COLERIDGE’S CONCEPTION OF the law was that it contained a constituted dialogue between the governors and the people. He did not expect that any simple legislative solution to social and political crisis existed within the limits of a single positive statute. But he did believe that the complex of laws attached to certain policies alleviated problems of distress and suffering, whereas others compounded them. While government may not solve the problems reflected by the “voice of tens of thousands” it had a duty to attend to that voice.1 In this sense, Coleridge’s constituted dialogue between the people and their government suggested a reflexive and organic mediation of political will and social change over time. Simply put, he juridically integrated the vital component of public opinion into his conception of government as an institutional form of political and social discourse. The link between opinion and political will was and is a difficult thing to chart. But Coleridge believed that it was possible to do so and that through the harmony of feelings and interests a “harmony of government” could be ascertained. This “harmony of government” and the national interest were, Coleridge argued, best sustained by legislative dialogue. The achievement of a coherent legislative dialogue was the consequence of a “true” science of government.
Coleridge believed that the rising tide of interest and feeling, that surfaced as opinion in response to a particular moment of crisis was a genuine sign of consensus. Where it was not twisted by propaganda, dominated by demagoguery, or the distorted voice of vulgar opinion, such feeling was true and respectable. Coleridge’s distinction between public opinion and vulgar opinion was an important one. The line separating public opinion from vulgar opinion was consistent with his emphasis on such classical virtues as reason, conscience, and duty. Coleridge thought that these qualities of virtue which allowed a true public voice lived in the “hearts and minds” of individuals in society and were not to be found in the particular doctrines of individuals claiming to “speak for the public.”
Central to this distinction between public opinion and vulgar opinion was Coleridge’s notion of a “thing of concretion [or] some home born feeling.” His constant reiteration that strong feeling in the hearts even of the vulgar often proceeded from transcendentally inspired intuitions of truth was markedly romantic. This Coleridgean link between “home born feeling” and authentic political opinion became increasingly clear as Coleridge perfected his theory of intuition and absolutes. He had referred in his earlier analysis of power and revolution, Conciones ad Populum, to the need for constantly “bottoming on fixed Principles.”2 Without this “bottom” foundation of ethically known truth for a solid groundwork in the nation, all revolution and reform was artificial innovation—a perfectly designed house built on sinking sand—and would end in arbitrary despotism.
Coleridge believed that there existed great inequalities of talent and attainment, of education, virtue, and political competence. Yet he also believed in “common sagacity” and “truths available to all.” While the people at large were not equally suited to the tasks of formulating and administering policy, they were capable of expressing a form of moral veto. In this respect only the people could perform the task of censure. In Coleridge’s contention that all dissent arose through the authentic voice of feelings of want, feelings grounded in truth, he came close to his fixed principle. Coleridgean “Common Sagacity” was something more than Paine’s conception of “Common Sense.” For Coleridge, “feelings” were complex sensations blended with intuitions: not just rational deductive logic, but transcendental and emotional judgments. As such, “feelings” proceeded from a complex association of sense and memory, structured by intuition and the will.3
Coleridge would develop his epistemology of emotion and, finally, intuitive imagination,4 throughout his mature writings. But even in his earliest analysis of social and political power, his views on human nature and understanding formed a central component of his conception of agency. Already in 1795, Coleridge emphasized personal feelings and affections and their corresponding relationship to intuitive knowledge in politics as well as art.
Intuition, Coleridge argued, expressed itself to the human mind immediately and directly. It did not require reflection, analysis, or association of ideas. He articulated this more completely after 1800 in Logic, when he observed that mathematics was based on intuitive reasoning, and he defined “immediate presentation et in concreto, in contradistinction from the knowing a thing mediated by representative marks obtained by abstraction.”5 Intuition, as Coleridge learned both from the Cambridge Platonists and Kant, existed a priori; that is, prior to any accumulation of “sense-data” or experience. It is the source of what Coleridge considered real knowledge: the light that allows one to see the shadows in the cave. Intuition was a pure form, some human aspect of “the Good,” “plastic nature” or the categories of time and space.6 Intuitive perception was certainly, for Coleridge, a manifestation of the will of God. As such, he considered all intuition to be the recognition, in some form, of an absolute idea, but, as perceived et in concreto, he argued that it was feeling and sense.
Feelings, Coleridge implied, surfaced in false ideas as they were rationalized and distorted in fragments and as they were “blended with error.” This constant admixture of error with feeling meant that all feelings were not to be trusted equally. Where a common and impassioned expression of want existed, however, Coleridge postulated that some degree of genuine feeling would be found. A polity that habitually surrendered to every mood and whim of the populace, Coleridge deduced, would quickly degenerate into demagoguery. But a polity that totally ignored the impassioned pleas and agonies of the public voice, he added, would equally quickly degenerate into tyranny. Whereas the French Jacobins had gone too far by indulging every folly of the popular emotions of the Paris mob, Pitt was about to go too far by gagging and binding the London mob in order that its voice would never be heard again.
Coleridge considered political virtue to subsist in the recognition and assessment of such honest “home-born” feeling, the recognition by the rulers of the voice of God in the voice of the people. Coleridge separated what he defined as legitimate public opinion from the vulgar cacophony of “opinions” and slogans slung about by the mob. He emphasized that the “swinish multitude” so publicly detested by Burke was not to be confused with the senatus populusque britannicum or the vox populi, which was truly, rather than merely rhetorically, vox dei.
J. A. W. Gunn has charted the transformation of public service into public opinion over the eighteenth century. He notes a tradition to 1780 by which “everyone knew that in some imprecise sense vox populi was held to be vox dei.”7 Increasingly after 1760, the question was whether this voice was best expressed through timocratic republicanism or through democracy. Was justice to be achieved through an elite consensus? Were the “best men” in the nation to provide a civilized and temperate form for what they perceived as the demands of the plebeians? Or was government to be trusted to a populist plurality, in which citizens felt a right to instruct their members of Parliament on exactly how they were to vote on certain issues of importance to those constituents? Gunn suggests that after 1780 the County Associations and theorists such as Dr. John Jebb not only encouraged a wider respect for the “opinions” of the “people” (Jebb went so far as to regard “opinion as the sole foundation of power”), but had set up new and innovative out-of-doors organizations such as clubs and associations through which they hoped to present their ideas to Parliament.8
While Coleridge certainly believed that in 1795 some had forgotten the “vox populi,” he would never at any time cut loose public opinion from the anchor of the constitution as Jebb had done. In Coleridge’s opinion, the people had no more implicit right to ruin the country than the Crown or the first minister did. All Britons, from George the king to the lowest common subject, were obliged to defend the balanced constitution from attacks from any quarter. In the seventeenth century, these attacks had largely come from the Crown; in the late eighteenth, they came from the first minister’s hammerlock on the legislature; in France, they came from the mob and the resultant fall into demagogue-dictatorship. In keeping with the Whiggish perspective of the Bishop of Llandaff and the constitutional theory of DeLolme, Coleridge believed that public opinion must be balanced against the three estates as an element of constitutional government. Before the judgments of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches can be brought to bear on matters of policy, public opinion and criticism, the voices of want and dissention, must be heard. Moreover, they must be heard in their varied and particular circumstances, when and where they surface. In short, while a distinction must be made between popular and vulgar opinion as to actions, both must be recognized before acts of judgment by the governing classes can take place.
