and not the king, who had been the target of the mob’s stone-throwing fury, who was the true beneficiary of the “Gagging Acts.” Coleridge regarded Pitt as a great evil genius, in the tradition of Cromwell, Richelieu, Mazarin, and Robespierre. Like all of those political operators who were capable of leading monarchs and indeed entire peoples by the nose, Pitt was convincing the people’s representatives in Parliament to hand over their liberties and rights to his dictatorship in the putative interest of their own safety and well-being. Pitt’s bid to centralize parliamentary power through a war cabinet, which allocated to itself extreme emergency powers, spoke in the Jacobin language of the day.13 Arguing in terms of public safety and the security of the realm, it was in truth simply a plan to gain unparalleled and centralized authority in the state. In the interest of attacking this newly crafted and absolutist Pittite state, Coleridge defended the traditions of the balanced constitution.
Coleridge cleverly dubbed Pitt’s shadowy plan “the Plot.” The very act of calling it a “Plot” conjured up images of wicked deeds done by cover of night, of muttered whispers by cloaked figures, of secret writings which meant things other than they seemed to mean on the surface, of visible puppets and unseen puppet masters. The term “plot” bore a plethora of connotations, all negative, to the reading public of 1795. The term had been used frequently in popular entertainments, including plays such as Ottway’s Venice Preserved: Or, the Plot Discovered. English history in particular was riddled with “plots” and “plotters,” particularly in the Elizabethan and Stuart eras. The word “plot” almost always connoted evil and treasonous activity. In English history, plots had been levelled, traditionally against the monarch, but sometimes against the nation at large. They include the “Gunpowder Treason and Plot” (1605), the “Popish Plot” (1678), the “Meal Tub Plot,” the “Rye House Plot” (1683), the “Assassination Plot” (1696), the “Atterbury Plot” (1722), and the “Elibank Plot” (1754). The early reign of George III had also seen reference made by the Rockingham Whigs to the “Shadow Cabinet” of the king’s evil adviser Lord Bute (see the North Briton papers of the 1760s). These are but a few resonant examples for audiences of the 1790s.
The word “plot” carried with it the idea of the normal routines and procedures of governance and change being subverted by clever and demonic men who, unlike quotidian politicians, were willing to transgress any law or standard they needed to in order to grab power. By entitling his pamphlet-rebuke of the two acts The Plot Discovered or an Attack Against Ministerial Treason, Coleridge suggested that the very men who claimed to pass legislation designed to stop secret conspiracy and plotting against the constitution by Jacobins were themselves the true plotters against the nation. The true English Jacobins featured in Coleridge’s Plot Discovered were the king’s own ministers. This metaphor of “the Plot” and “Ministerial Treason” was artful, not only because it applied the very accusations that Pitt’s administration had made against John Thelwall and Thomas Hardy to Pitt himself, but because it did so by employing the well-worn and time honored strategy of blaming the king’s “wicked ministers” while absolving the king of any wrongdoing. Thus, it would be read within the limits of the classic trope of Whig monarchial constitutionalism.
The true plot, Coleridge implied, was not Hardy’s proreform public meetings with “members unlimited,” but Pitt’s elite and secret cabal. Secret cabals met behind locked doors. Their proceedings were not subject to spying by the radicals in the same way that the proceedings of the radicals were subject to spying by the government. The true treason, Coleridge insinuated, was not Thelwall’s public lectures and their buzz of democratic arcana that would probably never amount to anything concrete, but Pitt’s secret machinations that had already resulted in a set of concrete and powerful bills. Such bills would, if passed Coleridge asserted, undoubtedly silence all voices in favour of liberty, present and past. The ideas of “plot” and “treason” played well into Coleridge’s own vision of himself as critic and “Watchman.” Coleridge, as we have seen, persistently thought of himself as an independent voice that dared to point out the evildoings that went unnoticed by a supine people. Coleridge’s identity as a “Watchman” was presumably tied up with his vision of himself as one of the few honest men who dared to venture out to locate and uncover the secret plotting of the “shadow monarchy” with Pitt as its king. In this sense, the worse and more lethal the plot and treason were, the more they made Coleridge’s work as a discoverer of them seem an act of importance, heroism, and vision.
Coleridge pointed out to his audience that the “ministerial treason” had two main objectives. The first was to silence the voice of public opinion and criticism that would have ordinarily acted to discover and expose the unconstitutionality of the plot and challenge Pitt’s expanded authority. The second goal was to expand the legislative power of the first minister in such a way as to overrun the executive power of the king and the judicial power of the courts. By means of these two strategies, Pitt hoped to achieve unprecedented, extraordinary, and dictatorial powers. This grab for power by Pitt, Coleridge maintained, was the true goal of “the Plot.” Coleridge remarked that “in all ministerial measures” there were “two reasons, the real and the ostensible…. The ostensible reason for the bill,” to combat sedition and rebellion, “we have heard,” he noted. “The real” reason for the legislation was hidden from view but not impossible to detect. Coleridge reassured his audience that the secret plans of the cabinet “will not elude the search of common sagacity.”14
The long-range but hidden grand-strategic rationale for the two acts was far more worrying and ultimately much more destabilizing than Pitt’s present tactical efforts at the censorship of books and public meetings, Coleridge argued. Thelwall, the corresponding societies, and “republican thought” were only the closest and most unpopular targets of the bills. Pitt’s true goals were far more expansive. Pitt had wisely chosen the extremist “Jacobins” as his first target. He had done so with the full knowledge that he could exploit the “moderate” reformists’ and Tory and Whig constitutionalists’ fears of the “Democrats.” Pitt, argued Coleridge, hoped to hustle the moderates into granting the administration and Crown emergency powers of suppression and prerogative to fight their common enemy. These powers, Coleridge pointed out, were of a height and extent which the moderates who supported the acts out of fear would ordinarily, in a time of peace free from anxiety about sedition, have opposed on the grounds that they were blatantly unconstitutional.
