IN 1797 the defenders of Hardy’s house were fighting a rearguard action. In the next few years, when a French invasion was possible, there is no doubt that the patriotic sentiments of the populace threatened the surviving Jacobins with mob terrorism. In Westminster, with its wide franchise, it was still possible to defeat the Radicals in 1806 by deploying the resources of bribery and deference. Francis Place saw servants of the Duke of Northumberland ‘in their showy dress liveries, throwing lumps of bread and cheese among the dense crowd of vagabonds’:
To see these vagabonds catching the lumps, shouting, swearing, fighting, and blackguarding in every possible way, women as well as men, all the vile wretches from the courts and alleys in St Giles and Westminster, the Porridge Islands, and other miserable places; to see these people representing, as it was said, the electors of Westminster, was certainly the lowest possiblé step of degradation…
Beer was given to the crowd, the heads of the butts were knocked in and ‘coal-heavers ladled the beer out with their long-tailed, broad-brimmed hats… but the mob pressing on, the butts were upset, and the beer flowed along the gutters, from whence some made efforts to obtain it’. Place looked on, appalled at this ‘disgraceful scene’. But in the next year (1807) Place and his friends organized a Radical election committee which worked among the people with such effect that Westminster returned two Radical Members, Sir Francis Burdett and Lord Cochrane.1 And from that time forward, the tradition of ‘Radical London’ is almost unbroken. Burdett was able in 1810 to model his tactics upon those of Wilkes, and assume the support of the populace in his contest with the Government. In the main provincial centres much the same is true by 1812: ‘the mob’ (a Sheffield diarist noted), ‘dislike all but a thorough Reformer’.1 By the time that the Wars ended (1815), it was not possible, either in London or in the industrial North or Midlands, to employ a ‘Church and King’ mob to terrorize the Radicals.
From time to time, between 1815 and 1850, Radicals, Owenites, or Chartists complained of the apathy of the people. But – if we leave out of account the usual election tumults – it is generally true that reformers were shielded by the support of working-class communities. At election times in the large towns, the open vote by show of hands on the ‘hustings’ which preceded the poll usually went overwhelmingly for the most radical candidate. The reformers ceased to fear ‘the mob’, while the authorities were forced to build barracks and take precautions against the ‘revolutionary crowd’. This is one of those facts of history so big that it is easily overlooked, or assumed without question; and yet it indicates a major shift in emphasis in the inarticulate, ‘sub-political’ attitudes of the masses.
The shift in emphasis is related to popular notions of ‘independence’, patriotism, and the Englishman’s ‘birthright’. The Gordon Rioters of 1780 and the ‘Church and King’ rioters in Birmingham in 1791 had this in common: they felt themselves, in some obscure way, to be defending the ‘Constitution’ against alien elements who threatened their ‘birthright’. They had been taught for so long that the Revolution settlement of 1688, embodied in the Constitution of King, Lords and Commons, was the guarantee of British independence and liberties, that the reflex had been set up – Constitution equals Liberty – upon which the unscrupulous might play. And yet it is likely that the very rioters who destroyed Dr Priestley’s precious library and laboratory were proud to regard themselves as ‘free-born Englishmen’. Patriotism, nationalism, even bigotry and repression, were all clothed in the rhetoric of liberty. Even Old Corruption extolled British liberties; not national honour, or power, but freedom was the coinage of patrician, demagogue and radical alike. In the name of freedom Burke denounced, and Paine championed, the French Revolution: with the opening of the French Wars (1793), patriotism and liberty occupied every poetaster:
Thus Britons guard their ancient fame,
Assert their empire o’er the sea,
And to the envying world proclaim,
One nation still is brave and free –
Resolv’d to conquer or to die,
True to their KING, their LAWS, their LIBERTY.1
The invasion scare resulted in a torrent of broadsheets and ballads on such themes, which form a fitting background for Wordsworth’s smug and sonorous patriotic sonnets:
It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which, to the open sea
Of the world’s praise, from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, ‘with pomp of waters, unwithstood,’…
‘Not to be thought of’: and yet, at this very time, freedom of the press, of public meeting, of trade union organization, of political organization and of election, were either severely limited or in abeyance. What, then, did the common Englishman’s ‘birthright’ consist in? ‘Security of property!’ answered Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘Behold… the definition of English liberty’.2 And yet the rhetoric of liberty means much more – first of all, of course, freedom from foreign domination. And, within this enveloping haze of patriotic self-congratulation, there were other less distinct notions which Old Corruption felt bound to flatter and yet which were to prove dangerous to it in the long run. Freedom from absolutism (the constitutional monarchy), freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, equality before the law, the freedom of the home from arbitrary entrance and search, some limited liberty of thought, of speech, and of conscience, the vicarious participation in liberty (or in its semblance) afforded by the right of parliamentary opposition and by elections and election tumults (although the people had no vote they had the right to parade, huzza and jeer on the hustings), as well as freedom to travel, trade, and sell one’s own labour. Nor were any of these freedoms insignificant; taken together, they both embody and reflect a moral consensus in which authority at times shared, and of which at all times it was bound to take account.1
