Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850

Radical Expression

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RADICAL EXPRESSION Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 JAMES A. EPSTEIN

New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1994

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Epstein, James. Radical expression : political language, ritual, and symbol in England, 1790-1850 / James A. Epstein, p. crn. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index ISBN 0-19-506550-6 1. Great Britain—-Politics and government—19th century. 2. English language—Political aspects—England—History—19th century. 3. Rites and ceremonies—England—History—19th century. 4. Great Britain—Politics and government—1760-1820. 5. Political oratory—England—History—19th century. 6. Radicalism—England—History—19th century. I. Title. DA530.E67 1994 303.48'4—dc20 93-20691

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Mona

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Preface

The essays in this book deal with the ways in which plebeian radicals gave expression to their political beliefs. The opening chapter establishes several of the book's major themes, tracing the contours of popular constitutionalism and underscoring tensions within late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century radical rhetoric and action. While never a coherent or stable set of ideas and beliefs, popular constitutionalism remained the dominant idiom within which radicals framed their democratic demands. The chapter, and the book more generally, reexamines the character of radical constitutionalist expression and action. Conflict surrounding England's constitutional past and its meanings was intense because (rather than in spite) of its status as a "shared" cultural inheritance; it was precisely because of the constitution's role as a "master-fiction" defining England's place in the universe of nations that radicals were compelled to contest its terms, to appropriate its language, to tell the "real" history of its origins and struggles, and to recover its essential properties of liberty and popular sovereignty. Chapters 2,3, and 5, explore a series of episodes in the history of popular radicalism: the trials of T. J. Wooler, editor of the Black Dwarf; the enfolding of the cap of liberty within the symbolic practice of radicalism and its linkage to radical claims to public space following the Napoleonic Wars; and the rituals of radical commemoration, dining, and toasting in Lancashire during the early nineteenth century. The underlying strategy of these chapters is at least twofold. First, I wish to draw attention to the "situatedness" of political expression. People speak, write, and act within given situations that have important consequences for the ways in which meanings are expressed. Moreover, there are costs to all utterances that really mean something to speakers and hearers, writers and readers. This is particularly true for dissident voices who must confront and calculate the cultural, discursive, and ultimately physical force of those holding state and civil power. Thus Chapter 2 considers the rhetorical economy of the courtroom and the choices facing Wooler and other radicals who stood trial for having expressed their democratic beliefs. The courtroom is a place where language is routinely narrowed or compromised, where authorized speech and authorized speakers usually hold sway; yet popular radicals created linguis-

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tic space within courtrooms, fashioning strong defenses and telling compelling stories about themselves and their nation's constitutional past. Second, these essays underscore the importance of meanings expressed not merely in terms of formal ideology or discourse, but within a highly ritualized and highly charged field of symbolic power and display. Radicals hoisted the cap of liberty at public meetings, chose to sing or not to sing "God Save the King," and toasted the "Sovereign Majesty of the People" at their dinners as carefully measured gestures or counter-gestures shaping political experience and identity. Such gestures were possessed of a certain density that empowered and entangled people in political action; they were thus deeply embedded in conflicts over who was able to move within public political space, who possessed the authority to give meaning to key cultural symbols, and ultimately who was to constitute the political nation, or "the people." It was also through such "social dramas" that radicals connected social action to political narratives and constructed and maintained traditions of popular radical culture and remembrance. Chapter 4 provides a sustained counterpoint to considerations of popular constitutionalism, the symbolic and ritual elements of radicalism, and the economy of political utterance. The chapter discusses the legacy of Paineite republicanism; the conceptions and practice of rationalist language and culture; radical commitments to science, materialism, and anti-Christian, reasoning; and allegiances founded on universal as opposed to local truths. Throughout the 1820s, Richard Carlile and his supporters, the "zetetics," were seekers after rational truth; opponents of tradition, both political and religious; proponents of language stripped of theatrical, symbolic, and metaphorical expression; and champions of the Utopian promise of free speech among equals, unencumbered by either privilege or power. The dream of reason was powerfully attractive to these plebeian intellectuals. Nashville June 1993

J.A.E.

Acknowledgments

I am thankful for the generous support of various institutions and agencies. An Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Pittsburgh (1983-1984) provided a year in which I decided not to write a study based on the factory community of Ashton-under-Lyne, although some of the research for this earlier project provides the basis for Chapter 5. This book took shape during a fellowship year at the National Humanities Center (1985-1986). For stimulating discussions and encouragement, I am indebted to Myra Jehlen, Madelyn Gutwirth, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, and Donald Scott. A fellowship from the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University (1989-1990), provided not only a reduction in my teaching responsibilities, but an opportunity to participate in a year-long faculty seminar under the indefatigable leadership of Jean Bethke Elshtain. Summer stipends from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1989) and the Vanderbilt University Research Council, and travel grants from the NEH, Vanderbilt URC, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Historical Association's Bernadotte E. Schmitt Award enabled me to travel to England for extensive research and writing. Chapter 1 draws on an earlier article entitled "Constitutional Idiom: Radical Rhetoric, Reasoning and Action in Early Nineteenth Century England," which originally appeared in Journal of'Social History 23 (Spring 1990). Chapter 3 is a slightly revised version of an article of the same title that originally appeared in Past and Present, no. 122 (February 1989), and is reprinted with kind permission. Chapter 5 is an expanded version of an article entitled "Radical Dining, Toasting and Symbolic Expression in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire: Rituals of Solidarity," which originally appeared in Albion 20 (Summer 1990). Alas, modest volumes taking a rather immodest time to get to press acquire a relatively long list of debts and kindnesses. John Beattie, Judith Bennett, Michael Bess, Linda Colley, Robert Hall, Cynthia Herrup, Lynn Hunt, Stewart Weaver, and James Vernon all read and commented on earlier drafts of various chapters. Robert Hall kindly sent me references from his own fine research on working-class politics in carly-nineteenth-century Lancashire. Mona Frederick read the entire manuscript, lending the careful

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intelligence of a nonspecialist reader. I owe particular thanks to Iain McCalman for letting me see drafts of work in progress; my debt to his outstanding work on the "radical underworld" should be clear to readers of Chapter 4. Over the years, Dorothy and Edward Thompson patiently endured most of these essays; I hope that something of their guiding hand and example are apparent. John and Mary Rose Belchem always extended the most wonderful northern hospitality, making research visits to Lancashire a delight rather than a mere necessity. Closer to home, I am grateful to Jim Toplon, Marilyn Jackson, and Joe Mount of Vanderbilt's Heard Library for their unfailing help in chasing down references and requests for research materials, and to the members of the Vanderbilt history department for their collegiality. During the early stages of this project, a group of friends—including Judith Bennett, Leon Fink, Sima Godfrey, Paul Krause, Cynthia Herrup, and Sue Levine—taught me much about true friendship, for which I remain grateful. I also deeply appreciate the support and love of my parents, Norman and Claire Lee Epstein. My daughters, Nicky and Andrea, and my stepson, Lucas, deserve special mention for being just who they are, and because Andrea quite correctly thought they merited this and more. For her wisdom, and much else, this book is dedicated to Mona Frederick.

Contents

1 The Constitutionalist Idiom, 3 2 Narrating Liberty's Defense: T. J. Wooler and the Law, 29 3 Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early-Nineteenth-Century England, 70 4 Reason's Republic: Richard Carlile, Zetetic Culture, and Infidel Stylistics, 100 5 Rituals of Solidarity: Radical Dining, Toasting, and Symbolic Expression, 147 Notes, 167 Index, 225

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Radical Expression

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1 The Constitutionalist Idiom

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. . . . In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.1 We, the people's real representatives, and our cause have suffered much from the misrepresentations of a portion of the public press. I take this opportunity of laying before the country my views upon the great question of arming, in order that it may be seen that there are some grounds for the people taking die course they do upon this subject. It is not for me to say what the people are arming for; it matters not to me, as an individual, for what the people arm, provided they do not arm to trench upon my life, my personal liberty and my property; suffice it to say that the people are not arming to carry the people's charter, or to carry the repeal of the new poor law, or even to resist or destroy an unconstitutional police force now about to be thrust upon them; but it sufficeth me to know that the people have at length discovered that they have not only the right to possess arms for their defence, but that it is their duty to 3

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Radical Expression take care that those arms are in constant readiness to oppose foreign aggression or domestic tyranny. I have laboured hard to discover the proper source of that right, and also to ascertain what duties are required to be performed in the exercise of that right; and I now give my countrymen the benefit of my researches. . . .2

The first passage is taken from the well-known opening of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which Marx formulates the relationship between revolutionary movements and their sources of legitimation, language, and traditions. The passage is not unproblematic, leaving unresolved questions such as the limitations that such language, such borrowings from the past, do or do not place on revolutionary movements. Marx also assumes that at moments of revolutionary crisis, moving between old and new political languages is essentially a matter of translation; the spirit of the "new" language is inscribed in the borrowed language of the past and will eventually establish itself through familiar usage, thus supplanting the old. The second passage is less well known; it is taken from a speech delivered to the Chartist Convention of 1839 by R, J. Richardson, a master joiner and one of Manchester's representatives to the convention. The convention, a body elected at mass meetings of hundreds of thousands of British workingmen and -women in late 1838, met in order to superintend the presentation of the National Petition for universal male suffrage to the British Parliament and to devise a strategy for seeing the people's rights realized in the almost certain event that the "corrupt" Parliament of Britain's ruling elite rejected the legitimate demands of the "real" parliament of the people. Richardson took the floor in support of the motion proposing that the convention formally and publicly recommend that the people of England arm in preparation to resist tyranny, whether foreign or domestic. Richardson offered an exhaustive list of authorities to support the people's right and duty to be armed: from the ancient Greeks to Blackstone, from the AngloSaxon legal code and the ancient posse comitatus, from the Anglo-Norman constitution to the Stuarts, from the Glorious Revolution and the misrule of the Hanoverian Whigs to the present day, such a right had remained an inviolable part of the English constitution and the birthright of "free-born" Englishmen. Erudite, if highly selective, quotations from such medieval constitutional authorities as Bracton and from parliamentary rolls punctuated a Chartist history lesson. The Normans, the Stuarts, the Whigs who called William of Orange to the throne and their descendants (responsible for such constitutional transgressions as the Riot Act of 1715), the villainous Tories who perpetrated the bloody slaughter of Peterloo and passed the infamous Six Acts—all were brought before the bar of the convention and measured against England's "real" constitution. Richardson and his fellow representatives were, no doubt, in the process of "finding once more the spirit of revolution." At the same time, they felt the imperative need to arm themselves with the borrowed language of the past. In particular, they sought the authority of the British constitution, or at least their own reconstruction of that elusive body of precedents. This

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chapter sets out to underscore certain aspects of popular constitutionalist reasoning in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to discuss the political strategies that constitutionalist language dictated, and to pose more generally the question of why the constitutionalist idiom remained dominant within popular radical politics: Why did certain spirits from the past move with such force on the rhetorical imagination of radicals like Richardson?

I There was, of course, an alternative idiom to that of popular constitutionalism—that bequeathed by Thomas Paine and the French Revolution. After all, The Rights of Man, Paine's magnificent response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France., was the most widely circulating radical text of the 1790s and continued so through the early decades of the nineteenth century. Among the key theoretical points that Paine so forcefully hammered home was that the rights of the living rather than the traditions of the dead should dictate the terms of governance; the consent of the people must be released from the grasp of historical precedent. Burke's Gothic sense of organic unity between the living and the dead was no more than a mystifying rationalization for the rule of priestcraft and kingcraft, of superstition and conquest, over Reason and the natural rights of the people. For Paine, there was no English constitution. In one of the most memorable passages of The Rights of Man, Paine challenged Burke to produce the famed English constitution: A constitution is not a thing in name only, but in fact. It has not an ideal, but a real existence; and wherever it cannot be produced in a visible form, there is none. A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government. . . . The constitution of the country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government. . . . Can then Mr Burke produce the English Constitution? If he cannot, we may fairly conclude, that though it has been so much talked about, no such thing as a constitution exists, or ever did exist, and consequently that the people have yet a constitution to form.3

While Paine occasionally echoed strains from the theory of the Norman Yoke—that the free constitution of Anglo-Saxon England had been destroyed by the Norman conquerors of the eleventh century—his injunction is clear: radicals must eschew arguments seeking to derive political rights from historical precedent and drink solely from the purely rationalist fountain of natural-rights theory. The Rights of Man is an essentially antihistorical work; democratic rights thrive in an imminent present freed from reference to the past. The attraction of Paine's writing is not difficult to understand. The stridency and rationalist vigor with which he dismissed Burke's high style and anti-iiitellectualism must have appealed to many self-improving artisans and plebeian autodidacts. Paine cut through the protocols of eigh-

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teenth-century political discourse with an irreverence that proved fundamental to the development of popular radical language and action. There is no hint of deference here. One can readily agree with the judgment that it is Paine's tone that marks The Rights of Man as a foundation text in the history of popular radicalism. Above all others, Paine made possible a vernacular language of popular democracy.4 Furthermore, Paine's work marked a decisive break in the prevailing assumptions underpinning popular radical reasoning. While carefully noting that vestiges of an older tradition remained current within popular radicalism, E. P. Thompson argues that Paine and the plebeian radicalism of the 1790s displaced the older constitutionalist reasoning of such reformers as Major John Cartwright. Paine's writing, revolutionary in both style and message, constituted a "new language," befitting the age of revolution. Arguments based on natural rights were, however, hardly new to English political discourse. Moreover, the French revolutionaries themselves drew on a broader tradition of classical-republican discourse that was indebted to the Anglo-American experience. It was the linking of naturalrights reasoning to support for the French Revolution and to a republicanism based not on the passive consent of property holding but on the active consent of the majority of the people that distinguished Paine's work and the democratic politics of the 1790s, particularly within the ranks of radical artisans.5 Inspired by the unprecedented spectacle of a European nation redesigning itself from first principles, radical writers elaborated new schemes of political and social justice; Godwin's Political Justice, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Paint's Agrarian Justice, and Spence's millenarian vision of a communitarian Utopia are merely the most outstanding examples of such departures.6 There was no unitary radical response to the French Revolution, not least because the revolution itself was in constant motion; the 1790s was a decade of great ideological diversity, experimentation, and flux, as radicals responded to the rapid pace of events in both France and Britain. Radicals drew eclectically on various traditions, including "Commonwealth" or "country" ideology, the myth of the ancient constitution, and millenarianism.7 Nonetheless, British radicalism shifted under the influence of the French Revolution, moving away from strictly historical and constitutionalist arguments and relying more exclusively on natural-rights and rationalist theory.8 Thus John Thelwall, the leading orator of the London Corresponding Society, followed Paine in rejecting the claims of historical precedent as being fundamentally incompatible with stable meaning and tending to support established systems of rule, "for precedent is infinitely diversified. All things may be decided by precedent; and all condemned. It would, therefore, revert to governments to decide what precedents were good and what were bad."9 It is not governments that should be allowed to dictate the principles by which they rule: "Establishments cannot decide upon First Principles; but First Principles must decide upon Establishments." And first principles are "in their very nature, few and simple," rooted in natural rea-

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son and thus open to the understanding of all men and women. History, Thelwall warned, must be carefully handled, never rendering the authority of precedent: "[H]istory is to be consulted, not for precedents that must be followed, but for examples that should be weighed: not for dogmas to restrain, but for circumstances to illustrate, our speculations."10 Henry "Redhead" Yorke, the Sheffield radical, showed little patience for the claims of the English constitution: "We have long been amused with the lofty sounds of timetried constitution and happy frame of government, but we have never been favoured with an explicit definition of them."11 One "Citizen Randol," writing at a time "when the bright star, REASON . . . unveils to the astonishing world the web-like mysteries, and horrid crimes, of purblind bigotry, and frantic zeal," explicitly rejected the sacred documents of English constitutionalism: Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Even the glorious Anglo-Saxon constitution stood condemned before the natural rights of man.12 The notion that 1789 was but a tardy Continental version of 1688 quickly collapsed before the force of events that shatter all precedents and models. Admiration for France at the expense of Britain and its constitutional heritage was one of the hallmarks of the popular response to the revolution. For example, as late as 1795 the Cabinet, a fairly moderate Norwich radical journal, featured an article asking "Is the English Constitution Adapted to the Genius of France?" While conceding that the English may have enjoyed greater civil and political liberties than did the inhabitants of other countries, the article argued that the English constitution lacked simple design arising from "the operation of simple, connected and accurate maxims of government." Moreover, the famed tripartite balance of England's constitution merely disguised the fact that the nation's sovereign will had been usurped. In contrast, the French Revolution represented the most important event in world history: "The emancipation of twenty-five millions of rational beings from a state of abject and brutalizing bondage is, surely, an event of the proudest and most magnificent kind." The author concluded by asking whether a "system of civil government so manifestly imperfect, so inadequate to the purpose for which it was instituted . . . so radically defective, so deformed, so corrupted, so diseased" could be worthy of imitation by "a great and enlightened people" in pursuit of liberty.13 Under the influence of the French Revolution and the subsequent wars with France, key terms in England's political vocabulary were called into question, destabilized, or transvalued: words such as "the people," "sovereign," and "patriot" were newly inflected.14 John Gale Jones, one of the most talented Jacobin speakers of the day, recounted visiting a French prisoners' ship harbored outside Chatham to seek out examples of the new breed of republican citizen. Disappointed by a group of prisoners who declined his request to dance the "Carmagnole"—"Monsieur, la musique est en France"—Jones entreated them: " Je suis Anglais, mais je suis Citoyen. J'aime votre Patrie, & je souhaite qu'elle seroit libre." Jones noted that such sentiments were dangerous: "The good old words, Citizen, or Nation, are now changed for new constructive appellations, and to express a sincere and

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ardent love of our country, is to incur the serious charge of exciting contempt and hatred against the King and Constitution."15 There was, indeed, intense conflict taking place precisely over the meaning of the "good old words" "citizen" and "nation," although it was the desire to become a "citizen of the world" that was at odds with the longest standing associations embedded in the term "citizen." Thelwall, writing in favor of peace with France and addressing his readers as "Citizens," declared: I do not love an Englishman merely for being an Englishman, one degree better than I love a Frenchman for being a Frenchman, or an African for being an African. I wish to be, and I wish you to be, Citizens of the world!. . . The happiness of the human species is the only object virtue has in contemplation. To be a "patriot" in the narrow sense of mere loyalty to one's own nation possessed no claim to virtue; it was a "contemptible and illiberal" feeling.16 There was a shifting away from older chauvinistic and imperialistic associations with radical constructions of patriotism.17 "Patriot" did not mean love of country per se, but allegiance to universal principles of reason, liberty, and human fellowship. In A Summary of the Duties of Citizenship, a highly publicized pamphlet associated with Richard "Citizen" Lee, the author described himself as a "perfect cosmopolitan," denouncing love of country as "amongst the confused train of disorderly passions that enter the human disposition" and favoring in its stead "a diffusive spirit of universal affection!"18 The symbolic gestures associated with French, and thus with universal, liberty—-planting liberty trees, wearing tricolor cockades, singing the "Marseillaise" and "Ca Ira," toasting victory to the French republic over its enemies, addressing fellow democrats as "citizen"—also became common practice among sections of the reform movement in London, Sheffield, Nottingham, Norwich, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Thelwall boldly identified himself with the labels "Jacobin" and "sans-culotte"; he told audiences: "I glory in the principles of the French Revolution! I exult in the triumphs of reason!"19 The days of kingcraft were numbered. The executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette sent shock waves throughout Europe. Charles Pigott's Political Dictionary defined "King" as "the chief magistrate of a state, generally hereditary. Kings were held in utter detestation by the ancient Romans; and they are in like manner execrated by the modern French. . . . Kingcraft seems everywhere to be now on the decline, or, in other words, 'Kings are ripe!"'' English Jacobins played outrageously with the theme of king-killing in handbills like The Happy Reign of George the Last and A Cure for National Grievances. Citizen Guillotine, A New Shaving Machine, regicidal counterpoints to sentimental depictions of the last days of the French royal family and celebrations of the domestic bliss of British royalty.20 An angry, raw republicanism found expression in streets and taverns, particularly during the opening years of war (1793-1795). For example, John Nuttall, cotton spinner of Little Bolton, filled his glass and gave the

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toast "Here's Damnation to the King and Constitution"; earlier in the evening, he had proclaimed Thomas Paine "a better man than the King." "Damn the King and Country too; if the French come I wonder who the Hell will not join them," uttered William Francis, of Prittlewell, Essex.21 At Newark, walls were chalked "Paine's the Poor Man's Friend," "Peace or a Speedy Revolution," and "Englishmen rise and fight like Frenchmen."22 Antimonarchical sentiments were formalized in Paineite terms; the masthead of one short-lived republican journal ran Paine's words: "Monarchy is the master-fraud which shelters all others."23 For both Burke and Paine, there was an inseparable link between linguistic and political order. For Paine, the unmediated transparency of rationalist language was a necessary precondition for democratic politics: democratic representatives were to mirror the sovereign will of the people as words were merely to reflect transparent meaning. For Burke, the great renaming that the French Revolution introduced—the new dictionaries and revolutionary catechisms, the eclipsing of the titles of nobility by the term "citizen," the reorganizing of calendars—was inseparable from the disintegration of social and political order: the fall of language and the fall of monarchy went hand in hand.24 II

The French Revolution made available a new political vocabulary, a new style, a new universalism, at once suggesting the extraordinary possibility of slipping the shadow of the past and reversing preexisting arrangements of power in the act of beginning the world anew. Yet what is striking about early-nineteenth-century British political reasoning, both elite and popular, is how rooted debate remained within a discourse about the "real" meaning of the English constitution and its history. Indeed, as one moves forward into the most intense and highly organized periods of radical political mobilization—the years directly following the close of the Napoleonic Wars (1815-1820) or those running from the Reform Bill crisis to the demise of Chartism (1830-ca. 1850)—it is not the resurgence of Paineite politics or a movement modeled on the language and style of the French Revolution that proves impressive, but rather the continued vigor of arguments that base democratic political and social claims on historical precedent and the predominance of closely related strategies of constitutionalist action. This is most evident outside London, in the provincial manufacturing centers of the North and Midlands.25 Plebeian democrats might have revered the memory of Tom Paine, but as often as not they ignored his strictures against invoking the legitimating force of the past. They turned more often to a radicalized British constitutionalism than to the language of the French Revolution in order to draw legitimacy for their own democratic claims and actions and to censure the claims and actions of their social betters. Some qualifications are in order here. First, the 1790s certainly marked a profound shift in the social and political history of England. The French

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Revolution, the opening of nearly a quarter-century of war, and the quickening pace of industrialization combined to make the last decade of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth century a crucial watershed in modern British history.26 Second, radicals did not neglect the Paineite tradition. Most notably, Richard Carlile and his followers nurtured the republican and deist principles of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution through the postwar years.27 If they nurtured a minority tradition, they did so with an intensity that left its mark on the character of nineteenth-century popular radicalism. Moreover, elements of Paine's critique remained central to popular radicalism: government was inherently parasitic; the system of taxation sustained corruption and should be replaced by direct taxes on landed wealth; tax revenue rather than funding warfare should support a program of social welfare, as outlined in the second part of The Rij/hts of Man.28 Third, at the level of popular politics, distinctions between arguments based on historical precedent and those based on natural rights, or between popular constitutionalism and republicanism, were rarely drawn very sharply. Feargus O'Connor, Chartism's most prominent leader, moved with no sense of contradiction from asserting the workingman's natural right to be represented in Parliament to claiming that universal male suffrage and annual parliaments (two of the famous six points of the People's Charter) "were formerly a portion of the boasted constitution of our country; which is considered the envy of surrounding nations."29 We must not look for theoretical coherence at the level of popular belief or "ideology." Nor is there reason to suppose that coherence per se renders political rhetoric more persuasive; indeed, it is often the "looseness"—the incoherences and ambiguities— within political language that facilitates mobilization and gains popularity.30 Paine's own status within the pantheon of radical heroes was secure. No toast was drunk more often at radical banquets of potato pies and homebrewed ales than that "To the Memory of that Undaunted Advocate of Liberty, Thomas Paine." William Cobbett, the most influential radical journalist of the nineteenth century, brought Paine's remains back with him from America, as if returning the sacred relics of a martyred saint to their proper resting place. Yet there can be no question of Cobbett's constitutionalist perspective. He could write in 1816: I know of no enemy of reform and of the happiness of the country so great as that man, who would persuade you that we possess nothing good, and that all must be torn to pieces. There is no principle, no precedent, no regulations . . . favourable to freedom, which is not to be found in the Laws of England or in the example of our Ancestors. Therefore, I say we may ask for, and we want nothing new. We have great constitutional laws and principles, to which we are immovably attached. . . . Alteration, modification to suit the times and circumstances; but the great principles ought to be and must be, the same, or else confusion will follow.31 Fourth, while the formal republican-infidel organizations remained sectarian in orientation, there was a more generalized, gut republicanism that often ran strong and deep within working-class culture. For instance, dur-

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ing the dark winter months of 1839, as small knots of would-be revolutionaries plotted insurrection, a spy reported to the Home Office on the activities of Birmingham's most militant insurgents. At a private meeting, amid much talk of arming and blood, William Smallwood "drew from his pocket a picture of Prince Albert, and sticking a dagger through it, pinned it to the wall, and then burned it, hoping, as he said, that such might be the end of the Queen, and of all who opposed the people." Edward Brown, a journeyman silversmith soon to serve a term in Warwick jail for his radical activities, lectured regularly outdoors in Birmingham's Bull Ring. In November 1839, Brown decided to read publicly from Paine's Rights of Man, although he dissociated himself from Paine's religious views. He told his audience that "he had got the book he had promised to bring and knew spies were there and that he could be got for sedition for reading but did not fear." Having read from the Rights, Brown told the meeting that "he had been a Republican ever since he was 16 [when] he read first of the Book about Revolution, and he should die one. He sd. he intended for his children to learn the whole of it by Art [sic] and if they did not he would give them a good thrashing."32 Republicanism remained the ultimate gesture of radical opposition because it aimed to overthrow the most exalted symbol of hierarchical authority and because of its identification with the French Revolution and more remotely with England's republican experiment of the seventeenth century. Finally, radicals drew freely on the Jacobin experience as they fashioned their own political rituals and repertoire of symbolic resistance. They regularly paraded liberty caps and tricolored flags at their demonstrations; radical bands played "(> Ira" and the "Marseillaise."33

Ill Thus there was often little sense of incompatibility within radical culture between the traditions of popular constitutionalism and those of Paineite republicanism. The dominance of constitutionalist reasoning is perhaps most clear, however, if we consider the forms of action that radicals employed and the arguments they used to legitimate insurgent mobilization. It was the repertoire of constitutionalist action—the mass petition, the remonstrance to the Crown, the mass demonstration and platform agitation, the convening of a convention—that could be relied on to rally the forces of popular radicalism.34 It was not merely what could be said but what could be done that gave the constitutionalist idiom force, allowing certain things to happen, certain political dramas to unfold. The constitutionalist prescription was often most powerfully invoked within a defensive context. This was particularly important in the immediate postwar years, when the government first relaxed and then reinstitutcd restrictions on public meetings and suspended habeas corpus (1817), and again in the 1830s, as the British state increasingly assumed a more aggressive posture toward popular freedoms. The Whig government's attack on

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trade unionism, the coercion of Ireland, and, most obviously, the new Poor Law and the Rural Police Act were widely regarded as wholesale abridgements of constitutional liberty and as a coordinated assault on working people's defensive resources.35 The tone of early Chartist protest, for example, was set in large measure by the rhetoric of violence brought to the radical platform from the anti-Poor Law movement. The first calls for the people to arm came from northern anti-Poor Law leaders such as the Reverend J. R, Stephens, who told his followers that he intended to attend the Chartist Convention as "the armed delegate of an armed people."36 In 1838 and 1839, banners at Lancashire demonstrations celebrated Stephens's threatening rhetoric of "war to the knife." The call to arms was nearly always couched in defensive terms: the people were arming in defense of constitutional liberties and against the unconstitutional encroachments of a centralizing and undemocratic state. While the central radical demand for universal male suffrage could be founded on distant constitutional precedent, the issue of the defense of the laboring poor's right to poor relief was charged with the urgency of an experienced loss. Thus Matthew Fletcher, Bolton's delegate to the convention, explained that the right of universal suffrage "had been so long neglected that they stood in a different position to that in which they stood in reference to those encroachments upon their liberties which they had had to encounter."37 There were widespread expectations that the Whig government was preparing a "reign of terror" similar to that of the 1790s or that which followed Peterloo (1819). It was this fear and the sense of a need to defend what were regarded as constitutionally guaranteed rights that underpinned much of the early tone of Chartist protest and dictated the powerful force of language rooted in constitutionalist opposition. The right to arm in defense of the constitution is a rather good example of how a radical rendering of English political history and an exploitation of what were regarded as legally sanctioned liberties could provide legitimation for insurgent action. Constitutional claims to the right to arm individually or collectively for defense derived from the Bill of Rights of 1689, which guaranteed the right of Protestant subjects to be armed. Thus the concern of England's ruling elite in the late seventeenth century to curb the powers of monarchical government and to disallow the maintenance of a standing army provided working-class radicals of the early nineteenth century with the (supposed) legal basis for arming themselves against the state. While the right to arm was, in fact, restricted by various game laws (particularly that of 1671) and later, in response to the insurgent challenge of 1819, by laws that prohibited drilling and giving magistrates the right to search for and seize arms without warrants, the generalized right to arm in defense of the constitution remained something more than a shadow force.38 It was a position that found support from Blackstone, the greatest eighteenth-century legal authority. Furthermore, the eighteenth-century tradi-

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tion of civic humanism placed particular emphasis on the need for an armed citizenry for the preservation of constitutional liberty; citizenship was directly linked to the rights and duties of bearing arms.39 Thus Major Cartwright regarded a popular militia composed of all men capable of bearing arms as among the original foundations of the English constitution, a local manifestation of a universal condition: "In all ages and nations, free armsbearing has been the distinction of a citizen from a slave."40 Radical activists were quick to pick up on such authority, as well as on the use that middle-class reformers had made of this tradition during their own struggle for inclusion within the political nation.41 Toasts at radical dinners, speeches at meetings, and articles in the Chartist press made constant reference to constitutional and legal authority and to historically based justifications for the arming of the people. According to the Northern Liberator, the constitution did not merely designate a time to be armed, but demanded "that Englishmen always ought to be armed; it is perhaps the oldest right the people possess." Arming and recommendations to arm were to be open, a symbolic and practical affirmation of the status of freemen. Arming was a duty, the badge of true citizenship. The manifesto of the Chartist Convention asserted that "the last vestige of RIGHT has been lost" to the present generation of English men and women: "the armed force of the country has been transferred to soldiers and policemen." The manifesto provided a series of questions to be put to the people at the "simultaneous" meetings held over Whitsuntide 1839. It was from the sentiments of the people as expressed at these "free assemblies" that the convention was to determine what "ulterior" measures to recommend to the nation after Parliament's expected rejection of the National Petition. The fourth question to be put to these demonstrations asked: "Whether, according to their old constitutional rights they had prepared themselves with the arms of freemen to defend the laws and constitutional privileges their ancestors bequeathed to them?^2 From the winter of 1838 through the summer of 1839, there is evidence of widespread arming throughout the industrial districts of England and Wales in anticipation of an imminent, decisive confrontation to take place between the people and their rulers. The full extent of this arming will probably never be determined. Most members of the convention, however, felt that the country was not prepared for an armed showdown and moved accordingly to reject plans for a national "holiday," or general strike, to gain the Charter.43 Whether the convention's decision reflected a lack of revolutionary nerve remains an open question. What seems likely, however, is that the language with which working people were exhorted to acquire arms facilitated rather than impeded the process of arming; the appeal to the legitimating authority of the constitution, the call to defend the rights of freeborn Englishmen, and the notion that arming to this end was legal provided a real impetus toward such preparations. This would have been the case for no other reason than that it allowed local and national leaders

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to talk openly about arming in terms that the Whig government, in part because of its own history and traditions, found difficult to suppress.

IV Behind assertions of the right to arm stood a more fundamental claim: the right of legitimate resistance to tyranny. Resistance was a defensive right, a response to governmental oppression; it was the government, not the people, that bore responsibility in such dire circumstances. Indeed, the strategy of open constitutionalism centered on the testing of the supposed contractual relationship between government and people. It was this relationship that radicals formally tested through large-scale petitioning campaigns, often seeking legitimation for actions that went beyond constitutional formalities in the event of their demands being rejected. During the early nineteenth century, popular radicals continually elaborated on the right of petitioning. Following the Napoleonic Wars, as open popular politics again became possible, radicals mounted a mass campaign to petition for parliamentary reform and convened public meetings to this end. Radical claims to the right of public assembly—of moving within public political space—were closely linked to those of petitioning.44 Throughout the country, newly formed Hampden clubs and Union societies, acting on Cartwright's initiative, forwarded petitions to London. The campaign was initially associated with Sir Francis Burdett's proposal for parliamentary reform, but rapidly moved beyond the moderate Whig radicalism of Burdett. The movement assumed militant tones; in the background stirred an insurrectionary minority, particularly in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the East Midlands.45 The formal language of public meetings and petitions, however, remained decidedly constitutional. The evils of misgovernment and misrule were the result of "a manifest breach of the constitution"; it was the people's duty to rescue the country and the constitution, "to exert themselves in a constitutional way, to recover their long lost rights." At a public meeting held in Manchester to form a Constitutional Society, speaker after speaker drew attention to the provisions of "the people's Statute, the Bill of Rights" and the Act of Settlement that had settled the crown on the House of Brunswick, which were seen as banning standing armies and unjust taxation and guaranteeing a "free" or democratically elected House of Commons independent of ministerial patronage and control 46 Although the emphasis of most radicals remained on lawful proceedings, the abortive march of the Blanketeers that grew out of this petitioning campaign suggests the potential for innovating on constitutionalist tropes and protocols. The scheme called for thousands of men with blankets strapped to their backs, for sleeping rough, to march from Manchester, through the Midlands, to London in order to present the prince regent with petitions demanding relief of distress and the dismissal of His Majesty's ministers. Constitutionalist form was finely blended with revolutionary content.

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The plans for the march took shape in Manchester during the winter of 1816/1817 and were touted throughout the surrounding district. These were months of extreme economic hardship, particularly among handloom weavers; they were also months of intense political ferment.47 In December 1816, radicals meeting in Salford debated the question "whether the Jacobin or the Loyalist commonly called was the best friend to his country" and decided by a large majority that the Jacobin was the true patriot. "Suppose a number of men was cast upon a Desolate Island, what kind of Government would they adopt?" This question was debated among Manchester radicals, with speakers holding up the American republic as an example for Britons.48 At the Manchester Constitutional Society's spacious debating rooms in New Islington, there was plenty of talk of impending revolution. Among the regular speakers at the meetings, the principal advocates of the march were the young leaders John Bagguley, an eighteen-yearold Manchester apprentice, and Samuel Drummond, a reedmaker from Stockport. According to a spy's report, Bagguley insisted that although their meetings might soon be shut down, "the law says that [if] the King did not give an Answer to the Petition within the space of 40 Days, He was liable to be seiz'd & all his Family and confined in a prison till he give an Answer." A point of "law" that Bagguley supported by reference to Magna Carta. The Salford tailor John Johnston warned that if the prince "will not harken to our Petition, but we will punish him by taking his head off as was formerly by Charles 1st."49 The shoemaker William Benbow announced his willingness to die in the sacred cause of liberty, reminding his hearers that "a blacksmith in the reign of Richard 2nd went to London with 20,000 men and got their Liberties which remained till they were destroyed by Tyranny." He briefed the radicals on constitutional modes of petitioning, reading from the relevant acts from the reigns of Charles II and James II, and informed them of their statutory right to arm, "although he would not say what to do with their arms."50 The question of what constituted lawful petitioning was itself at issue. The week before the march of the Blanketeers, the Commons upheld the Speaker's ruling that of the more than five hundred petitions that Burdett intended to present as a climax to the petitioning campaign—petitions claiming to represent nearly 1 million people—the vast majority were deemed unacceptable, either because they were printed or because they were identical to previous petitions deemed to be insulting. Only thirteen petitions were found unexceptionable.51 The space for open political action was rapidly shrinking, as Parliament suspended habeas corpus the week before the scheduled march. Disgusted by such procedures, Lancashire radicals raised the constitutional stakes. Great care was taken to conform to the strict letter of the law, specifically the Act Against Tumultuous Petitioning (1661). Marchers were to form themselves into separate groups often, each group with a leader who had tied to his wrist a petition signed by twenty people.52 Not surprisingly, on the appointed day (10 March) things went badly. Twelve thousand men and women gathered outside St. Peter's church in

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Manchester for a brief meeting before Bagguley directed them to form into groups often with their leading man at the head of each group. There was never a chance that the government would allow Lancashire weavers to march through England's industrial districts gathering thousands of hungry petitioners to confront the prince regent. The "citizens' army," as one speaker referred to the marchers, was dispersed by military forces as they prepared to set off; the leaders—including Bagguley, Drummond, Johnston, and the aged printer William Ogden (who had printed the petitions carried by the Blanketeers)—were soon arrested, as were large numbers of marchers. Several hundred got as far as Stockport and Macclesfield; a few weavers reached Ashbourne.53 The failed provincial march on London led small groups of ultraradicals to turn from open organization to secret plans for insurrection, forming part of the tangled relationships that culminated in the so-called Ardwick conspiracy and the tragic Pentridge rising of June 1817. Yet the episode of the Blanketeers' march illustrates more than the quixotic hopes of impoverished weavers; the scheme underscores the scope for dangerous elaborations on constitutionalist forms, for combining "all the advantages of legality with all the opportunities for developing into something else."54 In a similar spirit, radical speakers exploited England's past, summoning condensed images of civil war: the armed barons confronting King John at Runnymede, the peasants' revolt against unjust taxes, and the awful act of tyrannicide. What radicals left unstated was the obvious parallel to the more recent march of the Marseillois to Paris in 1792. Needless to say, neither local authorities nor the government regarded such marching or petitioning as constitutionally sanctioned. Nor did they show much respect for popular radicalism's brand of constitutional history. As a Manchester magistrate wrote to Lord Sidmouth: "Baguley is well versed in the history of his country, & has the consummate art to invest & torture it to his own purpose."55 Henry Brougham, among the administration's most ardent opponents, ridiculed the pretense to historical authority on which popular radicals based their petitions to Parliament: Sir, I would not be a party in telling the people, (monstrous assertion!) that twelve hundred years ago this country enjoyed a free and perfect constitution. (Hear, hear, hear!) This, sir, is a specimen of the historical knowledge,—of the antiquarian research,—of the acquaintance with constitutional law of these wiseacres out of doors, who, after poring for days and nights, and brooding over their wild and mischievous schemes, rise up with their little nostrums and big blunders to amend the British Constitution! (Laughter and loud cheers.)56

No doubt radicals tortured history to their own purposes; their antiquarian research and knowledge of constitutional law were at best highly selective. They similarly "tortured" the law against tumultuous petitioning, the original intent of which was not to facilitate but rather to curtail popular petitioning and assembly after the restoration of monarchy.57 The march

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on London was intended as a gesture of intimidation. Several of the most prominent leaders, including Bagguley and Benbow, were avowed republicans. Petitioning the prince regent would serve notice that, having ignored the people's petitions, Parliament stood divested of constitutional authority. Yet the plan to "undeceive" the prince regent was also to recast (perhaps ironically) the age-old myth of king and people in which the prince, betrayed by corrupt ministers and advisers, is called on to heal his people's suffering and restore justice to the land.58

V Petitioning remained central to the repertoire of popular radical mobilization. This is most evident if we return to a consideration of Chartism. Chartism came together through huge public demonstrations called to adopt the National Petition and to elect delegates to the Chartist Convention.59 The National Petition was widely seen as the embodiment of the people's will; Parliament's rejection of the petition would signal the severance of the contract between government and governed, the point at which the democratically elected convention might decide what action to take in defense of constitutional liberty. The convention assembled to superintend the presentation of the National Petition, but it also assembled in the role of "antiParliament" and thus as a possible substitute for the corrupt assembly of the ruling elite.60 At the meetings held to elect delegates to the convention, delegate after delegate declared his commitment to the authority of the convention.61 Chartist strategy in 1839 turned on the confrontation between the rival authorities of the convention and Parliament. In effect, the leaders of the movement sought to create a situation of "dual power"; they sought to develop autonomous class institutions—of which the convention was the most important—capable of offering an alternative to the existing structures of state power. The convention's decision that the petition should be more widely signed (in particular, that it should carry more signatures than any previous petitioning campaign had mustered) and the interviewing of sympathetic members of Parliament by delegates did not reflect a sanguine belief that the Commons might actually accept its political demands. They do suggest, however, a genuine concern to act with due constitutional protocol. If the rejection of the petition was to impart legitimacy to future action, to a coordinated strategy for reconstructing the basis of political power, things had to be done properly.62 Of course, it could be argued—and indeed was by many Chartists— that the act of petitioning Parliament constituted a formal recognition of rightful authority that radicals denied. There was widespread sentiment that Parliament, as constituted, was an unconstitutional body. Furthermore, as Paine had argued, "petitioning for rights" was a contradiction in terms: "Whatever the rights of people are, they have a right to them, and none

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have a right either to withhold them, or to grant them. Government ought to be established on such principles of justice as to exclude the occasion of all such applications."63 Moreover, previous petitioning campaigns—those of 1816 and 1817 and later, postreform campaigns for factory legislation and for repeal of the new Poor Law—had exposed the futility of this tactic. In many districts, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for petitioning. Petitioning itself had little inherent appeal. As Matthew Fletcher explained, the convention "sat under the cloak of being a petitioning body, and the men of the North held their meetings under this cloak, because the right of petitioning was almost the only Constitutional right they had left."64 Behind the constitutionalist gesture lurked more than a hint of instrumentality and deeper meanings coded in constitutionalist form. Within the constitutionalist prescription were locked contradictions and ambiguity. However, what Chartists and other working-class radicals of the early nineteenth century did was to push the boundaries of constitutionalist action as far as they could go; they reloaded the categories of reference with radical meaning and used this radicalized constitutionalism to pose an insurgent challenge. Thus the constant references in 1839 to the National Petition as the "last" petition in any form to be presented by the people to Parliament represented both a recognition of the reluctance of workingclass radicals to petition and a way to infuse the right to petition with revolutionary content by implying that armed resistance was the appropriate response to the rejection of the people's will. The ancient right to petition was given apocalyptic meaning. The convention itself provides a final example of the workings of the constitutionalist idiom. The concept of the national convention had a double origin. It was rooted both within the Jacobin tradition, conjuring images of the French and American revolutions, and within English constitutional history, deriving precedent from the conventions that had reconstituted the terms of state power in 1660 and 1688. During the eighteenth century, the concept of the convention, or anti-Parliament, emerged in the writings of certain "real" Whigs or "Commonwealthmen."65 With the coming of the French Revolution, however, the concept of the convention assumed distinctly Jacobin tones. The convention lost something of its "Englishness." Paine rejected the precedent of 1688, arguing that only a democratically elected convention of the people could form a constitution.66 The assembling of such a body became a central part of Paineite politics. Certainly the government's prosecutions of English and Scottish "Jacobins" involved in the convention schemes of 1792 to 1794 were based on the premise that these radicals were attempting to "introduce a system of policy in this country founded on the example of that instituted in France." Yet even in the 1790s, the concept of the convention was laced with constitutionalist references, often of a highly idealized kind. Joseph Gerrald (transported for fourteen years in 1794 for his role as delegate of the London Corresponding Society to the Scottish convention of 1793), in his tract A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us From RMOT (1793), called for a convention as a form of revival

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of the Anglo-Saxon constitution of King Alfred, when the "Mycelgemot, Folk-Mote, or Convention" had met annually on Salisbury Plain.67 With each subsequent revival of mass popular radicalism, schemes for a national convention, or anti-Parliament, reemerged. In the weeks preceding Peterloo, the "legislatorial attorney" scheme—a plan to elect "real" guardians of the people's will, to be sent to the Commons as representatives of the large unrepresented towns—was gaining support. The meeting at Manchester was originally called to elect a "legislatorial attorney" to match Sir Charles Wolseley's election the previous month at a huge gathering at Birmingham.68 During the reform crisis, especially after the full dimensions of the middle-class and Whig betrayal of 1832 were realized, there was much talk and some action directed at convening a convention. In both periods, many of the leading advocates of a convention were tinged with more than a hue of Paineite republicanism. James Lorymer, author of A National Convention, the Only Proper Remedy (1833) and editor of such unstamped journals as the Republican and the Bonnet Rouge, was an ultra-republican. Richard Lee, Spencean socialist and editor of Man, favored calling a convention in 1833 in order to reclaim the people's natural right to the soil. Lee printed and sold tricolored placards denouncing "Despotic Government."69 Once again, constitutionalist reasoning coexisted with strong undertones of Jacobinism. Yet in 1839, the first time a publicly elected convention of the people was actually convened and allowed to meet for an extensive period, radicals consciously resisted references drawn from the republican-Jacobin tradition. This was also the moment when the conception of the convention as an anti-Parliament, or alternative government, was most prevalent. Thus Dr. John Taylor, a hardcore revolutionary in 1839, made no reference to the French model in his history of the convention, written directly after its adjournment—perhaps a consciously ironic omission. Instead, he introduced his account by referring to the convention parliaments of 1660 and 1688: Conventions have been more than once held in England, and on several occasions have performed all the functions of Government. Such was the Convention which declared the Throne vacant on the abdication of James, and presented the Crown to William; but there was this difference between their position and that of the later Convention, viz., that in their case there existed no other Parliament, while in ours both Lords and Commons were in full and mischievous operation.70 The Chartist leaders also, at least officially, avoided the style "National Convention," with its clear associations with French republicanism, adopting instead the formal tide "General Convention of the Industrious Classes." Within the convention, the rhetoric of open constitutionalism prevailed. The handful of delegates who followed the lead of George Julian Harney, the "Marat" of 1839, were generally isolated. References to the "sacred right to insurrection" and the glories of the French Revolution found little support. Most delegates regarded the Jacobin posturing of Harney and others

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associated with the London Democratic Association as inimical to the cause of British freedom. W. S. Villiers Sankey, the Edinburgh delegate, went so far as to move a resolution that the present movement, being essentially English, and not having in view any theoretical innovations, but a recurrence to the first principles of the original Saxon Constitution, this Convention do deprecate any language or expression which would appear to associate our objects to those of the French Revolution, or to take it as our model.71 The objection was less to revolutionary resistance than to the models and sources of legitimation pressed into service. Again, there is evidence of instrumental motives at work in suppressing Jacobin references and symbolism; Harney's language and actions jeopardized the convention's legality.72

VI Certainly radical leaders did not wish needlessly to provoke the authority of the state. No doubt they also wished to maintain an openness to the meaning of their actions; many were themselves uncertain as to what actions should or could be taken in order to achieve their goals. But the commitment to constitutionalist rhetoric and reasoning went deeper than this. Radicalism's leaders sensed that the constitutionalist idiom and repertoire of action endowed their movement with the sort of authority needed to mobilize the force of popular radicalism nationally, to create a mass insurgent movement. Why? Why did radicals of the early nineteenth century, many of them seeking quite fundamental political and social change, feel the need to "conjure up the spirits of the past"? And why did certain spirits and traditions move with greater force on the imagination of plebeian radicals? Before addressing these questions, it must again be stressed that the dominance of the constitutionalist idiom does not imply the unimportance of the Jacobin inheritance or the lack of currency of arguments derived from natural rights as opposed to historical reasoning. The relationship between such traditions and forms of legitimation and argumentation was nothing if not complex. Political language is by its nature imprecise. Political rhetoric lacks sharp philosophic and linguistic clarity. The mention of a particular source of legitimation—the Glorious Revolution of 1688, for example— conjures a whole range of highly nuanced meanings and possible responses from listeners or readers. Political references are characterized by their multivalence. The range of ambiguities that any reference may summon depends on its social and linguistic context and, therefore, changes over time.73

Moreover, certain references may appear more "historical" than they really are. Thus it may seem rather contradictory for Thomas Davison to have founded an ultra-republican journal, entitled the London Alfred (established in 1819), or to have argued for male universal suffrage and annual

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parliaments on the authority of the practices of the Saxon witenagemotes. However, the appeal to the Anglo-Saxon constitution, while historical in form, was often a simultaneous appeal to some notion of natural law—the assumption being that the lost liberties of Anglo-Saxon England had embodied notions of original right. In a similar vein, republicans such as William Sherwin and Dr. James Watson, a former Spencean, were prepared to argue in 1818 that "the great Charter of our Liberties, commonly called MAGNA CHARTA," was "a RECOGNITION of POSITIVE RIGHTS antecedently existing and inherent in the People; of Rights, which no King or Government can lawfully give or take away." According to the Paineite Cap of Liberty, the British constitution was merely that portion of the aforesaid Law of Nature, which has been left to the enjoyment of the People by a successive chain of tyrannical and interested Ministers. . . . Magna Cha-rta and the Bill of Rights were, nothing more than a return to first principles, from which the tyrant John thought proper to depart.74 Nor were such views necessarily incompatible with the historicism of a radical like Cartwright, who himself recognized that the legitimacy of any constitution ultimately rested on " eternal principles of truth and inherent rights of Man.'''' Cartwright merely maintained—and was prepared to demonstrate at painstaking length—that the Anglo-Saxon constitution conformed to such inherent rights. He ransacked the constitutionalist inheritance, however, not to show its libertarian strengths, but to document the corruption in its fabric and to uncover residues of its original purity; he explicitly noted the deficiencies of such constitutional charters as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. In The English Constitution Produced and, Illustrated- (1823), his belated reply to Paine's challenge to produce the English constitution, Cartwright stressed the points of agreement between their positions, noting that in Common Sense Paine had, in fact, acknowledged the existence of the English constitution; he had merely missed "its really simple frame, or its true nature."75 Like Paine, however, Cartwright admired the American and French (1791) constitutions.76 It is often difficult to separate neatly reasoning that is historically or legally derived, as opposed to that based on some form of natural right; there was a structured interdependence between these two modes of reasoning within English political discourse since certain rights "inherent in the People" had been either fully or partially realized historically. The right to resist tyranny, for example, could be founded along with Locke on natural-rights reasoning, but reference could be made to the expression of this right in 1688.77 Similarly, the assertion of the right to bear arms can be traced back to Renaissance republican thought, as filtered through neo-Harringtonian writings of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in which the preservation of civic virtue depended on an armed citizenry, but the right could also be seen as having been historically guaranteed in England. It must also be stressed that these modes of thought did not maintain a constant value in relationship to each other. In the early 1790s, rational-

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ist argumentation was ascendant due to the influence of the French Revolution. After the 1790s, however, the appeal to pure reason and the flourishing of republican and and-Christian beliefs were more characteristic of periods of radical retreat. Thus the mass constitutionalist mobilization of 1819 was followed by a decade in which the republicanism and materialist atheism of Richard Carlile won support among plebeian intellectuals particularly in London and the industrial North; but this always remained a minority movement. As previously argued, the period of most intense Chartist mobilization (1838-1842), was dominated by constitutionalist modes of reasoning and action. The situation was more complicated in 1848, due to the impact of events in France and the crisis of the mass platform.78 It is perhaps not surprising that in the wake of Chartism's decline it was secularism that maintained "the sole nationally organized plebeian current of [radical] opinion" through the mid-Victorian period, connecting with the emergent socialist movement. But the most popular cause of these decades was the campaign in favor of the Tichborne claimant, which drew heavily on the traditions of popular constitutionalism.79 One final qualification: certain assertions of political or social rights were not well served by the force of constitutionalist reasoning. Established notions of the constitution's tripartite balance stood against republican demands for the abolition of the institutions of the monarchy and the House of Lords, although radicals following Cartwright's lead might argue for a democratically elected executive and legislature based on the terms of the ancient constitution and historical example.80 Yet not all rights could be thus founded; this was true of claims for an egalitarian redistribution of property and for the equal social and political rights of women. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, the linkage between civil and political liberty and the rights of private property was strong. It was difficult to invoke constitutional claims for political rights without acquiescence to the preservation of private property. Of course, the social base of working-class radicalism was primarily artisanal, and thus genuinely concerned with the protection of the rights of small-scale property against the encroachments of mercantile and industrial capital. There was also a tradition of political thought going back to Locke that recognized labor as an important species of property—indeed, as the natural source of all wealth. Artisans regularly claimed protection for their trades and skills as forms of property and could point to a body of law and custom acknowledging such claims.81 Moreover, there remained scope within the constitutionalist idiom to call existing property relations into question. Thus William Cobbett, in his Legacy to Labourers (1834), stressed the historically contingent nature of property rights: land was held not absolutely, but on condition of certain obligations. He warned that the new Poor Law threatened to "loosen all the ligaments of property . . . to break up the social compact; to produce confusion; and to leave to chance a settlement anew."82 Nonetheless, such arguments questioned existing property relations only in extremis, if obligations were flagrantly breached; they did not oppose fundamental inequalities in property own-

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ership or capitalist competition per se. Early socialist views were premised on different lines. Spencean claims that all inhabitants should be possessed of an equal portion of the soil—"the people's farm"—were based on natural, God-given, right; the socialist ideas of Robert Owen were founded on a complex fusion of Enlightenment rationalism, radical Dissent, and natural jurisprudence.83 Demands for equal social and political rights for women were usually grounded on strictly rationalist premises. Mary Wollstonecraft appealed to the notion of a "rational fellowship" between women and men "instead of slavish obedience."84 In the 1820s, it was the Carlileites who championed feminist principles. As Barbara Taylor demonstrates, in the 1830s and 1840s there was a close connection between demands for gender equality and the vision of a rationally ordered, noncompetitive new moral world. Thus women concerned with such an egalitarian reordering gravitated toward the Owenite movement.85 This is not to say that such women did not support the demands of popular radicalism or that thousands of women did not participate in the radical cause, but rather that claims specifically for women's political rights were more problematically situated within popular radical discourse and were not easily legitimated through an appeal to England's past.86 Moreover, the virtues of manly independence were among the key terms of constitutionalist reference; the constitutionalist notion of citizenship was predominately male; and women usually spoke not as citizens, but as mothers, wives, and guardians of family and community values. Such distinctions were rooted in part within traditions of Anglo-American political thought in which civic virtue was armed and male.87 Thus qualified, we can return to the question of why constitutionalist reasoning and action should have remained the dominant tradition within radical politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. Part of the answer is to be found in the 1790s, in the defeat of British "Jacobinism" and the retreat of middle-class opinion from the more radical emphases of Enlightenment thought. Republicanism and anti-Christian belief became inextricably associated with the anarchy of the French Revolution and the Terror of the Year II. Jacobinism was driven underground, subjected to Pitt's own campaign of legal repression and pursued with loyalist fervor by Reeveite associations and church-and-king mobs.88 In December 1792, a special jury had convicted Paine in absentia of seditious libel; Paine became an outlaw and The Rights of Man a proscribed text. While the celebrated treason trials of 1794—those of Thomas Hardy, John Home Tooke, and John Thelwall— were victories for English radicalism, bringing toasts at radical dinners to "Trial by an English Jury," the suspension of habeas corpus was followed a year later by the infamous Two Acts of 1795—the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act and the Seditious Meetings Act. Metropolitan debating societies all but ceased discussing political topics.89 From late 1795 through the summer of 1797, some members of the Corresponding Societies tried to maintain an open movement. Thelwall resigned from all popular societies but continued to lecture, turning to classical history to avoid prosecu-

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tion. By 1797, however, even Thelwall, the most irrepressible of radical leaders, had withdrawn from politics, turning for consolation to the company of Coleridge and Wordsworth.90 By the late 1790s, British Jacobinism had moved into the shadows, conspiratorial and underground. It was this movement, small but heroic, that ran through the Irish rising of 1798, with its English and French connections, to Colonel Despard's ill-fated conspiracy of 1802 and beyond.91 The image of Jacobinism as an illegal, clandestine affair was important to the future history of radical language and action. Government authorities and loyalists consistently portrayed popular radicals as modeling themselves and their movement on French example—a reaction that continued with vigor into the immediate postwar years.92 And there remained ultraradicals—the London Spenceans, for example—who eagerly embraced French revolutionary slogans, symbols, and gestures. Within popular radical culture, English and French tones often coexisted. The Patriot's Calendar, which appeared annually from 1794 to 1796, included Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights alongside the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the words and music of the "Marseillaise" and "Ca Ira." John Baxter, indicted for high treason in 1794, wrote A New and Impartial History of England (1796), which ran to over eight hundred pages. While taking strong exception to Paine's view that England had no constitution, he also included a sustained treatment of the French Revolution as part of England's history.93 By the early 1790s, however, many English radicals had already sought the legal shelter of constitutionalist rhetoric. The "pristine purity" of the constitution might do for an argument in favor of universal suffrage or for resisting tyranny as well as the dangerous rights of man; public reference to the glories of the French Revolution were often suppressed in the interests of personal safety.94 Thus the force of the law, backed by the power of the state, was important to structuring the economy of political rhetoric; the costs of unauthorized utterance and display were seen to be high. Whether Pitt's government ever intended to unleash a British "reign of terror," whether there were really eight hundred warrants for high treason signed, sealed, and ready to be served on the conviction of Hardy, whether there were plans afoot to abolish trial by jury, mattered less in the field of linguistic exchange than the fact that radicals made calculations based on the (reasonable) belief that such were the designs of government.95 John Richter, who was among the leaders of the London Corresponding Society arrested in 1794 and released following the acquittals of Hardy, Home Tooke, and Thelwall, carefully annotated his copy of the reports from the Commons and Lords committees of secrecy (1794). Presumably in preparation for standing trial, he scoured the text, underlining and noting phrases from the society's various publications—which were included as evidence in the committees' reports—indicating peaceful and lawful intent: "in a constitutional and legal Method," "Constitutional Measures for procuring a real Representation of the Commons of Great Britain," "every legal method," "the Way pointed out by the Constitution." In Janu-

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ary 1794, for example, the society's "Address to the People of Great Britain" complained of the demise of the English constitution: "We have referred to Magna Charta, to the Bill of Rights, and to the Revolution, and we certainly do find that our ancestors did establish wise and wholesome laws: But we as certainly find, that, of the venerable Constitution of our ancestors, hardly a vestige remains."96 That there was so much constitutional phrasing for Richter to underline is revealing. His marginal notes on debates within the councils of the society indicate a careful concern for "proper"—that is, constitutional—phrasing.97 To be sure, the situation in 1794 and 1795 was complex and extremely difficult for plebeian radicals; the space for maneuver was limited, and the gap between private and public utterance was often considerable. But whether members of the Corresponding Societies or radicals of later generations fully believed in such constitutionalist usage or merely exploited the full range of popular constitutionalism in an effort to avoid prosecution is perhaps less important than the fact that this was the language they actually used.98 The public language that plebeian radicals took into the nineteenth century was left unpurged of constitutionalism. English radicals had also to contend with the charge of being unpatriotic or disloyal. The context of war made universalist definitions of "patriotism" more difficult to sustain. Anti-Gallican and nationalist impulses ran strong, particularly during certain periods of the war; such popular emotions were fully exploited in government propaganda and evangelical tracts. The loyalist task was made easier in that British national identity had been forged during the eighteenth century largely in response to war with France; enmity toward France was a familiar emotion.99 Radicals were themselves split along pro- and anti-Gallican lines. The years 1803 to 1805, when the threat of a French invasion was greatest, were difficult ones for English supporters of French liberty. This is not to suggest that the wars were universally popular (on the contrary, there was often much popular resentment), that the meanings associated with patriotism were uncontested, or that there was popular consent for existing arrangements of political power at home. It became more difficult, however, for English radicals to claim the title "patriot" without suppressing language and gestures associated with the French Revolution, particularly as the French republic gave way to Napoleon's empire and France began to conform to an older image of a state founded on principles antithetical to British liberty.100 Patriotism was never the sole preserve of conservative politics. During the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the term carried enough radical weight—enough of a sense of citizens' rights—that ministerialists preferred "loyalist" to "patriot." There was a radical version of patriotism that structured the vocabulary and symbolism of national pride around such "patriotic martyrs" as Hampden and Sidney and through libertarian references drawn from the seventeenth century.101 Following Thelwall's release from the Tower, he and his wife named their newborn son Algernon Sydney (his younger brother was to be named Hampden).102 Radical patriotic ap-

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peals rested, however, not on the universal rights of man and the French Revolution, but rather on a radicalized and defensive British constitutionalism. After the French wars, radicals vigorously revived the rhetoric of British libertarianism, as hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers who had borne arms against Napoleon's armies fueled democratic claims for citizenship. Mobilizing the nation to arms had a radical sting in its tail. Thus the Democratic Recorder, a short-lived metropolitan journal, refashioned the nation's past to republican design as an inspiration to popular arming: Will not the example of the glorious army of patriots, from whom we are descended, flash upon our recollection, and awaken within us every dormant principle of resistance to oppression, which as their descendants must circulate in our veins? Or are we degenerated? Is the high spirit that actuated the Barons of Runnimede [sic] extinct? Are the masters of kings, the creator of kings, the transporters of kings, the executer of kings, to submit to a vile faction which is destitute of every passion but that of avarice and tyranny?103 It would be a mistake, however, merely to stress the negative or reactive forces predisposing nineteenth-century radicals to embrace constitutionalism. Popular constitutionalism did not remain the predominant source for legitimating democratic political demands, nor did the constitutionalist repertoire dictate the forms of action most commonly employed for mass mobilization merely due to the defeats suffered by the English Jacobins or the shortcomings of the French Revolution. Nor should the adoption of constitutionalism be viewed as a retreat from some more revolutionary idiom. On the contrary, for popular radicals to have fully embraced Paineite republicanism would itself have represented a sort of retreat; they would have been vacating important cultural and political terrain, discarding a shared idiom of political legitimation, a powerful constellation of references, symbols, and forms of action. For much the same reasons, popular Christianity remained more central to radical rhetoric in the nineteenth century than the materialist free-thinking of radicals like Carlile and his followers. It has been too readily assumed that the learning of "a new language," rather than the radical appropriation of the old, is a prerequisite to truly revolutionary practice. Similarly, as J. G. A. Pocock comments, it is an error "to suppose that the argument from natural rights by its nature tended toward radicalism, the appeal to history toward conservatism."104 There are clearly limitations to any political repertoire or vocabulary, but there is also great flexibility requiring careful decoding. Marx was, of course, much influenced in his thinking about the nature of revolutionary practice by the experience of the French Revolution. The rhetoric of the revolution drew on a pervasive presentism, what Lynn Hunt calls a "mythic present" devoid of historical anchorage. References and models drawn from French history were the weaponry of upholders of the ancien regime, whereas the Jacobins drew their references from classical history or from the actual events of the revolution itself: the revolution made its own time.105

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In contrast, England had a revolutionary tradition dating from the seventeenth century, one steeped in arguments based on English constitutional history and common law and rooted in the traditions of religious dissent. The force of constitutionalist reasoning was forged in the struggles of the seventeenth century, when sections of the ruling elite moved against Stuart attempts at "absolutism." This was also the point at which "the people" moved onto the stage of national history. The protracted struggles of the seventeenth century threw wide open questions about "the nature, source, and grounds of political legitimacy."106 From the late seventeenth century, "politics," as a distinct activity situated within "the public sphere" and linked to public opinion, was born.107 Within this context, the English constitution acquired the status of a founding national myth; the constitution, particularly as secured in 1688, guaranteed the liberties that distinguished England in the universe of nations. While elite power was firmly reconstituted by the Glorious Revolution—a moderate and largely conserving settlement—there remained an unresolved character to conceptions of the British constitutional liberty it was thought to have ensured.108 Arguments based on key constitutional documents and precedents, as well as celebrations of key events, most notably the Glorious Revolution, were the very stuff of politics. British culture was saturated with references to rights ensured by England's constitution; it was difficult not to be drawn into debate about its meanings and its content. The constitution became part of a "constellation of enshrined ideas" (to borrow Clifford Geertz's term)—modes of argumentation, symbols, and references necessary for framing political identities, for telling stories about the nation's past and future, for providing animating descriptions of the social and political world—and, as such, resonated across class lines.109 During the first half of the nineteenth century, the constitutionalist idiom was distinguished not so much for being the ideological property of any one class or political tendency, but as defining the contested terrain between different social and political groups.110 For conservatives, the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Settlement represented England's providential deliverance from popery, establishing the claims of the House of Brunswick, enshrining the Protestant state, and ensuring social order; the constitution was something to be preserved.111 Radicals stressed the counterthemes of recovery, resistance, and contract; the constitution confirmed the sovereignty of the people and the contingent authority of government. Charles I was executed and James II chased from the throne just as John had been compelled by force of arms to grant Magna Carta; Hampden bled and Sidney and Russell went to the scaffold to preserve English liberty. These were the stories deeded from England's past, to be told and retold—the stories that entangled and moved people to action. In much the same way as craft workers in France refashioned traditional corporate idioms and adopted the language of French republicanism, and radical artisans in America laid claim to the republican heritage of their nation's founding, working-class radicals employed the language of English constitutionalism.112

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This leads to the concluding observation that ideological struggle often goes on not between two sharply antithetical systems of political reasoning, but rather within a "shared" idiom or narrative discourse; the struggle becomes that of appropriating shared forms of rhetoric and symbolism to a particular class or political position, of restructuring this language—often from a class perspective—while maintaining an appeal to a presumed system of national political and cultural values that transcends class. Obviously, the appropriate language cannot create the conditions for insurgent mobilization; yet politics can take place only within the context of language.113 Indeed, the struggle over whose voices and what forms of political language possess authority within the public sphere of discourse is essential to the reproduction of relationships of dominance and subordination in modern society. The struggle over the narrowing or broadening of this sphere is also crucial to levels and forms of resistance and to the process through which people acquire the collective will to challenge prevailing power relations of state and civil society: to find "once more the spirit of revolution."

2 Narrating Liberty's Defense: T. J. Wooler and the Law

Make the best story you can for yourself—true, if truth, as I hope, will serve your purpose; but, if not, the most plausible and ingenious you can invent. That is what self-defence requires from every man, where, as it always happens to a man upon his trial, he has the whole world against him, and has his own battle to fight against the world.