Coleridge identified four pillars of despotism in his analysis of Pitt’s architecture of tyranny. In The Plot Discovered Coleridge wrote that there were “four things which being combined constitute Despotism.” His purpose in writing The Plot was to point out how perilously close Pitt was to achieving the goals of his “Treason” and “Plot.” “Let the present Bills pass,” Coleridge warned, “and these four things will be all found in the British government.”15 It is worth examining three of these four factors in depth, since they served as the general definition of “despotism” around which Coleridge built his critique of Pitt’s “plot.”
Pitt undertook the first ingredient of despotism argued Coleridge, for the true mark of tyranny was “the confusion of the executive and legislative branches.” Pitt intended to accomplish this task by silencing public opinion and its embodiment in regal “Majesty.” Although Pitt publicly claimed to be acting to defend King George’s safety and honor, Coleridge alleged that this served as pretence for Pitt’s treasonable stifling of the public’s impassioned petitions and prayers to their majesty the king. In separating the voice of the people from the king, Coleridge maintained, the first minister weakened and enfeebled royal power by separating it from its source in the millions of common people.
The second prop of despotism was “the direct or indirect exclusion of all popular interference” in government.16 This Pitt had done by the gagging acts, which excluded popular “out of doors” participation in government by preventing the previously legal and definitely constitutional privileges of free speech and public assembly. As Coleridge explained, although the “feelings” of the people were not always articulately or coherently expressed, they were nonetheless an important component in the British Constitution. The House of Commons alone was not sufficient to express this public opinion even in an uncorrupted state, Coleridge claimed. Informal, extraparliamentary means such as petitions, lectures, newspapers, and pamphlets were equally “constitutional” as components of the people’s representation, or “popular interference,” in the polity.
The third component was “A large military force kept separate from the people.”17 This Pitt had done by inventing high ministerial war powers, thereby taking away from the king the time-honored and constitutional royal prerogative of amassing and directing the army and navy and levying war. Coleridge’s disapproval of the war against France stemmed in part from his loathing of Pitt’s hypocritical crusade against the sort of republic Pitt had once applauded. Pitt, like Edmund Burke, had been an erstwhile supporter of American liberty. Although neither Pitt nor Burke would see much similarity between the French and American cases, Coleridge believed them to be common causes, an insight that must identify Coleridge’s French sympathies with the early and constitutional phase of the revolution. However, the deeper anxiety underpinning Coleridge’s antiwar sentiment was born of a conviction that the prime minister, as mastermind of the war, had stolen—from the king, the houses of Parliament, and the common people—the power to guide or censure the country’s conduct. Since Pitt had essentially defined opposition to his war against the French Republic as a treasonable and disloyal defense of regicide republicanism, he had separated the war powers in the state from the people, from their legislators, and from their king.
The fourth element was a misuse of the judiciary: “when the punishments of state offenders are heavy and determined, but what constitutes state offenses left indefinite, that is, dependent on the will of the minister, or the interpretation of the judge.”18 This Pitt had done by the vague wording of the treason bill, which could theoretically result in the hanging of a man for printing a copy of Plato’s Republic. Coleridge disliked the granting of heavy prerogatives to judges and ministers, because this traduced the tradition of Common Law.
From Coleridge’s sketch of the four pillars of despotism, an ideal type of a bad government, one may easily infer what he thought a free and good government contained. First, he implied that a free government separated rather than confused “the executive and legislative branches.” Second, he argued that a free government included rather than excluded the voice of “popular interference” in its deliberations; while it was not directly democratic, it was thereby virtually representative, since it listened closely to “out of doors” opinion. Third, he maintained that a free government kept the standing army small and under the control of the national consensus rather than of the first minister’s or king’s whim alone. Fourth, he implicitly stated that a free government in its laws carefully and accurately defined a small number of “state offences.” Such a free government did not use statute to offer prerogative powers and strong discretion to the Crown or to the bench. Rather, a free government left the greater measure of latitude to the Common Law, in the hands of the jury rather than “on the will of the minister or the interpretation of the judge.”
It remains to consider Coleridge’s treatment of three of the four pillars of despotism as he analyzed them in The Plot. These three principles as problematics follow roughly from the following assertions: first, Coleridge’s contention that “the confusion of the executive and legislative branches” was implicit in Pitt’s overwhelming of the king and the courts in his grab for power; second, that “the direct or indirect exclusion of all popular interference” was the direct consequence of the censorship imposed by the passage of the two acts; third, Coleridge’s construction of the practical weakness of the law “when the punishments of state offenders are heavy and determined, but what constitutes state offences left indefinite, that is, dependent on the will of the minister, or the interpretation of the judge,” which means that the weakness of the treason law was implicit in its framing rather than its application, in its theory rather than its practice.
Drawing on the ideas of Bolingbroke and Burgh, Coleridge focused on the ancient constitution as insuring the independence of the legislative power of Parliament from the executive power of Crown and ministry.19 The “plot” undermined and sapped precisely this independence. Pitt used positive law, Coleridge argued, conceived and executed by his junto in the cabinet, to corrupt the free representative voice of the House of Commons. Pitt’s plot, as Coleridge depicted it, subverted the formal (virtual) representative voice of the house and its informal corollary in “out of doors” (direct) public opinion. The treason, if it succeeded, would create a consolidated cabinet executive that would unite in the single person of First Minister Pitt the powers that had formerly under the constitution been separated in the branches of Crown (executive), Parliament (legislative), and courts (judicial).