Indefinite as such a notion as ‘moral consensus’ may be, this question of the limits beyond which the Englishman was not prepared to be ‘pushed around’, and the limits beyond which authority did not dare to go, is crucial to an understanding of this period. The stance of the common Englishman was not so much democratic, in any positive sense, as anti-absolutist. He felt himself to be an individualist, with few affirmative rights, but protected by the laws against the intrusion of arbitrary power. More obscurely, he felt that the Glorious Revolution afforded a consitutional precedent for the right to riot in resistance to oppression. And this indeed was the central paradox of the eighteenth century, in both intellectual and practical terms: constitutionalism was the ‘illusion of the epoch’. Political theory, of traditionalists and reformers alike, was transfixed within the Whiggish limits established by the 1688 settlement, by Locke or by Blackstone. For Locke, the chief ends of government were the maintenance of civil peace, and the security of the person and of property. Such a theory, diluted by self-interest and prejudice, might provide the propertied classes with a sanction for the most bloody code penalizing offenders against property; but it provided no sanction for arbitrary authority, intruding upon personal or property rights, and uncontrolled by the rule of law. Hence the paradox, which surprised many foreign observers, of a bloody penal code alongside a liberal and, at times, meticulous administration and interpretation of the laws. The eighteenth century was indeed a great century for constitutional theorists, judges and lawyers. The poor man might often feel little protection when caught up in the law’s toils. But the jury system did afford a measure of protection, as Hardy, Horne Tooke, Thelwall and Binns discovered. Wilkes was able to defy King, Parliament and administration – and to establish important new precedents – by using alternately the law courts and the mob. There was no droit administratif, no right of arbitrary arrest or search. Even in the 1790s, each attempt to introduce a ‘continental’ spy system, each suspension of Habeas Corpus, each attempt to pack juries, aroused an outcry beyond the reformers’ own ranks. If any – faced by the records of Tyburn and of repression – are inclined to question the value of these limits, they should contrast the trial of Hardy and his colleagues with the treatment of Muir, Gerrald, Skirving and Palmer in 1793–4 in the Scottish courts.1
This constitutionalism coloured the less articulate responses of the ‘free-born Englishman’. He claimed few rights except that of being left alone. No institution was as much hated, in the eighteenth century, as the press-gang. A standing Army was deeply distrusted, and few of Pitt’s repressive measures aroused as much discontent as the erection of barracks near the industrial towns. The right of individuals to bear arms in their own defence was claimed by reformers. The profession of a soldier was held to be dishonourable. ‘In arbitrary Monarchies,’ wrote one pamphleteer,
where the Despot who reigns can say to his wretched subjects, ‘Eat straw’, and they eat straw, no wonder that they can raise Armies of human Butchers, to destroy their fellow creatures; but, in a country like Great Britain, which at least is pretended to be free, it becomes a matter of no small surprize that so many thousands of men should deliberately renounce the privileges and blessings attendant on Freemen, and voluntarily sell themselves to the most humiliating and degrading Slavery, for the miserable pittance of sixpence a day…2
The ‘crimping-houses’ used for military recruiting in Holborn, the City, Clerkenwell and Shoreditch were mobbed and destroyed in three days of rioting in August 1794.3 At the height of the agitation by the framework knitters for protective legislation in 1812, the secretary of the Mansfield branch wrote in alarm when he learned that the workers’ representatives were proposing a clause authorizing powers of inspection and search into the houses of manufacturers suspected of evading the proposed regulations: ‘if iver that bullwark is broke down of every english mans hous being his Castil then that strong barrer is for iver broke that so many of our ancesters have bled for and in vain’.1 Resistance to an effective police force continued well into the nineteenth century. While reformers were prepared to agree that a more effective preventive police was necessary, with more watchmen and a stronger nightly guard over property, any centralized force with larger powers was seen as:
a system of tyranny; an organized army of spies and informers, for the destruction of all public liberty, and the disturbance of all private happiness. Every other system of police is the curse of despotism…2
The Parliamentary Committee of 1818 saw in Bentham’s proposals for a Ministry of Police ‘a plan which would make every servant of every house a spy on the actions of his master, and all classes of society spies on each other’. Tories feared the over-ruling of parochial and chartered rights, and of the powers of local J.P.s; Whigs feared an increase in the powers of Crown or of Government; Radicals like Burdett and Cartwright preferred the notion of voluntary associations of citizens or rotas of householders; the radical populace until Chartist times saw in any police an engine of oppression. A quite surprising consensus of opinion resisted the establishment of ‘one supreme and resistless tribunal, such as is denominated in other countries the “High Police” – an engine… invented by despotism…’3
In hostility to the increase in the powers of any centralized authority, we have a curious blend of parochial defensiveness, Whig theory, and popular resistance. Local rights and customs were cherished against the encroachment of the State by gentry and common people alike; hostility to ‘the Thing’ and to ‘Bashaws’ contributed much to the Tory-Radical strain which runs through from Cobbett to Oastler, and which reached its meridian in the resistance to the Poor Law of 1834. (It is ironic that the main protagonists of the State, in its political and administrative authority, were the middle-class Utilitarians, on the other side of whose Statist banner were inscribed the doctrines of economic laissez faire.) Even at the peak of the repression of the Jacobins, in the middle 1790s, the fiction was maintained that the intimidation was the work of ‘voluntary’ associations of ‘private’ citizens (Reeves’ Anti-Jacobin Society or Wilberforce’s Society for the Suppression of Vice); while the same fiction was employed in the persecution of Richard Carlile after the Wars. State subsidies to the ‘official’ press during the Wars were administered guiltily, and with much hedging and diplomatic denial. The employment of spies and of agents provocateurs after the Wars was the signal for a genuine outburst of indignation in which very many who were bitterly opposed to manhood suffrage took part.