Coleridge contended that to ignore the voice of public opinion, or to intentionally misrepresent it through a distorted propaganda, was to concentrate its many voices into one. Thelwall expressed feelings of dissention but did not speak accurately for all opinion. In this respect, it was ironically Pitt who “created” Thelwall as the single face of the many-headed mob. In doing so he dangerously intensified a distorted aggregate of varied individual feelings into the single voice of the mob. Coleridge observed that “William Pitt knows, that Thelwall is the voice of tens of thousands.” Knowing this, Coleridge asserted that Pitt “levels his parliamentary thunderbolts against [Thelwall] with the same emotion with which Caligula wished to see the whole of the Roman state brought together in one neck that he might have the luxury of beheading it at one moment.”9 The metaphor comparing Pitt to Caligula was, on the whole, no more favorable than that which compared that minister to a devious plotter or a spellbinding warlock or a heartless French dictator. It implied that Pitt was not only overzealous in his prosecutions, but actively and criminally insane. The “moment” which Caligula-Pitt had chosen for his beheading of the British state’s tradition of liberty, Coleridge implied, was the crowd’s stoning of the king’s carriage in October. From that moment forward, Coleridge argued, Pitt had neither ceased nor rested from his plot to sever the vocal organs of the English state from the body politic.
Arguing that seditious faction did not in reality exist, Coleridge urged the government to act specifically in its deliberations using the existing law when and if it applied, both as to treason and in response to the many individual voices of want. Coleridge demanded evidence of “Where? when? and by whom have factious and seditious speeches been made, and the public peace been endangered by assembled petitioners? … Unless these questions are circumstantially answered,” Coleridge warned, “and the answers proved by legal evidence,” it could not be certain that the acts were not a confidence game by which Pitt was deceiving a gullible nation out of its liberties. If the acts were passed without firm evidence of a crisis, then the public would have enacted into law a dangerous instrument of “emergency” power for no reason whatsoever. Pitt justified the constitutionality of his assumption of powers, argued Coleridge, on the strength of a crisis that did not actually exist. If the Commons granted Pitt emergency powers without first demanding that the prime minister provide some evidence of the emergency, Coleridge admonished, then “an act for repealing the constitution will have passed on the strength of a ministerial assertion.”10
The “Pure Breeze” of public opinion was the foundation of Coleridge’s conception of political stability. Public opinion was centrally important to Coleridge’s constitutional theory because he thought that it, like juries, represented a legitimate venue for popular power in the constitution. Indeed, Coleridge viewed the freedom of the press as similar to jury freedom because both allowed criticism by common citizens of the actions of government. He emphasized that “the Liberty of the Press, (a power resident in the people) gives us [the people] an influential sovereignty.”11 Coleridge argued in the Bristol Lectures that the artificial silencing of public opinion by the “Republic of Virtue” and the Committees was the cause of the violent extremities of the revolution in France. With the issue of security in mind, he considered the probable impact of the two acts in England. He predicted that under the influence of the new laws “all political controversy [will be] at an end…. Those sudden breezes and noisy gusts [of controversy] which purified the [political] atmosphere they disturbed, [will be] hushed to death-like silence.”12 It was precisely the suspension of public controversy on the grounds of “emergency,” argued Coleridge, that provoked rather than prevented the atmosphere of paranoia and violence that the prime minister (purportedly) wished to avoid.
Coleridge maintained that the same air of panic and violence that was the ostensible cause of the two bills had caused the worst mayhem of the French Revolution. With an eye to France, Coleridge characterized despotism as a silence of “cadaverous tranquillity.” Public opinion voiced through a free press might be subject to “graceful indiscretions,” but it alone produced “generous order.” The alternative, Coleridge insisted, was a freedom stifled by “the black pestilential vapour of slavery.” Suggesting that to live by the censor’s pen was to die by the censor’s pen, Coleridge advised the government to take heed of “the example of France.” “But beware[,] oh ye rulers of the earth,” he intoned, “for it was ordained at the foundation of the world by the king of kings, that all corruption should conceal within its bosom that which will purify.” He ended with the prophetic warning that “they who sow pestilence must reap whirlwinds.”13
This warning suggested yet again to Coleridge’s audience the similarity between the prime minister’s policies and those of Robespierre. Comparing the two leaders as politicians who sowed the despotic pestilence of censorship, Coleridge noted that both men had subverted representative governments in favor of arbitrary executive rule. Pitt would, as Robespierre had done in 1794, finally provoke the sudden reassertion of the disaffected voice of public opinion, and in its most violent incarnation, the angry and murderous mob. Coleridge argued that Pitt’s proposed legislation would do more to further a French-style popular revolt of the masses than the rambling manifesto of the corresponding societies ever could. Broad censorship, Coleridge concluded, produced a backlog of dissention and dissatisfaction which would inevitably break free, not through the gradual working of constitution and law, but “out of doors,” in the streets. Coleridge’s formula was almost Newtonian in its simplicity: every action of government pushing down the power of public opinion created an equal and opposite reaction by public opinion pushing upwards against government power.
Arguing that the bloom of corruption concealed the seeds of purity and renewal, Coleridge cautioned Pitt’s ministry. His seasonal metaphor suggested that the process of purification would be revolutionary. But whether that meant rotation and replanting or the bitter harvest of slash and burn was the choice of legislators. Emphasizing that censorship corrupted, Coleridge accused the government and its fear-mongering of transforming reasoned public discourse into panic and vulgar opinion. Equally, he insisted it was corrupt law that ultimately led to lawlessness. But these were not the only conclusions to be drawn from the proposed bill. Returning to the implicit meaning of the legislation at hand, Coleridge considered the law’s impact on the authors of the ages in the publication of books, past and present, and on writers living, dead, and as yet unborn.
Coleridge considered the actions of Pitt in 1795 tantamount to a conspiracy against the constitution and, as such, a “Ministerial Treason” against the people and the state. His objections were grounded in his own interpretation of the Common Law, those semi-mythologized congeries of laws, interpretations, and habits of mind that stood as an inveterate opponent of attempts to expand executive prerogative of any sort since the time of Charles I.
Arguments for the sovereignty of the Common Law had traditionally taken aim against the centralization of power in the Crown and its ministers, a centralization, constitutional theory posited, that invariably reduced the power of the judiciary and the legislature to act quasi-independently.14 During the seventeenth century the common lawyers had fought against prerogative courts and against Crown influence over the decisions of juries and judges. During the eighteenth century, this tradition of suspicion of Crown intrusions into courts and lawmaking expressed itself in a generic attack on the corrupting “influence” of the Crown and its agents in Parliament.
