1. One of the oddest ironies of the time was the return of Home Tooke in 1800 as Member for the rottenest borough of all – Old Sarum. Tooke was unseated on a technicality – that he was a former Minister of the Church.
1. One of the People, The Thirty-Sixth of a Letter to the Society which met at The Angel… to Celebrate the Birth-Day of C. J. Fox (Norwich, 1799).
2. See below, pp. 515–28.
1. J. Bowles, Thoughts on the late General Election, as demonstrative of the Progress of Jacobinism (1802), pp. 3–4; and Salutary Effects of Vigour (1804), p. 141. Reformers angrily gave the lie to Bowles with respect to the allegation of a naked lady: see Ten Letters on the Late Contested Election at Nottingham (Nottingham, 1803), pp. 24–5; Sutton, Date-Book of Nottingham, p. 244. The secret perhaps lies in a reference to a woman in the procession ‘dressed in salmon or flesh-coloured apparel’: Letter to John Bowles (Nottingham, 1803), p. 9.
1. Elected, Byng (Whig), 3,843, Burdett (Radical), 3,207. Not elected, Mainwaring (Tory), 2,936. See Cobbett’s Political Register, 10, 17, 24 July 1802; J. G. Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors and Captives (1904); J. Dechamps, Les Iles Britanniques et La Revolution Françis (Brussels, 1949), ch. 5; M. W. Patterson, Sir Francis Burdett (1931), chs. 4 and 7.
2. J. Bowles, Thoughts on the late General Election, p. 63.
3. See below, pp. 521–8.
1. Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, II, Supplement, 1667, 1752.
1. Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates, IV, 1191, 1362; The Times, 5 November 1804. For a contemporary record of the reconciliation between land and commerce in the Volunteers, see T. A. Ward’s Sheffield diary, Peeps into the Past, passim. And Jane Austen.
1. For the literature of popular patriotism, see F. Klingberg and S. Hustvedt, The Warning Drum… Broadsides of 1803 (Univ. of California, 1944). Even John Thelwall contributed a Poem and Oration on the Death of Lord Nelson (1805).
2. This honourably named periodical failed through lack of support. See Reasoner, 16 April 1808.
1. Political Register, 1 September 1804.
2. ‘I shall… use my utmost endeavour,’ he said on the hustings in 1804, ‘that 45 and Liberty shall go down connected together to the latest posterity.’
1. Cobbett’s Political Register, 25 August 1804.
1. See Cobbett’s partisan account of the 1806 contest, written twelve years later, Political Register, 17 January 1818.
1. Hood, 5,478, Sheridan, 4,758; Paull, 4,481.
1. For this incident, see Annual Register, 1807, pp. 425–8, 632–9; M. D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires (1947), VIII, pp. 528–9.
2. Cochrane held his seat until 1818, when he resigned it in order to go to the aid of the South American republics. Burdett remained Member for Westminster until 1837, when, with a final quixotic flourish, he crossed the floor of the House, resigned the seat and fought it again as a Conservative, just scraping home. Paull was less fortunate: he survived the duel by little more than a year, taking his own life in 1808.
1. This account of the 1806 and 1807 elections is based largely upon Cobbett’s Political Register, 1806 and 1807, passim; Ibid., 17 January 1818; Flower’s Political Review, May 1807; Place’s reminiscences, in Wallas, op. cit., pp. 41–7, and in Cole and Filson, British Working Class Movements, pp. 79–81; Anon., History of the Westminster and Middlesex Elections (1807), pp. 15, 36–7, 145, 157, 345, 379, 437; Westminster Committee, An Exposition of the Circumstances which gave rise to the Election of Sir F. Burdett, Bart… (1807). See also M. W. Patterson, Sir F. Burdett (1931), 1, ch. 10; G. D. H. Cole, Life of Cobbett, chs. 9 and 10; C. Lloyd, Lord Cochrane (1947), Part II, ch. 1; S. Maccoby, English Radicalism, 1786–1832, pp. 207–8. Cobbett’s account, while not wholly reliable, is a corrective to the accounts supplied by Place (and accepted too uncritically) which neglect the importance of the Middlesex elections of 1802 and 1804, ridicule Paull, and attribute success in 1807 solely to Place’s own organizing genius.
1. In addition to the support which he gave to Paull and Burdett, Cartwright himself stood in 1806 for his own town of Boston, polling 59 votes against 237 for the successful candidate.
1. Gorgon, 4 July 1818.
2. On one such list, the names from which the jury was to be drawn were marked G. (good), B. (bad), and D. (doubtful). The many B.s included such tradesmen as a scale-maker, a glass-seller, grocers, a sail-maker, and brewers (one Southwark brewer being marked ‘very B.’) T.S. 11.333.
1. The jury which acquitted Dr Watson for his part in the Spa Fields riots (1817) had as foreman a Lottery Office Keeper, and as members a Button-maker, Anchor Smith, Woollen-draper, Capellaire-maker, Ironmonger, Silversmith, Mercer, Shoe-maker, Carrier and Druggist: People, 21 June 1817.
2. For an insight into the working of the committee, see A. Aspinall, ‘The Westminster Election of 1814’, Eng. Hist. Rev. XL (1925).
1. G. Beaumont, Minister of the Gospel of Peace, The Warrior’s Looking-Glass (Sheffield, 1808). The author was probably a Baptist minister. For a similar note of radical Christian protest against the war, see the Cambridge Intelligencer, and letters in the Tyne Mercury, e.g. 5 January 1808.