Moreover, not only freedom from the intrusions of the State but also belief in the equality of rich and poor before the law was a source of authentic popular congratulation. Sensational reading-matter, such as the New Newgate Calendar: or Malefactor’s Bloody Register, recorded with satisfaction instances of the noble and influential brought to Tyburn. Local annalists noted smugly such cases as that of Leeds’ ‘domineering villanous lord of the manor’ who was executed in 1748 for killing one of his own tenants in a fit of temper. Radicals might affect a well-based cynicism. If the law is open alike to rich and poor, said Horne Tooke, so is the London Tavern: ‘but they will give you a very sorry welcome, unless you come with money sufficient to pay for your entertainment’.1 But the conviction that the rule of law was the distinguishing inheritance of the ‘free-born Englishman’, and was his defence against arbitrary power, was upheld even by the Jacobins. The London Corresponding Society, in an Address of 1793, sought to define the difference in status between the English commoner and the commoner in pre-revolutionary France: ‘our persons were protected by the laws, while their lives were at the mercy of every titled individual…. We were MEN while they were SLAVES.’
This defensive ideology nourished, of course, far larger claims to positive rights. Wilkes had known well how to strike this chord – the champion defending his individual rights passed imperceptibly into the free-born citizen challenging King and Ministers and claiming rights for which there was no precedent. In 1776 Wilkes went so far as to plead in the House of Commons for the political rights of ‘the meanest mechanic, the poorest peasant and day labourer’, who –
has important rights respecting his personal liberty, that of his wife and children, his property however inconsiderable, his wages… which are in many trades and manufactures regulated by the power of Parliament…. Some share therefore in the power of making those laws which deeply interest them… should be reserved even to this inferior but most useful set of men…
The argument is still that of Ireton (or Burke) but property-rights are interpreted in a far more liberal sense; and Wilkes rounded it off with the customary appeal to tradition and precedent:
Without a true representation of the Commons our constitution is essentially defective… and all other remedies to recover the pristine purity of the form of government established by our ancestors would be ineffectual.
‘Pristine purity’, ‘our ancestors’ – these are key-phrases, and for twenty years arguments among reformers turned upon nice interpretations of these terms. Which model was pure and pristine, to which ancestors should reformers refer? To the founding fathers of the United States, breaking free from the trammels of precedent, it seemed sufficient to find certain truths ‘self-evident’. But to Major John Cartwright (1740-1824), publishing his pamphlet Take Your Choice in the same year as the Declaration of Independence (1776), it seemed necessary to shore up his case for annual parliaments, equal electoral districts, payment of Members, and adult manhood suffrage, with reference to Saxon precedent. The ‘good, grey Major’ (as he became known nearly half a century later) defined as early as this the main claims of advanced political reformers, from 1776 to the Chartists and beyond.1 And from these claims he never swerved. Incapable of compromise, eccentric and courageous, the Major pursued his single-minded course, issuing letters, appeals, and pamphlets, from his seat in Boston, Lincs, surviving trials, tumults, dissension and repression. It was he who set out, before the Napoleonic Wars had ended, to found the first reform societies of a new era, the Hampden Clubs, in those northern industrial regions where his clerical brother had accelerated other processes of change with his invention of the power-loom. But although the Major’s principles and proposals outlived his own long lifetime, his arguments did not
In a moment, we shall see why. (The answer, in two words, is Tom Paine.) But we should first note that in twenty years before the French Revolution a new dimension was in practice being added to the accepted procedures of the Constitution. The press had already established indefinite rights independent of King, Lords and Commons; and the agitation surrounding Wilkes’s North Briton revealed both the precariousness of these rights and the sensitivity of a large public in their defence. But the second half of the eighteenth century sees also the rise of the Platform,2 – the ‘extra-parliamentary’ pressure-group, campaigning for more or less limited aims, mobilizing opinion ‘without doors’ by means of publications, great meetings, and petitions. Different uses of platform and petition were adopted by bodies as various as Wilkes’s supporters, Wyvill’s county associations, the Protestant Association (which figured at the start of the Gordon Riots), the ‘economical’ reformers, the anti-slavery agitation, agitation for the repeal of disabilities upon Nonconformists. While Wilberforce or Wyvill might wish to limit their agitation to gentlemen, or to freeholders, precedents were established, and the example was contagious. A new cog was added to the complicated machinery of constitution; Erksine and Wyvill, using the familiar mechanical imagery of checks and balances,1 called for ‘Clock-Work Regularity in the movements of the People’. Major John Cartwright went further – the more fuss stirred up, for the most far-reaching demands, among all classes of people, the better:
On the old maxim of teaching a young archer to shoot at the moon [he wrote to Wyvill] in order that he may acquire the power of throwing his arrow far enough for practical purposes, I have always thought that a free discussion of the principle of Universal Suffrage the most likely means of obtaining any Reform at all worth contending for.