Coleridge believed that the sovereign consensus of the Common Law manifested, through its continuity, the true political will of the people. In doing so, the Common Law revealed its relationship to the process that Coleridge conceived as history. But just as history and law were more than the compilation of statutes, Coleridge regarded sovereignty as more than a simple expression of popular public opinion. In The Plot Discovered, Coleridge suggested ways in which sovereignty and law under the British Constitution exemplified and yet remained distinct from the voice of the people.
The core of Coleridge’s argument in The Plot was that Pitt’s real reason for changing the existing law of treason was to obfuscate the concept of treason as it had theretofore existed in the Common Law. Defending ancient legal traditions, Coleridge returned once more to the comparative clarity of the old law as to acts and intentions. He emphasized that “our ancestors were wisely cautious in framing the bill of treason; they would not admit words as sufficient evidence of intention.”15 In light of the ambition to expand the prime minister’s power over the nation and laws implicit in Pitt’s conspiracy, Coleridge explicitly declared that “the existing laws of treason” were “too clear, too unequivocal!” to be the flexible tools of censorship demanded by Pitt. Edwardian and Georgian treason acts could be compared to reveal the true intent of the new legislation. While the law of Edward III was clear and simple and in keeping with the underlying principles of the Common Law, the new Georgian statute attempted to introduce a discretionary prerogative into judicial interpretations of the law of treason.
The government’s proposed legislation was, in Coleridge’s opinion, an attempt to tailor the law for the specific purposes of the administration. In this regard, he argued that the existing law was being amended because it did not suit the government’s current needs, that it was, indeed, too clear. He distinguished between the statute 25 Edward III and the bills proposed by Pitt and Grenville. The existing law stipulated that “if any person within the realm or without” should “compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend death or destruction, maim or wounding, imprisonment or restraint of the person of our sovereign Lord the king” or if he “levy war against his majesty or move or stir any foreigner to invasion,” he would be “adjudged as a traitor.”16
In Coleridge’s estimation, the Edwardian standard of treason was not unreasonable. Coleridge placed the strength and clarity of the existing statute in the law’s focus on actions and intentions to act that were direct and demonstrable. He concluded of the passage, “we object not.”17 But the new legislation, he continued, obscured action and addressed the realms of speculative imagination. This was the vital difference between the two forms of the law. The new law stipulated that “whoever by printing, writing, preaching, or malicious and advised speaking” should “compass,” or “imagine,” or “devise,” either “to depose the king” or even to deprive “his heirs and successors from the style, power, and kingly name, of the imperial crown of this realm,” he would be “adjudged a traitor.”18 As Coleridge observed, “here lies the snake.”19
The old law as it existed concerned itself with immediate spheres of action and intent. It considered the mens rea of individual agents “compassing the death,” “levying war,” and “stirring foreign invaders.” It addressed individual deeds rather than some amorphous construction of a public imagination (as opposed to opinion). The proposed bill referred to the less immediate purposes of “printing, writing and preaching,” to “malicious and advised speaking,” to “devising to depose” the king and his successors from their “style, power, and kingly name.” In short, the new bill was not about treason at all, it was about censorship and seditious libel. Beyond this, Coleridge argued that far from being concerned with any genuine libel, the new bill was the tool of a government campaign of arbitrary repression. It had been drafted broadly in order to allow general and arbitrary applications so that almost any speaking, writing, or thinking that was politically awkward or inconvenient to the ministry could be prosecuted by the government.
This breadth of power violated Coleridge’s rule that statute should not place vague or ill-defined crimes in the law. Good law, in the Common Law tradition as Coleridge defined it, was like the Edwardian Law of Treason: concrete, simple, detailed, and fit for centuries of use. Bad law, in the Prerogative Law tradition as Coleridge defined it, was like the Pittite Law of Treason: abstract, complex, vague, and suited only to be the momentary tool of a faction. For the sublunary practice of justice in Common Law to exist, Coleridge believed that there must be some historical mediation of judgment through a union of the all too human faculty of reason and some transcendental “Idea” of Lex Natura.
Coleridge’s 1795 pamphlet was more than a polemic against Pitt’s illegal actions in particular. In The Plot, Coleridge also considered the general limits and dimensions of sovereignty as defined in law. His principal concern was whether that sovereignty was constituted by the rule of law or by political will, and indeed whether there was a clear delineation or a close proximity between law and will. Coleridge rejected Enlightenment theories that a transhistorical and universal Natural Law could be discovered scientifically and known in most of its details by men. He objected particularly to the idea that “natural rights” could be codified in newly hatched civil laws such as those in France. Because he refuted the contention that the divine, universal “Idea” of Natural Law was knowable to any detailed extent by mortals, he denied the original-contractarian and natural-rights-based arguments of Locke and Rousseau, which were so popular in vulgarized forms among the French Revolutionaries. Instead, Coleridge imagined law as a socially and historically shaped construction of the universal but only partially knowable “Idea” of justice.
In rejecting natural-rights arguments in his discussion of law, Coleridge did not imply that all power was amoral or that the law ought ever to be used in unjust ways. He attacked the natural-rights theorists for positing a toothless set of “goods” without force or a network of civil duties to maintain them. But at the same time, Coleridge’s moral “Watchman,” in its indignation at Pitt’s “plot,” revealed a strong vision of a moral justice that was transcendental and that operated through a general set of universal norms which set “good” laws apart from “bad” ones. In this regard, the complexity of Coleridge’s early position becomes clear. He was an intense historicist without ever becoming a moral relativist.
Distinguishing that intuitive and vague form of shared moral common sense that Montesquieu had described as “raison primitive” from the rationalized and specific system of natural rights espoused by many, Coleridge emphasized the historical and particular virtues of the common law. In doing so, he never gave up a belief in a transcendent and even divine ethical groundwork for law. On the other hand, he consistently rejected the belief in absolute natural rights outside the context of a granting civil government that honored those rights as nonsense. Instead, he contended that reason, constituted through time and practice, provided the only sound ethical foundation for government. Coleridge, like Montesquieu, spent a great deal of effort attempting to discern whether the law of reason was a product of nature or time.
When writing on issues that dealt with the concept of constitutional sovereignty, Coleridge also leaned heavily upon the works of English intellectual descendants of Montesquieu, relying on the strongly historical arguments of writers such as Blackstone and Burke. At first, this pairing seems odd: the great apostle of raison primitive and common, human moral ground juxtaposed with the particularist and historicist arguments of Blackstone and Burke. Yet, as David Lieberman has suggested,20 Blackstone’s strong respect for the authority of custom and tradition as such did not preclude him from a strong belief that there was a universal morality that should shape and define the particular common laws of kingdoms. Common Law judges, such as Lord Mansfield, had long stated the principle that “The law of England is only common reason or usage.”21 Coleridge resembled Blackstone and his successors in that he located the ultimate seat of sovereignty in Parliament.22 He was unlike Blackstone in that he believed that if Parliament became “corrupt” and failed to preserve the checks and balances of a mixed constitution, it was the responsibility of law courts, judges, and juries—the personnel and tradition of the Common Law—to exercise judicial review and overturn the law as contrary to justice.23
From its earliest development in The Plot Discovered, Coleridge’s constitutional theory was pragmatic and conservative. It was pragmatic in that it based its conclusions on the tradition of the actual laws observed in the polity rather than on an overarching theory of law. It was conservative in that it tended to think that long-established common laws of realms should not be discarded wholesale and replaced by novel and untried systems of legislation.