Such is the advice that Forester offers Caleb Williams before hearing the "case" between Caleb and his master, Falkland. William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, written during the year 1793, when Pitt's administration brought charges of high treason against Britain's Jacobin leaders, can be read as a displaced commentary on the awesome power of the law. In a private letter written the same year to Joseph Gerrald, before Gerrald stood trial in Scotland on charges of sedition, Godwin offered his own advice on how best to defend oneself at trial. He implored his friend not to miss the opportunity "of telling a tale upon which the happiness of nations depends." Godwin advised Gerrald to appeal beyond the English constitution to the basis of "all written Law and parchment constitutions; the Law of universal Reason." He also implored Gerrald to show "that you are not terrible but kind," so that the jury and the world "will feel your value."1 Gerrald's defense was, indeed, a model of its kind, becoming one of the most renowned statements of British libertarianism. He died the following year, suffering the ill effects of the first year of his fourteen-year sentence of transportation.2 An inseparable relationship exists between law and the stories we tell: both participate in the creation and maintenance of a world of normative 29

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meaning. Courtrooms, however, are locations where legal talk is narrowed; boundaries are drawn, precedents established, and voices silenced or privileged through a strict hierarchy of speakers. For such reasons, Robert Cover maintains that the law itself constitutes an exercise of violence. In arguing against those who view the interpretative practice of the law as analogous to other rhetorical instances constitutive of social and political meaning, Cover insists that there is a radical disjunction between "the social organization of law as power and the organization of law as meaning." "The law" functions within the context of a virtual anarchy of claims about rights, justice, and communal responsibilities and expectations, which the law, in turn, attempts to contain. As opposed to legal talk per se, the law is buttressed by the coercive institutions of state violence. The law stands, therefore, as a singular rhetorical instance.3 Perhaps Gerrald would have agreed with Cover's characterization of the law. And yet one is impressed by how much legal talk there is. British political culture has been deeply colored by the law. The defeats and victories of the courtroom—the Bates case, the Five Knights' trial, John Hampden and ship money, the trial of the Seven Bishops—and the tales of such heroes as Hampden, "Freeborn" John Lilburne, and the martyred patriots Sidney and Russell were all enshrined in eighteenth-century Whig history and became part of libertarian rhetorical memory. The seventeenth century looms large in this view: when common-law lawyers took center stage in the political dramas of the era and when battle lines were drawn between the jurisdiction of the common law and that of the prerogative courts of the king. The triumph of common law over the Crown's prerogative courts was seen as marking a seminal moment in securing the liberty of the nation and its people against the ambitions of tyrannical government. The law made venerated martyrs of Sidney and Russell; within Whig demonology, pride of place went to Judges Scroggs and "bloody" Jeffreys.4 At a more subtle level, the language of politics drew heavily on law. As Howard Nenner demonstrates, during the period 1660 to 1689, "law was the touchstone of politics. . . . There was an unbroken reliance upon its structure, its arguments, its procedure, and its forms." Thus, to take a wellknown example, there was nothing inherently novel about Burke's drawing analogues from the language of private inheritance and contract in some of the most famous passages of Reflections on the Revolution in France? The very structure of common-law reasoning, based on the prescriptive force of precedent, remained central to modes of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury political thought. Reverence for England's past was often paralleled by a reverence for the law; there were close links between historically minded lawyers and legally inclined historians.6 Moreover, in his famous Commentaries, Blackstone demonstrated how English law, taken as a whole—despite its intricate reliance on obscure technicalities, legal fictions, and the artificial reasoning of judicial precedent—not merely was coherent in its historical development, but essentially conformed to reason and to the principles of natural law. The single most important attribute that distinguished

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English law, providing its connecting historical and ethical foundation, was the "idea and practice" of civil and political liberty. England's legal uniqueness had long been a point of national pride.7 Certainly there was as much myth as substance surrounding the political culture of the law. The myth of the ancient constitution, so dear to the hearts of common-law opponents of the Crown throughout the seventeenth century, functioned with attenuated force in the eighteenth century. But it was too much part of the ideological inheritance of Whiggery not to retain influence.8 According to this general theory, the common law was of ancient vintage, based on immemorial custom. While the origins of this legal code were lost in the mists of antiquity, there had been one law known to all Englishmen. This, in turn, demonstrated that the English people "had developed their own law out of their own accumulated wisdom and experience." Statute law enacted by Parliament served merely to clarify or confirm the common law, which remained essentially unchanged in its perfection. What is remarkable is that this apparently conservative legal theory was accessible to radical alteration and appropriation. Thus radicals might argue that there had been a break (most notably the Norman Conquest) or breaks in historical continuity: the ancient law had been corrupted by tyrannical design. It remained for the people of England to reclaim the original intent and democratic practice of their Anglo-Saxon forbears.9 More generally, the eulogistic tone and content of much eighteenth-century commentary on the law afforded scope for radical appropriation. It has been argued that during the eighteenth century the criminal law played a uniquely prominent and highly complex role as an instrument of both ruling-class coercion and ideological hegemony, making "it possible to govern eighteenth-century England without a police force and without a large army."10 However, as E. P. Thompson observes, the essential precondition for the effectiveness of law, in its function as ideology, is that it shall display an independence from gross manipulation and shall seem to be just. It cannot seem to be so without upholding its own logic and criteria of equity. . .. The law may be rhetoric, but it need not be empty rhetoric.11 Thus the distinction between the law as power and the law as meaning becomes less clear when the meanings associated with the law are constitutive of the ideology on which power itself relies. It was precisely the legitimating role of law, its rhetoric of justice and appeal to the notion of the rule of law, that made it politically vulnerable in the wake of the French Revolution and into the early decades of the nineteenth century. This chapter is, therefore, dedicated to the proposition that Godwin got it wrong.12 It was not the "happiness of nations" but the sacred act of narrating the story of a particular nation's happiness that was persuasive; it was not "the Law of universal Reason" but the local law that had endowed the English nation with the rights and liberties that mattered. Moreover, telling your own story as an episode in the saga of English con-

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stitutional liberty afforded the best chance that the jury and the world "will feel your value" as a citizen. To acquit was to reconfirm the story of the ancient constitution and to recall to memory the refounding moment of the seventeenth century.

I The dilemma of how to tell the tale, of how to "make the best story you can for yourself," remained poignantly relevant to British popular radicals. From the 1790s through the Chartist years, radicals faced legal restrictions on the use of political language, on methods of mobilization, and on forms of association. Radical speakers and journalists faced government prosecution on charges such as unlawful assembly, various forms of conspiracy, and seditious and blasphemous libel. An unfortunate few faced capital charges of high treason. In courtrooms, radicals and their lawyers drew on England's constitutional and legal past to construct what were often carefully conceived and (at least until 1819-1820) successful defenses of presumed political and civil rights. The courtroom was an important political arena, in which language was circumscribed by legal conventions but in which radicals were able to draw on historical and legal precedents that seemed to ensure certain key rights and liberties. More than occasionally, authorities were embarrassed as radicals turned the tables on their accusers. In quite a fundamental sense, such trials were about the power of and over language, about who could say what to whom and under what conditions. In the courtroom, bow things were said was of preeminent importance. The role of the professional pleader, or barrister, had evolved out of the need for litigants to present their cases with procedural accuracy; the litigant took the pleader's words as his own. In cases for high treason, radicals were usually represented by prominent barristers. Thomas Erskine, the greatest trial lawyer of the period, made his initial reputation in difficult and highly visible political cases.13 More often, however, radicals chose to defend themselves when brought to trial, although they might still seek legal counsel. In part this was a point of pride, but it also reflected a common distrust of lawyers. There was a feeling that a lawyer might not present a bold and principled defense, possessing more respect for the judge and fellow lawyers than for the integrity of the defendant and his principles.14 But bold strategies of self-defense carried risks, particularly at the point of sentencing. Daniel Isaac Eaton, convicted in 1812 for having published the so-called third part of Paine's-4^ of Reason, believed "that defending myself in the best manner I could, without that base servility of the counsel, gave great offence, I make no doubt. . . . [T]he trespass of pleading my own cause, must have greatly added to my supposed crime."15 In the courtroom, radicals formally confronted the power and agency of the state. The engagement was an unequal one (a major theme of this chapter): juries were packed; high-court judges held office through gov-

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ernment appointment; prosecution counsel were experienced courtroom practitioners. The attorney general and the solicitor general often acted on behalf of the Crown. Nonetheless, plebeian radicals directly faced the object of their opposition; just as they had to answer to the charges of the Crown, their opponents had to hear and respond to their defense. Political trials were occasions when radicals entered into a rather curious dialogue with government. Trials possessed many of the attributes of theater: pomp and ritual spectacle, rich costumes, dramatic tension and pathos, fine rhetoric, and occasional humor. There was also an audience; indeed, there were a number of audiences ranged both within and outside the courtroom. Most significantly, the verdict turned on the judgment of a jury of twelve "men of good conscience." In the eighteenth century, the jury's space was not always formally separated; jurors sometimes sat among the general courtroom audience. Within the visual register of the court, the jurors, like the defendant and the spectators, were dressed in their ordinary clothes, in contrast to the sumptuously robed and wigged judge and barristers, and the costumed court officials. The wigs and gowns formed part of the law's ensemble of visual effects aimed at producing terror and awe.16 The jury's place in this theater was "that of a lay presence conferring legitimacy upon the process." Because of the jury, the mysteries of the law had to be rendered into lay language. For radicals, the great virtue of the jury, as John Brewer notes, was "that it was a representative institution, and not merely a cog in the judicial machine.... Juries represented the public at large and acted, as it were, as the attorney of the people." The jury's presence was an active one; eighteenth-century radicals often insisted on the jury's right to question and cross-examine the accused.17 The jury was one of the constitution's most ancient and revered institutions—"the sacred bulwark of the nation," to quote Blackstone. It also was a controversial one. Questions concerning the jury's social composition and its powers to judge law as well as fact remained controversial throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century.18 The place of the jury—its composition, the means of its selection, and the extent of its powers—was of critical importance to popular radicals. It was the jury that mediated the engagement (the "dialogue") between elite power and plebeian opposition to that power. But if the jury constituted an audience with a crucial role in determining the outcomes of trials, there was also an audience beyond the jury. In celebrated cases such as those of John Wilkes and Thomas Hardy, the secretary of the London Corresponding Society, Westminster courtrooms bulged with relatives, friends, supporters, and curious spectators—an audience that often poured out onto the streets. More than occasionally, disapproving judges issued stern warnings to crowded galleries of boisterous partisans. Popular politicians like Wilkes, accompanied to court by large crowds of raucous supporters, played to this broader audience, reaching out to embrace the "varied throngs of gentlemen, shopkeepers and craftsmen that

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crowded the galleries and approaches to the court-room."19 On such occasions, there was a perceived correspondence between the fate of an individual subject and the concerns of the "nation" at large. Beyond the courtroom, an interested political public eagerly awaited news of important trials. Popular radicals who emerged from court victorious were feted in the streets of London and honored by triumphal dinners at which toasts to "Trial by British Jury" were solemnly drunk. The spectacular acquittals of Hardy, John Thelwall, and John Home Tooke in late 1794 initiated the longest-standing tradition of metropolitan radical dining.20 Commemorative medals were struck honoring both the defendants' patrician lawyers, Thomas Erskine and Vicary Gibbs—"PATRIOTS WHO FOR SACRED FREEDOM STOOD"—and the twelve independent jurors (all named), who "BY THE INTEGRITY OF THE JURY WHO ARE JUDGES OF LAW AS WELL AS FACT" returned verdicts of not guilty. This second medal echoed the inscription on medals worn by supporters of John Lilburne in 1649 following his acquittal by a London jury.21 While trials were preeminently occasions of the spoken word, there was a long-standing tradition of publishing key state trials. The prefaces to the successive eighteenth-century editions of State Trials (all reprinted in the early nineteenth century in Cobbett and Howell's Complete Collection of State Trials) stress the importance of making such texts available to a reading public. Thus Salmon's preface to the first edition of State Trials (1719) opens: Since 'tis observable that the best and bravest of mankind are far from being exempted from Criminal Prosecutions, and that potent malice, or prevailing faction, have too often attempted the most consummate merit; that Learning which shews how life, honour, and innocence are to be defended, when they happen to be injuriously attack'd, will not, 'tis presumm'd, be thought inferior to that, which instructs us how to defend our less important rights. — And as the Common Law is nothing else but immemorial Custom, and the custom and methods of Trial . . . is no inconsiderable branch of the Law; and since these, as other Customs, are only to be collected from former Precedents, 'tis something strange, that amongst the numerous Authors and Reports and Institutes, not one has hitherto thought fit to make any considerable collection of this kind.

It concludes by asserting that "here will be found the greatest collection of fine Speeches, and Arguments, on the most important subjects, that have hitherto been exhibited to the world."22 The overarching theme was that of the struggle for civil liberty, which could be defended only on the basis of precedent, through reference to the past. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these texts constituted an important repository of political argumentation and reference for radicals and their opponents; they also offered rhetorical models for libertarian trial defense.23 The intended audience for expensive editions of state trials was, of course, distinct from the popular readership of chapbook accounts of sensational murder trials and speeches from the gallows. But trial texts were a

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popular form of political literature, published in newspapers and radical journals, as well as being sold separately in cheap pamphlet form. Sometimes reports of unfolding courtroom dramas were sold on London's streets in daily sheets.24 Moreover, radicals sensed a strong continuity between their own confrontations with the authority of the law and previous generations' defense of constitutional liberty as manifest in state trials. There was an intersection here between the worlds of polite and popular political culture. Thus William Hone relates how reading the Tryal of John Lilburn as a young boy "aroused within me new feelings, and a desire of acquainting myself with Constitutional Law." As Olivia Smith superbly demonstrates, when Hone, the greatest radical satirist of the Regency era, was brought to trial in 1817 on charges of blasphemous libel, he drew on the arguments, language, and tactics of Lilburne's defense, speaking at his trial "with the strength of memory." It is unlikely that many nineteenth-century radicals shared Hone's detailed familiarity with seventeenth-century trial literature, but the trials of most radicals tapped deep reservoirs of historical and rhetorical memory. At the conclusion of his trials, Hone immediately brought out a cheap (3 shilling) edition of The Three Trials of William Hone. He understood that he was adopting the conventions of a literary form. All participants in prominent trials knew that their speeches were being recorded in shorthand and would be sold in an edited version.25 Trial defenses were often carefully prepared literary texts. Despite the asymmetrical arrangements of power within die courtroom, how one chose to tell the tale, devising "the most plausible and ingenious" defense, mattered. It mattered in the sense that winning at trial not only meant personal liberty, but countered the governing elite's more general aim of restricting political utterance and participation within the narrow boundaries of established eighteenth-century notions of who constituted the political nation.26 Acquittals asserted a claim to an expanded concept of who possessed the right to act within the public sphere of letters and politics, of who constituted "the people." Trial defense turned on careful calculations. Victory was nice, but it could not be the only consideration, not least because acquittals proved difficult to secure outside London or before packed or special juries. Moreover, the whole point was to defeat the government on radicalism's terms, to make the court bend to democracy's design. The audience that packed the capacious gallery at the Guildhall, the crowds that thronged the approaches to the court and cheered the comings and goings of radicals and their legal advisers, the readers of the trial text—this was the community that mattered. There was always the option of noble defeat, of stating one's views boldly and being carted off to jail. But, where possible, the treat was to upend authority, to beat the government at its own game, to turn the tables: the reversible world of carnival loomed as a possibility. The trick turned on composing a defense that was both true to radicalism's principles and stood a chance of either winning an acquittal from a jury of twelve men (usually holding political views at odds with those of the defendant) or at least persuading one juror to render a

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verdict according to conscience, thus upholding the popular trust in the ancient institution of the jury. A comprehensive analysis of the trials of radicals during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a large and challenging project worthy of a book in its own right.27 What follows serves merely to suggest the importance of this neglected subject, demonstrating its relationship to the wider theme of popular constitutionalism. The language of radical defense was decidedly constitutionalist; the imperatives of legal defense narrowed the effective rhetorical range. Within this narrowed range, however, radicals often managed to stir deep political emotions and to touch on matters of fundamental importance. The rest of this chapter concentrates on the crucial years 1817 to 1820, a short period in which radical success in the courtroom turned to bitter defeat. More particularly, it concentrates on T. J. Wooler's experience with the law. Wooler is of interest not only as one of the most influential political writers and publishers of his day, but also because he came to articulate a critical understanding of the workings of the legal system linked to a powerful defense of constitutional liberty. In this context, attention will also be given to the efforts of Wooler and others to combat the government's system of jury rigging—a long-standing object of radical complaint—and to defend a democratic concept of the jury. II

Thomas Jonathan Wooler was born in Yorkshire, probably in 1785 or 1786.28 Apprenticed as a printer, he followed this trade during his early adult years. Moving south as a young man, Wooler began associating with metropolitan radical circles. He quickly distinguished himself in London's radical debating clubs, successfully taking on such formidable opponents as the veteran Jacobin debater John Gale Jones at the British Forum. During these years, metropolitan debating clubs were dominated by freethinkers and Jacobins, skeptical in their politics and religion.29 In 1808 Wooler ran his own debating society, the Socratic Union, which held its meetings at the Mermaid tavern in Hackney. He became closely identified with the Reasoner (1813-1814), a literary magazine that published lengthy reports of debates held at the Globe and Mermaid taverns. Wooler was one of the chief debaters, and may have edited or published the Reasoner in 1814.30 In 1813, he also published and edited the short-lived Republican: A Weekly Historical Magazine, which held unmistakably Paineite views.31 The details of Wooler's transition from printer to radical journalist and publisher remain obscure, although such origins in the printing trades were common among radical writers. He next edited a well-produced theatrical journal, the Stage (1814-1816), drawing notice not only for his spirited style of theatrical criticism, but also for his habit of directly typesetting his articles without first committing them to writing. Wooler gave the Stage a radical cast. He called on the public to resist the increased prices at London's licensed theaters,

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arguing that if the managers of licensed theaters would surrender their patents "and let us have other theatres," they might, raise prices to whatever level they wished.32 Wooler thus exhibited talents as a radical speaker and writer that were to serve him well in the courtroom. His experience as a theater goer and drama critic was also of importance; there were parallels between popular notions of a democratic theater and a democratic courtroom. In late January 1817, Wooler brought out the first edition of the Black Dwarf (1817-1824), which rapidly became one of the most popular radical journals of the postwar years, rivalled in its influence only by Cobbett's Political Register and, to a lesser extent, Sherwin's Political Register. The immediate postwar period was one of radical resurgence, as the compressed energy of the final years of the Napoleonic Wars was released; mass demonstrations and radical publishing, often tinged with republican sentiment, flourished as government controls were temporarily relaxed. In early March 1817, however, in the wake of the Spa Fields riots, habeas corpus was suspended; later that month Lord Sidmouth, the home secretary, issued a circular letter informing local magistrates of the power to imprison anyone suspected of libel, including writers, publishers, and vendors of radical publications.33 William Cobbett, who had already served a two-year prison sentence for his conviction in 1810 for seditious libel, fled to America, temporarily suspending publication of his Political Register. Wooler, along with the young William Sherwin and William Hone, stood his ground.34 From the outset, the Dwarf hunched furious attacks on the government and its ministers. Wooler characterized the suspension of habeas corpus as a breach of England's constitutional heritage in sardonic tones that were to become a hallmark of his journal: The notorious offender, Habeas Corpus, has been at last happily subjected to the punishment of the law. He has long been suspected as the principle [sic] party towards inciting the people to unite and to tell the truth, and to demand their rights. . . although it is supposed the testimonies in his favor might have had some weight, if it had not been a matter of public notoriety that he was related to, or descended from two notorious traitors of old times, called Magna Charta, and the Bill of Rights.**

As the influence of Cobbett's Register waned, the Black Dwarf became the nation's most widely read radical journal. A letter to the Lord Chancellor from a northern mining district later claimed that it could be found "in the hat-crown of almost every pitman you meet." Lord Castlereagh referred to Wooler as "the fugleman of the Radicals."36 The politics of the JDiwrfwere those of radical constitutionalism. The journal was supported by literary and probably by financial contributions from "the venerable Father of Reform," Major John Cartwright, who clearly influenced Wooler's politics.37 Its brand of seditious satire, however, was the editor's own. Wooler had literary ambitions. The Dwarfs masthead ran two couplets from Pope:

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Radical Expression Satire's my weapon; but I'm too discreet, To run a-muck, and tilt at all I meet; I only wear it in a land of Hectors' Thieves, Supercargoes, Sharpers and Directors.38

Like most radical editors of the day, Wooler wrote most of the journal himself. In the letters from his literary persona, the impish "Black Dwarf," Wooler exploited one of the standard conventions of Enlightenment literature, in which foreigners from exotic lands report on the culture of the writer's own native country with a critical freshness available only to the outside observer. In his letters to his countryman the "Yellow Bonze at Japan," the Black Dwarf often comments on apparent similarities in British and Japanese political life; there seems to be little difference between life in a land where constitutional liberty is supposed to reign and that under the despotic order of Japan. In a typical passage, the Dwarf explains to the Yellow Bonze that whereas a deserving man might be imprisoned in Japan, it is the privilege of Englishmen that they can be put into prison whether they deserve it or not! for England, as I have often told thee, is a free country! . . . Trials are a very unnecessary trouble to every body. It is the practice in some places to punish first and try afterwards; but here they have improved the precept and punish without trying at all. This not only saves time and expense, but makes all sure?9

Wooler drew on the idioms of both elite and popular culture. The bombastic and pretentious quality often found in his writing is offset by the carnivalesque, by ribald tones drawn from the popular theater, the tavern, and the street.40 The Black Dwarf is a figure of misrule. Indeed, elite sensibilities were offended not only by the journal's politics, but by its vulgarity and by Wooler's pretensions to engage in public affairs. An anonymous writer thus denounced Wooler and his "trashy publication" for the "coarseness of its diction" and the "gross burlesque" on all things honorable: In whatever light we consider this trashy publication—whether for the coarseness of its diction or the audacity of its libels—whether for its stark-staring defect of literary excellence, or its unequalled extent of circulation, we are struck with the mingled sensations of astonishment and disgust.... [B]y what strange mechanism of society is it, that Wooler, a man—I beg his pardon—a gentleman without learning, without reputation, and without property, has been enabled in the space of three years to force himself from his patrimonial kennel of obscurity upon the attention of the extended British public? Is it not a gross burlesque upon every thing good and honourable, and patriotic, that the name of a brain-fevered scribbler of a two-penny newspaper should possess one grain of ponderancy in the scale of our domestic politics?41 Radical publishing was always a risky business, exposing publishers to the twin dangers of debt and government prosecution. Following the Spa Fields riots, the abortive march of the Blanketeers, and the passage of the "Gagging Act," Wooler fully expected to face government prosecution. The

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fact that Sherwin was not prosecuted for seditious libel made him suspect among radicals.42 The law officers of the Crown were preparing a case against Wooler almost from the Dwarfs first issue. He was arrested in early May 1817 and charged with a series of counts of seditious libel.43 Wooler was prosecuted for having published two articles that appeared in the third and tenth numbers of the Dwarf: one entitled the "Right Of Petition" and the other, "The Past—The Present—And The Future."44 The following week brought the arrest and imprisonment of William Hone on charges of publishing blasphemous libels—political parodies on the Church of England's catechism, litany, and creed.45 Wooler refused to post bail and spent five weeks in prison, where he and Hone formed a friendship and a fast alliance. Both men were visited in prison by Oliver, the government spy and agent provocateur, who tried to entangle them in the plotting that led to the Pentridge rising.46 Rejecting desperate schemes for insurrection, Wooler and Hone prepared to face the government in court. In the weeks before his trial, Wooler invoked the libertarian heroes of the seventeenth century; once again, great matters hung in the balance. If the government were to prevail against him, there would be "a final close to the boasted liberty of the press" and ministers could rule with impunity: Have our Hampdens fought, our Sidneys and our Russells bled for this. If they have, there is at least one who has lived long enough; and who would welcome the termination of life, that, would save him from the degradation of owing liberty to the forbearance of a set of men, whom he would blush to recognize as his acquaintance, in the walks of social life, with the same infirmities upon their heads.47

Wooler was rehearsing his defense. Ill

Wooler was brought to trial by means of ex officio informations, a procedure that offered the government important tactical advantages. First, it allowed the government to forgo presentment before a grand jury. Prosecution was entirely at the discretion of the attorney general, who merely filed an information against an offending publisher requiring him to appear before a petty jury to defend himself. Second, the attorney general could insist that the accused find securities for his good behavior before being admitted to bail. This left men like Wooler and Hone the choice of either assuming potentially crippling debt or remaining in jail. Also, because the action was taken by the attorney general, there was no way for a defendant, if acquitted, to recover costs. Third, it meant a trial by special jury. The jury pool was struck, therefore, not from the lists of common jurors, but from a special list of jurors of higher social status. In practice, this allowed the legal agents of the Crown to pack the jury in political cases.48 The only advantage these procedures allowed Wooler was the oppor-

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tunity to expose the patently unfair arrangements of power. Cast in the role of underdog, a man with no legal education and no personal wealth, Wooler presented the figure of an ordinary citizen relying on nothing but his own intelligence and personal integrity to combat the massive power of the state and its legal system. The government even refused to provide copies of the informations filed against him. He could see them at the crown office but was not allowed to take extracts; his only option was to purchase copies for £20 apiece. Wooler assumed an air of unconcern: "It will be sufficient for him to hear them [the informations] read, at the moment he is brought up for trial. He has been too long accustomed to think and speak freely, to want a prompter, or to hire a defender."49 He did, in fact, seek legal advice, retaining the services of Charles Pearson, a twenty-three-year-old City radical and lawyer.50 But as the Dwarf explained to the Yellow Bonze, Wooler stood his ground in "the plain garb of a citizen;" his competence as a citizen authorized him to speak in court: I told thee also that I was minded to buy a wig, for in this country those who attack or defend others in a court of justice must wear a wig and a black gown. This practice has been so long in use that no counsellor would be deemed competent to speak without his wig or his gown. But alas! my friend, the wig does not always contain wisdom, nor is the gown always evidence of understanding. My opponent wore both. . . . Ah! said I to myself, if a man with a wig and a cloak to hide his simplicity can be so ridiculous; what an appearance shall I make to this assembly, without a wig, and only dressed in the plain garb of a citizen?51 On 5 June 1817, Wooler was brought to trial at King's Bench before Justice Charles Abbott.52 The newly appointed attorney general, Samuel Shepherd, led the prosecution, assisted by Solicitor General John Richardson and his own son.53 Wooler conducted his own defense, although advised by Pearson. The Guildhall was packed; the crowds surrounding the court swelled as word spread throughout the City that Wooler had subpoenaed the government ministers George Canning and Lord Castlereagh, who were in attendance.54 Wooler was prosecuted separately for each article; two trials were held in immediate succession, lasting from 9:30 A.M. to around 6:15 P.M. The jury for the first trial was composed often special jurors and two talesmen, or common jurors (in the event that an insufficient number of special jurors were present, by-standers qualified as common jurors, called "talesmen," were added to the jury). Perhaps in an effort to catch Wooler off guard, or perhaps because he felt more confident of a conviction on the second information, Shepherd prosecuted the issues in reverse order to that set out in the original documents. Wooler was, therefore, tried first on two counts of libel arising from his article "The Past—The Present—And The Future": the first on the administration of the king's government and the second against two ministers, Canning and Lord Castlereagh, individually. Although the government presented evidence proving the fact of publication, this was a perfunctory matter, since Wooler freely admitted authorship. The trial was really a con-

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test over what constituted seditious libel; at a deeper level, it was a confrontation between rival interpretations—rival stories—of constitutional liberty and of the law itself. Shepherd opened with a standard appeal to the many blessings of the English constitution and government, stressing the words "as established by law." Liberty of the press was one of these blessings, but like other liberties it could be, and in this case had been, abused. Shepherd read excerpts from Wooler's article, glossing the text for the jury in order to demonstrate the author's intent "to excite a spirit of discontent and disaffection in the minds of the subjects of the King" by defaming the king's ministers and bringing them "into contempt and hatred" and "to excite discontent against the King's administration of public affairs." Wooler, declared Shepherd, had endangered the preservation of the constitution and the government: That the constitution is, and ought to be dear to Englishmen, beyond all doubt I admit and affirm, and it is because the constitution is dear to me that I charge this man as a libeller, on attempting to excite a spirit of sedition and disaffection, and if he could to revolutionise the people of England, whereby the constitution would either be endangered or destroyed.55 The actual text on which Wooler was charged provided an ideal vehicle for constitutional and legal engagement. Wooler had announced that England stood "on the brink of ruin," that the very constitution and liberties that distinguished England in the universe of nations were at an end. The public was no longer allowed to assemble without the threat of prosecutions for treason.56 Wooler denied the government's ministers the shelter of the constitution: "[They] shall not identify themselves with the constitution. They shall not creep behind the sanctuary which they have destroyed. . . . Liberty is banished from our shores, and we move and breathe in the open air, at the mercy of Lord Castlereagh, and his brother secretaries of state." The land of liberty was now the home of slaves. True patriots must openly resist this descent "as Englishmen of past times" had once done.57 Wooler's rhetoric was situated near the subversive core of England's dominant political mythology; the nation's "past" was summoned to give testimony against "the present." More specifically, Wooler maintained that the "first grand error we committed, as a nation, was the wild and quixotic enterprise, of resisting the improvement of France." Adopting "the accursed principles of'legitimacy'" in its policy toward revolutionary France had led Britain to revive "the worst errors of the Stuarts." The poverty and distress that presently prevailed could be traced to the wars against France. The article further charged that the ministers of state had betrayed the nation, using the wars as a cover for their own corruption and personal profit: They promised us that they would fight our battles, and they have fought their own. They talked of patriotism, when they meant plunder, and told us we were fighting die battles of regular government abroad, when they have been reduced to the necessity, even in the boasted success of our arms, to destroy that

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Radical Expression constitution themselves, which they pretended they called upon us to pay, and combat to defend. The constitution which France could not assail, nor ever wished to injure, has perished at Stephen's; perished ignobly, and without a struggle, among the representatives of the people, thzjjua.rdia.ns of the public purse.

Britain had "embarked in the last war to conquer France, and we have conquered ourselves.'1'' The ministers had emerged from the "contest against freedom abroad, and they are already in full armed mail against liberty at home. They would destroy the very name: —but it is immortal."58 For good reason, Shepherd stressed this section of Wooler's article; not only was it the most potentially libellous, but it suggested Wooler's implicit support not for the ordered liberty of Britain, but for the revolutionary anarchy and despotism of France. Shepherd said he could not understand the reference to war carried on against freedom abroad, unless "the continuation of that war against the most unbounded despotism, and an insatiable thirst for universal dominion, be considered 'a contest against freedom abroad.'" As for the charge of destroying domestic liberty, he hoped that "rational liberty founded on the laws and constitution of England . . . is immortal." But, Shepherd argued, if anything could destroy it, it was such language as Wooler's, which was an invitation to sedition and revolution.59 The points at issue were those of recent history as refracted through the lens of England's "immortal" constitutional past. There was little that could have surprised Wooler in Shepherd's case; it was standard fare for cases of seditious libel.60 For his part, Wooler suppressed an open defense of the principles of the French Revolution, although the argument that Britain's intervention had undermined the cause of French liberty was common among ultra-radicals. He structured his defense around four themes: the unconstitutionality of the law of libel and the procedures used in such cases, the importance of press freedom, the truth of his own allegations against the government, and an appeal to the jury as the sole protector of the ordinary citizen pitted against the power of corrupt rulers and unconstitutional laws. Wooler opened his two-hour defense by attacking the law of libel and by asserting the unconstitutionality of ex officio prosecutions as a disgrace to a country "calling itself free." In the "good old times" to which the attorney general referred, it would have been necessary to have him indicted by a grand jury. Instead, he had been thrown into jail until the attorney general decided where and when to try him; in the meantime, Wooler had been reduced to a state of poverty. "No, Gentlemen," he continued, "in those good old times informations were never heard of, and I will venture to affirm that they are illegal, and illegal because they are unconstitutional." At this point, Justice Abbott interrupted Wooler. He could not allow him to state that proceedings by information in cases of libel were unconstitutional, as they were indeed "as old as any other part of the law." Wooler repeated his assertion, along with his view that the judge was out of order. Abbott explained that while he did not wish to interrupt the defense, Wooler

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could not contend that something recognized by law was illegal. Wooler countered by noting that these procedures were of recent origin, asserting that they were inconsistent with both Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.61 Attacking unjust procedures in cases of libel had been a common refrain ever since the eighteenth century, when many of these innovations were introduced.62 Wooler later returned to this theme, repeating the familiar charge that the law of libel had been brought into the court of King's Bench from Star Chamber—"that most accursed of all the institutions that ever afflicted civilized beings."63 The very mention of Star Chamber functioned as synecdoche, summoning the whole fabric of Stuart "despotism" and touching the dominant Whig-radical myth of seventeenth-century libertarian recovery. Such law, Wooler insisted, had driven out the "ancient common law which in its mild and just provisions, equally protected the peasant in his cottage and the king upon his throne. . . . [T]his it was that attached the lower orders to their country and made them ready on all occasions to lay down their lives in its defence."64 The ancient constitution stood as the measure of true justice, situated in a distant era of social harmony. Wooler thus contrasted the present harsh procedures of the law with a former mildness. He complained that he had not even been given a copy of the information against him, but had had to send his solicitor to read it. He asked the jury to consider the fate of a poor man languishing in prison, unable to hire a solicitor—"a man with a wife and family, and reduced to beggary by being illegally and unjustly torn away from a business which required his personal supervision." Drawing on the rich public language associated with the jury's role as guardian of the subject's constitutional rights, Wooler reminded the jury of its duty: the sole hope and reliance of such a man "must be placed in the good sense and independence of a British jury." Wooler further maintained that to regard men like the attorney general as independent and unbiased—as "the true advocates of national liberty"—was "too ridiculous even to be stated, more especially in times like the present, when the freedom of the subject and the constitution of the country are so perseveringly and dangerously attacked."65 This flourish brought applause from below the bar, along with a stern warning from Abbott to the audience. At various junctures throughout the trial, the crowded courtroom entered fully on Wooler's behalf, unrestrained by repeated threats of commitment for disorderly conduct.66 Wooler was drawing the lines of battle—between himself and the attorney general, between ordinary men facing insurmountable odds and corrupt ministers with unjust powers, between the courtroom audience and the judge. The great matter to be decided in his case, Wooler announced, was whether or not the government was to be allowed arbitrarily to curtail press freedom: The real question between us is what he [Shepherd] proposed and hinted at, but what he has not dared to state: he has told you that the liberty of the press must have its metes and bounds, but let me seriously ask you, if die liberty of

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the press is to have its metes and bounds will you suffer that they should be chalked out by the Attorney-General? Government ministers had aimed a fatal blow at one of the most invaluable privileges of Englishmen. . . . [W]e are no longer free—we can no longer boast of our liberties compared with the rest of enslaved Europe. Every man now is a subject-—not to the king— not to the laws—not to the constitution, but—to the warrant of the Secretary of State.

Wooler claimed the status of an independent, public writer; in this role, he attacked the ministers only in their capacity as public men. The law of libel, imprecise and ill-defined, was being directed "not so much against me as against the general privileges of public writers."67 Wooler's defense turned on demonstrating the truth of what he had written: that ministers were engaged in destroying the last remnants of constitutional liberty. Shifting from self-defense to accusation, Wooler declared that "we, that is the large proportion of the people," ought to act to recover those rights of which "we have been deprived." Recasting the trial in the form of a plebescite, he embraced the jury as fellow citizens: "You Gentlemen, are members of the community-—subjects of the country." Therefore, they must "act as judges on questions of general policy" to determine whether he or the attorney general was right. While the jury could not decide "whether Ministers shall continue to be Ministers," they were required to decide "whether they deserve to be continued" in their posts.68 Wooler proceeded to read and comment on the entire text of his article. He admitted that he had used strong language, but this was his intent, as "nothing but the boldest language and the most determined energy . . . can rouse the nation" to dismiss ministers "so odious and injurious." He stood by his charge that the ministers had betrayed "that constitution which our ancestors fought for, and bought at so dear a rate of blood," challenging Shepherd, "my learned accuser," to prove his case. If this was indeed a libel, why had the attorney general produced no evidence to demonstrate the falseness of his charge? This brought Shepherd to his feet, objecting that Wooler was "transgressing every principle of law." Abbott sustained Shepherd's objection, ruling that Wooler had indeed moved "beyond all reason and contrary to every principle of law"; he must confine himself within "reasonable bounds." Wooler responded that he knew no other way to defend himself: "[M]y liberty is too precious to me to stand upon forms." The question of what constituted "reasonable bounds" in a self-defense at law merely reformulated Wooler's major contention that words written or spoken in defense of constitutional liberty could not be restricted by either law or government. Abbott again interrupted when Wooler stated as "an undoubted fact" requiring "no learning to support it" that the ministers were "murderers of those who starve." He could not allow Wooler to state this as fact: "[WJhat you allude to are the enactments of the whole legislature of the realm, and I cannot permit you to call them in question in the

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way you are doing." Wooler retorted that it might be better for the judge merely to state that "I am not to be permitted to enter into any defence."69 Wooler was attempting to re-create within the courtroom the conditions of unfreedom that he maintained existed now within the country at large. There was an implied concordance between the courtroom and the nation, between his own plight and that of "the people." He also managed to set in opposition an untutored understanding of things "that need no learning to support" and the "learned" political and legal culture of Shepherd and Abbott. His case did not depend on legal artifice, he declared; it stood on higher ground and on more important principles of shared understanding: "I am totally unacquainted with any forms of law; but, at the same time, I confess I am totally disregardless of them, for this is not a question at all depending upon low artifice or petty cavil." Such statements touched democratic impulses stretching back to the Levellers, requiring that the law's language, forms, and principles be made comprehensible to ordinary citizens. This line of argument, moreover, constituted an inversion of the elite critique of Wooler's supposedly crude and ungrammatical style in the Black Dwarf. Things were the reverse of what Shepherd and Abbott maintained them to be: the ordinary citizen, like the plebeian writer, spoke the true, unvarnished language of liberty and law. Finally, Wooler returned to the jury's role: "It is your privilege, and a most important one, to stand between the oppressor and the oppressed— the accuser and the accused—it is for a British jury to interpose its aegis for the protection of British liberty." Wooler made no attempt to "deny or to disguise" his opinions, declaring that if a tyrannical system "is to be established, I would rather die its victim than live its slave."70 As the lengthy applause that followed Wooler's conclusion subsided, Shepherd rose to reply.71 (Wooler previously had objected to the attorney general's right to reply, acknowledging its legality but noting the unfair advantage it gave to the Crown's counsellors.)72 Shepherd proceeded to attack Wooler's standing as a "public writer" and a competent commentator on matters of law. Were Wooler's pretensions as a public writer to be accepted, he argued, any man "who gets a room as a printing place, or a pen and ink, and through the medium of circulating his opinions may call himself a public writer." I am sometimes astonished when I hear these opinions and declarations about public writers—one could suppose they were some peculiarly educated, established and authorized body of men, who had passed through some previous course of probation and examination and had a right to set themselves up as censores morum of public men.73

Shepherd thus denied the plebeian claim to the status of "public writer": writers like Wooler were not "authorized." A restricted notion of whose voice should be empowered within the public sphere of discourse was consistent with a restricted concept of citizenship that denied democratic claims to suffrage rights based on person rather than property.74

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Even more ludicrous, however, was the idea that men like Wooler should pronounce on matters of law: "I shall never think that I ought to take what is or is not the law of England from any such public writer, but from lawbooks and acknowledged authorities upon the subject." All judges from Holt and Camden had been consistent on the point that the law protected public men from the attacks of "malignant writers." If the jury felt that what Wooler had written did not come within the law of libel, then the crime no longer existed. (This, of course, was Wooler's intent.) Shepherd explained that Wooler misunderstood the law of libel. In an action for civil damages, the truth of a statement was, indeed, a matter of justification, but this was not so in a criminal action, since the issue was not that of recovering personal damages but a matter of a breach of the peace. It was therefore necessary for the jury to understand that truth was not a matter of inquiry in this case.75 As a matter of law Shepherd was correct, but at the cost of allowing Wooler's assertion that he had spoken the truth to go unchallenged. Juries had on occasion acquitted in cases of criminal libel when they felt that the defendant had published the truth, although more frequently they delivered special verdicts in such cases; what was settled in law remained contested in practice. Given the prevailing climate of political emergency, Shepherd no doubt felt that he had done enough to convince a special jury (presumably packed) and a sympathetic judge that this notorious publisher was guilty of seditious libel. But in his first major political trial, Shepherd perhaps underestimated his opponent's very real forensic skills as well as misjudging the vagaries of such trials. Justice Abbott's charge to the jury was nicely tuned to Shepherd's case for a conviction. He stressed Wooler's manifold misrepresentations of the law, explaining that proceedings on ex officio informations were as old as any branch of the law, although their origins were unknown; that since the law of the land authorized commitment to prison without warrant, the defendant could not make due administration of the law a ground of complaint; and that the law of libel predated Star Chamber, noting as well that, unlike cases in King's Bench, verdicts in Star Chamber were not those of a jury. The defendant's argument that he had not attacked the king, but only his ministers, defied common sense, since the king appointed and acted through the agency of his ministers. In answer to the argument that nothing is libellous that is not directed at some particular person, Abbott quoted Chief Justice Holt's opinion that if men were not to be called to account "for possessing the people of ill opinion of the Government, no Government can exist." Finally, Abbott explained that the case was of such great importance because of the character of Wooler's defense: [H]is defence has consisted not of any endeavour to do away or explain the meaning of the words he has used—to shew that when examined they did not fairly bear the sense imputed to them, but he has boldly asserted that he enjoys the liberty by the law of the land, to publish a paper of the contents and character of that for which he is now called to answer. In that view it does become a very important question.

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Although the final determination rested with the jury, Abbott firmly stated his opinion that if the contents of the Black Dwarf did not constitute "a scandalous, malicious, and seditious libel... it is difficult to conceive any paper to which that character can be applied."76 After the jury had deliberated for ten minutes in open court, the foreman asked whether it might still be a libel if they found Wooler's statements to be true. Abbott answered that the truth of the facts charged was no justification in this proceeding. Unable to reach a quick verdict, the jury retired at about 2:00 P.M. to consider the case further. As the jury departed, Sheriff Bridges summoned the officers of the court to do their duty as "a great noise was made in the lower part of the Court by stamping with the feet." While the first jury was out, Shepherd directed the inferior officers of the Crown to call the second issue. By trying the informations in reverse order, Shepherd had given the impression that he might drop the first information against Wooler. Only six of the twenty-four special jurors selected as the pool (the array) for what was now the second trial appeared when their names were called over. Shepherd paused. Ostensibly in consideration of Wooler's exhausted condition, he now indicated his willingness to leave the question to a future day. But Pearson, sensing the possible advantage that the situation offered his client, "prayed his warrant of tales" (i.e., demanded that the jury be filled out with common jurors present in court).77 The second case was heard, therefore, before a jury composed of an equal number of common and special jurymen. The Crown counsellors had reason for concern: the government's efforts to pack the jury had come undone. Shepherd not only was matched against a skillful courtroom orator, but was being outmaneuvered in the practicalities of the courtroom. In the second trial, the Crown charged Wooler with having brought the House of Commons and the people's right to petition into contempt and with having excited the people to unlawful acts offeree and violence. The Black Dwarf had subjected the constitutional right of petition to ridicule by maintaining that it was "ridiculous" for the people of England to place confidence in petitioning Parliament for constitutional reform and redress of grievances. Wooler had thus mocked one of the constitution's most sacred liberties. The character and tone of the second trial were distinct from those of the first. Wooler, the former drama critic, observed that whereas the first trial was "tragedy," the second played as pure "farce." The courtroom was following the theater's conventional order of performance. Shepherd presented a straightforward case. Having asserted that the right to petition meant nothing—that it was a "mere farce"—and having contended that Englishmen of old had not petitioned but rather demanded their rights with force of arms, Wooler was guilty not only of bringing the House of Commons into contempt, but of exciting the people to insurrection. The doctrine that Wooler laid down rejected, in effect, the legitimate

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government of king, Lords, and Commons by insisting that government is bound to obey those who come "with what they term petitions, and that those who so come have a right, by force of arms, to insist upon and compel a compliance with what those petitions contain." Shepherd acknowledged that the mode in which the piece was written "might make persons smile when they read it," but it was no less libellous or dangerous on that account. On the contrary, I dispute what has been laid down upon high authority, that ridicule is the best mode of reproof, for it may be made a most important, powerful and destructive engine: —attempting to turn those things that are valuable into ridicule, and to make them objects of scoff and contempt, is no slight offence.

Serious matters were at issue, Shepherd insisted; jest could neither cover nor excuse sedition. What, for example, could Wooler have meant by declaring that the English people held the same right to petition as "the free burgesses of the Mogul, and the independent slaves of the Dey of Algiers"? The suggestion that the subjects of the Crown of England were no better off than the slaves of Algiers or the subjects of the despotic Great Mogul of India clearly scandalized the English constitution.78 Shepherd then turned to "what he [Wooler] calls matters of history, I suppose." Wooler had asked his readers whether King John was petitioned to sign Magna Carta or King William to sign the Bill of Rights. The attorney general took particular exception to Wooler's handling of the centerpiece of the Glorious Revolution. One of the main objects of the Bill of Rights was to secure the right to petition and to settle "beyond all doubt" the mode in which petitions should be presented to the king: "[Tjhat mode has always been adhered to from the revolution down to the present moment." There was neither a historical breach nor any ambiguity as to the character and form of the right to petition. Shepherd concluded his brief remarks by observing that a publication that "obviously and undeniably undervalues, ridicules, and brings into contempt this most important right" was without question libellous.79 Once again, Wooler did not contest the issue of his authorship. The clerk of the court then read the libel, but was constantly interrupted by laughter from below the bar. Justice Abbott directed that any person further disturbing the court would be brought forward and punished. Shepherd added that while courts of justice ought to be open, he would demand that the court be cleared "if the people did not conduct themselves properly." Decorum continued to break down, however, throughout the trial.80 The allegedly libellous essay, which on one level was entirely earnest, invited subversive laughter. Its mocking tone dissolved what was polite and established and excused the breakdown in order: The RIGHT of petitioning. Bravo! John Bull! Bravo! You have the right of petitioning, have you? And your ancestors obtained it for you, did they? And Hampden bled for the right of petitioning, did he? And Sydney was beheaded, and Russell, for the right of petitioning. And your ancestors sent Charles to the

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block, and drove James to the for the right of petitioning, did they? And you possess the right, Johnny? Do you? And are charged 60 millions a year for it, are you. Well you may call it one of your DEAREST RIGHTS, for you have paid dear enough for it, in all conscience. But you are a good sort of fellow; and being no great judge of the value of diamonds, it is the same to you whether you haveglass, or french paste. It mustglisten a little . . . and you are as pleased as the poor Indian who gives his gold or his treasure for a bauble. But the savage is the better off, of the two; for though he gets but a bauble, it is something &t least; but you, John, have got nothing for your liberty, but have had your pocket picked into the bargain.81

As Iain McCalman comments, historians of radicalism should pay greater attention to the carnivalesque, to the raucous strains of humor that popular publishers and speakers tapped.82 Wooler's second trial well illustrates how satiric humor could mask subversion. Inscribed within both Wooler's essay and his strategy of self-defense was a sustained interplay between disguise and exposure, between jest and serious commentary. Wooler deftly undercut the seriousness of his own claims by asserting that it was, after all, only a joke. His need to assume the mask of humor was itself an implicit recognition of discursive conditions of inequality, of a lack of expressive freedom. In the courtroom, the pragmatics of speech were deeply structured by relations of unequal power and authority. Joking was both a concession to unequal relations and a defiant gesture aimed at reversing them; it both covered and enhanced meanings. Thus Wooler argued that his intention was "only to amuse," although he did not deny that the sentiments "placed in a ludicrous point of view" were sincerely held. A "burlesque essay" written for "momentary amusement" had now been made a "serious ground of complaint." Its meaning, however, was undisguised: "[T]here is no mystery, no hidden meaning." At the time he wrote, Wooler explained, the Commons had been "literally" loaded with petitions, most of which were given no attention or were summarily dismissed when presented "because the language in which they were couched spoke somewhat too plainly" to be "deemed fit" for the Commons.83 Neither Wooler nor the people spoke appropriately. Wooler understood, of course, that there was more to the government's prosecution and the rejection of the people's petitions than matters of language. Indeed, the point of his essay, operating under the cover of "burlesque," was that petitioning was useless without real power to force Parliament to bow to the people's will. Following his trials, the Black Dwarf explained to the Yellow Bonze that the "Law" demanded an "amended sense of decency" that he had been unable to adopt; he was too old to "learn its grammar of politeness." But, he added, "if law would make me a judge, or an Attorney-General, I should, no doubt, inherit from LAW all the decency of LAW."84 It was not merely the language of law —"its grammar of politeness"—but one's position in relationship to the law that ultimately determined one's power to act with its authority. Not satisfied with the attorney general's explication, Wooler offered to

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"dissect" his own essay. It required little "knowledge of grammar" to see that "in the literal" he had not said in the accepted "political" sense that the right to petition was "an absolute absurdity." But it was impossible to conceive of a situation in which someone, "literally speaking," did not have a right to petition. The merely abstract right was the property of all men: "There never was a state in the world in which the right to petition in the literal sense of the word, did not exist." If he had said that the English people had nothing but what was in common with the free burgesses of the Mogul and the independent slaves of the Dey of Algiers, then the attorney general might have some cause for alarm, but this was not what he had written. The attorney general's "great and long study of law latin" had apparently "interfered with his knowledge of the English tongue." To maintain that there was anything dangerous about what he had said "is a mere burlesque of reasoning like the essay itself."85 What is interesting here is that Wooler's insistence on "literal" understanding entailed a rejection of the conventions of satire, in which meaning is rendered by reading against the literalness of the text. This opening gambit displayed Wooler's own cleverness; it also offered an ironic, although suppressed, comment on the law's own demand for literal meaning. Wooler did not rest here. He defied the attorney general to contradict the fact that the Commons had received but a small portion of the huge number of petitions sent to it during the last session. Radical reformers had centered much of their energy in 1816 and 1817 around a massive petition campaign.86 Wooler noted the difficulties that confronted the people in organizing petitions. In his own ward, the use of the parish church had been denied to them. This was a common experience throughout the country; the people were obliged to collect signatures in taverns and in fields, "where they are called mobs, or in other places where they are surrounded by soldiers." Yet petitions signed by a great number of persons "perfectly competent to decide upon grand and important national questions" and having the interests of the people at heart "ought" to be weighed and considered. More radically, he argued that "when a nation is unanimous upon any one point, to petition is absurd, and the members of administration must of necessity concede that which the people with one consent demand." The "great subject" of these petitions was parliamentary reform. The people undoubtedly had a right to complain, but in practice "the Honourable House" redressed grievances at its own pleasure.87 Wooler conceded that ridicule might not be the best mode of treating these matters, but added that it was "impossible not to laugh" when the people were told that they were "free born Englishmen, and you will claim your rights." What he stated "ludicrously" was, nonetheless, "true."88 Wooler's essay turned to historical example, touching the most sensitive point of constitutional history: the question of the legitimate right of resistance. It was an issue Wooler had briefly raised in his first trial, only to retreat from its implications. He now spoke with the authority of historical precedent:

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I apprehend that the Learned Gentleman does not mean to contend that King John was merely petitioned to sign Magna Charta—he was surrounded by armed soldiers . . . [and] with the sword they controuled his actions and enforced his signature. . . . The tyrant John would never have yielded to petitions—my learned accuser can say nothing in his favour: he stands accused on the records of history, in the opinions of all men, and he is abandoned even by the Attorney-General, though this paper is charged as a libel upon him.

This brought Shepherd to his feet. The information did not charge this as a libel; it only said that the libel in question "is of and concerning King John, of and concerning Charles First, of and concerning William the Third, but it does not charge that this is libellous as respects them." But this was the sort of legal nicety that Wooler refused to credit. In the face of Abbott's intervention supporting Shepherd's objection, Wooler forced the issue. The attorney general, he pointed out, had laid great stress on his statement that the people originally rose against King John, charging it "as an inuendo [sic], that I recommended thereby the people of England, in our day . . . to take the same steps as our ancestors." But he had uttered nothing that was not supported by "the utmost historical accuracy."89 The signing of Magna Carta, the summoned image of the tyrant John surrounded by armed barons ("the people"), was a recurrent point of radical reference. The most mythologized moment in English constitutional history, the charter of feudal liberties that Coke and the common lawyers had pressed into service against monarchy, was again refashioned to revolutionary design. Wooler had much less regard for the Bill of Rights, which Shepherd so cherished, commenting, "In the words of a suppressed writer, I always rather considered it a Bill of Wrongs." The allusion to Paine was otherwise at odds with a defense that relied almost exclusively on historical reasoning.90 The key point for Wooler was that William III had not been petitioned to accept the Bill of Rights; if the word "petitioning" had been employed in 1688, William had had no choice but to accept the terms on which he had been offered the crown. Here was "an instance of petitioning in form, while in fact the people are dictating to the monarch."91 In conclusion, Wooler returned to a theatrical allusion. In point of order, the present charge should have been brought forward first; but the attorney general had wisely postponed the present case, for the first trial "was serious and impressive . . . the tragedy of this day's entertainment, while the present case occupies the place of farce." Wooler was certain that a British jury would not consign him "to the gloom of a dungeon, because I have excited a laugh against the Ministers by a little effusion of harmless ridicule." Wooler retired to "tumultuous approbation" from the audience, having managed to expose the government's denial of the constitutional right to petition, to summon the revolutionary tones of England's past, and to cover his tracks with the redolent scent of harmless humor.92 Shepherd rose amid a courtroom of confusion; the theater of power now offered an uncomfortable stage for the Crown's agents. The attorney general denounced the "indecent . . . repetition of the misconduct of the

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persons who are by-standers and auditors in this Court." If such proceedings were permitted in courtrooms, "it is idle to expect that they should be repressed out[side] of courts of justice." Thus Shepherd also drew an analogy between the exercise of authority within and outside the courtroom: were courtrooms to succumb to the license of crowds and theater audiences, ordered liberty stood in jeopardy. He entreated the jury not to be moved by the defendant's appeal, "which has had such an effect on the by-standers crowding the court." Shepherd reiterated that the libel consisted not merely in what was said, "but in the manner in which those facts are so stated"— thus conceding once again that what Wooler had stated might indeed be "fact." Wooler mocked the constitution.93 But the course of English history put Shepherd in a bind. He noted that Wooler had selected "most eventful periods" when, due to the "unfortunate circumstances of the times . . . open hostile force was resorted to." He rejoiced "as an Englishman" at the liberties thus secured, but wished that the liberties "we do enjoy in this country through the medium of the Revolution [of 1688], could have been obtained by any other means." Shepherd grappled with the paradoxical character of the Glorious Revolution: a conservative settlement reached by radical means. During the eighteenth century, there had been a broad retreat on the part of elite politicians from the revolutionary implications of the actions that had consolidated elite rule and secured the privileged status of substantial owners of both commercial and landed property. Burke's careful handling of the revolution in his Reflections was merely a highly sophisticated statement of the conservative position.94 Shepherd's resolution was simpler: "All those who really loved and valued the constitution would much rather veil these unfortunate periods in oblivion, than bring them forward to the public recollection and observation of ordinary people, at a time when they feel peculiarly the pressure and distress unavoidably incident to our present situation." Wooler stood charged with pulling back the veil and exposing to plebeian gaze moments of revolutionary discord.95 Justice Abbott again summed up in the strongest possible terms. His charge to the jury was a persuasive restatement of the government's case. With a copy of the Bill of Rights in his hand, he stressed the utmost seriousness of the terms of that compact; the subject's right to petition was among its preeminent terms. That right, "having by our ancestors been thought a matter of so much importance" as to be made "a term upon the occasion," was sacrosanct; anything "which brings that right into ridicule and contempt, can scarcely be considered innocent." Abbott instructed the jury not to be moved in their deliberations "by any expectation of popular applause," stating emphatically that in his opinion Wooler was guilty as charged.96 The jury retired at 5:00 P.M. After the jury had retired, however, the courtroom was thrown into confusion. Toward the conclusion of the second trial (around 4:30 P.M.), the proceedings had been interrupted by the delivery of the verdict in the first cause. Returning through a partitioned corridor to an area behind the

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bench, the foreman of the first jury, accompanied by several jurymen, informed the court that they had found the defendant guilty, but added that "three gentlemen of the Jury wish to state special grounds." Abbott replied that the verdict must be general—guilty or not guilty. Pressing the foreman for a verdict, the judge asked, "Do I understand you to say that the verdict is guilty? Is that the verdict of all the Gentlemen of the Jury?" The foreman answered, "Yes." As the courtroom waited for the verdict in the second cause, Mr. Chitty, a barrister instructed by Wooler's counsel, now moved to address the judge. Three jurymen had apparently understood that they were to reconsider the verdict following Abbott's reply to the foreman's question concerning a special verdict. Abbott stated that he had distinctly asked if all agreed to the verdict, observing that the matter would have to be taken up elsewhere. Chitty pointed out that the jury had brought in a written paper. Abbott reiterated that nothing could be done in his court once the verdict had been recorded. He could not allow a portion of the jury to state that they did not concur in the verdict after they had withdrawn from the court. Wooler then intervened, stating that the jury had not separated and that the judgment was that of only nine of the twelve. He further objected that the jury had not returned their verdict in open court, "as by law they were bound to do"; only four jurors were visible to bystanders. Although the names of the jury had been called over, several jurymen apparently had remained in the room behind the judge. Abbott merely replied that he had delivered his judgment: "[I]f it be incorrect you will have an opportunity of correcting it hereafter." "This cannot be justice, my Lord!" shouted Wooler.97 In fact, Wooler had secured an important victory. Special verdicts in cases of seditious libel, particularly in such form as "guilty of publishing, but not with criminal intention," had long been a source of annoyance to both judges and government.98 The special wording that the dissenting jurors wished to record stated, "As truth is declared by the law of the land to be a libel, we three are compelled to find the Defendant guilty."99 The ministry could take little comfort from a trial in which a portion of the jury believed that Wooler had truthfully characterized the government as having betrayed the constitution. Despite government efforts, the special jury was not entirely packed; the two talesmen and one special juror turned out to be of questionable leaning.100 Furthermore, things had been handled badly, opening the way for a motion before the full bench for the verdict to be quashed. Worse was to follow. After retiring for just over an hour, the second jury returned a verdict of not guilty, which was received by "much applause."101 Several weeks later, Wooler obtained judgment for a new trial in the first case, although he argued hotly before Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough and the bench that the verdict should be erased, based on the affidavit of the three jurymen. He also lost on an important technical point, the striking of a new jury. Pearson and Wooler argued, with some legal justification, that the same jury should try the issue.102 Wooler remained in jail for

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nearly a month following his trials. He was released after Sir Francis Burdett presented a petition to the Commons on his behalf. Burdett, who had attended the full trial proceedings, took the occasion to comment on Abbott's handling of the first verdict: "The verdict was hastily taken; and if one could suspect a judge of a wish to entrap a jury into a verdict, he would behave exactly as judge Abbott had done."103 The threat of a new trial hung over Wooler until the end of the year. Wooler was a popular hero. He was "Truth's pride," the pygmy whose "fiery darts" had paralyzed "the savage host": Tyranny and Terror. The veteran radical Alexander Galloway wrote privately to Hone that Wooler "by his individual exertion has done more to combat corruption and more to serve the people than 10 Reg[imen]ts of Soldiers could have achieved." Hone compared Wooler's achievement with that of Wilkes in his case against general warrants. But the victory was not merely Wooler's. As the Whig Morning Chronicle commented, "Juries have lately taught the Cabinet Ministers and Crown Lawyers a most impressive lesson."104

IV Wooler's two trials illustrate a number of key points. Most obviously, Wooler's defense was framed in constitutionalist terms. This is hardly surprising; the context set parameters on the language available to Wooler. The rhetoric of constitutionalism defined the field of discourse for both the prosecution and the defense. But this was less a "shared" language than a contested field of meanings. To be sure, there were things that Wooler could not say without jeopardizing the legitimating force of this rhetorical inheritance. His allusion to Paine's suppressed writings was glancing and singular; he did not risk an open defense of the libertarian impulses of the French Revolution. Yet the scope offered for mounting a bold defense was as remarkable as were the restraints imposed by the courtroom and the law. Wooler drew on libertarian tropes that formed part of a tradition running from Lilburne through Penn, Wilkes, Home Tooke, and Hardy and into the early nineteenth century. He drew on both a discursive tradition and an imagined past. Thus Wooler found an authorized voice, speaking confidently within the surroundings of the court. Indeed, by retelling the story of the nation's liberty and its fall from glory, Wooler situated himself within the context of the courtroom. The convergence of his own story and the metanarrative of England's libertarian past, the fusion of his personal fate with the destiny of the nation, gave his defense persuasive force. Moreover, to tell one's own story in such terms was not merely to cast a backward gaze. On the contrary, it was to present a vision of how real justice might be rendered, to justify "how ideal community might be achieved," and to unify past and future promise against the terrain of the present. In short, it was to mobilize narrative's Utopian element.105 Trials themselves conform to the conventions of narrative order. Within

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the dual narrative of the trial and the story of the nation's constitutional past, Wooler placed himself in the role of the patriot martyr or virtuous citizen abused by corrupt government. This positioning of self was important, since it was not only the story told but who was to be allowed to tell stories about the law, the constitution, and England's history that was at issue: Who possessed the sacred trust of telling the nation's story to the nation? Wooler mobilized a cluster of values associated with independence, proprietorship, and patriotic virtue. He assumed a familiar persona, advancing a legal argument in terms of character.106 Here stood a latter-day Hampden, Sidney, or Russell, ready to die for freedom's cause. The very term "patriot" had emerged as a fully fledged part of England's political vocabulary within the radical Whig rhetoric of the late seventeenth century. The word was directly linked to political martyrdom, particularly to the self-sacrifices of Hampden, Sidney, and Russell.107 But unlike these seventeenthcentury heroes (invariably gentlemen or even peers), Wooler was only a small businessman, struggling to support wife and family, thrown into prison and thus unable to fulfill his family obligations. His capacity to act politically and legally resided in a construction of the citizen as nonspecialist, an image harking back to eighteenth-century concepts of independence and virtue.108 The citizen-hero stood in counter-distinction to lawyers and judges; the citizen spoke the nonspecialist language of civic virtue, the language of all citizens, including the jury.109 And yet despite constant reiterations of his lack of or disregard for legal knowledge, Wooler's general courtroom acumen also suggests the extent to which ordinary citizens might be familiar with protocols of legal justice. At various points, Wooler less solemnly turned the courtroom into a raucous counter-theater, playing the gallery against the private boxes, the people below the bar against the agents of the law. He acted the part of the jester or genius of misrule, threatening a breakdown of established order, a carnivalesque reversal of legal authority. Wooler's power to speak was enhanced by a packed, boisterous, partisan courtroom. The London populace played its part in the courtroom victories of 1817. Thousands packed the courtroom and the adjacent streets not merely as curious spectators, but as enforcers of notions of popular justice, attempting to impose communal expectations on the jury. Several days after Wooler's trials, the Spenceans James Watson, Arthur Thistlewood, Thomas Preston, and John Hooper—on trial for high treason for their part in the Spa Fields riots— were greeted by cheering crowds on their arrivals at and departures from Westminster Hall. As the news of Watson's acquittal reached Palace Yard, street celebrations erupted. An estimated twenty thousand milled outside the Guildhall during Hone's final trial, on 20 December. The failure of many of the carefully vetted special jurors to show up at Hone's second and third trials may have been a result of jurors' fears of the London populace.110 The extent to which juries were influenced by popular pressure is hard to determine, although in 1817 the matter certainly concerned the legal establishment; at Wooler's trial, both Abbott and Shepherd warned the jury

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not to be swayed by popular expectations. What can be said is that barristers of Shepherd's ilk had little respect for the wisdom of juries or the talents required in such causes. As the attorney general's son later commented: "In truth, for the business of Nisi Prius but little learning is required. The questions are reduced to issues of fact, and the ultimate tribunal of the day, is an unlearned jury."111 Such learned attitudes were directly opposed to radical notions about the place of the jury. Both Wooler's and Hone's encounters with the law also underscore the complexity and importance of the mechanics, as well as the more technical aspects, of the law. Following Wooler's failure to have the first verdict quashed on appeal, the attorney general initiated proceedings for a new trial. Wooler, Pearson, and Hone now turned their attention to the question of the jury, exposing the corrupt practice by which special juries were selected in Crown prosecutions. The procedures for striking a special jury were different from those for selecting a common jury. Special juries, which could be used by the government in misdemeanor cases but not in felony trials, were chosen from lists that were supposed to be provided by the sheriffs and were composed of men of considerably higher social and economic status than ordinary jurors. The use of special jurors rested on the argument that there were cases that required either men of greater education than common jurors or merchants who understood the customs of London.112 In London, special jurors were customarily drawn from lists of City merchants. The master of the Crown Office, who also bore the title King's Coroner and Attorney, "nominated" forty-eight jurors from these lists. With the treasury solicitor representing the government, each party was then allowed to strike twelve names, leaving twenty-four names. Of those who actually appeared, the twelve whose names stood first on the list served; if fewer than twelve appeared, they were supplemented by talesmen taken from among bystanders at court.113 Wooler and Pearson focused on two aspects of the procedure for striking special juries: the manner in which the master of the Crown Office selected jurors and the nature of the list from which he worked. While Wooler was still in prison, he and Pearson attended, on 26 June, the striking of the jury for his new trial in the chambers of the master of the Crown Office. At this session, and at the striking of the juries for Hone's trials, Pearson and Wooler became fully aware of just how unfairly the legal deck was stacked against opponents of the Crown. The government attempted not merely to circumvent trial before "an unlearned jury," but to design juries devoid of any vestige of independence. According to affidavits later sworn by Wooler and Pearson, Edmund Henry Lushington, master of the Crown Office, did not indiscriminately choose forty-eight names, but discarded several prospective jurors on whose names his pen randomly alighted, and then substituted names of his own choosing. For instance, Lushington replaced one juror's name, over Pearson's objections, with that of a man whose situation rendered him dependent on government favor— a broker frequently employed by the government in selling old stores.114 However, even more prejudicial to the cause of those prosecuted by

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the government was the list or book of special jurors from which Lushington worked. Indeed, Hone, who was still in King's Bench prison, had Wooler deliver a formal protest to King's Bench when he attended the Crown Office for the striking of his jury, charging that the master had nominated juries to try the issues in the three ex officio informations filed against him from a list "imperfectly and illegally constructed."115 Packed juries were the result not merely of the "packer of Juries" (as Wooler referred to Lushington), but of a packed book. Lushington's pen could randomly scan the list of special jurors with little fear of picking an independent juror.116 This issue was hardly new. In 1777, Home Tooke had launched a sustained attack on the methods of striking special juries in London. Following his conviction in 1792, Paine had similarly denounced special juries.117 More recently, Jeremy Bentham's The Elements of the Art of Jury Packing, written in 1808 but not published until 1821, had detailed the corrupt method of jury selection. Bentham lent Wooler a manuscript copy of his work,118 but much of the information on which Bentham based his critique was available in Sir Richard Phillips's A Letter to the Livery of London on the Views of the Writer in Executing the Office of Sheriff (second edition, 1808). Nonetheless, the cases of Wooler and Hone, and Pearson's dogged efforts on their behalf, gave unprecedented publicity to the use of special juries in political cases. Most significantly, in July, Pearson brought the issue before the Common Council of the City of London, of which he was a member. He moved a resolution ordering the secondaries of the City of London to lay before the Court of Common Council lists of persons qualified to serve as jurors and special jurors in the City. Backed by a group of City reformers that included Robert Waithman, Samuel Favell, and Robert Slade, the young lawyer secured the appointment of a committee to investigate the issue of special juries.119 While the Common Council could not control the master of the Crown Office, it could instruct the sheriff of London to revise the lists of jurors. In November, Wooler was served notice that he would be tried at the next sitting of Nisi Prius for the City of London. Pearson and Wooler countered with a motion for a rule to show cause why the list of jurors should not be cancelled, on the grounds that it was "improperly, illegally and partially selected." Lord Ellenborough, an embattled enemy of radicalism, granted the rule to show cause, but when the motion was heard he and his brother justices found nothing irregular in Lushington's methods of selection. The Lord Chief Justice ruled that the term "nominated" encompassed a discretionary power permitting the master of the Crown Office to discard the names of persons who he felt were not fit to serve as jurors.12° As Wooler argued, this gave the master extraordinary powers that could prove fatal to a fair and legal jury trial. What if he were to "select" instead of "nominate"; how could this be known? There was no security for his honesty. The fact that Lushington was related to both Lord Ellenborough and Lord Castle reagh hardly inspired confidence in his impartiality.121 The following week, the Black Dwarfappeared bordered in black, an-

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nouncing the "DEATH OF TRIAL BY JURY IN CASES OF ALLEGED LIBEL." "The trial by jury in cases of alleged libels prosecuted at the instance of the Crown, may now be considered as actually abolished. The form only remains." In the Dwarf"and in his pamphlet An Appeal to the Citizens of London Against the Alleged Lawful Mode of Packing Special Juries (1817), Wooler denounced special-jury proceedings. The last rampart defending constitutional liberty had been breached. This system, if allowed to continue, "may hereafter render Trial by Jury a mere farce played between the Crown Judges, the Crown Lawyers, the Master of the Crown Office, and the Ministers of the Crown." Wooler maintained that the "nature of Special Juries were unknown to the primitive spirit of our laws." Special juries grew out of despotism's need to circumvent the judgment of common people—the "swinish multitude"—in pretended cases of "peculiar importance."122 At this point, however, the Common Council intervened to offset the ruling of Lord Ellenborough and the bench. The committee's report, delivered in December 1817, revealed the full dimensions of corruption. The books of special jurors contained only 485 names. Of these, 226 were not even householders within the City of London and should, therefore, have been ineligible to serve as jurors. Of the remaining 259, only 88 could be considered merchants and 171 were more properly styled tradesmen; the term "merchant" no longer reflected the true situation of most of those so designated in the lists of special jurors. Furthermore, jurors were summoned in strikingly disproportionate ratios. Only 274 of those on the books had actually been chosen to serve as jurors. Eight had been summoned forty or more times; one man had been summoned fifty-five times in one term.123 Paid at the rate of 1 guinea per cause, there was in effect a corps of professional jurors, "the guinea-corps." As Wooler charged, jury service was now a trade, supporting "a race of avaricious pretenders." These were largely tradesmen of broken fortunes in need of money. Wealthy men of "high integrity" rarely bothered to perform their duties as jurors.124 The scope for official jury packing was obvious. A small pool of active jurors meant that officials could fairly easily ascertain their political sympathies; those who brought in verdicts against the government would not be picked again. In fact, the Crown had made strenuous efforts to fix the jury in Wooler's initial trials. Although the secondary of London, Samuel Collingridge, at first denied the charge, he later confirmed that the solicitor of the treasury had requested assistance in vetting jury lists. The full report of the committee included a death-bed affidavit from David Walker, a clerk in the office of the secondary of London, disclosing that a representative from the solicitor of the treasury had come seeking out Collingridge, who was out of the office. He showed Walker a letter from the solicitor to Collingridge, requesting to know whether certain persons were "good men," and asked Walker to "mark some of the names of the best." In fact, Walker, who believed such intervention on behalf of the ministers to be "very improper," stated that he "marked two or three of the names as good men whose political opinions I knew to be in favour of liberty."125 This prob-

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ably explains the one special juror who supported a special verdict in Wooler's first trial. In presenting the official report of the committee to the Common Council, Pearson invoked Blackstone: "the palladium of our liberties," this "great privilege of the British people," existed in form only. Drawing attention to recent proceedings in King's Bench, he maintained that if jury packing were to continue, then every cause presented to such juries must be decided by a judge who was appointed by the Crown. He called for a return to the practices of the "good times, when Juries were chosen from among the neighbours of the accused, who must be best qualified to judge from a knowledge of his character." Thus Pearson harked back to an old argument made by Lilburne that jurors should know the character of the defendant—a diminished possibility within Europe's largest metropolitan community.126 He also gave a popular gloss to what was at best a highly class-based jury system. The report, which was adopted by an overwhelming majority, called for an enlarged jury pool and a strict enforcement of the statute law (3 Geo. II, cap. 25) that had established qualifications for jurors in London: a juror must possess £100 in property, real or personal, and be a householder within the City. As Favell noted, this hardly presaged "the ascendancy of Democracy." Juries would be chosen not from the "lowest class, but out of the middle class, who were, perhaps, of all society, the most honest and independent."127 In late 1817, however, with widespread hostility in London toward the ministers' policies, the drawing up of new lists of jurors dealt a critical blow to the government and to ex officio prosecutions. Hone's first trial marked the appearance of a jury struck "from a book fully and fairly made out."128 Enraged by Hone's first acquittal, Lord Ellenborough left his sickbed to preside over the second and third trials. Soon after Hone's triumph, the Lord Chief Justice retired. He died within a year, and the popular opinion was that his death was caused by this humiliating defeat.129 As a result of Hone's stunning victories, the attorney general never brought Wooler's case back to trial. The case against Richard Carlile for republishing Hone's parodies was also dropped.130 Although the victories of 1817 were a collective radical achievement, Pearson's role was crucial. At a meeting called to raise a subscription for Hone, attended by the leading City reformers, Pearson eloquently recounted: When I went to the Crown-Office with Mr. Hone to strike the Jury, and endeavour to abolish that system, which has sent many persons, as innocent as he is, to dungeons and death, I found there the Ostlers of the Augean Stable, with the hacks of the Court in waiting, and the Jehus of the law ready mounted to ride over the liberties of the people.