For the Major – although he couched his arguments in terms of precedent and tradition – believed in methods of agitation among ‘members unlimited’. In the years of repression, 1797–9, the squire of Boston issued a reproof to the caution of the north Yorkshire reformer. ‘I am but little afraid of your Yeomanry,’ he wrote to Wyvill, ‘but your Gentlemen I dread…. It is fortunate for me that hitherto all the Gentlemen, except one, have been on the other side. My efforts, therefore, have not been maimed by their councils, and I have on all occasions spoken out’:
I feel as if nothing but strong cordials, and the most powerful stimulants, can awaken the People to any thing energetic…. Unless our appeals convince all under-standings, and the truths we utter irresistibly seize on the heart, we shall do nothing…. If you should, in order to get on at all, be compelled to propose mere expedients short of such energetic appeals, I hope in God you will be rescued from the situation by some strong-minded men at your Meeting…2
Similar constitutional arguments might, then, conceal deep differences in tone and in means of propaganda. But all reformers before Paine commenced with ‘the corruptions of the Constitution’. And their degree of Radicalism can generally be inferred from the historical precedents cited in their writings. The Wilkite, but largely aristocratic, Supporters of the Bill of Rights (and its successors, the ‘Revolution Societies’ (1788) and The Friends of the People (1792)) were content to enforce the precedent of the settlement of 1688. The advanced Society for Constitutional Information, founded in 1780, whose pamphlets by Dr Jebb, Cartwright, and Capel Lofft provided Thomas Hardy with his first introduction to the theory of reform, ranged widely – to the Magna Carta and beyond – for precedents, and drew upon both Anglo-Saxon and American example.1 And, after the French Revolution, theorists of the popular societies dealt largely in Anglo-Saxon ‘tythings’, the Witenagemot, and legends of Alfred’s reign. ‘Pristine purity’, and ‘our ancestors’, became – for many Jacobins – almost any constitutional innovation for which a Saxon precedent could be vamped up. John Baxter, a Shoreditch silversmith, a leader of the L.C.S. and a fellow prisoner with Hardy during the treason trials, found time to publish in 1796 an 830-page New and Impartial History of England, in which Saxon precedent is almost indistinguishable from the state of nature, the noble savage, or the original social compact. ‘Originally,’ Baxter supposed, ‘the constitution must have been free.’ History was the history of its corruption, ‘the Britons having been subdued first by the Romans, next by the Saxons, these again by the Danes, and, finally, all by the Normans…’ As for the Revolution of 1688 it ‘did no more than expel a tyrant, and confirm the Saxon laws’. But there were plenty of these laws still to be restored; and, next to manhood suffrage, the ones which John Baxter liked best were the absence of a standing Army, and the right of each citizen to go armed. He had arrived, by industrious constitutional arguments, at the right of the people to defy the Constitution.
Nevertheless, as Mr Christopher Hill has shown in his study of the theory of the ‘Norman Yoke’, these elaborate and often specious constitutional controversies were of real significance.2 Even the forms of antiquarian argument conceal important differences in political emphasis. From the anonymous Historical Essay on the English Constitution (1771) to the early 1790s, the more advanced reformers were marked out by their fondness for citing Saxon example. Long before this Tom Paine had published his Common Sense (1776) whose arguments were scarcely conducive to the appeal to precedent:
A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself King of England, against the consent of the natives, is, in plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it…. The plain truth is that the antiquity of English monarchy will not bear looking into.
But this was published on American soil; and, as we shall see, it was only after the French Revolution and the publication of Rights of Man that such iconoclasm was heard in England: ‘If the succession runs in the line of the Conqueror, the nation runs in the line of being conquered, and ought to rescue itself from this approach.’ Meanwhile, the thory of the ‘Norman Yoke’ showed astonishing vitality; and even had a revival, in Jacobin circles, after 1793, when Paine was driven into exile and his Rights of Man was banned as seditious libel.
This was, in part, a matter of expediency. Paine’s prosecution revealed the limits of freedom permitted within the conventions of constitutionalism. To deny altogether the appeal to ‘our ancestors’ was actively dangerous. When Henry Yorke, the Sheffield reformer, was on trial in 1795, his defence turned upon this point: ‘In almost every speech I took essential pains in controverting the doctrines of Thomas Paine, who denied the existence of our constitution…. I constantly asserted on the contrary, that we had a good constitution’, ‘that magnanimous government which we derived from our Saxon fathers, and from the prodigious mind of the immortal Alfred’. Even John Baxter, whose ‘Saxons’ were Jacobin and sans-culottes to a man, felt it expedient to dissociate himself from Paine’s total lack of reverence:
Much as we respect the opinions of Mr Thomas Paine… we cannot agree with him, that we have no constitution; his mistake seems to arise from having carried his views no further than the Norman Conquest.
But it was more than expediency. According to legend, Saxon precedent provided legitimation for a constitutional monarchy, a free Parliament based on manhood suffrage, and the rule of law. In coming forward as ‘Patriots’ and constitutionalists, men like Major Cartwright and Baxter were attempting to take over the rhetoric of the age.1 It seemed that if matters were to be posed as bluntly as Paine posed them in Common Sense, then reformers would be forced to disengage from the constitutional debate altogether, and rest their claims upon reason, conscience, self-interest, ‘self-evident’ truths. For many eighteenth-century Englishmen whose minds were nurtured in a constitutionalist culture the idea was shocking, unnerving, and, in its implications, dangerous.
And yet it was necessary that this rhetoric should be broken through, because – even when tricked out in Baxter’s improbable Saxon terms – it implied the absolute sanctity of certain conventions: respect for the institution of monarchy, for the hereditary principle, for the traditional rights of the great landowners and the Established Church, and for the representation, not of human rights, but of property rights. Once enmeshed in constitutionalist arguments – even when these were used to advance the claims of manhood suffrage – reformers became caught up in the trivia of piecemeal constitutional renovation. For a plebeian movement to arise it was essential to escape from these categories altogether and set forward far wider democratic claims. In the years between 1770 and 1790 we can observe a dialectical paradox by means of which the rhetoric of constitutionalism contributed to its own destruction or transcendence. Those in the eighteenth century who read Locke or Blackstone’s commentaries found in them a searching criticism of the workings of faction and interest in the unreformed House of Commons.2 The first reaction was to criticize the practice of the eighteenth century in the light of its own theory; the second, more delayed, reaction was to bring the theory itself into discredit. And it was at this point that Paine entered, with Rights of Man.