Coleridge held the merging of the legislative power of the first minister with the executive power of the Crown in the person of Pitt to be the ultimate form of despotism. Pitt’s plan was particularly devious as it also intruded the minister’s reach into the system of justice. Coleridge’s arguments against the plot bore a striking resemblance to those of Blackstone whose principles became axiomatic among theorists of constitutional balance by 1795:
[Liberty] cannot subsist long in any state, unless the administration of common justice be in some degree separated from the legislative and also from the executive power. Were it joined with the legislative, the life, liberty and property of the subject would be in the hands of arbitrary judges, whose opinions would then be regulated only by their own opinions … were it joined with the executive, this union might soon be an overbalance for the legislative.20
Coleridge had already indicted Pitt for upsetting the balance of the constitution in the earlier lecture On the Present War: “who is this Minister, to whom we have thus implicitly trusted every blessing?”21 He contended in On the Present War that Pitt had, for almost two years, conducted his war with France in opposition to the voice of the House of Commons and the will of the people. Through the creation of faction and coalition, through the smoke screen of a war against radical agitation fought by treason trials and suspensions of habeas corpus, Pitt had gathered the reins of all three branches of government into his hands.22
Coleridge’s criticisms of Pitt’s “plot” considered the force of the “Ancient Constitution” as mediated through the institutional workings of the “Balanced Constitution.” Fusing the traditional accounts of history and law, long invoked by the common lawyers, with the discourses of morality and opinion favored by the polemic of skeptical Whiggery after 1688, Coleridge attempted to set the case for legitimacy in both the language of juridical science and customary right. Accordingly, Coleridge argued that the “science of the legislator” was an extension of the “science of history.”
Coleridge depicted the British Constitution as the tripartite system that Montesquieu and De Lolme had described. Two houses, one popular and one hereditary, and a king who was the symbolic and historical union of both, generated policy, instituted laws, and appointed and sustained an independent judiciary to interpret and apply those laws as justice. In its mediation between the national interest and what he frequently defined as “the harmony of government,” the constitution was at one and the same moment both a stable and disinterested line of traditions and an active interpreter of the immediate needs of the polity. As such, Coleridge considered it to be more than the sum of its parts: more than the division of powers, more than an accumulation of statutes, and more than popular contemporary reflections of political interests. Coleridge viewed the constitution in organic terms as an active living agent, with memory, capacity, and intentions. In his theory of the constitution, Coleridge distinguished between “Constitution” and “Government” and “People.” His extended conception of a “State” embraced all three of these elements even as it transcended their limitations.
This distinction was emphasized by Coleridge in his contention that mere “government” alone, in the sense of a clearly recognized authority rather than chaos, was not enough. The state had to be governed by more than iron-handed coercion if a free government was to be markedly different from a slave plantation. Coleridge scoffed at Pitt’s excuse that the emergency measures were designed to preserve freedom and “government” from the sedition of English Jacobins. Once the emergency powers of coercion were granted to Pitt, Coleridge complained, there would be no more British freedom to protect from the Jacobins: “A government indeed we should have had: there is not a slave plantation in the world that has not a government!” On the other hand, he pointed out, “a constitution[,] if it means anything, signifies certain known laws, which limit the expectation of the people and the discretionary power of the legislature.”23
Believing that the distinction between the people and the legislature had been made in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, Coleridge claimed that it was a historically established principle of the constitution that the law was sovereign over the political wills of Parliament or the king. This same principle of law guaranteed “constituted” opinion through the liberty of the press. Dickinson has described the distinction between the arguments in favor of the “Ancient Constitution” versus those in favor of “Revolution Principles.”24 Coleridge, borrowing as it pleased him from both these traditions, believed that both constitutional history and the Common Law had been vindicated and perfected in the 1689 Bill of Rights. The bill, he believed, formally established the sovereignty of law over the political agitations of Crown versus Parliament, agitations that had led to the unlawful absolutist dictatorship of King Charles in the 1630s and the equally unlawful absolutist dictatorship of the Rump Parliament in the 1640s. Still, he emphasized his suspicion of positive law removed from the moorings of historical practice, and also the distinction between law in its broadest sense and statutes that served immediate legislative corruption.
The first axiom that Coleridge drew was from Montesquieu’s theory of balances in the constitution. He argued that “the people,” represented “by their proxies in the House of Commons,” were “a check on the [influence of the] nobility” of the realm, thereby preventing the excesses of aristocratic caballing and oligarchy.25 Coleridge himself asserted that the government of Britain was intended to rule “by” or “with” “the people” rather than “over” them. Theories that had claimed otherwise, he characterized as inherently despotic.26 Coleridge used the term “people” to describe three major interests in the nation. He used the word, in his discussions of constituted government, specifically to denote the House of Commons. But he also used it in a broader sense, to include two groups who embodied public opinion “out of doors,” beyond the narrow purview of Parliament. The first of these two groups comprised the literate and educated classes. This group made its voice heard through newspapers, pamphlets, and public lectures like Coleridge’s.
The second of the two groups considered institutionally significant by Coleridge was that of the lower orders. This group, lacking the literacy, education, and money which would admit it to the true sphere of enlightened public opinion, made its “response” (if not its “opinion”) felt through the cruder discourse of criminal activity and mob violence. This broader national sensibility, which included and incorporated social unrest, existed as a diffuse but palpable form of opinion. At the level, therefore, that order may be disrupted and property threatened by this lowest stratum of the people, Coleridge recognized some limited degree of a consensus of the poor. But the lower orders had no claim to direct or unmediated political presence in Coleridge’s conception either of government or of public opinion. Still, Coleridge emphasized, the legitimate needs of the unenfranchised must be considered by those who inhabited the parliamentary constitutional sphere. The opinion of the extraparliamentary elite, responding as it must to the needs and tempers of the poor, actively shaped public opinion and government policy.