According to Coleridge, the moral principle of natural justice—which he regarded as the transcendental “Idea” of Natural Law—could only express and preserve itself through material, fallible, and specific incarnations in historical, national, and local institutions. Thus, although the general idea of justice was the same the world over, argued Coleridge, the actual shape which it would take in Babylon in the time of Hammurabi would be different from that it would take in Bristol in the time of George III. The universal “Idea” of justice, Coleridge asserted, mediated itself through variations in customs, geography, moral standards, and governmental power. In particular, the “Idea” of justice emerged through the everyday give and take of the law courts and juries of a polity as dictated by circumstances over time, rather than through the interminable abstractions written by legal theorists. Particular statutes had a duty to reflect the law of reason as best they could, Coleridge maintained. Still, given his postulate of man’s fallible knowledge of transcendental (or divine) ideas such as justice, Coleridge asserted that it was impossible to attempt to write down in full, and thereby fix and codify forever, the principles of Natural Law. Nor was it possible or desirable to use such a contrived code to run actual societies.
Coleridge assumed that general universal principles were so complex and pure as to be unsusceptible to concretion in a single set of particular rules. He offered an example of this disharmony in a marginal note that he appended to the Huguenot natural-rights theorist Pierre Jurieu’s historical reflections on church councils. Coleridge wrote that “a general council” of the church “may be the best attainable Judge” of “what is fittest or most expedient for the Church” at any given moment, “at that any one particular time.” On the other hand, he asserted, “a general council is not, and without arrogation of a divine attribute cannot be assumed to be, a compet[e]nt judge of the Truth in itself.” Such a council made up of fallible human beings was assuredly not a competent judge “of all truths, relatively to all ages, all future times.”24 If such were the case with a purportedly inspired general council of the Catholic Church, it presumably was all the more evident in the instance of the British Parliament, which had (almost) never made the claim to be acting under the inspiration of God.
It was in the light of this distinction between the “Idea” of something aspired to by a government and the fallible customs and institutions by means of which they edged their way toward that goal that Coleridge drew a sharp line between Common Law custom and statutes such as the Gagging Acts. For Coleridge, the general principles of the English Common Law went far beyond the positive rules enacted by the Parliament and printed in the Statutes of the Realm. Had law been only a simple matter of statutory algorithms applied to certain facts, Coleridge implied, then the courts could be dispensed with and a simple printed copy of the statutes (along with a single reader of that copy who would act as judge) would be enough to dispense justice. As it was, the Common Law required contextual reasoning by judge and jury. This contextual reasoning included considerations of intent and other mitigating factors in the cause. It demanded thought be given to precedents from similar causes (as remembered in printed books of judgments by famous jurists in the major courts or in unwritten local or judicial memory). It required judicious attention to the habit and repute of the accused. It requested the jury’s discretion in judging the value of stolen goods so as to be a misdemeanor or a hanging felony. It allowed judicial offers of mercy from the bench or commutation of sentence in the case of hanging offences. English juries, judges, and lawyers regularly exercised discretion as well as independent action beyond the boundaries of statute. Such discretion was not only tolerated by that legal system, it was actively solicited.
Individual “Judges indeed” might try to warp the law to their own purposes, “might endeavour to transfer to these laws their own flexibility.” For, as Coleridge cynically remarked, “what will judges not do?”25 Judges might bend or even break the law in overzealous and blind attempts to condemn someone for a crime they considered heinous, even if the party in question currently on trial was not guilty. Judges may be honest or not, Coleridge argued, but their counsel should be restricted by custom to specific points of law, written or unwritten, and not indulge in direction as to facts.
British juries had historically served as a brake on the enthusiasms of such hanging judges.26 Although the practical abuses of British courts had caused Coleridge to distrust individual judges, Braxfield for example, he retained his faith in the English system of law as vindicated by the honesty and power of the average juror. Coleridge had boasted in the wake of the acquittals in the State Trials of 1794 that “English judges might make strange interpretations … but English Juries could not and would not hear them.” Coleridge emphasized the degree to which an English jury knew what it felt to be the truth despite any bullying and browbeating which they might receive from the judge.27 This faith was upheld by the acquittal of twelve radicals in 1794, despite the best efforts of government to convict them. Juries had often blocked the efforts of the judge to convict in centuries of historic cases such as Throckmorton’s case of 1554, the Quakers’ Case of 1678, and Hardy’s case in 1794. Coleridge specifically accused Pitt, Grenville, and Dundas of trying to remove the traditional discretionary power of the jury by their wording of the new law. He charged this ministerial triumvirate and not the House of Commons at large with attempting to confuse and delude English juries by muddling the law beyond comprehension.28
Thus, for Coleridge the Common Law system represented the consensus of a cumulative, suprastatutory wisdom of practice and habitude over time. Common Law decisions were derived through practice in the historic courts and were applied in practice to individual cases that occurred in particular and local circumstances. For Coleridge, the Common Law revealed its accord with higher principles of reason and justice through its durability and historical continuity. Particular Statutes of the Realm, taken individually, did not partake of this “cumulative wisdom.”
Coleridge considered particular statutes to be too localized and “presentist,” too often overtly political in their inception and their execution, to articulate any principle of universal truth in and of themselves. Bad bills, such as the Gagging Acts of 1795, and even good bills such as the Habeas Corpus Act of 1678, appeared in order to address the issues and circumstances of the day. A government could only shape long-term legal policy by carefully and discreetly shaping the preexisting complex of rules by interpretation and by improving the education, the moral norms, and the professional habits of those deputized to enforce those rules.
In a given legal system, there were a number of arcane customs, procedures, and norms that each, like the various strands in a spider’s web, contributed integrity and strength to the whole. Would-be reformers of a legal system had to be aware that certain aspects of that system that might seem antiquated or arcane actually accomplished important tasks when considered in context. Unless one understood how and why the part functioned within a system, one would be unwise to remove or amend it beyond recognition.