In a long and electrifying speech, Wooler excoriated the judges of King's Bench and proclaimed that of the three great barriers erected for the preservation of freedom—trial by jury, liberty of the press, and the "constitu-

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tional representation of the people"—two were now secure.131 The issue of jury composition reformulated the debate over who constituted "the people": who had the right of petition and assembly, the right to comment on the constitution and to censure the actions of ministers.

V London was safe, at least for the moment. Carlile and Sherwin published Paine's complete political works without incurring government prosecutions. The success of metropolitan reformers was, however, peculiar to the political and legal culture of London; radicals could not as easily reproduce such triumphs where lists of special jurors were restricted to esquires of the county. The convictions of Jeremiah Brandreth and his fellow rebels (all poor stockingers) in October 1817 on charges of high treason were a sobering reminder that radicals could not always rely even on common juries to protect them from the force of government prosecution and the awful sanction of the law. One of Brandreth's comrades, Thomas Bacon, an "old Jack" of the 1790s, expressed few illusions about the class nature of British justice. He told his fellow prisoners while awaiting trial that "they are not tried by their Peers, but by men of property." Indeed, the government took extraordinary care in constructing the jury pool for these trials.132 Wooler understood some of this. But radicals like Wooler and Hone felt reasonably comfortable about their prospects when tried before a "middle-class" jury. Moreover, Wooler refused to condemn the juries in the trials of the Pentridge leaders. He wrote scathingly about the defense counsel, John Cross, and denounced the role of the Crown lawyers in the cases. But he defended the integrity of the juries: The Trial by jury ought to be respected even in its errors. It is the only bulwark left us by which we can hope to defend our liberties.... We are satisfied with the verdict as far as the jury is concerned. We differ only from the construction of the law, upon which they have been found guilty.

The Derbyshire leaders had acted foolishly out of desperate conditions, but they were not guilty of high treason.133 Nor was Wooler's position idiosyncratic. Sherwin, a Paineite republican less inclined than Wooler to praise the benefits of the English constitution, handled the verdicts of the juries at Derby with measured care: I respect the right of Trial by Jury too much to say one word against the Juries which have convicted these unfortunate men, and I do not deny that these Juries have returned verdicts which they were bound to return in compliance with their oath. But though I reverence the institution, I am clearly convinced that it may, by wicked and crafty men, be turned into an instrument of tyranny and injustice.134

While radicals were fully aware that juries were subject to government manipulation, the jury was the only institution that still seemed to embody an Anglo-American concept of active citizenship.

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Reverence for the jury remained central to a general radical critique of the law. Drawing on his own and other radicals' experience, Wooler articulated an understanding of the workings of the law as a system of unconstitutional design. The virtues of independent juries were consistently counterposed to the power of judges, who were seen as mere agents of the Crown. The oft-boasted independence of the bench, regarded as one of the constitutional guarantees of 1688, was a sham: judges were the creatures of corrupt ministers. The Black Dwarf mounted a running attack on judges and the legal system. The packing of juries was an attempt to render the institution subservient to the opinions of judges and lawyers. Wooler argued, as Home Tooke had, for a restricted role for judges. They were to administer the law, not expound on it; they were merely to preside and keep order in court; they were to be "neutral protectors," standing between "the destined victim, and the impending stroke."135 The constant interruptions of Abbott and Lord Ellenborough during his own and Hone's defenses and their charges to the jury confirmed a view of judicial tyranny.136 Wooler's concept of the judge-jury relationship was particularly important: it was the jury's role to find law. Real law should be accessible to the understanding of ordinary citizens in their capacity as jurors. A system of judge-made law, based on a complex tangle of judicial precedents, rendered the jury powerless, placing unwarranted authority in the opinions of judges: The law wants no exposition but common sense; and a law that could not be understood, but through the comment of a judge, would disgrace a civilized people. It would in fact be NO LAW. It would only be the passing opinion of a man who happened to sit upon the bench. . . . The laws should expound themselves.

It had been the business of lawyers, he argued, to confound "the simplicity of the English law . . . originally found on common justice. . . . From the design to perplex, has arisen all the foolish jargon about the value of precedents, which have been brought forward in place of the law." Rather than living under "the wise legislation of the sages who originally formed the laws," the English people now lived "under the unauthorized decisions" of men who had corrupted the law's original foundation.137 Wooler showed a particularly fine understanding of how the law worked as ideology. As the Black Dwarf explained to the Yellow Bonze: In England, the great art is not to avoid tyranny but to disguise it. ... Everything here must be done according to LAW. You must eat, drink, sleep, walk, talk, and think as LAW prescribes. And though, this Law be as great a tyrant as Nero of old . . . it is still LAW, and therefore must be obeyed.

He ridiculed the "boasted manner in which these islanders speak of their ancestors," noting that the first inquiry in any case is always "hath any thing like unto it occurred before? are there any precedents? What have our ancestors done in such a case?" This method of legal reasoning left the law vulnerable to the manipulation of lawyers, opening "an immense field of speculation and adventure.... They do not literally/o^e the cases; but what

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is nearly the same, they forge the application, and by inference and inuendo [sic] make the dead understanding of ancestors say just what will suit them." The question was not whether their ancestors were mistaken, "but also whether those ancestors are made to speak the sentiments they might have entertained; or the corrupt and flagitious objects of their modern interpreters."138 Within such an interpretive discourse, the jury's role was paramount, penetrating the disguise of law, unravelling the skein of precedent, counterpoising common justice to law, and tempering judgment with compassion. At points, Wooler comes close to a Paineite rejection of a legal and political culture based on historical precedent. Wooler's views on the jury's role harked back to a late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition of pro-jury opinion.139 Prosecutions for seditious libel were the locus classicus of libertarian views on the jury.140 The eighteenth-century rational dissenter Joseph Towers, for example, quoted Lilburne (1649): "The jury by law are not only judges of fact, but of law also; and you that call yourselves judges of the law, are no more but Norman intruders; and in deed, and in truth, if the jury please, are no more but cyphers, to pronounce their verdict." As for the judge-made law, "not founded upon the ancient common law," there was "a great deal too much in this country." The business of a judge is jus dicere, not jus dare; and in no cases should they be less allowed to make law, than in those which concern the extension of their own jurisdiction, and the limitation of that of juries. . . . [The] mere opinions of judges, ought not be implicidy received as law, when they tend to the diminution of the liberty of the subject, and relate to points which may be contested between the subject and the crown.141 English history boasted plenty of bad judges—a recurrent theme in such works. If the opinions of judges were regarded as law, then one would have to accept as binding precedents the corrupt judgments of the ship-money judges of Charles I and the dispensing judges of James II, Scroggs and Jeffreys. In 1817, the tract Triumphs of Justice Over Unjust Judges (first published in 1681), containing a catalogue of the criminal actions of English judges, was republished. King Alfred had hanged a judge for not consulting a jury in a case of murder; Lord Chief Justice Tresilian had been hanged at Tyburn during the reign of Richard II; Henry VIII had executed the judges Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley.142 The jury's capacity to find and interpret law was closely linked to notions of popular sovereignty and to the ancient origins of English common law and the constitution. The origins of the jury were coeval with the ancient law itself. Writing in 1680, during "the heroic age of the English jury,"143 John Hawles maintained that juries had existed time out of mind, "so long, that our best historians cannot date the original of the institution; being indeed contemporary with the nation itself, or in use as soon as the people were reduced to any form of civil government." The jury was "the first-born of our English freedoms."144 Trial by jury was inseparable

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from conceptions of the nation and national identity. A century later the Foxite Lord Stanhope maintained: Two of the great Principles, upon which the Liberty of this Country rests, are these. First, that the People shall be bound by no Laws but those of their own making. . . . Secondly, that the Laws when made, shall, upon every General Issue, be interpreted by the Country also, which Country the Juries are. Take away from the People, either of these two fundamental Pillars of the Constitution, and from that Instant the Nation is enslaved.1^

According to Henry "Redhead" Yorke, the Sheffield radical tried in 1795, trial by jury "is one of those institutions, which has weathered the wreck of conquest with the subsequent dilapidations our country has undergone, and has flourished even when civil confusions have drenched it in blood." Indeed, the jury was the one constitutional institution that English Jacobins of the 1790s consistently praised.146 Whether Wooler, in fact, read the writings of authors like Hawles and Stanhope is hardly important, although such works were certainly available. In 1793, for example, the London Corresponding Society brought out a carefully annotated edition of Hawles's classic statement, The Englishman's Right. In 1811, Cobbett serialized Hawles's tract in his Political Register, along with Sir Richard Phillips's Golden Rules for Jurymen.147 The arguments, as well as the particulars, of this tradition were well known, having been broadly incorporated within the ideology of popular radicalism. Major John Cartwright provided radicals with the most complete and erudite rendering of the constitution, the law, and the heritage of the nation. From 1817, Wooler became closely associated with Cartwright.148 Above all others, Cartwright was responsible for mediating the connection between the radical constitutionalism of the eighteenth century and the emergent popular radicalism of the nineteenth century. Supported by exhaustive reference to constitutional authorities, Cartwright counted trial by jury among the five original, and therefore irreducible, principles of the English constitution: [TJhis sacred Trial is not, as some would persuade us, a mere wheel in the complicated and mysterious machinery of obscure or doubtful Law, but a main spring and potent element of our simple and lucid Constitution itself; to be applied by the plain sense of men taken indifferently from the mass of the People, as the parties entrusted by the Constitution.

Unlike the nation's other institutional foundations—a militia composed of all citizens capable of bearing arms, an annually and democratically elected parliament, and a magistracy elected by the people to perform all executive duties—only the jury remained in essentially pristine form. And because the jury was antecedent to law, it was empowered to disregard unconstitutional laws established either by statute or by presumed legal precedent. Juries "as an essential to the CONSTITUTION itself, are not bound to pay any regard whatever to statutes incompatible with or in violation of the CONSTITUTION."149 Thus Cartwright, usually regarded as the most precedent-bound political writer,

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in effect gave juries the power to recover principles of natural law as encoded within the ancient and notoriously elusive Anglo-Saxon constitution. Without the right to universal (male) suffrage, the jury remained the last vestige of a constitution founded on popular sovereignty.

VI Reviewing the year 1817, Wooler gave pride of place to trial by jury. The attempt to reduce juries to dependence on the Crown had failed. "Suspending laws will not now avail," he wrote, for "Corruption [must] SUSPEND JURIES before Englishmen can be punished for opposing her." Enacting bad laws would no longer avail, since juries would not recognize such law. Corruption had but one choice: "She must DISPENSE WITH LAW altogether, and assume if she dare, the avowed and undisguised form of DESPOTIC POWER!"ISO Wooler, in fact, was to be proved mistaken: juries, the pride and glory of the ancient constitution, were poised to turn on the cause of popular liberty. During 1818 the radical movement regrouped, as many key leaders emerged from prisons and the acts suspending habeas corpus and prohibiting mass demonstrations lapsed. From late 1818, the radical movement mobilized an unprecedented challenge to governmental authority. Peterloo, and the intense months of confrontation that followed the massacre at St. Peter's Field, marked the climax of postwar radicalism. With the passage of the Six Acts, it seemed to many that the government had, indeed, dispensed with law. Juries, however, were to provide radicals little shelter amid the storm of repression that set in. Class lines in Britain hardened as radicalism's center of gravity shifted to the industrial districts of the North and Midlands.151 This is not the place fully to recount the ensuing legal struggles, but in conclusion it may be useful to sketch the outlines and follow several of this chapter's themes into the early 1820s. Particularly important was the shattered faith of plebeian radicals in trial by jury. In 1818, prosecutions for seditious libel all but ceased; the following year, however, radicals again confronted the government's authority in courtrooms throughout the country.152 In April, the Lancashire radicals John Bagguley, John Johnston, and Samuel Drummond were convicted and sentenced to two years' imprisonment for sedition and conspiracy arising from speeches they had delivered at a mass meeting at Stockport in September 1818. At Chester, the Crown had been allowed a free hand in restricting the jury panel to "none but baronets and esquires."153 In August, however, at the Warwickshire summer assizes, local authorities had no difficulty gaining a conviction against the Birmingham publisher Joseph Russell on charges of blasphemous libel for having republished Hone's parodies; Russell, assisted by Pearson, was tried by a jury composed of eleven talesmen.154 The verdict was ominous, particularly with the government preparing to try Richard Carlile on a series of informations for having published Paine's A0e of Reason. Lord Sidmouth, the home secretary,

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congratulated the Warwickshire magistracy, expressing his hope that the result would "operate as an encouragement to magistrates in every part of the Kingdom to show their confidence in the intelligence and integrity of British juries on similar occasions."155 Carlile noted that "almost every judge that has been engaged on the summer circuit, has been found preaching to the grand jury a sermon, either on what they call sedition or blasphemy."156 It was becoming clear, and was to become all too obvious in 1820, that under conditions of mass popular mobilization, juries—particularly special juries outside London—were unlikely to acquit radical leaders. Yet radicals remained reluctant to criticize trial by jury, at least in its "pure" constitutional form.157 They continued to look to juries for protection, as the government and local authorities arrested and prepared to try large numbers of their leaders. For example, William Greathead Lewis, a Coventry schoolmaster turned radical journalist, was prosecuted for an article denouncing the ministers for having secured royal thanks to the Manchester authorities responsible for the Peterloo massacre. In the same article, Lewis maintained that the "one thing" the government had overlooked in preparing its reign of terror was " Trial by cm English Jury. Thank God, amidst the wreck of most of our constitutional rights and privileges, we yet possess the invaluable right of a Trial by a Jury of our Peers." He acknowledged that there had been instances in which juries had followed the dictum of "a perjured judge, yet are they rapidly improving in knowledge, independence, and patriotism." He predicted that an English jury would be "the instrument of Holy vengeance upon the Manchester Magistrates and Yeomanry."158 On the government's introduction of the Six Acts, in December 1819, the Cap of Liberty, published by the deist-republican Thomas Davison and edited by James Griffin, declared trial by jury to be the "only Palladium or shadow of Freedom which is now left us." The journal cautioned jurymen not to convict any individual charged before them with violations of laws that "violate the Constitution itself, and are therefore illegal, unjust, and in the words of the venerable Major Cartwright, should be holden for nought."159 Such sentiments were soon disappointed. Within a year, Lewis stood convicted by a Warwickshire special jury and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in Oakham jail; in a celebrated trial in King's Bench, Davison was convicted and sentenced to two years' imprisonment for blasphemous libel.160 Radicalism's fading hopes in trial by jury can be followed in the columns of the Black Dwarf. Where possible, the government preferred to try cases outside London. In early 1820, Wooler observed that the government, having been driven out of London, had gone to the country to secure convictions. Remarking on Justice Best's charge to the jury at the Leicester spring assizes in the trial of Sir Francis Burdett, Wooler noted, "A Jury of London cobblers would not have listened without reply to such misapprehension of law and fact."161 The crucial test came in proceedings arising from the Peterloo meeting itself. The radicals struck first at the coroner's inquest at Oldham on

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the body of John Lees, who had died from wounds suffered on 16 August. They were foiled in their endeavor, however, by the blatantly biased coroner, Thomas Farrand, who at the end of the second week adjourned the hearings. The case was never resumed due to a ruling in King's Bench based on the manifold irregularities on the part of Farrand himself. The expectations of radicals such as Lewis, however, were not entirely misplaced, for the jury at the inquest had been prepared to return a verdict of murder against the Manchester authorities; seven jurymen published a letter protesting the inquest's untidy conclusion.162 In 1820, at the spring assizes at York, Henry Hunt and a group of local radical leaders went on trial for their part at the Manchester meeting, charged on a series of counts of seditious conspiracy and unlawful assembly.163 The trial was crucial in the struggle over the key issue of 1819: what constituted lawful assembly. Hunt staked radicalism's hopes on securing a legal victory, declaring, "The day is arriving when we shall see whether the Constitution has left any virtue in our Courts of Justice, or whether our Constitutional rights were buried in the Tomb of Peterloo."164 The government remained uncertain of the dependability of provincial juries. Throughout the trial George Maule, the treasury solicitor, kept the Home Office informed about the proceedings and their likely outcome; he was consistently pessimistic about the jury: "I think there are two or three bad ones among them and I fear a little leaven may affect the whole Mass." Midway through the trial, which lasted nearly two weeks, he could see no way the jury could convict on the evidence: the radicals had produced an extraordinary defense.165 Maule's worst apprehensions, however, were not borne out. The jury returned verdicts of guilty against Hunt, Samuel Bamford, Joseph Johnson, John Knight, and Joseph Healey on one count of unlawful assembly; five others were acquitted.166 While the government might well have hoped for greater success at York, under the circumstances this was a major defeat for radicalism.167 Authority stood vindicated in open court: Peterloo was an illegal meeting. The failure to secure convictions against the Peterloo authorities, Hunt's conviction, and the series of successful prosecutions against radicals arising from other demonstrations of 1819 showed that juries were not inclined to sanction radicalism's assertion of an unrestricted right to free public assembly. Wooler's own trial merely confirmed this conclusion. At the Warwickshire summer assizes of 1820, Wooler was tried along with Lewis, Cartwright, and the Birmingham radicals George Edmonds (schoolmaster and journalist) and Charles Maddocks (pawnbroker). They were indicted for their part at a large meeting held at Newhall Hill on 12 July 1819, at which Sir Charles Wolseley was elected (in absentia) as the "legislatorial attorney" for the city of Birmingham. They stood charged with conspiracy to excite discontent and disaffection, and most particularly to procure the election of a representative to Parliament without lawful authority. It was Wooler who had first proposed that the people use the procedures laid down in Cartwright's A Bill of Rights and Liberties to elect representatives to be

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sent to the Commons as "legislatorial attorneys" for the large unrepresented towns.168 This was the next step beyond petitioning Parliament. At Birmingham, Wooler had asserted that the people's right to elect national representatives was inviolable, maintaining that the king's writ "confers no authority—it only calls peremptorily for the discharge of a duty" that the people, without the writ, might voluntarily perform.169 The scheme, which was closely associated with radical concepts of a national convention or "antiParliament," was a calculated attempt to escalate the confrontational dynamics of constitutionalist protest, pushing the right to public assembly to the edge of the law.170 When the case was brought to trial, controversy again raged over jury packing.171 Defense counsel, assisted by Pearson, challenged the array on a number of grounds. First, they protested against the failure to summon a special juror, Samuel Peach, who was known to have liberal sentiments. Second, they challenged the jury pool from which the master of the Crown Office had struck the jury. Only about one hundred freeholders appeared on the list of special jurors for the county of Warwickshire. Excluding those who had already served on the grand jury that had found true bills against the defendants left only fifty-six names, from which the master then selected the forty-eight from which the jury was struck. The jury list was composed entirely of baronets and esquires, many of whom held commissions from the Crown.172 As Wooler commented, the situation was even worse than what had prevailed in London before the expanded lists of special jurors had been established. However, Lord Chief Justice Baron Richards, before whom the case was heard, refused to interfere or appoint triers to judge the merits of the challenge.173 Wooler also attempted to question each juror, when his name was read over and as the juror's oath was being administered, as to whether he had expressed any previous opinion as to the merits or demerits of the case. Richards refused to allow Wooler to question the special jurors, although he did allow the eight talesmen who served to reply to Wooler's question. Following the trial, these issues—the failure to summon Peach, the composition of the special jurors' list, and the right to question prospective jurors—constituted grounds for a series of unsuccessful appeals for a new trial. Wooler delivered a three-and-a-quarter-hour speech to the jury. Pearson read an even longer statement by Cartwright, who reminded the jury, "You are not so much trying five Englishmen, as you are trying the English constitution."174 The jury, however, quickly returned verdicts of guilty against all the defendants. The defendants lost their appeal to King's Bench for a new trial. The legality of special juries narrowly drawn from the upper reaches of society was confirmed. Wooler was sentenced to fifteen months in prison.175 Once again, he denounced the workings of the law: the great body of the people, "who are as wise, as good, and as competent as those 'squires of high degree,'" were excluded from juries in political trials. Ignoring the difficult fact that the jury at Warwick had included eight common jurors, he main-

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tained that "the defendants could not have been found guilty by an unprejudiced and fairly chosen jury." Law demanded that a man be tried by his equals; in England, however, laws "exist only in their [the courts'] interpretation.'"176 Wooler echoed the experience and lament of radicalism: juries, formerly cast in the role of the preservers of law, had been rendered the compliant instrument of government.177 Even in London, the "citadel of liberty," juries were unwilling to acquit in certain cases. Radicals recognized that there was little hope for Arthur Thistlewood and the Cato Street "conspirators," who were convicted of high treason.178 But metropolitan ultra-radicals also scored few victories against charges of blasphemous libel. During the early 1820s, Carlile and the "zetetics" were largely responsible for shifting the field of battle from sedition to blasphemy. The trials of Paineite deists and republicans had a different character from those of more constitutionally inclined radicals. While Carlile defended what could be regarded as the constitutional right of free expression, by attacking Christianity he stood technically outside the shelter of the constitution. Hone's defenses had been based not on anti-Christian reasoning, but on the grounds that his parodies were political, not religious, in character; Hone was, indeed, troubled by the charge of infidelity. In contrast, Carlile and his followers turned courtrooms into platforms for infidel propaganda.179 The courtroom battles of the men and women who published and sold deist works offered defiant challenges to authorized opinion. They stood their ground boldly against outraged judges and unsympathetic juries.180 Their defenses, often written by Carlile, were erudite exercises in textual exegesis. The language of rationalist defense, however, lacked the resonant tones of constitutionalist or counter-constitutionalist reasoning. For Carlile, common law was "the very reverse of the Law of Nature. Laws made to preserve customs to perpetuity are not only ridiculous but wicked."181 The dominant discourse of radicalism, both within and outside the courtroom, remained rooted in a tradition of constitutionalist discourse, counterposing a libertarian understanding of the nation's laws and history to that of the government and the ruling elite. Thus at his trial in 1820, Wooler argued that it was not he who had conspired "to alter and change the constitution as by law established," noting that the very phrase had first been introduced at the treason trials of 1793 and 1794. Following their convictions, Bagguley, Johnston, and Drummond similarly denied the charge of having intended to subvert the constitution, explaining that "we have a different idea of our Constitution, it is not the constitution which we have conspired to destroy, but the power of those whose object was to destroy everything which tended in the remotest degree to ameliorate the condition of our suffering and oppressed countrymen."182 The legacy of the courtroom battles of these years was twofold. Radicals of the 1830s and 1840s continued to use the courtroom as an arena where they could expound "a different idea of our Constitution," where they could tell stories about the nation's past. Trials remained occasions on

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which radicals drew public attention to the "real" subversion of England's constitutional heritage. But if die language of libertarian defense bore strong continuities with that of an earlier period, the dynamics of the courtroom had changed irrevocably, for the jury was now more often regarded not as the potential defender of liberty but as part of a pervasive system of class oppression. Chartists were more inclined to look to judges rather than to juries for a measure of sympathy—an extraordinary reversal.183 In 1848, George Julian Harney observed, "Place Fustian in the dock, let Silk Gown charge the culprit with being a 'physical force Chartist,' and insinuate that he is not exactly free from the taint of'Communism,' and forthwith Broad Cloth in the jury box will bellow out 'GUILTY.' "184 As much as any individual, Wooler was responsible for exposing the injustice of the law and its workings. But he would never have diagrammed the courtroom with such stark strokes of class alignment or with Harney's sense of resignation. There is, however, a final irony: Wooler was at some level seduced by the law itself. In late 1825, he again appeared before the court of King's Bench, where he failed to win a rule to show cause in his petition against the benchers of Lincoln's Inn for having denied his application to enter chambers in order to study to become a barrister.185 As Wooler remarked, it was as if the Black Dwarf himself had sought to don the barrister's gown and wig. Although excluded from a career at the bar, Wooler slipped out of the world of radical journalism and moved into the world of law, working as a legal advocate in the police courts. In the 1840s, he wrote a legal handbook that has little to say about politics and the law, but that was intended to impart practical legal knowledge to readers seeking to avoid the expensive services of a lawyer.186 Here was Wooler's revenge against the learned profession of the law.

3 Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in

Early-Nineteenth-Century England

Under the powerful influence of cultural and linguistic theorists, predominantly from France, social and labor historians in both Britain and America have become increasingly aware of the complexity and importance of questions about the social construction of meaning. In an influential set of essays, Gareth Stedman Jones has outlined a redirection for British labor history, asserting the relative autonomy of politics and political discourse and underscoring the interpretative costs of unproblematically reducing political language and behavior to social determinants. The implications of Stedman Jones's approach are most fully developed in the essay "Rethinking Chartism," which seeks to reconstruct the continuities between Chartist "language" and the language of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century radicalism. Most controversially, it questions the emphasis historians have placed on Chartist and pre-Chartist radicalism as a "class" movement. According to Stedman Jones, radicalism remained a "vocabulary of political exclusion whatever the social character of those excluded" rather than an ideology of a specific class.1 Stedman Jones's argument would appear to qualify the central thesis of E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, particularly since Thompson's own definition of class stresses the preeminence of "class consciousness" and much of his study concerns the ways in which working people gave political expression to "a consciousness of identity of interests between working men of the most diverse occupations" and "as against those of other classes."2 70

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While very much in sympathy with the enterprise of restoring politics to its proper place, this chapter departs from Stedman Jones's approach to the "languages of class" in at least two important respects. First, this discussion places much greater emphasis on the indeterminate meanings associated with signs and links this indeterminacy to social conflict. Thus in early-nineteenth-century Britain, terms such as "the people," "property," "patriot," and "industrious" had a range of meanings within radical discourse, but, more important, these meanings were constructed in opposition to the accent given by other social and political groups. Stedman Jones's fine concern for the formal properties of ideology, his emphasis on words and "vocabularies," can lead to a flat, or univocal, interpretation of meanings.3 It may also neglect elements of resistance within political discourse. It is quite possible, for instance, to have intense (class?) struggles to appropriate key signs within a "shared" or national political idiom.4 Indeed, the authority to give accent or meaning to such signs is an essential part of the exercise of political power. Struggles to enforce or destabilize such meanings often define the contested terrain of politics. Second, this chapter embraces an expanded notion of the repertoire of "symbolic practices" that constitute political culture or language.5 The most cursory reading of the British Home Office papers or the press files of the period 1815 to 1820 suggests the continued political weight given to flags and banners, hats and caps, ribbons and medals, songs and toasts.6 These were not merely the trimmings of political culture, but often went to the heart of what was ultimately at issue: how power at all levels of the state and civil society was to be defined and exercised. Furthermore, radicals were able to employ symbolic gestures in ways that served not only to reinforce but also to alter or subvert meanings apparent within written or verbal discourse. This chapter is a case study that attempts to decipher the dense web of meanings surrounding one such symbol: the cap of liberty. Understanding the cap of liberty also offers a point of entry for exploring more generally certain aspects of radical political mobilization, language, and ideology during the early nineteenth century.

I By the end of the 1790s, the British government had managed to suppress the plebeian radical movement that flourished in the wake of the French Revolution. However, with the closing of the Napoleonic Wars there was a resurgence of popular radicalism in England. Once again, radicals held large public meetings, organized petitions, and formed associations demanding constitutional reform—particularly franchise reform. Not only were the numbers greater and the organization of the movement more widespread, but the heartland of insurgent popular radicalism had shifted decisively to the industrial districts of the North.7 The face of British popular radicalism was more distinctiy working-class. The climax of the postwar movement occurred on what radicals referred to as "the never to be forgotten" 16

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August 1819, or "Peterloo," when nine men and two women were killed and hundreds were injured as local magistrates and yeomanry tried to arrest the speakers at a huge, peaceful reform demonstration assembled on St. Peter's Field, Manchester. Peterloo came to represent a seminal moment in the struggle for the rights of free public assembly and political expression. In January 1819, a smaller reform demonstration had gathered on St. Peter's Field. The meeting attracted considerable attention from the Manchester authorities because it was the occasion of Henry Hunt's first direct intervention in Lancashire politics. Hunt was later to preside over the Peterloo meeting. The presence of London's most notorious demagogue was not, however, all that was novel about this meeting, for it marked the reemergence of a symbol absent from the public face of Lancashire radicalism during the immediate postwar years. Its reemergence did not go unnoticed. Indeed, the government-financed New Times saw no point in reporting the actual proceedings of the Manchester meeting; the meaning of the event was determined not by what was said but by what was displayed on that winter's day. The New Times reported Hunt's entrance: He was surrounded by an immense mob, and preceded by the Jacobin Red Cap, the miserable harbinger of so many murders in France, and by a flag bearing die too significant inscription of " The Rights of Man." We shall waste few words on the other incidents of die day; but these circumstances are so degrading to Englishmen, that we blush to find they did not excite the instant indignation of the lowest of the Mob! What! Are Englishmen, born under the noblest Constitution in the world, to seek the signs and emblems of their liberty from France in her infamous and degraded state? Is tiiis a national, a patriotic feeling? The New Times went on to suggest that Parliament enact a law "to proscribe for ever . . . those ensigns of massacre and rebellion, the Bonnet Rouge [and] the Drapeau Tricolor" from public display. In conclusion, the paper warned against treating such matters as trivial. If authority did not respond to the challenge, "we shall soon see the ensigns of Revolution regularly displayed whenever a mob of the labouring classes can be got together; and . . . they shall certainly not stop there in their imitation of French example."8 What is remarkable about the New Times editorial is not its alarmist tone, but the accuracy of its predictive understanding. The cap of liberty (Phrygian Cap or bonnet rouge) became the most prominent symbol of popular radicalism in the critical year 1819. The ability to display the cap of liberty or to prevent its display became the measure of the shifting balance of power between the forces of working-class radicalism and those of authority, particularly in industrial Lancashire. Its display became inextricably linked to both the politics of public space and the politics of gender. For loyalists, the "meaning" of the cap of liberty was unmistakable: it was the symbol of revolution, the ensign of French anarchy, the sign under which the Jacobins had orchestrated the Terror of 1793 and 1794. It represented the antithesis of British constitutional "liberty" and patriotism. The

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presence of the cap of liberty betrayed the real intent of plebeian radicals, exposing the constitutional guise of their proceedings as merely cover for seditious organization. Thus the Reverend W, R. Hay, chairman of the Salford Quarter Sessions and prominent among magistrates at Peterloo, addressed the grand jury in July 1819: "At l a s t . . . all disguise, as it was assumed, has nearly been thrown aside. . . . That no doubt might remain as to Revolution being their aim, the cap of Liberty, that bloody ensign of French Rebellion*, is constantly hoisted and displayed at their meetings."9 To magistrates, often isolated on the frontiers of industrial Lancashire, the hoisting of the cap of liberty was an audacious affront to their fragile authority. The Lancashire bench, essentially an oligarchy composed of Tory landed gendemen and Anglican clergy, was thinnest on the ground precisely where the needs of social order were most acute.10 The Lancashire and Cheshire magistrates, corresponding with the government in 1819, unfailingly reported on the presence of the cap of liberty. From Stockport, the ever-vigilant John Lloyd expressed shock that Manchester authorities had allowed such a powerful symbol to preside unchallenged. Lloyd promised that "we will not be disgraced [at Stockport] by the Cap of Liberty being borne over our Bridge."11 Lloyd was unable to make good on his promise when Stockport radicals hoisted a cap of liberty at a large outdoor meeting at Sandy Brow in February. Lloyd's son and the town's deputy constable, William Birch, led a group of special constables and local yeomanry in an unsuccessful attempt to seize the cap. As the authorities entered the meeting, John Thacker Saxton (a veteran of Jacobin struggles of the 1790s who was later tried for his part at Peterloo) pointed from the platform to the cap of liberty and proclaimed, "This constitutionalist sign . . . a ruffian banditti are at the moment contemplating to wrest from your grasp." Should "an illegal seizure be attempted," his "mind was made up to perish in its defence." The demand for the cap's surrender went unheeded, and the authorities who then tried to seize the cap were beaten from the scene by a shower of stones and brickbats. The meeting continued as Saxton, who had taken the cap and placed it on his head, returned it to the pole on which it had been mounted. That night in the streets of Stockport, the Riot Act was read three times as crowds singing the revolutionary song "Millions Be Free" clashed with troops and constables. The first toast at the evening's radical dinner was to "The brave Patriots, who so nobly defended the Cap of Liberty."12 Through the late winter and spring of 1819, there were constant reports of arming, delegates' meetings, and what local magistrates believed were preparations for general insurrection.13 The cap of liberty did not, however, reappear until June, at a meeting at Ashton-under-Lyne, where radicals hoisted it atop a white banner inscribed "Annual Parliaments, and Universal Suffrage." When the Reverend Joseph Harrison, from Stockport, told the meeting that the local rector, Reverend Chetwode, had offered £50 for their cap the crowd "held up very large Bludgeons & declared they wo[ul]d defend it with their lives." No attack took place at Ashton. After the meet-

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ing, thousands marched home preceded by the cherished emblem. That evening at Charles Walker's hush shop, radicals honored the man who had presented the cap to the meeting, the brushmaker Joseph Johnson, secretary of the Manchester Patriotic Union Society, by drinking his health out of a cap of liberty.14 A fortnight later, at another large meeting at Sandy Brow, chaired by Sir Charles Wolseley, the cap of liberty was called for and again displayed. Despite a keen sense of the importance of preventing the symbol's reappearance, John Lloyd reported that the forces of order were helpless, unable to muster ten men: "We are forever disgraced."15 During the summer, the cap of liberty became an integral part of the Lancashire demonstrations that culminated on St. Peter's Field—displayed at Rochdale, Blackburn, and Leigh. The victory at Stockport became a celebrated point of radical reference; the determination to defend the cap at all costs was a reiterated theme.16 In July, the symbol was prominently displayed in London at the great Smithfield demonstration.17 By early August, it had moved across the Pennines, as radicals hoisted "the red cap of liberty" at Huddersfield.18 The decision to display the cap of liberty was clearly a calculated gesture, making claims on the control of public space, asserting the right of free expression and assembly, testing the repressive resolve of government and local authority, and signifying more ambiguously revolutionary intent. The legal right of free assembly (as well as the right of freedom of expression) was ambiguous and had been severely curtailed during and immediately after the wars with France.19 In the wake of the Spa Fields meetings, the suppressed Blanketeers' march, and the so-called Ardwick conspiracy, the government had resorted to familiar methods, suspending the Habeas Corpus Act and reenacting the Seditious Meetings Act in the spring of 1817. Meetings again became possible with the expiration of these restraints in the summer of 1818.20 However, the legal status of large meetings—held under no recognized corporate jurisdiction, chaired by ordinary workingmen, involving speakers with no local connections, and drawing large numbers from outside the immediate locality—was uncertain.21 It was unclear how far the protective shelter of the right of petition extended. Although radicals were careful to requisition the proper local authorities in order to convene meetings and to legalize their proceedings as far as possible by public advertisement following the authorities' invariable refusal to oblige, it remained unclear whether their meetings were protected under law or would be tolerated by government. In order to appreciate the threatening novelty of these democratic assemblies, it is necessary to recall how thoroughly the radical platform had been shut down between 1795 and 1815 and how plebeian radicals had been harassed and excluded from public space.22 In Manchester, for instance, taverns displayed boards inscribed "NO JACOBINS ADMITTED HERE." At Ashtonunder-Lyne, Cockhill Pump was renamed Jacobin's Pump "because of its being used by the Tories . . . in the delicate service of forcibly pumping on the Jacobins or Radicals." During the peace of 1802, "no Jacobin dared

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scarcely show himself in the streets without being in danger of having to undergo the dreaded pumping."23 Hoisting the cap of liberty, a more or less proscribed symbol during the period 1793 to 1815, was a form of counter-intimidation, a strident rejoinder to ritualized pumpings and to the burning of copies of The Rights of Man and effigies of Thomas Paine. The week before Peterloo, radicals paraded through the weaving village of Lees, near Oldham, for two days. An alarmed inhabitant reported to the Home Office: I have just witnessed a Scene by the Reformers . . . which has opened my Eyes more than ever[.] They have paraded through the village for Two Days with a large Flag on a Black Ground with on one Side "no Borough Mongering, Taxation Without Representation is Unjust and Tyrannical," on the Reverse "Unite and be Free, Equal Representation or Death" on one Staff[,] the Cap of Liberty on another and the Red (or Bloody Flag) on a Third; Singing to some Musick that most vile and infamous of all Songs, called Green upon the Cape, with Green and Pink Ribbons in their Hats; Green is to be their Coloursf. ] This Song was the instigation of the Irish Rebellion 21 years ago. From the Bury district, a report of nightly drilling on Cockey Moor concluded with the observation "that the common toasts with the lower class in the public-houses, are 'the Cap of Liberty,' and 'May the Wings of Liberty never lose a feather.'" The month before, Lloyd had noted that "the working classes are becoming more independent & insulting—expressing their confidence of soon having the Rule & power."24

II The cap of liberty offered a vehicle for raising the political stakes; it intensified meanings. At first sight, the symbol also appears to have fractured the terms of a dominant political idiom—that of popular constitutionalism. The language of early-nineteenth-century radicalism was permeated by popular constitutionalism, not by the "counter-hegemonic" ideology of Paineite republicanism.25 The dominant sway of popular constitutionalism was evident in the speeches and resolutions presented at the radical demonstrations of 1819, as it had been in 1816 and 1817. For example, following the hoisting of the cap of liberty at Almondbury Bank, Huddersfield, the Dewsbury printer James Willan told the meeting: Let us tell them what Constitution we admire—what Constitution we are anxious to live under—and what Constitution we will cheerfully obey: It is the English Constitution. . . . This Constitution, on which English law ought to be founded, is the Constitution which we claim, demand and insist upon; and not the laws which have subverted this Constitution by taxing men without their consent, by withholding justice, demanding excessive bail, and punishing numerous individuals without a trial by their peers. At Stockport, Joseph Johnson offered a litany of arcane statutory references stretching back to the reigns of Edward III and Richard II in order to

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"prove" the constitutional rights of "universal" suffrage and annual parliaments.26 It must be stressed that the dominance of constitutionalism, of appeals to the past, did not imply the insignificance of the Jacobin inheritance or the lack of currency of arguments derived from natural rights as opposed to historical reasoning. Paineite journals such as Sherwin's Political Register and Thomas Davison's Medusa, provided a significant counterweight to the constitutionalist emphasis of T. J. Wooler's Black Dwarf and Cobbett's Political Register. At Stockport, Sir Charles Wolseley spoke proudly of having participated in the storming of the Bastille. At the dinner following this meeting, Stockport radicals drank to " The Rights of Man''' out of a cap of liberty and, standing in solemn silence, toasted "The Immortal Memory of Thomas Paine." With no sense of contradiction, they next toasted "The health of the venerable Major Cartwright," the most revered propagandist of popular constitutionalism.27 The rituals of popular radicalism were syncretic. Moreover, certain references appear more "historical" than they really were. Thus appeals to the Saxon constitution, while historical in form, were often a simultaneous appeal to some notion of natural right, the assumption being that the lost liberties of Anglo-Saxon England had embodied notions of original right.28 The appeal of popular constitutionalism, however, is not difficult to understand. As Lynn Hunt argues, all political authority requires "a cultural frame" in which to define itself and through which to put forward its claims to authority.29 For working-class radicals to have abandoned the constitutionalist idiom would have meant discarding a "shared" language of political legitimation. Conversely, to embrace constitutionalism was to participate in a powerful national myth structure, to evoke the authoritative force of a "master fiction" of British society. But it was a "master fiction" firmly rooted in a real political achievement—that of the seventeenth century—and one that possessed oppositional as well as integrative potential. Thus radicals of the early nineteenth century sought to give the most radical accent to the constitutionalism of the opponents of Stuart "absolutism." In reality, the constitutional victories of the seventeenth century were highly ambiguous. That ambiguity—the incompleteness of the achievement—meant that the meaning and trajectory of those victories continued to define much of the contested terrain of British politics. Popular radicals constantly sought to open "rights," such as the rights of public assembly and freedom of expression, as well as notions of popular sovereignty, to the widest possible interpretation and practice. In contrast, the governing classes sought to narrow these definitions and practices without abandoning the myth that was thought to distinguish England from its Continental neighbors. In 1819, radicals traded on precisely such ambiguities. It was no coincidence that Saxton referred to the cap as "this constitutionalist sign" or that radicals toasted the brave "patriots" who protected it from attack. Indeed, here was a perfect inversion of the New Timers appeals to "the noblest Constitution in the world" and "patriotic feeling." The plebeian

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radicals were neither abandoning the legitimating force of the English constitution nor rejecting the claims of patriotism, but rather offering counterdefinitions to those of loyalism. They were the "true" upholders of constitutionalist rights and, therefore, England's "true" patriots. There was an attempt here both to appropriate the dominant terms of national political discourse and to parody the pretensions of loyalist regard for the glorious British constitution. The apparent incongruity of bringing the cap of liberty forward at meetings for parliamentary reform and arguing that both the meetings and the demands of the meetings stood in defense of lost or endangered constitutional rights merely underscored this tension between appropriation and parody. Ill

There was, however, another complication: the history of the sign—a history that came out most clearly at the trials following the Peterloo massacre. The mnemonic force of the cap of liberty was multivocal; what was being remembered was not as fixed as the New Times portrayed. If the cap of liberty conjured only the horrors of the French Revolution for loyalists, its older—its classical and English—meanings came rushing forward as radicals moved into courtrooms to defend and accuse. Since the magistrates had moved to disperse the meeting at St. Peter's Field before the speakers had said anything of substance, the government had to prove that the meeting itself was illegal in form and intent. In the absence of any evidence of inflammatory language, the symbols themselves became all the more important in creating circumstances calculated to "produce terror of immediate danger in the minds of the King's subjects." Thus the meeting's banners and emblems, along with their inscriptions and meanings, became focal points of legal contention—central evidence of radical intent "to alter the legal frame of the government of these realms, by force and threats." But the meanings were not so simple. In his opening address to the jury at York, Hunt drew attention to counter-meanings. The cap of liberty "was an emblem of a most sacred nature. In ancient Rome if a slave had saved the life of a citizen, or had performed a service to the state, he received as a reward, his Freedom; and on his emancipation from Slavery, he had a Cap placed on his head as an emblem of his Liberty." Hunt also pointed to the representation of the cap of liberty on the front of the town hall at York as evidence of the Englishness of the symbol.30 In fact, the "visual etymology" of the cap of liberty was complex. Classical in origin, prominent in the late Roman republic as a symbol of republican virtue, the pileus was placed on a slave's head on emancipation as a sign of freedom.31 In England the cap's history dated from 1688. It had long been a Dutch symbol, signifying the struggle for liberty from Spanish rule in the sixteenth century, and was brought over as part of William of Orange's campaign of liberation. It appeared on medals and prints commemorating the Glorious Revolution.32 In the eighteenth century, Liberty was regularly portrayed with her cap and spear. Although prominently

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associated with the radical causes of John Wilkes (see, for example, Hogarth's vicious sketch of Wilkes) and American independence, and linked in political cartooning with Fox's election campaign of 1784, the symbol had no exclusive association with anarchy or sedition until the early 1790s.33 There was certainly nothing Gallican about it; it could be found mounted on Britannia's spear in prints, on medals, and on commemorative pottery.34 As late as 1793, The Antigallica-n Songster reproduced on its frontispiece Thomas Rowlandson's popular engraving "The Contrast, 1793" (Figure 1). The print contrasts "English Liberty" with "French Liberty." Britannia appears seated under an oak with her shield and with a cap of liberty mounted on her staff, holding a copy of Magna Carta in her right hand and the scales of Justice in her left hand. The British lion crouches at her feet. "French Liberty," in the guise of Medusa, holds a long dagger in her left hand and in her right hand grasps a trident, on which is mounted a bleeding head flanked by two hearts.35 In the century before the French Revolution, there was no iconographic incompatibility between the cap of liberty and patriotic sentiment. The role of the cap of liberty in the events of the French Revolution, however, quickly undermined such patriotic meanings in Britain. In June 1792, when the revolutionary crowd invaded the Tuileries Palace, Louis XVI was symbolically decrowned and forced to don the emblem of the revolution. Transformed by the popular masses into the bonnet rouge and accompanied by the tricolor cockade, the cap of liberty became part of the uniform of the sans-culottes. Carried aloft in the revolutionary festivals, endlessly reproduced in paintings and prints and on the calendrier republicain, gracing the head of the goddess of Liberty or of the republican Marianne, the bonnet rouge became inextricably, and from the perspective of loyal British opinion solely, linked to the cause of the French Revolution.36 As for Britannia, Linda Colley comments that the war with France "ensured that the figure of Britannia, previously used Marianne-like as a national, often libertarian symbol, became increasingly royal and state property."37 The cap of liberty was no longer an optional, libertarian complement to Britannia's figure, disappearing in the design of Matthew Boulton's state-contracted issue of copper coinage in the late 1790s.38 The cap of liberty now bore a nearly exclusive attachment to Jacobinism, given preeminence in the cartooning of James Gillray as the emblem of French anarchy threatening the ordered liberty of Britain. In Gillray's ferocious visual attacks on revolutionary France, plebeian radicals, both French and English, were stripped of humanity. On their heads they usually wore the bonnet rouge?* The Irish experience, particularly the rising of 1798, further underscored the danger of French example. The complex social, nationalist, and religious motivations that had led to mass insurrection were obscured in loyalist and government propaganda; the rising was presented as the most alarming illustration of the savagery that could be unleashed when the popular masses took their cue from a revolutionary leadership dedicated to French principles and allies.40 The francophilia of the United Irishmen, and their dependence

1. Thomas Rowlandson, "The Contrast, 1793." (By permission of the British Museum)

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on French aid, gave ample scope for such interpretation. Heading a section of the French expeditionary force in September 1798, General James Napper Tandy, the senior United Irish officer in the French army, issued a proclamation to his fellow Irishmen on behalf of the "Northern Army of Avengers." "Liberty, or Death" was the heading, along with an Irish harp on which was mounted a cap of liberty.41 The French Revolution had made it impossible for radicals merely to retrieve the symbolic discourse of British libertarianism; meanings had been irrevocably changed. The revolution's attempt to represent the unprecedented had caused a transvaluation of language and of visual symbols such as the cap of liberty. Furthermore, the response of the British state to the ritual display of revolutionary France, the molding of national sentiment increasingly around the figure of the monarch, altered meanings associated with the term "patriotism."42 Under the impact of war, particularly with the threat of invasion (1803-1805), and as the French republic gave way to Napoleon's empire, it became increasingly difficult for English Jacobins to claim the title "patriot," or at least to make patriotism compatible with a defense of the principles of the French Revolution. Plebeian radicals were themselves split along pro- and anti-Gallican lines and along the lines of internationalism and nationalism.43 During the first decade of the nineteenth century, reformers did occasionally exhibit libertarian symbols. For example, during the peace celebrations at Durham in 1803, John Fenwick, a friend of the Reverend Christopher Wyvill and commander of a volunteer company, displayed an illuminated Britannia with a cap of liberty and the inscription "No Income Tax."44 At the front of Burdett's triumphal car at the 1807 Westminster election stood the Roman goddess of Liberty holding a liberty cap atop her spear.45 Henry Hunt, who modeled his early radical career on that of the patrician Burdett, adopted the cap of liberty at the Bristol by-election of 1812.46 It was following the war, however, that radicals attempted to counter the partial closure of meanings effected during the previous two decades, boldly seeking to reappropriate and refashion visual and gestural symbolism that not only drew on the experience of English history, but continued to suggest the sense of possibilities encoded within the French Revolution. The defeat of France and the widespread feeling that the war had been needlessly prolonged in the interests of parasitic beneficiaries of a corrupt state and its system of taxation accommodated the reincorporation of certain repressed symbolic practices. It also meant that radicals could give a "patriotic" accent to their endeavor to create a national movement. Such was the context in which the cap of liberty made its vigorous reentry toward the center of radicalism's vocabulary of symbolic ritual.

IV The strident reintroduction of libertarian symbolism came initially, however, not from the strongly constitutionalist radicals of Lancashire but from the revolutionary "Spenceans" of the metropolis. Heirs to the underground

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traditions of the war years, men like Arthur Thistlewood, Thomas Preston, and Dr. James Watson and his son sought to provoke the conditions for immediate insurrection.47 They self-consciously introduced the emblems of the French Revolution at the Spa Fields meetings of 1816 and 1817. These were the first "unlimited" outdoor meetings since the great "monster" demonstrations of 1795. It was at these meetings that radicals began to define the tactics of a politics of "forcible intimidation." For the Spenceans, the mass demonstration was to be the catalyst for insurrection.48 Accordingly, they paraded a red cap of liberty at the first Spa Fields meeting (15 November 1816) alongside two tricolor flags; the Watsons, Preston, and the cordwainer John Hooper wore tricolored cockades in their hats. Thistlewood had commissioned his wife, Susan, to make "the real" tricolor—the colors were green, red, and white—intended as a emblem of revolutionary British unity between the peoples of Ireland, England, and Scotland.49 At the second meeting (2 December), before Hunt, the main speaker, had arrived, the younger Watson seized the large tricolor flag off the wagon from which he was speaking and implored a crowd of several hundred to follow him. Thus commenced the Spa Fields riots. Watson, flag in hand, and Hooper led the crowd through the Minories, raiding gunsmiths' shops in preparation for the intended assault on the Tower, where Thistlewood was waiting to orchestrate the dramatic beginning of Britain's republican future.50 When the government suppressed the radical movement in early 1817, it played predictably on the undisguised modeling of Spencean political culture and action: "the intended insurrection assumed the symbols of the French revolution."51 In his opening address at Watson's trial for high treason, the attorney general, Sir Samuel Shepherd, asked the jury to "recollect, under what ensigns were those horrors committed, in a neighbouring country." Throughout the trial, the prosecution drew attention to the flags and cockades, emblems of French anarchy. There was no way for the defense to evoke patriotic meanings from this ensemble of symbols.52 In the radical press, William Cobbett defended Hunt's role at Spa Fields, but could offer only feeble apologetics for the meeting's symbols.53 What is of particular interest here is the contrast between the construction of symbolic meanings at Spa Fields and what emerged in Lancashire in 1819. In London, despite their most zealous endeavor, the Spenceans remained a relatively isolated group of revolutionaries.54 The appeal of republicanism, although not inconsiderable, never unified the radicals of the capital. In contrast, the weavers and spinners who marched on Manchester on 16 August 1819 mobilized behind a medley of libertarian symbols that they had made compatible with the language and rituals of popular constitutionalism. They drew on remarkably dense networks of cultural solidarity rooted in their work, their families, and their smaller communities. The "language" of their movement bore a definite, although quite complex, relationship to the social conditions of industrial Lancashire. In 1819 the movement's symbols were successfully reenfolded within an alternative idiom of national political culture. In the wake of Peterloo, Cobbett defended the symbol of liberty in a manner that Thistlewood's

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tricolored flag could never allow. The denial of the right to exhibit the cap of liberty and its removal from English coinage now constituted fundamental abridgements to the heritage of British freedom: What would an old king of England have said, if he had been advised to take the Cap from the half-penny, lest his subjects should, by the sight of it, be urged on to sedition and revolution! Every thing that could be done has been done to keep the emblems of our country's former liberty from our sight and to extirpate the recollection of it from our minds; but, all the efforts having this object in view have failed.55 Following the battle at Sandy Brow, Wooler had rushed similarly to defend the emblem of liberty, appealing to Britain's revolutionary heritage: But the French hoisted the cap of liberty—and the French were revolutionists. So were our ancestors in 1688. Hampden was a revolutionist, when he drew his sword against the tyrant Charles. Russell was a revolutionist, —Sydney another. Wallace, Bruce, and the patriots of almost all ages have been revolutionists; and for the plain reason—they opposed pertinacious corruption, which could only be conquered, by being destroyed—and bringing back the state to first principles. And unless some speedy remedy be applied to our system, it will also be the victim of a revolution.56 The "sacred center" of British history allowed an ambiguous return to "first principles"; the past could liberate the future. Wooler's editorial well illustrates the carefully constructed tension between disguise and revelation inscribed in the actions of the Lancashire radicals. Densely layered historical meanings enhanced the symbolic "energy" of the cap of liberty.57 The historicity of the sign masked meanings in ways essential to radical mobilization.

V With Henry Hunt we'll go, brave lads, With Henry Hunt we'll go; We'll raise the Cap of Liberty In spite of every foe.58 From Staley-Bridge they did advance with a band of music fine. And brought a cap of liberty from Ashton-under-Lyne; There was Macclesfield and Stockport lads, and Oldham rougheads too, Came to hear the treason sermon preached by Hunt at Peter-loo. . . . When the Yeoman did advance the mob began to fly, Some thousands of old hats and clogs behind them there did lie; They soon pulled down their Treason Flags, and numbers of them flew. And Hunt they took a prisoner on the plains of Peter-loo.59 It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the emblems and banners carried into Manchester on 16 August 1819. At Middleton, Samuel

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Bamford pressed for the appointment of "a party of men with stout cudgels . . . to take care of the colours, in order, that they might be preserved." He was overruled by Hunt's injunction that radicals come unarmed to Manchester. The radical colors were carried to St. Peter's Field protected by numbers, discipline, and moral courage. The cap of liberty gave coherence to the Middleton "colours." Between the blue and green silk bannersinscribed in gold "UNITY AND STRENGTH," "LIBERTY AND FRATERNITY," "PARLIAMENTS ANNUAL," "SUFFRAGE UNIVERSAL"—mounted on a staff was "a handsome cap of crimson velvet, with a tuft of laurel, and the cap tastefully braided with the word, LIBERTAS, in front."60 All accounts of Peterloo, written and visual, depict numerous caps of liberty mounted on poles ringing the hustings, as if imparting apotropaic protection to the meeting (Figure 2). Hunt entered the grounds in a barouche, preceded by the same flag and cap of liberty that had been displayed on his first visit to Manchester. Banners and caps of liberty poured into Manchester as the "country" people marched in assembled order to the music of bands. According to the Manchester Observer, "thousands of willing votaries" had come "to the shrine of sacred liberty."61 They came to take hold of the most important commercial city of the North for one day, temporarily suspending the "natural" order of their social and political existence. Bamford and his comrades had transformed the mass demonstration into a carnival of prefigurative reversal, a rich counter-statement to the rituals of loyalism. The assemblage of signs and gestures was anything but accidental. The caps of liberty were set within a field of signs and complementary meanings. There were no tricolor flags; twelve Middleton youths carried branches of laurel "as a token of amity and peace"; Middleton's section leaders wore sprigs of laurel (a libertarian symbol of regeneration) in their hats instead of cockades. The female reformers of Manchester and Oldham were dressed entirely in white, a self-reflective symbol of feminine purity simultaneously alluding to the purity of the radical cause. Amateur bands played neither "Ca Ira" nor the "Marseillaise." The radical bands heralded Hunt's arrival on the field with strains of "See the Conquering Hero Comes," "God Save the King," and "Rule Britannia." The playing of "God Save the King" was particularly noteworthy, since during the previous two decades it had supplanted the more libertarian "Rule Britannia" to become the recognized national anthem.62 Plebeian radicals had on occasion resisted the imposition of this anthem.63 In January 1819, Hunt had refused to stand and uncover in response to loyalist demands for the singing of "God Save the King" at a performance at Manchester's Theatre Royal. A group of loyalist gentlemen and officers of the Seventh Hussars, including Lord Uxbridge, threw Hunt and his party out of the theater. Several evenings later, groups of radicals from the surrounding district, including Middleton and Oldham, came into Manchester to act as bodyguards for Hunt, who again had booked theater tickets. Fearing a full-scale riot, the borough reeve and town constables prevailed on the manager to close the theater. Crowds shouting "Hunt forever" and "No Dandy soldiers"

2. "Dreadful Scene at Manchester: Meeting of Reformers, August 16th 1819" (detail). (By permission of the Manchester Public Libraries)

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occupied the streets around the theater. Addressing the crowd, Hunt denounced the "bloody butchers of Waterloo."64 At one level an instrumental gesture (it was later cited as evidence of the meeting's patriotic demeanor), the playing of "God Save the King" on 16 August was also a gesture of ironic appropriation. Having resisted loyalist attempts to impose deferential acquiescence to patriotic protocol, radical bands now offered "God Save the King" on terms transformed by radicalism's massive presence. The radical banners at Peterloo most straightforwardly announced the demands of the meeting: universal suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by ballot, no taxation without representation, no corn laws, no Combination Act. Two banners, however, commanded particular attention, since they suggested something beyond peaceful protest. The Royton Female Union carried a banner inscribed "LET us DIE LIKE MEN AND NOT BE SOLD LIKE SLAVES," and on the reverse "LIBERTY is THE BIRTHRIGHT OF MAN." More awesome was the black banner of the Saddleworth, Lees and Mossley Union (the banner paraded the week before through Lees), inscribed with the slogans "EQUAL REPRESENTATION OR DEATH," "UNITE AND BE FREE," "NO BOROUGHMONGERING,"

"TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION is UNJUST AND TYRANNICAL," "NO CORN LAWS" and "UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE." Both banners became focal points of legal contention in the aftermath of the massacre. Much debate turned on the ambiguous slogan "Equal Representation or Death," which was widely misremembered or misread as "Liberty or Death," a motto with close historical parallels to the cap of liberty.65 Prominently voiced in the American and French revolutions, the phrase had roots in the classical allusions of English libertarian rhetoric.66 From the 1790s, it possessed strong associations with both English Jacobinism and Irish republicanism.67 At a reform meeting on Sandy Brow, in September 1818, at which speakers had recommended the need for armed resistance to tyranny and raised the prospect of convening a national convention of the people, the young Stockport leader Samuel Drummond had concluded his oration with an impassioned appeal to liberty: "Liberty thou sweet Liberty is what I will gain or die in the attempt, Liberty or Death."68 The slogan was echoed at radical meetings throughout 1819. In the wake of Peterloo, its force was redoubled, as the Spencean martyr James Ings sang the "national" song "O, give me death or liberty" from the scaffold before his execution for high treason in May 1820.69 Peterloo was burdened with a complex prehistory of intense social and political conflict, a prehistory that found expression in the rituals of symbolic power. When the Manchester yeomanry attacked the meeting, they pursued the banners and the caps of liberty with vicious enthusiasm—scores were to be settled, authority restored, definitions reimposed. After the arrest of Hunt and the others on the hustings, the cry "Have at their flags" immediately went up among the cavalry. The mounted caps marked some of the few points on the field where unarmed working people offered resistance.70 The yeomanry and constables captured nearly all the flags and caps, including the black flag from Saddleworth, whose guardian was cut down.

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The caps of liberty—the tropaia of working-class radicalism—were among the "trophies" the yeomanry gathered from the field of battle: The proud ensigns of Revolution, with an exception of one or two which were secured entire by the Police, were in a moment, torn into a thousand pieces, and delighted is the individual who can shew a shred as a trophy of the downfall of these wicked machinations; the red caps are a spoil, the general envy of those who missed the opportunity of possessing so conspicuous a memento. The implements of sweet and harmonious sounds . . . were reduced to one common ruin.71 The loyalist press rejoiced at the capture and destruction of the radical banners and caps, "levelled with the dust." On the evening of 16 August, a radical crowd in the New Cross district of Manchester broke the windows of a grocer for displaying a captured flag.72 The day's victory belonged, however, to the forces of authority. The members of the Stalybridge band managed to save their instruments, but could not avoid loyalist jeers as they returned home: "a landlord who loved things as they were remarked to them as they passed his door, 'Pigs are very quiet, neaw' the butchers bin amung um.'"73 From Stockport, Lloyd could at last report that "we have come back with honour to-day." The Stockport troop of the Cheshire yeomanry had captured two of the most resplendent radical banners: "they were appointed to be publicly burnt in the Market-place of that town, devoted to the shrine of their Country's Cause." The crimson and gold banner of the Royton Female Union was one of the "trophies" that the Stockport yeomanry had secured for public burning.74

VI In these reforming, innovating days, Woman the part of State Reformist plays; Not the chaste Fair of angel form and mind, Bestow'd of Heaven to grace and bless mankind; But she, the Amazon of strife and storm, Of mind hermaphrodite, in woman's form: Who talks of rights, and politics will scan, Yet she herself usurps the "Rights of Man."75 The day had opened as carnival, but military tones were never far from the surface. The very language used—"colours" and "trophies"—and the carefully ordered files marching into Manchester led by musical bands possessed irresistible meanings for a society only recently emerged from over twenty years of European warfare.76 Yet the military aspect of radicalism's presence was undercut in at least two crucial regards. First, despite the considerable "drilling" that went on in the summer of 1819, radicals arrived hi Manchester unarmed.77 More significant, perhaps, women and children were prominent among them. If the caps of liberty, the marching, the bands, and the tremendous size of the meeting imparted quasi-military meanings, the moral presence of womanhood gave a counter-sign.78

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The participation of women in popular protest was not new.79 What was novel in 1819 was the scale of mobilization and the inclusion of women within the formal politics of radicalism: voting at meetings, forming associations with female officers, holding their own meetings, presenting addresses. During the summer of 1819, female reformers established associations throughout the cotton-manufacturing districts—at Blackburn, Manchester, Rochdale, Stockport, Oldham, Royton, and Ashton-under-Lyne. Their example soon spread to women in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and beyond.80 Yet it was not only the increased numbers of women at public demonstrations or their formal role in the movement that proved striking in 1819, but also the way in which radical working-class women entered the arena of public politics. They chose to mark their entry and pronounce their attendant claim to a distinct public voice with the same symbol that radicals hoisted aloft as they claimed the right to public space and inclusion within the political nation. One month before Peterloo, at the great Blackburn meeting, female radicals had dramatically expanded the repertoire of innovative "ritual" associated with the mass demonstration. Just as William Fitton stepped forward to read the resolutions to be placed before the meeting, the Committee of the Blackburn Female Reform Society entered the grounds and sought leave to approach the hustings. The chairman signalled for the crowd to open a path for the "ladies." According to the Manchester Observer, they were very neatly dressed for the occasion, and each wore a green [the radical color] favour in her bonnet or cap. . . . The ladies ascended the hustings amidst the reiterated acclamations of the people . . . then stepping forward towards the chairman; one of them with becoming diffidence and respect, presented him with a most beautiful Cap of Liberty, made of scarlet silk or satin, lined with green, with a serpentined gold lace, terminating with a rich gold tassel.