The French Revolution had set a precedent of a larger kind: a new constitution drawn up, in the light of reason and from first principles, which threw ‘the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute’ into the shadows. And it was not Paine, but Burke, who effected the first major evacuation of the grounds of constitutional argument. The French example, on one hand, and the industrious reformers quarrying for pre-1688 or pre-Norman precedent, on the other, had made the old ground untenable. In his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) Burke supplemented the authority of precedent by that of wisdom and experience, and reverence for the Constitution by reverence for tradition – that ‘partnership… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. The theory of checks and balances upon the exercise of specific powers was translated into the moody notion of checks and balances upon the imperfections of man’s nature:
The science of constructing a commonwealth… is not to be taught a priori…. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs…. The rights of men in governments are… often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil…
Radical reformers ‘are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgotten his nature’. ‘By their violent haste and their defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchymist and empiric.’1
The argument is deduced from man’s moral nature in general; but we repeatedly glimpse sight of the fact that it was not the moral nature of a corrupt aristocracy which alarmed Burke so much as the nature of the populace, ‘the swinish multitude’. Burke’s great historical sense was brought to imply a ‘process of nature’ so complex and procrastinating that any innovation was full of unseen dangers – a process in which the common people might have no part. If Paine was wrong to dismiss Burke’s cautions (for his Rights of Man was written in reply to Burke), he was right to expose the inertia of class interests which underlay his special pleading. Academic judgement has dealt strangely with the two men. Burke’s reputation as a political philosopher has been inflated, very much so in recent years. Paine has been dismissed as a mere popularizer. In truth, neither writer was systematic enough to rank as a major political theorist. Both were publicists of genius, both are less remarkable for what they say than for the tone in which it is said. Paine lacks any depth of reading, any sense of cultural security, and is betrayed by his arrogant and impetuous temper into writing passages of a mediocrity which the academic mind still winces at and lays aside with a sigh. But the popular mind remembers Burke less for his insight than for his epochal indiscretion – ‘the swinish multitude’ – the give-away phrase which revealed another kind of insensitivity of which Paine was incapable. Burke’s blemish vitiates the composure of eighteenth-century polite culture. In all the angry popular pamphleteering which followed it might almost seem that issues could be defined in five words: Burke’s two-word epithet on the one hand, Paine’s three-word banner on the other. With dreary invention the popular pamphleteers performed satirical variations upon Burke’s theme: Hog’s Wash, Pig’s Meat, Mast and Acorns: Collected by Old Hubert, Politics for the People: A Salmagundi for Swine (with contributions from ‘Brother Grunter’, ‘Porculus’ and ad nauseam) were the titles of the pamphlets and periodicals. The stye, the swineherds, the bacon – so it goes on. ‘Whilst ye are… gorging yourselves at troughs filled with the daintiest wash; we, with our numerous train of porkers, are employed, from the rising to the setting sun, to obtain the means of subsistence, by… picking up a few acorns,’ runs an Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude (1793). No other words have ever made the ‘free-born Englishman’ so angry – nor so ponderous in reply.
Since the Rights of Man is a foundation-text of the English working-class movement, we must look at its arguments and tone more closely.1 Paine wrote on English soil, but as an American with an international reputation who had lived for close on fifteen years in the bracing climate of experiment and constitutional iconoclasm. ‘I wished to know,’ he wrote in the Preface to the Second Part, ‘the manner in which a work, written in a style of thinking and expression different to what had been customary in England, would be received.’ From the outset he rejected the framework of constitutional argument: ‘I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controuled, and contracted for, by the manuscript-assumed authority of the dead.’ Burke wished to ‘consign over the rights of posterity for ever, on the authority of a mouldy parchment’, while Paine asserted that each successive generation was competent to define its rights and form of government anew.
As for the English Constitution, no such thing existed. At the most, it was a ‘sepulchre of precedents’, a kind of ‘Political Popery’; and ‘government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up’. All governments, except those in France and America, derived their authority from conquest and superstition: their foundations lay upon ‘arbitrary power’. And Paine reserved his particular invective for the superstitious regard attached to the means by which the continuation of this power was secured – the hereditary principle. ‘A banditti of ruffians overrun a country, and lay it under contributions. Their power being thus established, the chief of the band contrived to lose the name of Robber in that of Monarch; and hence the origin of Monarchy and Kings.’ As for the right of inheritance, ‘to inherit a Government, is to inherit the People, as if they were flocks and herds’. ‘Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals…. It requires some talents to be a common mechanic; but to be a King, requires only the animal figure of a man – a sort of breathing automaton’:
The time is not very far distant when England will laugh at itself for sending to Holland, Hanover, Zell, or Brunswick for men, at the expense of a million a year, who understood neither her laws, her language, nor her interest, and whose capacities would scarcely have fitted them for the office of a parish constable.
‘What are those men kept for?,’ he demanded.
Placemen, Pensioners, Lords of the Bed-chamber, Lords of the Kitchen, Lords of the Necessary-house, and the Lord knows what besides, can find as many reasons for monarchy as their salaries, paid at the expence of the country, amount to: but if I ask the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman… the common labourer, what service monarchy is to him, he can give me no answer. If I ask him what monarchy is, he believes it is something like a sinecure.
The hereditary system in general was consigned to the same oblivion: ‘an hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author’.