The “people” then, in Coleridge’s use of the term, were dually represented in the constitution. Firstly, they sent over four hundred representatives to the House of Commons, at least a few of whom purported directly to represent the local interest of any given citizen through county or borough seats, and the remainder of whom aspired virtually to represent them as composing the national interest. Secondly, they were represented as a class, along with all of the subjects of the realm, by the “majesty” of the Crown.
Coleridge reminded his audience that new laws, if not forged in the tempering fires of precedent and the Common Law, were merely arbitrary edicts and were not to be thought of as “the voice of the people” speaking through its representatives. Statutes that broke with the historical traditions of English law in favor of sudden novelty and innovation were to be considered aberrant and perverse. They were, in this regard, as despotic an act of law as any absolute monarch’s fiat, even if they were rubber-stamped by Parliament claiming (wrongly) to act as representatives of the people.
Coleridge referred to the political genius of Lord Burleigh, whom he claimed stood as witness that the danger of an unhinged Commons was recognized almost two centuries before Pitt: “England can never be undone except by a parliament.”27 The Common Law, argued Coleridge, trued the balance between the Crown and Parliament. This ultimate sovereignty of law was the defining principle of the good republic. England, he argued, had been in essence a good republic since the guarantee of the Bill of Rights. Underlining his point, Coleridge pointed out that Burleigh’s contention that Parliament might undo the nation by acting irresponsibly had been made in a time “before the contract of the Bill of Rights had been entered into by the people and their governors,” William and Mary. “But now” Coleridge opined “we cannot [legally] be undone even by a parliament.” Placing these arguments in the context of Bolingbroke’s constitutional republicanism, Coleridge concluded finally “Parliament cannot annul the constitution.”28
Coleridge’s intrinsically positive critique of magnate oligarchy depended on preserving the role of the nobility in the constitution. The second axiom which Coleridge drew from Montesquieu’s theory of balances in the constitution was that “the nobility,” represented directly on a one-seat-for-one-noble basis in the House of Lords,29 were “a check on the [influence of the] people,” thereby preventing the excesses of mob rule and demagoguery.30 The Lords had significant power in the Parliament, not only by virtue of sitting in their own rights but by their exercise of political patronage in those “corrupt” seats in the Commons which they “owned’—and in which they could place pliant eldest sons and other henchmen. Recognizing this double influence in the upper house, Coleridge advocated a strengthened voice in the lower house. In the House of Commons, Coleridge complained, “three hundred and six [M.P.s] are nominated or caused to be returned by one hundred and sixty Peers and commoners with the treasury.” These “three hundred and six” members were “more than a majority” in a house of only five hundred and thirteen members. “The majority therefore of the house of Commons,” Coleridge concluded, “are the choice, and of course the proxies, of the treasury, and the one hundred and sixty-two [peers].”31 “The majority” in the Commons, he lamented, “is tipped to the propertied and the aristocratic, and the so-called independent voice in the house is overshadowed by the interested” voices of the sons and cronies of the lords.
Believing that, “Everyman a King,” “majesty” was to be understood in terms of the powers of the first magistrate, and Coleridge depicted the Crown powerfully as the supreme representative of the people. Therefore, the third axiom which Coleridge drew from Montesquieu’s theory of balances in the constitution was that “the king” and his ministers who composed the corporate person of the Crown served as “a check on both” the potential misdeeds of the nobles and the House of Commons.32 This idea of the king as providing an important balance in the tripartite constitution was not in itself such an innovative theory.
The monarchical theory of the balanced constitution dated at least as far back as Charles I’s Hyde/Falkland-influenced Answer to the Nineteen Propositions in the 1640s and had become so widespread among both Georgian Whigs and Georgian Tories that it was hardly a “radical” idea in 1795. Indeed, Coleridge’s suggestion that the king was a necessary “check” against the vagaries of the Parliament was a distinctly “conservative” position to espouse since it raised a critical and cynical voice against Painite confidence in the capabilities of an unmediated “people” as makers of law. Even as it attacked caballing oligarchs, Coleridge’s suggestion that the king was the protector of the “real” people against the depredations of a perverted and nonrepresentative Parliament had been used by sources as disparate as Charles I in the 1640s and the American patriots in the 1760s. In both of those cases, and in Coleridge’s case, the rhetorical “move” consisted of suggesting that the king represented the true will of the people, which had been thwarted by the parliamentarians. By praising the king even as he damned the Parliament’s mistakes, Coleridge (like the American patriots before him) essayed to show himself as a loyal subject whose objections to current policy did not diminish his status as a faithful servant of the king.
If the Crown was the focus and representative voice of the people as an order, it must act as the champion of those disenfranchised masses who were not directly represented in Parliament. Kingship, for Coleridge, was the living embodiment of majesty. To this extent, Coleridge frequently referred to the king as the “first magistrate.”33 Majesty was the concentrated political will of the people. It operated, not as an amalgamated incorporation, as in Rousseau’s general will, but both individually and collectively, as the aggregate of individual assent. He provided the etymological information that “the word majesty in its original signification” meant “that weight which the will and opinions of the majority imparted.” Counterintuitively, the laws regarding “majesty,” considered in the context of that word’s true signification in ancient times, defended democracy rather than despotism. For in its original meaning, “majesty” “meant the unity of the people; the one point in which ten million rays concentrated.” Yet, in that concentration, there remained the distinctive presence of those ten million separate rays of light. Therefore, “The ancient Lex Majestatis, or law of treason[,] was intended against those who injured the people,” as well as for those who attacked the person of the king.34 In this sense, Coleridge argued, a treason against the people was a treason against the king, and a treason against the king was a treason against the people.