Mrs. Alice Kitchen, in a short speech, asked chairman John Knight to accept "this token of our respect to those brave men who are nobly struggling for liberty and life; by placing it at the head of your banner." She concluded with the request that Knight read aloud their address, which explained their woes "and may apologize for our interference in the politics of our country." The banner was lowered, "crowned" by the cap of liberty, and rehoisted to the cheers of the meeting and cries of "Liberty or Death." Knight received the permission of the meeting to read the address, which opened: The members of the Blackburn Female Reform Society, beg leave with the greatest diffidence and respect, to tender into your hands the emblem that has ever been held sacred to the people, in the most enlightened ages of our history; and particularly to our ancestors, who contributed so much to the fame of our beloved county—THE CAP OF LIBERTY!!! In presenting this Cap of Liberty, which we trust no rufHan banditti will be allowed to wrest from your hands but with the forfeiture of your existence, we hope it will not be deemed presumptuous to offer a faint sketch of the misery and suffering we are doomed to endure.

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The address maintained that the imperative demands of nurturing and the unbearable prospect of their children's starvation legitimated women's coming forward to call on all men to join in the struggle for political reform. The address raised the specter of a greater inversion of "natural order" than women's appearance at public meetings, warning that if men did not come forward "to demand your rights as men," the approaching winter might bring the same fate upon their children that befell the children at the siege of Jerusalem, "when mothers devoured their own offspring." That evening, the first toast at the radicals' public dinner was to "The Female Reformers of Blackburn, and may their example be speedily followed throughout the United Kingdom."81 Thus these Blackburn women moved onto the platform at one of the great reform meetings of the summer of 1819. They moved into exclusively male space on highly qualified terms, presenting themselves in a manner that sought to invoke the protective shelter of female decorum. A chairman read their address to the meeting. The address itself made no political claims on behalf of women per se; they pressed for male "universal" suffrage. Their justification for "interfering" in national politics drew legitimacy from traditional claims of motherhood, not citizenship. There were no signs of "feminist" politics here and nothing to alter the picture of radical women playing an active but fundamentally subordinate and supportive role to men. The dominant strains of radical discourse, certainly of constitutionalist reasoning, offered little scope for demands that went beyond those of the Blackburn women. The implicit denial of a distinct political role for women gave their appeal a moral force that operated outside and above the politics of collective self-interest. In a similar vein, the published addresses of other female radical associations inspired by the Blackburn women often eschewed the sharp rhetoric of class, seeking to evoke sympathy on the basis of the "natural" instincts of gender and Christian humanity.82 Yet one central aspect of the Blackburn women's behavior suggests the extraordinary character of their intervention: the vehicle by which these women entered the meeting. The meanings associated with the cap of liberty ran directly counter to the careful assemblage of signs associated with female "respectability" and gave notice of the real audacity of their presence. There was an essential incongruity between the gestures of retiring female modesty and the women's role as bearers of the preeminent symbol of class confrontation. The tension between their apologetic tone and their identification with the cap of liberty reflected the challenge of women entering the public sphere. For loyalists and the district's local authorities, women imparted no moral weight to public demonstrations. On the contrary, women forfeited the protective claims of gender by virtue of their participation in radical politics. As might be expected, the loyalist press had no difficulty identifying the meaning of the Blackburn women's behavior. The New Times immediately proclaimed the "ladies" of the Blackburn Female Reform Society "worthy followers" of the women of the French Revolution: "the Poissa-rdes

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of Paris, those furies in the shape of women, who committed so many murders, and were foremost in so many scenes of horror." The Manchester Exchange Hera-Id recorded its "repugnance" at the "most disgusting scene" of women presenting a cap of liberty, noting that the women "mixed with the Orators" and remained on the hustings for the rest of the day. "The Public scarcely need to be informed, that the females are women well known to be the most abandoned of their sex." The New Timesleft no doubt about the character of the "Lady" who presented the society's address: "[W]e cannot conceive that any but a hardened and shameless Prostitute would have the audacity to appear on the hustings on such an occasion and for such a purpose."83 Loyalist cartoonists unleashed a similarly virulent attack on the manners, morals, and appearance of female reformers. In "The Belle Alliance: or, the Female Reformers of Blackburn!!!" George Cruikshank offered the visual counterpart to the New Timers editorial, reducing Alice Kitchen and her comrades (all wearing caps of liberty) to the grotesque, semisimian creatures characteristic of anti-Jacobin cartooning. Dwarfish Jacobin children brandishing daggers and a man dressed in a petticoat present comic images of a world turned upside down (Figure 3).84 Loyalist propagandists drew directly on tropes established in response to the French Revolution and on popular stereotypes of women as ungovernable and as more ferocious protesters than men.85 The role of the market women of Paris during the French Revolution offered the quintessential image of a total inversion of natural order, an image enhanced by the close association of female radicals with the bonnet rouge?6 The dramatic entry of women onto the public platform bearing the symbol of revolution underscored the threatened reversal of all relations of social and political authority. It is at least possible to imagine that some members of the Manchester yeomanry saw "harpies" rather than mothers amid the confusion on St. Peter's Field. Lists of those wounded suggest that there was little attempt to spare the lives of women.87 For radical women, the Blackburn female reformers offered an influential model. Charlotte Johnston wrote to her husband in prison, "I dare say you have seen by the Observer . . . that the women have taken it in hand, and you will see that they will do something, for one woman will do more than five men."88 Other female societies followed the example of the Blackburn women, formally presenting caps of liberty at the Lancashire meetings at Rochdale and Leigh, immediately preceding Peterloo, and at the demonstrations in the northern industrial districts following the massacre.89 Before the Leigh meeting, "a number of female reformers were assembled in a public-house, where they had a very gaudy and fantastic CAP OF LIBERTY! Several of them at times put it upon their heads, and exhibited themselves at the windows."90 The disciplined order and solemnity of the popular platform should not obscure the more raucous elements of subversive play also exhibited on such occasions. It was at these meetings that radical workingmen and -women transformed the mass demonstrations into highly stylized rituals of collective solidarity, carnivals of popular sovereignty. The

3. George Cruikshank, "The Belle Alliance: or, the Female Reformers of Blackburn!!!" (12 August 1819). (By permission of the British Museum)

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active participation of women represented the final stage in the broadening of the platform, as popular demonstrations became family outings embracing entire communities of working people. The elaborate banners and ornate caps of liberty that women made for and presented to meetings in the summer and autumn of 1819 suggest a celebration of skills conventionally regarded as female. A report, perhaps inflated, of large-scale nightly drilling on Unsworth Moss, two miles outside Middleton, suggests, however, that the making of caps of liberty was not necessarily an innocuous female enterprise. The report illustrates the inadequacy of a purely "traditional" reading of such activity: [T]he Women are going ab[ou]t from House to House begging for Money to Make Caps of Liberty which they intend to carry to the Manchester Meetingf;] they are to have an inscription on taken from the 1st Chapter of St. James Verse the 25th[;] they say in public they will begin with the branches and cut them all down till they come to the ball, the Meaning of that is they will murder all their Neighbours that are against their Purpose.91 The description of the activities of radical women as being "confined to giving moral support to the men, making banners and caps of liberty which were presented with ceremony at reform demonstrations, passing resolutions and addresses, and swelling the numbers at meetings" fails to capture the full impact of their intervention.92 It undervalues the difficulties surrounding the emergence of women into the public realm of politics and the strident edge imparted to this entry by their chosen symbol. In an open letter "To the Female Reform Society of Blackburn in Lancashire," Cobbett offered the most sustained defense of the radical women. Always the master of setting popular radicalism on traditional foundations, he countered loyalist attacks on the Blackburn women by comparing their actions with the public conduct of loyalist women. Cobbett asked whether it was a departure from feminine character when loyalist women presented colors to volunteer corps or local yeomanry at public ceremonies: It is notorious, that, when any dunderheaded fellow of a Squire or Lord, has embodied a corps of tame soldiers, never intended to see a foreign foe, his wife, or daughter, accompanied with a parcel of women, have come forth into public meeting and presented the tame gentlemen with the banners, under which they were to attack whole hosts of starving women and rebellious boys. At any rate, these women came, like you, out into the open air amongst crowds of men. They, like you, exhorted the men, to stand bravely to the emblems they presented.93 Cobbett had hit on the most obvious parallel to the ritualized presentation of the cap of liberty—one, no doubt, the radicals had in mind. However, despite his subsequent argument that female reformers presented symbols of "civil life" and "emblems of the social compact," as opposed to those of bloodshed and warfare, the comparison itself underscored the military tones that such performance implied.94

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The allusion to the "crowning" of a banner in descriptions of the Blackburn female reformers' presentation suggests a final range of meanings. The symbolic properties of the cap of liberty ran directly counter to those of the crown of royalty. The cap and the crown were at opposite ends of a spectrum of social and political distinctions associated with "hats."95 The cap was given definition within a structure of oppositions. The rigid crown was exclusive, designed for a single head. The cap, in contrast, was an everyday object available to everyone. Its formless flexibility ensured that one size fit all heads.96 As the women of Leigh demonstrated, the cap could be moved effortlessly from one head to another. Its transmissibility further implied the potential for a democratic reordering, for "changing hats." The cap in place of the crown carried the veiled threat of the "decrowning" of a monarch. The ritual presentation of the cap of liberty and the mock "crowning" of banners echoed strains within written radical discourse, giving a republican accent to the protocols of constitutional mobilization.97

VII As E. P. Thompson notes, "If Peterloo was intended to curb the right to public meeting it had exactly the opposite consequences." The months following the massacre witnessed an expansion of radical activity and an intensification of symbolic display as the lines between constitutional rhetoric and revolutionary mobilization became increasingly blurred.98 Throughout the industrial districts of England and Scotland, there was an escalation of symbolic expression as radicals more generally assumed the rituals pioneered at the Lancashire demonstrations. Throughout Yorkshire—at Halifax, Huddersfield, Hull, Otley, and Barnsley—women now presented caps of liberty to radical meetings held to protest the Manchester outrage. Chairmen at the radical meetings of autumn regularly donned caps of liberty. Banners bearing the inscription "LIBERTY OR DEATH" became commonplace.99 The Halifax demonstration illustrated the explosion in the sheer scale of ritual display. The Manchester Observer reported seventy-four banners and flags and sixteen caps of liberty.100 As at Peterloo, popular radicals of the industrial North usually avoided direct symbolic allusions to the French Revolution, at least at public meetings. In contrast, the symbolic displays of London radicalism continued to exhibit more distinctly French tones. No doubt this was due in large measure to the prominence of the Spenceans in the organization of metropolitan radicalism.101 The prominence of the cap of liberty was confirmed as popular radicalism assumed a more national and a more class-based character. In the autumn of 1819, the radical press reemphasized the national and patriotic qualities of the cap of liberty.102 From the loyalist side, there was no attempt to rcappropriate the symbol for the cause of national order (Figure 4). The association of the cap of liberty with working-class politics was underscored by the absence of the symbol from the officially convened town and county meetings that demanded a parliamentary inquiry into the events of 16 August

4. George Cruikshank, "Death or Liberty" (1 December 1819). (By permission of the British Museum)

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and over which Whig politicians presided.103 While Peterloo elicited a sense of moral indignation that transcended the bounds of class, Whig politicians and middle-class reformers emphatically distanced themselves from the demands, the leadership, and the forms of mobilization and display associated with popular radicalism. Outside the formalities of the public meeting, the symbols of popular radicalism also assumed a more distinct identification with the politics of class. Working-class radicals fashioned a repertoire of symbolic gestures and emblems linked to a struggle for control of public space reaching beyond the platform to the streets, taverns, and chapels of their localities. This was particularly evident in the textile districts of the North. There was not merely an extension and intensification of the repertoire of symbolic resistance, but an expansion of the terms of reference as radicals added a new badge of allegiance. The wearing of white hats with green ribbons in honor of Hunt became widespread in the autumn of 1819. While the loyalist and middleclass press excoriated him, working-class radicals claimed Hunt as their own, donning the white hat of the gentleman leader. On his return from the opening of the assizes at Lancaster, Hunt was drawn into Bolton . . . by men in White Hats (which it seems, is to be the distinguishing Badge of his Followers) and this morning when he left this town for Manchester, he was drawn by Females, followed by several Thousands of persons, shouting to the Terror of his Majesty's peaceable subjects.104

By the autumn of 1819, local authorities were seriously concerned that certain districts were almost entirely out of their control. Magistrates and constables could not enter the New Cross district of Manchester, for example, without fearing for their personal safety.105 The Reverend Charles Ethelston, a magistrate much despised for his part at Peterloo, reported that "white Hats & green Ribbons were generally worn yesterday [at Leigh] & at Saddleworth I hear no man can appear with safety in a black hat."106 Francis Harwood complained to Lord Sidmouth that the wearing of white hats with green ribbons & black crape around the arm, is alas too universal, nay the very mugs that are sold for drinking out of, have blasphemous & seditious verses stamped upon them & reformers' songs, are sung about the streets. . . . [I]t is said that the Soldiers have been tampered with in some Towns.107

The wearing of white hats to divine services and Sunday schools in Lancashire opened a new theater of resistance.108 Manchester's Anglican establishment quickly moved to ban children wearing hats "and other badges or appendages now used by persons whose political conduct and opinions are subversive of the Religion and the Constitution and Government, of the Country."109 John Stephens, circuit superintendent, conducted a fullscale purge of Wesleyan Methodism in Manchester, expelling Sunday-school scholars and working-class preachers who refused to renounce the symbols and politics of popular radicalism.110 Twenty years later, the Chartist Isaac Johnson, an ex-Methodist smith from Stockport, explained the abrupt end-

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ing of his formal education as "owing to his being turned out of [Sunday] school after gaining 6 prizes in consequence of his father obliging him to go to school in a white hat with crape and green riband at Peterloo time, for which he was expelled."111 The cap of liberty also moved outside the confines of the radical platform and onto the streets as a vehicle of radical intimidation. It was reported that at Stockport, "a Rabble of Factory Boys sing their Peterloo song . . . at nights and carry something they call the Cap of Liberty."112 A Methodist minister, James Briggs Holroyd, reported from the industrial village of Haslingden that from early September to mid-November "the streets of this town were paraded almost every night by hundreds singing seditious songs about Hunt & Liberty, frequently accompanied with a Red Cap suspended on a pole with a lighted torch." At the houses of the principal radicals, the crowd gave three cheers, whereas at the houses of "the King's men, as they term it, they gave three most dismal groans." One evening a radical crowd visited Holroyd, who was "one of the five in this town . . . marked to be killed the first day" of insurrection: On the 15th Nov. last about 7 o'clock in the evening a great concourse of people assembled in front of my house. . . . Not judging it prudent to attempt forcing my way through the crowd, I stopped inside the garden gate, when the man that carried the Cap of Liberty gave the word of command, they gave three horrible groans, with each groan a young man brandishing a Pike within three feet of my breast accompanied with the most dreadful imprecations.113 Holroyd was not the only unpopular clergyman subjected to a terrifying brand of radical charivari in the autumn of 1819.1M The caps of liberty and ribboned white hats of radicalism were emblems of empowerment for radicals as they laid claim to both formal and informal public space. They were powerful symbols of political and class solidarity, symbols that served sharply to demarcate boundaries of allegiance. The cap of liberty was a symbol that radicals had appropriated and given an exclusive definition, a symbol that possessed great depth of historical meaning. The white hat was a symbol that radicals had created for themselves, reversing its gentlemanly tones and transforming it into an emblem of class conflict. Although the cap of liberty had a broader and deeper range of tones and counter-tones, the tragedy of Peterloo seemed to demand a more specific symbol of counter-terror.115 The white hat never supplanted the cap of liberty, but whereas the cap was more closely associated with the claims of popular public assembly and the evolving protocols of the radical platform, the white hat was more closely linked to less formal gestures of solidarity, intimidation, and counter-intimidation.

VIII Iii late November 1819, Parliament was specially convened to pass the Six Acts—repressive legislation aimed at putting an end to popular insurgency

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and returning to the narrow confines of eighteenth-century political participation. The government sought to take the ambiguity out of the term "the people." The cornerstone of this legislation was the Seditious Meetings Prevention Bill, which was far more restrictive than the acts of 1795 and 1817. For a start, the original proposal curtailed the "right" of public assembly indefinitely—a provision later amended to a period of five years. The legislation placed public meetings under strict corporate authority and under the control of local magistrates. To curtail the continuation of unlimited demonstrations, the forms of meetings and of the proclamations that could be forwarded from meetings were carefully defined. A new clause restricted attendance to those actually resident in the parish in which a meeting was held. There was also a new provision banning attendance at meetings "with any flag, banner, or ensign, or displaying or exhibiting any device, badge, or emblem, or with any drum or military or other music" under penalty of two years' maximum imprisonment.116 The cap of liberty and the rich field of signs that had accompanied its appearance were thus outlawed from public display. On introducing this measure to the Commons, Lord Castlereagh declared that it was imperative "to put a stop to a practice which never had been British, but was borrowed from the worst times of the French revolution." He and other ministers reiterated a standard loyalist refrain: Peterloo was an illegal meeting by virtue of its form and the revolutionary intent manifest in its banners and symbols. He also noted that "one point on which he would propose no law [was] the part which women had borne in the late transactions." It would be sufficient, he trusted, to inform them "that when the French republicans were carrying on their bloody orgies, they could find no female to join them except by ransacking the bagnios and public brothels."117 His comments suggest, however, that government ministers had at least considered a legal ban on women's attendance at public meetings. The state repression that followed the passage of the Six Acts in December effectively brought to a close the popular mobilization of the postwar years. The movement was already deeply split along tactical lines, particularly over the question of convening "simultaneous" meetings, a tactic widely regarded as a step toward insurrection. The repressive power of the state also forced a sharper clarification of ideological differences. The government prosecutors' relentless attempts to link Hunt to the infidelism of Richard Carlile forced Hunt to dissociate the constitutionalism of the radical platform from the principles of republicanism or deism.118 The ambiguity on which popular radicalism and its symbols had thrived was dispelled. In the 1820s, under Carlile's direction, the formal organization of Paineite republicanism retreated into the shallow waters of sectarianism. In the early 1820s, the symbols of popular radicalism intermittently reappeared as part of a stubborn rearguard action against the closures imposed on the movement. Predictably, forms of symbolic resistance continued most strongly in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and

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Cheshire.119 During this period, however, as the radical platform and the popular movement went into steep decline, there was Little opportunity for radicals to hoist the outlawed cap of liberty. The most genuinely popular cause of the early 1820s was that of Queen Caroline, a movement structured around the politics of reversal and notions of counter-monarchy. It was also a movement that involved unprecedented levels of female participation. But the queen's color was white, not the radical green, and the cap of liberty was only occasionally exhibited in her cause.120 With the sudden revival of large-scale radical mobilization in the early 1830s, the submerged symbolism of the postwar years reemerged. The French revolution of July 1830 inspired gestures of republican display.121 Significantly, such symbolism was not embraced by middle-class reformers or displayed at the reform demonstrations under their control. By the 1830s, however, the value of the cap of liberty had changed: it no longer bore the same relationship to the dynamics of popular mobilization or the symbolic discourse of radicalism. The character of this change can be clearly seen in the emergence of Chartism, the largest and most sustained popular movement of the nineteenth century. Intensely conscious of the traditions of radicalism, Chartists recovered and expanded the language and protocols of popular constitutionalism. At Chartism's "monster" demonstrations, working people displayed the cap of liberty within a rich and highly variegated field of signs and slogans drawn from popular Christianity, Romantic poetry, and the conventions of libertarianism. The cap of liberty also appeared, for example, on the membership card of the National Charter Association and on Chartist broadside ballads,122 But the cap of liberty was now merely one symbol among many. Moreover, despite the crucial role of symbolic ritual in forging Chartist solidarities, there was no longer the same intensity surrounding acts of symbolic display, particularly after 1839. The meanings associated with the cap of liberty were less highly charged because the precise linkage between libertarian symbols and radical claims to public assembly no longer prevailed.123 Rationalist-based republican and deist reasoning was also much less pronounced in Chartist discourse than in the radical discourse of the postwar movement.124 Thus the cap of liberty no longer served to mediate the tension between constitutionalist and republican tones, as it had in 1819. Meanings were extremely fluid; they could and did change. The real power of the cap of liberty was as a vehicle for imparting an essential openness to the language, symbolism, and actions of radicals. The instability of the sign was part of its attraction. Radicals employed the cap of liberty not merely to amplify meanings within spoken or written discourse, but also to articulate meanings that appeared to run counter to those established within more formal discourse. Thus the most obvious meanings associated with the cap of liberty hardly conformed to constitutionalist language or to the repertoire of constitutionalist actions dominant in popular radicalism. Similarly, there was an incongruity between the apologetic tone of the Blackburn

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women's address and their presentation of the cap of liberty. The cap of liberty allowed certain things to be said without actually saying them. The choice of symbol, the manner of its presentation, and the field of signs within which it was placed constituted a careful, complex, and deliberate construction of meaning on the part of radicals. Clearly, working people were "inventing" political traditions through a "process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past." As Eric Hobsbawm notes, a large store of materials "is accumulated in the past of any society, and an elaborate language of symbolic practice and communication is always available."125 The choice of the cap of liberty, however, was not the result of randomly ransacking the accumulated political symbolism of England's past. Radicals chose to display the most prominently available symbol that the ruling class had jettisoned from its own political past and symbolic repertoire. The obsessive concern with such symbolism was linked to questions of power: the power to move within public space, the power to speak, and the power to give definition to words, visual symbols, and actions. What was ultimately at issue was the power to provide an interpretation of England's past and, therefore, to give direction to the nation's political and social future. This leads to certain conclusions about the relationship between political language and class and, therefore, has implications for what we mean by a "class" movement. The meaning (or, more precisely, set of meanings) of the cap of liberty was constantly being constructed and reconstructed in a continual process of political conflict. It is through such processes that classes define themselves in oppositional relationship to each other. This does not necessarily mean that they adopt discrete "languages" of class, but that "the dialogue of class struggle is (normally) one in which two opposing discourses fight it out within the general unity of a shared code."126 Thus the constitutionalist rhetoric and symbolic practice of working-class radicals throughout the first half of the nineteenth century should not be regarded either as inherently less "revolutionary" than or as falling short of a "genuine" form of class consciousness or ideology. Certainly there were limitations to this political language and the forms of actions associated with it. This is particularly apparent with regard to questions of the political and social emancipation of women.127 This chapter has made no systematic attempt to reconstruct the sociological composition of postwar popular radicalism. It should be noted, however, that while political language and symbolism can never be neatly reduced to sociological ascriptions of class—there are no "pure" class movements or "pure" languages of class—the force of radicalism and the conflict over displaying the cap of liberty were most pronounced among workers in the textile districts of Lancashire and Cheshire. It was, after all, within these communities that workingmen and -women felt most acutely the loss of personal liberty as a result of capitalist industrialization. Finally, the meaning of the cap of liberty was highly contextual. Eighteenth-century national, libertarian meanings were transformed by the

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experience of the French Revolution and the French wars. During the immediate postwar years, the cap of liberty offered a confrontational counterpoint to the intensified national consciousness resulting from the wars and loyalist propaganda. Within this context, radicals were able to reenfold the symbol within a movement making radical claims to patriotic national regeneration. Among the many tensions mediated by the cap of liberty, not least important was that between class and nation.

4 Reason's Republic: Richard Carlile, Zetetic Culture, and Infidel Stylistics During the 1790s, as middle-class reformers turned away from the more radical tones of Enlightenment thought, works such as Paine's Age of Renson, Volney's Ruins of Empires, and d'Holbach's System of Nature joined The Rights of Man as cherished texts among sections of plebeian radicals. This was most evident within the ranks of the London Corresponding Society. By the late 1790s, however, the language of Paineite rationalism was suppressed, driven underground by government and law; it became a submerged current within radical politics. For two decades, the languages of democratic republicanism and anti-Christian skepticism were displaced within the public discourse of popular radicalism. During the immediate postwar years, Paine's legacy was retrieved; beginning in 1817, his works were again openly published and sold; republicanism and deism were embraced within widening sections of the radical movement, particularly in London. The retrieval of the Paineite legacy was, therefore, a moment of considerable importance. Moreover, despite the government's drastic curtailment of popular radical mobilization and expression in the wake of Peterloo, it was during the 1820s that groups of radicals most explicitly reengaged this broken tradition. The early 1820s witnessed a sustained campaign to resituate the discursive strains of Paineite reasoning at the center of radicalism's language and culture. It was in retreat that determined bands of Paineites pressed once again the counter-hegemonic claims of republicanism and anti-Christian rationalism, insisting that popular radicalism re100

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examine its language of legitimation, its programmatic aims, and its style of agitation. Above all other writers and publishers, it was Richard Carlile who was responsible for returning Paine to center stage in public politics. Self-appointed heir to the mantle of Paine, he embraced the principles of republicanism and anti-Christian reasoning with a rationalist vigor that at times bordered on fanaticism. This chapter focuses on the republican-infidel culture of these years and, in particular, on Richard Carlile and the groups of "zetetics" who supported him and his journals—the inheritors of the materialist culture of the radical Enlightenment, devotees of Paine and advocates of free theological and political inquiry and discussion. In many respects, the zetetics were archetypal plebeian intellectuals. Not only dedicated to exposing the twin evils of kingcraft and priestcraft in all guises, they were also ardent seekers after scientific knowledge, inquirers after rational truths. The term "zetetic" was derived from the Greek word for "seek." Within the culture of plebeian rationalism, there was a deep interplay between republican politics, infidelism, scientific learning, and the pursuit of free discussion and inquiry. Joel Wiener has told Carlile's story, and done it well. While retracing similar ground, my purpose is somewhat different from Wiener's. This chapter sets out to explore the cultural stylistics of this republican-infidel reflourishing, including rationalist notions of language and modes of expression and organization. Among other things, it is about the possibility of creating and communicating rational meaning and knowledge and the conditions that might govern such possibilities.

Reengaging Paine A brief review of Carlile's own progress toward rationalist politics offers a point of departure for considering the revival of Paineite political culture. It also underscores an important contrast between the diffuse and ill-defined dissemination of republican and deist tones within postwar popular radicalism and the more systematic rendering of Paineite rationalism that characterized the Carlileite movement of the 1820s—a contrast between the ways in which rationalist political culture was situated within the broader contours of popular radicalism. Born in the year after the outbreak of the French Revolution in a small Devonshire market town, Carlile witnessed during his childhood the burning of Thomas Paine in effigy. "Many a faggot have I gathered in my youth to burn old Tom Paine!" he recalled later. "In the West of England, his name became quite a substitute for that of Guy Faux."1 Although a promising scholar, Carlile left school at the age of twelve and trained as a tinplate maker, a declining artisanal trade. In 1813, he moved with his wife, Jane, to London, that greatest of artisans' centers. His progress toward radicalism resembled that of so many other artisans: a commitment forged under the combined impact of the French Revolution, the hard final years of the war, and the encroachments of industrial capitalism on the vestiges of

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artisanal independence. By the spring of 1817, he had given up tin-plating for the life of politics, earning his living by hawking William Sherwin's Political Register and T. J. Wooler's Black Dwarf. "Being fired with ardour by the political publications of the day," Carlile shared the dangers of publishers like Wooler, Sherwin, and William Hone. Ironically, given his later opposition to the mass platform, Carlile was first attracted to politics not through reading or attending metropolitan debating clubs, but rather "in consequence of the distress and noise made by public meetings" in 1816. He became an advocate of violent measures, drawn to the prospect of taking an active part "in the much talked-of and much-expected general and revolutionary insurrection."2 Carlile's ambition, however, ran well beyond hawking radical journals and pamphlets; he was driven by literary ambitions, by a desire to enter the republic of letters. In the spring of 1817, he embarked on his life's career as a publisher and journalist when he teamed up with the young and talented William Sherwin to publish Sherwin's Political Register, a journal distinguished by its republican temper, as indicated by its original title, the Republican. As the journal's publisher, Carlile "filled the gap" between Sherwin and the law, affording Sherwin great latitude in what he wrote. It was his willingness to take legal risks, to shield Sherwin from prosecution, that initially recommended Carlile to Sherwin, who, in return, gave him space in his Fleet Street shop.3 Most significantly, it was around this time that Carlile first read the political writings of Paine. He immediately embraced Paine as the only true guide to democratic political change and undertook the mission of making his ideas available to the widest possible public. According to Carlile, Paine's works, which were generally regarded as illegal, had become "so near a total extinction as to be found no where for sale, but in a clandestine manner, and at exorbitant price."4 Carlile perhaps overestimated the difficulty of obtaining cheap copies of Paine's works, given the huge sales during the early 1790s, but he accurately conveys the submerged character of Paine's legacy. As recently as 1815, for example, a correspondent to George Cannon's shortlived Theological Inquirer had suggested that the editor write a biography of Paine, not only to counter loyalist charges about Paine's character, but as a subterfuge, as a way to circulate Paine's ideas without fear of prosecution: [T]hough you dare not print his Rights of Man and Age of Reason word for word in your magazine, yet you can safely tell the world every tiling he has said by way of an analytical critique on his writings, which might be introduced into his biography with the greatest propriety.5

In September 1817, Sherwin's Political Register began reprinting Common Sense; the following month, the journal began serializing The Rights of Man. Carlile and Sherwin also brought out a series of Paine's political works in the form of cheap tracts, which Carlile then collected in a two-volume set with the aim of providing a uniform edition of Paine's complete politi-

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cal works. These were the first popular editions of any of Paine's political writings to be published in the nineteenth century.6 In effect, Carlile and Sherwin challenged the government to prosecute them for publishing the second part of The Rights of Man and A Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation, both texts having brought convictions in the 1790s. But as Sherwin observed in a note to "the Purchasers and Sellers of Paine's Works," conditions had changed: the government could no longer be certain of winning convictions in cases of seditious libel.7 Indeed, in the wake of Wooler's and Hone's legal victories, the prosecution of London's radical publishers temporarily ceased. Carlile, who had been arrested and charged with blasphemy for having reprinted Hone's parodies, was released from King's Bench prison following Hone's acquittals. As he recalled: "In this year in London, the Press was free. The Political works of Thomas Paine, were publicly published and unopposed by the Government, though they had been previously so often prosecuted."8 For a moment, freedom of the printed word seemed a real possibility. By declining to prosecute Carlile, the government appeared to give Paine's political works the status of legal texts. The open publication and sale of the most celebrated texts of English republicanism underpinned the hopes of ultra-radicals for reorientating popular radicalism, for shifting its center of gravity toward an outright commitment to revolutionary republicanism. The reprinting of Paine's writings was also part of a wider campaign to expand the world of radical texts—to retrieve contested works, often of a republican or an infidel bent, for a popular audience. Just as radicals asserted an expanded right to move within public space, London's radical publishers expanded the public domain of the printed word. Thus Sherwin published Robert Southey's suppressed republican drama Wat Tyler, which became one of the great commercial successes of nineteenth-century radical publishing.9 Carlile, for his part, brought out a cheap edition of Edward Sexby's Killing No Murder, the notorious Leveller pamphlet asserting the popular right of tyrannicide. Citing Sexby's tract as an exemplary text, Sherwin published a series of lead articles in his Register in which he played dangerously with the theme of slaying tyrants.10 Whereas, for example, Shelley privately printed and circulated his more daring works, ripping out the title pages to avoid incrimination, the plebeian publishers Sherwin and Carlile forced the issue, seeking to remove all boundaries of permissible literary visibility. In late 1818, Carlile took the final step, publishing The Age of~R.en.son as part of a collection of Paine's Theological Works.11 By openly publishing The Age of Reason, he asserted an unrestricted right to free expression. Suppressed since 1797, the book had been available only through clandestine channels.12 As recently as 1812, Daniel Isaac Eaton had been sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment, including a stint in the pillory outside Newgate Prison, for having published the so-called third part of The Age of Reason.13 No work was better calculated to alarm established opinion; this was part of its appeal. The Age of Reason was the quintessential forbidden

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text. It broke decisively with the literary conventions of eighteenth-century skepticism, which were governed by the classical notion of "double" truth, whereby elite skepticism was kept hidden from vulgar minds in the interests of maintaining social order. The detached urbanity, balanced eloquence, and temperate control of irony that characterize the writings of an author like Gibbon reflected reservations about exposing the anti-Christian case to popular view. Paine shared no such reservations; he made no concessions to polite company.14 His low tone—what one of his critics termed his "popular eloquence and wit"—was what alarmed opponents. The same critic noted, "It is easy to answer Mr. Paine's reasonings: but his confident assertions, vehement declamations, and smart repartees, are very imposing."15 Battle lines were drawn over the social implications of literary style. The French Revolution had yoked together republicanism and antiChristianity. Burke gave early definition to the loyalist view: revolutionary politics and infidelism were inseparably fused, based on a "philosophic revolution" that brought ruin to the French monarchy, moral devastation, and revolutionary savagery.16 It was specifically within the context of the French Revolution that Paine first detailed his own theological views, a dual articulation set against both Christianity and atheism. Francis Place later noted that "nearly all the leading members [of the London Corresponding Society] were either Deists or Atheists." In the event, The Age of Reason split the association.17 Perhaps with this experience in mind, ultra-radicals usually left vague or unstated the link between republican politics and infidelism.18 Sherwin's Political Register remained silent on the subject of Paine's deism. Legal considerations encouraged such silence; Christianity was part of the British constitution, "by law established." The confessional state itself drew attention to religion as a matter of politics.19 It was only during his own imprisonment in 1817 that Carlile began seriously to consider theological questions and to move tentatively toward an appreciation of the inseparable connection between politics and religion. Like many other plebeian freethinkers, Carlile was converted to deism by reading Volney's Ruins of Empires and Paine's Age of Reason; he also read the works of freethinkers such as Gibbon and the American deist Elihu Palmer.20 In January 1819, Carlile also began publishing the Deist: or Moral Philosopher, a periodical in which he reprinted many of the classics of eighteenth-century rationalist thought.21 Carlile did not yet write on theological questions; his views on religion were still taking shape. In an important sense, it was the act of publishing itself that pushed Carlile toward a systematic examination, and ultimately to a rejection, of the claims of all established religion. By 1819, Carlile had emerged from the literary underworld of struggling writers, street hawkers, and would-be publishers, having acquired a reputation as a publisher and bookseller careless of his own and his vendors' safety. Behind the scenes, he was often encouraged by those who shared his principles but not his courage. Early in 1819, Carlile moved into his own shop at 55 Fleet Street. Dubbed the "Temple of Reason," the name

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of the most famous metropolitan infidel club of the 1790s, his shop became the most prominent center for the distribution of radical and freethinking works, as well as a gathering spot for radicals.22 As a member of Henry Hunt's entourage, Carlile operated near the center of metropolitan ultra-radicalism, crossing paths with Spencean revolutionaries and veteran Jacobins and forging his political identity within an extremely open political culture. Meanings were in flux; ideological and associational boundaries lacked sharp definition. Essentially a publisher rather than a public speaker, Carlile joined Henry Hunt on the platform at Peterloo. He managed to escape from Manchester following the attack and returned to London determined to expose the ruthlessness of the Manchester authorities and the complicity of the Liverpool administration. At this point, Sherwin, who had adroitly shielded himself from prosecution, sensed danger and retired from the field, leaving Carlile in control of his journal.23 Boldly resurrecting Sherwin's original title, Carlile launched his own Republican. The shift in the journal's title measures the distance that popular radicalism traveled between 1817 and 1819. In March 1817, Sherwin explained that he was changing the tide of his fledgling journal in order to find a wider readership: "I know, that there are many, who agree with the principle, but who actually are afraid of the paper, bearing such a name, being found in their possession."24 In the late summer of 1819, Carlile announced there was now no choice but that between republican government and military despotism; the new journal's title left no doubt as to the publication's object. In the first issue, Carlile invoked "our great and only prototype, Thomas Paine." Such an explicit commitment to Paineite republicanism was no longer a barrier to huge sales.25 Paineite tones resurfaced just as popular constitutionalism took on renewed confrontational vigor, as radicals fashioned an expanded repertoire of political expression and ritual display. In the closing months of 1819, as ultra-radicals confronted the possibility of insurrection to forestall the government's plans to suppress the democratic movement, there was an intensified linkage between a raw republicanism and a revolutionary call to arms.26 Radicals rarely summoned the experience of revolutionary France directly; more often, they paid oblique or glancing tribute to the revolution's reversal of established authority and to the unprecedented attempt to shape the world anew. By 1819, however, there was a strong republican accent to popular radicalism, particularly in the metropolis. At demonstrations in London, as well as throughout the industrial districts, radicals hoisted caps of liberty and sang the "Marseillaise," "Ca Ira," and "Millions Be Free." Allen Davenport unmasked the bloody history of monarchical rule in Paineite verse: And few have reign'd who have not been a scourge, From mighty Nimrod down to the fourth George! Their tyranny with their succession run, From age to age, from father to the son; Train'd up to conquest, is the royal boy,

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Thomas Davison, the Spencean publisher-printer, brought out a series of London journals of an unmistakably republican and deist cast: Medusa, the London Alfred, the Deists1 Magazine, the Cap of Liberty (edited by James Griffin), and the Theological Comet (edited by Robert Shorter). Medusa,, for example, gave away portraits of Paine with issues of the journal, appealed for a return to first principles based on Reason, and defended the violence of the French Revolution. One of the journal's correspondents reflected on the "astonishing" progress of "truth and reason"; only twenty years before, Paine had been excoriated, but "the gloomy night of superstition and slavery is fast passing. . . . [T]he people are now convinced that all power is concentrated in themselves, and when that power is once exerted crowns and mitres, kings and priests, thrones and monasteries, must totter and fall amidst the shouts of the emancipated millions."28 Both Sherwin and Thomas Clio Rickman, an old friend of Paine's, at last provided full and sympathetic biographies of Paine.29 An open coalescence between revolutionary politics and infidelity had also emerged within sections of the metropolitan radical movement. Popular deist publications proliferated. Medusa was an explicitly deist journal specializing in articles such as "Bible, Versus Bible; or, Which is the Word of God?" and calling on deists publicly to avow their sentiments for the cause of rationalist virtue and morality. The journal rallied support for Carlile, insisting that those "who have hitherto silently acknowledged the solidity of Paine's arguments" must come forward and show their true colors.30 Robert Shorter, editor of the Theological Comet, maintained a weekly Paineite barrage against the hypocrisy and moral inconsistency of the Bible.31 Davison reprinted Volney's classic Ruins of Empires, as well as publishing d'Holbach's System of Nature, the most rigorous statement of materialist atheism, in cheap weekly installments.32 In a rather different key, Robert Wedderburn, a West Indian sailor turned millenarian prophet, hailed the imminent downfall of tyranny, the end of kings and priests. At his Hopkins Street Chapel, he told his Sunday morning audience that although they may burn by the hand of the Common Hangman Mr. Carlile's publications of Paine's Age of Reason, Common Sense, and Rights of Man they cannot burn it out of my Head for although they may hang me I pretty well know that Lord Sidmouth, Lord Casdereagh, Mr. Vansittart and jumping fiddling Monkey George Canning will lose their Heads.33 There was a submerged culture of popular irreligion. According to the Lords' report of 1817, meetings at London's radical clubs "are frequently terminated . . . by profane and seditious songs and parodies of parts of the liturgy, in which the responses are chanted by the whole company."34

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The extent of radical support for deist views is, however, difficult to gauge. It is often difficult to distinguish anticlericalism or mere hostility to the privileges of the religious establishment—both widespread sentiments —from a more systematic deism or atheism. Those who supported what they regarded as Carlile's constitutional right to free expression did not necessarily share his anti-Christian opinions.35 Moreover, there were radicals who suppressed their support for infidel views, fearing either legal prosecution or victimization. Even William Cobbett, usually regarded as a staunch defender of traditional Christianity, had at least flirted with rationalist free thought between 1813 and 1815.36 What can be said is that in London there was widespread opposition to the coordinated efforts of the government and the Society for the Suppression of Vice to silence Carlile; there was also a section of the metropolitan movement, loosely associated with the Spencean party, that was willing openly to embrace infidelism. The plebeian infidelism associated with the Spencean assault constituted a minority current within metropolitan radicalism. But although sales of Davison's journals remained modest,37 the open, sustained, and vigorous character of these and other publications marked a significant departure, fostering loose networks of association and sentiment. Carlile invited prosecution. After the publication of The Age of Reason and the reprinting of Palmer's Principles of Nature as part of the Deist, the Society for the Suppression of Vice almost immediately initiated private prosecutions against Carlile; the attorney general followed with ex officio informations.38 Carlile's cause elicited widespread radical support; his impending trial was viewed as an important test of the temper of metropolitan juries. The Cap of Liberty, without commenting on the soundness of deism, urged prospective jurymen to read The Age ofReasonwith an unbiased mind. James Griffin, the journal's editor, asked why Joanna Southcott was allowed openly "to sell passports to heaven" while deist views were suppressed.39 The British Forum's debate at the Crown and Anchor tavern on the question of Carlile's publication of infidel works occupied three evenings. In his opening speech, Mr. Fleming urged hearers to resist separating questions of politics from those of religion: "The Borough-mongers have artfully contrived to enlist all the parsons, as well as all the canting methodistical preachers on their side; their black-coated army of parsons and preachers is much more effective and formidable than the red-coated army of soldiers." John Gale Jones, a direct link to the London Corresponding Society and perhaps the most accomplished plebeian debater of his day, argued that were Jesus alive he would probably be prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, for "he openly exposed and denounced the false systems and pernicious doctrines of the existing government both in church and state." He defended Carlile in the language and spirit of Paine. Carlile's only crime, he maintained, had been to publish the work of a man "whose system of morality is one of the most pure and benevolent, and whose notions of the Deity are more sublime and magnificent, than any that have ever been given to the world."40 At Wedderburn's Hopkins Street Chapel, following Carlile's

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conviction for blasphemous libel, attenders discussed the question "Whether the refusal of Judge Abbott to Mr. Carlile's reading of the Bible in his defence was to be attributed to a Respect he had for the Scriptures or a Fear that the absurdities and falsehoods it contained should be exposed."41 It was, however, Carlile's publication of his own and others' eyewitness accounts of Peterloo, interspersed with thinly veiled calls for armed resistance, that finally moved the government to take up the host of charges that had piled up against him for both seditious and blasphemous libel. In October 1819, Carlile faced two successive trials at the Guildhall for having published The Age of Reason and The Principles of Nature.*2 He was thus charged with blasphemous libel, which promised greater security of conviction than seditious libel; indeed, once convictions were secured in these two cases, the remaining prosecutions were abandoned. Behind the scenes, Hone helped prepare Carlile's defense; Hunt, Sherwin, and Wooler, among others, accompanied him to court at the Guildhall. According to Carlile, Major John Cartwright borrowed a copy of The Age of Reason, which he had never read, and later confided to Carlile that he saw nothing blasphemous about the work.43 Carlile always felt that had London juries acquitted him, making The Age of Reason a legal text, infidelism would have openly flourished within the radical movement. It was difficult, however, to mount a legal defense against the argument that Christianity was part of the constitution of the realm. Carlile did not bother, preferring to exploit the opportunity to publicize the principles of rationalist free thought and to demonstrate the absurdities and immoralities of Christian belief. In short, he structured his defense around demonstrating the validity of Paine's indictment of the Bible. During the opening day, he read the entire text of The Age of Reason to a packed courtroom, with the intent of creating a cheap and legal version of Paine's work, published as part of the trial proceedings. Chief Justice Abbott refused, however, to allow Carlile to comment freely on passages from the Bible, declaring that he would suffer nothing that impugned the divinity of the Christian religion.44 The juries in Carlile's two cases promptly delivered verdicts of guilty; indeed, the juries showed less tolerance than Abbott for Carlile's defense. The courtroom and the protocols of the law afforded narrow scope for the rationalist defense of deism. Eaton's defense in 1812 had been more succinct and eloquent, but there was probably no language of defense that would have brought Carlile an acquittal. As Gale Jones had predicted, Carlile "comes into court like a foreigner. . . . Every thing that human force or ingenuity can address to a jury will hardly persuade them, who have been accustomed to hear Paine and his writings dressed up as a demon of deformity."45 Despite the contention that blasphemy was not an offense in common law and the argument that the toleration recently granted to nonTrinitarians should extend to deists, hostile London juries consistently returned guilty verdicts against plebeian infidels.46 Carlile's shopworkers, brought to trial during the early 1820s for selling The Ajje of Reason and

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The Principles of Nature, were subjected to continual interruptions from judges who refused to tolerate their carefully prepared statements and prevented them from commenting on the Bible.47 For Carlileites, courtrooms came to represent the antithesis of theaters of free speech: courtrooms were places where reason was silenced. The government's success against Carlile also foreshadowed the defeats that Hunt and other radicals were to suffer during the coming months in courtrooms throughout the country. From Lancashire, Lord Sidmouth received a telling letter of congratulations: "Carlile's verdict is a grand stroke and I have no doubt Hunt's will be similar. That fellow is like Paine, the devil's agent."48 The government's legal campaign played an important role in fragmenting the radical movement. Beyond the disastrous impact of imprisoning the movement's leaders and shutting down its primary means of communications—-the platform and the press—prosecution at law often forced radicals to make explicit what they had left vague. Thus Carlile's decision to defend Paine's deism rather than to press constitutional claims to free expression disappointed certain radicals. In turn, the relentless attempts of the loyalist press and government prosecutors to link Hunt to Carlile's infidelism led Hunt explicitly to dissociate himself from Carlile and Paine.49 Repression and defeat bred fragmentation and clarity.

"Signs of the Mind": Transparent Reason Carlile spent the next six years in Dorchester jail.50 From his prison cell, he conducted what he termed "the war of discussion"; through the Republican, he and his supporters created an open forum for rationalist debate. The Republican (1819-1826) stands as one of the outstanding radical journals of the nineteenth century. Carlile edited the Republican almost exclusively from prison, and his family and co-workers produced the paper from the Temple of Reason. Shut down, burned down, moved up Fleet Street, subjected to the harassment of the government and the Vice Society, the Temple of Reason survived the 1820s. After his wife and his sister, Mary Anne, joined Carlile in prison, his shopworkers took over the crusade of rationalist publication, but they soon found themselves in prison cells, too. From the provinces, men and women traveled to London to participate in the struggle. While other radical journals quickly collapsed as a result of the Six Acts, the Republican stood as a testament to the tough culture of plebeian rationalism. From the dock, brave infidels like the lacemaker Susannah Wright turned courtrooms into platforms for anti-Christian reasoning. Years later, Wright could be found defending her "rational" bookstall in her native Nottingham with a loaded pistol.51 Carlile's intransigent followers withstood the blast of persecution and won a significant victory: after 1824, no further attempts were made in the nineteenth century to interfere with the publication of the works of either Paine or Palmer. The achievement was as much the vendors', shopworkers', and readers' as it was Carlile's.52 And yet the zetetic culture of the 1820s was always that of a distinct

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minority—of men and women standing often on the margins of workingclass political culture—and was increasingly reduced to sectarian status. Despite a shared respect for Paine and support for the cause of free expression, most working-class radicals resisted the brand of systematic rationalism and universalism that zetetic culture demanded. Zetetics cut themselves off from the two most powerfully legitimating discourses within British political culture: constitutionalism and popular Christianity. In the early 1820s, Carlile and his followers distilled a rationalist essence from the complex solution of popular radicalism. There was a formalization of meanings and a closure in the language and culture of plebeian rationalism. This closure was not immediate, but was closely linked to the collapse of radicalism's mass presence. Thus initially, while opposing established religion as a corrupt prop to despotic government, Carlile balanced his own deism against respect for others' Christian beliefs.53 Most striking, republican support for Queen Caroline demonstrated a willingness to bend with the flow of popular radical sentiment and to tolerate highly ambiguous meanings. In the wake of the conspiracies and abortive risings of early 1820, the Queen Caroline movement offered a populist coda to postwar radicalism. The campaign was distinguished by its capacity to encompass the support of an extraordinarily wide range of reformers and to accommodate a bewildering melange of tones and subtones. The Queen Caroline "aesthetic" was by no means confined to the conventions of melodrama or Gothic romance, nor was it merely a latent manifestation of the symbolic appeal of monarchy. As Iain McCalman argues, the popular campaign to crown Caroline was also characterized by a coarse, subversive humor, dissolving of authority. There were strong elements of burlesque at work, a carnivalesque set of reversals: queen for king, counter-monarch for monarch. Radicals offered a satiric reversal of the standard trope of king and people, in which Caroline might assume the guise of the "Queen of Misrule."54 Carlile overcame his understandable reluctance to meddle with questions of monarchical rights, sympathizing with the queen as an incarnation of moral purity, which he contrasted with the debauchery of Carlton House, "a complete brothel."55 Throughout 1820, the Republican reported and commented extensively on the queen's struggle. She was appropriated to the Paineite cause, although at her most radical the queen invoked the rhetoric of popular constitutionalism.56 According to Carlile, however, the struggle between king and queen was conducive to creating republicans by exposing the nonsense of monarchy. He was even willing to recognize Caroline as the "last Queen of Britain," a transitional monarch on the road to republicanism, if she would promise to leave to the people at her death the right to formulate a democratic constitution by means of a national convention.57 It was, of course, deeply ironic that republicans had to rely on Caroline's popularity to undermine the authority of monarchy. The Republican's support for the queen's cause was most remarkable, however, because the cam-

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paign embodied so many elements that Carlile came so emphatically to reject: chauvinism, low humor, theatricality, traditionalism, personalization of politics, and ambiguity. It was a movement whose meanings were often contradictory, relying heavily on disguise, ritual display, and a richly textured interplay of symbol and counter-symbol; in short, it was both immensely popular and decidedly lacking in rational clarity. The boisterous, playful aspects of the agitation were fundamentally at odds with the serious demands of republican reasoning, moving outside the precise contours of rationalist language that came to dominate zetetic culture. During the early 1820s, zetetics turned away from much of the "lower" and more popular tones of radicalism, from elements that were closely associated with the rough-and-tumble of the street, the tavern, and the unlicensed theater, and from meanings often expressed in the form of scurrilous prints, irreverent toasts, and off-color songs. By late 1820, Carlile, who had earlier written a series of political-religious parodies in imitation of Hone, rejected such popular forms of satire and ridicule as ineffective as a means to "convey principles of the mind": I saw that corruptions and delusions of the day required to be attacked with something stronger than squib and pasquinade, which, however it might annoy the subject of attack, or amuse the reader, must be confessed to be but ill adapted to convey principles of the mind. Correct principles require nothing but a clear and forcible statement to have them adopted and admired.58

Carlile's emphasis on the need for clarity of political expression owed much to his reading of Paine. As Olivia Smith comments, for such radicals reading Paine was "virtually a precondition to their writing": Paine was a model for fashioning a vernacular style of political literature.59 Particularly important is the way in which Paine linked directness and transparency of expression to the engendering of democratic politics. Aristocratic government, like aristocratic writing, depends on disguise, on elaborate conventions of deception, craft, and artifice; amid the show of monarchy, truth is kept safely hidden from view, and government-—which is essentially a simple thing— is thus rendered mysterious. Metaphors of concealment ran through Paine's writings. Monarchy, his principal target of attack in The Rights of Mem, is "the master-fraud, which shelters all others." The powers of the Crown are themselves "said to reside in a metaphor, shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling apiece." In contrast, the "excellencies and defects" of representative government are truly "visible to all." For Paine, democratic government, like democratic language, is directly accessible to understanding. Thus the American constitutions "were to liberty, what grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax." The transparency of reason, as encoded in clearly defined words and concepts, is set against the theater of monarchy and the politics of ritual display. Paine has a puritan contempt for public show. Indeed, as J. W. Burrow notes, it is often difficult to disentangle the inherited puritanism from the influence of Enlightenment rationalism. Monarchy is a staged event,

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mere spectacle, "the puppet show of state and aristocracy." Burke is viewed as indulging in theatrical representation, "where facts are manufactured for the sake of show"; the Reflections can be thought of only as "a dramatic performance."60 Reason is not counter- but antitheatrical. What has been termed the "technique of demystification" is central to both Paine's political and theological writings.61 "Mystery," "craft," "fiction," and "superstition" are constantly assailed, stripped of their power to delude under the gaze of pure reason. The task for the democratic writer is to unmask, to make visible the absurdities of aristocratic government and dispel the "incoherent rhapsodies" of writers like Burke: constantly to bring to view that which is hidden. Paine possessed a boundless faith in his readers' innate rational capacities. It is enough merely for truths to be openly stated for reason to triumph over fiction: "Truth, whenever it can fully appear, is a thing so naturally familiar to the mind, that an acquaintance commences at first sight." As the American and French revolutions showed, "the age of fiction and political superstition, and of craft, and mystery is passing away."62 During the early 1820s, the culture of the Carlileite movement was constructed around a rigorous appeal to openness and clarity of rational expression: nothing must be suppressed from view. Like Paine's, Carlile's views on language drew directly on the scientific emphases of seventeenthand eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought. He embraced a designative theory of expressive meaning whereby language, as the philosopher Charles Taylor explains, "is an instrument of control in the assemblage of ideas which is thought or mental discourse." Taylor continues: It is an instrument of control in gaining knowledge of the world as objective process. And so it must be perfectly transparent; it cannot itself be the locus of mystery, that is, of anything which might be irreducible to objectivity. The meanings of words can only consist in the ideas (or things) they designate. The setting up of a designative connection is what gives a word meaning. We set these up in definitions.63

From this perspective, language is dangerously seductive if it cannot be reduced to precise, determinate meanings corresponding to objective truths that exist independently of language itself: there must be a way to get outside language. If they are not to deceive readers, words must be rendered transparent bearers of meaning.64 Not surprisingly, religious writers were the worst offenders against the protocols of transparent or rational language. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, for example, was thus dismissed as constituting "such a burlesque upon language."65 The concern that ideally language should constitute a neutral or transparent medium accounts for the near obsession with definitions that often marked debates in Carlile's journals, on political and social as well as theological issues. Contributions to the Republican were often accompanied by a running commentary or a lengthy reply from Carlile arguing that the author's words did not mean anything, that the author's language fell desperately short of the imperatives of rational debate. For example, Carlile

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chastised Allen Davenport, the Spencean agrarian socialist and poet, for his muddled use of words: "Never countenance an improper play with words. Depend on it, that words are [more] often used as the balls for state jugglers to play their tricks with, than money or metal counters." Words are "the signs of the mind," the measure of intellect: "[W]e can only judge of the mind by the words put forth to our view or hearing. An improper use of words is therefore considered a defect of the mind, as they are the only criterion by which we can judge the intellectual man."66 Only the correct use of words, honed by unrestricted debate and discussion, promised rational consensus and the emergence of truth. Carlile instructed his readers and correspondents: Make use of no words that you cannot define, and then you will find the foundations of unanimity. All the literary quarrels of mankind have their foundations in a wrong conception of words; or a use of wrong words to convey their ideas. If we could agree about words as we can agree about colours, we should never disagree.67 This understanding of language accounts for the extraordinary literalness that marks zetetic culture; it also accounts for the deep suspicion of the ritual or symbolic elements within popular radicalism. Carlile's acrimonious quarrels with Hunt were based not only on differences over political language and ideology—republicanism versus popular constitutionalism— but also on Carlile's rejection of the politics of public display and the mass platform. Zetetic culture turned its back on the more theatrical aspects of popular radicalism as inappropriate to rational expression. The typical zetetic associational mode was the small but studious reading, discussion, or debating group. In 1821 James Affleck, bookseller and ardent materialist, described the goals of the Edinburgh Paineites: "to collect a few men of liberal opinions, with the intention of instructing one another in scientific subjects, or general literature." Early the next year, Affleck suggested that freethinkers adopt the name "zetetick society" to unite Carlile's supporters. Open to all political, theological, and scientific opinions, zetetic societies were to become centers of free inquiry and free discussion. Affleck offered the procedures of the Edinburgh Freethinkers Zetetic Society as a model: As many of our members as choose, and who consider themselves qualified, produce an essay or a lecture in succession each Sunday, on any subject they think proper . . . then, as soon as the essay or lecture is over, the member that delivered it comes from the chair, which is immediately taken by the person who read the Sunday before, and who acts as president for that day, then all the members of the Society have liberty to address the president and comment upon what was delivered, and after they have made their observations, the person that read the essay or lecture makes his reply, after which the president offers his observations, and closes the proceedings of that day.

The Edinburgh zetetics had already collected a library; as soon as funds permitted, they intended to purchase a pair of globes and an orrery, hop-

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ing that "at no very distant period, we may become a large scientific society." Carlile, who had not come across the word "zetetic" before, immediately sanctioned its adoption, understanding the term to mean "a proceeding by inquiry—a seeking after truth."68 During 1822 and 1823, Carlile's supporters founded zetetic societies throughout the country. These associations constituted a loose federation of freethinkers held together by an unshakable commitment to rational discussion and to republican and materialist principles. From these societies came the men and women who risked imprisonment to keep the Temple of Reason open, who acted as local agents for Carlile's publications, and who sent financial contributions to cover legal costs, support imprisoned comrades, and finance the Republican, which had ceased to be a profitable concern. Through the Republican's columns, the zetetic movement was given a sketchy coherence, as Carlile transformed the journal into a corresponding society of freethinkers. Although zetetic culture was always that of a committed minority, with the collapse of Hunt's efforts to establish the Great Northern Union the zetetics were the only organized radical presence to survive the early 1820s. Outside the metropolis, the major centers of zetetic support were in the industrial districts of Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, the East Midlands, and Scotland, particularly Edinburgh.69 The central vision around which zetetic culture was built was that of a community of free and equal speakers, a community in which the power to control words, to fix meaning, and to determine what can or cannot be written or said is removed. There is no authorized or privileged speech, no hierarchy of speakers, but rather a symmetrically ordered relationship between speakers engaged in truly free discussion. Ideological constraints—the mystifying force of superstitious belief—as well as external or institutional constraints are eliminated, making rational consensus possible. It was a profoundly democratic and essentially Utopian vision of communicative conditions, of speech unencumbered by power or restraint, where nothing but the persuasive force of rational argument would prevail among equals dedicated to the pursuit of truth and mutual improvement. As Carlile put it: When all men are prepared for free discussion, all paltry and mischievous distinctions among them will cease. . . . Mutual instruction, and mutual aid, will be the common characteristic of humanity; and words without meaning, and without such meaning as follows demonstration, will be banished from the human language. All our blood-thirsty, blood-spilling, quarrels are about words.70

The vision is not unlike Jiirgen Habermas's elaboration of an "ideal speech situation." The Republican, and later the Lion (1828-1829), were intended to provide a space where conditions of totally free debate, a cherished Enlightenment goal, could prevail: a prefigurement of the republic of reason.71 The zetetics' commitment to free discussion was matched only by their devotion to the written text. This was a profoundly text-bound political culture. At his trial, Carlile provided the jury with twelve copies of both the

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Bible and The Age of Reason so that jurymen might compare the two texts and follow his commentary. Exhaustive textual exegesis, often stultifying in its literal-mindedness, was commonly practiced by Carlile and his supporters. Great pride was taken by zetetics in acquiring books and mastering texts, particularly the works of Paine. William Perry, a Stockport republican and one of Carlile's imprisoned shopworkers, captured the sheer pleasure, determination, and sacrifice this involved for working people living on slender means: I recollect when I purchased the Political Works of Mr. Paine, my means was scanty, but so determined was I to put them in the hands of my children, that I deprived myself of both butter, sugar, and tea. I purchased them as Mr. Sherwin published them, I do not find that my body is any worse for it, but I find a great pleasure in possessing them, and think myself happy that I have it in my power to teach my children the true path to Republicanism.72 Zetetics placed tremendous faith in the power of the printed word, reproducing a characteristically Protestant attitude to its unmediated capacity to move readers to truthful understanding. It was enough, Carlile felt, merely to expose readers to The Age of Reason for the absurdities of the Bible to be disclosed: I would desire nothing more than to put a copy of "The Age of Reason" into the hands of every man who can read and understand the Bible. I would be content to let it operate upon him without any explanations, or scientific enforcement of its doctrines, leaving the priest to oppose it as much as he pleased. Carlile believed that had The Age of Reason been kept in open circulation from its first appearance, "it would ere this, have undermined the Christian Idolatry of this country." The progress of civilization, of universal reason and uniform human understanding, was directly linked to the advent and status of the printing press, which "might justly be called NATURE'S COUNTERPART . . . worthy of being worshipped as one of a Trinity of Gods." The printing press had become "the UNIVERSAL MONARCH; and the Republic of Letters will go on to abolish all minor monarchies, and give freedom to the whole human race, by making it as one nation and one family." The properties of truth were universal: "[T]ruth, when once spoken, will stand for ever, and is alike in all ages and to all persons."73 Only the power of governments to suppress free communication and the reluctance of authors and publishers to resist this coercion stalled the progress of reason. The strong emphasis on arriving at determinate or literal meaning, however, narrowed the register of zetetic expression. Carlile noted the deep impression that Volney's Ruins of Empires had made on him in his early political days, adding that "it has led thousands besides myself to search after truth." But Volney's was "a metaphorical work"; Paine made clear what Volney left "disguised in metaphor."74 The literalness of Paine's own reading, his total disregard in The Age of Reason for allegorical or metaphorical meaning, became a model for zetetic interpretative practice.75 Carlile was

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profoundly suspicious of the imaginative arts as inherently trivial, deceptive, and antirational. Although he published editions of Shelley's Queen Mab (predictably preferring the lengthy explanatory notes to the poetry) and Byron's Cain and The Vision of Judgement, he generally refused to read either fiction or poetry; no doubt he concurred in Bentham's assessment of poetry as "misrepresentation in metre." To Carlile, Godwin's stature as a philosopher was compromised by his having bothered "to educe a mass of fiction under the name of a novel."76 Certainly, not all his readers or shopworkers shared Carlile's narrow views on literary expression. Carlile himself often wrote with verve and occasionally with humor. Nonetheless, there was a characteristic "flatness" to the Republican, more pronounced after 1822, that derived from a theory of rational communication that consistently devalued meanings encoded ("disguised") as metaphor. A brief comparison with Jacobin literary expression during the 1790s suggests the closure entailed by the drive for determinate (rational) meaning and the suppression of figurative and symbolic elements. Popular literary forms associated with chapbook literature—such as allegory, parody, fable, song, poetry, dramatic dialogue, skit, and visionary dream—abound in a journal like Eaton's Politicsfor the People (1793-1795).77 Republicans often assumed the "disguise of metaphor" to considerable effect. In late 1793, for example, Eaton published John Thelwall's fable "King Chaunticlere; or, the Fate of Tyranny," which was first delivered at the Capel Court debating society. In this barnyard parable, the "fine majestic" game cock, portrayed as "a haughty, sanguinary tyrant, nursed in blood and slaughter from his infancy" and "devouring by far the greater part of the grain" provided for the poultry, meets a just end at the hands of farmer Thelwall. The humor is deadly and outrageously seditious: So, I believe, if guillotines had been in fashion, I should have certainly guillotined him: being desirous to be merciful, even in the stroke of death, and knowing, that the instant the brain is separated from the heart . . . pain and consciousness are at end. . . . However, I managed the buisness [sic] very well; for I caught Mr. Tyrant by the head, and dragging him immediately to the block, with a heavy knife in my hand, separated his neck at a blow: and what will surprise you very much, when his fine trappings were stripped off, I found he was no better than a common tame scratch-dunghill pullet: no, nor half so good, for he was tough, and oily, and rank with pollutions of his luxurious vices.78

Here elements of disguise and humor intensified subversive meaning (as well as offering the pretext for a London jury to acquit Eaton on charges of seditious libel). In 1795, Charles Pigott's A Political Dictionary gave the joke a further twist, defining "Cock (game)" as "a sanguinary, cruel tyrant. Vide where the Attorney-General compares a game-cock to our most gracious Sovereign George III." And Eaton installed a new sign at his shop at 74 Newgate Street: a cock and a swine.79 Nearly two decades later, in 1812, after Eaton's one-hour stint in the pillory as part of his sentence for having published the third part of The Age of Reason, a spectator emerged from

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the large crowd assembled outside the Old Bailey to place a cock on the scaffold: the theater of authority was undercut by the counter-theater of the crowd and by the deep interplay between symbol and text.80 Such theatricality was largely alien to zetetic culture, which privileged written texts over ritualized public display and rationalist discourse over meanings structured around the workings of either metaphor or metonymy. Elements of subversive play were usually suppressed; strategies of concealment were eschewed. For Carlile, the requirements of the humorous disguise of satire and parody, no matter how subversive, entailed a surrender, an acknowledgment of the constraints on communication. The commitment to rational meaning was an assertion of autonomy: a freedom from control, from being forced to seek the shelter of disguise. There were, however, costs attached to such commitments to clarity and precision: they severed potential reciprocities between textual and symbolic meanings and gave definition to a separation between rationalist and popular culture. Furthermore, there was an integral relationship between rationalist notions of language and free expression and the style of the Carlileite movement, its modes of organization and agitation. Demands for transparency of expressive meaning paralleled the insistent call for republicans and infidels to reject the clandestine modes that had characterized Paineite political culture and plebeian irreligion. In the Moralist (1823), Carlile ranked secrecy along with the vices of drunkenness, theft, and idleness, proudly proclaiming that he held no secrets in his mind.81 Language, he insisted, must never be compromised to convenience or safety. Due to the largescale arrests of his vendors, Carlile ceased publishing the Republican at the close of 1820 (a suspension that lasted only one year), explaining that "if I adapt my style to the safety of the vendor, I shall defeat my object, and disgrace my title."82 His preference to shut down his journal rather than write in a style that masked meaning demonstrated a determination to keep Paineite politics from slipping toward the edge of clandestine operation. He advised shopworkers facing government prosecution, for whom he often wrote defenses and whose trials he subsequently published, that he preferred an open statement of political and theological belief in court to lawyerly defenses. An acquittal was useful only if a jury sanctioned the publication of the text at issue and thus enlarged the realm of free expression.83 Carlile denounced William Benbow and George Cannon not only for pirating his and Sherwin's edition of Paine's political works, but also for clandestinely publishing an edition of Paine's theological works rather than openly joining the battle for free expression.84 He privately chastised James Wheeler, his Manchester agent and a staunch Paineite, for using an assumed name: "Do all things openly and care for no man."85 Such demands for personal openness are strikingly similar to the desire for transparency between citizen and citizen that animated Jacobins during the French Revolution: the republic of virtue was founded on "an apocalyptic vision of restored transparency" in personal relations as well as in representational expression.86

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Carlile failed to break entirely the code of anonymity that surrounded republican and freethinking authorship and publication. On taking over Sherwin's Political Register, he established the policy that no correspondence or essays would be published in the Republican without the author's real name and address—a policy that lasted less than six months.87 Similarly, on launching a subscription for himself, his family, and his vendors, Carlile urged supporters to send in their names along with their pence; indeed, he encouraged those who could spare no money to forward their names for publication nonetheless, in order to publicize broad support for rationalist politics. Many did. Workingmen and -women (the lists included substantial support from women) often chose, however, to withhold their names for reasons indicated by anonymous signatures such as "My Name would bag me" and "Not ashamed of my name but afraid of my bread."88 The subscription lists themselves are remarkable examples of creative self-expression, embodying the tones of a submerged but robust culture of plebeian anticlericalism and irreligion. The cloak of anonymity often sanctioned a transgressive boldness: "T. J. who thinks the conscience of a Priest is like the virtue of the Prostitute, that yields to the power of filthy Lucre." There was an autobiographical quality to these lists of epithets, an element of anti-Christian witnessing. A constant theme was that of rationalist conversion, of having emerged from darkness into the light of reason: "Once a Deluded Fanatic," "A Female who has been in the bogs of Priestcraft but now got out," "A Christian Priest for seven years, but on reading Mirabaud [i.e., d'Holbach] receded and became ashamed of the profession," "A Christian who has lost his chimeras in the infinity of matter," "A Materialist who after walking fifty years in the dark path of Priesthood discovered the true path of Virtue," "A Female who has been under water with her eyes shut, but now they are open to Reason," "J. T., four years I have been a Methodist, two years a Radical, but now I am a Materialist and a Republican." Along with more straightforward expressions of support—"An Atheist," "A Lover of Truth and Fair Play," "An Enemy of Tyranny," "A Friend to Truth," "A Republican," "An Enemy of the Bridge Street Conspiracy," "A Cosmopolitan," "A Little Radical," "One Adverse to Persecution," "A Female Materialist"—there were those who fashioned more elaborate statements, taking obvious delight in a brand of sustained swearing at authority: William Millward, a Friend to Free Discussion; a Blasphemer, in that he denies the Three Gods in One which Idolaters worship; a Liar, in that he denies what once he acknowledged to be truth; who deems it a greater honour to be buried in a cross-road, with a stake through his body, than to be buried in Westminster Abbey with a Christian Legislator that cut his own throat [i.e., Lord Castlereagh]. John Buckley, a Republican of Long Royd Bridge, a detester of Priestcraft from the high Church Dignitary, to the smooth-faced Hypocritical canting "do put some money in the place" Methodist Parson, in short a real disciple of Mirabaud.89

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The hundreds of subscription lists published in the Republican probably bring us closer to a genuinely popular culture of irreverence, skepticism, and anti-authoritarianism than the lengthy and highly abstract materialist discourses favored by Carlile.

