POPULAR radicalism was not extinguished when the corresponding societies were broken up, Habeas Corpus suspended, and all ‘Jacobin’ manifestations outlawed. It simply lost coherence. For years it was made inarticulate by censorship and intimidation. It lost its press, it lost its organized expression, it lost its own sense of direction. But it is there, as a palpable presence, throughout the Wars. It is scarcely possible to give a coherent historical account of an incoherent presence, but some attempt must be made.
In 1797, as Pitt’s repression settled upon the country, Grey and Fox moved for a last time a motion in the House for household suffrage. Thereafter, Fox and his patrician rump of Whig ‘commonwealthsmen’ seceded from the House, in protest against the suspension of Habeas Corpus and in opposition to the war. They retired to their country mansions, their amusements and their scholarship, their discussions at Holland House and Brooks’ Club. Wealthy and influential, they could not be altogether excluded from political life, since they were secure in the possession of rotten boroughs which their own principles denounced.1 After 1800 they drifted back and resumed their seats in the House. While the democratic persuasions of most of the group were largely speculative, individual members – Sir Samuel Romilly, Samuel Whitbread, H. G. Bennet – stood up again and again in the House to defend political liberties or social rights. Between 1797 and 1802, Fox appeared to provide the only shelter for reform. Here and there groups met to toast Fox and Grey, to demand the restoration of political liberties, or to petition for peace. In Norwich former Jacobins met in this way, and commenced in 1799 ‘an open Monthly Meeting of the Friends of Liberty’.1
But the least evidence of such groups drew the immediate attention of magistrates, and the fire of anti-Jacobin publicists – not the least vitriolic of whom was a new journalist, William Cobbett, who had recently returned from the United States where he had done service as an anti-Jacobin polemicist, and who had been rewarded for his patriotism by being given assistance by the Secretary at War, Windham, in founding his Political Register (1802). But if the open reformers were dispersed or driven underground, general disaffection grew throughout the years 1799–1802. Napoleon’s continental blockade brought to Britain stagnant industries, unemployment and soaring food prices. Manufacturers petitioned for peace, and were supported by a swell of resentment against the Assessed Taxes. There were food riots throughout the country. And there is evidence to suggest an organized, insurrectionary underground.2
The brief Peace of Amiens (April 1802 to May 1803) introduced a new period. Pitt gave way for a time to Addington (later Lord Sidmouth), who was a weaker Prime Minister, although he was firmly in the same anti-Jacobin, repressive tradition. The war had dragged on for nearly ten years, and the peace was received with illuminations and public rejoicing. Napoleon’s emissary was drawn in triumph through the London streets. Cobbett’s office was wrecked because the Register supported the continuance of war. Curious Whigs and reformers, including Fox himself, flocked to Paris to look at the new republic. (Colonel Thornton, who had flung his regimentals to the York ‘rabble’ in 1795, brought to Paris a pack of fox hounds, horses, and a case of pistols as a gift for the First Consul.)
Peace brought a General Election, in which in half a dozen constituencies advanced candidates, with Jacobin support, achieved surprising success. In Kent, where the corresponding societies had once had such strength in the Medway towns, a Foxite candidate defeated the sitting Member. In Coventry after serious riots a Radical failed to secure election by a mere eight votes. In Norwich Windham, the Secretary at War, was unseated, and two Foxite candidates were elected with very active Jacobin support. At Nottingham there were extraordinary scenes of excitement, when a reformer was elected with the support of the Foxite corporation and the exultant crowd. In a triumphant procession, the band played Ça Ira and the ‘Marseillaise’, the tricolour was hoisted, and (according to an anti-Jacobin pamphleteer) ‘a female, representing the Goddess of Reason, in a state of ENTIRE NUDITY was a conspicuous figure!!!’ The Nottingham crowd (commented Cobbett) was ‘to all appearances… a republican, revolutionary mob’. The victor was unseated, in 1803, by the House of Commons, on the plea that rioters had intimidated the electors; and the event was made the occasion for introducing legislation strengthening the power of country magistrates in the manufacturing town.1
But the most sensational election was in Middlesex, Wilkes’ old constituency. In the previous three years scandals had come to light as to the treatment of the ‘Habeas Corpus prisoners’ of the L.C.S. and United Englishmen, held without trial in Coldbath Fields prison, under the régime of Governor Aris. Sir Francis Burdett, an M.P. and friend of Horne Tooke, received an appeal from the victims, written – according to a later account by Cobbett – upon the fly-leaf of a book with a splinter of wood dipped in blood. He found several of the prisoners emaciated, ‘mere frames of men’, and took up their cases – in particular the case of Colonel Despard – inside and outside the House of Commons. Overnight he became the hero of the London crowd, and the cry went up: NO BASTILLE! In 1802 he fought Middlesex against the sitting Member, a ministerial supporter named Mainwaring who was also a magistrate associated with Governor Aris. The campaign focused the attention of the country, John Frost, who had been pilloried in 1794, was one of Burdett’s agents; and other former Jacobins and detainees helped with his campaign. The still-Tory Cobbett lamented that:
The road from Piccadilly to the hustings at Brentford is a scene of confusion and sedition, such as never was beheld, except in the environs of Paris, during the most dreadful times of the revolution…. The road… is lined with ragged wretches from St Giles’s bawling out ‘Sir Francis Burdett and No Bastille’ and at the hustings there are daily some half a dozen convicts who have served out their time in the house of correction, employed in amusing the rabble with execrations on the head of Mr Mainwaring.