The king, in Coleridge’s account of “majesty,” represented the living law and was the very essence of his organic constitutional model of the body politic, its vibrant, beating heart. Continuing Montesquieu’s line, he concluded that the king was “the majestic guardian of freedom.” George III was, Coleridge informed his audience, “gifted with privileges that will incline, and prerogatives [such as the royal veto] that will enable him to prevent the legislative from assuming the executive power.” For the expansion of Crown into Parliament or Parliament into Crown both meant the same dire outcome. The “union” of legislative and executive powers, Coleridge apprised his listeners, “is the one distinguishing feature of tyranny.”35
Coleridge’s royalism in The Plot requires some explanation. The appearance of a democratic-monarchist polemic in the middle of what is commonly thought to be one of Coleridge’s more radical “early” works is emblematic of the slipperiness of Coleridge’s rhetoric in The Plot. For a “radical” to have such high praise for the office of the king in the unreformed constitution violates one’s common expectations that “radicals” in the 1790s depreciated the powers of the king and elevated the powers of the unrepresented people. One wonders initially why, in a polemic against William Pitt—who was, after all, the king’s own choice to head the ministry in Parliament—Coleridge aspired to depict the powers of King George so vitally and so plentifully. One would have intuited that Coleridge would have taken the usual tack, made famous by Dunning’s resolution in 1780, of suggesting that the “ministerial treason” was the result of an expansion of the powers of the Crown over those of the Parliament. Instead, Coleridge did the opposite. He employed a style reminiscent of the polemicists against Sir Robert Walpole and the Duke of Newcastle from 1725 through 1755. He suggested that the evil and designing ministers in Parliament had not only corrupted the Parliament itself through treasury monies, but had gone so far as to put “the king in chains,” effectively drawing Crown powers out of the king’s hands into their own. Why, in 1795, did Coleridge prefer the strategy of “the king in chains” to that of “the influence of the Crown increasing”?
First, one gathers that the appeal to the king was a last-ditch attempt—an appello Caesaris—by which Coleridge hoped to gain the attention of the king and, perhaps, win the veto of the two acts. One must doubt this hypothesis from the start. George III had not publicly displayed dissatisfaction with the Younger Pitt in the same manner that his grandfather George II had publicly and violently objected to the Elder Pitt. It is unlikely that Coleridge imagined that his pamphlet could gain the king’s ear and rouse into life the royal prerogative of the veto that was still recognized in the constitution but had lain dormant by tradition since the reign of Queen Anne. Nevertheless, Coleridge does mention in The Plot the royal “prerogatives that will enable [King George] to prevent the legislative from assuming the executive power.” Appealing to the good will of the king and encouraging the Bristol gentlemen to do the same, Coleridge hoped to stop the acts with the king’s veto: the last place where they plausibly could be stopped since they would almost certainly pass in their final readings in the two houses. This was a bold hope, but, at the very least, the appeal to Caesar was a good-faith gesture. It showed Coleridge and the Bristol gentlemen as publicly imploring the king to stop the acts that would abate his power. Such an appeal was, in this sense, probably more than just a mask of loyalism to excuse the violence of the attack on Pitt. While the appeal to the king may have been an honest attempt to convince the monarch to destroy the bills and save the nation, it was a long shot. But even if the realistic chance for George depriving Pitt of confidence and sinking the bills was almost nil, it was a gesture that had to be made.
The second and more likely explanation for the appeal to the king is that, by using the old royalist trope of the king as cynosure of the nation’s majesty, Coleridge was attempting to lay a rhetorically complex snare for Pitt. The argument ran as follows: Royalist doctrine said that the king represented not only his own majesty as an individual prince, but “that weight which the will and opinions of the majority imparted … the unity of the people; the one point in which ten million rays concentrated.” In that sense, the king was not only the first magistrate, but also was the people in a mystical sense. He was, claimed Coleridge, a sort of material objective corollary of the “Idea” of a people. Therefore, if one injured the people, one injured the person of the king: “The ancient Lex Majestatis, or law of treason [against majesty,] was intended against those who injured the people.” Pitt had excused the excessive curtailment of the freedoms of the common people—the freedoms of speech and assembly—on the pretence that these acts were necessary to protect the person of the king from the tumultuous people who had thrown stones at the royal carriage. Coleridge pointed out that the acts, by curtailing the constitutionally granted protections to the press and to free association, materially “injured the people.” To injure the people was in truth to injure the king. Ergo, Pitt’s acts, that claimed to protect His Majesty, actually injured his “majesty.” Ergo, Pitt was as great a traitor as the men who threw stones at the royal carriage. Greater, even, because the stone throwers only annoyed and frightened the king for one day, while Pitt’s acts attempted to institutionalize and make permanent the “treason against majesty” of the acts for all times.
Third, the high-royalist argument accomplished the same “work” that the Hyde/Falkland doctrine had managed in the 1640s and that the American patriot argument had accomplished in the 1760s and early 1770s. It undermined and subverted Pitt’s claim that the acts represented the will of the British people because they were passed by a Parliament that was the representative of that people. Coleridge’s redefinition of sovereignty and majesty jerked sovereignty away from the hands of Parliament, where Pitt had placed it, and redistributed it among king and people. Thus, he attempted to undermine the rhetoric of parliamentary absolutism that had been used last to such great effect against the colonists two decades earlier.
None of these three arguments was disingenuous or spurious. Coleridge’s Plot employed plenteous sarcasm and ridicule against Pitt. Still, it is imperative that the heavy larding of humor, which the work employed, not be used as license to say that the entire pamphlet was written “tongue in cheek,” nor that it possessed an esoteric meaning opposed to that which it put forward, nor that it hid an essentially “radical” message in conservative clothing. In any event, the very habit of mind that argued that one ought to dress up one’s arguments for reform in the modest garments of the traditional constitution and ancient authority was, in truth, one of the major traits which separated true “radicals” from “moderate reformers.”