Coleridge dealt with this interrelatedness of the parts of a given system in his lecture of 1795 on Mosaic law, the legal system that in his eyes had the greatest plausible claim to be in accord with divine reason and will. Reflecting on the imagined possibility that “any” individual member of his Bristol audience “had the legislative power committed to [him] for the next hundred years” in the manner that Moses had, Coleridge wondered at the feasibility and outcome of such an experiment. The individual in question would have unlimited authority to write and introduce statute but not to execute them or judge offenders against those laws. Given those terms, the individual in question would be expected to “introduce a pure republic” or “perhaps an abolition of all individual property … at the end of [that century],” that is, by 1895. (The achievement of a “pure” republic in England and an end to the ownership of all property, it will be recalled, were two projects that Coleridge saw as inherently difficult, theoretically problematic, and probably not realistic goals given current moral standards.) He concluded that “a variety of laws” in the system would prove “useful only as tending to a better form of things,” that is, as means to a more significant end. In the end, the interrelationship of the laws was such that seemingly useless or arcane or imperfect pieces actually accomplished important work within the system as a whole. “We are not hastily to conclude an ordinance or action trifling,” argued Coleridge, “simply because at first sight we do not perceive its uses.” “Many ordinances [in the law of Moses] which would appear trifling or injurious if considered as universal and perpetual might have been highly useful” in the context of their specific civilization and culture, he concluded.29
Coleridge’s parable of the legislator with a century to perfect a country by statute alone was, of course, meant to stun his Bristol audience with the sheer impossibility of the task. He thus forced upon them the recognition that civilizations were not made or broken by statute alone, although bad statute more easily and rapidly destroyed a polity than good legislation constructed it. His parable was a thinly veiled argument for the wisdom and complexity of the unwritten constitution, as well as for traditional law, however “trifling” or “injurious” it might seem. Even a good-hearted Bristolian given a century to transform the English people, he insinuated, could not instill universal principles of reason (or cultural habits such as disregard for property) in that people by acts of Parliament alone. For statute, by virtue of its fixity and specificity, was an incredibly awkward and counterproductive method of expressing vague and general moral truths. It was not possible to formulate, without the divine and infinite wisdom that only God possessed, a law code that would be a universal assertion of truth. Legal systems therefore had to fumble along as best they could using the cumulative historical wisdom of their tradition and the grounds of common sense and judgment.
Given the inevitable fallibility of human legislation, Coleridge wondered how the legislation of Parliament could be drafted to reflect the general principles of justice and reason in light of the contingencies of historical change and the impossibility of encoding them. Coleridge aspired to know how laws could be made productive of or even harmonious with morality. He had already suggested the connection between policies of government, rules of law, and principles of morality in his consideration of the “right” of property. He argued in the Bristol lectures that “the right of landed property made [the idea that one might own such property] consistent with the prevailing ideas of justice” (my italics).
Coleridge implied that in politics pragmatic considerations and the lessons of experience were a better guide to practice than pure theory. This was not for Coleridge a distinction between the “bad science” of the French theorists versus the “good pragmatism” of the English traditionalists. It was instead the distinction between that “bad” hypertheoretical science that claimed mathematical certainty and in doing so held onto its theories in the teeth of the evidence and that “good” theoretical science that only claimed moral certainty when and if warranted and which based any “hypothesis” on “phenomena.” This Coleridgean pragmatism, therefore, was not irrational, nor was it celebratory of tradition for its own sake. Instead, it was truly scientific. For in the natural sciences (“natural philosophy”), Coleridge asserted, “we scruple not to adopt a hypothesis as true which solves Phaenomena [sic] in a simple and easy manner.” He added, “if no other [explanation for the phenomenon] can be produced, that gives a similar solution, the probability [of the hypothesis being valid] amounts to a moral certainty.… A Rule is given and demonstrated to be the true one, if it solves all the cases to which it can be applied.”30 In this sense the law was more than mere rules. As ultimate sovereign over the king and the houses of Lords and Commons, both transhistorical and the creature of time and place, the law existed as a social matrix.
Coleridge made a clear distinction between particular statutes or rules and law as a larger process. Proceeding from this assumption, he began The Plot Discovered with a consideration of the sovereignty of Parliament, which for Coleridge was subordinate to the sovereignty of law. He quoted James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions: “We have entrusted to Parliament the guardianship of our liberties, not the power of surrendering them.”31
Implicitly, Coleridge believed that it was not within the power of Parliament to abrogate or abolish the subject’s fundamental liberties as defined in basic constitutional documents such as Magna Carta or the 1689 Declaration of Rights. Coleridge was sensible to the fact that most subjects did not understand the nature or the powers of their rights under the law or their position within the Common Law system. He acknowledged the wit of Samuel Horsley’s acidic Tory observation that “the mass of people have nothing to do with the laws but obey them.”32 Coleridge nevertheless argued against Horsley that if the “people had nothing to do with the laws” in practice, they had everything to do with them in principle. As Coleridge defined them, the civil liberties of the subject resided within the existing power and spirit of the English law. These constituted civil liberties were the “majesty” of the nation, and Coleridge embodied his opposition to the statute in the melodramatic cry: “Ere yet this foul treason against the majesty of man, ere yet this blasphemy against the goodness of God be registered among our statutes, I enter my protest!”33 Coleridge considered it a “treason against the majesty of man,” the common subject of Britain, a treason which he implicitly saw as the corruption of the laws, if the two acts were “registered among our statutes.” Where Parliament created unlawful laws, he argued, Parliament exceeded its sovereignty. Emphasizing this distinction, Coleridge concluded his catalogue of perils with a warning that men of conscience had to act rapidly “ere yet it be made legal for Ministers to act with vigour beyond the law.”34
Coleridge’s distinction between rules and law in the larger sense was consistent with the arguments of common lawyers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century that placed sovereign power in the law rather than in any one man or set of men. Coleridge did not dispute that Parliament had the supreme power to enact statutes, but he considered that activity as only a small part of “making law” in the larger sense of refining, shaping, and molding the Common Law to the changing face of English culture and society. Not unlike Coke, Coleridge considered, that unreasonable statutes were “inapplicable” if not “unlawful.”35
Coleridge’s conception of law was clearly something larger than the simple recognition of rules. He viewed the formative value of the law as subsisting in the Common Law: in precedent, custom, and tradition. More than this, he regarded the law as a living process and not merely a static compilation of statutes. Coleridge emphasized the active element of interpretation through the human intercession of judges and jurors. He echoed the opinions of the Swiss jurist J. L. DeLolme in distinguishing between statute (the written law), immemorial custom (unwritten law), and the common law that mediated statute and custom.36 This deeply historical continuity of the Common Law, which had been defined and memorialized in Mathew Hale’s writings, was the underlying source of the Common Law’s capacity for reasonability and mediation.37
The mediating component of the Common Law was that which adjusted for the particular, the individual, the contingent: in short, the human and humane qualities of the law. It was through this process of mediation that reason became manifest. Through the accumulated wisdom of custom and practice in case law, common lawyers and judges distilled principles of reason. This formulation of principle, along with the establishment of precedent, constituted an active historical voice in the law. In Coleridge’s view, this active historical voice constituted a distinctive third component, alongside rules and cases, in the law of the land. It survived in reasons for judgment, where judges employed historical precedents alongside longstanding principles to interpret statutes as they applied to individual cases. These new interpretations were, in turn, incorporated into the body of law; they became custom as they changed custom.