All this was (and has some of the dare-devil air of) blasphemy. Even the sacred Bill of Rights Paine found to be ‘a bill of wrongs and of insult’. It is not that Paine was the first man to think in this way: many eighteenth-century Englishmen must have held these thoughts privately. He was the first to dare to express himself with such irreverence; and he destroyed with one book century-old taboos. But Paine did very much more than this. In the first place he pointed towards a theory of the State and of class power, although in a confused, ambiguous manner. In Common-Sense he had followed Locke in seeing government as a ‘necessary evil’. In the 1790s the ambiguities of Locke seem to fall into two halves, one Burke, the other Paine. Where Burke assumes government and examines its operation in the light of experience and tradition, Paine speaks for the governed, and assumes that the authority of government derives from conquest and inherited power in a class-divided society. The classes are roughly defined – ‘there are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon taxes’ – and as for the Constitution, it is a good one for –
courtiers, placemen, pensioners, borough-holders, and the leaders of the Parties…; but it is a bad Constitution for at least ninety-nine parts of the nation out of a hundred.
From this also, the war of the propertied and the unpropertied: ‘when the rich plunder the poor of his rights, it becomes an example to the poor to plunder the rich of his property’.1 By this argument, government appears as court parasitism: taxes are a form of robbery, for pensioners and for wars of conquest: while ‘the whole of the Civil Government is executed by the People of every town and country, by means of parish officers, magistrates, quarterly sessions, juries, and assize, without any trouble to what is called the Government’. So that – at this point – we are close to a theory of anarchism. What is required is less the reform than the abolition of government: ‘the instant formal Government is abolished, society begins to act’.
On the other hand, ‘society’, acting through a representative system as a government opened up new possibilities which suddenly caught fire in Paine’s mind while writing the crucial fifth chapter of the Second Part of Rights of Man. Here, after extolling commerce and industrial enterprise, clouting colonial domination (and – later – proposing international arbitration in place of war), hitting out at the penal code (‘legal barbarity’), denouncing closed charters, corporations, and monopolies, and exclaiming against the burden of taxation, he came to rest for a moment on the sins of the landed aristocracy:
Why… does Mr Burke talk of this House of Peers, as the pillar of the landed interest? Were that pillar to sink into the earth, the same landed property would continue, and the same ploughing, sowing, and reaping would go on. The Aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land… but are the mere consumers of the rent…
And this led him on to far-reaching impressionistic proposals for cutting the costs of government, Army and Navy; remitting taxes and poor rates; raising additional taxation by means of a graduated income-tax (rising to twenty shillings in the £ at £23,000 p.a.); and paying out the moneys raised or saved in sums to alleviate the position of the poor. He proposed family allowances: public funds to enable general education of all children: old age pensions – ‘not as a matter of grace and favour, but of right’ (for the recipients would receive back only a portion of what they had contributed in taxation): a maternity benefit, a benefit for newly-wedded couples, a benefit for funerals for the necessitous: and the building in London of combined lodging-houses and workshops to assist immigrants and unemployed:
By the operation of this plan, the poor laws, those instruments of civil torture, will be superceded…. The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to breathe their last, as a reprisal of parish upon parish. Widows will have a maintenance for their children… and children will no longer be considered as encreasing the distresses of their parents…. The number of petty crimes, the offspring of distress and poverty, will be lessened. The poor, as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of Government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults will cease. Ye who sit in ease, and solace yourselves in plenty… have ye thought of these things?
This is Paine at his strongest. The success of the First Part of Rights of Man was great, but the success of the Second Part was phenomenal. It was this part – and especially such sections as these – which effected a bridge between the older traditions of the Whig ‘commonwealthsman’ and the radicalism of Sheffield cutlers, Norwich weavers and London artisans. Reform was related by these proposals, to their daily experience of economic hardship. However specious some of Paine’s financial calculations may have been, the proposals gave a new constructive cast to the whole reform agitation. If Major Cartwright formulated the specific demands for manhood suffrage which were to be the basis of a hundred years of agitation (and Mary Wollstonecraft, with her Rights of Women, initiated for the second sex an even longer era of struggle), Paine, in this chapter, set a sourse towards the social legislation of the twentieth century.
Few of Paine’s ideas were original, except perhaps in this ‘social’ chapter. ‘Men who give themselves to their Energetic Genius in the manner that Paine does are no Examiners’ – the comment is William Blake’s. What he gave to English people was a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the ‘free-born Englishman’ and which penetrated the sub-political attitudes of the urban working people. Cobbett was not a true Painite, and Owen and the early Socialists contributed a new strand altogether; but the Paine tradition runs strongly through the popular journalism of the nineteenth century – Wooler, Carlile, Hetherington, Watson, Lovett, Holyoake, Reynolds, Bradlaugh. It is strongly challenged in the 1880s, but the tradition and the rhetoric are still alive in Blatchford and in the popular appeal of Lloyd George. We can almost say that Paine established a new frame-work within which Radicalism was confined for nearly 100 years, as clear and as well defined as the constitutionalism which it replaced.
What was this framework? Contempt for monarchical and hereditary principles, we have seen:
I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified. Hereditary distinctions, and privileged order of every species… must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement. Hence it follows that I am not among the admirers of the British Constitution.
The words happen to be Wordsworth’s – in 1793. And Wordsworth’s also the retrospective lines which recapture more than any other the optimism of those revolutionary years when – walking with Beaupuy – he encountered a ‘hunger-bitten’ peasant girl—
… and at the sight my friend
In agitation said, ‘ ’Tis against that
That we are fighting,’ I with him believed
That a benignant spirit was abroad
Which might not be withstood, that poverty
Abject as this would in a little time
Be found no more, that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense
The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil,
All institutes for ever blotted out
That legalised exclusion, empty pomp
Abolished, sensual state and cruel power,
Whether by edict of the one or few;
And finally, as sum and crown of all,
Should see the people having a strong hand
In framing their own laws; whence better days
To all mankind.