The “radicals” who are so-termed by historians generally earned that post facto classification because they proposed bold measures for swift reform and set out their plans for social change in stark and uncompromising images.36 It depreciates the true “radical” tradition of Godwin, Thelwall, Paine, Spence, and Wollstonecraft and the activist artisans; the “reform” tradition of Wyvill, Burgh, Cartwright, Rockingham, and Burke and the aristocratic reform societies, and (one might argue) Coleridge and the Bristol gentlemen; and the shadowy “radical middle” of reform which included Price, Priestley, and (one might equally well argue) Coleridge and the Bristol gentlemen, to herd them all into either the pen marked “radical” or the pen marked “conservative.” Coleridge’s use of “Tory” strategies such as the royalist polemic set him apart from the “true radicals” as surely as his acid “Whig” critique of the corruption of the unreformed constitution set him apart from the true “conservatives.” The very fact that one still demurs after analyzing the 1795 writings as to whether to place him amongst the “reform” or the “radical-middle” partisans of renovation suggests the degree of difficulty inherent in creating any valid taxonomy for these years. The British reaction to the war with revolutionary France produced a political atmosphere not only supercharged with paranoia and rage but also gradually being stifled by the onset of the censorship acts.
Coleridge gave extensive attention to the stabilizing influence of public opinion in his lectures and pamphlets of 1795. He believed censorship to be one of the ultimate causes of faction precisely because it suppressed criticism and debate. The suspension of public opinion, Coleridge believed, created an abnormal and polarized tension between social and historical forces and the political institutions of government. In both his Bristol Lectures and Conciones ad Populum, Coleridge had considered the artificial rigidity of legislation that suppressed, or intrusively altered, the natural course of political, social, and historical process. However, not until The Plot Discovered did he apply these considerations to contemporary political crisis and particular English law. The two bills and the entire Jacobin-baiting campaign were, in Coleridge’s estimation, only a smoke-screen. Pitt had used the “Jacobin crisis” to excuse his inattention to the very real concerns among the populace who resented the depressed economy at home and the unpopular war on the continent. The mob that had thrown the stones at the king in October had been expressing hunger, resentment, and disaffection rather than allegiance to Tom Paine or Thelwall. The prime minister, Coleridge assured his reader, knew this fact perfectly well. Thelwall was far more useful, unpopular, and visible as a scapegoat than the nameless “miserable people,” who had disrupted the King’s procession to Parliament on that October day.37
Coleridge contended that the implications of the proposed bill were enormous. The acts were calculated to repress all critical opinion and to hasten the destruction of the free press. Moreover, through the implementation of arbitrary law and corrupt politics, they threatened to poison the constitution itself. The fundamental assumption underscoring Coleridge’s critique of Pitt’s acts was the belief that the critical opinion of the opposition was essential for the health of the constitution. This argument was not a justification of capricious or self-interested factionalism; opinion, to be legitimate, had to be reasonable and in good conscience.38 Coleridge expressed his belief in the centrality of free public opinion to the stability of the nation in a clear aphorism: “to pro-mulge what we believe to be true is indeed a law beyond the law.”39 With this idea in mind, he spent a good part of The Plot debunking the “ostensible cause” of Pitt’s acts: John Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society. The intention of the convention bill was plain in this respect. The “first” goal, remarked Coleridge, was “that the people should possess no unrestrained right of consulting in common.” The “second” aim, he concluded, was “that Mr. Thelwall should no longer give political lectures.”40 But why, Coleridge asked, did the government care so intensely about Thelwall? Thelwall’s relative insignificance would certainly appear to mark the desperation of Pitt’s gesture. Coleridge wrote that “in proportion that [Thelwall] feels himself of little consequence,” then Thelwall could only come to his own conclusion, and “perceive the situation of the ministry is desperate.”41 Coleridge observed that “nothing could make [Thelwall] important [as a target of Pitt] but that [Thelwall] speaks with the feelings of multitudes.”42 Coleridge’s most successful technique in maligning Pitt was to point out that Pitt was prepared to condemn Thelwall as an incendiary for saying certain things which Pitt himself had said in different, although similar, circumstances.
Pitt’s new laws would have resulted in the younger Pitt’s being jailed in 1795 for statements that were ignored by the law in 1781. Coleridge quoted Pitt’s own “seditious” words in a 1781 denunciation of the American War: “by this iniquitous and unjust War the Nation was drained of its vital resources of Men and Money.”43 Pitt the “apostate”44 had mourned the expensive triumphs in the former thirteen colonies over “men struggling in the holy cause of Freedom.”45 “O calumniated Judas Iscariot!,” Coleridge wailed: “All this William Pitt said!” in his youth. As prime minister and virtual monarch by 1795, argued Coleridge, Pitt’s concerns had changed. The Pitt of 1781 once approved of the battle of a republic in America to protect newly coined American liberties against the invasion of British troops hoping to squelch the infant American constitution and restore monarchy. The Pitt of 1795 now disapproved of the battle of a republic in France to protect newly coined French liberties against the invasion of British and allied troops hoping to squelch the infant French constitution and restore monarchy. Therefore, Coleridge concluded, this newborn crusading zeal must have been engendered by something more heartfelt than his hate of republicanism: namely, his lust for unrestrained power.