Burdett’s victory was the signal for illuminations almost on the scale of the celebration of the peace. ‘It will have this most dreadful effect’, mourned Cobbett. ‘It will embolden and increase the disorderly and dishonest part of this monstrously overgrown and profligate metropolis.’1
Even Lancaster saw a contest in which a ‘Jacobinical mob’ was addressed by a lady, who told them that ‘the contest was between shoes and wooden clogs, between fine shirts and coarse ones, between the opulent and the poor, and that the people were everything if they chose to assert their rights’.2 It seemed that a movement of greater force than that of 1792–5 was maturing. The course of English history might have been changed if there had been five years of peace. But events occurred which threw all into confusion. In November 1802, Colonel Despard was seized on a charge of high treason; in January executed.3 In the winter of 1802–3 relations between Britain and France became acrimonious. In May 1803, the two countries were once again at war.
But this appeared to many reformers as a different kind of war. In 1802 Napoleon had become First Consul for life; in 1804 he accepted the crown as hereditary Emperor. No true follower of Paine could stomach this. The hardened Jacobin was cut as deeply by this as more moderate reformers had been dismayed by Robespierre. However much they had sought to maintain a critical detachment, the morale of English reformers was closely involved with the fortunes of France. The First Empire struck a blow at English republicanism from which it never fully recovered. The Rights of Man had been most passionate in its indictment of thrones, Gothic institutions, hereditary distinctions; as the war proceeded, Napoleon’s accommodation with the Vatican, his king-making and his elevation of a new hereditary nobility, stripped France of its last revolutionary magnetism. Ça Ira faded in the memories even of the Nottingham crowd. If the Tree of Liberty was to grow, it must be grafted to English stock.
France appeared to many now simply in the guise of a commercial and imperial rival, the oppressor of Spanish and Italian peoples. Between 1803 and 1806 the Grand Army was poised across the Channel, waiting only for mastery of the seas. ‘Jacobinism is killed and gone,’ declared Sheridan, who had himself joined Addington’s Ministry, in December 1802: ‘And by whom? By him who can no longer be called the child and champion of Jacobinism; by Buonaparté.’ And Windham, fresh from his Norwich defeat, made an extraordinary appeal in the House for national unity in the face of the return of war:
To the Jacobins I would appeal, not as lovers of social order, of good government, of monarchy, but as men of spirit, as lovers of what they call liberty, as men of hot and proud blood – I would ask them if they are content to be put under the yoke, and crushed by France? 1
With the renewal of war, the Volunteers drilled Sunday after Sunday. They were not, perhaps, as popular as contemporary publicists and patriotic legend suggest. ‘Volunteers’ is, in any case, a misnomer. Officers came forward a great deal more readily than the miscellaneous, ill-disciplined, incurably anti-militaristic rank-and-file, who were losing their only day of rest. Pains were taken, also, to keep arms out of the hands of the disaffected. ‘In large towns,’ Sheridan said on behalf of the Government, ‘such as Birmingham, Sheffield, and Nottingham, he should prefer associations of the higher classes, and in the country and villages those of the lower.’ In Norwich, The Times reported in 1804,
the common people in the city… and its vicinity have taken an aversion to the system of volunteering. On Monday an attempt was made by them, particularly the females, to obstruct the volunteers of the Norwich regiment from mustering. They abused and insulted the officers, and accused the volunteers of being the cause of small loaves and the advance in corn.