An optimism (which Wordsworth was soon to lose) but to which Radicalism clung tenaciously, founding it upon premisses which Paine did not stop to examine: unbounded faith in representative institutions: in the power of reason: in (Paine’s words) ‘a mass of sense lying in a dormant state’ among the common people, and in the belief that ‘Man, were he not corrupted by Governments, is naturally the friend of Man, and that human nature is not of itself vicious.’ And all this expressed in an intransigent, brash, even cocksure tone, with the self-educated man’s distrust of tradition and institutes of learning (‘He knew by heart all his own writings and knew nothing else’, was the comment of one of Paine’s acquaintances), and a tendency to avoid complex theoretical problems with a dash of empiricism and an appeal to ‘Common Sense’.
Both the strengths and the weaknesses of this optimism were reproduced again and again in nineteenth-century working-class Radicalism. But Paine’s writings were in no special sense aimed at the working people, as distinct from farmers, tradesmen and professional men. His was a doctrine suited to agitation among ‘members unlimited’; but he did not challenge the property-rights of the rich nor the doctrines of laissez faire. His own affiliations were most obviously with men of the unrepresented manufacturing and trading classes; with men like Thomas Walker and Holcroft; with the Constitutional Society rather than the L.C.S. His proposals for a graduated income tax anticipate more far-reaching notions of property redistribution; but they were aimed at the great landed aristocracy, where the hereditary principle involved in the custom of primogeniture gave him offence. In terms of political democracy he wished to level all inherited distinctions and privileges; but he gave no countenance to economic levelling. In political society every man must have equal rights as a citizen: in economic society he must naturally remain employer or employed, and the State should not interfere with the capital of the one or the wages of the other. The Rights of Man and the Wealth of Nations should supplement and nourish each other. And in this also the main tradition of nineteenth-century working-class Radicalism took its cast from Paine. There were times, at the Owenite and Chartist climaxes, when other traditions became dominant. But after each relapse, the substratum of Painite assumptions remained intact. The aristocracy were the main target; their property might be threatened – even as far as Land Nationalization or Henry George’s Single Tax – and their rents regarded as a feudal exaction dating from ‘a French bastard’ and his ‘armed banditti’; but – however hard trade unionists might fight against their employers – industrial capital was assumed to be the fruit of enterprise and beyond reach of political intrusion. Until the 1880s, it was, by and large, within this framework that working-class Radicalism remained transfixed.
One other element Paine contributed to the nineteenth-century tradition: the true Painite – Carlile or James Watson or Holyoake – was also a free-thinker. ‘My religion is to do good,’ Paine wrote in Rights of Man, and left the matter there. But he saw himself as the champion of these rights against ‘the age of fiction and political superstition, and of craft and mystery’: and it was natural that he should complete his work with The Age of Reason, a sustained invective against State religion and every form of priestcraft. Paine wrote, not as an atheist, but as a Deist; the First Part, written in France in 1793 under the shadow of the guillotine, saw proofs of a God in the act of Creation and in the universe itself, and appealed to Reason as opposed to Mystery, Miracle or Prophecy. It was published in England in 1795, by Daniel Isaac Eaton who sustained no fewer than seven prosecutions and – by 1812 fifteen months of imprisonment and three years of outlawry – for his activities as a printer. Despite the brash provocations of its tone, The Age of Reason contained little that would have surprised the eighteenth-century Deist or advanced Unitarian. What was new was the popular audience to which Paine appealed, and the great authority of his name. The Second Part – published in 1796 (also by the courageous Eaton) 1 – was an assault on the ethics of the Old Testament, and the veracity of the New, a pell-mell essay in biblical criticism:
I have… gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulders, and fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.
It has to be said that there are other uses for woods. Blake acknowledged the force and attack of Paine’s arguments, rephrasing them in his own inimitable shorthand:
That the Bible is all a State Trick, thro’ which tho’ the People at all times could see, they never had the power to throw off. Another Argument is that all the Commentators on the Bible are Dishonest Designing Knaves, who in hopes of a good living adopt the State religion… I could name an hundred such.
But Paine was incapable of reading any part of the Bible as (in Blake’s words) ‘a Poem of probable impossibilities’. For many of Paine’s English followers during the years of repression, The Age of Reason was as ‘a sword sent to divide’. Some Jacobins who maintained their membership of Dissenting or Methodist churches resented both Paine’s book and the opportunity which it afforded to their enemies to mount a renewed attack upon ‘atheists’ and ‘republicans’. The authorities, for their part, saw Paine’s latest offence as surpassing all his previous outrages; he had taken the polite periods of the comfortable Unitarian ministers and the scepticism of Gibbon, translated them into literal-minded polemical English, and thrown them to the groundlings. He ridiculed the authority of the Bible with arguments which the collier or country girl could understand:
… the person they call Jesus Christ, begotten, they say, by a ghost, whom they call holy, on the body of a woman engaged in marriage and afterwards married, and whom they call a virgin seven hundred years after this foolish story was told…. Were any girl that is now with child to say… that she was gotten with child by a ghost, and that an angel told her so, would she be believed?