With this process in mind, Coleridge was acutely critical of the attempt to integrate commentaries into rules and to encode precedent into a positive body of laws. With respect to the crisis of the day he wrote that the “old treason laws” were “superseded” by “the exploded commentaries of obsequious crown lawyers.” Through the government’s preferring a gloss by a servile judge to an accurate interpretation of the spirit of the old law, “the commentary has conspired against the text.” The magnitude of this crime was such that it was as if “a vile and useless slave,” legal commentary, “has conspired to dethrone its venerable master,” the treason law of King Edward.38
Coleridge was not upholding the primacy of positive law over common law. He was arguing against the corruption of judicial process, which was the consequence of according commentary the positive force of statute. By “text,” he referred not to any particular rule but to the laws of England. Coleridge maintained that where rules were drafted too complexly, in an attempt to articulate whatever “absolute” principle the government of the day required, there existed a vicious corruption of the law. His barbed reference to “exploded commentary” and “obsequious Crown lawyers” was a reformist challenge to precisely this sort of vice and corruption. Vice was often cloaked by the creation of labyrinthine and ornate embellishments. The best and most virtuous rules, Coleridge contended, were the simplest.
Coleridge construed the two acts as obfuscatory, undermining the reason of the law. Beyond elevating commentaries over rules, the prime minister had attempted to redraft the existing statutes in order to incorporate abstract principles. As Pitt attempted to destroy the clarity of the old treason laws, he overrode historical wisdom. Coleridge believed that this was a true violation of natural justice. The government’s new legislation was, he believed, ahistorical rather than transhistorical. It was, as such, arbitrary in creation and unreasonable in intent. Consequently, it was as artificial and abhorrent an innovation as anything proposed by Robespierre and the Jacobin tribunals. How then to defeat the “Plotters”? Coleridge enlisted the aide of the Bristol gentlemen in a defense (and reform) of British liberty.
Coleridge aimed his critique in The Plot Discovered specifically at Pitt’s “unconstitutional” ministerial actions. By doing so, Coleridge expressed his faith in the basic soundness of the constitutional status quo prior to 1795. While Coleridge did not shrink from invoking the names of the great republican writers of the past, his position on constitutional reform in The Plot diverged from more authentically “radical” opposition attacks. Coleridge’s opinions, by comparison to those of Thelwall and the “Jacobins,” mainly relied on a set of older Whig arguments and cannot accurately be classified in the ranks of “radical” antigovernment polemic.39
Coleridge’s conclusions in 1795 on what was best for Britain in terms of change and reform never employed the “radical” political theory of the natural “Rights of Man and the Citizen” nor the avowal of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Indeed, he was never so heavily invested in the success of the ultrademocratic, truly “Jacobin” wing of the French Revolution as were those who lent their active talents towards advancing the Revolution in France itself (Paine) or to forming coherent political groups dedicated to a speedy and wide-ranging British Reform (Hardy, Thelwall).
In his earliest political writings in 1795, Coleridge had already repudiated Robespierre and the Jacobin party’s murderous harnessing of the sansculottes and had additionally condemned the relatively moderate Dantonists and Brissotins for opening the gate for the escape of the beast of unchecked popular power. This is not to say that Coleridge utterly detested everything that had taken place in France after the Tennis Court Oath, as the flamboyant high Tory reactionaries did. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge felt elation at the “dawn” brought about by the collapse of Bourbon absolutism. The wicked empire of Bourbon despotism, after all, had been a stock villain in the loyalist Georgian polemic of Whig and Tory pamphleteers for over a century. Thus, one could without contradiction support British freedoms in the constitution as it stood (imperfectly) in 1789 and extend congratulations to the vanquishers of the lettre de cachet and other relics of Bourbon tyranny. The true falling-off from admiration for the Revolution amongst Coleridge and other Whig constitutionalists came with the steady arrival of the massacres, the breakdown of constitutional rule, and the institution of revolutionary dictatorship from 1791 to 1794.
Coleridge and other moderate constitutionalist “pro-French” thinkers had never supported such actions as the Terror, the destruction of the aristocrats as a class, or the extirpation of the French royal family. He had not turned against these policies, for he never supported them in the first place. Therefore, Coleridge’s disapproval (renunciation or “recantation’) did not amount to “repudiation,” “treason,” or “apostasy” against the “cause,” so much as a righteous anger that what had begun so promisingly had derailed and utterly demolished itself. If one were to “place” Coleridge in the milieu of the French Revolution, one might position him in the environs of Lafayette, Mirabeau, and the early Feuillants, or in the ranks of the revivers of the powers of the propertied among the Thermidoreans. Given that Paine himself narrowly escaped the guillotine for the crime of excessive moderation, it is inconceivable that Coleridge would have fared very well among the true “Jacobins” in France. On the other hand, Coleridge detested the ultraroyalists who were willing to waste English lives and money in order to restore the Bourbon despotism in all its malicious and unrestrained power. Thus, in 1795 Coleridge was caught, like so many others of his generation, in the middle: he hated Jacobinism and Terror and hated Bourbonism and absolute monarchy and did not wish to see either succeed.
Indeed, it is more correct to see Coleridge’s political lexicon in 1795 as not waving the republican tricoleur of universalist French theories but as repairing and re-erecting the old aristocratic banners of the ancient constitution and the Common Law originally sewn by the great avatars of the these nobiliare in France (Montesquieu), Switzerland (DeLolme), and Britain (Blackstone, Burke). Coleridge’s ideas in 1795 owed an incalculable debt to the work of the very “dough-baked Patriots” and “self-styled constitutionalists” at whom he is presumed to have jeered in his Moral and Political Lecture of 1795.40 Coleridge by 1795 was deeply grounded in the European these nobiliare and appears to have accepted its central emphases on the benefits of constitutional balance (between the king, Lords, and Commons), preserving and mending the old whenever possible, and evading broad-brush statutory reform. Because of his fundamental accord with these old aristocratic, constitutionalist writers, Coleridge never ventured very far into the high-democratic and republican arguments that were made by the true “radicals” of 1795. Far from contributing to a radical or democratic republicanism newborn in 1789, his arguments in The Plot reflect a subtle and careful constitutionalism rooted in the works of the 1730s through the 1780s. He argued for the stabilizing balances of free opinion, “the King in parliament,” and the sovereignty of law over the will either of absolute royal authority or of absolute popular authority.
Such preoccupations have long been associated, both by modern and contemporary critics, with “True” Whig ideology. The Rockinghamite “New Whig” Edmund Burke had identified these more “conservative” or classical strands of Whiggery in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.41 An ideology that reached back to the seventeenth century and beyond, “True” (or real or loyal) Whiggism was a variant strain of “Country” anticentralism that relied heavily on ideas of constitutional balance, moderation, and Common Law for its conception of sovereignty.42
Coleridge’s “radical” attack on Pitt, therefore, was only as “radical” as the invective against “corruption” and “influence of the Crown” that Bolingbroke and Amhurst had used against Walpole in the 1730s Craftsman essays and that John Dunning had employed against Lord North in his famous “Resolution” of 1780. Like Bolingbroke and Dunning, Coleridge saw the influence of a powerful first minister expanding so quickly that it threatened to devour the theretofore independent powers of judges and lawmakers.