The Republican Present During the early 1820s, Carlile linked the emphasis on rational language and organizational openness to an uncompromising drive for ideological purity. Determined to shake Paineite republicanism and infidelity loose from other tendencies, particularly from any blending with elements of either popular constitutionalism or Christianity, he refused to tolerate the ambiguity on which popular radicalism thrived. The success of democratic politics depended not on mere numbers—the mistake of the postwar movement—but on adherence to well-understood principles: democrats must define their terms: When I see men avowing themselves to be Republicans and Materialists, I can comprehend what they mean, but when I hear them calling themselves political Protestants or Radical Reformers, I cannot perceive what object they have in view, or whether I shall find it a credit or discredit to be associated with them. I think very lighdy of that man who professes to be a Reformer, and who fears to define to what extent he thinks it necessary Reform should be carried.90

Those unwilling to conform to Paineite reasoning were, in effect, excommunicated. The invitation to free political discussion was predicated on the prior certainty that Paine had said most of what needed to be known about democratic politics; indeed, democratic thinking could not exist independently of Paine: "His writings are to politics what grammar is to language; you can come to no correct conclusion without them." Paine's works were "the Alpha and Omega of politics," according to John Smithson, an ardent supporter from Leeds.91 There was an unacknowledged closeness between the authority accorded to Paine's work, particularly The Rights of Man, and a Protestant reverence for the textual authority of Scripture. By 1821, Carlile had urged that the label "radical" be dropped in favor of the term "republican": It is my intention to call upon every man who stiles [sic] himself a Reformer to come up to the Political Principles of Thomas Paine, as laid down in the Second Part of his "Rights of Man." I know they are secredy admired by you all. I shall call upon you to substitute die word Republican for the unmeaning and hacknied [sic] word Radical. . . . The boasted white fej^teaches no useful principles. We will disavow all badges, and resort to the declaration of some welldefined and well understood principles. Badges are too often the converts of treachery.92

This passage is revealing on a number of counts. Perhaps most symptomatic is the opposition drawn between "badges" and "principles." Political

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unity constructed around the "boasted white bat" the "badge" of Huntite allegiance, stands in opposition to well-defined "principles"; the badge is the analogue to the "unmeaning . . . word Radical." Thus radical unity, as practiced by those who remain wedded to popular constitutionalism and to Hunt's personal leadership, is based on vague words and tokens that impede untrammelled understanding—the antithesis of precise or transparent meaning. In contrast, behind the word "Republican" stands not a badge or symbol, but a clarifying text about which there can be no misunderstanding. In an important sense, Carlile regarded the victory of republicanism as already secure, since most "radicals" were, in fact, "secretly" convinced republicans who were merely too intimidated to make public their true politics. On recommencing the Republican in 1822, he assured readers, "Once assume the name and character of Republicans, and act upon that title, and every kind of delusion will recede from your view."93 The public avowal of one's republican and materialist commitment became a pressing concern. Conversely, the refusal to shed the disguise of popular constitutionalism was regarded as a political sin. Thus Wooler, who as a young man had been a professed Paineite, was branded an apostate for allying himself with Major Cartwright and Hunt.94 Since there could be no relapse from Paineite principles founded on reason or honesty, dissimulation was the only possible explanation for such shifts of allegiance. For Paineite republicans, the British constitution was an enslaving fiction. To discuss the "Constitution of England" was to speak about something without definition. The popular demand for a democratic refounding based on the "purity" of Britain's past was superstitious nonsense, the political equivalent of the search for primitive or "pure" Christianity. James Watson, a Leeds Carlileite, characteristically dismissed the notion of a pure British constitution as a "phantom . . . a thing of the imagination," asserting "as a positive fact, that this wonder of wonders, this glory of Englishmen, has not, nor ever had, existence."95 Paineites rejected all forms of inherited authority. As Carlile wrote: "[O]ur maxim should be, to hold nothing sacred but truth. . . . I venerate nothing for antiquity's sake, nor bow before customs that I cannot approve." Cartwright's notion that the Saxon ancestors of the English people could have known anything about political "truth" was "preposterous. . . . They [Anglo-Saxons] were as barbarous and as ignorant, as any society or herd of men now existing on the African soil!" More generally, Carlile observed: "Look where I will into the history of this country, I cannot find a population that excites in my bosom an atom of respect! I see it rapidly improving at the present; there, I reserve all my respect for the future, when it shall have a becoming foundation." The story of England's past was worth retelling only as a cautionary tale, a narrative of errors and misdirection. There was nothing to be sought from and certainly nothing sacred or heroic about the history of the English people. "Progress" was firmly situated in the

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present and future tenses, or seen as something that flourished outside the British Isles—in the United States, Santo Domingo, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Greece, or South America. Paineite allegiance was typically cosmopolitan and presentist. Once discovered, truths were universal and imperishable rather than local and contingent.96 To be a Paineite republican was to cut oneself off from a powerful vocabulary associated with England's past, to reject the emotional force of a radicalized version of popular nationalism and patriotism. To be "a citizen of the world" is a problematic desire: from earliest usage to be a "citizen" is to be linked, to owe allegiance to a particular political space.97 Carlile had no interest in evoking a radical sense of British patriotic virtue; quite the contrary, he directed attention to an international pantheon of contemporary republican heroes. James Affleck went so far as to suggest that republicans drop the name Britain, reverting to the original, pre-Roman Albion: Let servile, fawning, cringing, monarchicalists, continue the name which the conquerors gave i t . . . but I think it behoves Republicans to revive the ancient name of ALBION, the name by which the Island was known to its early inhabitants. It demeans us to acknowledge ourselves and our country by an opprobrious name bestowed upon us by tyrannical and ambitious conquerors.

Acting on Affleck's suggestion, in 1823 Carlile began addressing his writings to the "Republicans of the Island of Albion." Formally, this renaming was historically grounded, a radical summoning of the ancient past, but in effect such gestures lacked any palpable sense of a national past. Indeed, it was its esoteric cast (the term carried radical literary weight; for example, both Blake and Thelwall regularly refer to "Albion" in their poetry) that made the name Albion attractive, distancing republicans from more familiar attachments and meanings.98 Neither Carlile nor Affleck sought to narrate the former glories of Albion. The repudiation of the past, the desire "to begin the world over again" on democratic foundations, was reflected in the exaggerated hopes that republicans invested in the wave of European and Latin American revolutions in the early 1820s—hopes initially linked to support for the abortive insurrections of 1820 in Yorkshire and Scotland and shared by many ultraradicals.99 Universal liberty was again on the agenda. Nothing could have been further from the confused and parochial campaign of Queen Caroline. Real constitution-writing was the order of the day. Throughout the spring of 1820, for example, the Republican serialized the full text of die new Spanish constitution, accompanied by Carlile's detailed commentary on each article.100 Spain, long regarded as the epitome of backwardness and despotic rule, suddenly became a model of democratic progress, a nation in the process of constituting itself. In his New Tear's Address to the Reformers of Great Britain (1821), Carlile pressed the claims of the Spanish constitution: "Britain has no Constitution. If we speak of the Spanish Constitution, we have something tangible; there is substance and meaning as well as sound." The

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revolutionary implications of such claims were not lost on the attorney general, who immediately brought charges of seditious libel against Carlile's sister, Mary Anne, for having published this tract.101 Republican internationalism assumed millenarian tones: time was about to start again, with 1820 as Year One. Carlile began dating his political addresses thus—"in the Year One of the Spanish Revolution"—and continued the practice until the defeat of the revolution by Bourbon forces in 1823. Carlile predicted that "Europe will take on a new character, and the history of the past will be referred to, only to excite our contempt, and to rejoice for the future." A new era of human emancipation was opening: "Nothing has ever before occurred to resemble the present era. The revolutions hitherto have been solitary . . . but now, one feeling seems to pervade all nations." The French Revolution had been derailed by foreign intervention; the need to resort to arms had opened the way to the Terror and eventually to Bonaparte. But the present "march of liberty" was "irresistible. . . . [T]o oppose the growing age of reason, is to war with nature." By the summer of 1822, Carlile looked to an apocalyptic showdown between the international forces of monarchy and those of republicanism: In the next European war, every crown in Europe will be staked against Republicanism, and the Republicans against crown heads or monarchical forms of Government. The battle will be for nothing short of tMs, and that from the conviction, on both sides, that the moment for the last struggle has arrived. . . . The Republicans will have victory or death forced upon them without seeking it. ... The assistance of the whole continent of America, for surely the TransAtlantic Republicans can never remain neuter [sic] in the course of such struggles. It will be a war peculiarly their own: the fleets of Chili [sic] and the United States will fly to support die glorious principles of Republicanism.102

The conscious distancing of rationalist political culture from a shared national past can be seen in the rituals of the zetetics. Carlile's list of recommended toasts for the 1822 commemoration of Paine's birthday—a central part of this political culture—captures the movement's deep commitment to international liberty and brotherhood. It included toasts to Washington; Jefferson; Bolivar "and the Republicans of Columbia [we]"; "Joseph Martin [Jose de San Martin], his companions in arms, with Republicans in Chili [sic] and Peru"; "Peter [Jean-Pierre] Boyer, and the Republicans of the Island of St. Domingo. We despise not their colour, but hail them as brothers"; "The Republicans of Spain and Portugal, and may they annihilate the last vestige of Kingcraft and Priestcraft"; "The French Revolution, and may the next be free of both a Robespierre and a Buonaparte"; and "Success to the Greeks, if they fight for the Representative System of Government." At Leeds, fifty "disciples of Nature" toasted "Success to the Republicans in all the four quarters of the Globe, who are now contending for the pure principles of election." It was, however, as if Britain were bereft of a libertarian or radical tradition of its own; for the zetetics, as for Paine, there was no "usable" national past.103

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Yet Carlile was never comfortable with the ritual elements or with the boisterous and profane aspects of popular radicalism. He contrasted traditional political dining, which invited "intoxication and gluttony" and was structured around unthinking repetition of tired toasts and songs, to zetetic celebration, which occasioned "a festival of sentiment-—a feast for the mind . . . a festival of reason." Joseph Lawton, a member of the Salford Zetetic Society, nonetheless complained that celebrating of the birthdays of public characters and "preserving and almost idolizing portraits, statues, and relics" should be renounced as "a species of idolatry." Carlile, who had himself commissioned a statue of Paine for his shop and offered small busts of Paine for sale, agreed with Lawton, but defended the celebration of Paine's birthday purely on the grounds that "the principles of Thomas Paine are the rising principles of the age."104 The dinners held to commemorate Paine's birth were really celebrations of a ritualized present rather than evocations of a venerated past. Toasts to Paine and to various Enlightenment philosophers—like the one given at Bolton to "The immortal memory of Helvetius, Voltaire, Mirabaud, Condorcet, Volney, Elihu Palmer, Shelley, and all others, whose writings may have contributed to the advancement of Civil and Religious Liberty"— were tributes paid to Reason and Progress.105 Zetetic dining inscribed the promise of a future based on universal political and philosophical principles: on imperishable truths. Speaking at a dinner in Leeds, John Smithson suggested that language itself, so deeply embedded in the past and central to any definition of national identity, might succumb to universal redesign: [I]t would be far better if the language was corrected, and every word printed according to its proper pronunciation, and such new letters added as would properly distinguish the sound of every syllable in the spelling of it, and when we have governors of our own choosing in every country . . . it would be better for all the world to adopt one language, one date, one specie, one weight, and one measure, and be as one family.106

The world must be spoken and measured anew. The zetetics articulated the ethos of modernism: the longing for free action "that knows no past," for an immaculate, unmediated, and stable present.107

Plebeian Philosophers and Their Intellectual World In January 1823, Bath's zetetics concluded their celebration of Paine's birthday with the toast: "May the efforts of the Philosopher and Man of Science drive from the World that Superstition which has enslaved and brutalized mankind."108 Zetetics reinscribed the millenarian role that radicals of the late eighteenth century had attributed to science.109 Free scientific inquiry promised to release human minds from the bondage of religious bigotry. The realms of human freedom and progress depended 011 the triumph of scientific truth over religious nonsense—of reason over antireason. Science and religion stood as irreconcilable opposites: "Science is the Anti-Christ," declared Carlile.110

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The Enlightenment commitment to science is, of course, well known, although in Britain this did not prevent an accommodation between scientific learning and religion. The 1790s, however, were marked by a strong evangelical attack on rationally constructed natural theology in favor of revealed truth. Moreover, various recent scientific discoveries had cast into doubt portions of the Bible, increasing uncertainties about the relationship between science and religion.111 What is striking about hard-core zetetics is the consistency and rigor with which they came to embrace scientific materialism and to reject all expressions of religious belief. Carlile showed little patience for the genteel school of eighteenth-century British skepticism, exemplified by writers such as Peter Annet, David Hume, and Anthony Collins; he dismissed "the half-measured Deists of the last century" for having refused to press doubts to logical conclusions or having wrapped their works in obscure or evasive language.112 The intellectual culture of plebeian rationalism was marked by a directness, comprehensiveness, and coherence as well as a powerful reductive quality. "I test history by physics, religions by physics, gods by physics and morals by physics," announced Carlile.113 The appeal to the authority of scientific learning not only underpinned the rationalist attack on religious belief, but also enabled infidels to mediate the worlds of elite and popular learning and to cast themselves in the roles of plebeian "philosophers." Science provided a position from which to speak in the cultural world. The language of science was itself the ultimate expression of reason— transparent, antimetaphorical, universal. Science conformed to the value that rationalists placed on establishing precise meanings and reinforced their deep suspicion of figurative language and symbolism. Science was everything that religion was not. Whereas religion depended on mystery, ritualism, and symbolic display, science relied on self-evident, demonstrable truth, on things that could be brought clearly into view. Science offered the position outside "local" language from which truths might be discovered and neutrally described. Nature's meanings were stable and universal, free from the play of language; the object of science was to make legible Nature's universal text.114 The language of science was, therefore, uniquely open to human comprehension and agreement; science stood opposed to religion's Tower of Babel. Whereas science provided a language of natural understanding around which humankind might peacefully unite, religion was superstitious and particularistic, dividing humankind into warring camps of fanatical misunderstanding. Founded on the discovery and articulation of Nature's timeless laws, science was both universal and fundamentally antihistorical. Science knew no past, acknowledging only present truths while anticipating the unlimited promise of future discovery. Circumscribed by neither place nor time, science was a partner to the cause of republican internationalism. Moreover, zetetics viewed the practice of science as antihierarchical, a democratic field of knowledge, in direct contrast to religion's priestly hierarchies. The authority of scientific reasoning did not derive from the status of the speaker or writer, but arose purely from scientific truth as expressed in clear

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statements of fact. The scientist, unlike the prelate, paid homage only to truths open to verification and debate. Paine served as a model. Whereas eighteenth-century British deism cast its attack on the Bible primarily in terms of its irrationality, immorality, and inadequate historical veracity, Paine pressed science, in the form of a popularized Newtonianism, into the service of deism. Throughout his life, he maintained an active interest in scientific inquiry and experimentation. A man of practical science himself (he was the inventor of the single-arch iron bridge), Paine recalled, "The natural bent of my mind was to science."115 It was to his early grounding in science, particularly to his study of mathematics, that Sherwin traced the precision and simplicity of Paine's political and theological writings, enabling him "to reduce abstruseness to simplicity, to understand difficult subjects himself, and to render them intelligible to others."116 According to Paine, learning did not consist "in the knowledge of languages, but in the knowledge of things to which language gives names." Carlile thus claimed that he himself was doing what Bacon had done two hundred years before—"correcting words by things and rooting out of the language those words which have no relation to tilings."117 Scientific discourse was one of correspondence: names and things were one and the same. Elite education was, however, traditionally founded on the knowledge of classical languages; writers modeled their English composition on classical texts in terms of both formal rhetorical style and grammar.118 Yet Paine had destroyed the veracity of the Bible unaided by a knowledge of any classical language. The related questions "What constitutes learning?" and "Who is learned?" were contested issues; the question of who could speak or write with authority was linked in turn to notions of linguistic or rhetorical competence. For zetetics, the knowledge of dead languages constituted a form of monopoly: the private code of privilege. Robert Armstrong, a watch- and clockmaker from Stokesly, North Riding, chafed under the local vicar's presumption that a person was unqualified to discuss theological matters "unless he has wasted the best part of his youth stultifying his intellects, by poring into antiquity, through the muddy and polluted channels of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew." Commenting on the antipathy of public writers for Paine's work, Allen Davenport observed: These writers style themselves literati, or the learned; but they may be more fairly called literary despots.... [T]he Republic of Letters [has been converted] into a literary despotism by excluding genius, talents, and abilities, be they ever so brilliant, except the possessor be either very opulent, or can chatter Greek and Latin fluently, the proper pronunciation of which the literati themselves have no more idea of than the pens have with which they write.119

Paine threw open the literary doors of anti-Christian thought; this was his great achievement. During the early 1820s, however, Carlile and his closest supporters formally broke with Paine's theology, moving from deism to a more rigorous, scientifically founded atheism. Reflecting on his own advocacy of "dashing all prejudices without ceremony," Carlile noted that the

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"moment I perceived that Materialism was a clearer and more comprehensible system than Mr. Paine's Deism, I advanced without hesitation and avowed the former."120 Within rationalist circles, there was a shift of textual allegiances; materialist philosophy was decidedly French. While The Age of Reason remained the starting point for theological discussion, it was not a "philosophical" work. Hard-core zetetics pored over translations of Helvetius, Diderot, Condorcet, and Mably. Above all, they embraced the highly systematic, scientific, and learned materialism of d'Holbach (usually referred to by his pen-name, Mirabaud), whose two-volume System of Nature became the zetetics' bible.121 Paine's opening statement of belief in The Age of Reason, his views on "a future state," and his proposals for alternative forms of theophilanthropist worship were seen as residues of superstition, a failure of rationalist nerve.122 As William Campion, a Lancashire shoemaker and one of Carlile's shopworkers, declared, "The word God is but a cloak for our ignorance, and a bar to all social improvement." Rather than form deistical churches, Carlile maintained, zetetics should establish temples of science: "[L]ectures on science can form the only utility in congregating bodies of people within the walls of a building."123 Carlile and zetetics like Campion made precisely the move that Paine had hoped to foreclose, rejecting all notions of an immaterial soul as well as of an intelligent or a designing god: nothing existed beyond matter in a continual state of motion and change. "[T]o this one simple word matter I will reduce every thing mental or corporeal that can be suggested to me," wrote Carlile.124 On restarting the Republican in 1822, Carlile announced that a greater portion of the journal would be devoted to "warfare with theological or mythological idolatry." He explained: "A very few aphorisms will give expression to every necessaiy political sentiment, but the mazes of theology are boundless, and more difficult of correct explanation. In all the items of Reform, this is by far the most important."125 Throughout the 1820s, Carlile insisted on the inseparability of republicanism and infidelism: "The craft of Monarchy and Priesthood is a joint craft, and he that is the advocate of one cannot consistently oppose the other."126 As the decade wore on, however, the title of his journal represented an increasingly muted commitment as Carlile, in effect, uncoupled theological from political discussion. In part, this reflected the general political disengagement of these years, including the defeat of the republican revolutions in Europe. There was also the troubling example of Paine's America. As Cobbett delighted in pointing out, Carlile's brand of anti-Christianity would receive rough justice on republican shores.127 Republican institutions offered no guarantee against the irrational sway that religion held over the minds of untutored citizens. But perhaps the most important clue to understanding the turn toward theological and scientific debate—toward "philosophy"—is Carlile's assertion that politics could be reduced to "a few aphorisms," whereas "the mazes of theology arc boundless." All of reality might be reduced to the single word "matter," but discussions about what constituted "matter" or the character of intellect could endlessly occupy ingenious minds predisposed to ab-

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stractions.128 The challenge of philosophical exchange promised opportunities for zetetics to prove their intellectual self-worth, to wield the powerful weapons of materialism and natural knowledge against the fortress of learned culture. Access to a privileged form of knowledge was part of the movement's attraction. If science was, indeed, the anti-Christ, it was the man of science who brought the message of rationalist deliverance. The man of science held a key position in the contest over learning, language, and belief; he was the new intellectual, poised to supersede the traditional intellectual authority of the priest and the classical scholar. The "scientist," as opposed to the gentleman amateur, was still struggling to gain full professional recognition; scientists stood at the boundary defining men of letters.129 Carlile did not include philosophers or scientists "in the sweeping term of aristocrats. . . . The labourers themselves are not of more importance than this class of men." A representative system of government would turn churches into temples of science and cherish the philosopher instead of the priest.130 Men of science—particularly chemists, geologists, and astronomers—had, in fact, already laid the foundations of knowledge necessary to break the hold of priestly superstition: Our Chemists have proved themselves the greatest of all revolutionists, for they have silently and scientifically undermined all die dogmas of the priest. . . . Every species of matter has been brought to dissolution, and its elementary properties investigated, by their crucibles and fires, or their galvanic batteries, and we have been practically and scientifically shewn in what manner Nature performs her dissolutions and regenerations.

In his Address to Men of 'Science (1821), Carlile called on scientists publicly to join him in the battle against priestcraft. It was their duty as true scholars to combat all error and imposture; it was reserved to them to deliver the deathblow to all religious belief. Carlile offered himself as the medium through which they might escape legal prosecution. He pledged "that there is no truth that any Man of Science will write" that he would not publish.131 During the immediate postwar years, the cause of free inquiry and discussion offered a possible point of convergence between plebeian rationalism and the concerns of certain scientists.132 The tribulations of William Lawrence were a case in point. In 1816 Lawrence, newly appointed professor of anatomy and surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons, had offended the medical establishment by delivering a series of lectures in which he attacked John Hunter's vital-life theory.133 Most significantly, he rejected the notion of the independent and separate nature of mind and body, a materialist position easily conflated into a denial of the existence of the soul.134 In a subsequent series of lectures, Lawrence defended himself, his skepticism, and his alleged reliance on the work of French physiologists in terms of internationalism, rational progress, and free inquiry: Science, the partisan of no country, but die beneficent patroness of all, has liberally opened a temple, where all may meet. She never inquires about the coun-

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Proclaiming that the "philosopher" should "make the world his country," he argued that "reason and free inquiry are the only effectual antidotes of error." The United States, exhibiting "the grand and animating spectacle of a country sacred to civil liberty," promised such freedom, in contrast to "the worn out despotisms of the Old World."135 There is a striking correspondence between Lawrence's vision of a scientific community as a cosmopolitan fraternity engaged in the free search for rational truth and Carlile's writings on republicanism, science, and free speech. But unlike Carlile, in 1819 Lawrence recanted in order to save his career; he also agreed to suppress further publication of his original lectures. Lawrence arranged, however, for the radical publisher Benbow (soon to be prosecuted for publishing pornography in Rambler's Magazine) to bring out a clandestine edition of his lectures. In 1822, controversy again broke out over various republications of his work; Lawrence again made his peace with authority. Carlile republished Lawrence's lectures in twice-weekly numbers despite Lawrence's formal protests.136 The Republican also ran Lawrence's recantation, which included a formal declaration of his faith in the New Testament, in double columns beside Galileo's abjuration. Carlile, who made a career out of his own refusal to be silenced, commented that he did not blame Lawrence for having recanted any more than he blamed Galileo for having surrendered to the Catholic Church, but he denounced other surgeons for allowing Lawrence to be silenced by priests.137 The causes of free scientific inquiry and plebeian infidelism might cross paths, but generally zetetics were unable directly to enlist the aid of men of science. James Affleck reported that the Edinburgh zetetics would like to get "a scientific gentleman or two to give us an occasional lecture," but added that not only were they unable to pay a regular lecturer, but "no man bred to science will be likely to come near us, as the name of lecturing to a society of Deists would, at present, prevent him from ever getting further employment."138 They were thus thrown back on their own limited intellectual resources. Carlile and his band of plebeian philosophers assumed the work effusing natural knowledge to the antireligious crusade. They were aided in their materialist endeavors "by the multiplying army of peripatetic lecturers, their globes and orrerys and oxyhydrogen microscopes," by extraordinary individuals like Rowland Detrosier, who began his working life in a cotton factory before turning to a career as a popular scientific lecturer and deist preacher.139 They also turned to the newly founded mechanics' institutes for scientific reading and discussion, and even to the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. As Detrosier told working-class audiences, scientific learning was open to those having nothing to boast beyond the ordinary rate of talent with which our species is blest. . . . [O]ur want of riches does not exclude us from the temple

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of science. . . . The page of nature is liberally opened to our view, and the only fee demanded for liberty to inspect its almost infinite contents, is attention.

Carlile thought science "the peculiar property of Mechanics," but, more important, he believed that science constituted an unrestricted field of knowledge poised beyond class.140 Since it was not yet fully incorporated into hegemonic intellectual culture, science might, therefore, confer legitimacy on those who were themselves on the cultural margin, providing a fluid set of meanings for groups or individuals engaged in fashioning alternative social or intellectual identities.141 In 1826, the Republican carried the obituary of the precocious Richard Hassell, who had died at the age of twenty-five. Brought up in Carlile's home county of Dorset, Hassell had worked as a carter; "he long endured this life, much against his soaring disposition." Converted to atheism after visiting Carlile in prison, Hassell volunteered as a shopworker and moved to the metropolis. In 1824, he was arrested for selling The Age of Reason and sentenced to two years in prison. As he told the jury at his trial, from an early age he had "always had a strong desire to investigate the foundations of every opinion which I heard preached to the world." Hassell co-edited the Newgate Monthly Magazine, a journal produced by Carlile's imprisoned shopworkers. He also became a regular correspondent to the Mechanics' Magazine, the journal of the mechanics' institute movement. Although lacking in formal education, Hassell taught himself French and developed a strong interest in scientific topics. On his release from prison, he went to work in Carlile's printing office, proofreading, translating, and typesetting. Before his death, arrangements were being made for him to edit a new journal of his own. The obituary concludes, "Hassell was one of those village geniuses which rise above the clod-brains of surrounding human beings, and continue to rise by reflections on the imperfections of others."142 One cannot fail to be impressed by such ambitious intellectualism. But HasselPs obituary suggests the strong crosscurrent of elitism that flowed against the mainstream of egalitarianism. Zetetic culture was based on humble men and women of learning—intelligent people with unrealized potential, anxious to pit themselves against the world of elite learning. Large portions of the Republican were taken up by lengthy epistolary exchanges between Carlile or other correspondents and clergymen willing to enter into public debate. The journal was full of contributions from readers eager to exhibit their talent, constructing intricate materialist theories, exposing the absurdities of the Bible, composing odes to Paine. A single issue of the Lion, for example, included a reader's translation of a passage from the memoirs of Madame Roland describing her loss of Christian faith, a letter from a New York correspondent on the merits and defects of various translations of Volney's Ruins of Empires, and a reader's note on "A Further Enquiry into Sir Isaac Newton's Theory of Tides."143 Hungry for knowledge, Carlile's shopworkers turned Newgate prison into a college of self-educa-

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tion. From his prison cell, John Clarke, "a humble mechanic" and former Methodist, addressed a series of letters to the eminent Christian scholar Adam Clarke carefully scrutinizing the inconsistencies and absurdities of the Gospels.144 Terms such as "scholar," "genius," and "philosopher" carried particular weight within zetetic circles. This was a movement of clever folks. As Carlile trumpeted in 1828: "It is much to the merit of what is called Infidelity, that it is embraced by almost every clever man in the country. Go where I will, and hear of extraordinary genius, I find it above the superstition of the day."145 True to radical Enlightenment values, Carlile believed that all people were capable of rational understanding, that it was merely lack of education that enabled superstition and tyranny to prevail. But mass ignorance loomed as a daunting fortress secured against reason and liberty. Hassell had distinguished himself as a "village genius" by rising above the surrounding "clod-brains"; he had crossed a frontier of learning that promised both to liberate and to separate him from the general walk of humanity. Indeed, the desire to forge identities anew, to refashion oneself as a writer or scholar, may be as important as strong feelings of corporate social or class identity in understanding plebeian intellectuals like Carlile and Hassell and assessing the appeal of rationalist culture. Individuals, like nations, could reconstitute themselves, seeking freedom from the prescriptive force of their own past. Carlile's own autobiographical reflections describe how someone "bred as a mechanic" might aspire to the world of learning.146 One senses in these accounts an intense desire for independence, a strong streak of antiauthoritarianism, and a driving ambition for individual self-improvement. If not expressing outright contempt for his trade, no pride is taken in the status or skills of his craft. Dignity is conferred by scholarship, not manual labor. Independence and equality are achieved through learning, through liberation from work. Thus Carlile reflected on having rescued himself from his trade as a tinplate maker: "Never a Negro slave obtained his freedom with more joy than I quitted the mechanic's bench for a situation in which I could better improve my mind." Extrapolating from his own experience, he later observed: The progress of knowledge affords to every man the means to educate himself, and it is by education alone that the majority can be brought out of a state of servitude to the minority.... But as yesterday I was a journeyman mechanic, subject to many oppressions; today I feel, that I am the equal of, and independent of, every man in the world. Education alone has made this change; for, I am neither better clothed, nor better fed, than I was occasionally as a journeyman mechanic, and possess but little more of what is called property.147 Carlile left the workshop, but he explicitly sought a working-class readership, refusing to adapt his literary style to more learned tastes: It has been said to me by more than one person: "Let us write in a style of Hume and Gibbon, and seek readers of the higher classes." I answer no; I know

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nothing of the so-called higher classes but that they are robbers; I will work towards the raising of the working class above them. . . . I as a mechanic will allow no class to be higher than myself.148

Yet few could keep pace with the intense intellectualism that became the hallmark of zetetic culture. There were those like William Fitton, Royton's veteran radical, who not only rejected atheism as based on scientific truth, but found the plebeian claim to the status of "philosopher" pretentious: "I affect to be nothing more than a plain man; I have no ambition to pass in the world for a great learned philosopher."149 The highly abstract discussions featured in the Republican's columns also jeopardized the rapport that Paine had established between Enlightenment theology and a robust tradition of popular irreligion. Although irreverent ridicule remained current within zetetic circles, it was subordinate to a more serious turn of mind. The tavern world of profane sing-songs and outrageous parodies was hardly in keeping with the rationalist march of the mind. The low, bawdy, blasphemous inflections to be found among the "rough" Spenceans of the metropolis or within an older mode of Jacobin debating clubs were increasingly alien to the zetetic milieu.150 Zetetics were frequently caught between cultural worlds, stubbornly seeking recognition from the very culture they sought to dislodge. Perhaps, as Jacques Ranciere argues with regard to certain French artisans and their self-appointed spokesmen in the 1830s and 1840s, the marginality of trades such as shoemaking, tailoring, and tin-plating created alienated artisans who, rather than extolling the virtues of their trade, turned from the monotony and insecurity of their work to visionary world views and sought recognition as intellectuals.151 The Spencean socialist Thomas Preston, who only narrowly escaped the gallows for his part in the Spa Fields riots, wrote in terms very similar to Carlile's about his trade of shoemaking: "I was . . . bound to the profession of which I have been since the victim and the slave."152 Similarly, working as a carter was "much against" Hassell's "soaring disposition." The republic of radical letters might offer a measure of personal autonomy that could no longer be found at work. The act of writing itself, as Ranciere suggests, constituted a "symbolic rupture," empowering these plebeian intellectuals in the cause of liberty and simultaneously distancing them from the world of the artisan's workbench.153 Similar motivations may also help to explain the appeal of Carlile's materialist and antihierarchical reasoning to some members of the lower professions, representatives of what Gibbon Wakefield called the "uneasy class": surgeons, out-of-work attorneys, apothecaries, preachers, and teachers.154 The invitation to reason, free expression, and inquiry also proved profoundly liberating for certain women drawn from both working-class and middle-class backgrounds. Although women were a minority presence in the world of plebeian rationalism, members of female republican societies in Manchester, Blackburn, Ashton, Bolton, and Bath were among the Republican's most zealous correspondents and subscribers. Without the

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support of Jane Carlile, Mary Anne Carlile, Susannah Wright, and several shopworkers' wives who stepped into the breach after their husbands' arrests, the Temple of Reason would certainly have fallen. On returning home to Sheffield following his prison sentence, William Holmes found his wife "eager to stand forward as a martyr to free discussion. . . . She is reading Mirabaud, and aims at being a philosopher."155 Mary Gregory, a London supporter, described how reading the Republican had changed her world view. Formerly, she had retreated from the room when her husband began reading the Republican, "terrified" at being exposed to Carlile's religious views, but no longer: The case is altered, for the moment your book comes into the house, I am anxious to read it. ... Had I never read your "Republican," I should always have been miserable and in fear of everlasting torment for sins committed on this earth. . . . Sir, I hope there is not a married man who takes your "Republican" but reads it to his wife. I fear they do not for if they did I think they would have come forward before this.156

Carlile argued for open and equal discussion between women and men: the home should become "the theatre of free discussion . . . and every woman its patron." Dedicating the Republican for 1825 "To Woman, Man's Equal," Carlile contended that there were no matters "unbecoming" to the inquisitiveness of women and no useful positions in society to which women should not aspire. His own daughter was given the name Hypatia, "from the celebrated female philosopher of that name, who was barbarously murdered by some Christian savages, called Monks."157 Demands for equal social and political rights for women were most persuasively grounded on strictly rationalist premises. Women concerned specifically with a democratic reordering of gender relations gravitated toward republican-infidel circles and the Owenite cause. Moreover, as zetetics distanced themselves from a rougher artisanal milieu—a male-centered culture often dominated by heavy drinking and sustained absence from the home—a "feminized" infidel movement might recommend itself to freethinking women. Thus Mary Gregory argued that female rights in free discussion required "a great reformation in husbands, as well as the government. .. . How is it possible we should become politicians or philosophers, or acquire useful knowledge, when they are at the alehouse till midnight, and then return home without saying a word to us?"158 Carlile, indeed, proposed a revolution in the relations between men and women, maintaining that "in the absence of equality, there cannot be wedded happiness."159 A pioneering advocate of birth control, he also argued that women should be allowed the same kinds of sexual choices as men and should be able freely to satisfy their sexual needs; divorce should be available with the consent of either party. His explicit—and thus highly controversial—pamphlet Every Woman's Book (1826) not only served as an instructional manual on contraception, but also outlined a libertarian theory of sexual desire. Carlile called on women to reject the repressive teachings of

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Christianity (the cross being a phallic emblem of irrationality). Passion, he contended, is a natural drive, like hunger or thirst: if love were freely expressed, "desire would never be tyrannically suppressed"; women, possessed of the same sexual instincts as men, should have an equal right to make advances in the cause of genuine love. He even advocated Temples of Venus for the controlled, healthy satisfaction of both female and male desire outside marriage.160 In contrast to Mary Wollstonecraft, who, like many female feminists of the early nineteenth century, cautioned against the "tumultuous" impulse of female desire in the higher interest of rational fellowship between the sexes, Carlile showed no fear of releasing female passion; his view of freelove as linked to free inquiry owed more to Shelley than to Wollstonecraft.161 Most dramatic was the union that Carlile and Eliza Sharpies formed. A chance reading of the Republican in the late 1820s, followed by a lengthy correspondence with Carlile, converted Sharpies to infidelism and induced her to leave a comfortable middle-class home in Bolton to follow Carlile; she became his "moral wife" in the early 1830s. Richard and Jane Carlile had been unhappily married for many years and had earlier decided to live separately. In 1832, Sharpies lectured regularly at the Rotunda, the center of radical free expression during the reform crisis. "The Lady of the Rotunda," as Sharpies was known, presented the alarming spectacle of a woman who publicly disputed orthodox Christian belief and denounced established religion as the original cause of secular tyranny.162 The motivations of female zetetics were complex. The desire for selfeducation and improvement was deeply felt, as was the drive for equality in both politics and personal relationships. Sharpies broke free of the stultified domestic life of an unmarried middle-class woman, moving from the shelter of her family's provincial home to the free-for-all of London politics; in the process, she transformed herself into "an inquirer, thinker, reasoner and speaker." She declared herself "reborn," a "new being," "an independent woman, bound by nothing but moral ties."163 Not unlike Hassell and other male zetetics who found their ambitions confined by their daily labors, she reforged her identity, taking on the role of an independent philosopher. Perhaps women such as Gregory, Sharpies, and Wright also shared an intensified sense of displacement that underpinned their radical commitment. As Barbara Taylor writes, the early nineteenth century was a highly unstable period in male-female relations.164 However, it is also the case that most women were not intent on remodeling the institution of marriage based on greater informality or flexibility, but rather sought increased protection against their husbands' and lovers' possible neglect of marital and familial responsibilities. Moreover, the language of women's protest typically drew legitimacy from claims associated with female responsibilities within the family and community, often invoking a rhetoric of Christian compassion. Women like Sharpies and Wright, in common with zetetic culture more generally, usually spoke from outside the context of local communities. Grounding women's social and

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political claims on purely rationalist or liberal concepts of individual rights undercut a moral vocabulary whereby women gained the power to protest against injustice based on their place within the family and community. The disinterested power of female speech on behalf of general human welfare derived from women's distinct roles as mothers and wives—as providers— from sexual difference rather than affinity.165 Nor were zetetics entirely free of certain more conventional views on gender. At least in the present state of society, women often were seen as less inclined toward progressive or scientifically founded opinion than men. Carlile thought the female mind "more susceptible of imagery than the male," suffering more, therefore, from the "bad effects of religion." In an attempt to explain the difficulty of attracting more women to infidelism, Carlile noted the movement's lack of spectacle and public assemblies: "We have as yet, no public assemblies of a Sunday, but those which are religious. We want irreligious assemblies, assemblies of instruction and amusement of a Sunday, to draw away the ladies from the stultifying church and conventicle."166 As Carlile sensed, the absence of public ceremony may have had particular significance for women. It was no coincidence that large numbers of women were first publicly drawn into popular radicalism by the great demonstrations of 1819—expansive communal celebrations marked by ritualized performance. Carlile and the zetetics came to regard such occasions as spectacles of unreason. Access to zetetic culture was primarily through the printed word, setting a definite educational threshold for participation. Moreover, the emphasis on private reading, an activity centered on an individual engagement between a reader and a text, contrasts with popular radicalism's greater reliance on oral and visual modes more conducive to generating a sense of community.167 Paradoxically, the style or communicative mode of Carlileite rationalism may have rendered zetetic culture less available to women than more formal commitments might at first suggest, and in certain respects may have rendered it less open to female involvement than popular radicalism. To some extent, of course, the limitations on female participation were merely indicative of a more general condition: a movement of philosophers was by definition a minority affair. The style of rationalist organization, particularly the strong reliance on the printed word and the attendant displacement of ritual, drew a tight boundary around the zetetics' universe. But the zetetics' popular appeal was restricted in other ways. There was an ambivalence to die scientific cast of mind, most apparent at those points at which science lent authority to an ethos of individualism and a critique of working-class behavior. For example, zetetic support for phrenology as an "infidel science" was radical in its materialist thrust and its egalitarian tones; but Carlile rejected Owen's request to consider socialist communitariaiiism on the "scientific" grounds that "phrenological inequalities of human disposition rendered any principle of general cooperation for equality . . . apparently impracticable."168 Moreover, as "neutral" principles of social science were brought to bear on reforming or instructing working-class behavior, plebeian rationalists drew

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close to the agenda of social reformers such as Francis Place and the Benthamites and to the emergent values of liberal culture. The cult of reason did not break neatly along class lines. Carlile's views on religion, science, law, language, and sexual desire were remarkably similar to those of Bentham, as was his emphasis on individual social agency.169 Many radicals harbored well-founded suspicions that arguments for population limitation were disguised attempts to control the lives of working people and to rationalize lower wages in the name of iron laws of labor supply and demand; for most working-class radicals, there was too strong a hint of the Reverend Thomas Malthus in Carlile's writings on contraception.170 Much influenced by his contact with Place and by the laissez-faire writings of Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and James Mill, Carlile regarded political economy as "the science of profits," "the science of the welfare of mankind" that would harmonize the interests of all classes. In the name of rational progress and human happiness, workers were chastised for their short-sighted resistance to the introduction of labor-saving machinery.171 Of all Paine's major writings, Agrarian Justice seems to have had the least appeal to Carlile and his supporters.172 The editors of the Newgate Magazine, particularly Hassell, wrote with considerable originality on the science of political economy, maintaining that a proper understanding of economic principles would bring social and industrial harmony.173 Such views conformed to a certain "scientist" logic and were in keeping with a rationalist belief in the social value of actions based on enlightened self-interest. The ideal of a scientifically managed society founded on utilitarian moral design easily gave way to a modernizing indifference to popular sensibilities and customary mores. Rationalist attempts to refashion traditional attitudes to the human body were calculated affronts to widely held notions of decency. The frontispiece to the first edition of Every Woman's Book features an engraving of an entirely naked Adam and Eve. Although Carlile carefully distinguished between the transparent purity of human nakedness and the pornographic publications of William Benbow and John Stockdale, the frontispiece signals a work unlikely to be put freely into the hands of "respectable" working-class wives and daughters; the strategy of the text seems premised on the view that conventional prudery must be shocked into compliance with reason.174 Carlile also joined Bentham and other liberal-minded reformers in the campaign for the dissection of human corpses for anatomical research, willing his own body to the surgeons and denouncing burials in churches and churchyards as "a most revolting practice."175 Whatever the scientific value of such gestures, they were deeply at odds with popular beliefs about the body and death. As Ruth Richardson comments, the literature supporting both voluntary efforts and legislative initiatives for the dissection of paupers' bodies shared in the expression of "a mixture of contempt and distant benevolent sympathy" toward the laboring poor.176 Popular death culture, for its part, proved remarkably resistant to the incursions of "scientific" medicine. Most significantly, the Temple of Science and the universal language

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of materialist disputation could not simply displace Christianity. Gwyn Williams comments that the growth of "infidelity" within the working class "was almost as remarkable a phenomenon of the 1820s as the more familiar triumphs of Methodism, evangelicalism and 'vital religion.'"177 Perhaps; but what seems certain is that although there was much indifference to religion and often bitter hostility toward both the established church and the increasingly conservative Dissenting sects, Christianity, often in a primitive and democratic form, maintained a powerful hold within many workingclass communities. Popular radicalism was, after all, largely the creation of people steeped in religion and the Bible. It remained less than obvious to many ultra-radicals that democratic political reform could not be achieved without the wholesale destruction of Christian belief or that science and religion stood as irreconcilably opposed. While Carlile might ridicule the Scriptures as an "obscene, voluptuous, false, scandalous, malicious, and seditious" text, for many working people the Bible remained a cultural touchstone, a shared language of moral righteousness.178 The later inversions in Carlile's own language (for instance, his announcement that he was the messiah of reason "risen again to stand before you"), and in infidel culture generally, attest to this view.179 Many zetetics, Carlile included, were raised within the pale of popular Dissent; below the surface of infidelity often lurked a strongly religious sensibility.

Showtime at the Rotunda: Allegory Takes a Turn For a brief moment, during the years 1830 and 1831, Carlile came near to realizing his cherished aim of establishing a theater of free discussion in the nation's capital. In May 1830, he officially opened the Rotunda, in Blackfriars Road on the south side of the Thames. Here the full register of metropolitan radicalism found expression. Hunt, Cobbett, Carlile, Gale Jones, Henry Hetherington, and Julian Hibbert were among those who spoke regularly. The National Union of the Working Classes, the most important ultraradical organization of the early 1830s, held regular meetings at the Rotunda, as did Owenite socialists and the deists of the Christian Evidence Society. Republican politics were again the order of the day. "Regephobia" was spreading across Europe, more contagious than cholera morbus, declared Gale Jones: "Kings are now generally considered as public nuisances that ought to be removed."180 The Rotunda was kept under close government surveillance. During the tense month of November 1830, several thousand supporters of political reform nightly packed the building, the windows of which were draped with tricolor flags; thousands more crowded the surrounding streets as special constables, "shut in stalls exactly opposite," waited in readiness in case of riot. Against the backdrop of European revolution, the struggle for parliamentary reform, and agrarian revolt, popular radicalism regained its mass presence.181 The Rotunda's star attraction, however, was not a familiar radical figure, but a renegade from the Anglican clergy. The Reverend Robert Taylor,

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dubbed by Hunt the "devil's chaplin," filled the Rotunda's theater for his Sunday evening performances of "Astronomico-Theological" discourses on Christianity, which he repeated during the week. A spy's report describes Taylor's striking appearance, manner, and argument: Taylor in his usual clergymans dress with the addition of a Bishops white lawn sleeves began his lecture by taking as his text that part of St. Matthew which describes Christ's Crucifixion. He imitates precisely the manner in which the clergy perform their duties and lately he with a smile leans his head on his two hands on a desk which causes much laughter, he doing this precisely as is done in Church service and before he begins for a minute or two. In a very long address of abuse of the Clergy and Priests of all nations who had and were still preaching to the people what they knew nothing about themselves described by the use of his celestial Globe that the Gospel account was no more than allegory of what was by the ancient Astrologers or Magi or Wise Men of the East who knew the Astronomical signs of the Zodiac and who craftely [sic] made a Religion of it to rob the people.

The Victorian journalist Henry Vizetelly, who as a youth went to see Taylor at the Rotunda, left a similar description, commenting that the transition from Taylor "with his theatrical get-up, his stagey manner, and his ranting delivery to actors of a legitimate type is simple and natural enough." Taylor, indeed, modeled his voice and delivery on that of the actor Charles Kemble.182 Both spy and journalist suggest Taylor's essential theatricality: the exaggerated gestures, the oudandish dress, the props, the burlesque on Anglican ceremony, the mocking tones, and the sheer measure of excess. Taylor presented a highly contrived and very popular counter-theater of unbelief.183 But how could plebeian philosophy, the cult of science, and the drive for transparency and fixed meaning succumb to theater, extravagant spectacle, and laughter? The very role of actor seems at odds with the rationalist mode and the construct of the transparent citizen: acting requires disguise, identities that shift and change. Deep suspicion of the theater was a point of convergence between the puritan and rationalist sensibilities. In 1829 Carlile commented, "We are no great admirers of the theatrical profession, viewing it as a corresponding principle with that mass of fiction, of which all theology is a part, by which man is so much degraded."184 Personal comportment was also an issue. Taylor was a fop, a dandy, a boozer, and a womanizer—a man of almost uncontrolled excess. There seems little in his personal habits to recommend him to the self-improving artisan.185 In contrast to Taylor, Carlile was an austere personality, a "rational" dresser, and a temperance advocate: "I am a plain man, and wear nothing that the world calls decoration, in dress or ornament. The Reverend Taylor has a passion for peculiarly of dress, —for decoration, —for that which the world calls show or ornament." Carlile considered Taylor's notions of dress "feminine." Whereas he himself was an "ungarnished-narrative . . . sort of man," Taylor was "poetical and hyperbolical," telling his story "somewhat in Asiatic style."186 The antithetical pairings—plain/decorated, male/female, narrative/poetry, Western/Asiatic—suggest the controlling break between rea-

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son and unreason. And yet Carlile not only tolerated these contradictions, but admired and supported Taylor, incorporating the preacher's interpretations of astronomical mythology into his own infidel thought. There were financial considerations: the admission receipts from Taylor's performances paid a high proportion of the rent on the Rotunda. But Carlile's alliance with Taylor predated the Rotunda. He regarded the Lion, the successor journal to the Republican, as forming a record of the prosecution of Taylor, who had been sentenced to one year in Oakham jail in 1828 for blasphemy.187 Following Taylor's release from prison, the two had toured the country together on an "infidel mission." Their first stop was the university town of Cambridge, where Taylor sought out "the field of accomplished controversy," challenging "men of the highest order of education" to match his learning in open theological debate and forswearing "a tone of sarcasm and coarseness," of which he had been accused.188 No university scholars came forward, but Taylor was well qualified to debate on their terms. Schooled in classical languages and theology at St. John's College, Cambridge, he excelled as a scholar.189 The son of well-todo parents, he had first studied medicine, gaining membership to the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1813, he entered the Anglican clergy. In 1817 and 1818, however, his reading of various infidel works and the expression of his growing religious doubts set him adrift, eventually closing him out of the clergy and various teaching jobs.190 He moved to Ireland and turned to propagating deistic views, but was driven out of Dublin by a group of students from Trinity College who wrecked the small theater where he attempted to hold a public Sunday meeting of his newly founded Christian Evidence Society. In the summer of 1824, Taylor moved to London, where the refounded Christian Evidence Society first met at the Globe Tavern, Fleet Street, a long-standing plebeian debating center.191 Until his trial and imprisonment in 1827 and 1828, Taylor conducted discussions and gave lectures throughout London, disputing the historical evidences of Christianity.192 By 1827, he had moved out of the world of low metropolitan taverns and debating rooms into his own stylish chapel, the Areopagus, where he invited Protestant ministers to defend the historical veracity of the New Testament. Taylor's case against Christianity was set out in two volumes written in prison and published by Carlile: Syntagma of the Evidences of the Christian Religion (1828) and The Diegesis; Being a Discovery of the Origin, Evidences, and Early History of Christianity (1829).193 The Diegesis presents at great length and in scholarly detail the argument that Jesus never existed, that the Gospel texts were based on the writings of the Therapeutae Essene monks in Egypt, and that there were strong parallels between the story of Jesus and various pagan myths, including that of Krishna. Drawing on the oriental scholarship of Volney, William Jones, William Drummond, and, most significantly, Charles Dupuis, Taylor argued that all religions had their origin in allegorical personifications of solar myths and reinscriptions of astronomical phenomena.

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Taylor was a displaced theologian, a defector from the ranks of elite learning; this gave him a certain standing within infidel circles. He was a cultural broker, mobilizing overlapping tones and counter-tones drawn from the worlds of high and low culture. He was also a deist, not an atheist. By the late 1820s, Carlile's brand of mechanistic atheism was being strongly challenged by the more popular theism of freethinkers such as Detrosier, as well as by various freethinking Christian sects. Pure materialism had a fairly limited attraction; it left a spiritual void. Moreover, as Detrosier perceptively noted, Carlile merely displaced the notion of intelligent design, bowing "at its shrine" in the name of "the persecuted principle of reason, as your idol."194 There were zetetics who favored a more accommodating attitude toward both freethinking Christians and deists and who saw the attraction of ceremonial forms. Campion, a staunch atheist, maintained that deism required "no exterior forms and ceremonies . . . no flappers to remind the possessor when they should be brought into action," while observing that deism's chief deficiency was its lack of a condensed manual of belief—most deist works merely attacked other systems. During 1828 and 1829, Carlile's own rationalist Sunday school and school of free discussion found relatively few takers in the metropolis; nationally, the zetetics no longer constituted a movement in any real sense.195 Carlile's initial reactions to Taylor were mixed, opposing his deism but recognizing his talent in the pulpit. Taylor remained a priest, but only in a minimalist way: "in all the inessentials of a priest. He is not a priest in trying to deceive his hearers .. . but in seeking to amuse them with forms and ceremonies, little pomps and lesser fineries." Carlile wavered. He saw the popularity of ceremonial spectacle; but as with Paine's theophilanthropy, he opposed efforts to replace rituals of Christian worship with deistical ceremony. For example, he denounced both Josiah Fitch, a popular Christian universalist minister, and Detrosier for concocting alternative forms of public worship for their congregations. Yet he eventually reconciled himself to Taylor's liturgy, written for the Society of Universal Benevolence, on the grounds that, like Wedderburn's liturgy of "Pure Christian Diabolism" (which Carlile probably helped write), it was a joke, "a Punch and Judy kind of burlesque of religious worship," assuming the literary form of the Anglican service only to undermine its religious content.196 By allowing that theatrical form might convey serious meaning and purpose, Carlile shifted his ground: rationalist counter-theater became a possibility. Taylor excelled at the burlesque, but he did not aim to amuse audiences of the lowest sort. According to Carlile, Taylor had "no talent for a pot-house, no grace for a barn, no oratory for the hedge-side, or marketplace"; he demanded a "well-dressed audience, and a respectable place of assembly, a splendid structure." The Rotunda, renovated at considerable expense by Carlile, allowed Taylor full scope to exhibit his learning and his theatrical talents. Originally designed as a museum for the Levcrian naturalhistory collection, the Rotunda later housed the Surrey Institute, a prominent literary and scientific society. During the 1820s, the building became

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a place of popular entertainment, used as a concert hall and wine cellar, an equestrian amphitheater, and finally a panorama. Taylor lectured in a domed, circular theater with a comfortable pit below a balustraded gallery supported by marble pillars; a figure of Contemplation stood in the balcony, an emblem of seriousness. The dome was painted with the twelve zodiacal signs, which Taylor used to illustrate his astronomical-theological discourses.197 Taylor drew large (500-1000), socially mixed audiences that included artisans, members of the middle class, and a minority of well-dressed women; spies' reports consistently note the "respectable," "very decent," "well dressed" character of those in attendance. Francis Place was a regular attender. The relatively high admission charges—3 pence for the pit and 6 pence for boxes—ensured a "respectable" clientele.198 The questions of what attracted audiences to Taylor and what message they took away from his performances are not answered simply. McCalman suggests that Taylor tapped a vitalist and deeply Romantic impulse among contemporaries. There was something seductively dangerous about Taylor, a Byronic element that stirred the libertarian desires of respectable artisans and members of the lower middle class.199 Taylor engaged the imaginative longings of his hearers, endowing infidelism with a sense of mystery neglected by Carlile. In part, Taylor's appeal turned on a complex fusion of overlapping, perhaps conflicting, idioms that destabilized meanings. Whereas Carlile had sought to contain the inherent instability of free thought within a narrowed compass of rationalist expression, Taylor enlarged infidelism's stylistic range in extraordinary fashion, reencompassing burlesque, bawdy anticlericalism, melodrama, Romantic poetry and song, science, philology, and allegory. He practiced a brand of infidel syncretism. The Rotunda, having itself run the gamut from museum and scientific institute to a venue for diverse popular entertainments, having hosted lectures by Coleridge and Hazlitt as well as circus acts, was an appropriate site for the task. Blasphemous humor, irreverent buffoonery, and farce figured prominently in Taylor's stage manner. He recast the vulgar, convivial, Rabelaisian temper of plebeian irreligion within the elevated surroundings of the Rotunda's theater. In his discourse "The Cup of Salvation," Taylor asked why God should forgive human sin because of Christ's blood, explaining that God "likes a drop of the crater, as well as we do; that puts him in a good humour, and then he is not so particular about us." God, like man, is a boozer; and in the spirit of good cheer, Taylor sang a chorus of "Auld Lang Syne." The sacrament of the Eucharist was regularly subjected to the most outrageous mockery, rocking audiences into fits of laughter. Taylor's discourse on John the Baptist opens: John the Baptist! John the Baptist!! How d'ye do, Johnny? Where d'ye come from? Who are you when you're at home? What d'ye mean by making ducks and drakes of the people—by sousing them i' the horse-pond? What d'ye mean by the kingdom of heaven being at hand"!

A mock sermon follows, delivered in the style of the "Reverend Doctor," and concluding with Taylor gobbling like a turkey.200

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Taylor's purpose, however, went beyond buffoonery, beyond merely reducing religion to farce. This can be seen, for example, in "Raising the Devil!" his most popular and most notorious act. Taylor promised to raise and put down the devil, pledging the safety of his audience as he dabbled as "an artist in the black art." Entering into a darkened theater, the "Devil's Chaplin" summoned his master: "What oh, Satan! Beelzebub! Baal Peor! Belial! Lucifer! Abaddon! Apollyon! thou King of the bottomless Pit, thou King of Scorpions . . . Appear!" Touching a celestial globe and giving it a half-turn to represent the earth's half-circuit around the sun, Taylor proclaimed the appearance of the devil, not as the prince of the bottomless pit, but as transformed into "an Angel of Light." Knockabout stuff, strange and wildly popular, but Taylor had a serious intent: the liberation of minds from the burden of sin and fear of punishment beyond this world, fear that in turn sustained a false priesthood. Moral virtue was a matter for this world. Taylor maintained that all passages in the Bible referring to the devil "are allegorical, metaphorical, anagogical, oratorical, rhapsodical, categorical, and all the other orygoricals, that mean in plain English, they are downright lies." The devil is merely the "adversary," situated at the opposite zodiacal position to Jesus; both are merely zodiacal representations of the seasons. Priests used the doctrine of eternal hell to frighten the people, to tame them into submission, to "make them the slaves and cowards that 'tis most convenient to their betters that they should be."201 Taylor's "scientific display" of the raising of the devil supported biblical exegesis with astronomical and philological proofs. As in all his discourses, the point of departure was a biblical passage—in this case, Matthew 4:1, the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness by the devil. The incantation of the various names of the devil, suggestive at one level of the casting of folkloric spells, introduced a lesson in philology: all the names and titles of the devil found in scripture "are the common names of the Supreme God" and indicative of the annual progress of the sun.202 Using the zodiacal charts on the Rotunda's dome, as well as celestial globes and a small orrery, Taylor explained the complex ways in which Christian mythology, like that of all pagan religions, had its natural origin in solar allegory and astrology. He promised to teach the "science" of words. Through the closest scrutiny of the extensive class of linguistic radicals, which form the roots of innumerable languages, the basic sameness of all languages, like all religions, was disclosed. Taylor explained this philological strategy, which became commonplace at the Rotunda, thus: In setting ourselves to decipher, or to make out the significancy of hidden meaning of any confessedly Pagan allegory, we invariably begin with the severest possible scrutiny into the names or nomenclature of the machinery. We weigh the force of every letter of which the names are composed, of every significancy which the names could convey, and of every variation of letters by which the same name might be exhibited.