When we consider the barbaric and evil superstitions which the churches and Sunday schools were inculcating at this time,1 we can see the profoundly liberating effect which Paine’s writing had on many minds. It helped men to struggle free from a pall of religious deference which reinforced the deference due to magistrate and employer, and it launched many nineteenth-century artisans upon a course of sturdy intellectual self-reliance and enquiry. But the limitations of Paine’s ‘reason’ must also be remembered; there was a glibness and lack of imaginative resource about it which remind one of Blake’s strictures on the ‘single vision’. In the Book of Ecclesiastes Paine could see only ‘the solitary reflection of a worn-out debauchee… who, looking back on scenes he can no longer enjoy, cries out, All is Vanity! A great deal of the metaphor and of the sentiment is obscure…’
The Age of Reason was not the only source-book for nineteenth-century free thought. Many other tracts and translations (abridgements of Voltaire, D’Holbach, Rousseau) were circulated in Jacobin circles in the 1790s, the most influential of which was Volney’s Ruins of Empire. This was a profounder and more imaginative book than Paine’s, an original study in comparative religion. Moreover, Volney’s allegory of the evolution of priestcraft was correlated with an allegory of the growth of political despotism; in its conclusions it offered a more general message of toleration and of internationalism than did Paine. Unlike William Godwin’s Political Justice (1793), whose influence was confined to a small and highly literate circle,2 Volney’s Ruins was published in cheap pocketbook form and remained in the libraries of many artisans in the nineteenth century. Its fifteenth chapter, the vision of a ‘New Age’, was frequently circulated as a tract. In this the narrator sees a civilized nation determined to divide itself into two groups: those who ‘by useful labours contribute to the support and maintenance of society’, on the one hand, and their enemies, on the other. The overwhelming majority are found in the first group: ‘labourers, artisans, tradesmen, and every profession useful to society’. The second was ‘a petty group, a valueless fraction’ – ‘none but priests, courtiers, public accountants, commanders of troops, in short, the civil, military, or religious agents of government’. A dialogue takes place between the two groups:
People…. What labour do you perform in the society?
Privileged Class. None: we are not made to labour.
People. How then have you acquired your wealth?
Privileged Class. By taking the pains to govern you.
People. To govern us!… We toil, and you enjoy; we produce and you dissipate; wealth flows from us, and you absorb it. Privileged men, class distinct from the people, form a nation apart and govern yourselves.
A few of the privileged class join the people (the vision continues) but the remainder attempt to cow the people with troops. The soldiers, however, ground their arms, and say: ‘We are a part of the people.’ The privileged class next attempt to delude the people with priests, but these are rebuffed: ‘Courtiers and priests, your services are too expensive; henceforth we take our affairs into our own hands.’ By a curious effect of translation, Volney’s views appeared more radical in English than in French. The notion of the parasitic aristocratic estate or order comes through as the more generalized ‘class’ of the wealthy and idle. From this the sociology of post-war Radicalism was to be derived, which divided society between the ‘Useful’ or ‘Productive Classes’ on the one hand, and courtiers, sinecurists, fund-holders, speculators and parasitic middlemen on the other.1
Volney’s, however, was a somewhat later influence. Paine dominated the popular radicalism of the early 1790s. It is true that his polemical literalness of mind gave a narrowness to the movement which (with the more sophisticated euphoria of Godwin) was bitterly caricatured by disenchanted reformers when French revolutionary Convention passed, by way of Terror, into Bonapartism. The critique and the caricature, expressed with the combined genius of Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, have dominated the judgements of many contemporary scholars, themselves exposed to similar experiences of revolutionary disenchantment in the past twenty-five years.
There was certainly a star-struck, messianic mood among some of the disciples of Godwin and of Paine, which prepared them for the acceptance of facile (and ultimately disenchanting) notions of human perfectibility:
O, PAINE! next to God, how infinitely are millions beholden to you for the small remnant of their liberties… Alexanders, Caesars, Ferdinands, Capets, Frederics, Josephs, and Czarinas have… fought ferociously to enslave mankind; but it was reserved to you… to wave the celestial banners of the rights of man, over the tottering bastiles of Europe; to break the shackles of despotism from the ankles of millions, and destroy those yokes of oppression… for the necks of millions more as yet unborn.1
Such moods are always to be found in periods of revolutionary excitement. But if the myth of Jacobin ‘totalitarianism’ is applied to the English context, then it is necessary to rebut it with the simplest truths. Paine and his English followers did not preach the extermination of their opponents, but they did preach against Tyburn and the sanguinary penal code. The English Jacobins argued for internationalism, for arbitration in place of war, for the toleration of Dissenters, Catholics and free-thinkers, for the discernment of human virtue in ‘heathen, Turk or Jew’. They sought, by education and agitation, to transform ‘the mob’ (in Paine’s words) from ‘followers of the camp’ to followers of ‘the standard of liberty’.
This is not to dismiss the charges against some English Jacobins, of doctrinaire notions and shallow moral experimentalism, whose most notable expression is in Book III of Wordsworth’s Excursion. These have often been the vices of the ‘Left.’ Paine had little historical sense, his view of human nature was facile, and his optimism (‘I do not believe that Monarchy and Aristocracy will continue seven years longer in any of the enlightened countries in Europe’) is of a kind which the twentieth-century mind finds tedious. But so great has been the reaction in our own time against Whig or Marxist interpretations of history, that some scholars have propagated a ridiculous reversal of historical rôles: the persecuted are seen as forerunners of oppression, and the oppressors as victims of persecution. And so we have been forced to go over these elementary truths. It was Paine who put his faith in the free operation of opinion in the ‘open society’: ‘mankind are not now to be told they shall not think, or they shall not read’; Paine also who saw that in the constitutional debates of the eighteenth century ‘the Nation was always left out of the question’. By bringing the nation into the question, he was bound to set in motion forces which he could neither control nor foresee. That is what democracy is about.