The Plot contributed to a defense of Whig “revolution principles” and a constitutional tradition that looked to Cicero rather than Machiavelli, Cato, or Robespierre for its model of an ideal republic. Coleridge combined in the pamphlet his conception of classical republicanism with ideas of Common Law, a system of checks and balances, and a view of history that he derived from a variety of political sources: the Tory Bolingbroke, the Old Whig Shaftesbury, the reformer James Burgh,43 and the conservative Edmund Burke, as well as from those more “radical” specters of liberty whom he mentioned in The Plot: “Milton, Locke, Sydney, [and] Harrington.” Coleridge believed that the works of the great republican writers of the seventeenth century such as Milton and Harrington provided a shocking example of a set of authors formerly considered to be innocuous or even patriotic who would be branded seditious by the passage of the bills. The argument he employed in defense of British liberty was essentially True Whiggish or Old Constitutional Tory rather than republican in the contemporary sense. It paid heed to the moral condition of the citizenry in the republic and the problems of wealth in terms of national virtue and renovation rather than to the sorts of bills and charters of rights that confirmed the fundamental rights of the subject, which had achieved a sort of apotheosis above the reach of Parliamentary power.44
The heroes of Coleridge’s pantheon, it must be remembered, were not only heroes to “radicals” in the late eighteenth century.45 The use of the mythicized “pantheon of liberty” by members of the “party of liberty” of all stripes was not an indication that one agreed with all of the heroes’ particular deeds, nor that one thought that admiring sturdy republicans such as Milton made a man a republican, but that one concurred in their impassioned and stalwart defense of the chartered (or natural) rights of the subject against the incursions of tyrants. The invocations of the great shades of the heroes of liberty by Coleridge in The Plot was an effort to make such tyrants as Pitt realize that, like Robespierre, they “had a lith in their necks.” They could not, he warned, run roughshod over the liberties of the people without the people striking back in defense of their liberties. To be sure, “corruption” presented certain practical, although not insurmountable, problems for the constitution. Accordingly, Coleridge sought moderate solutions in his ambitions for reform.
Practical problems of application, whether questions of revenue or the efficacy of the electorate, had dogged the constitution before Pitt’s attempt to destroy it. But Coleridge perceived these to be problems of misapplication and not fundamental errors of structure or principle. To use later Coleridgean terminology, the “Idea” of the British Constitution balanced between king, Lords, and Commons, executive, legislative, and judicial, was essentially a sound one. Only the practice of it had been warped and bent by years of corruption and purchase and exchange of seats by aristocrats and Crown officers. In his assumption that the “Idea” of the balanced constitution was definitely correct despite the excrescences that had grown upon it through corruption, Coleridge again emphasized the discrepancies that existed between the ideal and the actual: the “real [ideal] world,” true and pure and perfect, and the “moral [material] world,” fallible and impure and imperfect.
Coleridge focused on the sicknesses of the realm that merited a moderate Parliamentary reform and derided the instances of borough-mongering and corruption which he saw as playing into Pitt’s hands. Turning to what he perceived as an overwhelming bias in favor of the executive, he criticized the powers of the treasury and the seats that it controlled in the Commons through placemen, pensioners, and other Crown officials. The other practical problem was corruption, and specifically the corruption that attended elections.
In the “corruption” of Parliament, Coleridge blamed all three branches of the government. He blamed the Crown, which through the Civil List and the first minister’s patronage controlled and gave out Treasury-funded seats to court and administration lackeys, placemen, and pensioners. He blamed the Lords, which owned and distributed seats in rotten boroughs to idle sons and pliant minions. He blamed the Commons, which undertook their civic duty of electing members of Parliament not with a sense of sobriety and dignity but in a roistering chaos of “the drunkenness, perjury, and murder that attend a general election.” Indeed, the behavior of the common people at any given election was so bad, complained Coleridge, that “every honest man [might] wish that the lesser number of the house of commons [who were elected “freely” by voters in open boroughs and counties] were elected as [are elected] the majority (or actual legislative power) [of the House of Commons;] that is by the one hundred sixty-two peers, gentlemen, and treasury.”46
Coleridge, unlike most of his “radical” contemporaries, was a timocrat rather than a democrat in his plans for Parliamentary reform. Even in his relatively “wild” youth, when he saw himself as blowing the tinny trumpet of sedition, he could never quite shake off his scorn for the great unwashed. During the entirety of 1795, he retained a subtle bias in favor of the responsible patrician elements of government and a suspicion of the general, more plebeian elements of the electorate. Even in his most “democratic” moments, his partly subconscious, detestation of the multitude and the mob would surface: note that he could not defend the “Majesty” of the common people in its own right, but instead cloaked it in the corporate and more decorous “Majesty” of King George. Even in his so-called “radical years” of 1794 to 1796, Coleridge regarded the “citizens,” into whose hands the radicals wished to commend the spirit of the laws, as not (yet) the somber, devoted, sober-sided Roman-style people the radicals imagined them to be. In Coleridge’s Plot, the British “citizen” was admittedly more “an antique Roman” than a Briton. Unfortunately, as of 1795 the British common man was the wrong kind of antique Roman: not the dignified, self-sacrificing, Spartan saint of the Catonian era that the “radicals” pictured him as, but rather the loutish, dole-besotted begetter of “drunkenness, perjury, and murder” at elections, the sort of Roman who had sold the imperial dignity to the highest bidder in the time of Galba. If those plebeians who already had the franchise went to the polls drunk and were swayed in their votes more by bribes and hired bully-boys than by independent thought, then how could expanding the number of voters purify the constitution?
Yet, again criticizing the constitutionalist’s position, Coleridge considered Paley’s defense of the propertied interest equally flawed. Paley was not so much interested in reform of process—that is, a broadening of the number of Britons eligible to vote for M.P.s—as in the reform of representation: a betterment of the quality and wisdom of the men returned as members to those seats in the Commons. Paley argued that “if men the most likely by their qualifications to know and promote the public interest, be actually returned to parliament, it signifies little who returns them.”47 Paley theorized that once such an appointment of wise men to the house had been made, the large number of the members in the Commons should diffuse and balance their interests. Furthermore, appeals to a broader consensus would do no better. “If such a number of such men,” Coleridge quoted Paley as saying, “be liable to the influence of corrupt motives, what [more democratically elected] assembly of men will be secure from the same danger?” All of “the different interests” in the nation, Paley had argued, “are actually represented and of course the people virtually.”48
Nonetheless, it should be apparent that although Coleridge was not in favor of expanded democratic franchise as a panacea, he held a great degree of scorn for the corruptions that he saw in the unreformed Parliament of his day. He was especially hateful towards those legislators whom he saw as Parliamentary mercenaries rather than as independent-thinking legislators. Coleridge’s later 1801 contention, that an independent ownership of substantial property was an essential qualification for M.P.s that kept them from becoming rootless freelances who would sell their talents to the highest bidder, was already evident in The Plot. He noted Paley’s observation that “many individuals eminent by their abilities and eloquence” that is, “in plain language, needy young men of genius,” were “occasionally picked up by one party or other, presented with title or place, and then brought forwards as rhetorical gladiators for the amusement of the good people of England.” “A prize or two gained at Oxford,” Coleridge smirked, “sometimes proves an excellent advertisement to a young man who wants the lucrative office of an accommodating legislator.”49 Throughout his career, even in his “Tory” years, Coleridge maintained the ardor of his “Country” invective against the “needy young” entering a Parliamentary arena where they could only serve as farcical “rhetorical gladiators” and “accommodating legislator[s].” Even in 1795, Coleridge saw the ideal M.P. as a man who had property that kept him from being “needy” and thus kept him in the category of honorable men, as citizen-soldiers rather than as mercenary gladiators.