Coleridge charged the Pitt administration with deliberately attempting to muzzle the London Corresponding Society and the republican and democratic lectures of “Citizen” John Thelwall. This criticism was not so much a mark of Coleridge’s democratic sympathies as his constitutional concerns. For he saw the attack on Thelwall and the LCS as the first step on the government’s way to grander things: the muzzling of the entire nation. Having failed to convict the twelve radicals in the State Trials of 1794, the prime minister had decided that the existing legislation regarding seditious writings was insufficient to his purpose. Squelching all opposition, public and parliamentary, was a necessary precondition to his expansion of ministerial power in the state. That purpose, Coleridge argued, was the ultimate goal of Pitt’s “plot.” Pitt desired, reported Coleridge, to use “Citizen” Thelwall as a scapegoat. The pursuit of Thelwall was Pitt’s method of marshalling onto his side the great emotional power of reflexive, fearful anti-Jacobin hysteria. This hysteria and the charged political discourse that it fuelled swept the nation even as rumors of an impending French invasion and a British fifth column began to surface. Pitt’s stated objective, for the better pursuit of which he requested extraordinary powers, was the defence of the realm against foreign French enemies and domestic “British Jacobins.” Coleridge “unmasked” Pitt’s true goal: to gag all opposing voices, stigmatizing even moderate opposition to the war with France as “Jacobinical,” and thereby liberate the power of the first minister from the constitutional restraints of public opinion and press criticism. But the construction of “Treasonable Words” as “Treasonable Deeds” amounted to a new interpretation of acta non verba.
In The Plot Coleridge devoted several pages to the way in which Pitt’s new law of treason obliterated what had been an obvious distinction between republicanism as a contemplative Grecian theory as opposed to republicanism as regicidal French practice. He thought that the true madness of the new law was that it would punish those who passively spoke of the merits of a theoretically perfect republic as severely as those who actively plotted to kill the king and create a republic in fact. Coleridge argued that under the existing law “if any man should publish” a republican idea, even if it were only “published” in the narrow venue of “a friendly letter” or “a social conversation,” he would be called a traitor. For in the eyes of the law, if any should “assert a republic to be the most perfect form of government” and “endeavour by all argument to prove it so” for any reason, he was “guilty of high treason.” He was guilty because under the new law of treason, “what he declares,” even theoretically, “to be the most perfect form of government, and the most productive of happiness” was a republic, “and to recommend a republic is to recommend the abolition of the kingly name.”46
The freedom to voice purely theoretical opinions had been upheld by the old Edwardian law precisely because of its clarity in demanding clear evidence of deeds against monarchy as well as words critical of it. Coleridge maintained that “by the existing treason laws” of Edward, “a man so accused” of speculating that a republic was the best form of government “would plead, ‘it is the privilege of an Englishman to entertain what speculative opinions he pleases provided he stir up no present action.’” Emphasizing the long established merits of the ancient law of Edward, Coleridge also recalled the guarantees and liberties provided by the ancient constitution, or “the privilege of an English-man.” His timeless English everyman was here offered in the guise of an innocent though accused man who must rightfully conclude his defense with the maxim: “Let my reasonings be monarchial or republican, whilst I act as royalist I am free from guilt.”47
The new legislation proposed by Pitt and Grenville would destroy the ancient privileges of the free-born Englishman. Coleridge “fear[ed]” that “soon … such a defense will be of no avail.” “It will be in vain,” he warned his hearers, “to allege that such [republican] opinions were not wished to be realized” in the government of Britain.48 Addressing the indefinite character of such a charge, Coleridge saw little protection for his imaginary free-born John, despite claims that his dreams “[neither] could be nor would be nor ought to be realised in the present or the following reign.” Even if his reflections were a pure fantasy of utopian proportions and admitted by him to be so, “still he would be guilty of high treason.” This was so because “though he recommends not an attempt to depose his present majesty from his kingly name, he evidently recommends the denial of it to some one of his distant successors.”49
The ministerial treason against the ancient constitution was expressed as a double perfidy, as a treachery against the ancient and sacred traditions of the British Constitution in church and state. Coleridge’s account of this treason in the Plot points out an act of impiety and sacrilege as well as secular treachery. To this end, the rhetoric of the Plot is saturated with mystical imagery—gothic visions of corruption, wizardry, and “Spells of Despotism” against the “Canon of British Liberty.” Not only was Pitt’s crime treason, it was blasphemy. Coleridge’s Pitt was an apostate in the tradition of Julian, a role he would later fashion for another French nemesis, for Bonaparte.
The diabolical nature of “the plot,” as described by Coleridge, was not only that it smothered the living voice of opinion, but that it sought to proscribe those parts of the British past that did not conform to Pitt’s vision of the national character. Coleridge was mindful that the new calendar of the French Republic established in 1793 had been an attempt to “murder history.” He associated the destruction of English constitutional traditions, both in church and state, with the Jacobin erasure of such French Catholic traditions as saints’ days and indeed the generically Christian seven-day week punctuated by a Lord’s Day.
The destruction of the French ecclesiastical-political calendar was another one of the Terror’s cautionary examples. More than a welcome assault on a foreign Romish remnant, it struck at the heart of a British constitutional heritage anchored to a sacred conception of time. As an example calculated to frighten the most conservative elements of his readership into a moderating opposition, Coleridge could not have chosen better. Indeed, in the Jacobin case, the committees had violently erased from public view all reminders of France’s monarchial and episcopal past in the name of public safety.