The sons of the squire, the attorney, and the manufacturer, enjoyed dressing up on horseback and attending Volunteer balls. A common understanding grew up between aristocracy and middle class, forming that esprit de corps which was later to carry the day on the field at Peterloo; while at the balls their sisters selected husbands who facilitated that cross-fertilization of landed and commercial wealth which distinguished the English Industrial Revolution. The rank-and-file had few such rewards: in one Northumberland village, with a high percentage of ‘volunteers’, ‘13 offered to serve in the infantry, 25 in the cavalry, 130 as guides, 260 as waggoners, and 300 as drivers of cattle’.1
But despite this undercurrent, Sheridan was right, Jacobinism, as a movement deriving inspiration from France, was almost dead. Between 1802 and 1806 there was certainly a revival of popular patriotic feeling. ‘Boney’, if he was admired, was admired as a ‘warrior’, not as an embodiment of popular rights. Britain was inundated with patriotic chap-books, broadsheets, and prints. If the women of Norwich resisted and if Northumberland villagers played dumb, thousands of Lancashire weavers joined the Volunteers. Nelson was as popular a war hero as England had known since Drake; he was thought to be a man with sympathy for popular rights, and his intercession for the life of Colonel Despard was remembered; the bitter-sweet victory of Trafalgar (1805) was the theme of a hundred ballads and the talk of every tavern and hamlet. In 1806 Fox (in the last year of his life) himself joined the national coalition – the ‘Ministry of All-the-Talents’ – and became resigned to the continuance of war.1
Once again, Radicalism was not extinguished. But the terms of argument shifted beyond recognition. Former Jacobins became patriots, as eager to denounce Napoleon for his apostasy to the republican cause as legitimists were to denounce him for his usurpation from the House of Bourbon. (In 1808 a former Secretary of the L.C.S., John Bone, made a significant attempt to reawaken the old cause by publishing the Reasoner, a journal which supported both the war and many old ‘Jacobin’ demands.2) Others, like Redhead Yorke of Sheffield, suffered the classic compulsions of guilt and the desire for self-exculpation, so familiar in the disenchanted romantics of more recent times; Yorke had become by 1804 an ‘anti-Jacobin’ publicist so virulent that Cobbett was driven by him towards the reformers out of sheer disgust.
It was in this highly unexpected quarter that the new note of Radicalism was first sounded. For the same influences which had dispersed the old kind of Jacobinism had also caused the old kind of anti-Jacobinism to lose some of its force. If Napoleon was an enemy because he was a despot who had concentrated all power in his hands, what was to be said of Pitt, who (back in power from 1804 until his death early in 1806) had eroded British liberties, jailed men without trial, bribed the press, and used every form of Ministerial influence to shore up his power? Cobbett, the pugnacious Tory journalist who could by no stretch of the imagination be accused of Jacobinism, swung round in 1804 and began to rake the Ministry with polemic:
The tide has turned: from popular enthusiasm it has run back to despotism: Buonaparté’s exaltation to the post of Consul for life began the great change in men’s minds, which has been completed by his more recent assumption [i.e. as Emperor], and which not only removes the danger before to be apprehended from the prevalence of notions in favour of liberty, but tends to excite apprehensions of a different kind, to make us fear that, by means of the immense and yet growing influence now deposited in the hands of the minister by the funding and bank-note system, we may, in fact, though not in name, become little better than slaves, and slaves, too, not of the king but of the minister of the day…
The logic which connected the despotism of Napoleon and of Pitt is by no means clear: Cobbett, so cogent in detailed argument, often blustered through the larger outlines. But the drift of what he said, with increasing force and frequency, was clear. Despotism ought to be fought at home as well as abroad. The press was bought. The Ministry was inefficient and corrupt, supporting a mob of ‘court-sycophants, parasites, pensioners, bribed-senators, directors, contractors, jobbers, hireling lords, and ministers of state’. The Civil List was a form of factional bribery, supported by money raised from excessive taxation. The upstart nouveau riche, fattened by the war, threatened the rights of the King and the liberties of the people. Only a free Britain could resist foreign invasion. In a queer jumble of Toryism and Radicalism he accused, not the reformers, but the Ministry of:
… endeavouring to sow the seeds of discord amongst [the people]; to divide them again into Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins; to hatch a pretext for measures of extraordinary coercion; to create discontent and disloyalty, to unnerve the arm of war, and to lay us prostrate at the foot of the enemy.1
Cobbett’s words were no less remarkable than their occasion. Mainwaring had upset the 1802 result on a petition to the House. In 1804 there was a Middlesex by-election, in which every Ministerial resource was employed to push Sir Francis Burdett out, and replace him by Mainwaring’s son. Burdett was scarcely a reformer of the calibre to provide national leadership. He was a patrician Radical who consciously modelled his tactics upon Wilkes, 2 and who had acquired great wealth through his marriage to Miss Sophia Courts. Histrionic on the hustings, he proved himself to be a weak reform leader in the House in the next ten or fifteen years. But he was one of the only national spokesmen of reform capable of being heard at all. He did not try to repudiate the taint of Jacobinism brought upon him by his friendship with Horne Tooke and Arthur O’Connor. In 1804 he stood his ground, and while the populace huzza’d NO BASTILLE he poured scorn on Whigs and Tories alike. For fifteen days the poll wavered between Mainwaring and Burdett. Every day, at the close of the poll, Burdett addressed enormous, excited crowds, appealing to the Middlesex freeholders under the slogan of ‘INDEPENDENCE’, urging them again and again to ‘be active and canvass’. Could the electors