Yet even in the aftermath of the candid and sarcastic tour around Britain’s corrupted and sad political circus to which he treated his audience, Coleridge believed that unreformed England was not yet a despotism, not in the Ottoman or the Venetian or the Jacobin senses of the word. He was prepared to pile abuse upon the various toadies and underlings who plagued the Commons, but he was not prepared to shift the blame for this condition onto the structure of property in the state or the “Idea” of the tripartite constitution or the existence of hereditary honors such as monarchy and peerage. As theatrical as Coleridge became in The Plot, he was never capable of reaching the height of “radical” hyperbole that would have led him to denounce the Britain of his day as a “despotic” realm. “This conclusion,” he insisted, “we disavow.”50 As of 1795, Coleridge saw Britain in great danger of becoming a tyranny under Pitt, but not yet fallen into that condition.
Indeed, Coleridge thought that the constitution even in its unreformed state had most of the features it needed to represent the public will. He argued, for instance, that the voice of public opinion was intended, by virtue of the nature and structure of the constitution, to be listened to by the monarch and Parliament even in the unreformed state of the law and the constitution. He argued for the responsible vigilance of the men of property, and for the emphasis on property as a guarantee of incorruptibility in M.P.s. And he implied the need for a moderate and specific reform of Parliament against the encroachment of the Crown and the corruption of ministerial and aristocratic patronage. In this regard, Coleridge’s 1795 speech to the Bristol gentlemen, while a rallying cry against tyranny, must be understood within the long constitutional memory of measured resistance.
It must be recalled that Coleridge was addressing men of property in his lecture at Bristol. His appeal was therefore to the independent backbencher, the honorable opposition, and those interested citizens to whom they were responsible and who through the liberty of the press made their influence felt. In short, Coleridge was addressing the enfranchised patriot of property and standing. His patriot was to be found both in the house, as a member of Parliament, and “out of doors” as a private citizen. Coleridge emphasized that there was a direct line between these different spheres of influence, between a representation both virtual and direct.
The text of The Plot Discovered presents a politically moderate if rhetorically impassioned Whig critique of corruption and centralization in the Pitt administration. Coleridge’s constitutional criticism was neither republican nor democratic in the more extreme sense but contributed to a defense of the landed oligarchy and the propertied interest against the encroachment of an arbitrary executive. Against such an encroachment, Coleridge recognized the right and indeed the duty of responsible propertied resistance in defense of parliamentary sovereignty.
In the spirit of moderation and rational criticism, and deliberately setting himself apart from the popular radicals of the London Corresponding Society, Coleridge began his lecture with something of a disclaimer. Referring to Bolingbroke, he remarked that “true political moderation” consisted in “not opposing the interests of government except when great and national interests are at stake.” When the great and national interests were at stake, the citizen was bound not to overreact. He was justified only “in opposing them with such a degree of warmth as is adequate to the nature of the evil.”51
Yet Bolingbroke was very careful in his defense of resistance to emphasize that he did not advocate an ongoing right to constantly oppose government, as he believed some of Locke’s adherents had done, nor did he mean to defend nonresistance and divine right as was practiced under the old King James II. Bolingbroke simply argued, as did most men of his age who were not Jacobites or High Tories, that every man had the right to resist tyranny in extremis. The question for Coleridge in 1795, as it had been for Bolingbroke before him, was how did one define the limits of abuse? What constituted tyranny? Coleridge drew a principle from Common Law in his allusion to what has been called “necessary and sufficient force.” Specific and limited abuses by government that threatened the national interest were not to be met with a complete termination of the social contract and a descent into insurrection and lawlessness. Rather, government must be resisted and criticized surgically. Continuing his gloss of Bolingbroke, he asserted that “to oppose” government “upon any other ground” than true defects and emergencies was wicked. It was especially factious, Coleridge noted, “to oppose things which are not blameworthy” or “which are of no material consequence to the national Interest.” Using “such violence as may disorder the harmony of government” was “certainly faction” and not to be tolerated or allowed as legitimate.52
Coleridge introduced several of his pivotal concerns in this passage: a national interest, the harmony of government, and the nature of faction. The emphasis upon a harmony of government was a critical component of Coleridge’s conception of a limited and specific resistance. He believed that the proper sphere for criticism or resistance was through the editing and adjustment of specific conditions of abuse and mistake. These were to be considered in terms of particular instances and as they occurred. Coleridge distrusted systematic solutions to human problems, and, while he looked for universal goals, he accepted the necessity of specific means.53 He attempted a limited and specific critique of ministerial abuses in his pamphlet and argued that members of the house must do likewise when they observed treachery in the cabinet. Resistance must be constructive; it must restore and conserve the existing framework of the constitution and not promote further dissension.
Promoting a loyal opposition, Coleridge’s “patriot” had a duty to oppose those elements of government that threatened the greater structure of the constitution as an active force. Coleridge called this active structure “the harmony of government.” With regard to the merits of opposition, he noted that it was “likewise faction, and faction of the worst kind,” if one decided in a true crisis or case of authentic oppression “either not to oppose at all, or not to oppose in earnest where the principles of liberty are endangered.”54
Coleridge referred to the “principles of liberty” and the national interest in the preceding passage. His “harmony of government” was the best safeguard for these principles. He argued that the constitution and the sovereignty of the law preserved individual freedom and promoted the national interest. Coleridge’s conception of a national interest was as an aggregate of individual interest that did not exist as a collective or general will. In this regard, there was an individualistic rather than broadly communitarian basis to his concept of government. Coleridge suggested that an individual showed “true political moderation” if he, “with all feelings of abhorrence and with all powers of fearless argument” within his power, “gird[ed] himself up to oppose the bill for the more effectively preventing seditious meetings and assemblies.”55
Coleridge contended that it was not books, assemblies, or public meetings but the government’s own legislation that generated sedition. He argued that Pitt’s legislation was a provocation to unbridled and ill-considered resistance outside the house. Coleridge informed his audience that the bill was in itself a betrayal of the constitution and the harmony of interests that the constitution was truly meant to represent. If passed, Pitt’s legislation would create a seditious assembly in the cabinet as it allowed ministers to conspire against the law. Only by opposing the government’s current legislation could the “true Patriot” act against faction and sedition that threatened from within. Only by preserving the legislated discourse of opinion and law could the “true Patriot” defend the constitution.