He told his audiences that they were about to repeat the crime that damned the whole human race: "We are going to pluck the forbidden fruit of knowl-

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edge, that grows under this leafy wilderness of words." By showing the submerged correspondence between the names of various gods, religious figures, and mythological heroes and by charting their astrological relationships, Taylor purported to prove scientifically the falseness of the Christian Gospel and to demonstrate that all religions had a single, natural origin.203 The dazzling performance should not obscure the dense textuality of Taylor's lectures, all of which were carefully prepared for publication in his own journal, the Devils Pulpit.204 Through dramatic display, Taylor made visible universal, materialist truths that were themselves wrapped in mysterious or theatrical form. According to Taylor, the whole story of creation and the account of the character and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ were "acted as a play, or holy pantomime, in the ancient mysteries of Mithra and Bacchus," from which all Christian doctrine derived. Astrologers had first conveyed meanings to ignorant people "by pantomimic and hieroglyphical actions"; they had personified natural phenomena and dressed themselves "in emblematical devices, stoles, rochets, tonsures, black gowns and white, and performed tragedies." These first men of science were thus driven to dissimulation, "obliged to hide the bright pearls of astronomical knowledge under the thick veils of gospel allegory." Ancient civilizations reenacted permanent truths about man's natural environment in the form of poetry and drama. The present-day clergy, Taylor asserted, were totally ignorant of the real meanings of the texts from which they preached. Careful attention, however, to the "strict letter of the text, the very letter of it"— which often required sustained excursions into Greek, Hebrew, and Latin— could unfold wonders. Taylor was engaged in "enucleating the bright germs of science, hid in the shell of religious allegory." Part of the fascination with this "bright" science arose from its illuminist pretensions: keys were offered that could break secret codes; dark mysteries were unravelled; hearers were initiated into the privileged circle of understanding. The virtue of Taylor's mode of allegorical interpretation was that it worked uniformly, explaining all the details of the Gospels by means of a unified reading technique: "We are not put to the juggling Unitarian artifices, of picking and culling, rejecting passages we don't like." There was, moreover, no need to shift between literal and figurative methods of reading. Indeed, Taylor brought a brand of scientific literalism to bear on religious mythology; he contrasted the stabilizing force of his astronomical methodology to the liberties taken by Christian scholars in their translations of and interpolations in biblical texts.205 While the casual spectator may have had little interest in mythological or philological matters, the more serious-minded experienced an exhilarating demonstration of esoteric truths. Taylor collapsed the categories of entertainment and learning. He gave theatrical expression to a system of scientific knowledge. This presumably made the spectacle acceptable to Carlile and perhaps to other zetetics. Through the Rotunda lectures, Taylor popularized Dupuis's anthropological theory of the universal design and natural origins of religion. Dupuis's masterwork, the seven-volume Origins

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de tous les cultes (1795), was untranslated and little known,206 Furthermore, Taylor's lectures were usually preceded by either Carlile or Joseph Harris, another supporter, reading selections from Volney's Ruins of Empires, a more familiar, visionary work that unfolds the mythological origins and oppressive role of all established religions throughout world history. Volney directly links his allegory of the evolution of priestcraft to an allegory of the growth of political despotism.207 Taylor's own discourses were rarely explicitly political, but his scathing abuse of the Anglican clergy reinforced the strong anticlericalism of contemporary radical publications such as the Devil in London and Carpenter and Cleave's Slap at the Church. In November 1830, Taylor appeared at the Rotunda wearing a large tricolored ribbon around his shoulders from which his eyeglass was suspended.208 Occasionally he voiced a raw egalitarianism, denouncing the doctrine of passive obedience and attacking religion and the clergy as agents of social control, as in his lecture "The Rich Man and Lazarus": And look at your poor, your be-gospelled poor,—your beggarly Lazarus, faint and wounded, sick and sore, contented to have their grievances licked over by the tongues of curs and puppies of salvation, content to lay down and die, because it'd be as a sin "to covet and desire other men's goods." He declared that at the Rotunda, They should learn the Rights of Man and should be taught not to fear asking such questions as, how is it my Lords that your dogs are fed while our Children are starving[?] . . . For we are not to be crammed any longer with faith and hope while we lie down and die with stomachs full of wild sorrell [sic].209 There was an inchoate summons to a Utopian realm of moral justice. As McCalman brilliantly demonstrates, Taylor drew on many of the key impulses and tropes of melodrama, the most popular nineteenth-century dramatic mode. This is most clearly seen in Taylor's play Swing: or, Who are the Incendiaries? A Tragedy (1831), which was performed several times to enthusiastic audiences at the Rotunda and which was closely modeled on melodramatic conventions.210 The characters, who include the villains the Archbishop of Cant, Reverend Elijah Brimstone, Ebenezer Sanctity, and Judge Jefferies, along with the play's heroes, John Swing, his family, and Robert the Devil ("or the Genius of Reason"), are all broad stereotypes, personifications of pure good and evil. The highly charged action, which leads to full-scale revolution and concludes with a gesture of reconciliation, is devoid of moral ambiguity; the revolution is both political and of the heart. Somewhat similarly, the arresting imagery of darkness and light, the Manichaean dualism of goodness and evil (surprisingly reconciled in the unity of the devil and Jesus), and the aesthetics of astonishment and excess, all of which are present in "Raising the Devil," suggest the workings of the melodramatic imagination. Melodrama's rapid transitions of scene, mood, and style—from pathos to farce to violence and back again—as well as its

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reliance on sensational visual effects, were abundantly present in Taylor's performances. Taylor's very persona—hyperbolic and intensely Romantic— was a melodramatic construction. At the heart of melodrama is the stark ethical conflict between good and evil, justice and injustice: the drama of moral becoming. It is the dramatization of a second world of dreams, "an allegory of human experience dramatically ordered, as it should be rather than as it is."211 Significantly, melodrama had its origins in the context of the French Revolution, the moment when the sacred centers of religious and political authority gave way to a new vision of moral and political virtue. In the years 1830 and 1831, many of those packing the Rotunda may well have felt that Britain was on the verge of momentous change. Taylor gave infidelism new stylistic expression, more richly textured and more flexible than the zetetic rationalism of the early 1820s. As McCalman notes, he often voiced visionary and allegorical themes more typical of the 1790s and more akin to the ruminations of Romantic poets such as Blake and Shelley on the mythological origins of religion. He also shared an interest in the sexual meanings that might be attached to ancient myths and religions. Taylor, who carried an edition of Queen Mab in his waistcoat pocket, stocked his discourses with poetic quotations. In reuniting poetry and allegorical interpretation with science, he tapped the strong attraction that Romantic poetry had for so many radicals. At the same time, Taylor's bawdy anticlericalism was reminiscent of the vulgar, blasphemous humor to be found among plebeian infidel preachers and debaters.212 The incoherence, the radical breaks in the traffic between various styles or modalities—burlesque, melodrama, astronomical display, etymology, and such—endowed Taylor's performances with a destabilizing openness that generated an esoteric medley of potential meanings and correspondences. The show, however, could not be sustained without the showman. In July 1831, Taylor was tried at Surrey Sessions for having preached blasphemy on Good Friday and Easter Sunday and was sentenced to two years in Horsemonger Lane jail.213 Earlier in the year, Carlile was himself sentenced to two years in the Giltspur Street Compter, convicted on four counts of seditious libel for having published an address "To the Insurgent Agricultural Labourers" in which he maintained that agricultural workers were justified in destroying private property and recommended that they read the works of Paine. In fact, however, Carlile was rapidly distancing himself from ultra-radical associations, particularly from the National Union of the Working Classes.214 The Rotunda was kept open through the efforts of John Gale Jones, Julian Hibbert, and Eliza Sharpies, all of whom lectured regularly, as did James "Shepherd" Smith, a former Southcottian preacher who later became editor of Owen's Crisis. After Taylor's arrest, Smith repeated his lectures, but to diminished audiences. In late March 1832, Carlile cut his losses and relinquished his lease on the Rotunda: the theater of free discussion closed.215 The alliance between Taylor and Carlile did not survive prison.216

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Throughout the early 1830s, freethinking radicals, including John Cast, Allen Davenport, Hibbert, James Mee, and Henry Medler, held weekly theological debates and discussions at various small metropolitan chapels, coffeehouses, and taverns—-Baume's Optimist Chapel, in Finsbury (later Watson's Chapel), the Philadelphian, and the Borough Chapel, where Smith preached. Their dialogues blended strains of radicalism, socialism, primitive Christianity, millenarianism, and rationalist infidelism.217 But it was the spectacle, the theater of free expression, not free discussion per se, that drew large numbers. Carlile's own lectures and discussion sessions at the Rotunda, as well as those of the Christian Evidence Society, in which Taylor and others debated with the few Christian ministers willing to subject themselves to derision, had attracted only small audiences. In May 1832, Mr, a journal edited by Sharpies, carried notice of Carlile's conversion "after fourteen years of obstinate infidelity" to the Christian faith. For more than a year, he had been moving toward the idea "that the Sacred Scriptures will bear a rational interpretation," although there had been earlier signs that Carlile did not find materialist atheism entirely satisfactory. Allegory was the bridge he crossed to embrace what he now termed "primitive Christianity." Taylor had offered the key to reading the Bible anew, reconciling reason and religion, science and drama. Sharpies signalled this shift in her discourses on the Bible, written in conjunction with Carlile and delivered in a new lecture room off Fleet Street. The Christian Gospel was the most ancient text to proclaim that "knowledge is power" and "that it will go on to equalize mankind"; the task now was to "rescue the sacred scriptures," to seize them from the control of priests. In her lecture "The Real Meaning of Words," Sharpies asserted that God, Father, and Son are all names that mean knowledge or reason; to be "born again" is to assume moral virtue through reeducation. Undeterred by her lack of knowledge of any classical languages, Sharpies embarked on the writing of a lexicon or glossary as a "rational key to the superstitious words of existing [religious] books." Republicanism was also brought into line with religion. According to Sharpies, "In the Gospel drama, Jesus plays the part of a Republican, though he warily submits himself to the established despotism." The Bible "is no supporter of Kings and Queens, of priests and Lords."218 After his release from prison, in 1833, and throughout his final decade as a neglected lecturer and publisher, Carlile preached a doctrine of Christian rationalism. He eventually became a licensed preacher, assuming the title Reverend.219 On the one hand, the transition from atheist to Christian minister is not all that surprising or contradictory. Rationalist unbelief was always marked by radical instability, and such oscillations were common enough among plebeian freethinkers. Carlile maintained a millennialist faith in science as providing the key to understanding the "dramatic or mythologic construction of [religious] language." On the other hand, it was a remarkable reversal for the man who had so consistently put Paine's writings at the center of his life's work. The Bible, the historical coherence and moral-

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ity of which Paine rejected, was rehabilitated as a text that revealed universal scientific and moral truth when read not as a historical but as a mythological text. The literalism of Paine's reading was rejected; Carlile cited Paul's injunction to ministers of the gospel against literal interpretation: "For the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." Metaphor in its most luxuriant and fertile form, that of allegory, held Reason in its grasp, no longer an impediment to transparency or understanding. "Mystery," always a term of abuse for Paine, regained credibility in Carlile's lexicon of rationalist Christianity.220 Thus, in his own idiosyncratic way, Carlile paid tribute to the enduring force of the shared vocabulary of Christianity. As "Shepherd" Smith observed, "The Bible is regarded by a great proportion of the public as a standard of faith, and if it can be demonstrated that there exists within the Bible a faith directly the reverse of that which is commonly received, it must ultimately tend to remove the deeply-rooted partialities."221 But Carlile, who was out of sympathy with postreform radicalism, stopped short of embracing the full rhetorical possibilities of the Bible. It was left to others, such as the Reverend J. R. Stephens, himself deeply imbued with Romantic and theatrical coloration, to voice the prophetic cadences of the Old Testament, threatening divine retribution against the Lord's and the people's enemies, marrying primitive Christianity to popular constitutionalism in the service of populist insurgency.

5 Rituals of Solidarity: Radical Dining, Toasting, and Symbolic Expression

In 1869, William Aitken looked back over a long and distinguished career as a radical activist in the Lancashire factory town of Ashton-under-Lyne. In a letter to the Ashton Reporter, he recalled his introduction to the ranks of radicalism: "My earliest remembrances of taking a part in Radicalism are the invitations I used to receive to be at 'Owd' Nancy Clayton's in Charlestown, on the 16th of August to denounce the Peterloo Massacre, to drink in solemn silence 'To the immortal memory of Henry Hunt.'"1 In November 1838, the Northern Star, Chartism's great newspaper, made one of the first mentions of Aitken's public role in radical politics.2 The twentyfour-year-old Aitken, a former piecer and cotton spinner turned schoolmaster, attended a dinner held in the working-class suburb of Charlestown, at the home of John and Nancy Clayton, to commemorate the birthday (6 November) of the hero of Peterloo fields. The report reads as follows: HENRY HUNT'S BIRTH DAY — In consequence of the operatives of this town and neighbourhood being continually locked up, and unable to appropriate a single hour either to domestic affairs or recreation, the celebration of this immortal Patriot's birthday took place on Saturday evening last, at the house of Mr. John Clayton, Charlestown, an individual that was wounded severely, as well as his wife Nancy, on the never-to-be-forgotten 16th of August 1819, and at whose house the anniversary feast has always been held. . . . The room was tastefully decorated with evergreens and political pictures, amongst which a splendid painting of die Peterloo massacre shone conspicuously. About fifty real radi-

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Radical Expression cals and their wives, the principal part of whom were sufferers on that fatal field, (where British blood sealed the death-warrant of British tyranny,) . . . sat down to supper, at seven o'clock. . . . Mr. Elijah Broadbent was called to the chair, and after all parties had satisfied their honest hungry cravings with good old English fare, the cloth was withdrawn, and the chairman gave "The People, the source of legitimate power." Mr. Fenton rose and said, Mr. Chairman and Brother Radicals, as one of the people, I cannot refrain from expressing my most unfeigned delight at seeing so many true hearts collected together once more, to vindicate the cause of universal liberty. . . . [W]e dare not stand passive during this glorious struggle for freedom but exert ourselves to the utmost of our ability to assist each other in spreading political knowledge, and in endeavouring to obtain possession of that undoubted right to every honest man, viz. Universal Suffrage. We cannot, sir, too much revere the memory of that illustrious personage, the anniversary of whose birth we are met to celebrate. . . . Song—John Stafford—Peterloo Massacre. The chairman then gave—"To the Immortal Memory of Henry Hunt, the man who never deceived us," which was drunk in solemn silence. Mr. Samuel Walker then rose, and entered into a lengthened detail of the life and practices of this gentleman. . . . He then read a list of the killed and wounded, and amongst the latter was his own father, who was present . . . and then sung in a masterly style the "Death of Henry Hunt," at the close of which beautiful composition he was heartily cheered. The next toast was "To the Memory of William Cobbett," which was responded to by Roger Wilde who sung an excellent and heart-stirring patriotic song, showing the benefits of a free press. Toast—"To the Memory of Robert Emmett, who was shamefully murdered by Horbury," &c. Mr. Timothy Higgins responded to the above . . . Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentleman, it would ill become me, as an Irishman, if I sat silent on the present occasion. When I see a company, almost exclusively English, doing honour to that ornament to society, that was once a brilliant star in the political hemisphere of Ireland, I cannot but lament, sir, and that most deeply, that my countrymen pay so little attention to the advice of those that would lead them to peace and prosperity. . . . I hope, ere long, to see all men of all countries unite in goodfellowship, to demand justice for the blood shed at Peterloo and Rathcormac, and also for the elective franchise, for all those who laboured for their bread. . . . Song, by Jonathan Walker—"Adieu to Old Ireland. "The next toast given was—"To the Memory of that undaunted advocate of Liberty, Thomas Paine." Mr. Williamson, printer, responded to this toast. . . . After which a gentleman sung "The Death of Paine." The next toast was—"Feargus O'Connor, and the Prosperity of the Northern Stair." Mr. William Aitkin [sic] rose and said, Chairman and Brother Radicals . . . I feel convinced, sir, that every drop of blood that was shed on Peterloo will operate as seeds that will produce hundreds, nay thousands, of armed patriots that will one day (and I hope that day is not far distant) seek retribution for the calamities brought on innocent people by those inhuman butchers at Peterloo. . . . [A]t the midnight hour, my vows are registered in Heaven, that any man would abuse my parent, kinsman, or child—(hear)—as those worthy Britons were treated at Peterloo, that man shall surely fall by my hand, let the consequence be what may. (Loud cheers) . . . [Tjhe people are now in a different position, and wo unto the fragment of military power that would dare to attack such a meeting again.

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Englishmen are Englishmen still. . . . Thomas Paine that night had been called the father of reform; but he would contend that Feargus O'Connor had done more for the cause of reform than any public man now in existence, and that Henry Hunt could not be dead while Feargus O'Connor was alive. . . . He said he should always revere the memory of Hunt, and he hoped all present would teach their children to hold sacred the 16th of August; for, says he— "The tear that we shed, tho' in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory dear in our souls." Mr. Aitkin then sat down. . . . Song, Mr. Robert Knott, "Exile of Erin." The next toast was "Messrs. Stephens and Oastler." Song—"We shall never see his like again." The next toast was "To the memory of Volney, Voltaire, Bronterre, Mirabaud, Robespierre, Condorcet, Diderot, and those that wrote or fought in the cause of freedom." The Chairman was here called upon to recite the 15th chapter of Volney's Ruins of Empires, which he did in his usual eloquent style, and at the close was warmly greeted by a tremendous burst of approbation. The memory of Muir, Palmer, &c. was drunk, and was responded to by Mr. Aitkin, as a Scotchman. Song, Mr. M'Neish, "Scots wha hae." The health of Richard Carlisle [sic] being drunk, as a supporter of a free press, and thanks having been voted to the Chairman, the meeting adjourned to their respective homes at twelve o'clock.3

As this text well illustrates, the Chartists of Ashton, like those in other manufacturing districts, laid claim to a rich political heritage. The Northern Star's report is extraordinary for its length and detail, particularly its rather full account of the speeches delivered; however, the toasts and the general tone of the proceedings were not untypical of such occasions and may serve as a point of entry for discussing certain ritual aspects of popular politics during the early nineteenth century. This chapter does not attempt to map the entire range of occasions and meanings associated with radical political dining. Instead, it attempts to provide the fullest possible context for understanding one such dinner, or tradition of commemoration. More generally, this chapter seeks to establish the importance of meanings that were expressed in terms of a highly ritualized field of political and symbolic practice rather than in terms of more formally articulated ideology, whether written or spoken. Ritual performance allows people to enact—to define by means of social drama—certain roles and meanings.4 The emphasis here is on the process by which such meanings and roles were produced and reproduced and, therefore, on how radicals constructed "traditions" of a culture of popular politics and enacted their own version of a political history.5 The first section considers briefly the roots of plebeian radical dining in the immediate postwar years. It also discusses the conflicts that gave rise to and sustained a tradition of political commemoration, as well as the ritualized forms that radicals and their opponents often gave to these conflicts. The second section looks at the period of the early 1820s and at the beginnings of the specific dining tradition into which Aitken was initiated. The

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final section returns to consider the Northern Star's report against this broader background.

I From the late seventeenth century, there was, of course, a long-standing pattern of oppositional convivial activities, particularly visible during the Wilkite agitation and the American War of Independence. More generally, the realm of symbol and ritual was important to the popular politics of eighteenth-century England: Jacobites toasted the king over the water; opponents of oligarchy kept radical meanings associated with 1688 current through ritual commemorations; celebrations of naval heroes such as Admiral Edward Vernon encoded notions of British patriotism and liberty; plebeian crowds fashioned their own repertoire of symbolic display, often mocking their social betters; elections were occasions for carnivalesque inversions of everyday social order.6 Moreover, during the eighteenth century, the organization of debating and dining clubs at taverns and coffeehouses in urban centers was crucial to the creation of a bourgeois "public sphere," to the formation of nonexclusive social and political space where private citizens might form networks of association and exchange ideas on free and equal terms.7 Similarly, radical dining during the early nineteenth century can be viewed as an aspect of the attempt to fashion an autonomous and distinctly working-class or plebeian "public sphere."8 The celebrations at Ashton were part of a continuing battle to define the terms of an alternative culture of popular politics. Radicals also gave ritual expression to a broad contest over symbolic power, raising such questions as who constituted the political nation and how the story of the nation's past was to be symbolically inscribed. The key fixtures in the commemorative calendar of Ashton's radicals were the anniversary of Peterloo and the birthdays of Paine (26 January) and Hunt. Thus the radicals of the Chartist period linked their own movement to two earlier moments of radical insurgency: the Jacobinism of the 1790s and the challenge of postwar radicalism in 1815 to 1820. These fixtures were augmented by occasional celebrations such as those marking the liberation of imprisoned local or national leaders. There were local variations of these standard commemorations; at Oldham, for instance, radicals held annual dinners to celebrate the birthday of England's greatest radical journalist, William Cobbett (9 March), who had served as the town's Member of Parliament.9 The political weight accorded these celebrations must be understood in terms of the near-obsessive concern surrounding gestures of symbolic resistance and the repression endured by earlier generations of radicals. They must also be seen in relation to the barrage of loyalist propaganda in the form of sermons, festivals, cheap tracts, addresses, token coinage, songs, and prints. During the period of the French Revolution and the wars with France, reformers faced constant harassment and the threat of prosecution; they were

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also consistently denied the use of both formal and informal public space.10 At Manchester, for example, 186 innkeepers and alehouse-keepers signed a declaration banning "Jacobins" from their rooms. The entrance doors of Birmingham's loyalist taverns carried "No Jacobins admitted here" in polished gilt letters. In 1794, a public house near Royton in Lancashire was gutted by a church-and-king mob because it had provided a venue for reformers.11 The burning of Tom Paine in effigy was the most widespread and visible feature of loyalist festivals.12 At Failsworth, not far from Ashton, the village pole, where cocks were fought and badgers drawn, became the site where Paine was burned in effigy and where "the last of the Jacobins was tied to the saddle of a dragoon's horse, whilst the mad and bigoted populace stuck pins in his legs." At Ashton, Cockhill Pump was renamed Jacobin's Pump "because of its being used by the Tories . . . in the delicate service of forcibly pumping on the Jacobins or Radicals"; during the peace of 1802, "no Jacobin dared scarcely show himself in the streets without being in danger of having to undergo the dreaded pumping."13 Radical dining and toasting were a major focus of public activity among reformers during the 1790s. The influence of Paine can be traced, for example, in the elaborate toasting at dinners of the largely middle-class Manchester Constitutional Society. Manchester radicals like Thomas Walker, whose house was violently attacked by a church-and-king mob in December 1792, drank such Paineite toasts as "Revolution to the World" and "May every Constitution be founded on the Rights of Man."14 The occasion of Birmingham's Priestley riots of 1791 was a dinner held to commemorate the fall of the Bastille.15 In the treason trials of 1794, toasting at London radical dinners was cited as evidence of disloyalty—for example, John ThelwalPs "God save the King— If God don't damn him, he will damn no man!" In turn, the acquittals of Thomas Hardy, John Home Tooke, and Thelwall gave rise to the longest-lasting tradition of metropolitan radical dining.16 The toasts to which one was prepared to stand were crucial indicators of political allegiance, signs of dissidence or loyalty. Following the Priestley riots, Dr. Samuel Parr, a friend of Priestley's and the former tutor of the exiled Joseph Gerrald, was compelled to toast church and king while dining out in the vicinity of Birmingham. He boldly added his own comment: "Church and King. — Once it was the toast of Jacobites; now it is the toast of incendiaries. It means church without the gospel—and king above the law."17 With the closing of the Napoleonic Wars, radicals dramatically reasserted their right to move within public space; they also reclaimed an expanded repertoire of symbolic practice. The flags and banners carried to meetings; the green ribbons, sprigs of laurel, and tricolored cockades worn in the hats of radicals; the songs, toasts, and slogans invoked at working-class taverns— all bear witness to an intensified field of symbolic display. It was during these years that Lancashire's plebeian radicals began to shape a distinct tradition of formal political dining, drawing on and reacting to earlier experience and models. Moreover, the popular radicalism of the postwar years was decid-

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edly more working-class in its social composition than the movement of the 1790s had been, as radicalism's center of gravity shifted toward the manufacturing districts of the North.18 The symbolic actions of these radicals were calculated gestures of defiance to both state and local authority; they were intended to provoke a reaction, to test the resolve of radicalism's opponents. In January 1817, for example, at an outdoor meeting at Oldham, the magistrate William Chippendale reported that the band played at intervals, "but all loyal tunes were cautiously avoided. The People frequently called out for 'Ca ira,' 'Millions be free,' and 'March on, March on' by which they meant the Marseillaise Hymn, of which they have all got a Translation." Following the meeting, Chippendale's offer of 5 shillings to the band to play "God Save the King" was flatly refused.19 In May 1818, at a meeting at Lydgate in Saddleworth, held to consider the propriety of petitioning for parliamentary reform, Samuel Bamford declared that "as it was the custom to sing hymns and psalms in the Church," reformers should offer "Hymns to Liberty": "The French Patriots at the dawn of Liberty in that Country sung the Marseillois Hymn and he could [sic] the English Patriots with the same enthusiasm to rend the air with Hymns to Liberty."20 In February 1819, local authorities at Stockport moved against radicals for displaying a cap of liberty at a large meeting assembled on Sandy Brow. The chairman refused to surrender the cap, and the authorities were beaten from the field with a shower of stones and brickbats. Throughout the evening, crowds singing the revolutionary song "Millions Be Free" clashed in the streets of Stockport with troops and constables.21 In 1819 radical dining was closely linked to the escalating challenge of the mass platform; dinners routinely followed large outdoor demonstrations and were reported in the radical press. Toasts made specific reference to the victories of the platform; radicals honored those "patriots" who had presented or defended liberty caps at public meetings. Following a meeting at Ashton in June 1819, radicals dining at the hush shop of the veteran Jacobin Charles Walker drank, out of a cap of liberty, the health of the man who had earlier presented the cap of liberty to the meeting, the brushmaker Joseph Johnson.22 In 1819 radicals adopted the liberty cap as their most prominent emblem. The symbol was well chosen, managing to conjure the horrors of the French Revolution while alluding to eighteenth-century traditions of British libertarianism.23 The evolving rituals of plebeian radical dining were also contrived as counter-statements to the conventions of elite dining and to the existing calendar of loyalist observance, which included such occasions as the king's birthday and the dates of Charles I's martyrdom (30 January) and of the restoration of the royal family, "Oak Apple Day" (29 May). To this essentially monarchist and Protestant calendar were added commemorative dinners to honor the heroes of the French wars—Pitt, Nelson, and Wellington— and to mark events such as the formation of local volunteer corps.24 loyalists also celebrated their victories over radicalism. In December 1818, 126 of

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the "principal inhabitants" of Manchester dined to honor "the magistrates of 1817," the authorities responsible for repressing the march of the Blanketeers and heading off the so-called Ardwick conspiracy. This dinner included no fewer than thirty-eight loyal toasts and seventeen songs and glees.25 Dinners typically opened with a rendition of "Non nobis," followed by a well-established order of toasts and songs. The opening toast to the king was followed by a series of toasts to members of the royal family. Each toast was matched by an appropriate song: "God Save the King," "The Regent's March," "The Duke of York's March," "Hail, Star of Brunswick." Pitt Clubs followed with a toast to "The Immortal Memory of William Pitt" and the song that Canning had written for Pitt's birthday during the peace of 1802, "The Pilot that Weathered the Storm." Subsequent toasting might typically include tributes to "The pride of Britons, and the admiration of the World our Glorious Constitution," "King and Church," "Protestant Ascendancy," "Ministers of the Prince Regent, by whose firmness and perseverance the vast designs of Mr. Pitt have been accomplished," "The Memory of Spencer Perceaval [«V]," "Duke of Wellington," and "Earl Liverpool, Pitt's Successor," and conclude with a series of toasts to local Tory dignitaries and the officers of the local Pitt Club.26 The occasions for loyalist celebration, the gallery of heroes invoked, and the reverential regard for royalty and the established church constituted an attempt to universalize particularistic, albeit officially sanctioned, notions of patriotism and national history. Radicals responded in ritual kind, offering counterpoints to the national memory of loyalism and asserting their own brand of popular patriotism. The unprecedented need to mobilize the nation for war not merely deepened a conservative sense of British nationalism, but also sharpened debate and conflict over the very question of what constituted "true" patriotism.27 As well as toasting such modern "patriots" as Paine, Hunt, Cobbett, and Major John Cartwright, radicals recovered libertarian strains from the seventeenth century. Toasts to the revolutionary martyrs Hampden, Sidney, and Russell became commonplace, as did toasts to such figures as Wat Tyler and the Scottish patriots Wallace and Bruce. At a dinner held to celebrate Henry Hunt's first visit to Manchester, in January 1819, radicals followed the toast to "The immortal memory of Hampden, Sydney and Russell" with "Confusion to those, who, wearing the mask of patriotism, desert the cause of liberty in the day of trial." The dinner had opened with toasts to "The source of all power, the People," "The Rights of Man, and may the thrones of tyrants tremble," "May the principles of liberty be disseminated through the armies of tyrants, and may every soldier become an enlightened citizen," and "May the sword aimed at the breast of liberty be buried in the heart of despotism."28 Giving meaning to Britain's revolutionary past was bitterly contested political terrain. Sentencing the Stockport radicals John Johnston, John Bagguley, and Samuel Drummond to two years' imprisonment for seditious speeches delivered at a meeting in 1818, the Lord Chief Justice took most seriously the charge that they had "profaned the names of Hampden, Sydney,

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and Russell." He found it shocking that these names should be mentioned in front of an audience that lacked the leisure to read the history of England. In the columns of the Black Dwarf, T. J. Wooler replied that the Stockport meeting contained men better versed in the history of their country, than your lordship. They know that Hampden, Sydney, and Russell, were fearless enemies of despotism—Hampden took arms with his countrymen against illegal taxation, standing armies, and arbitrary power, and that he fell nobly upon the field of arms against a crowned tyrant.29 This was Whig history with a vengeance. If radicals resisted toasting the "glorious constitution," they willfully turned the tables of constitutional history on their opponents.30 Most flagrant of all, radicals refused to open their proceedings by toasting the monarch or singing "God Save the King." They almost invariably countered with some version of the toast given by the Ashton radicals in 1838: "The People, the source of legitimate power." From the perspective of the 1830s, it is easy to lose sight of the challenge embodied in such inversions. Radicals of the early nineteenth century adopted a toast that had become prominently associated with both English Jacobinism and the opposition of the Foxite Whigs. In 1798 standing to the previously tolerated toast "Our Sovereign, the Majesty of the People" had cost the Duke of Norfolk the lord lieutenancy of the West Riding and Fox his place on the list of privy councillors. Pitt had considered the toast close to treason.31 A willingness to toast the people in place of the king became a measure of the audacity of reformers. There was, however, a spectrum of available toasting strategies. For instance, the Liverpool Concentric Society, an important middle-class reform club, toasted "The Prince Regent: May his declaration that the Crown is held in trust for the people be exemplified by his conduct."32 On occasion, plebeian radicals followed the opening toast to the people with the heavily ironic toast to "The King and Constitution, and a speedy recovery of both."33 There was no radical equivalent of "God Save the King." "Ca Ira" and the "Marseillaise" were less commonly played in Lancashire than at London radical banquets and meetings. The London Spenceans, who devised the most outrageous repertoire of songs and toasts, published their own songbooks to be used for convivial entertainment.34 Radicals like the weaverpoet Samuel Bamford provided northern radicalism with a stock of original songs. From the 1820s, the Ashton radicals boasted their own local songwriter, John Stafford, who often sang his original composition "Peterloo Massacre" at their dinners. According to the Northern Star, although Stafford "never had the opportunity of learning either to read or write, [he] has composed songs that would do honor to a Southey."35 Defined in opposition to the rituals of loyalism and linked to a wider field of symbolic practice, radical dining also gave formal expression to more spontaneous and informal gestures of popular defiance to established

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authority. From the galleries of provincial theaters there was resistance to loyalist demands for the singing of "God Save the King" and a raucous edge to confrontations over "calling the tunes" at the intermissions that occasionally ended in riot.36 Charles Pigott's Political Dictionary (1795) defined "Theatre" as the common sewer for the most beastly and the most depraved sentiments of loyalty. . . . It is in these places that a most impious, and blasphemous song is sung, during which time the obedient People are compelled, by force of arms, to stand up, uncovered, as if they were in a church.37

In January 1819, Hunt was thrown out of Manchester's Theatre Royal by a group of officers for his refusal to stand and uncover for the playing of "God Save the King." Several nights later, the theater was forced to close due to fears of a riot upon Hunt's threatened return.38 During the trial of Hunt and other radical leaders for their part at Peterloo, Mary Lees gave evidence about popular drinking customs. Serving at a public house at Middleton on 16 August, she had overheard radicals bound for Manchester drinking various toasts, including "God Save the King," "which, although not a common toast, is made use of by the country people." Pressed on cross-examination, she conceded that '"God Save the King' was not a common toast. 'Hunt forever!' was often heard; but she did not know whether this was good or bad."39 The special jury had less difficulty in judging the appropriateness of working people toasting Hunt in place of the king. In the angry aftermath of Peterloo, an informer reported on an evening spent drinking at an illegal liquor shop with a group of determined radicals: We had plenty to drink. They always wanted to know why I did not drink, I told them my stomach was very bad so Bamford went and fetched me nearly a tumbler of wine, he gave a toast, which was "May the tree of liberty be planted in Hell, and may the bloody butchers of Manchester be the fruit on it", or very like that.40

Such informal challenges, voiced within the shelter of the working-class tavern or dram shop, possessed a raw energy, an element of subversive effrontery, usually absent from the more controlled atmosphere of formal public dining. II

The public presence of radicalism was much reduced during the 1820s. State repression followed the passage of the Six Acts in December 1819 and effectively brought to a close the popular mobilization of the postwar years. The legal restrictions placed on large-scale meetings under the new Seditious Meetings Prevention Act (which was far more restrictive than the acts of 1795 and 1817) denied radicalism its major vehicle of mobilization.41 What remained was a bitter resentment toward the reconstituted authority

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of the state. Acts of symbolic resistance, if less common, remained highly charged. In the spring of 1820, for example, radicals and soldiers clashed at the Bull's Head Inn in Oldham following military celebrations of the king's birthday. Customers at the bar sang a song entitled "Peterloo," which included the lines We'll not forget To pay our debts On the field of Peterloo.

They proceeded to denounce the soldiers as "bloody butchers," and radicals proposed the toast "May the skins of all Church and King men serve as drum heads for the Radical armies." Pushed beyond endurance, a soldier seized a radical's white hat (a symbol of radical allegiance borrowed from Hunt) and threw it into the fire. Soldiers of the Seventh Dragoon Guards had to be called from their barracks to save four comrades who were locked inside the tavern and had sustained severe beatings. At the Salford Quarter Sessions, magistrates gave prison sentences of between eighteen months and two years to four men for their part in the seditious toasting and the attack.42 To the surprise and annoyance of government authorities, however, James Taylor was acquitted at Staffordshire spring assizes on charges of sedition. Taylor, a local constable, had tried to force two foot soldiers passing through the parish of Waterfall, Staffordshire, on their way from Manchester to Derby, to toast "Success to Hunt" at the George and Dragon tavern. When one of the soldiers instead toasted the king's health, Taylor exclaimed, "Damn King George, Damn the Prince Regent, Damn them all." The jury acquitted Taylor despite the strong testimony of both soldiers, who appeared in court wearing medals they had won in battle.43 It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Peterloo. For many people, it came to represent the most blatant example of the ruling elite's transgressions against constitutional liberty. Local radicals attempted to give organizational shape to feelings of popular outrage that ran deep in working-class communities. During the early 1820s, Lancashire radicals organized processions of mourning to mark the anniversary of the massacre. At Manchester, radicals paraded through the town, uncovering their heads as they passed St. Peter's Square; the procession proceeded to Hulme Chapel, where, on the second anniversary, the Reverend James Scholefield christened nine children "Henry Hunt." From Ilchester prison, Hunt dated his addresses to male and female reformers by calculating the day and year from 16 August 1819. At Ashton, on the first anniversary, radicals paraded through the town in the afternoon and evening bearing white wands surmounted with black crape; they sang Bamford's "Song of the Slaughter" and listened to a reading of the "National Prayer" for those killed at Peterloo. The following year, it was reported that Ashton's procession was more than twice the size of the town's coronation procession, despite "all the aids that bribery and threats could give" the latter event.44 In 1822, however, Joshua

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Hobson, Charles Walker, Samuel Clayton, and James Higson were brought before the Salford Quarter Sessions on charges of sedition for having displayed a black flag inscribed "Murder: 16 August" from a window of the Union rooms at Charlestown on the anniversary of Peterloo. Radicals had paraded the flag through the streets of Ashton as working people gathered in large numbers to sing "Song of the Slaughter"—described as "a sort of seditious hymn"—and to hear a reading of the names of the magistrates and yeomanry who had acted against the people.45 As the events at Ashton demonstrate, local authorities, backed by the agencies of the law, made it increasingly difficult for radicals to give formal public expression to their politics. By 1823, processions of mourning had faded throughout Lancashire. Moreover, the Seditious Meetings Act not only banned most forms of outdoor assembly, but also limited debates and lectures to licensed premises.46 Under these restrictive conditions, commemorative dining took on expanded importance, as radicals sought ways to operate within the law. As well as preserving democratic traditions, political dining allowed local stalwarts to give a public cast to what were technically private affairs. Thus radicals were able to construct political space ambiguously poised between public and private spheres. Unable to control and define the use of nonexclusive public space, radicals were still able to shape the terms of their own political culture within the ritualized setting of the "public" dinner. Thus in 1820, Ashton radicals gathered at John Higson's Flash Hall to celebrate the birthday of the imprisoned Hunt. The following year, the Manchester Observer reported details of dinners held to honor Hunt at Higson's and at the Claytons' house in Charlestown.47 Here was the beginning of the tradition into which William Aitken was initiated in 1838. If during the immediate postwar years radicals often dined to celebrate the victories of the platform, they now dined to resist the government's attempt to return to the narrow confines of eighteenth-century political participation. The dominant theme at these dinners was that of martyrdom. The opening toast to Hunt—"May . . . [he] finally triumph over his enemies"— was followed by a series of toasts to local Lancashire leaders who had faced trial and imprisonment. "The immortal memory of the slaughtered victims who fell on the fatal 16th of August" was drunk "in solemn silence." The list of songs included "The Liberty Tree," "The Manchester Massacre," "Patriots be Ready," "Adam and Eve," and the "Marseillaise." In 1820 radicals toasted the queen and sang "God Save the Queen"; they followed with a toast to the women of Ashton, "as they have not forgot their Queen; may their Queen never forget them." The abused wife of George IV was radicalism's newest cause. Queen Caroline offered a perfect vehicle for ritual inversion. The myth of king and people was recast with Caroline in the unlikely role of counter-monarch; the prevailing tones were those of parody.48 In the wake of Peterloo, Lancashire radicals also began holding regular dinners to celebrate the birthday of Thomas Paine.49 In many districts, the followers of Richard Carlilc played a crucial role in sustaining the radical

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movement during the 1820s. These zetetics nurtured the minority culture of Paineite republicanism and anti-Christian reasoning with an intellectual intensity worthy of vanguard radicalism.50 Yet when conditions for mass mobilization reemerged in the 1830s, radicalism drew leaders from the ranks of infidel republicanism in certain key Lancashire localities, including Ashton, which was a stronghold of zetetic culture. Most of Ashton's zetetics were workingmen. The radical bookseller Joshua Hobson informed Carlile, "What I sell of your works go, with one or two exceptions, amongst labouring men."51 The highlight of the political year for these advocates of Enlightenment reason was the anniversary of Paine's birth. In 1822, for example, "upwards of sixty male and female friends" sat down to a "neat and simple dinner" at the Claytons'. If the dinner was simple, the proceedings were elaborate. On being called to the chair, Josiah Matley reminded his old political friends of "how proud he had always been at the appellation of Paineite, a term bandied about at first by Church and King mobs, and intended as a term of reproach." Meanings were structured in part through strategies of inversion: Paine in place of the king; Paine as "Saviour." The language of rationalist celebration assumed mock-religious tones. Responding to the opening toast to "The Immortal Memory of Thomas Paine, the Political Saviour of the World," the veteran Jacobin Charles Walker denounced those who "worship men as Gods, and make martyrs of thieves and robbers, (a striking instance of which will be exhibited to-morrow in the celebration of the just death of the tyrant Charles as a martyr)." Speaking to the same toast, and addressing the company as "Citizens," Hobson offered the assurance that while "the panders and supporters of corruption, the decayed remnants of the Pitt and Fox Clubs, may still continue to celebrate the births of their demi-gods . . . the name of Thomas Paine will be transmitted with honour to posterity" and would be cherished by Englishmen "when the names of those political apostates" were either forgotten or recalled only with abhorrence. Later in the evening, Hobson delivered a lengthy disquisition 011 the scientific basis of Paine's Age of Reason. An appropriate cast of international heroes was honored, including such republican favorites as Mirabaud (Baron d'Holbach), Voltaire, Helvetius, and Simon Bolivar and the patriots of South America. The toast to the people carried explicit scorn for monarchy: "May those Scourges of Mankind, commonly called Kings, soon be taught that all true Sovereignty emanates from the People." Priestcraft was treated with derision, as the evening's tone shifted from high seriousness to ridicule. Strong currents of subversive play ran through an evening characterized by the strident rejection of all established authority. The song "A Parson who had a remarkable Foible" followed the toast "May Priests be made to drink plentifully of the Cordial they so much recommended to others, namely, Patience and Long-Suffering." Matley and Walker joined in a duet, "In Liberty's Cause I would yield up my life," and the evening closed with the anthem "God save great Thomas Paine," the verses sung by "the ladies" and chorus by the whole meeting.52

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The Ashton republicans maintained an active minority presence through the 1820s. Reports of commemorative dinners at Ashton cease, however, after 1823. This probably reflects the demise of the Manchester radical press and the disinterest of middle-class newspapers rather than a discontinuation of these gatherings.53 After having encouraged the observance of Paine's birthday—indeed, having published his own list of recommended toasts— Carlile also lost interest.54 It seems unlikely, however, that the Claytons and their friends shared Carlile's inveterate suspicion of popular ritual; nor were they much affected by Carlile's unrivalled talent for sectarian discord. The rituals and language of popular radicalism were syncretic. Many of the same radicals who celebrated Paine's birthday attended dinners at the Claytons' to honor Hunt, the greatest platform orator of the day and a forceful champion of constitutionalist, as opposed to rationalist, reasoning.55 The retreat from the tactics of large-scale demonstrations was a necessity of the times. Even after restrictions against public meetings expired in late 1824, plebeian radicals found it difficult to resuscitate the mass platform.56 Political dining was one response to the closing down of the mass platform and the restrictions placed on the use of public space. Radicals gave ritual notice, however, that they regarded certain rights, particularly free public assembly and free religious and political expression, to be inviolable— a conviction based most commonly on libertarian notions of Britain's constitutional past. Finally, Ashton's republicans not only managed to nurture the radical movement through lean years, but also kept certain meanings available for the labor movement at large. During the bitter Ashton cotton spinners' strike in the winter of 1830, their young leader, John Joseph Betts, who was also a Carlileite, addressed meetings wearing a broad tricolored ribbon. Armed strikers marched under tricolored flags and carried banners inscribed with the republican slogan "Liberty or Death."57 Ill

We are now in a better position to consider William Aitken's formal introduction to radical politics and the report in the Northern Star that opened this chapter. The Claytons' dinner clearly served as part of the rites of radical passage. A new generation of radicals was being initiated into the rituals of solidarity, brought within the radical fold. Younger activists like Aitken and Timothy Higgins, both of whom were to serve prison sentences for their Chartist commitment, came together with radicals of an earlier generation, men and women who had marched to St. Peter's Field and who had kept the fragments of popular radicalism in place during the difficult decade of the 1820s.58 Samuel Walker gave the traditional reading of the names of those killed or wounded at Peterloo, including that of his own father, a veteran republican, who also attended the dinner. Radical principles ran strong through families like the Claytons, the Walkers, the Matleys, the Broadbents, and the Dukes. In 1839 the Ashton Chartists dined at the Walkers' (Mrs. Walker had been injured at Peterloo). The following year,

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they dined at the Charlestown home of the "old republican" Abraham Matley, who was a bricklayer. Dinners for Paine continued at the Claytons' house.59 The presence of women was significant. Although resolutely anonymous in this report (as in most others), women sat down to dine with their husbands at the Claytons', as they had done for nearly two decades. No woman was reported proposing a toast or offering a song; the toast to Paine was not matched by one to Mary Wollstonecraft. John Fenton and Aitken addressed their remarks to the chairman and their "Brother radicals." Yet despite their subordinate roles, radical women were part of the movement.60 Their attendance was in marked contrast to the practice of elite dining, in which women were either excluded or separated from the main party. The community- and family-based character of popular radicalism was most pronounced in the northern manufacturing districts. It was, after all, in the cotton-manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Cheshire that women had first assumed a prominent public role in popular radical politics and had first formed their own political associations. During the early 1820s, subscription lists from Ashton supporting the imprisoned Carlile included large numbers of women.61 Not the least important, women such as Nancy Clayton and Mrs. Walker had been present at Peterloo. The dinner, like the broader movement, was highly inclusive, integrating the radical community and its culture at a number of key levels. Radicals expressed a sense of revolutionary unity among the nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Paine was toasted along with the martyrs of Scottish Jacobinism: Thomas Muir and T. F. Palmer. The anthem of Scottish Jacobinism, "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," written by Robert Burns during the trials of 1793, was sung. The tragic Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet, executed for high treason in 1803, was similarly honored. In 1840 and 1841, in order to raise subscriptions for the families of imprisoned Chartists, the Ashton Chartists gave touring performances of a play based on Emmet's trial that included his famous speech from the dock.62 Aitken's concluding tribute to Hunt was merely an altered version of the final lines of Tom Moore's elegy for Emmet.63 The Irish-born Higgins linked the struggles of English radicalism to those of Irish nationalism. Peterloo was paired with the more recent outrage (1834) at Rathcormac, County Cork.64 Like many other northern towns, Ashton possessed a large pre-famine Irish population that had grown rapidly during the 1820s and 1830s, primarily as a result of the collapse of Irish textile manufacture.65 Most significantly, the appeal to these "exiles of Erin" was made in the spirit of 1798, the year of Ireland's abortive rising, and as a counter to Irish allegiance to the moderate nationalism and anti-Chartist leadership of Daniel O'Connell.66 The choice of heroes toasted, the decorations, and the songs were studied reminders of a tradition running back to the 1790s and beyond. The heroes of postwar radicalism—Hunt, Cobbett, and Carlile—were toasted along with the emergent heroes of northern Chartism, the leaders of the factory and anti-Poor Law movements—O'Connor, O'Brien, Oastler, and

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Ashton's own Reverend J. R Stephens. Strict ideological coherence was a low priority. Radicals who toasted Hunt in "solemn silence" apparently felt no sense of contradiction in raising their glasses to honor Carlile "as a supporter of a free press." It is hard to imagine that Stephens, a renegade Methodist minister whose fierce opposition to factory conditions and the new Poor Law drew moral energy from the prophets of the Old Testament, relished being honored with England's most notorious infidel and the leading atheist philosopher of the French Enlightenment, Mirabaud.67 Stephens brought an apocalyptic moral vision to Chartism; his platform rhetoric was structured on Manichaean dualisms—contrasting images of darkness versus light, evil versus good, oppression versus justice, governors versus the people, employers versus workers.68 His was the language of the torchlight meeting, where pistol volleys celebrated pronouncements of the divine vengeance to be visited on the people's and the Lord's enemies. The style and language of these proceedings would seem to share little with the world of plebeian rationalism. Yet tolerance for such apparently discordant ideological strains was born neither of ignorance nor of ideological indifference; on the contrary, the inclusion of Paine, Carlile, Voltaire, Volney, Condorcet, Robespierre, and company, reflected the past commitments of local radicals and the origins of radical dining at Ashton. Moreover, such commitments continued. Aitken, for example, believed that science would liberate humankind from the twin evils of priestcraft and aristocratic government and "mend the social condition of mankind": Science will remove the unhallowed influence which a venal priesthood, have for thousands of years held over the whole human family, it will shed a ray of light over all your musings, wanderings, and private conversations, and will eventually (to use the emphatic words of the great Lord Byron) "conduct the world at last to Freedom." The improvements which are now making in the scientific world, will remain, as so many landmarks in the flood of time to show the wish of the philosopher, to mend the social condition of mankind, and will also show the perfidy of the government who allowed a nation's best and most useful prop—the people—to fall amidst so many great and beneficial improvements.69

Following an all-embracing (and very French) toast to "those that wrote or fought in the cause of freedom," the watchmaker Elijah Broadbent recited the fifteenth chapter of Volney's Ruins of Empires, one of the sacred texts of republican-infidelism. The fifteenth chapter, which presents the vision of a "New Age," was often published separately as a tract. In this chapter, "the People," or productive classes, confront various sections of "the Privileged class" and interrogate them as to their functions in society. Having concluded that the governing elite perform no useful labor, the people banish them: "Privileged men, class distinct from the people, form a nation apart and govern yourselves."70 The selection of text is interesting, not only as an illustration of the continued influence of the French Revolution on English radical experience, but because The Ruins of Empires \& a deeply alle-

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gorical work, dividing the world into two hostile camps. Volney's vision of a "New Age" shares an apocalyptic or millenarian sensibility also present in Stephens's sermons and speeches: the world is be reborn, reimagined into righteousness. Perhaps not coincidentally, in the early nineteenth century Ashton had been a center of plebeian millenarianism—a Southcottian and then a Wroeite stronghold.71 Moreover, Volney's distinction between "the People" and "the Privileged," between the vast productive majority and a corrupt minority, affirmed a distinction fundamental to English radical discourse. A sharp line was drawn not between employers and employed, those who purchased and those who sold their labor power, but between the ruling elite and the ruled. By the 1830s, however, an important shift in meaning had taken place within radical discourse, as "the People" assumed a nearly exclusive identity with "the working classes."72 As if to underscore this shift in meaning, in 1839 the Ashton Chartists opened their dinner with a toast to "Working Classes, the true and legitimate source of all power."73 At Ashton a broad section of "the people" were now factory workers. The traditions of artisanal politics were preserved within the altered context of the factory town. The Northern Star's, report opens by reminding readers of one of the key material constraints these workers faced as they attempted to fashion their own political culture: control of time.74 Ashton's radicals had delayed the celebration of Hunt's birthday from 6 November to 10 November, a Saturday, because during the week factory operatives were "continually locked up, and unable to appropriate a single hour" for such convivialities. Factory workers lacked the flexibility overworking hours enjoyed by artisans and by many outworkers. The issue of control of time had become a matter of acute conflict throughout industrial Lancashire by September 1838, when several mill owners dismissed employees who had attended the great Kersal Moor demonstration.75 The Chartist rally was held on a Monday, a working day for factory hands but a customary day of leisure for many artisans. The torchlight demonstrations convened throughout the factory districts during November and December were a response to these restraints—intimidating reappropriations of working-class "independence." At these meetings, the Chartists of the North pushed the right of public assembly to the edge of the law.76 The dinner itself not only marked Hunt's birthday, but also celebrated Chartism's reclamation of the mass platform. The commemorative occasion reinforced the link between radical dining and the politics of public space. Radicals dined in part to make a moral and political statement to the rulers of the nation and of their own community—"the Privileged"—that never again would troops march on a meeting of constitutionally assembled English men and women, or at least not with impunity. Those dining at Ashton had taken it upon themselves to be the preservers of a fundamental constitutional right, the defense of which could not be entrusted to their rulers. Defensive and offensive tones were finely blended in an appeal to patriotic virtue. Aitken hoped that the day was not distant when thousands of "armed patriots" would seek retribution for the Peterloo massacre and

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warned that "the people" were in a stronger position than in 1819. "Englishmen are Englishmen still," prepared to resist a military assault on the cause of popular liberty.77 Moreover, the reclamation of the mass platform and radicalism's constructions of patriotism must also be set against official attempts to constitute the nation and local community through civic ritual, through a marking out of urban space and time. Thus in June 1838, in common with other localities throughout the country, elaborate coronation celebrations were organized for the Ashton district. Town worthies, thousands of Sundayschool scholars and their teachers, firemen with their engines, Greenwich and Chelsea pensioners, bands of drums and fifes, benefit and trades society members, masons, constables, churchwardens, the old and the young, the high and the low paraded through the streets of Ashton, Stalybridge, and Dukinfield, marking out urban space as an intended measure of both local and national consensus. The national anthem was sung, refreshments were provided, dinners held, and fireworks set offin the marketplace. There is, however, reason to doubt that such celebrations represented unified communal understandings or served to engender consent to established relations of authority. Indeed, radical opponents of the new Poor Law overtly resisted the terms of this ritual inscription of local and national allegiance. On the (Thursday) morning of Queen Victoria's coronation, Ashton's radicals mounted a counter-demonstration. Five thousand men and women assembled in the marketplace, where they passed a series of resolutions threatening armed self-defense on the part of "the people"—"the last and most solemn step, which the constitution requires them to take"—-against the "unconstitutional" authority of the police, soldiers, and Poor Law commissioners. The meeting resolved that although they were called upon to swear allegiance to the young queen, they could only acknowledge "as their constitutional duty, that allegiance that is loyally given by a free people for that protection, which the sovereign is bound to afford the subject."78 Allegiance was contingent on alternative views of the national and local community and of norms of justice. Despite Chartist apprehensions and the escalating rhetoric of armed confrontation, there was no repetition of Peterloo; a right had indeed been gained. The rituals of remembrance, however, remained charged with intense political feeling. In his recollections of his early radical days, Aitken provides an illustration of how strong such sentiments could run. He relates that after Peterloo, Nancy Clayton had transformed a black petticoat that she had worn on "that memorable day" into a black flag that was displayed, along with a green cap of liberty, on anniversaries of the massacre. In 1839 a new cap of liberty was made, and as usual it was hung out with the black flag on 16 August. "These terrible and terrifying emblems of sedition" alarmed the authorities; this was the week that the Chartist "sacred month" was supposed to begin. A group of constables and a troop of the Sixth Dragoons marched to Charlestown to seize the flag and cap. Having gotten wind of this move, an obstinate band of women gathered to defend the

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Clayton home and the emblems of radicalism. The women were unable to prevent the police from searching the premises and capturing the black flag, which had been hidden under the Claytons' bed. "Off this gallant and noble body of men marched with poor old Nancy's petticoat—the black flag, never more to grace a Radical banquet of potato pies and home-brewed ales." The cap of liberty was, however, never found. The following week 'Riah Whitty, who told Aitken this story, met the town's chief constable and exclaimed, "'Now thou did na find that cap o'liberty did ta?' 'No,' he said, 'I did na 'Riah, where wur it?' She said, 'I knew thou couldna find it; it wur where thou duratna go for it.'"79 As in many Chartist reminiscences written during the golden years of popular liberalism, Aitken managed to tame the radical experience of his youth. Nancy Clayton and 'Riah Whitty are colorful personalities, but there is little danger about them. Aitken's reminiscence does, however, draw attention to the ritual context of popular radicalism. He linked the traditions of radical dining to a wider field of symbolic display and to conflict over ritualized gestures of political resistance. The display and seizure of Nancy's petticoat fully makes sense, however, only when set against the mourning processions of the early 1820s and the prosecutions of local republicans for displaying a black flag (was it Nancy's?) on 16 August 1822. Radicals and their opponents had engaged in a contest (one they replayed more than once) that measured their respective powers to control, to exhibit or suppress, certain symbols of resistance. On 16 August 1840 a new black flag was hung out at Ashton, bearing the defiant inscription "in letters of blood: —'Murder on the 16th of August 1819, at Peterloo.'"80 The symbolic practice of radicalism thrived on conflict and ambiguity. The black flag was a symbol of mourning. The pirates' black flag, however, carried a revolutionary message: under no law or government.81 The cap of liberty most obviously referred to the experience of the French Revolution. But Ashton's radicals did not display the bonnet rouge of French republicanism; their cap was Leveller green, and thus assumed English libertarian tones. There was a similar tension between the traditions of popular constitutionalism and Paineite republicanism at Ashton's radical dinners. Two notions of "patriotism" coexisted: an internationalist allegiance rooted in the Enlightenment impulses of the American and French revolutions, and a nationalist claim to the inheritance of freeborn Englishmen. The language of political ritual, the process of radical remembrance, was important to the emerging political and class solidarities of the early nineteenth century. Through such rituals, radicals helped to define the terms of a distinct political culture and public sphere of discourse that was in opposition to that of the ruling elites of both their nation and their local communities. Furthermore, the dining and toasting, the processions and flags offered something more than mere color to popular politics; they formed part of an arena of contested meanings. Throughout the 1840s, Chartists at Ashton maintained the traditions of radical conviviality. Indeed, into the late 1850s, "a few choice spirits of the old school of Radical

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reformers" still met at taverns and in the homes of radicals like Samuel Walker to celebrate the birthdays of Paine and Hunt, to toast "The people, the one true source of power," to drink in solemn silence to "The immortal memory of Henry Hunt, the man who never deceived the people," to recite Emmet's speech and sing "Tyrants of Old England." As late as 1859, residents of Charlestown displayed black flags outside their homes to mark the anniversary of Peterloo.82 By this period, however, there was a new temper within the factory town. Just as the rituals of radical commemoration had embodied a shared experience of popular insurgency, the annual works dinner (financed by the factory owner) and the increased number of civic processions (under the control of the town corporation) signaled the arrival of more accommodative tones.83

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Notes

Chapter 1. The Constitutionalist Idiom 1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1.852), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), P. 97. 2. R. J. Richardson, The Right of Englishmen to Have Arms.. . as Shown in a Speech Delivered in the National Convention ... 9th April, 1839 (London, 1839), p. 3. 3. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791-1792; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 41-42, 71-72. 4. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), chap. 4; Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chap. 2; Gwyn A. Williams, Artisans and SansCulottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), pp. 13-18; Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), chaps. 3, 4. 5. Claeys, Thomas Paine, pp. 85-104; Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michael Sonenscher, "The Sans-Culottes of the Year II: Rethinking the Language of Labour in France," Social History 9 (1984): 304; William H. Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 120-26, for Locke's influence on French revolutionary thought. 6. All these writers drew on older traditions of civic and dissenting discourse. For the shift in Spence's views under the influence of the French Revolution, see Malcolm Chase, The People's Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 3.

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Notes to Pages 6-8

7. Mark Philp, "The Fragmented Ideology of Reform," in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 50-77; John Dinwiddy, "Conceptions of Revolution in the English Radicalism of the 1790s," in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 535; Gregory Claeys, "The French Revolution Debate and British Political Thought," History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 59-80, for a "rereading" of the Paine-Burke debate. 8. H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in EighteenthCentury Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 240-58. There remained moderate reformers who from the outset distanced themselves from Paine and the French Revolution. See Iain Hampsher-Monk, "Civic Humanism and Parliamentary Reform: The Case of the Society of the Friends of the People," Journal of British Studies 18 (1979): 70-89. 9. John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments . . . Containing Strictures on the Spirit and Temper ofBurke's Letters on the Prospect of a Regicide Pence, 2 pts., 3rd ed. (London, 1796), pt. 1, p. 75. 10. Ibid., pt. 2, pp. 16-17, 4, 50-51. See also John Thelwall, The Natural and Constitutional Right of Britons to Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage and the Freedom of Popular Association (London, 1795); Iain Hampsher-Monk, "John Thelwall and the Eighteenth-Century Radical Response to Political Economy," Historical Journal 34 (1991): 1-20; cf. Geoffrey Gallop, "Ideology and the English Jacobins: The Case of John Thelwall," Enlightenment and Dissent$ (1986): 3-20. While there were certainly unresolved tensions within ThelwalPs writings, Gallop's argument that in practice Thelwall rejected Paineite republicanism in favor of constitutionalism takes little account of the discursive conditions prevailing at the time of the passage of the Two Acts. 11. Henry Yorke, These Are the Times that Try Men's Souls! (London, 1793), p. 6. 12. Citizen Randol [D. I. Eaton?], A Political Catechism of Man: Wherein his Natural Rights are Familiarly Explained, and Exemplified (London, 1795), pp. 3, 15-19.1 am indebted to Edward Thompson for a copy of this work. 13. Cabinet! (1795): 238-48. 14. See, for example, Jackson Barwis, A Fourth Dialogue Concerning Liberty: Containing an Exposition of the Falsity of the Leading Principles of the Present Revolutionists in Europe (London, 1793), pp. 7-11, for a loyalist case against the ways in which the words "sovereignty" and "the people" were being used contrary to "nature." See more generally Thomas Philip Schofield, "Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution," Historical Journal29 (1986): 601-22. 15. John Gale Jones, Sketch of a- Political Tour Through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend (London, 1796), pp. 46^18. 16. Tribune, 18 Apr. 1795, pp. 132-33. 17. Linda Colley, "Radical Patriotism in Eighteenth-Century England," in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 169-87; Kathleen Wilson, "Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon," Past and Present 121 (1988): 74-109. Colley suggests fundamental shifts in radical usage of the term coming with the American Revolution. 18. A Summary of the Duties of Citizenship: Written Expressly for Members of

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the London Corresponding Societies (London, 1795), pp. 19, 22, 27-28; PRO, TS 11/837 (2832), Kingv. Lee. The pamphlet became controversial during the parliamentary debates over the Two Acts; the London Corresponding Society disclaimed any association with the work. 19. First Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons (London, 1794); Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons . . . To Which are Added the First and Second. Reports of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords (London, 1794); Tribune, 28 Mar. 1795, pp. 49-50,25 Apr. 1795, pp. 155-56, 3 June 1795, p. 194; Cecil Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall, by His Widow (London, 1837), p. 128. Thelwall dissociated the Terror from the principles of the revolution. 20. Copies in PRO, TS 11/837 (2832), Kingv. Lee. Lee sold selections from Charles Pigott's Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words (London, 1795) in separate 1-penny sheets. See Marilyn Ann Morris, "The Monarchy as an Issue in English Political Argument during the French Revolutionary Era" (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1990), particularly chaps. 2-4. Morris stresses the ambiguities and changing emphases within English republicanism. For loyalist portrayals of monarchy and the visual culture of radicalism, see David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum, 1989), pp. 47-59. 21. PRO, TS 11/506 (1662),.R. v. Nuttall, October 1793;TS 11/924 (3238), R. v. William Francis, May 1794. The files of TS ll/- contain a fair number of such cases. 22. PRO, HO 42/26, Brough to Kinderley and Jones, 25 July 1793. The chalkings were protesting the sentencing of Daniel Holt to four years' imprisonment for having refused to withdraw from sale Paine's Letter Addressed to the Addressers. 23. Monitor, December 1797, copy in British Library, Place Newspaper Collection, Set 38, vol. 1. 24. John Turner, "Burke, Paine, and the Nature of Language," Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 36-53; Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988), particularly chap. 6. 25. John Belchem, "Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England," Social History 6 (1981): 1-32; Belchem, "Orator" Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 107-10; James Epstein, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832-1842 (London: Groom Helm, 1982), particularly chaps. 3, 4 passim. 26. See, in particular, Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 17931815 (London: Macmillan, 1979). 27. Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983); Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 720-34, 762-68; Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). The postwar republican-infidel movement is the theme of Chapter 4. 28. lorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (Folkestone: Dawson, 1979), pp. 83-85; Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), chap. 6.

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Notes to Pages 10-13

29. Leeds Times, 19 Dec. 1835, p. 4. The following week he declared, "We don't look for anything unlawful, for up to the reign of Henry the Seventh, we had annual parliaments; up to the reign of Henry the Sixth, we had universal suffrage. Then we were deprived of it" (Leeds Times, 26 Dec. 1835, p. 4). 30. See Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary Theory and Legal Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), pp. 23-25. 31. Cobbett's Political Register, 2 Dec. 1816, cols. 454-55; William Spater, 'William Cobbett: The Poor Man's Friend, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 387-88; Ian Dyck, "Debts and Liabilities: William Cobbett and Thomas Paine," in Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine, ed. Ian Dyck (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 86-103. 32. PRO, HO 40/50, reports of William Tongue, 27 Oct. 1839, fols. 64647, 13 Nov. 1839, fols. 880-82. See also TS 11/142 (390), for Brown. 33. See Chapters 3 and 5. 34. For changing "repertoires" of social and political action, see Charles Tilly, "Britain Creates the Social Movement," in Social Conflict and Political Order in Modern Britain, ed. James E. Cronin and Joanthan Schneer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), pp. 21-51. 35. See, for example, Northern Star, 23 June 1838, p. 3, 9 Mar. 1839, p. 7, for Richardson's letter, "The Centralizing System"; M. E. Rose, "The Anti-Poor Law Agitation," in Popular Movements, 1830-50, ed. J. T. Ward (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 78-94; John Knott, Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law (London: Groom Helm, 1986); R. D. Storch, "The Plague of the Blue Locusts: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840-57," International Review of'Social History 20 (1975): 61-90. 36. PRO, HO 40/38, fol. 658; T. M. Kemnitz and F. Jacques, "J. R. Stephens and the Chartist Movement," International Review of Social History 19 (1974): 211-27. 37. Northern Star, 18 Oct. 1839, p. 4. See also Matthew Fletcher, Letters to the Inhabitants of Bury (Bury, 1852), letter 4, pp. 5-7. 38. Lois G. Schwoerer, "No Standing Armies! "The Anti-Army Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights, 1689 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 74-78; Joyce Lee Malcolm, "The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms: The Common Law Tradition," Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 10 (1983): 285-314; Malcolm, "The Creation of a 'True Antient and Indubitable' Right: The English Bill of Rights and the Right to Be Armed," Journal of British Studies 32 (1993): 226-49; P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws, 1617-1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 1, pp. 78-82. The right to arm was granted to all Protestant subjects "suitable to their condition and degree." 39. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (17651769; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), vol. 1, p. 139; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), particularly pp. 38590 (on Harrington), 430-32. 40. John Cartwright, The English Constitution Produced and Illustrated (London, 1823), pp. 104-15.

41. Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act (London: Hutchinson, 1973),

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pp. 250, 254-59, 297, 307-9; John L. Baxter, "The Case for Resistance, Arming and the Early Chartist Road to Insurrection," Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 42 (1981): 5. 42. Northern Liberator, 17 Nov. 1838, p. 3; Charter, 19 May 1839, p. 268; Northern Star, 18 May 1839, p. 5. 43. See, for example, PRO, TS 11/1030 (4424 A), for the case against Timothy Higgins; Robert Sykes, "Physical-Force Chartism: The Cotton District and the Chartist Crisis of 1839," International Review of Social History 30 (1985): 21119; Epstein, Lion of Freedom, pp. 175-79. 44. Peter Fraser, "Public Petitioning and Parliament Before 1832," History 46 (1961): 195-211. 45. Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (1844; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 13-74 passim; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 603-69; Belchem, "Orator" Hunt, chap. 3; N. C. Miller, "John Cartwright and Radical Parliamentary Reform, 1808-1819," English Historical Review 83 (1968): 722-26; H. W. C. Davis, "Lancashire Reformers, 1816-17," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 10 (1926): 46-79. Burdett opposed popular radicals' decision to petition for universal as opposed to household suffrage. Lord Thomas Cochrane presented most of the petitions. 46. Proceedings of the Middleton Union Society, for Promoting a Constitutional Reform in the Common's House of Parliament (Manchester, 1816), pp. 5-6; A Report of the Proceedings of the Public Meeting Held in . . . Manchester (Manchester, 1816), pp. 2, 6-8, 14, 22-24. See also To the People of England: At a Meeting of Deputies from Fourteen Petitioning Bodies of the County of Lancaster (Manchester, 1816), and, more generally, Manchester Political Register, 4 Jan.-l Mar. 1817; the journal explicitly dissociated the Lancashire movement from the London Spenceans. 47. See, for example, Robert Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (London: Groom Helm, 1983), chap. 9, on Stockport. 48. PRO, HO 40/10, informers' reports, 31 Dec. 1816, fol. 121, 24 Feb. 1817, fols. 134-35. 49. PRO, HO 40/10, informers' reports, 27 Jan. 1817, fol. 126,29 Jan. 1817, fols. 130-31; HO 42/158, depositions of Samuel Fleming and Peter Campbell, enclosed in Ethelston to Sidmouth, 1 Feb. 1817; HO 40/9, digest of evidence against Lancashire reformers, fols. 455, 458; HO 40/4/1, pt. 2, information of "P. C.," 28 Jan. 1817, fol. 108. 50. PRO, HO 40/5/4A, deposition of John Livesey, 4 Mar. 1817, fol. 12; HO 40/9, digest of evidence, fols. 460-61. 51. John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 170. 52. See The Statutes at Large 3 (London, 1770), 2 Car. II, cap. 5, pp. 208-9. The act made it illegal for more than twenty persons to sign a petition aimed at altering "matters established by law in church or state" unless first ordered by at least three magistrates or the majority of the grand jury of the county; furthermore, no petition could be presented accompanied by more than ten persons. Cf. Bagguley's careful instructions on how to petition in PRO, HO 40/5/4A, examination of Livesey, 11 Mar. 1817, fols. 57-58. 53. Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 15 Mar. 1817; PRO, HO 40/5/4A: report of meeting of 10 Mar. 1817, fols. 43-16, Green to Sidmouth, 10 Mar. 1817, fols. 47-18; HO 41/2: Beckett to Byng, 10 Mar. 1817, fol. 200; Sidmouth to Evans, 7 Mar. 1817, fol. 202; TS 11/347 (1077), Crown brief, including narrative of

172

Notes to Pages 16-19

events; HO 40/9, list of Lancashire reformers imprisoned. Ogden and Johnston were arrested prior to the march. The authorities had difficulty finding lawful grounds on which to arrest or prosecute marchers most of whom were released; none of the organizers were brought to trial. 54. R J. White, Waterloo to Peterloo (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 164. 55. PRO, HO 42/159, Ethelston to Sidmouth, 5 Feb. 1817, went on to note, "The Resistance of the Barons to King John's Tyranny was applied in this way with the desired effect." 56. Blackwood'sMagazine, Apr. 1817,p. 106, reporting the Commons debate of 14 Feb. 1817. For the broader conservative attack on radical antiquarianism, see Janice Lee, "Political Antiquarianism Unmasked: The Conservative Attack on the Myth of the Ancient Constitution," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 55 (1982): 166-79. 57. In 1795 the same act was cited as precedent for the Seditious Meetings Act. See The History of the Two Acts (London, 1796), p. 260. 58. Drammond told the marchers, "We will apply to our noble Prince as a child would to its Father for bread" (PRO, HO 40/5/4A, report of 10 Mar. 1817, fol. 43). 59. The scheme for a single national petition was in response to recent parliamentary restrictions on presenting petitions. See Fraser, "Public Petitioning and Parliament," pp. 209-11. 60. T. M. Parssinen, "Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771-1848," English Historical Review 88 (1973): 504-33; I. J. Prothero, "William Benbow and the Concept of the 'General Strike,'" Past and Presented (1974): 135-41. 61. See, for example, Bolton Free Press, 20 Apr. 1839, p. 3; Northern Star, 3 Aug. 1839, p. 7. 62. A small group of delegates felt that they sat only as a petitioning body. See Charter, 10 Feb. 1839, pp. 45-46,17 Feb. 1839, pp. 50-53; Northern Star, 2 Nov. 1839, p. 6; Epstein, Lion of Freedom, pp. 146-51. 63. Thomas Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation (1792), in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 499-500. 64. Charter, 28 Apr. 1839, p. 220. See also Charter, 17 Feb. 1839, p. 5, for the comments of Peter McDouall. Lord John Russell assured the Commons that the convention "was a body for the sole purpose of preparing and presenting petitions to Parliament" (Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 45 [11 Feb. 1839], col. 220). 65. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commomvealthman (New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 363-67; Parssinen, "Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament," pp. 505-10. 66. Most explicitly outlined in Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers. 67. T. B. Howell and T. J. Howell, eds., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1809-1826), vol. 24: 1794, col. 207; Thomas Hardy, Memoir of Thomas Hardy (1832), in Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians, 1790-1885, ed. David Vincent (London: Europa, 1977), pp. 51-58; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 102-137 passim; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French

Notes to Pages 19-22

173

Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), chap. 9; Parssinen, "Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament," pp. 510-15. 68. Black Dwarf, 30 June 1819, cols. 431-32,21 July 1819, cols. 473-84; A Correct Report of the Proceedings of a Meeting, Held at Newhall Hill, Birmingham... for the Purpose of Obtaining the Representation of the People of Birmingham in Parliament (Birmingham, 1819); Belchem, "Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform," pp. 13-14. 69. K E. Lee, A Whisper to the Whigs, or, What is Treason? (London, 1833); William Benbow, Grand National Holiday and the Congress of the Productive Classes (London, 1832); Cosmopolite, 7 Apr. 1832, 18 May 1833; Man, 8 Aug. 1833, pp. 49-50; Hollis, Pauper Press, pp. 114-15, 204, 212-14, for Lee and Lorymer; Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London, pp. 295-96. 70. Northern Star, 26 Oct. 1839, p. 3. 71. Northern Star, 4 May 1839, p. 5. 72. Some of Harney's sharpest critics had themselves donned caps of liberty at public meetings, most notably Fletcher, who persuaded Sankey to withdraw his resolution. 73. See J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum 1971), chap. 1. 74. Shenvin's Political Register, 12 Sept. 1818, pp. 295-96; Cap of Liberty, 1 Dec. 1819, p. 200; Iain McCalman, "Popular Radicalism and Freethought in Early Nineteenth Century England: A Study of Richard Carlile and His Followers, 181532" (M.A. thesis, Australian National University, 1975), pp. 9-11; J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796-1821 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 322-23. For the myth of the free Anglo-Saxon constitution, see Christopher Hill, "The Norman Yoke," in his Puritanism and Revolution (London: Mercury, 1962), pp. 50-122; J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 125-27; cf. R. B. Seaberg, "The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: The Levellers and the Argument from Continuity," Historical Journal 24 (1981): 791-806. 75. Cartwright, English Constitution Produced, pp. 78-8, 6-7. For an earlier statement on Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, see also John Cartwright, An Appeal on the Subject of the English Constitution (Boston, 1797), pp. 36-38. 76. John Cartwright, Letter to the Duke of Newcastle . . . Together with Some Remarks Touching the French Revolution (London, 1792), pp. 102-5. 77. Mark Goldie, "The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688-94," History of Political Thought 1 (1980): 209; H. T. Dickinson, "The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the 'Glorious Revolution,'" History 61 (1976): 28-45, for the Whig retreat from any generalized notion of the right of resistance. 78. John Belchem, "1848: Feargus O'Connor and the Collapse of the Mass Platform," in The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, ed. James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 269-310; John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge.: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 79. Logic Barrow, "Socialism in Eternity: The Ideology of Plebeian Spiritualists, 1853-1912," History Workshop Journal 9 (1980): 39; Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861-81 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), chap. 5; Rohan McWilliam, "Radicalism and Popular Culture: The Tichborne Case and the Politics of'Fair Play,' 1867-1886," in Currents ofRadi-

174

Notes to Pages 22-23

catism: Popular Radicalism, Organised, Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 18501914, ed. Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 44-64. 80. Thus while reference to the ancient constitution offended notions of progress, Carlile acknowledged that Cartwright's English Constitution Produced came close to Paine's republican agenda. See Republican, 11 July 1823, pp. 1-32. 81. John Rule, "The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture," in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 99-118; Robert G. Hall, "Tyranny, Work and Politics: The 1818 Strike Wave in the English Cotton District," International Review of Social History 34 (1989): 462-63, for weavers citing Locke. 82. William Cobbett, Cobbett's Legacy to Labourers; or, What is the Right which the Lords, Baronets, and 'Squires, Have to the Lands of England (London, 1834), p. 124. See also Northern Star, 6 Jan. 1838, p. 5, for Lawrence Pitkeithley's speech drawing on "ancient statutes" that supported the laborer's right to the soil. I am indebted to Stewart Weaver for drawing my attention to Cobbett's argument here. 83. T. R. Knox, "Thomas Spence: The Trumpet of the Jubilee," Past and Present 76 (1977): 75-98; T. M. Parssinen, "Thomas Spence and the Origins of English Land Nationalisation," Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 135-41; Chase, People's Farm, chaps. 3,4; Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 1; J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Questfor the New Moral World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 45-87. 84. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 263. 85. Iain McCalman, "Females, Feminism and Freelove in an Early Nineteenth Century Radical Movement," Labour History 38 (1980): 1-25; Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983). See also Sally Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Difference in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of Feminist History," History Workshop Journal 17 (1984): 136-46. See also Chapter 4. 86. But see Republican, 10 Sept. 1819, pp. 44-46, for Samuel Ferrand Waddington's attempt to found women's right to political participation historically. For female involvement and the place of gender in Chartism, see Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1984), chap. 7; David Jones, "Women and Chartism," History 68 (1983): 1-21; Anna Clark, "The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s," Journal of British Studies Z\ (1992): 62-88. Also important were the ways in which Chartist endorsement of the male artisan ideal of the family wage and of notions of women's domestic role reinforced gender subordination. 87. See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987), particularly pp. 66-73, for her discussion of Wollstonecraft. 88. Frank O'Gorman, "Pitt and the 'Tory' Reaction to the French Revolution, 1789-1815," and H. T. Dickinson, "Popular Conservatism and Militant Loyalism, 1789-1815," both in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789-1815,c&. H. T. Dickinson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 21-37, 103-25; Alan Booth, "Popular Loyalism and Public Violence in the North-West of England, 17901800," Social History9, (1983): 295-313; Thompson, Making of the English Work-

Notes to Pages 23-25

175

ing Class, pp. 104, 112-16; Clive Emsley, "Repression, 'Terror' and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution," English Historical Review 100 (1985): 801-25; Robert L. Dozier, For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), pp. 64, 83, 90-92. 89. Mary Thale, "London Debating Societies in the 1790s," Historical Journal 32 (1989): 70-86, 90. John Thelwall, Citizen Thelwall: Fraternity and. Unanimity to the friends of freedom (London, 1795); Thelwall, Prospectus of a. Course of Lectures . . . in Strict Conformity with the Restrictions of Mr. Pitt's Convention Act (London, 1796); Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 7. Hardy quit attending political meetings following his acquittal. 91. Roger Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795-1803 (Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1983); Wells, "English Society and Revolutionary Politics in the 1790s: The Case for Insurrection," in French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Philp, pp. 188-226; Hone, For the Cause of Truth, chaps. 1, 2; Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), particularly chaps. 6, 9. 92. See, for example, "Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons," Journals of the House of Commons 54 (15 Mar. 1799): 329-71; "Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Commons, Respecting Certain Meetings and Combinations," Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 35 (19 Feb. 1817), cols. 438-47; Trevor McGovern, "Conservative Ideology in Britain in the 1790s," History 73 (1988): 243-44. 93. John Dinwiddy, "England," in Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution, ed. Otto Dann and John Dinwiddy (London and Ronceverte: Hambleton, 1988), p. 60; John Baxter, A New and Impartial History of England (London, 1796), pp. ix, 817-30. Baxter's handling of the French Revolution makes no reference to the execution of the king and queen or the rise of Robespierre. 94. See, for example, John Baxter, Resistance to Oppression: The Constitutional Right of Britons ("London, 1795). 95. Cf. Emsley, "Repression, 'Terror' and the Rule of Law"; Clive Emsley, "An Aspect of Pitt's 'Terror'; Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s," Social History 6 (1981): 155-84; John Ehrman, The ToungerPitt: The Reluctant Transition (London: Constable, 1983), pp. 389-402, 455-60; Tribune, 23 May 1795, pp. 255-60,21 Nov. 1795, pp. 225,233-35, for Thelwall's assessment of the situation. 96. Richter's copy of First Report of the Committee of Secrecy, p. 13 (British Library C.61. b.16). See also Mary Thale, ed., Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society (Cambridge.: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 106. The address was adopted at a meeting at the Globe Tavern. 97. See, for example, Richter's manuscript notes in First Report, opposite p. 33. 98. Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, chap. 6, stresses the influence of constitutionalism and historicism among English radicals, as does Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins: Reformers in Late Eighteenth Century England (New York: Scribner, 1968), p. 62; Giither Lottes, "Radicalism, Revolution and Political Culture: An AngloFrench Comparison," in French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Philp, pp. 83-85; Dinwiddy, "Conceptions of Revolution," pp. 541^7.

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Notes to Pages 25-27

99. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); David Eastwood, "Patriotism and the English State in the 1790s," in French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Philp, pp. 146-68; Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chaps. 7-11. 100. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 456; Colley, Britons, chap. 7; Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, pp. 65-77,112-23; J. E. Cookson, "The English Volunteer Movement of the French Wars, 1793-1815: Some Contexts," Historical Journal 32 (1989): 867-91; Frank J. Klingberg and Sigurd B. Hustvedt, eds., The WarningDrum: The British Home Front Faces Napoleon: Broadsides of 1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944); Gerald Newman, "Anti-French Propaganda and British Liberal Nationalism in the Early Nineteenth Century: Suggestions Toward a General Interpretation," Victorian Studies 18 (1975): 385-418. 101. Colley, "Radical Patriotism," p. 182; Hugh Cunningham, "The Language of Patriotism, 1750-1914," History Workshop Journal 12 (1981): 8-33; cf. Linda Colley, "The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760-1820," Past and Present 102 (1984): 126-29; Colley, "Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750-1830," Past and Present 113 (1986): 97-117; F. K. Donnelly, "Levellerism in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Britain," Albion20 (1988): 261-70; David Eastwood, "Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism," Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 265-87, for conservative constructions of "patriotism." 102. Thelwall, Life of John Thelwa.ll, pp. vi-vii, describes her husband as a "patriot" who "as a Briton" knew he had a right to be a politician. See also Thelwall's confiscated lecture notes (1794), "Historical Strictures on the Trials of Hampden, Sydney, & Russell, and other Champions of Liberty in the Last Century," in PRO, TS 11/951/3495. 103. Democratic Recorder, and Reformers' Guide, 2 Oct. 1819, col. 1, copy in PRO, TS 24/7/44. 104. J. G. A. Pocock, "Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform," in his Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 226. 105. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 26-30, and chap. 1 generally. 106. Quentin Skinner, "History and Ideology in the English Revolution," Historical Journal^ (1965): 151-78; Christopher Hill, "Sir Edward Coke—Myth Maker," in his Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), chap. 5; Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 225-26; J. H. Hexter, "Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England," Journal of Modern History 50 (1978): 14-15, 47-48; Howard Nenner, By Colour of Law: Legal Culture and Constitutional Politics in England, 1660-1689 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 107. See Kevin Sharpe and Steven W. Zwicker, "Politics of Discourse: Introduction," in The Politics of Discourse: The Literature ana History of Seventeenth Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven W. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 4-10; Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a. Category of Bourgeois Society (1962; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), particularly pp. 57-67.

Notes to Pages 27-30

277

108. See the essays in J. R. Jones, ed., Liberty Secured? Britain Before and After 1688 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 109. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 135; Elshtain, Women and War, pp. 3-4. 110. Cf. James Vernon, "Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture and Communication, 1808-68," (Ph.D. diss., Manchester University, 1991), chap. 8. 111. Dickinson, Liberty and Property, chap. 8; G. F. A. Best, "The Protestant Constitution and Its Supporters," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., vol. 8 (1958): 105-27. The liberal version of constitutional history stressed progressive improvements founded on the concepts of liberty and tolerance, justifying continued but moderate reform. 112. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 113. See the provocative exchange between William H. Sewell, Jr., "Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case," and Theda Skocpol, "Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power," Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 57-85, 86-96. Chapter 2. Narrating Liberty's Defense 1. William Godwin, Caleb Williams; Or Things As They Are (1793; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), pp. 169, 355-58, for Godwin to Gerrald, 23 Jan. 1794. Godwin similarly advised John Thelwall, "To quote authorities is a vulgar business," urging him to appeal to "that eternal law" that all men recognize (quoted in Mark Philp, Godwin's Political Justice [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986], p. 118). 2. Trial of Joseph Gerrald (Edinburgh, 1794); Gerrald, A Fragment; Containing an Account of the Life of the Devoted Citizen (London, 1795); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), pp. 121-30. 3. Robert M. Cover, "The Supreme Court, 1982 Term—Foreword: Nomos and Narrative," Harvard Law Review 97 (1983): 4-68; Cover, "Violence and the Word," Yale Law Journal 9S (1986): 1601-29. Cf. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); White, Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 4. Christopher Hill, "Sir Edward Coke—Myth-Maker," in his Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), chap. 5; Christopher Brooks, "Legal Thought and Political Consciousness in Early Seventeenth-Century England" (Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, October 1987); J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 13. 5. Howard Nenner, By Colour of Law: Legal Culture and Constitutional Politics in England, 1660-1689 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. ix, chap. 2. 6. Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study in the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 164-67.

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Notes to Pages 31-33

7. David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 1. See also Robert Willman, "Blackstone and the 'Theoretical Perfection' of English Law in the Reign of Charles II," Historical Journal26 (1983): 39-70; Charles M. Gray, "Liberty and the Law," in Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War, ed. J. H. Hexter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 156. 8. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Norton, 1967), particularly chaps. 2, 9; H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), pp. 62-63,141, on which this brief summary is based; R J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), particularly chaps. 2-4. 9. Christopher Hill, "The Norman Yoke," in his Puritanism and Revolution (London: Mercury, 1967), pp. 50-122. 10. Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1975), p. 56. See also E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), pp. 9, 34-35, 47-51. 11. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975), pp. 263, 258-69 generally. 12. It should be noted that in the event, Gerrald cast his defense as a libertarian retelling of England's constitutional past. Moreover, Godwin himself offered a deeply constitutionalist critique of the Lord Chief Justice's construction of the law on treason. See William Godwin, Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, October 2, 1794 (London, 1794), in Godwin, Uncollected Writings (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968). On the treason trials themselves, see John Barrell's superb "Imaginary Treason, Imaginary Law: The State Trials of 1794," in his The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 119-43. 13. There is no satisfactory work on Erskine. But see Lloyd Paul Stryker, For the Defense: Thomas Erskine, the Most Enlightened Liberal of His Times (New York: Doubleday, 1947); Lord John Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal, 10 vols. (New York, 1878), vol. 8, particularly pp. 45-144. 14. This populist distrust of lawyers, linked to a critique of the law, was carried deep into the nineteenth century. See Rohan McWilliam, "Radicalism and Popular Culture: The Tichborne Case and the Politics of'Fair Play,' 1867-1886," in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914,ed. Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 55-59. For the growing role of lawyers in criminal defenses, see J. M. Beattie, "Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Law and History Review 9 (1991): 221-67. 15. Trial of Mr. Daniel Isaac Eaton for Publishing the Third and Last Part of Paine's Age of Reason (London, 1812), p. iv. Eaton was sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment and two hours in the pillory. 16. Peter Pindar [C. F. Lawler?], Bubbles of Treason; or State Trials at Large (London, 1817), p. 12, put it in rather bad verse:

Notes to Pages 33-35

279

Now wigs and gowns, collected round, With looks of gravity profound, In fancy see assemble: While the twin lawyers of the crown, Put on their most terrific frown, To make the traitors tremble. 17. E. P. Thompson, "Subduing the Jury," London Review of Books, 4 Dec. 1986, p. 8; John Brewer, "The Wilkites and the Law, 1763-74," in An Ungovernable People: The English and. Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. John Brewer and John Styles (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980), p. 154. 18. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4vols. (17651769; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), vol. 4, p. 344. See Thomas A. Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), chaps. 7, 8; Douglas Hay, "The Class Composition of the Palladium of Liberty: Trial Jurors in the Eighteenth Century," and P. J. R King, "'Illiterate Plebeians, Easily Misled': Jury Composition, Experience, and Behavior in Essex, 1735-1815," both in Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200-1800, ed. J. S. Cockburn and Thomas A. Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 305-57,254304; J. M. Seattle, Crime and the Courts of England, 1660-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 378-95. 19. George Rude, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study, 1763-1774 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 26. 20. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 135-36; Albert Goodwin, friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 330-31, 36162; Northern Star, 11 Nov. 1843, p. 7, for the forty-eighth anniversary celebration. 21. Laurence Brown, A Catalogue of British Historical Medals, 1760-1960, 2 vols. (London: Seaby, 1980), vol. 1, p. 88, nos. 376, 378; R Dalton and S. H. Hamer, The Provincial Token-Coinage of the Eighteenth Century (1910; Lawrence, Mass.: Quarterman, 1977), p. 193; Edward Hawkins, Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain and Ireland to the Death of George II, 2 vols. (London, 1886), vol. 1, pp. 385-86. 22. T. B. Howell and T. J. Howell, eds., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1809-1826), vol. 1, pp. xix-xx. 23. In 1798 the English Jacobin John Binns obtained and read the entire set of state trials while in prison awaiting trial for high treason. See John Binns, Recollections of the Late John Binns (Philadelphia, 1854), p. 114. 24. See, for example, The Trial at Large of Thomas Hardy (London, 1794), "published daily in 8 numbers"; Republican, 30 May 1823, p. 678, reported that sales of Carlile's trial proceedings in 1819, printed in daily sheets, reached a circulation of ten thousand; Margaret Hambrick, A Chartist Library (London: Mansell, 1985), for George Julian Harney's impressive personal collection of trial literature. 25. F. W. Hackwood, William Hone: His Life and Times (London: Unwin, 1912), p. 40; Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 172, 176-77, 193, 196-201, chap. 5 generally. See also F. K. Donnelly, "Levellerism in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain," Albion 20 (1988): 261-69.

180

Notes to Pages 35-37

26. The question of who constituted the eighteenth-century "public" was hotly contested. See Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Dror Wahrman, "National Society, Communal Culture: An Argument about the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain," Social History 17 (1992): 43-72. 27. The focus here is on "political" trials defined in a narrow sense; the entire structure of the law is political in a broader sense. See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime cm A Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 28. Dictionary of National Biography, 21 vols. (London, 1885-1890), vol. 21, p. 899; Frederic Boase, Modern English Biography, 6 vols. (1892-1921), vol. 3, col. 1493; obituary in Gentleman's Magazine, December 1853, cols. 646-48; Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Gossman, eds., Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, 4 vols. (Brighton: Harvester, 1979-1988), vol. 1, pp. 557-58, adds little to the entry in the DNB. 29. Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 19, 8990; J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796-1821 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 147; Satirist, May 1808, pp. 235-39, for a vividly hostile description of these societies; Autobiography of James Silk Buckingham, 2 vols. (London, 1855), vol. 1, pp. 192-96, for the British Forum. 30. Reasoner, July 1813-July 1814. From the eighth number (March 1814), Wooler is listed as the journal's printer. Speakers are identified only by initials, but "T. J. W." surely is Wooler. The entry in the DNB claims that Wooler published and edited a journal called the Reasonerin 1808. Although he may have been associated with the Reasoner: An Independent Publication (2 Jan.-16 Apr. 1808, published by John Bone), I have found no evidence of such a connection. Most likely, the writer confused the Reasoner of 1813 and 1814 with Bone's earlier journal. There is also the suggestion that Wooler succeeded Cobbett as editor of the radical evening paper the Statesman, although it is not clear when this was. See Notes and Queries, 7 Oct. 1865, p. 295. 31. Republican: A Weekly Historical Magazine, 6 Jan.-23 May 1813. I have been able to locate only one issue, 7 Mar. 1813, held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 32. Stage, 29 July 1815, cols. 449-54. For popular attitudes to the theater and the Old Price riots of 1809, see Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 33. Annual Register, 1817, pp. 60-61; George Pellew, The Life and Correspondence of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth, 3 vols. (London, 1847), vol. 3, pp. 174-75; John Belchem, KOrator" Hunt: Henry Hunt and Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 71-78. Sidmouth's circular letter was aimed at intimidating the vendors of radical publications. "Publishing" was understood in common law to include the writing, publishing, or selling of libellous texts. 34. Wooler denounced Cobbett's retreat. See Black Dwarf, 2 Apr. 1817, cols. 145,155-58,16 Apr. 1817, col. 192; George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Mum's Friend, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 2, pp. 353-60. 35. Black Dwarf, 5 Mar. 1817, cols. 95-96. See also Black Dwarf, 5 Feb. 1817, col. 17, 26 Mar. 1817, cols. 129-32, "The Ministers." 36. PRO, HO 42/197, Castlereagh to Eldon; Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, lstser.,vol. 41 (12 Oct. 1819), col. 103; William H. Wickwar, The Struggle

Notes to Pages 37-40

181

for the Freedom of the Press, 1819-1832 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928), p. 57. PRO, HO 42/197, Gordon to Sidmouth, 19 Oct. 1819, estimates the Dwarfs weekly circulation at twelve thousand. 37. The second volume of the Black Dwarf (I8\8) is dedicated to Cartwright. See F. D. Cartwright, ed., The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, 2 vols. (London, 1826), vol. 1, pp. 137-38; Naomi C. Miller, "John Cartwright and Radical Parliamentary Reform," English Historical Review 83 (1968): 726. 38. Alexander Pope, "The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated" (1733). The journal's title presumably was taken from Scott's recently published novel. 39. Black Dwarf, 4 Feb. 1818, col. 70. Characters such as the "Blue Devil" at St. James and the "Green Goblin" in Ireland also appear as correspondents. 40. Richard Hendrix, "Popular Humor and 'The Black Dwarf,'" Journal of British Studies 16 (1976): 108-28. 41. Remarks on Wooler and His Dwarf (Newcastle, 1820), pp. 3-4. 42. Republican, 3 Mar. 1820, pp. 227-29. 43. PRO, TS 11/43 (4); Black Dwarf, 7 May 1817, cols. 25-30. 44. Black Dwarf, 12 Feb. 1817, cols. 39-44, 2 Apr. 1817, cols. 145-60,14 May 1817, cols. 249-51. 45. Hone's Reformists'Register, 10 May 1817; Black Dwarf, 14 May 1817, cols. 255-26. 46. Morning Chronicle, 23 June 1817, p. 3, letter from Wooler; Hone's Reformists'Register, 28 June 1817, cols. 723-32; British Library, Add. MS. 40,121, Hone's autobiographical notes, fols. 74-77; Hackwood, William Hone, pp. 13840. 47. Black Dwarf, 14 May 1817, col. 251. See also Black Dwarf, 21 May 1817, col. 266. 48. See Wickwar, Struggle for Freedom of the Press, pp. 37-40. 49. Black Dwarf, 21 May 1817, col. 262. 50. Pearson, who apparently had a large practice, later assisted in a number of cases arising from the radical meetings of 1819. See Rosamond Davenport-Hill and Florence Davenport-Hill, The Recorder of Birmingham: A Memoir of Matthew Davenport Hill (London, 1878), p. 39. 51. Black Dwarf, 11 June 1817, col. 315. 52. There are at least three edited versions of Wooler's two trials: A Verbatim Report of the Two Trials of Mr. T. J. Wooler... for Alleged Libels Before Mr. Justice Abbott, and a Special Jury, Taken in Short Hand by an Eminent Writer, and Revised by T.J. Wooler (London, 1817), the most complete record and the source on which I have generally relied; A Correct Report of the Two Trials of Thomas Jonathan Wooler (London, 1817); and Trial of Thos. Jonathan Wooler . . . For Two Libels Against the Government Generally, and Against Mr. Canning and Lord Castlereagh (Glasgow, 1817), copy in Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. There is also a manuscript version of the first trial, copied from Gurney's shorthand notes, in PRO, TS 11/43 (4), which is almost certainly the source on which A Verbatim Report is based and which indicates that this edited version is an accurate account of the court proceedings, although, as the full title indicates, Wooler made minor stylistic revisions. I am indebted to Dr. Robert Hall for carefully checking the published text against the manuscript report. 53. Morning Chronicle, 6 June 1817, p. 3. For Shepherd, see Henry John Shepherd, Memoir of the Right Honourable Sir Samuel Shepherd (London, 1841). In 1819

182

Notes to Pages 40-50

Shepherd was appointed Chief Baron of the Exchequer in Scotland. For Abbott, later Lord Tenterden, see John Lord Campbell, The Lives of the Chief Justices of England, 4 vols. (London, 1874), vol. 4, chap. 52. Abbott succeeded Ellenborough as Lord Chief Justice on the King's Bench. 54. The Times, 6 June 1817, p. 2. 55. Verbatim Report, pp. 4-16. 56. A reference to the Seditious Meetings Act, passed in March. 57. Black Dwarf, 2 Apr. 1817, cols. 145-46. 58. Ibid., cols. 147-49. 59. Verbatim Report, pp. 11-12. 60. Black Dwarf, 11 June 1817, col. 306, for Wooler's comments on his adversary's ineptitude. 61. Verbatim Report, pp. 25-27. 62. Brewer, "Wilkites and the Law," pp. 161-62; Howell and Hovvell, eds., Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 20: 2777, cols. 679-80, John Home [Tooke]. 63. Wooler's claim was essentially correct. See William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, rev. ed., 16 vols. (London: Methuen, 1977), vol. 8, pp. 33646; Wickwar, Struggle for Freedom of the Press, p. 22. 64. Verbatim Report, p. 38. 65. Ibid., pp. 31-32. 66. Morning Chronicle, 6 June 1817, p. 3; Black Dwarf, 11 June 1817, col. 307. 67. Verbatim Report, pp. 35, 37, 66-68. 68. Ibid., pp. 44-45. 69. Ibid., pp. 55-61. 70. Ibid., pp. 69-70. 71. Morning Chronicle, 6 June 1817, p. 3. 72. The point at issue had been settled in the eighteenth century. See Howell and Howell, eds., Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 20, cols. 660-65, for Lord Mansfield's ruling. The radical argument was that if the defense brought no new evidence there should be no prosecution right of reply. 73. Verbatim Report, pp. 71-72. 74. At Hone's first trial, Shepherd directed his attack at plebeian readers. See "First Trial," in The Three Trials of William Hone (London, 1818), p. 5. 75. Verbatim Report, pp. 72-79. See Holdsworth, History of English Law, vol. 8, pp. 336-^12; Green, Verdict According to Conscience, pp. 319, 336-39, for the projury opposition to this doctrine. 76. Verbatim Report, pp. 80-86. 77. Black Dwarf, 9 July 1817, cols. 379-80, for Pearson's account. 78. Verbatim Report, pp. 93-97. 79. Ibid, pp. 98-100. 80. Ibid., pp. 101, 105. 81. Black Dwarf, 12 Feb. 1817, col. 39. 82. McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 175-77. See also Joseph M. Butwin, "Seditious Laughter," Radical History Review 18 (1978): 17-34. 83. Verbatim Report, pp. 100-105. 84. Black Dwarf, 25 June 1817, cols. 346-^7. 85. Verbatim Report, pp. 101-7. 86. See, for example, Manchester Political Register, 4 Jan.-l Mar. 1817.

Notes to Pages 50-54

183

87. Verbatim Report, pp. 108-11. The passage that Wooler was glossing reads: "We may petition the House for reform, if, in the same breath, we will admit that it wants no reform; we may entreat it to restore us the blessings of the constitution, and give us back our rights, if we will confess that our rights have not been infringed upon, and that the blessings of the constitution have never been impaired. Such is now the state of the Right of Petition. We must suppress the remonstrance of truth and the firm tone of justice, and then our complaints may be heard—and despised." 88. Ibid., pp. 115-16. 89. Ibid., pp. 111-14. 90. See Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791-1792; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 40-44,91,193, for his handling of 1688; Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation (1792), in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 495, 499-500, where he also rejects petitioning for rights. 91. Verbatim Report, pp. 114-15. 92. Ibid., pp. 116-19. 93. Ibid., pp. 119-20. 94. H. T. Dickinson, "The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the 'Glorious Revohaion,'" History 61 (1976): 28-45; J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), particularly chap. 3; cf. Kathleen Wilson, "Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics," Journal of British Studies 28 (1989): 349-86. 95. Verbatim Report, pp. 124-25. 96. Ibid., pp. 126-32. 97. Ibid., pp. 86-90. Because the two trials are treated separately in this text, the timing of the proceedings cannot be determined. The timing can be reconstructed, however, from other sources. See PRO, TS 11/43 (4/1), Gurney's report, fols. 91-92; Correct Report of the Trials of Thomas Jonathan Wooler, pp. 31-34; Morning Chronicle, 6 and 7 June 1817; Examiner, 8 June 1817, pp. 366-68; Sherwin's Political Register, 14 June 1817, pp. 172-73; British Library, Place Newspaper Collection, Set 39, vol. 1, fol. 128. 98. See, for example, The Proceedings, on the Trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton . . . for Selling... The Second Part of the Rights of Man (London, 1793), pp. 42—45; Trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton .. . for Selling... A Letter, Addressed to the Addressers (London, 1793), p. 65; Patriot, 3 Apr. 1792, pp. 16-22. 99. Examiner, 8 June 1817, p. 361; Morning Chronicle, 7 June 1817, p. 2. Nonetheless, Abbott might still have sentenced Wooler to prison on such a verdict. 100. Examiner, 8 June 1817, p. 361; Morning Chronicle, 7 June 1817, p. 2; James Oldham, "Special Juries in England: Nineteenth Century Usage and Reform," Journal of Legal History 8 (1987): 154-55; see also the discussion in section IV of this chapter. 101. Verbatim Report, pp. 126-32. 102. The point was that Wooler had already fully disclosed his defense. 103. Verbatim Report, pp. 133-43; The Times, 20 June 1817, 12 July 1817; Black Dwarf, 25 June 1817, cols. 345-49,2 July 1817, cols. 353-58,9 July 1817, cols. 379-80; Hone's Reformists'Register, 21 June 1817, cols. 681-82; Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 36 (26 June 1817), cols. 1189-92. 104. Hone's Reformists' Register, 25 Oct. 1817, poem entitled "Freedom's

184

Notes to Pages 54-57

Field-Marshal," 14 June 1817, col. 641; University College Library, Ogden Papers, MS. 74, book 4, fol. 28, Galloway to Hone, 6 June 1817; Hone, For the Cause of Truth, p. 331; Morning Chronicle, 18 June 1817, p. 3. 105. This view of narrative draws on Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a- Socially Symbolic Act(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), and Hayden White's discussion of Jameson, "Getting Out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative," in his The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 142-68. 106. See Jerry Frug, "Argument as Character," Stanford Lav Review 40 (1988): 869-927. 107. Mary G. Dietz, "Patriotism," in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terrence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 183. See also Blair Worden, "The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney," Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 1-40; Lois G. Schwoerer, "William Lord Russell: The Making of a Martyr, 1683-1983," Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 41-71; Peter Karsten, Patriot-Heroes in England and America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 108. This notion of citizenship was distinctly masculine; the courtroom was predominately male space. This is why the following year the case of Mary Ann Tocker, who defended herself against charges of criminal libel, drew so much attention. Women did attend trials as spectators. 109. See J. G. A. Pocock, "Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought," in his Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 37-50. 110. Morning Chronicle, 12, 14, and 17 June 1817, 20 and 21 Dec. 1817; The Times, 20 and 21 Dec. 1817; Examiner, 21 Dec. 1817, pp. 806, 811-16, 28 Dec. 1817, pp. 830-32; "Second Trial," in Three Trials of William Hone, p. 4; "Third Trial," in ibid., p. 6; British Library, Place Newspaper Collection, Set 39, vol. 1, fols. 121, 124, 199; Hone, For the Cause of Truth, p. 334. The "most profound silence prevailed" as Mr. Law, the clerk at Nisi Prius, called over the list of special jurymen for Hone's third trial. 111. Shepherd, Memoir o f . . . Sir Samuel Shepherd, p. 13. 112. Indeed, the most frequent use of special juries was in civil cases dealing with commercial matters in which both parties agreed on a list of special jurymen. 113. James C. Oldham, "The Origins of the Special Jury," University of 'Chicago Law Review 50 (1983): 137-221; Oldham, "Special Juries in England. "There was, in fact, no statutory basis for a higher property qualification for special jurors until 1825. There was a £5 property qualification for talesmen. 114. PRO, TS 11/43 (4); Black Dwarf, 19 Nov. 1817, cols. 729-33. See also British Library, Add. MS. 40,120, Pearson to Hone, n.d [ca. 23 Nov. 1817], fol. 71. 115. Hone's Reformists'Register, 28 June 1817, cols. 732-33, 5 July 1817, cols. 737-78. 116. Black Dwarf, 3 Dec. 1817, col. 737. 117. Howell and Howell, eds., Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 20, cols. 685-93; Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers, vol. 2, pp. 493-94. Both Wooler and Hone made reference to Tooke's trial. See, for example, T. J. Wooler, An Appeal to the Citizens of London Against the Alleged Lawful Mode of Packing Special Juries (London, 1817), pp. 28-32; Hone's Reformists' Register, 14 June 1817, cols. 645-67. 118. Jeremy Bentham, The Elements of the Art of Jury Packing as Applied to

Notes to Pages 57-59

185

Special Juries, particularly in Cases of Libel Law (London, 1821); see the series of letters from Bentham to Place in late December 1817 and early 1818, in The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 9: January 1817 to June 1820, ed. Stephen Conway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 131-32, 134,150. Samuel Whitbread had brought the issue before the Commons, as reported in The Times, 25 Apr. 1809. See also [Francis Place], On the Law of Libel, with Strictures on the Self-Styled "Constitutional Association" (London, 1823); The Petty Constable's Guide to Making Up the Jury List By a Barrister (London, 1821). 119. Morning Chronicle, 9 July 1817, p. 3; The Times, 9 July 1817, p. 3; Hone's Reformists' Register, 12 July 1817, cols. 778-82; The Substance of An Address Delivered by Charles Pearson, Esq. at a Public Meeting . .. Containing a Brief History of the Corporation of London as the Asylum of English Freedom in Past Ages (London, 1843), p. 26; Hone, For the Cause of Truth, p. 332. 120. PRO, TS 11/43 (4); Black Dwarf, 12 Nov. 1817, col. 695,19 Nov. 1817, cols. 729-33; Morning Chronicle, 22 Nov. 1817, p. 3,28 Nov. 1817, p. 3,10 Dec. 1817, p. 3; Examiner, 23 Nov. 1817, p. 751, 30 Nov. 1817, pp. 766-68. Pearson maintained that Lushington only pretended to use his pen randomly to choose jurors; whenever his pen alighted on a name not approved by the Crown, he substituted another person on the list "best suited to his views." 121. Wooler, Appeal to the Citizens of London, pp. 6-9; British Library, Place Newspaper Collection, Set 39, vol. 1, fol. 216, for Place's manuscript note on Lushington. 122. Black Dwarf, 3 Dec. 1817, col. 735; Wooler, Appeal to the Citizens of London, p. 3. See also Sherwin's Political Register, 6 Dec. 1817, pp. 57-62. 123. Corporation of London Records Office, Misc. MS. 174.3 (no fol. nos.), report of "The Especial Committee Appointed to examine the Books and Lists of persons qualified to serve on Juries in and for the City of London"; "Report— Especial Committee on Juries," in Minutes of the Proceedings of the Court of Common Council, 1817(London, 1817), pp. 210-11; Morning Chronicle, 12 Dec. 1817, p. 3; The Times, 12 Dec. 1817, p. 3; Oldham, "Special Juries in England," pp. 150-51. Some of those considered competent were wealthy landowners with no connection to London. 124. Wooler, Appeal to the Citizens of London, pp. 23, 25-26. See also Bentham, Elements of the An of Jury Packing, pp. 28-33. 125. Corporation of London Records Office, Misc. MS. 174.3, transcript of the "Minute Book of the Corporation of London Especial Committee Respecting Juries," fols. 3-7,10-12,17-18, 38-39; "Report—Especial Committee on Juries," pp. 211-12; Oldham, "Special Juries in England," pp. 154-55. The social composition of this jury remains difficult to determine; no occupations are given in trial reports. Through The Post-Office Directory for 1817, however, several jurors can be identified, including a "merchant," a wine merchant, an insurance broker, a "scothfactor," and a chemist. 126. See Hone's comments, Hone's Reformists' Register, 5 July 1817, cols. 748-49. Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 131-33, suggests that by the early seventeenth century trial by neighbors was already much diminished in criminal cases. 127. Morning Chronicle, 12 Dec. 1817, p. 3; "Report—Especial Committee on Juries," includes a review of the law pertaining to special juries: 3 Geo. II, cap. 25 modified 4 H. VIII, cap. 3.

186

Notes to Pages 59-62

128. Morning Chronicle, 22 Dec. 1817, p. 3; Republican, 20 June 1823, p. 772; Black Dwarf, 24 Dec. 1817, col. 786. 129. Pellew, Life of Henry Addington, vol. 3, pp. 236-40; Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices, vol. 4, pp. 286-88; Hackwood, William Hone, pp. 166-67; Black Dwarf, 11 Nov. 1818, cols. 714-17,16 Dec. 1818, col. 793, for Wooler's venomous commentary. 130. Morning Chronicle, 21 Dec. 1817, p. 3,22 Dec. 1817, p. 3; Black Dwarf, 17 Dec. 1817, cols. 767-72. Wooler's trial was set for 19 December, the day after Hone's first acquittal. 131. Trial by Jury and Liberty of the Press: The Proceedings at the Public Meeting, Dec. 29 1817 (London, 1818), pp. 14, 17-18; Black Dwarf, 31 Dec. 1817, cols. 799-803. 132. Howell and Howell, eds., Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 32: 1817, trials of Brandreth, Turner, Ludlam, and Weightman; J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832 (London: Longmans, 1919), pp. 366-69; Thompson, "Subduing the Jury," p. 9; PRO, HO 42/171, 21 Oct. 1817, cited in Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer, p. 369; HO 40/7/8, Fletcher to Hobhouse, 22 Oct. 1817, fols. 68-69, expressing the importance of these verdicts in the light of radicals' successes in London and York. Brandreth was found guilty by a jury of eleven farmers and one gentleman. Special juries were not used in felony cases. The government was defeated in the trials of the Glasgow and Policy Hill (Yorkshire) "conspirators." 133. Black Dwarf, 29 Oct. 1817, cols. 655-63, 5 Nov. 1817, cols. 671-76. Wooler conceded that there was no hope for Brandreth, since he had actually killed someone. 134. Sherwin's Political Register, 1 Nov. 1817, p. 22. 135. Black Dwarf, 29 Oct. 1817, col. 660. See also Trial by Jury and Liberty of the Press, p. 17; Manchester Observer, 14 Nov. 1818, p. 368, for a similar assessment. 136. Although Fox's Libel Act (32 Geo. Ill, cap. 60) made the jury judges of the whole issue in cases of libel, it also provided for the court or the judge to direct the jury on the matter "in like manner as in other criminal cases." On the general question of the relationship between trial jury and judge, see Beattie, Crime and the Courts of England, pp. 406-10; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 191-92. 137. Black Dwarf, 29 Oct. 1817, cols. 658-59. 138. Black Dwarf, 25 June 1817, col. 345, 21 May 1817, cols. 263-65. 139. Green, Verdict According to Conscience, chaps. 6-8. 140. See, for example, Erskine's speeches in the protracted proceedings against the dean of St. Asaph for seditious libel, in Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Howell and Howell, vol. 21: 1783-1784, cols. 971-1044. 141. Joseph Towers, Observations on the Rights and Duty of Juries in Trials for Libels (London, 1784), pp. 27-29, 72; "Trial of Liet. Col. John Lilbourne for High Treason," in Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. Howell and Howell, vol. 2: 1649, col. 1379. For Towers, see F. K. Donnelly, "Joseph Towers and the Collapse of Rational Dissent," Enlightenment and Dissent, no. 6 (1987): 31-39. 142. Triumphs of Justice over Unjust Judges: Exhibiting the Names and Crimes of Four and Forty Judges Hanged in One Tear in England . . , for their Corrupt Judgments (London, 1817; reprinted for J. J. Franklin [grand-nephew of Benjamin Franklin]). Sec also, for example, Charles Earl Stanhope, The Right of Juries De-

Notes to Pages 62-65

187

fended Together with Authorities of Law in Support of Those Rights and the Objections to Mr. Fox's Libel Bill Refuted (London, 1792), pp. 80-84, 161-62; John Hawles, The Englishmen's Right: A Dialogue, Between a, Barrister at Law and a Juryman (1680; London, 1793), pp. 5-7. 143. J. M. Beattie, "London Juries in the 1690s," in Twelve Good Men and True, ed. Cockburn and Green, p. 214. 144. Hawles, Englishman's Right, pp. 3, 21. 145. Stanhope, Right of Juries Defended, pp. 105-6. See also, for example, Patriot, 10 July 1792, p. 295. 146. Henry Yorke, These Are the Times That Try Men'sSouls! (London, 1793), p. 10. See also, for example, Cabinet1! (1795): 240—41; Tribune, no. 45, pp. 22537, for Thelwall's lecture, 21 Nov. 1795. 147. Hawks, Englishmen's Right, in Cobbett's Political Register, 20, 23, and 27 Mar. 1811; Richard Phillips, Golden Rulesfor Jurymen, in Cobbett's Political Register, 10 Aug. 1811, cols. 179-81; Cobbett's Political Register, 7 Dec. 1811, cols. 707-11, for Cobbett on the role of juries in relation to judges; Hone's Reformists' Register, 5 July 1817, cols. 762-68, also republished Phillips's Golden Rules. 148. Cartwright, Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright,vo\. 2, pp. 13738; Hone, Ear the Cause of Truth, p. 333. Cartwright helped research the mountain of references on which Hone based his defense; he also visited Wooler in prison and allowed him to use his library. 149. John Cartwright, The English Constitution Produced and Illustrated (London, 1823), pp. 137, 140, 137-45 generally. See also Cartwright, An Appeal, on the Subject of the English Constitution (Boston, 1797), p. 12. 150. Black Dwarf, 7 Jan. 1818, col. 4. 151. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 669-710; Thompson, "Subduing the Jury," p. 9; Belchem, "Orator" Hunt, pp. 84-132; Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 209, 213, who dates the birth of class to the years 1815-1820. 152. Wickwar, Struggle for Freedom of the Press, Appendix B, p. 315. Wooler, however, maintained the attack on the legal system, denouncing the bill that indemnified ministers against prosecution by those imprisoned under the suspension of habeas corpus, and exposing both the ferocious law against the forgery of bank notes and the game laws. 153. A Full, Accurate, and Impartial Report of the Trial, of John Bagguley, of Stockport, John Johnston, ofSalford, and Samuel Drummond, of Manchester, Charged with Conspiracy and. Uttering Seditious Speeches (Manchester, 1819); PRO, HO 42/ 180, Lloyd to Hobhouse, 3 Sept. 1818, report of John Livesey; Manchester Observer, 17 Apr. 1819,p. 544,24 Apr. 1819,pp. 551-52,22 May 1819, p. 580; Black Dwarf, 21 Apr. 1818, cols. 241-46,28 Apr. 1818, cols. 257-62. While regretting that the defense had been left in the hands of a lawyer, Wooler acknowledged that radical success depended on fairly impanelled juries. 154. The Trial of Joseph Russell for a Political Libel, Being Mr. Hone's Parody on the Litany (Birmingham, 1819); Black Dwarf, 7 Apr. 1819, cols. 219-22, 18 Aug. 1819, cols. 535-38. 155. PRO, HO 41/4, fol. 487; Wickwar, Struggle for Freedom of the Press, p. 108. 156. Republican, 3 Sept. 1819, pp. 26-27. 157. See, for example, the preface to Trial of Joseph Russell, pp. 6-7, written by a "Professional Gentleman," almost certainly Pearson.

188

Notes to Pages 65-67

158. Lewis's Coventry Recorder: or, The Freeman's Advocate, 16 Oct. 1819, p. 7; PRO, TS 11/424 (1346), for the Crown brief. 159. Cap of Liberty, I Dec. 1819, p. 194. See also Medusa, 1 Jan. 1820, pp. 367-68. 160. The Trial of Thomas Davison for Publishing a Blasphemous Libel (London, 1820); Henry Cooper, The Right Assumed by the Judges To Fine a. Defendant "While Making His Defense in Person, Denied (London, 1821). 161. Black Dwarf, 19 Jan. 1820, pp. 37-44, 29 Mar. 1820, pp. 401-2. The government chose to try Sir Francis Burdett at Leicester assizes on charges of seditious libel arising from a open letter addressed to the Westminster electors, condemning the government's complicity in the Peterloo massacre. A series of unsuccessful appeals against Burdett's conviction turned on the issue of where the libel was "published." See "Trial of Sir Francis Burdett," in Reports of State Trials, ed. John MacDonell, n.s., 8 vols. (London, 1888-1898), vol. 1: 1820. 162. Joseph A. Bowling, ed., The Whole Proceedings Before the Coroner's Inquest atOldham, &c. on the Body of John Lees (London, 1820); Black Dwarf, 5 Jan. 1820, pp. 8 5 3-5 5; Robert Walmsley, Peterloo: The Case Reopened (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), chap. 20. 163. The government originally charged Hunt with high treason. See PRO, TS 11/695,1055-56, for the Crown briefs. 164. PRO, HO 40/11, fol. 173, "To the Persons, Male and Female, who attended the Meeting at Manchester," posting-bill, cited in Belchem, "Orator" Hunt, p. 117. 165. PRO, HO 40/11, Maule to Hobhouse, 17, 20, 23, 24, and 27 Mar. 1820, fols. 217, 234-35, 259-60, 266-67, 274-76. Maule showed little more enthusiasm for the conduct of Justice Bayley, whose charge to the jury was widely regarded as favoring an acquittal. 166. Thomas Dolby, ed., The Trial of Henry Hunt, Esq.,. . .for an Alleged Conspiracy to Overturn the Government(London, 1820); "The King against Henry Hunt and Others," in Reports of State Trials, ed. MacDonell, vol. 1; Manchester Observer, 25 Mar. 1820, 1 Apr. 1820, 13 and 20 May 1820. 167. Wooler maintained that the jury had "virtually" acquitted the defendants. See Black Dwarf, 29 Mar. 1820, pp. 447-48. 168. Black Dwarf, 30 June 1819, cols. 431-32; John Cartwright, A Bill of Rights and Liberties or An Act for a Constitutional Reform of Parliament (London, 1817). 169. Black Dwarf, 21 July 1819, cols. 473-84; A Correct Report of the Proceedings of a Meeting, Held at Newha.ll Hill, Birmingham . . . For the Purpose of Obtaining the Representation of the People of Birmingham, In Parliament (Birmingham, 1819); Edmonds' Weekly Recorder, 17 July 1819, pp. 25, 29-30. 170. PRO, HO 41/4, Hobhouse to Norris, 17 July 1819, fols. 180-81; TS 11/695 (2206); Jeremy Bentham, The King Against Edmonds, and Others. . . To Show the Untenability of This Indictment (London, 1820); T. M. Parssinen, "Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771-1848," English Historical Review 88 (1973): 515-17. Speakers at a Macclesfield meeting were convicted for merely recommending the scheme. See Black Dwarf, 19 Jan. 1820, pp. 4L-12. 171. "The King against Edmonds and Others," in Reports of State Trials, ed. MacDonell, vol. 1; Black Dwarf, 9 Aug. 1821 [special issue]; PRO, TS 11/695 (2206), for the Crown brief and the appeal against the jury's composition.

Notes to Pages 67-70

189

172. This was an extreme example of a more general condition. On introducing the Juries Regulation Bill in 1825, which expanded special juries in the counties to include bankers and merchants and randomized the selection of the array, Peel made particular reference to the case at Warwick. See Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 2nd ser., vol. 12 (9 Mar. 1825), cols. 968-72. 173. Black Dwarf, 9 Aug. 1820, p. 192. 174. John Cartwright, A Defence, Delivered at Warwick, Third August, 1820, by Major Cartwright (London, 1831), p. 71. 175. Black Dwarf, 15 Nov. 1820, pp. 701-3,29 Nov. 1820, pp. 773-74,14 Feb. 1821, pp. 244-48, 30 May 1821, pp. 753-65, 6 June 1821. Particularly important for the course of British legal history was the court's ruling that Richards mistakenly allowed Wooler to question any jurors at Warwick, thus defining an important difference between British and American legal practice. 176. Black Dwarf, 30 May 1821, pp. 762,757,754-55. See also Black Dwarf, 6-27 June 1821, for Wooler's open letters to the chief justices of King's Bench. 177. "The Trial by Jury is become a farce," declared Carlile following the trials at Warwick (Republican, 11 Aug. 1820, pp. 541-45). 178. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 700-710; G. T. Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato-Street Conspiracy: With the Trials at large of the Conspirators, for High Treason and Murder (London, 1820); Black Dwarf, 19 Apr. 1820, pp. 510-12, 26 Apr. 1820, pp. 541-56. 179. See The Report of the Proceedings of the Court of King's Bench ... Being the Mock Trials of Richard Carlile (London, 1822). See also A Dialogue on the Approaching Trial of Mr. Carlile for Publishing the Age of Reason (London, 1819), almost certainly written by Wooler. 180. Wickwar, Struggle for Freedom of the Press, chaps. 3,6,7; Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), chaps. 3-5. 181. Republican, 8 Feb. 1822, p. 169. Carlile's critique of common law had something in common with Bentham's views. 182. Black Dwarf, 9 Aug. 1820, p. 224; Manchester Observer, 22 May 1819, p. 580. 183. Thompson, "Subduing the Jury," p. 9; David Williams,/0&« Frost: A Study in Chartism (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1939), chap. 8, pp. 290-94, for the role of Chief Justice Tindal; The Trial ofFeargus O'Connor, Esq., and Fifty-Eight Others At Lancaster, on a Charge of Sedition, Conspiracy, Tumult, and Riot (Manchester and London, 1843), pp. i-iii, for O'Connor's dedication to the "Just Judge," Baron Rolfe. 184. Northern Star, 23 Dec. 1848, p. 5. 185. T. J. Wooler, The Case between Lincoln's Inn, the Court of King's Bench and, Mr. T. J. Wooler with his Critical Comments (London, 1826), copy in the library of Lincoln's Inn. 186. T. J. Wooler, Every Man His Own Attorney (London, 1845).

Chapter 3. Understanding the Cap of Liberty 1. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 104, and introduction. 2. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gol-

190

Notes to Pages 70-73

lancz, 1963), p. 807, and introduction; Thompson, "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Straggle Without Class?" Social History 3 (1978): 133-65. 3. See Michael Sonenscher, "The Sans-Culottes of the Year II: Rethinking the Language of Labour in France," Social History 9 (1984): 302. For full critiques of Stedman Jones's approach, see John Foster, "The Declassing of Language," New Left Review 150 (1985): 29-45; Joan Wallach Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working Class History," International Labor and Working Class History 31 (1987): 1-13; Neville Kirk, "In Defence of Class: A Critique of Recent Revisionist Writing upon the Nineteenth-Century English Working Class," International Review of Social History 32 (1987): 2-47; James Epstein, "Rethinking the Categories ofWorking Class History," Labor/Le Travail 18 (1986): 29-45. 4. See, for example, Hugh Cunningham, "The Language of Patriotism, 17501914," History Workshop Journal 12 (1981): 8-33. Whether such conflict constitutes "class" struggle depends on how categories such as class and class-consciousness are defined, and may be an issue that cannot be resolved solely on the basis of language. See also Roger Chartier, "Text, Symbols, and Frenchness," in his Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), particularly p. 104, for his critique of anthropologically inspired notions of "shared" meanings. 5. This perspective is indebted to Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chaps. 1-3. See also Richard C. Trexler, "Follow the Flag: The Ciompi Revolt Seen from the Streets," Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 46 (1984): 357-92; Paul A. Pickering, "Class Without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement," Past and Present112 (1986): 144-62. 6. For the importance of symbolic ritual to eighteenth-century popular politics, see the brilliant series of studies by John Brewer: Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chap. 9; "The Number 45: A Wilkite Political Symbol," in England's Rise to Greatness: England from the Restoration to the American War, ed. Stephen Baxter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 349-80; "Theater and CounterTheater in Georgian Politics: The Mock Elections at Garrat," Radical History Review, no. 22 (1979-1980): 7-40. 7. See Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 603-69; John Belchem, ''Orator" Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 2-4; Robert Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (London: Groom Helm, 1983), chap. 9; H. W. C. Davis, "Lancashire Reformers, 1816-17," Bulletin of the John Rylands LibraryTO (1926): 47-79; Nicholas Cotton, "Popular Movements in Ashton-underLyne and Stalybridge before 1832" (M.Litt. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1977), pp. 105-34; W. W. Kinsey, "Some Aspects of Lancashire Radicalism, 181621" (M.A. thesis, University of Manchester, 1926). 8. New Times, 21 Jan. 1819. For general reactions of the loyalist press, see Manchester Mercury, 19 Jan. 1819; Manchester Herald, 19 Jan. 1819; The Times, 21 Jan. 1819; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 23 Jan. 1819. For a full report of what was said at this meeting, see John Knight, A Full and Particular Report of the Proceedings of the Public Meeting Held in Manchester. . . 18th of January, 1819 (Manchester, 1819); PRO, HO 42/183: Norris to Sidmouth, 18 Jan 1819; Livesey's report, enclosed in Norris to Sidmouth, 21 Jan. 1819; report of "B," enclosed in Fletcher to Sidmouth, 4 Feb. 1819. 9. Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 24 July 1819.

Notes to Pages 73-74

191

10. David Foster, "The Changing Composition of the Lancashire County Magistracy, 1821-51" (Ph.D. diss., University of Lancaster, 1975), passim, but particularly Appendixes II, IV, V. 11. PRO, HO 42/183, Lloyd to Hobhouse, 23 Jan. 1819. 12. Manchester Observer, 20 Feb. 1819, pp. 476-77; Black Dwarf, 24 Feb. 1819, cols. 113-18; PRO, HO 42/184: Lloyd to Hobhouse, 16 Feb. 1819; Prescot to Sidmouth, 18 Feb. 1819; Chippendale to Fletcher, 18 Feb. 1819; Livesey's report, enclosed in Norris to Sidmouth, 20 Feb. 1819; report of "B," enclosed in Fletcher to Sidmouth, 22 Feb. 1819. Saxton, a Liverpool printer with links to the United Irishmen, was sentenced to one year's imprisonment in 1797 for seditious libel. 13. PRO, HO 42/184-87, particularly the correspondence of Norris, Lloyd, and Fletcher, Feb.-May 1819. 14. Manchester Observer, 19 June 1819, pp. 609, 612-13; Black Dwarf, 23 June 1819, cols. 412-15; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 26 June 1819; PRO, HO 42/188: Chippendale to Sidmouth, 15 June 1819; Norris to Sidmouth, 15, 16, and 17 June 1819. The viability of capturing a cap at a radical meeting is constantly discussed in the Home Office correspondence. 15. Manchester Observer, 3 July 1819, pp. 627-30; Black Dwarf, 7 July 1819, cols. 440-48; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 10 July 1819; PRO, HO 42/188: Lloyd to Sidmouth, 28 June 1819; also Wheeler to Sidmouth, 28 June 1819; Norris to Sidmouth, 28 June 1819; Chippendale to Sidmouth, 30 June 1819. 16. Manchester Observer, 19 July 1819, pp. 636-37, 31 July 1819, pp. 658, 663, 14 Aug. 1819, pp. 674-75; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 10 and 31 July 1819,7 and 14 Aug. 1819; PRO, HO 42/190: Fletcher to Sidmouth, 26 July 1819; Norris to Sidmouth, 29 July 1819; Samuel Bamford, Homely Rhymes, Poems, and Reminiscences (London, 1864), pp. 177-79, for his poem "The Fray of Stockport," which was read at the Ashton meeting. 17. A Report of the Meeting Held in Smithfield (London, 1819); The Times, 22 July 1819; PRO, HO 42/190, reports of Atkins and others. 18. Leeds Mercury, 7 Aug. 1819; PRO, HO 42/191, Byng to Sidmouth, enclosure, 5 Aug. 1819. 19. H. U. Jephson, The Platform: Its Rise and Progress, 2vols. (London, 1892), vol. 1, chaps. 5,7-9; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 145-49, 163,451,474-75,639; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), chaps. 10,12; Roger Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795-1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), pp. 170, 207-18; N. G. Cox, "Aspects of English Radicalism: The Suppression and Re-Emergence of the Constitutional Democratic Tradition, 1795-1809" (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1971); cf. Clive Emsley, "An Aspect of Pitt's 'Terror': Prosecutions for Sedition during the 1790s," Social History 6 (1981): 155-84. 20. Habeas Corpus remained suspended until January 1818. The Seditious Meetings Act did not expire until 24 July. In fact, radical meetings in Lancashire were not entirely suppressed. See Manchester Observer, 14 Mar. 1818, p. 85, 28 Mar. 1818, p. 100, 11 Apr. 1818, p. 113, 25 Apr. 1818, p. 133, 11 May 1818, p. 149. 21. See, for example, An Inquiry into the Lav Relative to Public Assemblies of the People (London, 1819); Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 41 (29 Nov. 1819), cols. 389-90, (2 Dec. 1819), cols. 664-65, for the views of Lord Erskine and Henry Brougham.

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Notes to Pages 74-78

22. Alan Booth, "Popular Loyalism and Public Violence in the North-West of England, 1790-1800," Social History 8 (1983): 295-314; Frida Knight, The Strange Case of Thomas "Walker (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957), chaps. 8— 11; Thompson, Making of the English "Working Class, pp. 104, 112-16; Robert L. Dozier, For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists ana the French Revolution (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), pp. 64, 83, 90-92; J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England, 1793-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), shows that loyalism never fully succeeded in destroying the local coteries of middle-class liberals, particularly in Yorkshire and Lancashire. 23. Archibald Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (London, 1851), pp. 7-8; Ashton Reporter, 29 Feb. 1869. 24. PRO, HO 42/191, Wrigley to Sidmouth, 11 Aug. 1819; HO 42/192, information and examination of John Law, 14 Aug. 1819; HO 42/189, Lloyd to Hobhouse, 5 July 1819. 25. Belchem, "Orator" Hunt, pp. 107-9; John Belchem, "Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform," Social History 6 (1981): 132; see also Chapter 1. 26. Leeds Mercury, 7 Aug. 1819; Manchester Observer, 3 July 1819, pp. 62829. 27. Manchester Observer, 3 July 1819, p. 630. Similarly, Davison had no trouble mixing his Paineite republicanism and deism with praise for Cartwright and appeals to the constitution and to the Anglo-Saxon past in the columns of Medusa. 28. Christopher Hill, "The Norman Yoke," in his Puritanism and Revolution (London: Mercury, 1962), pp. 50-122; J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 126-27; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 86-87. 29. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, p. 87. Hunt draws on Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," in Culture and Its Creators, ed. Joseph Ben-David and Terry Nichols Clark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), particularly pp. 152-53, 171. 30. The Trial of Henry Hunt, Esq.... For an Alleged Conspiracy to Overturn the Government (London, 1820), p. 174; John MacDonell, ed., Reports of State Trials, n.s., 8 vols. (London, 1888-1898), vol. 1: 1820, cols. 329-30; Manchester Observer, 1 Apr. 1820, p. 974. 31. E. H. Gombrich, "The Dream of Reason: Symbolism of the French Revolution," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies2 (1979): 195-96; Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head," Representations 4 (1983): 40-50; Seth William Stevenson, A Dictionary of Roman Coins, Republican and Imperial (1809; Chicago: Argonaut, 1968), p. 618. 32. Lois G. Schwoerer, "Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688-89," American Historical Review 77 (1977): 865; Schwoerer, "The Glorious Revolution as Spectacle: A New Perspective," in England's Rise to Greatness, ed. Baxter, pp. 136-37; Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain and Ireland (London: British Museum, Department of Coins and Medals, 1904-1911; Lawrence, Mass.: Quaterman, 1979), e.g., plates Ixxii-iv, Ixxxv; Edward Hawkins, Medallic Illustrations of the History of Great Britain and Ireland to the Death of George II, 2 vols. (London, 1886), vol. 1, pp. 644, 657, 672, 674, 681-83; vol. 2, p. 34. 33. M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature to 1792: A Study ofOpin-

Notes to Pages 78-80

193

ion and Propaganda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 44,82-83,130, 137-39; F. G. Stephens and M. D. George, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Division I, Political and Personal Satires, 11 vols. (London: British Museum, 1870-1954), e.g., vol. 4, print nos. 4028,4050,4119,4130; vol. 5, print nos. 5244, 5327, 5329, 5473, 5641, 5657, 5665, 5691, 5836, 5989, 6051, 6173, 6267; vol. 6, print nos. 6410, 6380, 6485, 6524, 6586. 34. George, English Political Caricature, pp. 117,126; Stephens and George, Catalogue of Prints, vol. 4, print nos. 3846, 4179, 4368; vol. 5, print no. 5244; vol. 6, print nos. 6403,6485; J. May and J. May, Commemorative Pottery, 1780-1900 (London: Heinemann, 1972), pp. 16, 28; Hawkins, Medallic Illustrations, vol. 2, p. 658. 35. The Antigallican Songster, no. 2 (London, 1793); Stephens and George, Catalogue of Prints, vol. 6, print no. 8149. For a late retention of the cap of liberty in a loyal guise, see the mast-head of The Anti-Gallican; or Standard of British Loyalty, Religion and Liberty (London, 1804). 36. George Rude, The Crowd and the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 100; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, chaps. 2, 3; Jennifer Harris, "The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans, 1789-94," Eighteenth Century Studies 14 (1981): 283-312; Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 22325; Marie-Louise Biver, Fdtes revolutionnaires a Paris (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1979); Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 1. 37. Linda Colley, "The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760-1820," Past and Present 102 (1984): 106. 38. Roger Ruding, Annals of the Coinage of Great Britain, 3rd ed. (London, 1840), pp. 94-95,100; George C. Brooke, English Coin, from the Seventh Century to the Present Day, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 220-21; R. Dalton and S. H. Hamer, The Provincial Token-Coinage of the Eighteenth Century (1910; Lawrence, Mass.: Quarterman, 1977), pp. 2,42,92,127,152,167, 236,258, for examples of representations of the cap of liberty on token coinage of the 1790s. The design of Britannia for Boulton's issue was established by royal proclamation. 39. John Brewer, The Common People and Politics, 1750-1790s (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986), pp. 39-40. 40. See, for example, "Report of the Committee of Secrecy," Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 54, pp. 329-31 (15 Mar. 1799). 41. R. R. Madden, The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times, lstser.,7 vols. (London, 1842-1845), vol. 2, pp. 32-34, 54-55, 233; Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 25-26, chap. 1 passim; Thomas Pakenham, The Tear of Liberty: The Story of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 (London: Panther, 1972), p. 368. 42. Colley, "Apotheosis of George III." 43. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 454-59; Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793-1815 (London: Macmillan, 1979), chap. 6; Cunningham, "Language of Patriotism," pp. 13-15; Colley, "Apotheosis of George III," pp. 127-29; Cookson, Friends of Peace, pp. 169-70. 44. PRO, HO 42/67, Fenwick to Pelham (>), 11 Apr. 1803, fol. 148. Forced to defend his choice of symbols, Fenwick explained that Britannia was displayed

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Notes to Pages 80-82

"with the usual Emblem with which she is painted, & of course with the Cap of Liberty." 45. M. W. Patterson, Sir Francis Burdett and, His Times, 1770-1844, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1931), vol. 1, pp. 214-18; Annual Register, 1807, pp. 45354; J. M. Main, "Radical Westminster, 1807-1820," Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, 12 (1966): 186-91, for the significance of this election. 46. Examiner, 19 July 1812; Belchem, "Orator" Hunt, pp. 38-39. At the Westminster election of 1818, Hunt's colors, provided by the Paineite Richard Carlile, consisted of a large red flag surmounted by a cap of liberty. It was this cap and flag that were sent to Manchester in January 1819. See Republican, 1 Mar. 1822, p. 262. 47. T. M. Parssinen, "The Revolutionary Party in London, 1816-20," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 45 (1972): 266-82; lorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gust and His Times (Folkestone: Dawson, 1979), pp. 90-92; J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796-1821 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 23537; Iain McCalman, "Ultra-Radicalism and Convivial Debating-Clubs in London, 1795-1838," English Historical Review 102 (1987): 309-33; Malcolm S. Chase, ''The People's Farm": English Radical Ayrarianism, 1775-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), particularly chap. 4. Links between English ultra-radicals in London and Lancashire and Irish revolutionaries were also significant. See Marianne Elliott, "The 'Despard' Conspiracy Reconsidered," Past and Present 75 (1977): 46-61; Alan Booth, "The United Englishmen and Radical Politics in the Industrial North-West of England, 1795-1803," International Review of Social History 31 (1986): 271-97. 48. Belchem, "Orator" Hunt, pp. 57-58; Hone, For the Cause of Truth, pp. 261-62; Arthur Calder-Marshall, "The Spa Fields Riots, 1816," History Today 21 (1971): 407-15. 49. PRO, TS 11/197/859, fols. 10-11; HO 44/4, "Further Narrative." See also The Shamrock, Thistle and Rose, 29 Aug. 1818, copy in PRO, HO 42/182. 50. These brief details of the first two meetings are based on Examiner, 17 Nov. 1816, pp. 730-32, 8 Dec. 1816, pp. 777-78; William Hone, The Meeting in Spa-Fields: Hone's Authentic and Correct Account of all Proceedings on Monday, 2 December (London, 1816); Hone, The Riots in London (London, 1816); British Library, Add. MS. 27,809, Place's account, fols. 22-25. 51. "Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Commons, Respecting Certain Meetings and Dangerous Combinations," Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 35 (19 Feb. 1817), cols. 441-42. This theme was picked up more generally in loyalist commentary. See, for example, Anti-Cobbett, or the Weekly Patriotic Register, 15 Feb. 1817, col. 10; William Firth, Remarks on the Recent State Trials and the Rise and Progress of Disaffection in the Country (London, 1818), pp. 70-76. 52. T. B. Howell and T. J. Howell, eds., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1809-1826), vol. 32: 1817, cols. 51-52. Watson was acquitted largely because of John Castles's role as agent provocateur. 53. Cobbett's Political Register, 23 Nov. 1816, cols. 650-56. 54. PRO, HO 40/7(1), see report dated 24 Sept. 1817. Preston claimed that old Spitalfields acquaintances would not stop their work to listen to him: "they did not like such men as himself." 55. Cobbett's Political Register, 23 Oct. 1819, cols. 265-66. 56. Black Dwarf, 24 Feb. 1819, col. 118.