of Middlesex have ‘a free and independent voice,’ or was the seat to be traded in perpetuity into the control of ‘a combination of interested distillers, publicans and brewers, of magistrates and contractors’? Every day at the close of the poll, Mainwaring stepped forward to address the crowd on the hustings, and was howled down with groans. The supporters of Mainwaring placarded London with libels upon Burdett and his ‘Jacobin’ connexions, challenged his voters, and polled every elector subject to influence – ‘the clerks, psalm-singers and bell-ringers of Westminster’, ‘police-officers, jobbers, and thief-takers’. On the fifteenth and final day it appeared that Burdett had a majority of one: Burdett, 2,833, Mainwaring, 2,832. An exultant crowd dragged him in triumph through London ‘amidst a cavalcade, that appeared like a moving wood – the carriages and horsemen being covered with green boughs’, while the bands played ‘Rule Britannia’ and a flag flew above Burdett’s carriage painted with Hercules treading on the Hydra. On the next morning the Sheriff reversed the decision on a technicality which turned on the closing time of the poll. But the moral triumph was complete.1
Cobbett was right to speak of a turning tide. His own support for Burdett – inconceivable two years before – was a sign of the turn. That so many freeholders should have declared for Burdett indicated an unusual restiveness among the tradesmen, professional men and small gentry, and master-artisans. They had a dozen grievances, some disinterested – the appeal of the old cries of ‘liberty’ and ‘independence’ – some more interested; for example, Government contracts for coach-building, harness, and military clothing were commonly placed with a few big firms or middle-men, passing over the host of smaller masters and master-artisans. Cobbett, in 1804–6, was not initiating but flowing with a new reforming tide. In the next few years his Register voiced a pugnacious piecemeal Radicalism, which was the more formidable in that each particular abuse was aired and argued with individual detail. Cobbett exposed civil and military mismanagement, peculation, the sale of commissions by the Duke of York’s mistress, brutal flogging in the Army, with a force which compelled attention from men of different persuasions, for many of whom the old alignments of the 1790s had lost their meaning. Because Cobbett was still something of a Tory, who harked back to a sentimental ideal of a sturdy, independent, plain-speaking people who despised wealth and rank but were loyal to their Constitution, he evaded the anti-Jacobin prejudices and enabled reformers to re-group.
But Burdett’s triumph was made possible by the presence of the far more radical London crowd. In 1806 popular feeling found another outlet, and surged through into the electoral process at Westminster. While Middlesex had a freeholder franchise, Westminster was one of the few ‘open’ constituencies in the south of England, with a householder franchise which admitted many master-artisans and some journeymen to the vote. From 1780 one of its two seats had been held by Fox. Horne Tooke had contested the other seat, and had polled respectably, in 1790 and 1796, but the seat had gone to a Ministerial nominee by tacit agreement. ‘Pitt’s party put in one Member, and Fox’s party put in the other; and, both parties hated all thought of any thing resembling a real election. The affair was settled at a joint meeting of the two factions, as thieves made a division of booty…’1
On Fox’s death, the seat was left open to the Whig faction and the Duke of Northumberland arrogated to himself the right to nominate his son, Lord Percy, who was ‘elected’ without a contest. Francis Place watched with disgust, as the Duke’s liveried servants threw lumps of bread and cheese, and distributed beer, to the servile, struggling mob.1 With a General Election approaching, Cobbett addressed four open letters to the electors of Westminster. The themes were simple:
To hear some persons talk of an election for Westminster, a stranger to the state of things would believe, that the electors were the bondsmen, or, at best, the mere menial servants of a few great families. The question… seems to be, not what man the electors may wish to choose, but what man is preferred by a few of the noblemen…
Electors should assert their independence, and rid themselves of deference and the fear of influence:
You are nearly twenty thousand in number. Your trades and occupations are… full as necessary to your employers as their employment is necessary to you. If you are turned out of one house, there is always another ready to receive you; if you lose one customer you gain another…
In particular, ‘the journeymen who compose no small part of the electors of Westminster, appear to me to be entirely out of the reach of seduction…’ Employers who sought to enforce the votes of their employees should be exposed to ‘public scorn’: ‘the artisans of a workshop, led to the hustings under the command of the master, are degraded to a level with cattle’. Unless some independent candidate offered himself at the General Election, ‘Westminster would… place itself upon a level with Old Sarum or Gatton’.2
The Tories brought forward Admiral Hood. The Whigs brought forward Fox’s old colleague, Sheridan, who was now Naval Secretary in the Coalition Government, in receipt of £6,000 a year. Cobbett and the reformers would have nothing to do with him. At the eleventh hour, a candidate offered himself who personified the state of confusion in the Radical camp. James Paull, the son of a Perth tailor, was a self-made wealthy India merchant, who had returned to England in 1804 with the aim of assisting in the impeachment of Governor-General Wellesley. He was taken up by Fox’s circle, which then had the support of the Prince of Wales; and as a man likely to embarrass Pitt’s administration, he was found (in 1805) a seat in the rotten borough of Newtown, Isle of Wight. The attack on Wellesley was duly launched. But when the Foxites entered the Coalition, Paull was privately told to drop the matter, or at the least ‘lay upon my oars’. When Paull indignàntly refused he found himself at the dissolution ejected from his seat at Newtown, and repudiated by the men whom he had naïvely supposed to have his cause at heart. His answer was to hurl himself on to the hustings at Westminster.
