1. Add. MSS. 27850 ff., 19–20: 27838 ff., 19–20; G. D. H. Cole and A. W. Filson, British Working Class Movements (1951), pp. 79–80. See below, ch. 13.
1. T. A. Ward, Peeps into the Past, ed. A. B. Bell (1909), p. 192.
1. See E. Haiévy, op. cit., I. pp. 193–212.
1. See pp. 135 ff. below. The evidence is fully discussed in Lord Cockburn’s learned and lively Examination of the Trials of Sedition… in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1888).
2. Anon., Letters on the Impolicy of a Standing Army in Time of Peace, and on the unconstitutional and illegal Measure of Barracks (1793). John Trenchard’s History of Standing Armies in England (1698) was republished in 1731, 1739, 1780 and in the Jacobin Philanthropist (1795).
3. See Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty, p. 14; S. Maccoby, English Radicalism 1786–1832 (1955), p. 91. It was said that prostitutes, known as ‘gallows bitches’, enticed men into the house where they were forcibly ‘recruited’: see H. M. Saunders, The Crimps (1794).
1. Records of the Borough of Nottingham, VIII (1952), p. 152.
2. J. P. Smith, An Account of a Successful Experiment (1812).
3. The Times, 31 January 1823: see Radzinowicz, op. cit., III, pp. 354–64.
1. T. Walker, Review of some Political Events in Manchester (1794), p.87.
1. Major Cartwright also came to advocate the secret ballot, but not the sixth Chartist point, the abolition of property qualifications for M.P.s.
2. I use here the term of Henry Jephson, whose two-volume history of The Platform (1892) is still the only consecutive study of this institution.
1. See Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement (1959), pp. 88 ff.
2. C. Wyvill, Political Papers, V, pp. 389–90, 399–400.
1. The Constitutional Society became quiescent in the later 1780s, but – with Horne Tooke as a prominent member – was most active after 1790.
2. In Democracy and the Labour Movement, ed. P. Saville, (1954), esp. pp. 42–54.
1. This rhetoric turns up in unlikely places. A late eighteenth-century bill advertises ‘that Most antient, Loyal, National, Constitutional and Lawful Diversion: BEAR-BAITING’. Provincial Jacobin societies, between 1792 and 1796, usually described themselves as Constitutional or Patriotic. John Thelwall’s widow, when compiling his life, was at pains to note that her husband was ‘descended from a Saxon family’, while Joseph Gerrald, when proposing the dangerous expedient of a National Convention, cited as precedents the ‘folk-motes’ of ‘our Saxon ancestors’.
2. Erskine rested his defence of Paine, at his trial in absentia, upon passages from Blackstone, while the Sheffield reformer, Yorke, read extracts from Locke at public demonstrations. Student in the Temple, Trial of Thomas Hardy (1794), p. 108.
1. Reflections on the French Revolution (Everyman edn) pp. 58–9, 62, 166.
1. Paine returned to England in 1787, and was much preoccupied with his experiments in bridge-building. The First Part of Rights of Man was published in 1791: the Second Part in 1792. The most recent biography of Paine – A. O. Aldridge, Man of Reason (1960) – is thorough but pedestrian, and adds little to our knowledge of Paine’s English influence and connexions. It should be read beside the lively but partisan Life (1892) by Moncure D. Conway; or the brief sketch by H. N. Brailsford in Shelley, Godwin and their Circle.
1. These last three passages are taken from Paine’s Letter Addressed to the Addressers (1792), pp. 19, 26, 69. All others from Rights of Man.
1. Eaton published a ‘Third Part’ in 1811, and was sentenced in 1812 – at the age of sixty – to a further eighteen months imprisonment and to the pillory. T. S. Howell, State Trials (1823), XXXI, pp. 927 ff.
1. See below, ch. 11.
2. Godwin’s philosophical anarchism reached a working-class public only after the Wars; and then mainly through the Notes to Shelley’s Queen Mab, in Richard Carlile’s pirated editions.
1. See especially the discussion of Wade and the Gorgon, below, pp. 848 ff.
1. Citizen Randol, of Ostend, A Political Catechism of Man (1795), p. 8.