Coleridge was able to employ the fear of Jacobinism, with all its associations of unnatural, anticlerical and antihistorical innovation, against the Pittite regime of revisionist Terror. Robespierre’s tyranny had cut away the past and proclaimed the new age of the revolution as the Year One. Coleridge feared that Pitt had similar goals in mind. Pitt, Coleridge argued, intended to extirpate that great plethora of books that might tend to encourage people to want a republic or even think well of a republic. This was a far more comprehensive scheme than simply stamping out that small number of books that openly and directly issued a call to arms, advocating revolution in Britain in 1795. Such writing and speaking was already proscribed by the old treason laws of England. Coleridge implied that by censorship, Pitt wanted to erase from the collective memory of the nation the scholarly traditions of theoretical debate on republics and utopias that had exercised so many of the great political thinkers of the previous centuries. The new act, after all, stipulated that “whoever by printing, writing, preaching, or malicious and advised speaking” caused disaffection between the sovereign and the people was guilty of sedition. Moreover, the proscription was extended to cognize “distribution” as a criminal act. The guilt would now be pinned equally to publisher as well as author. How long before it attached its significance to purchaser as well as vendor, reader as well as writer, listener as well as speaker? Coleridge wondered. Both “he who writes against” monarchy and his formerly innocent abettor, “he who prints and publishes against monarchy,” would, under the new law, noted Coleridge, “be hanged as traitor[s].”50
Coleridge believed that this law must inevitably apply not only to both present and future publications and discourses on politics, ethics, and religion, but also to those past treatments of the subject. Indeed, this single “execrable clause” would “smother” entirely “the exertions of living genius.” It would also “equally proscribe” “all names of the past ages dear to liberty!”51 This carte blanche license for censorship, Coleridge concluded, would stifle not only the hotheaded controversialists of the 1790s, but the formerly anodyne books on republics from previous centuries, including those by purely theoretical republicans and utopia makers.
The list of bannable books was theoretically limitless, insinuated Coleridge, once the old insistence on the book posing a real and immediate threat was discarded and the new criterion of imagining a world or even praising a nation without kings was applied. (The prohibited canon in such a world might imaginably include previously “non-controversial” books such as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Neville’s Plato Redivivus, Milton’s Free and Easy Way to Establish a Commonwealth, Thomas Hobbes’s [pro-Cromwellian when written] Leviathan, James Harrington’s utopian Oceana; even perhaps Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Plato’s Laws, Livy’s and Tacitus’s antiroyal Roman histories, and the Biblical books of Judges and Samuel.) Once a book was judged to be seditious, “the future editions” of it “will be treasonable” in perpetuity.52
Coleridge himself listed some of those authors who might be liable to prosecution under the new law: the great republican writers of the seventeenth century. Coleridge warned that the “cauldron of persecution” was “bubbling” “against the Sages and Patriots that being dead do yet speak to us.” These “Sages and Patriots” were the “Spirits of Milton, Locke, Sydney, [and] Harrington,” voices that “still wander through your native country giving wisdom and inspiring zeal!.” “The spells of despotism,” he concluded in a somber finish, “are being muttered” with increasing success against the works of those authors.53 The Gothic imagery that Coleridge employed—of warlocks’ cauldrons bubbling up noxious persecution even as Pitt’s wizards mutter spells of despotism in attempts to destroy the benevolent “Spirits” of the great patriots—was pure theatre but nonetheless communicated an important point.
The “spells of despotism” was a very apt image in this context. Coleridge identified Pitt’s repression of the lights of the ancient constitution with the entire Kingdom of Darkness once anatomized by Hobbes: a kingdom that, for Coleridge, was governed by the moral equivalents of witchcraft and cabalistic practice. Coleridge saw himself as defending public opinion as the embodiment of reason and the law against all religions of absolute power, including the Jacobin one. For this reason, Coleridge defended the emotional power of popular opinion as a “Mode of Expression Blended with Error.” Through this antiegalitarian paean to the “Feelings of [common] Men,” Coleridge could attack the arguments of Thelwall, Paine, and the so-called English Jacobins while still defending the liberties of assembly, speech, and press.
Coleridge used Thelwall’s expression of the “feelings of multitudes” as the basis for examining the proper sphere of influence for public opinion in politics in The Plot.54 Coleridge suggested that Thelwall’s emotional rhetoric provided a cathartic point of focus and release for the “feelings” of common subjects, feelings which, although distorted and confused, were essentially true. By “true,” Coleridge meant earnest, sincere, and ultimately constructive of good. He was convinced that “the feelings of men are always founded in truth.” The “modes of expressing” those truth-inspired feelings “may be blended with error,” Coleridge warned. Indeed, he cautioned that, “the feelings themselves may lead to the most horrid excesses.” “Yet still,” he insisted, the feelings “are essentially right.” The feelings were right because they encouraged a critical awareness, which was superior to supineness in the citizen: “they teach man that something is wanting, something which he ought to have.”55 In considering the veracity of “feeling,” Coleridge was careful to distinguish between the authentic “substance” of a sincere intention and the often-distorting “accidents” of its expression in a man such as Thelwall or in a club or crowd. As was the case in his consideration of the “graceful indiscretion” of informed political commentary as opposed to the “whirlwind” of a plebian public opinion, Coleridge suggested that whether civil or vulgar, such opinion must be recognized as genuine expressions of need.
In the end, Coleridge regarded Thelwall as “a mode of expression blended with error.” He warned repeatedly that the great emotional tide of a mob was destructive and violent. Emphasizing again the significance and complexity of the deeper human causes of political strife, Coleridge argued that the source of such “feelings of want” must be acknowledged and addressed by governments. The government could not silence the true vox populi, Coleridge contended, nor could the government border and contain that general opinion by classifying it in limited and inaccurate terms, such as “Democratic sedition,” “Republicanism” or “Citizen Thelwall.” Just and prudent legislation ought to consider the voice of the people, whether that voice came from the jury box or from the press gallery or from a petition, or even from the street. The government and the law had a duty to respond to the political realities of the day, particularly when those realities became manifest in the voices of disaffection and want. Coleridge linked and juxtaposed the legislative power with the “censorial power … the exercise of which must be left to the people themselves.”56 His attack on the abusive and coercive powers of Pitt’s ministry of the state turned on his defense of the legitimate and sovereign authorities of the people in the constitution. It was a timeocratically res publican rather than democratically republican argument.