Paull passed briefly through Radical history, and no one has bothered to find out much about him. It is customary to dismiss him as a quarrelsome little man with a personal grievance. His grievance, however, was more than personal. Wellesley’s arrogance, brutality, and bad faith in his dealings with Oudh are incontestable. There is no reason to suppose that Paull was not passionately outraged by these ‘acts of wanton aggression and tyranny’ in India, which he compared with those for which ‘we are daily reproaching’ France. If the issues were remote for the Westminster electors, Paull compelled respect as a man whom both the Whigs and the Tories wished to silence. ‘What our man wanted in point of talent and knowledge,’ Cobbett wrote later,
he amply made up for in industry and pluck. He was a man of diminutive size; but what there was of him was good. He was game, every inch of him: a real game cock.
He knew little of English politics, had no great eloquence as a speaker or cogency as a writer, but he also had no political inhibitions or ambitions. In three weeks of tumultuous campaigning, a new alliance of reformers was founded: Sir Francis Burdett, the patrician Radical, who nominated Paull on the hustings; Cobbett, the empirical reformer who directed his campaign; and Major Cartwright, the veteran advocate of manhood suffrage, who secured from Paull a pledge that he was a parliamentary reformer.
‘We had to contend against the whole force of the Borough-faction, who had united against us in open, active, and desperate hostility,’ Cobbett recalled. The first four days of the poll showed Paull in the lead, whereupon Hood and Sheridan, who had ridiculed his chances, formed a coalition against him. Broadsheets, squibs, and songs flew around London:
Lo! Corruption stalks forward in Liberty’s guise,
Freemen! rally your legions, and guard your rich prize,
Wave your banners on high, at fair Liberty’s call –
Shout the watch-word aloud – Independence and Paull!
Let the place-hunting crew ’gainst our politics rant,
Call us Jacobins, Traitors, and such idle cant;
With our King we’re determined to stand or to fall –
So success to our cause – Independence and Paull!
He’s the friend of the poor, and the freedom of man,
And will lighten our taxes as fast as he can…
Paull’s opponents ridiculed his humble origins, and his appearance:
… who is that odd little fellow beyond,
Who looks like a pickpocket dragg’d to a pond?
On one side, declared Cobbett, were the ‘relations of placemen and pensioners’, the ‘tax-gatherers, magistrates, police-men, and dependent clergy’, and Sheridan’s personal following of ‘play-actors, scene-shifters, candle-snuffers, and persons following… immoral callings’. On the other side, there is evidence of the first serious attempts at democratic electoral organization among the artisans and journeymen; parish committees for canvassing; and organized support among the trades clubs of journeymen-shoemakers, printers, and tailors. Night after night the crowd drew Paull in triumph through the streets.
James Paull failed to gain the seat, but he came in only 300 votes behind Sheridan1 and the campaign broke the grip of both the factions upon Westminster. ‘That was the real struggle,’ declared Cobbett: ‘that was the real triumph of freedom in Westminster.’ When actual victory came in the following year, Paull had no part in it. Burdett had failed to win Middlesex in 1806; some of the freeholders were frightened by his extremism, although he still commanded the huzzas of the hustings and on his defeat ‘most of the houses in Kensington and Knightsbridge were illuminated, and the whole had more the appearance of a triumph…’ But he failed also for another, and typically quixotic, reason. In previous contests he had used his great wealth freely in the traditional manner of electioneering, with the wholesale treating of voters, and probably as much general oiling with drink and money as was employed by his opponents. He was now nettled by accusations of bribery; while Cobbett, who was now his ally, had been sounding throughout 1806 the demands of electoral austerity. In a celebrated by-election at Honiton in 1806 Cobbett had demanded the absolute prohibition of bribery and treating, and that the candidates should enter into a solemn pledge that if returned they would accept neither office nor public money. Burdett, therefore, adopted the austere manner; but, not content with this, he refused to do more than appear each day on the hustings and call upon the ‘independent electors’ to come forward of their own accord. There was to be no canvassing, no treating, no carriages for elderly voters, no organization whatsoever. When his supporters formed a committee, he repudiated it upon the hustings and urged them to rely on the ‘unassisted public principle’. The reliance halved his vote.
In 1807 another General Election gave reformers their opportunity. Week after week in the Political Register Cobbett addressed letters to the electors of Westminster, sounding an alert. Paull’s supporters got ready, and a committee was formed which called on Burdett to fight for the other seat. But Burdett had given up:
With the omnipotent means of corruption in the power of our spoilers, all struggle is vain. We must wait for our redress and regeneration till corruption shall have exhausted the means of corruption…. Till that time shall arrive, I beg leave to retire from all parliamentary service…
A deputation waited upon him, and asked whether if he was elected without his own permission or intervention, he would be willing to accept the seat? To this Burdett gave a weary assent: ‘If I should be returned for Westminster… I must obey the call… but I will not spend a guinea, nor do anything whatever, to contribute to such election.’ There was worse to follow. With this passive assent, the Westminster Committee prepared to bring forward Burdett and Paull as colleagues for the two seats. But Burdett seems to have wished to shake off his plebeian fellow candidate, whereupon the ‘game cock’ flew into a rage and challenged Burdett to a duel in which both were wounded – Paull so seriously that his supporters dropped his candidature. On the eve of the fifteen-day poll the reformers’ cause appeared to have brawled and ridiculed itself out of the field.1 The last-minute candidature of a little-known Radical sailor, Lord Cochrane, brought a slight revival of hopes. But on the morning when the poll commenced, the members of Burdett’s committee ‘were very much depressed’:
We had no money, no means of making a display, nobody had joined us, the Tories despised us and the Whigs derided us. It was the being laughed at that produced the worst effect of all… those who could well have borne to have been abused could not bear to be laughed at.
But only a fortnight later the artisans and shopkeepers of Westminster were chairing Burdett and Cochrane in a tumultuous triumph. Burdett had left the others far behind, while Cochrane had won the second seat with a majority of 1,000 over Sheridan. (Cochrane was so sorry for Sheridan on the last day of the poll that he took off his inspectors, and allowed him to poll the same voters many times over in order to achieve a more respectable defeat.) Thereafter Westminster (except for a curious episode in 1819) was never lost to Radicalism. The only popular constituency in London, in which the Houses of Parliament were situated, had been captured by men whom almost the entire press designated as ‘Jacobins’.2
This was not as wild an accusation at it seems. An interesting incident had taken place in 1806. Paull was informed that a leading member of his committee was a notorious Jacobin of French origin, Mr Lemaitre. In horror he demanded that Lemaitre leave his committee-rooms, and asked Cobbett to deliver the message. Cobbett tried to serve the sentence of dismissal as gently as he could, but he encountered a man of greater strength of will than he expected. Lemaitre was indeed a former Jacobin; an active member of the L.C.S. and a watchcase maker, he had been seized during the ‘Pop-Gun Plot’ scare of 1794–5, imprisoned again without trial in 1796, and was detained once more between 1798 and 1801, being ‘confined a great part of the period between eighteen and twenty-five years of age’. On his release, he had helped Burdett in his Middlesex elections, and had gained considerable experience. Entering Paull’s committee-rooms on the third day of the poll, he found the Committee ‘had neither plan nor system to regulate the business of the canvass’. For several days he had worked from early morning until midnight to organize an effective plan of canvass. This plan he now brought to Cobbett’s attention. ‘Upon my honour, Mr Lemaitre, this is the only really useful thing I have yet seen in this committee,’ exclaimed Cobbett. Apologies were made, and Lemaitre remained.
The victory of 1807 was entirely the work of the Westminster Committee. Several of its key members were former committeemen of the L.C.S. Lemaitre had his plan of street-by-street and court-by-court canvass prepared well in advance. On the third floor of ‘a Gin Shop called the Britannia Coffee House’, Francis Place worked for three weeks without payment, from dawn until midnight, keeping careful accounts, collating canvass returns, and preparing reports for the General Committee. Richter, another former detainee, was his lieutenant. ‘We were all of us obscure persons,’ wrote Place:
… not one man of note among us, not one man in any way known to the electors generally, as insignificant a set of persons as could well have been collected together to undertake so important a matter as a Westminster election against wealth and rank and name and influence…
They were derided by their opponents as ‘nobody, common tailors, and Barbers…. We were laughed at for our folly, and condemned for our impudence.’ Both principle and the shortage of funds demanded electoral austerity:
… there should be no paid counsellors, attorneys, inspectors nor canvassers, no bribing, no paying of rates, no treating, no cockades, no paid constables, excepting two to keep the committee-room doors.
No money was spent, except by a vote of the committee. By far the greatest item of expense (until the flags, bands, and ribbons of the triumph) was in printing handbills and placards. In Place, who only left the committee-rooms once to canvass, the Committee had an organizer of genius.1
We must now attempt some survey of the position of the English Radicalism in 1807. In the first place, the term ‘radicalism’ suggests both a breadth and an imprecision in the movement. The Jacobins of the 1790s were clearly identified by their allegiance to the Rights of Man and to certain forms of open organization. ‘Radicalism’ came to include very diverse tendencies as the nineteenth century advanced. In 1807 it suggests as much about the courage and tone of the movement as it does about any doctrine. It indicated intransigent opposition to the Government; contempt for the weakness of the Whigs; opposition to restrictions upon political liberties; open exposure of corruption and the ‘Pitt system’; and general support for parliamentary reform. There was little agreement on social and economic questions, and while the most consistent radicalism was that of the London populace, it was broad enough to take in at times the unrest of manufacturers or small gentry.
Notwithstanding their confusion, the contests of 1806 and 1807 were of real importance. The cause of reform became articulate once more. There were two extreme Radicals, returned by a plebeian electorate, in the House. There was a weekly journal, edited with genius, which the administration could scarcely ban, and which had proclaimed itself beyond reach of Tory or Whig influence. Even the ‘father of reform’, Major Cartwright, had secured renewed publicity and popularity.1 A new name is first heard – a gentleman-farmer, Henry Hunt, who issued an appeal to the freeholders of Wiltshire to follow the example of Westminster. In the city itself a new kind of electoral organization had been built up; and the Westminster Committee did not disband itself, but remained for many years as a prototype of post-war reform organizations. These names – Burdett, Cartwright, Cobbett, Hunt, Place – are prominent in the history of articulate Radicalism for the next fifteen years. Burdett continued for some years to be the darling of the London crowd. Cartwright, whose fixity outlasted every twist of events, was to promote the first Hampden Clubs. Cobbett was to advance step by step from ‘independence’ to root-and-branch denunciation of ‘Old Corruption’ – and, indeed, of milk-and-water Radicals like Burdett and Place. Hunt was to act, now as Cobbett’s ally, now as his rival, pitting his mastery of mass oratory against Cobbett’s mastery of polemic. Place was to develop the policy of reformist permeation, and of the artisan and middle class alliance, and was to act as the link between Benthamite reformers and trade unions and plebeian debating groups.
The victory of 1807 was a half-way house between the patrician techniques of Wilkes and more advanced forms of democratic organization. The gains were important. A new meaning had been given to the notion of ‘independence’. Hitherto, the word had been a synonym for opulence and landed interest: Whig and Tory candidates were often recommended on the hustings on account of their wealth, which, it was supposed, would render them ‘independent’ of the need to curry favour or place from the Ministers or King. Cobbett’s notion of independence insisted upon the duty of the electors, whether freeholders, tradesmen or artisans, to free themselves by their own exertions from patronage, bribery and deference. The Westminster Committee had gone yet further; in so far as they had organized victory independently of their own candidates, the menu peuple of Westminster had emerged as a force in their own right. Moreover, they had provided a striking example of the effectiveness of a new kind of electoral organization, dependent not upon the wealth or influence of the candidate but upon the voluntary exertions of the electors. In this sense the people of Westminster felt the victory to be their own.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the Westminster Committee led an independent ‘populist’, still less working-class, movement. The electorate (comprising about 18,000 householders in 1818) 1 included many independent craftsmen and some artisans. But its tone was increasingly set by the small masters and tradesmen. The degree of Radicalism of these groups was an important factor in post-war political life, and it had an influence on one sector of English liberties which proved to be a continuing embarrassment to the authorities. Most of the important political and press trials took place in London, and it was from this social milieu that the juries were drawn. Shopkeepers and tradesmen had made intractable juries in the 1790s. Lists of possible jurymen are preserved in the Treasury Solicitor’s papers, in the cases of Despard and O’Coigly, showing with what care the law officers of the Crown sought to eliminate Jacobin sympathizers from the juries.2 Despite their precautions, the authorities received new humiliations at the hands of London juries between 1817 and 1819.1 Thereafter the juries became more compliant, partly because the authorities developed new refinements of the special jury system and other means of ‘packing’, partly because the radicalism of the City (and its representatives, such as Aldermen Waithman and Wood) was becoming more and more distanced from the plebeian movement.
Thus the victory at Westminster scarcely belonged to the artisans, however much they contributed to it. And the victory, also, was partially illusory. Apart from the fact that the necessary property-qualification confined the choice of candidates to men of means, no one on Place’s General Committee (least of all Place) would have conceived of putting forward one of their own number as candidate. The seat was Burdett’s, and the function of the Committee was to bring him support. Moreover, the Committee showed itself in later years to have serious limitations as a democratic organization. In 1807 it was formed in the heart of a new democratic impulse. In later years it became essentially a self-appointed body – or, as Cobbett complained, a ‘caucus’ – partly under the control of Burdett, partly representative of tradesmen and masters like Place. By the end of the Wars, Place had become the confidant of Bentham and James Mill. He grew more and more hostile to Hunt and to Cobbett, and to methods of agitation among ‘members unlimited’. The Westminster Committee was a useful place from which discreet wire-pulling could be exercised in the interests of the sober and studious artisan. When Cochrane’s seat became vacant, in 1818, Cobbett’s nominee, Major Cartwright, was passed over in favour of the Benthamite Radical, Hobhouse. The Committee became increasingly detached from the working people of London in the same proportion as Place’s sense of ‘self-approbation’ and his dislike of the demonstration and the hustings grew.2
This was, in part, an inevitable outcome of the situation in which the Radicals of 1807 were placed. Anti-Jacobinism was by no means dead. Cobbett broke through the censorship almost by accident, and there was scarcely any other regular Radical press. (In 1810 Cobbett himself was imprisoned for two years for his attack upon the abuses of flogging in the Army). The Westminster Committee survived as an electoral organization, but the authorities had no intention of permitting a new growth of popular clubs. When John Gale Jones, the former L.C.S. leader, overstepped the bounds of prudence in debates which he organized in ‘The British Forum’, off Covent Garden, the House of Commons committed him to Newgate (1810). And when Burdett denounced its action as illegal, the House committed Burdett to the Tower. It is true that almost the whole population of London seemed to be on Burdett’s side. Burdett at first refused to surrender to the House, adopting Wilkes’s policy of defiance, and barricading himself in his Piccadilly home. Lord Cochrane drove up in a hackney-coach, rolled a barrel of gunpowder through the door, and prepared to mine all entrances and defend Burdett with arms. The people milled in the streets, and it seemed that riots on the scale of 1780 were inevitable. Place himself thought that the Army was so disaffected that some spasmodic insurrection was possible. But the very nature of the incident, with its histrionic echoes of Wilkes and its confusion among the Radical leaders, underlines the weakness of the reformers. Even when they rode an insurrectionary tide, they had neither organization nor coherent policy. The laws outlawing corresponding societies had open political meetings had atomized the movement, so that the individualistic and quarrelsome behaviour of its leaders was a function of their situation as ‘voices’ rather than as organizers.
Radicalism remained a defensive movement, an articulate movement of protest, supported by widespread popular disaffection. It was not yet an offensive force. If we are to understand the extremism of Burdett and Cochrane in 1810, we need only read Byron. Such men despised the scramble for power and riches, the hypocrisy of their own class and the pretensions of the new rich. In their frustration they dreamed perhaps at times of some revolutionary spasm which would overthrow the whole fabric of ‘Old Corruption’. If we are to understand the anger of Cobbett, we need only think of the things which made him angry: the fat contracts, the squalid scandals of the Royal Dukes, the soaring rents and taxes, and the impoverishment of the rural labourers, the Ministerial subsidies to the press, the destruction of popular amusements by the informers of the Vice Society. Disaffection swelled for a hundred reasons. Hostility to the press-gang, the grievances of disabled soldiers, the grievances of artisans elbowed out by the mushrooming war-contracting firms, and, after Trafalgar, the growing undertow of opposition to a seemingly endless and purposeless war.
‘It is very probable,’ a Sheffield Dissenting minister wrote, in 1808,
that whenever mankind shall form themselves into societies for the establishment of that kingdom, in which swords shall be beat into ploughshares… that great men will be the principal opposers of the glorious work; especially the opposition may be expected from Generals, Admirals, Contractors, Agents, and such like; and many of the advocates for Christ’s peaceful reign may look for severe treatment from their wicked hands.
‘Christ’s kingdom’ could be ushered into the world only after ‘much opposition and blood’, for the ‘Devil and his agents’ would not suffer it to come any other way:
How often have I known poor wives and mothers pawn their necessary clothing to redeem their husbands or their sons from the gripe of a rascally unrelenting crimp! Oh heavens! what hardships are poor men doomed to…
‘O poverty! thou art the unpardonable offence!… Thou hast neither rights, charters, immunities nor liberties!’
Come hither, old SATAN, old Murtherer, and I will do by thee as thou didst by a better than me: I will take thee, in turn, into ‘an exceedingly great and high mountain, and I will show thee all the kingdoms of this christian world and the glory of them’…. Now, SATAN, look down upon christendom, and behold the motley group; Bibles, Swords – Churches, Barracks – Chapels, Fortresses – Ministers of peace in black, and men of war in red and blue – a few men who act as Saviours; millions of men whose sole business is to systematize and practice the destruction of men…. The true Sons of Peace lightly esteemed, obscure, neglected and scorned. – The Heroes of Murder and Plunder, exalted, extolled, honoured, pensioned, and immortalized…1
It is a voice out of the old England of Winstanley and Bunyan, but of an old England which had begun to read Cobbett. And it reminds us of how remote, in Sheffield, Newcastle or Loughborough, the Westminster elections had been. In the taverns and coffee-houses of the city, Radicals could meet to discuss, and could feel the strength of their numbers. Of the provincial centres where the Jacobin propaganda had penetrated most deeply, only Norwich and Nottingham had a franchise wide enough to allow Radicals to make use of the electoral process. Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, and most of the growing industrial centres were without any representation in the unreformed House. Here, and in the smaller towns and industrial villages, the Church and magistrates watched for any signs of ‘sedition’; even a subscriber to Cobbett’s Register might find himself to be marked. The reformer felt himself to be isolated – ‘obscure, neglected and scorned’. The Westminster triumph threw into greater darkness the repression of the provinces.
Hence it was that the Radical movement took markedly different form in the Midlands and industrial north – a difference which was to influence events for half a century. In London the channels between middle-class and working-class reformers remained open; the characteristic form of organization was the committee, in which a few professional men worked alongside self-educated artisans who tended to despise the political backwardness of the labourers and the demoralized and criminal poor. As repression relaxed, the forum, debating society, and discussion group revived. Periodical Westminster elections provided at least a safety-valve, and a sanction for tumults. In the Midlands and the north, Radicalism was driven underground, into the world of the illegal trade union; it became associated with industrial grievances, the secret meeting, and the oath. Until 1815 neither Burdett nor Corbett meant much in the heartlands of the Industrial Revolution. The Westminster Committee had no message for the Luddites. North of the Trent we find the illegal tradition.