Notes to Pages 82-85

195

57. Gombrich, "Dream of Reason," pp. 199-200. 58. Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 4 Sept. 1819, for the singing of "With Henry Hunt we'll go." For slightly different words (the last line is changed to "In spite of Nadin Joe"), see John Harland, Ballads and Songs of Lancashire (Manchester, 1882), p. 262. 59. "The Answer to Peterloo," copy in Manchester Public Library, Broadsides Collection, 1819/2/E. 60. Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (1844; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 145-46. 61. Manchester Observer, 21 Aug. 1819, p. 688. Full secondary accounts of the day's events appear in Robert Walmsley, Peterloo: The Case Re-opened (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), chaps. 10-15; Donald Read, Peterloo: The "Massacre" and Its Background (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), chap. 8; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 669-90. 62. Colley, "Apotheosis of George III," pp. 103-4. See also Percy A. Scholes, God Save the Queen! The History and Romance of the World's First National Anthem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). 63. See, for example, PRO, HO 40/4 (1, pt. 2), Chippendale to Sidmouth, 4 Jan. 1817, fols. 72-77. 64. Manchester Observer, 23 Jan. 1819, pp. 447-49, 30 Jan. 1819, p. 455; Manchester Gazette, 30 Jan. 1819; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 23 and 30 Jan. 1819; Manchester Mercury, 26 Jan. 1819,2 Feb. 1819; Sherwin'sPolitical Register, 30 Jan. 1819, pp. 204-6; PRO, HO 42/183: Norris to Sidmouth, 23,25, 26, and 29 Jan. 1819; Chippendale to Norris, 27 Jan. 1819; Bamford, Passages in the Life, pp. 226-30. 65. MacDonell, ed., Reports of State Trials, vol. 1, cols. 203-4, 392; J. A. Dowling, ed., The Whole Proceedings before the Coroner's Inquest at Oldham, &c. on the Body of John Lees (London, 1820), pp. 92, 318, 340-41, 420, 424. 66. "Vivre Libre, ou Mourir" was the motto of the Jacobin Society. The French were acquainted with Patrick Henry's famous words of 1775: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" This in turn seems an echo from Joseph Addison's play Cato (1713): "It is not now time to talk of aught/ But chains, or conquest; liberty, or death" (2.4.79-80). See Fredric M. Litto, "Addison's Cato in the Colonies," William ana Mary Quarterly 23 (1966): 431-49; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 12. 67. Goodwin, Friends of Liberty, p. 346. The slogan was chalked on walls during the Sheffield riots of 1791. See John Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790-1810 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 200. 68. PRO, HO 42/180, John Livesey's "Outline of the Different Speeches made . . . 1 Sept. 1818." See also AFull, Accurate, Impartial Report of the Trialof John Bagguley, ofStockport, John Johnston, ofSalford, and Samuel Drummond, of Manchester (Manchester, 1819). 69. Cobbett's Political Register, 6 May 1820, col. 596. The "national" character of the song "O, Give Me Liberty or Death" was brought up in court to show the legitimacy of the Saddleworth banner. See Dowling, ed., Whole Proceedings before the Coroner's Inquest on John Lees, p. 341. 70. [J. E. Taylor], Peterloo Massacre: Edited by an Observer (Manchester, 1819), no. 1, p. 5; Dowling, ed., Whole Proceedings before the Coroner's Inquest on John Lees, pp. 79, 179-80.

196

Notes to Pages 86-89

71. Manchester Mercury, 24 Aug. 1819. 72. Ibid.; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 21 Aug. 1819. 73. Stalybridge Old Band (Stalybridge: Whittaker, 1914), p. 16. 74. PRO, HO 42/192, Lloyd to Hobhouse, 18 Aug. 1819; Francis Phillips, An Exposure of the Calumnies Circulated by the Enemies of Social Order (London, 1819), pp. 38-39; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 21 Aug. 1819. 75. "The Female Reformists," Patriot, 28 Aug. 1819, col. 15. 76. Norman Gash, "After Waterloo: British Society and the Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars," Transactions of'the Royal Historical Society 28 (1978): 15051. 77. For arming and drilling in the weeks before Peterloo, see reports in PRO, HO 42/190-92; "Papers Relative to the Internal State of the Country," Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 1st sen, vol. 41 (24 Nov. 1819), cols. 230-301. 78. Several liberal middle-class observers regarded the presence of women and children as a "guarantee" of the peaceful intent of the meeting. See John Benjamin Smith, "Reminiscences" (typescript, Manchester Public Library), p. 15; F. A. Burton, Three Accounts of Peterloo (Manchester, 1921), p. 15; MacDonell, ed., Reports of State Trials, vol. 1, col. 350; [J. E. Taylor], Notes and Observations on the Papers Relative to the Internal State of the Country (London, 1820), p. 166. 79. Dorothy Thompson, "Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics: A Lost Dimension," in The Rights and Wrongs of Women, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 112-38; Malcolm I. Thomis and Jennifer Grimmett, Women in Protest, 1800-1850 (London: Macmillan, 1982); John Bohstedt, "Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots, 1790-1810," Past and Present, no. 120 (1988): 88-122. 80. Manchester Observer, 10 July 1819, pp. 640, 641,17 July 1819, pp. 646, 648, 31 July 1819, pp. 658, 662-63; Leeds Mercury, 31 July 1819, 7 Aug. 1819, 9 and 23 Oct. 1819; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 24 July 1819, 7 and 21 Aug. 1819; Thomis and Grimmett, Women in Protest, pp. 93-94; Glen, Urban Workers, pp. 231-32; Carol E. Morgan, "Working Women and Labor and Social Movements of Nineteenth Century England" (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1979), pp. 87102 passim. 81. Manchester Observer, 10 July 1819, pp. 636-37 (reprinted as a pamphlet, copy in PRO, HO 42/195); Black Dwarf, 14 July 1819, cols. 453-60. For mothers of Jerusalem devouring their own children, see Deut. 28:53, 57, Lam. 2:20, 4:10. 82. See, for example, the address of the Manchester Female Reform Society, Manchester Observer, 1 Aug. 1819, p. 664. See also Sally Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Difference in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of Feminist History," History Workshop Journal 17 (1984): particularly 136^16; cf. Temma Kaplan, "Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-18," Signs? (1982): particularly 545-51; Catherine Hall, "The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: Gender and Working-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century England," in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 78-102. 83. New Times, 13 July 1819; Manchester Exchange Herald, 13 July 1819, p. 224. See also Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 10 July 1819; Courier, 15 July 1819. The liberal Manchester Gazette, 7 Aug. 1819, showed no greater tolerance for the political participation of women. 84. M. Dorothy George, English Political Caricature, 1793-1832: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 182-83;

Notes to Pages 89-92

197

Stephens and George, Catalogue of Prints, vol. 9, print no. 13,257; see also print no. 13,264 ("Much Wanted A Reform Among Females!!!"). 85. Joan Wallach Scott notes that Burke's attack on the revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France is built around a contrast between the image of the murderous hags who came to seize the royal family at Versailles and that of the lovely queen, Marie Antoinette. Scott persuasively suggests the importance of gender as "a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated" ("Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," in her Gender and the Politics of History [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], pp. 44-46). 86. For women's role and image in the French Revolution, see Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795: Selected Documents (Urbzna.: University of Illinois Press, 1979), especially pp. 199-200, 205-17, for the issue of women wearing tricolor cockades and the bonnet rouge; Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), chap. 4; Dorinda Outram, "Le Language male de la vertu: Women and the Discourse of the French Revolution," in The Social History of Language, ed. Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 120-35. 87. See [Taylor], Peter-Loo Massacre, nos. 13-14. Of the total of just over four hundred casualties listed, more than one hundred were women and girls. 88. Charlotte Johnston to John Johnston, 19 July 1819, copy in PRO, HO 42/190. 89. For the proceedings at Rochdale, see PRO, HO 42/190, report of "Ben," enclosed in Fletcher to Sidmouth, 26 July 1819; Manchester Observer, 31 July 1819, pp. 658, 663. Such a formal presentation was almost certainly planned for Peterloo. 90. Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 14 Aug. 1819; Manchester Exchange Her»W,17Aug. 1819, p. 264. 91. PRO, HO 42/190, anonymous to Sidmouth, 26 July 1819. The biblical passage alluded to reads, "But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." 92. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 417; cf. Iain McCalman, "Females, Feminism and Freelove in an Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Movement," Labour History 38 (1980): 1-25. See also James Vernon, "Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture and Communication, 1808-68" (Ph.D. diss., Manchester University, 1991), pp. 216, 442^3, 451-52. 93. Cobbett's Political Register, 23 Oct. 1819, cols. 267-69. For a description of loyalist women presenting colors, see, for example, W. Brimelow, Political and Parliamentary History ofBolton (Bolton, 1882), p. 11; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 25462. 94. Cobbett's Political Register, 23 Oct. 1819, cols. 278,283-84,29 Dec. 1819, col. 523. Cobbett opposed the notion of votes for women, ridiculing Benthamite support for female political rights. 95. This paragraph is much indebted to the comments of Sima Godfrey. See also Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), particularly pp. 29-30. 96. Le Bonnet Rouge, 16 Feb. 1830, noted that "le Bonnet Rouge" possessed "the two-fold properties of adhesion and expansion[;] . . . it sticks to the head of the unlettered, equally with that of the more fortunate individual."

198

Notes to Pages 92-94

97. For example, the remonstrance adopted by the Manchester meeting of January 1819 pointedly reminded the prince regent of the fates of Charles I and James II. See also "Thoughts on the Slaying of Tyrants," Sherwin's Political Register, 24 Oct. 1818, pp. 385-93,7 Nov. 1818, pp. 1-6. The ultra-radical Democratic Recorder, 2-23 Oct. 1819, carried this on its masthead: "ARE THE MASTERS OF KINGS! THE CREATORS OF KINGS!! THE TRANSPORTERS!!! THE EXECUTORS OF KINGS!!!! TO SUBMIT TO A VILE FACTION?"

98. Thompson, Ma-king of the English Worling Class, pp. 690-92. 99. Leeds Mercury, 9 and 23 Oct. 1819, 13 and 27 Nov. 1819; Manchester Observer, 20 Nov. 1819, p. 818; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 13 and 20 Nov. 1819; Statesman, 16 Oct. 1819, 8 Nov. 1819; Carlisle Patriot, 16 Oct. 1819; Carlisle Journal, 6 Nov. 1819. 100. Manchester Observer, 9 Oct. 1819, p. 738; PRO, HO 42/196, Horton to Hobhouse, 4 Oct. 1819. 101. See, for example, The Triumphal Entry of 'Henry Hunt, Esq., into London . . . September 13, 1819 (London, 1819); New Times, 14 Sept. 1819; Statesman, 14 Sept. 1819. The Spencean tricolor flag was exhibited on Hunt's entry into London, and radicals wore cockades in their hatbands. At the dinner arranged by Watson to honor Hunt, the band played "Ca Ira" and the "Marseillaise." 102. See Manchester Observer, 2 Oct. 1819, p. 735 (from October, the editorial column of the Observer carried an engraving of a cap of liberty hoisted atop a banner inscribed "Death or Liberty"); "The Origins and Properties of the Cap of Liberty," Cap of Liberty, 8 Sept. 1819, p. 16, 29 Sept. 1819, p. 64 (reprinted, although unacknowledged, from D. I. Eaton's Philanthropist, 21 Sept. 1795, PP. 7-8). 103. The town meeting at Nottingham, under the control of the local Whig oligarchy, was an exception, as radicals marched a cap of liberty to the foot of the hustings. See New Times, 30 Sept. 1819; Statesman, 29 Sept. 1819. 104. PRO, HO 42/194: Fletcher to Sidmouth, 9 Sept. 1819; Norris to Sidmouth, 9 Sept. 1819. 105. Phillips, Exposure of the Calumnies, p. 11; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 7 and 21 Aug. 1819, 4 Sept. 1819, 23 Oct. 1819; Manchester Mercury, 24 Aug. 1819; PRO, HO 42/194, Nadin to Hobhouse (?), n.d. (ca. 3 Sept. 1819); HO 42/193, Norris to Sidmouth, 24 Aug. 1819. 106. PRO, HO 42/194, Ethelston to Sidmouth, 13 Sept. 1819. The following month, Ethelston's own groom, John Dent, was attacked by a crowd of men "wearing white hats." See. Manchester Mercury, 12 Oct. 1819; Manchester Exchange Herald, 12 Oct. 1819, p. 325. 107. PRO, HO 42/196, Harwood to Sidmouth, 3 Oct. 1819. 108. PRO, HO 42/194, Norris to Sidmouth, 13 Sept. 1819; HO 42/195, Norris to Sidmouth, 20 Sept. 1819; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 25 Sept. 1819. For similar events at Birmingham, see New Times, 30 Nov. 1819. 109. Chetham Library, Manchester, Sunday School Minute Book (18061839), fol. 165, and handbill dated 24 Sept. 1819. 110. D. A. Gowland, Methodist Secessions: The Origins of Methodism in Three Lancashire Towns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 24-26, 3637; Paul Stigant, "Weslcyan Methodism and Working-Class Radicalism in the North," Northern History 6 (1971): 106,113-16; David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750-1850 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984),

Notes to Pages 94-97

199

pp. IM-IQ; Methodist Magazine,n.s.,vol. 16 (1819): 942-47, for the official statement of the Wesleyan Committee of Privileges. 111. PRO, HO 20/10, prison examination. 112. PRO, HO 42/195, Lloyd to Hobhouse, 22 Sept. 1819. 113. PRO,HO40/11, JamesBriggstoG.S.Holroyd,25 Feb. 1820,enclosed in G. S. Holroyd to Sidmouth, 29 Feb. 1820. For a similar account, see Holroyd's letter of 23 Dec. 1819, in The Early Correspondence ofjabez Bunting, 1820-1829, ed. W. R Ward (London: Royal Historical Society, 1972), pp. 23-26. 114. See, for example, PRO, HO 42/197, Ethelston to Sidmouth, 20 Oct. 1819. At 3:00 A.M., twelve men in white hats arrived at a loyalist clergyman's house outside Manchester, "dancing 'a la Carmagnole' and singing a revolutionary ditty[;] . . . a Man stepped forward into the Circle & called aloud 'Blood & vengeance.'" 115. See Thomas Teulon's explanation of the title of his new journal, White Hat, 16 Oct. 1819, p. 6. For a loyalist riposte, linking the white hat to the cap of liberty and to "ev'ry rogue who lov'd a riot," see White Hats: or, The Reformiad.. . by Humphry Helicon, Poet-Laureate to the Radicals (London, 1819). 116. T. E. Tomlins, ed., The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1820), vol. 60, Geo. Ill, cap. 6, pp. 15-28; Belchem, "Orator "Hunt, p. 118. 117. Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 41 (29 Nov. 1819), cols. 389-91. See also George Pellow, The Life and Correspondence of the Right Hon. Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth, Svols. (London, 1847), vol. 3,pp. 28586, for Eldon's comments to Sidmouth. 118. MacDonell, ed., Reports of State Trials,vol 1, cols. 311, 371-74,376-81, 406-8; Manchester Observer, 13 Nov. 1819, p. 808. 119. Manchester Observer, 19 Aug. 1820, pp. 1130-31; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 19 Aug. 1820; Manchester Guardian, 26 Oct. 1822, 2 and 9 Nov. 1822, 12 Apr. 1823. 120. Thomas W. Laqueur, "The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV," Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 417-66; Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London, chap. 7; Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 105-15. This did not prevent Craikshank from transferring the cap of liberty from the heads of the Blackburn female reformers to Caroline; see the Loyalist: or, Anti-Radical, 21 Oct. 1820, p. 158, for his "Mother Red Cap's Public House in Opposition to the Bang's Head Tavern." 121. See, for example, Republican, 6 Aug. 1831, pp. 4-6, dinner to celebrate the anniversary of the 1830 revolution; Cosmopolite, 29 Sept. 1832, report of a "republican funeral"; PRO, HO 64/11, 23 Nov. 1831, fols. 441-42, tricolored flag displayed at the Rotunda; George Rude, "English Rural and Urban Disturbances on the Eve of the First Reform Bill, 1830-1831," Past and Present, no. 37 (1967): 92, 96-97, 101; Belchem, "Orator" Hunt, pp. 205, 210, 213-16, 269; Roger Wells, "Rural Rebels in Southern England in the 1830s," in Artisans, Peasants and Proletarians, 1760-1860, ed. Clive Ernsley and James Walvin (Beckenham: Groom Helm, 1985), p. 139. 122. See accounts of die great Kersal Moor meeting in Northern Star, 22 Sept. 1838; Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 29 Sept. 1838. See also, for example, the

200

Notes to Pages 97-103

broadside ballad sheet "A New Song in Praise of W. Lovett and John Collins, To be Sung on the Day of their Liberation," which features an illustration of a large cap of liberty with a skull and the words "or Liberty" and a cockade. I am grateful to Dorothy Thompson for a copy of this ballad. 123. At Birmingham, however, where local authorities eventually moved against Chartist meetings held in the Bull Ring, the cap of liberty was prominently displayed. See Birmingham Journal, 6 and 27 Apr. 1839. 124. Belchem, "Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform," pp. 30-32. 125. Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions," in The Invention ofTmdition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 4, 6. 126. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 83-84. 127. Feminist claims were usually made within a natural-rights- or rationalistbased paradigm. See Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983).

Chapter 4. Reason's Republic 1. Richard Carlile, The Life of Thomas Paine, Written Purposely to Bind with His Writings (London, 1821), p. 18. This biographical summary draws on Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983). See also G. J. Holyoake, The Life and Character of Richard Carlile (London, 1870); Theophilia Carlile Campbell, The Battle of the Press: As Told in the Life of Richard Carlile (London, 1899); Guy Aldred, Richard Carlile, Agitator: His Life and Times (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1941). For Carlile's reminiscences, see Republican, 3 Mar. 1820, pp. 226-28, 30 May 1823, pp. 673-86, 28 Jan. 1825, pp. 97-126,14 July 1826, pp. 1-13; Prompter, 29 Jan. 1831, pp. 200-203; Isis, 7 July 1832, pp. 34145. 2. Republican, 3 Mar. 1820, p. 227,28 Jan. 1825, pp. 100-102,14 July 1826, pp. 2-3. 3. Republican, 3 Mar. 1820, pp. 227-28,1 Mar. 1822, pp. 266-67, 280-83; Richard Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 13 Oct. 1821, pp. 7-8; Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 158; William H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819—1832 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928), pp. 69-71; see Joel H. Wiener's entry for Sherwin, in Biographical Dictionary of Modern Radicals, ed. Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Gossman, 3 vols. (Hassocks: Harvester, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 445—46. 4. "The Following Publications May be Had of R. Carlile" [handbill] (ca. 1818), p. 3, copy in PRO, HO 42/202. 5. Theological Inquirer; or Polemical Magazine, May 1815, p. 189. 6. Republican, 11 July 1823, pp. 2-3; "Publications of R Carlile," pp. 3-4; Sherwin's Political Register, 6 Sept.-2 Nov. 1817, for Common Sense, 4 Oct.31 Dec. 1817, for The Rights of Man; Iain McCalman, "Popular Radicalism and Free-thought in Early Nineteenth Century England: A Study of Richard Carlile and His Followers, 1815-32" (M.A. thesis, Australian National University, 1975), Appendix I,p. 213. In 1813, Wooler had published extracts from the TheRightsof

Notes to Pages 103-104

201

Man in his short-lived Republican: A Weekly Historical Magazine. The Political Works of Tom Paine, published in January 1818, sold for 1 guinea. The following year, Carlile came out with a slightly enlarged and cheaper edition. 7. Sherwin's Political Register, 4 Oct. 1817, pp. 3-4. 8. Republican, 30 May, 1823, pp. 675-76; Isis, 7 July 1832, p. 343. In August 1817, Carlile had been arrested for reprinting Hone's parodies. See PRO, TS, 11/945 (3465); TS, 11/556;F. W. Hackwood, William Hone: His Life and Times (London: Unwin, 1912), pp. 116-17. 9. Republican, 29 Mar. 1817, where it was first published. See also Republican, 25 Jan. 1822, p. 119, 30 May 1823, p. 674; Wickwar, Struggle for Freedom of the Press, pp. 259-61; The Life and Correspondence of 'Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey (New York, 1851), pp. 346-51. 10. Republican, 27 Aug. 1819, p. 16; Isis, 7 July 1832, pp. 342-43; Sherwin's Political Register, 24 Oct. 1818, 7 and 14 Nov. 1818. Although available in earlier editions, Sexby's work (first published 1657) had become difficult and expensive to obtain. 11. At the price of a half guinea per volume, initial sales of the Theological Works were slow; sales quickened with Carlile's prosecution, enabling him to bring out a second edition of three thousand copies. 12. "Proceedings against Thomas Williams for publishing Paine's 'Age of Reason,'" in A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell and T. J. Howell, 33 vols. (London, 1809-1826), vol. 26:1796-1797, cols. 653-720. See also Michael J. Williams, "The 1790s: The Impact of Infidelity," Bulletin of the Thomas Paine Society 5 (1976): 21-30; cf. Franklyn K. Prochaska, "Thomas Paine's The Age. of Reason Revisited," Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 561-76. 13. Trial of Mr. Daniel Isaac Eaton for Publishing the Third and Last Part of Paine's Age of Reason (London, 1812). 14. R A. Soloway, Prelates and People: Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, 1783-1852 (London: Routledge, 1969), pp. 39, 90; Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order in England, 1760-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 151-59. 15. Thomas Scott, Vindication of the Divine Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures ... Being an Answer to Mr. Paine's Age of Reason, 2nd ed. (London, 1799), p. iv. 16. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 125, 185-86, 237, 256, 262. See New Times, 6 Feb. 1819, p. 3, for a postwar restatement. 17. British Library, Add. MS. 27,809, fol. 115; Mary Thale, ed., Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792-99 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. xv, 306, n.40; William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in This Metropolis (London, 1800), pp. 3-9; The Autobiography of Francis Place, ed. Mary Thale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 126, 159-60. See, more generally, Iain McCalman, "The Infidel as Prophet: William Reid and Blakean Radicalism," in Historicizing Blake, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: Macmillan, 1993). 18. Some refused the linkage. See Briton, 25 Sept. 1819, p. 1,16 Oct. 1819, p. 31, 23 Oct. 1819, pp. 33-35, 6 Nov. 1819, pp. 49-51 The Briton was an ultraradical journal founded to preserve religion, oppose deism, and champion the "Rights of Man." 19. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and

202

Notes to Pages 104-107

Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), particularly chaps. 3-5. 20. Republican, 18 Feb. 1820, p. 148, 9 June 1820, p. 267, 27 July 1824, p. 92,14 July 1826, p. 4. 21. Deist, 2 vols. (1819-1820), included works such as Samuel Francis's Watson Refuted, Palmer's Principles of Nature, d'Holbach's Christianity Unveiled and Letters to Eugenia (the first English translation), and Voltaire's Important Examination of the Holy Scriptures. 22. Republican, 3 Mar. 1820, pp. 218-19. 23. Sherwin's Political Register, 21 Aug. 1819; Republican, 28 Jan. 1825, pp. 103-4. 24. Republican, 29 Mar. 1817, p. 80. 25. Sherwin's Political Register, 21 Aug. 1819, p. 246; Republican, 27 Aug. 1819, pp. xvi, 1-3, 23 May 1823, p. 678. Weekly sales ran as high as fifteen thousand. 26. Democratic Recorder, and Reformers' Guide, 2 Oct. 1819, col. 1, copy in PRO, TS 24/7/44. 27. Allen Davenport, The Kings, or Legitimacy Unmasked,, a Satirical Poem (London, 1819), p. 3. 28. Medusa, 20 Mar. 1819, pp. 33-36, 27 Mar. 1819, pp. 41-43, 24 Apr. 1819, p. 74, 31 July 1819, p. 189 (quotation); for Davison, see McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 152-61 passim. 29. W. T. Sherwin, Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1819); Thomas Clio Rickman, The Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1819). 30. Medusa, 27 Mar. 1819, pp. 41-44, 22 May 1819, pp. 109-10, 25 Sept. 1819, p. 251. 31. Theological Comet: or, Free-Thinking Englishmen, 24 July-13 Nov. 1819, changed its name after Peterloo to Theological and Political Comet. See, for example, "The Beauties of Paine Quoted; Or, The Age of Reason Fairly and Fearlessly Reviewed," a regular feature. 32. Cap of Liberty, 6 Oct. 1819, p. 80, 1 Dec. 1819, p. 201, 8 Dec. 1819, pp. 221-24; Medusa, 9 Oct. 1819, p. 272, 30 Oct. 1819, pp. 295-96. 33. PRO, TS 11/45 (167), deposition of William Plush, 13 Oct. 1819; Axe Laid to the Root, or A Fatal Blow to Oppressors, no. 1 (1817), col. 7, copies, which were circulating in late 1819, in PRO, HO 42/202. For Wedderburn, see McCalman, Radical Underworld, chap. 3; The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn, ed. Iain McCalman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). 34. "Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords," in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 1st ser., vol. 35 (18 Feb. 1817), cols. 417-18. 35. See, for example, [T. J. Wooler], A Dialogue on the Approaching Trial of Mr. Carlile for Publishing the Age of Reason (London, 1819), p. 16. 36. Cobbett's Political Register, 4 Dec. 1813, cols. 716-17; Republican, 12 May 1826, pp. 603-^i; J. R. Dinwiddy, "William Cobbett, George Houston and Freethought," Notes and Queries 222 (1977): 355-59. 37. For estimates, see PRO, HO 42/197, L. Gordon to Sidmouth, 19 Oct. 1819; McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 277 n. 37, puts the combined circulation of Medusa, the Cap of Liberty, the Theological Comet, and Deists' Magazine at between two and six thousand copies a week. 38. Richard Carlile, A Letter to the Society for the Suppression of Vice (London,

Notes to Pages 107-109

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1819); A Copy of the Information, Exhibited Ex Officio . . . Against Richard Car tile, for Publishing Paine's Age of Reason (London, 1819); Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain, pp. 34-35; Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public Order, pp. 207-10. For Palmer, see Roderick S. French, "Elihu Palmer, Radical Deist, Radical Republican: A Reconsideration of American Free Thought," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1979): 87-108. 39. Cap of Liberty, 15 Sept. 1819, pp. 22-24. 40. The Opening Speech, and Reply, of Mr. Fleming, at the British Forum (London, 1819), pp. 4-5; John Gale Jones, Substance of the Speeches of John Gale Jones, Delivered at the British Forum (London, 1819), pp. 16, 19. 41. PRO, TS 11/45 (167), Crown brief, report of 25 Oct. 1819. 42. PRO, TS 11/945 (3465); TS 11/157 (553); TS 24/1/11. The government prosecuted Carlile for having published The Age of Reason, and the Vice Society pursued a private prosecution against him for having published The Principles of Nature. 43. Republican, 30 May 1823, p. 679; Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 20 Dec. 1821, pp. 23-24. Bentham volunteered his help; Charles Pearson was prepared to act as counsel. See The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 9: January 1817 to June 1820, ed. Stephen Conway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 418-22. 44. The Report of the Proceedings of the Court of King's Bench ... Being the Mock Trials of Richard Carlile (London, 1822); Republican, 22 Oct. 1819, p. 136, 29 Oct. 1819, p. 147; Examiner, 18 Oct. 1819, pp. 657-59,24 Oct. 1819, pp. 66672, 673-77. The government initiated proceedings against Jane Carlile for having published Carlile's trial. See Vice versus Reason: A Copy of the Information Found against Mrs. Carlile for Publishing Mr. Carlile's Trial (London, 1820). 45. Jones, Substance of the Speeches, pp. 9-11. 46. Samuel Waddington's acquittals were not really exceptions, since he did not attack the authority of the Bible. See Black Dwarf, 8 Sept. 1819, cols. 586-87; Republican, 29 Sept. 1820, p. 151; McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 142-43. 47. See, for example, Report of the Trial of Humphrey Boyle... To Which Is Attached, the Trial of Joseph Rhodes (London, 1822); A Report of the Proceedings, In the Mock Trial of an Information . . . Against William Tunbridge (London, 1823); Republican, 18 and 25 June 1824,9-30 July 1824, for the trials of William Campion, Thomas Jefferies, Richard Hassell, John Clarke, William Haley, and William Cochrane. 48. PRO, HO 42/197, Baldwin to Sidmouth, 27 Oct. 1819. 49. "The King against Hunt and Others," in Reports of State Trials, ed. John MacDonell, n.s., 8 vols. (London, 1888-1898), vol. 1: 1820, cols. 311, 371-74, 406-7; Republican, 7 Apr. 1820, pp. 399-403. 50. Carlile was sentenced to two years for publishing The Age of Reason and one year for publishing The Principles of Nature, and was given fines totaling £1,500 and £1,000 securities for life. His extended imprisonment was the result of his failure to meet the financial conditions of his sentence. 51. Report of the Trial of Mrs. Susannah Wright, for Publishing in His Shop, the Writings and Correspondences ofR. Carlile (London, 1822); Republican, 18 Aug. 1826, pp. 188-89, 1 Sept. 1826, pp. 252-55,15 Sept. 1826, p. 304. 52. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain, chap. 5; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), pp. 728-33; Wickwar, Struggle for Freedom of the Press, chap. 7.

204

Notes to Pages 109-113

53. "To Readers," Republican, 1819, pp. x-xi. 54. Thomas W. Laqueur, "The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George TV" Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 417-66; Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 113; McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 162-77; Anna Clark, "Queen Caroline and die Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820," Representations 31 (1990): 56-57, and more generally; lorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (Folkestone: Dawson, 1979), chap. 7; John Stevenson, "The Queen Caroline Affair," in London in the Age of Reform, ed. John Stevenson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp. 117-48; Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (London: Virago, 1990), pp. 10-13. 55. Republican, 25 Feb. 1820, pp. 189-92. See also Tamara L. Hunt, "Morality and. Monarchy in the Queen Caroline Affair," Albion 23 (1991): 697-722. 56. See, for example, Republican, 8 Sept. 1820, p. 56, response to the inhabitants of Clerkenwell; New Times, 26 Sept. 1820, p. 3, replies to the London wards of Farringdon Without and Cripplegate Within. 57. Republican, 30 June 1820, p. 335, 17 Nov. 1820, pp. 397-402, 8 Dec. 1820, pp. 505-20, 15 Dec. 1820, pp. 541-46; Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 13 Oct. 1821, pp. 3-4. 58. Republican, 29 Dec. 1820, p. 615; Richard Carlile, A Political Catechism (London, 1817); Carlile, The BulletTeDeum, with the Canticle of Stone hyp. Rabelais (London, 1817); Carlile, The Order for the Administration of the Loaves and Pishes (London, 1817). 59. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 59-61; Gauntlet, 21 Apr. 1833, p. 162. See also Sherwin, Memoirs of Paine, p. 62. 60. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791-1792; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 204, 77, 95, 182, 49-50, 59; J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 3 passim; John Turner, "Burke, Paine, and the Nature of Language," Tearbook of English Studies\9 (1989): 49-52; James T. Boulton, TheLanguage of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 143^6, for Paine's use of theatrical imagery. 61. Michael J. Williams, "The 1790s: Paine and the Age of Reason," Bulletin of the Thomas Paine Society 5 (1975): 17. 62. Thomas Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation (1792), in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 470, 510. 63. Charles Taylor, "Language and Human Nature," in his Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 226. See also Smith, Politics of Language, chap. 4; Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), particularly chap. 1. The debt to Locke's views on language is clear. 64. See, for example, Carlile's comments in the debate over divine intelligence in Republican, 19 Dec. 1823, pp. 735-42. The problem, he says, is that the words in dispute—"god," "nature," "spirit," "matter," etc.—"stand for nothing determinate." 65. Republican, 5 July 1822, p. 179. 66. Republican, 18 Oct. 1822, pp. 669, 662.

Notes to Pages 113-117

205

67. Republican, 27 June 1823, p. 826; also Republican, 25 Oct. 1822, pp. 691-92. 68. Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 13 Oct. 1821, p. 10; Republican, 18 Jan. 1822, pp. 79, 83-84. Cf. "Rules of the London Zetetic Society," Republican, 3 May 1822, pp. 570-71. 69. Gwyn A. Williams, Rowland Detrosier: A Working-Class Infidel, 1800-34 (York: St. Anthony's Press, 1965), p. 3; James Watson, "Reminiscences of James Watson," in Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians, 17901885, ed. David Vincent (London: Europa, 1977), p. 110, for the formation of the Leeds group; McCalman, "Popular Radicalism and Freethought," pp. 82-87, for the geography and scale of Carlileite support; John Belchem, "Orator" Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 143-58, 174, 206-11, for the Great Northern Union; Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791-1866 (Manchester. Manchester University Press, 1974), pp. 37-39. 70. Republican, 1 Aug. 1823, p. 119. See also Republican, 12 Nov. 1824, p. 598; Richard Carlile, Richard Carlile'sFirst Sermon on the Mount (London, 1827), pp. 11-13; Prompter, 5 Nov. 1831, p. 899. 71. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory ofjurgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 306-10; Lion, 4 Jan. 1828, p. 1. See also Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressers, p. 507; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794; Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1974), p. 190. 72. Republican, 5 Apr. 1822, p. 445. 73. Republican, 13 Sept. 1822, p. 495, 1 Nov. 1822, p. 710, 6 Sept. 1822, p. 449; Richard Carlile, Observations on "Letters to a Friend On the Evidences, Doctrines and Duties of the Christian Religion: by Olinthus Gregory" (London, 1821), p. 33. 74. Republican, 18 Feb. 1820, p. 148. In Paine's writing, metaphor was generally considered illustrative rather than constitutive of meaning. 75. Reid, Rise and Dissolution, p. 70, observes that for Paine, "neither metaphor nor allegory is allowable in religion!" 76. Republican, 1 Feb. 1822, pp. 145-48,5 Mar. 1824, pp. 289-309; Gauntlet, 10 Feb. 1833, p. 2, on Godwin; Lion, 14 Nov. 1828, pp. 609-12; Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain, p. 62. 77. Daniel L. McCue, Jr., "Daniel Isaac Eaton and Politicsfor the People" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1974). 78. Politics for the People, 16 Nov. 1793, pp. 104-5; Cecil Thelwall, The Life of John Thelwall, by his Widow (London, 1837), pp. 107-10; Mary Thale, "London Debating Societies in the 1790s," Historical Journal 32 (1989): 67. 79. The Trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton, for publishing a supposed libel, intituled Politics for the People; or Hog's Wash (London, 1794); PRO, TS 11/951/3495; Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words (London, 1795), p. 13; McCue, "Daniel Isaac Eaton," pp. 60-61. 80. Cobbett's PoliticalRegister, 13 June 1812, cols. 748-49; Morning Chronicle, 5 June 1812, p. 3. 81. "On Secrecy," Moralist, no. 8 (1823): 113-23. See also Richard Carlile, Manual of Freemasonry (London, 1843), p. iii. 82. Republican, 29 Dec. 1820, p. 613. 83. Carlile to William Holmes, 15 and 28 Jan. 1822, 13 Feb. 1822, Carlile Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

206

Notes to Pages 117-122

84. Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 20 Dec. 1821, pp. 14-20; Republican, 1 Feb. 1822, pp. 145-47. 85. PRO, HO 40/16, Carlile to Wheeler, 24 Dec. 1821, enclosed in Norris to Home Office, fols. 451-52. 86. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 44^15, chap. 2 passim; Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, p. 61. 87. Republican, 27 Aug. 1819, pp. 1-3, 14 Jan. 1820, p. 36. 88. Republican, 22 Oct. 1819, p. 135, 7 June 1822, p. 58, 19 July 1822, p. 255; Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 3 Mar. 1821, p. 16. 89. Republican, 7 June 1822, pp. 57-58, 27 Sept. 1822, p. 559 (Portsea), 4 Oct. 1822, p. 596 (Huddersfield), 14 Feb. 1823, p. 212 (Huddersfield). 90. Republican, 27 Dec. 1822, p. 978. 91. Richard Carlile, An Effort to Set at Rest Some Little Disputes and Misunderstandings between the Reformers of Leeds (London, 1821), p. 7; Republican, 8 Feb. 1822, p. 181, 22 Mar. 1822, p. 375. 92. Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 20 Dec. 1821, p. 3. Carlile explains in the first volume of the Republican, 1819, pp. viii-x, that "republican" merely refers to a government that "consults the interest of the whole people," although he notes that any democratic government would almost certainly abolish both monarchy and aristocracy. 93. Republican, 4 Jan. 1822, pp. 1, 6. 94. Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 20 Dec. 1821, p. 23; Republican, 30 Aug. 1822, p. 438; Carlile, Effort to Set at Rest, p. 12. 95. Republican,2l June 1822,pp. 98-99,19 Apr. 1822,p. 507,4 Mar. 1825, p. 284. 96. Republican, 4 Jan. 1820, p. 6, 11 July 1823, pp. 20, 23. See also Republican, 26 May 1820, p. 162, 10 May 1822, pp. 577-80, 17 May 1822, pp. 60714; Carlile, Effort to Set at Rest, p. 9. 97. See the comments of Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (1970; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 84. 98. Republican, 1 Nov. 1822, p. 707, 20 Dec. 1822, p. 931, 16 Dec. 1825, p. 739, "To the 'Albionites,'" 15 Oct. 1819, pp. 127-28, carried a poem entitled "Anticipation: or, Albion's Republic." 99. Republican, 17 Mar. 1820, pp. 289-91, 21 Apr. 1820, pp. 469-75. See also, for example, Black Dwarf, 15 Mar. 1820, pp. 326-36, 2 Aug. 1820, pp. 154-57, 6 Dec. 1820, pp. 821-24,12 Dec. 1821, pp. 838-51, 21 May 1823, pp. 717-21; Woofer's British Gazette, 28 Apr. 1822, p. 129, 7 July 1822, p. 209, 21 July 1822, p. 233, 1 Dec. 1822, pp. 97-98; Henry Weisser, British WorkingClass Movements and Europe, 1815-48 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), pp. 17-27; David V. Erdman, "Richard Carlile and the Spanish Republic," Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 87 (1986-1987): 251-59. 100. Republican, 28 Apr.-2 June 1820. 101. Richard Carlile, A New Tear's Address to the Reformers of Great Britain (London, 1821), pp. 10-11; Bridge-Street Banditti: Report of the Trial of Mary Anne Carlile for Publishing A New-Tear's Address to the Reformers of Great Britain (London, 1821); see also Philantropos [Richard Carlile], The Character of a Soldier (London, 1821), noting the role that mutinous regiments played in Spain, Naples, and Portugal as an example to British soldiers.

Notes to Pages 122-125

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102. Republican, 22 Sept. 1820, pp. 109-10,1 Sept. 1820, p. 7,13 Oct. 1820, p. 229,16 Aug. 1822, p. 353-54. 103. Republican, 25 Jan. 1822, pp. 97-99, 22 Mar. 1822, p. 375. See also Ian Dyck, "Local Attachments, National Identities and World Citizenship in the Thought of Thomas Paine," History Workshop Journal 35 (1993): 117-35. 104. Republican, 1 Feb. 1823, p. 129,14 Feb. 1823, pp. 214-17,8 Oct. 1819, pp. 100-102; Lion, 18 Jan. 1828, p. 71, 7 Nov. 1828, p. 577, for Carlile's repudiation of commemorative dining. Ironically, Carlile commissioned the government spy George Edwards to produce the statue of Paine. 105. Republican, 26 Mar. 1824, p. 404. 106. Republican, 29 Mar. 1822, p. 396. 107. See Lee Patterson, "On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies," Speculum 65 (1990): 88, for his comments on "modernism." 108. Republican, 28 Feb. 1823, p. 275. 109. Isaac Kramnick, "Religion and Radicalism: English Political Theory in the Age of Revolution," Political Theory 5 (1977): 521-30. 110. Republican, 1819, p. xiv. 111. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1967, 1969); J. V. Golinski, "Science In the Enlightenment," History of Science 24 (1986): 411-24; Roy Porter, "Science, Provincial Culture and Public Opinion in Enlightenment England," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1980): 20-46; John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), particularly chap. 8; Royle, Victorian Infidels, pp. 15-22. 112. Republican, 1 Nov. 1822, p. 709; also Republican, 18 Feb. 1820, pp. 163-64,18 Mar. 1825, p. 346,17 Nov. 1826, p. 604. For Enlightenment deism and materialism, see John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in EighteenthCentury Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of the Enlightenment in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Margaret C. Jacob, TheRadical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981). 113. Quoted in Gwyn A. Williams, "The Infidel Working Class, 1790-1830" [conference report], Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 29 (1974): 7. 114. Paine, Age of Reason, pp. 68-74. The view of science as somehow outside the entanglements of language has a long history. See James J. Bono, "Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science," in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), pp. 59-89; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 34-44. 115. Paine, Age of Reason, p. 82; Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 6-7; Williams, "Paine and the Age of Reason," pp. 21-22. 116. Sherwin, Memoirs of Paine, p. 12.

117. Paine, Age of Reason, pp. 77-80; Republican, 28 Jan. 1825, p. 122. 118. Smith, Politics of Language, particularly chap. 1. 119. Republican, 11 Oct. 1822, p. 640, 2 May 1823, p. 567.

208

Notes to Pages 126-127

120. Republican, 10 May 1822, p. 606, 9 June 1820, pp. 266-67. Carlile declared himself "the disciple of Paine in politics only." 121. Williams, Rowland Defroster, p. 3; Reid, Rise and Dissolution, p. 6, for the work's influence in the 1790s. Systeme tie la nature (1770) was first published in English in 1795-1796 by William Hodgson; Davison republished it in 1819. Carlile published d'Holbach's Christianity Unveiled and Letters to Eugenia in the Deist; he also published editions ofEcce Homo; or a Critical Inquiry into the Life of Christ and Le Bon Sens (attributed to Meslier). 122. Paine, Age of Reason, p. 50; Thomas Paine, "My Private Thoughts on a Future State," in Complete Writings, ed. Foner, vol. 2, pp. 892-94; Paine, Manual of the Theophilanthropes, or Adorers of God and Friends of Man (London, 1797). 123. "Atheism," Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 Aug. 1825,pp. 529-36,1 Mar. 1825, pp. 291-92, for Campion's assessment of Paine; Republican, 13 Oct. 1820, p. 220, 7 July 1820, pp. 391-92. 124. Republican, 29 Mar. 1822, pp. 419-20; Carlile, Observations on "Letters to a Friend,"'for a materialist statement based closely on d'Holbach's work; Richard Carlile, Every Man's Book; Or, What is God? (London, 1826). 125. Republican, 4 Jan. 1822, p. 4; also Republican, 31 Mar. 1826, p. 396. 126. Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 13 Oct. 1821, p. 18. On the other hand, he claimed that he catered to two fairly distinct communities of readers, political and theological. See Republican, 7 Apr. 1820, p. 400, 29 Dec. 1820, p. 621; Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 24 June 1821, p. 11. 127. Cobbett's Political Register, 1 Feb. 1822, cols. 257-61; Republican, 8 Aug. 1823, pp. 134-41. 128. See the exchange between J. E. C. and Carlile, Republican, 27 Dec. 1822, pp. 969-75, or the debate that raged in the Republican from late 1823 through early 1824 among Watson, Penny, J. E. C., Mackintosh, Carlile, and others. 129. T. W. Heyck, "From Men of Letters to Intellectuals: The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Nineteenth-Century England," Journal of British Studies 20 (1980): 162-65; Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (Folkestone: Dawson, 1978), particularly chap. 5; Frank M. Turner, "The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension," Isis69 (1978): 356-76; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 232-35, for changing meanings of the word "science." 130. Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 23 Apr. 1821, p. 5. 131. Richard Carlile, An Address to Men of Science, calling upon them to stand forward and vindicate the truth from thefoulgrasp and persecution of Superstition (London, 1821), pp. 5-9, 17-18, 22, 30-31. 132. Ian Inkster, "London Science and the Seditious Meetings Act of 1817," British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979): 192-96. 133. William Lawrence, An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology . . . Delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons (London, 1816), particularly pp. 174-75; Daniel T. Stinson, The Role of Sir William Lawrence in 19th Century Surgery (Zurich: Jurie-Verlag, 1969), pp. 13-21. 134. For the ensuing controversy, see John Abernethy, Physiological Lectures, Exhibiting a General View of Mr. Hunter's Physiology (London, 1817); Thomas Rennell, Remarks on Scepticism, especially as it is connected with the subjects of organization and life (London, 1819); Philostratus [Thomas Forster], Somatopsycho-

Notes to Pages 127-130

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noologia, Showing That the Proofs of Body Life and Mind Considered as Distinct Essences Cannot be Deduced from Physiology (London, 1823); Oxonian, The radical triumvirate; or infidel Paine, Lord Byron and Surgeon Lawrence (London, 1820); Owsei Temkin, "Basic Science, Medicine, and the Romantic Era," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 37 (1963): 97-129. 135. Richard Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (London, 1819), pp. 14, 100, 34-35. See also Thomas Charles Morgan, Sketches of the Philosophy of Life (London, 1819), which aggressively linked French physiological theories to advanced political and moral principles. 136. Charles Wortham Brook, Carlile and the Surgeons (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1943), pp. 26-34; Carlile, Address to Men of Science, p. 19; Republican, 20 Dec. 1822, p. 959,21 Feb. 1823, p. 250. In 1822, Lawrence's work was pirated by a bookseller named Smith. Lawrence applied to the court of Chancery, but Lord Eldon denied copyright on the grounds that the work discredited Christianity, opening the way to republications without the author's permission. 137. Republican, 19 July 1822, p. 256, 2 Aug. 1822, pp. 317-19. 138. Carlile, To the Reformers of Great Britain, 13 Oct. 1821, p. 10; Republican, 19 Nov. 1824, p. 615, for Carlile's denunciation of men of science for their general cowardice. 139. Williams, Rowland Defroster, p. 3; Rowland Detrosier, An Address, Delivered to the New Mechanics' Institution, Manchester... March 25,1831 (Manchester, 1831), pp. 3-4. 140. Rowland Detrosier, The Benefits of General Knowledge; More Especially, the Sciences of Mineralogy, Geology, Botany, and Entomology (1829; London, 1840), pp. 14-15; Republican, 26 Dec. 1823, p. 768. 141. The question of the cultural meanings of science is complex and controversial. But see Arnold Thackray, "Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model," American Historical Review 79 (1974): 672-709; Morris Berman, "'Hegemony' and the Amateur Tradition in British Science," Journal of Social History % (1975): 30-50; Ian Inkster, "Introduction: Aspects of the History of Science and Science Culture in Britain, 1780-1850 and Beyond," in Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780-1850, ed. Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 11-54; Inkster, "Culture, Institutions and Urbanity: The Itinerant Science Lecturer in Sheffield, 17901850," in Essays in the Economic and Social History of South Yorkshire, ed. Sidney Pollard and Colin Holmes (Barnsley: South Yorkshire County Council, 1976), pp. 218-32. 142. Republican, 17 Nov. 1826, pp. 577-79,25 June 1824, p. 813; Mechanics' Magazine, for example, 9 July 1825, pp. 217-18, 8 Oct. 1825, pp. 426-27, 3 Dec. 1825, pp. 109-13. The Newgate Monthly Magazine (Sept. 1824-Aug. 1826) was edited by Thomas Riley Perry, Hassell, and William Campion and was published by Carlile. 143. Lion, 25 July 1828, pp. 108-11, 119-21. 144. Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 Sept. 1824, pp. 16-27; John Clarke, Critical Review of the Life, Character, Miracles and Resurrection of Jesus Christ in a series of letters to Dr. Adam Clarke (London, 1825). 145. Lion, 4 Jan. 1828, p. 26. 146. Republican, 2 Mar. 1820, pp. 226-27; also Republican, 28 Jan. 1825, pp. 98-101, 14 July 1826, pp. 1-3.

210

Notes to Pages 130-133

147. Carlile, New Tear's Address, p. 15; Republican, 21 May 1824, p. 648; also Republican, 28 Jan. 1825, p. 105. 148. Jail Journal: Prison Thoughts and Other Writings by Richard Carlile, ed. Guy A. Aldred (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1942), pp. 18-19. See also Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 Aug. 1826, p. 530. 149. Republican, 27 June 1823, p. 807, and pp. 807-32 for the entire exchange; also Republican, 28 Mar. 1823, pp. 387-411. 150. See, for example, A Warning to the Frequenters of Debating Clubs: Being a Short History of the Rise and Fall of those Clubs (London, 1810), pp. 3-4, claiming that at Gale Jones's British Forum "they occasionally hired a drunken prostitute to perform the part of the Goddess of Reason" and to preside over debates. 151. Jacques Ranciere, "The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History," with responses by William H. Sewell, Jr., and Christopher Johnson, International Labor and Working-Class History 24: (1983): 1-25; Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 48-49,153. 152. Thomas Preston, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Preston, Patriot and Shoemaker (London, 1817), p. 5. 153. Ranciere, "Myth of the Artisan," p. 13; cf. Robert Darnton, "The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature," in his The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 1^10. 154. McCalman, "Popular Radicalism and Freethought," chap. 3, for the social composition of the Carlileites. See more generally, R. S. Neale, "Class and Class Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century England: Three Classes or Five?" in his Class and Ideology in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1972),pp. 1540; David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981); Brian George Worrall, "Self-Taught Working Men: The Culture and Ideology of Autodidacticism, with Special Reference to Lancashire, ca. 1790-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Manchester University, 1985), particularly pp. 1-3, 61, 88-95, 155. 155. Iain McCalman, "Females, Feminism and Freelove in an Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Movement," Labour History 38 (1980): 8,12-13; Republican, 14 Mar. 1823, pp. 328-29,4 June 1823, p. 708,11 June 1823, p. 762 (Mrs. Thomas Jeffries), 12 Aug. 1824, p. 185 (Mrs. Thomas Riley Perry). 156. Republican, 29 Nov. 1822, p. 843. 157. Republican, 15 Feb. 1822, pp. 172-79, 7 June 1822, p. 63; also Republican, 21 June 1822, pp. 135-37, for Hypatia; preface to Republican 11 (1825): ii-iv. 158. Republican, 29 Nov. 1822, p. 843, 19 Apr. 1822, p. 500, for Carlile's opinion that women gave zetetic societies "a guarantee for good manners." See also "A Female Materialist and Republican," Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 Jan. 1825, pp. 235-37; more generally, Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983). 159. Republican 11 (1825): iv. 160. Richard Carlile, Every Woman'sBook; Or, What is Love? (1826; London, 1833), pp. 7-13,43^4; also Republican, 12 Aug. 1824, pp. 178-80, 6 May 1825, pp. 545-69,17 Nov. 1826, pp. 594-97; Lion, 3 Oct. 1828, pp. 417-29. For Carlile's place in the history of birth control, see Peter Fryer, The Birth Controllers (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1965), chaps. 7, 8.

Notes to Pages 133-135

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161. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 110, 113-15; Queen Mab, in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neville Rogers, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), vol. l,pp. 301-4 n. 9; Republican, 1 Feb. 1822, pp. 14748, Carlile's initial hesitancy about Shelley's views on marriage; Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 47—48; Barbara Taylor, "Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism," History Workshop 33 (1992): 197-219. See also Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 6. 162. Isis, 27 Oct. 1832, pp. 545-47; Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain, chaps. 9, 10; R. S. Neale, "Women and Class Consciousness," in his Class in English History, 1680-1850 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 205-15; Theophilia Carlile Campbell (daughter of Richard and Eliza), in Battle of the Press, reproduced many of her parents' private letters, which reflected an often difficult relationship. Sharples's lectures are reprinted in Isis (11 Feb.-15 Dec. 1832), which she edited. 163. Isis, 10 Mar. 1832, p. 71, 27 Oct. 1832, pp. 545-47, 17 Nov. 1832, p. 579; McCalman, "Females, Feminism and Free Love," pp. 13-14. Cf. Carlile Papers, Sharpies to Carlile, n.d. [ca. Sept.-Oct. 1832], in which "Isis" declares that she can't be both lover and philosopher, preferring the role of lover. 164. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 192-205. 165. Ruth L. Smith and Deborah M. Valenze, "Mutuality and Marginality: Liberal Moral Theory and Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-Century England," Signs 13 (1988): 366-87; Temma Kaplan, "Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-18," Signs? (1982): 345-66; Sally Alexander, "Women, Class and Sexual Difference," History Workshop Journal 17 (1984): particularly 135-46. 166. Republican, 14 July 1826, p. 8; Lion, 26 Sept. 1828, pp. 389-90. The view that women were more religious than men was commonly held. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 107-8; James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825-75 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 313. 167. Walter Ong, "Reading, Technology, and Human Consciousness," in Literacy as a Human Problem, ed. James C. Raymond (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982), p. 184. 168. Republican, 14 Apr. 1826, pp. 449-51,28 July 1826, pp. 82-86; Lion, 29 Feb. 1828, pp. 257-62; Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 Sept. 1825, pp. 10-18; Prompter, 11 June 1831, pp. 500-506; Roger Cooler, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), chap. 7. 169. James E. Crimmins, Secular Utilitarianism: Social Science and the Critique of Religion in the Thought of Jeremy Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth- Century Britain, chap. 7. Carlile was the original publisher of Bentham's Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind (London, 1822), published under the pseudonym John Beauchamp. 170. Trades Newspaper, and Weekly Mechanics Journal, 17-31 July 1825, 21 Aug. 1825,11 Sept. 1825; Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 Nov. 1825, pp. 97-104; Republican, 21 Apr. 1826, pp. 493-94, 18 Aug. 1826, pp. 161-70, 8 Sept. 1826,

212

Notes to Pages 135-136

pp. 268-72; Lion, 18 Jan. 1828 pp. 92-95, 22 Aug. 1828, p. 226, 8 Oct. 1828, pp. 417-29. Carlile was strongly influenced by Place's Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (London, 1822), a defense of Malthus. However, Carlile and the utilitarians differed significantly from Malthus in their optimism about the ability of the working class to improve its conditions. See Angus McLaren, "Contraception and the Working Classes: The Social Ideology of the English Birth Control Movement in its Early Years," Comparative Studies in Society and History 18 (1976): 236-51. 171. Republican, 5 May 1826, pp. 545-46,14 July 1826, p. 6,29 Sept. 1826, pp. 367-84,13 Oct. 1826, pp. 417-26; Lion, 22 Aug. 1828, pp. 225-26. 172. Cf. Malcolm Chase, The People's Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 122-25, who views Carlile's opposition to agrarian monopoly as somehow inconsistent with the view that he was a keen proponent of political economy and competition. For a careful analysis of Agrarian Justice, see Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), chap. 8. 173. Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 Oct. 1825, pp. 49-62, 1 Jan. 1826, pp. 193-207; McCalman, "Popular Radicalism and Freethought," pp. 153-54,158. Similar views were prominent among mid-Victorian secularists such as Bradlaugh and Bessant. 174. Republican, 17 Feb. 1826, p. 200, 28 Apr. 1826, p. 514. For Cobbett's predictable view of the work as "so filthy, so disgusting, so beastly, as to shock the mind of even the lewdest of men and women," see Cobbett's Political Register, 15 Apr. 1826, cols. 133-41. 175. Lion, 20 Mar. 1829, pp. 353-59; Lancet, 18 Feb. 1843, p. 774, for a report of the dissection of Carlile's body at St. Thomas's Hospital; Isis, 16 June 1832, pp. 303—4, carried an account of the anatomical lecture on the body of Bentham. 176. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), chap. 1, pp. 168-71. For a singularly insensitive diatribe—particularly with regard to women—by one of Carlile's associates, see Peter Baume, Speech of a Frenchman, on the Proposed Bill for the Dissection of Human Bodies, delivered at the British Forum (London, 1829). 177. Williams, Rowland Defroster, p. 3. 178. Deborah H. Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Thomas Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 244; Eileen Yeo, "Christianity in Chartist Struggle, 1838^2," Past and Present 9\ (1981): 103-39. 179. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain, pp. 108, 201. For a brilliant handling of this theme, see also McCalman, Radical Underworld, particularly chaps. 3, 7, 9. 180. Republican, 25 June 1831, pp. 4-6. "The Rotunda: House of the Unrepresented. Theatre of Free Discussion" ran the headline for weekly reports in Hetherington and Lorymer's Republican. 181. PRO, HO 40/25: R. Chambers to Phillipps, 10 Nov. 1830, fols. 209, 213-14; report dated 9 Nov. 1830, fols. 153-54; Thomas Faulkner to Wellington, 9 Nov. 1830, fols. 157-59; Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early NineteenthCentury London, chap. 14; Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Early NineteenthCentury Britain, chap. 9.

Notes to Pages 137-139

213

182. PRO, HO 64/11, n.d., fol. 254; Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Tears: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences, 2 vols. (London, 1893), vol. 1, p. 99; Trial of the Rev. Robert Taylor, A.B. & M.R.C.S. Upon a Charge of Blasphemy (London, 1827), p. 33. 183. My treatment of Taylor draws heavily on the work of Iain McCalman, particularly his article "Popular Irreligion in Early Victorian England: Infidel Preachers and Radical Theatricality in 1830s London," in Religion and, Irreligion in Victorian Society: Essays in Honor ofR. K. Webb, ed. R. W. Davis and K J. Helmstadter (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 51-67.1 am indebted to Dr. McCalman for sending me a copy of this article before publication. 184. Lion, 14 Mar. 1829, pp. 321-22. For similar radical sentiments, see Le Bonnet Rouge, 16 Feb. 1833, p. 8, 23 Feb. 1833, p. 19. 185. PRO, HO 64/11, n.d. [ca. December 1830], fols. 209-10; n.d., fol. 249; Scourge for the Littleness of "Great" Men, 4 and 11 Oct. 1834; Trial of the Rev. Robert Taylor, p. 3. 186. Prompter, 23 July 1831, pp. 626-28. 187. The Judgment of the Court of King's Bench, Upon Rev. Robert Taylor (London, 1828); Lion, 25 Dec. 1829, p. 802. Taylor's discourses were a regular feature of the Lion. 188. Robert Taylor, First Missionary Oration, As Delivered, or Intended to be Delivered, Before the Three Universities (London, 1829), pp. 6, 12; Lion, 29 Mar. 1829, pp. 673-92. 189. For details of his life, see "Memoir of die Reverend Robert Taylor," Devil's Pulpit, vol. 1, pp. ix-xvi; vol. 2, pp. v-xvi; Robert Taylor, "Life and Opinions of Talasiphron," Philalethean, Oct. 1833-Jan. 1834, copies in New York Public Library. See also Guy A. Aldred, The Devil's Chaplin: The Story of the Rev. Robert Taylor, M.A., M.R.C.S. (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1942); H. Cutner, The Devil's Chaplin: Robert Taylor (1784-1844) (London: Pioneer Press, n.d.). 190. Richard Lloyd, A Reply to Letters Illustrative of Recent Transactions in the Town ofMidhurst... and an Interesting Account of the Rev. Robert Taylor, Late Curate ofMidhurst (London, 1819); Robert Taylor, Remonstrances Addressed to his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant, and to the Chief Justice of Ireland; as also to his Grace the Lord Archbishop of Dublin (Dublin, 1822). 191. Republican, 9 Apr. 1824, pp. 452-54, 30 Apr. 1824, pp. 546-48,2 July 1824, pp. 847-51, 9 July 1824, pp. 6-10; Robert Taylor, The Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the Society of Christian Evidence (London, 1824). 192. See,forexample, Republican, 6 Jan. 1826, p. 18,13 Jan. 1826, pp. 4042, 20 Jan. 1826, p. 73,10 Mar. 1826, p. 320,28 July 1826, pp. 94-95,11 Aug. 1826, pp. 129-32, 8 Dec. 1826, pp. 669-71. 193. Syntagma was a reply to an attack on the Manifesto of the Christian Evidence Society (London, 1825). See John Pye Smith, An Answer to a Printed Paper Entitled ^Manifesto of the Christian Evidence Society," 4th ed. (1826; London, 1830), includes replies to both Syntagma and Diegesis. Generally, Taylor's works were ignored by theologians, but see Remarks on the Work of the Reverend Robert Taylor Styled "The Diegesis" (London, 1830); J. M. Robertson, A History ofFreethought in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Watts, 1929), vol. l,pp. 64-65, for Charles HennelPs balanced assessment. 194. Lion, 18 Jan. 1828, pp. 81-84, 1 Feb. 1828, pp. 133-41, 8 Feb. 1828, pp. 177-80, for Detrosier on Carlile, 14 Mar. 1828, pp. 343-51, 28 Mar. 1828, p. 394, 9 May 1828, pp. 604-5, 16 May 1828, pp. 633-40; Carlile, First Sermon

214

Notes to Pages 139-143

on the Mount; Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London, pp. 258-64. 195. Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 July 1826, pp. 486-87; Republican, 8 Oct. 1824, p. 431, 12 Nov. 1824, pp. 594-602; PRO, HO 64/11, reports of "S.S.," n.d. [ca. October 1828], fols. 74,83,85; Lion, 21 Mar. 1828, pp. 361-62,28 Mar. 1828, pp. 385-86,20 June 1828, p. 784,12 Dec. 1828, pp. 739-40,30 Jan. 1829, p. 142; 13 Mar. 1829, pp. 325-28. 196. Republican, 11 Aug. 1826, pp. 129-30; Lion, 14 Mar. 1828, p. 348,21 Mar. 1828, 359-61; Robert Taylor, The Holy Liturgy or Divine Service on the Principles of Pure Deism, As Performed Every Sunday in the Chapel Society of Universal Benevolence (London, [ca. 1827]); PRO, HO 64/11, reports of "S.S.," n.d. [ca. October 1828], fols. 74-78, 83, 86; McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 18891. 197. Lion, 7 Aug. 1829, p. 161;Prompter, 13 Nov. 1830, pp. 7-8,2 July 1830, pp. 552-55; Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 28-33; Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800-1850, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), vol. 1, p. 220, notes that after Carlile gave up the lease the Rotunda became the Globe Theatre. 198. PRO, HO 64/11: 30 Nov. 1830, fol. 147; 27 Nov. 1830, fol. 131; 10 Dec. 1830, fol. 180; n.d., fol. 190; n.d. [1831], fol. 294; 29 Nov. 1831, fols. 44647. Admission charges to NUWC meetings were set at 1 penny or 2 pence; the audience is more typically described as including "many of the lowest class." 199. McCalman, "Popular Irreligion," pp. 55-56, 61-62. 200. Devil's Pulpit, 10 June 1831, pp. 230, 232, 25 Mar. 1831, pp. 49-51. See also PRO, HO 64/11, n.d. [1831], fol. 292; HO 64/13,27 Mar. 1831, fol. 20. 201. Devil's Pulpit, 1 Apr. 1831, pp. 69-78; also Devil's Pulpit, 8 Apr. 1831, pp. 81-95, 24 Sept. 1831, p. 94, "The Rich Man and Lazarus"; Prompter, 11 Dec. 1830, pp. 87-88,18 Dec. 1830, p. 123. 202. Devil's Pulpit, 10 Sept. 1831, pp. 55, 58. 203. Devil's Pulpit, 11 Mar. 1831, pp. 20-21, 18 Mar. 1831, p. 34, 3 June 1831, p. 218,10 June 1831, pp. 226-27. 204. Devil's Pulpit, 2 vols. (4 Mar. 1831-13 Jan. 1832), 2 pence per issue; PRO, HO 64/11, 17 May 1831, fol. 230, claims that the journal regularly sold out its weekly print run of two thousand copies, and an extra thousand were printed. 205. Devil's Pulpit, 16 Aug. 1831, p. 25, 5 Aug. 1831, pp. 352, 355, 1 Apr. 1831, pp. 72, 78-79, 15 Oct. 1831, pp. 137-38. See also Philalethean, 12 Oct. 1833, p. 33,16 Nov. 1833, p. 61, 21 Dec. 1833, p. 91. 206. See Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), chap. 3, on Dupuis; Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactions: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 78-82, for the influence of Dupuis and other mythologists on the Romantics and deists of the 1790s. For later secularist attempts to popularize Dupuis, see Was Christ a Person or the Sun ? An Argument from Dupuis (London, 1857); Christianity a Form of the Great Solar Myth from the French of Dupuis ("London, 1873); On the Connection of Christianity with Solar Worship (London, 1877). 207. PRO,HO 64/11:27Nov. 1830,fol. 131;n.d.,fol. 253; 19 and21 Dec. 1831, fols. 454, 458; HO 64/13,12 Nov. 1830, fol. 3; HO 40/25,9 Nov. 1830, fol. 154; Prompter, 27 Nov. 1830, p. 38; Thompson, Making of the English Work-

Notes to Pages 143-146

215

ing Class, pp. 98-99. Chapter 22 of Ruins, "Origin and Filiation of Religious Ideas," gives a materialist or natural interpretation similar to that of Dupuis. 208. PRO, HO 64/11, 30 Nov. 1830, fol. 148. 209. Devil's Pulpit, 24 Sept. 1831, pp. 95-96; PRO, HO 64/11, n.d. [1831], fol. 289. 210. PRO, HO 64/11, n.d., fols. 189, 192, 206, 221 (poster advertising Taylor's "deep monological" tragedy). The British Library's copy ofSwingis a presentation copy dedicated to Kemble. 211. McCalman, "Popular Irreligion," pp. 56-57; Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), particularly chaps. 1, 2; Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama. (London: Jenkins, 1965), pp. 13,64; Louis James, "Was Jerrold's Black Ey'd Susan more popular than Wordsworth's Lucy?" in Performance and, Politics in Popular Drama, ed. David Bradbury, Louis James, and Bernard Sharratt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 3-16. 212. McCalman, "Popular Irreligion," pp. 53-54; McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 202-3. See also, for example, the series of articles on Shelley, Newgate Monthly Magazine, 1 May-1 Aug. 1826. For the 1790s, see Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: 'William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), particularly chap. 3. 213. Prompter, 9 and 23 July 1831. 214. PRO,TS 11/945 (3465); MacDone.ll,ed., Reports of State Trials, vol. 2: 1823-1831, cols. 459-627; Prompter, 27 Nov. 1830, p. 35,25 Dec. 1830, pp. 11620, 22 Jan. 1831, 4 June 1831, pp. 134—41, on political associations. 215. PRO, HO 64/11: n.d., fol. 228; 31 Mar. 1831, fols. 231-32; 20 Sept. 1831, fol. 420; 26 Oct. 1831, fol. 425; 7, 21, and 28 Nov. 1831, fols. 434, 439, 445; 19 and 21 Dec. 1831, fols. 454,458; HO 64/12: 3 Jan. 1832, fol. 2; 15 Feb. 1832, fols. 38-39; 3 and 5 Mar. 1832, fols. 52, 54; Carlile Papers, James Smith to Taylor, July 1831;Prompter, 17Sept. 1831,pp. 798-800;Isis, 31 Mar. 1832,p. 113. John "Zion" Ward, former leader of the Christian Israelites, also spoke at the Rotunda during this period. 216. On his release from prison, Taylor reestablished himself in new lecture rooms, again called the Areopagus. See the series of reports in PRO, HO 64/15, Apr-May 1834, fols. 59-70, 161-63. 217. See, for example, Optimist, December 1829, copy in PRO, HO 64/16, fol. 132; HO 64/11: 20 Nov. 1830, fol. 171; n.d., fols. 205, 209, 214, 240; 19 Jan. 1831, fol. 235; 27 July 1831, fol. 380; 3 Sept. 1831, fol. 417; HO 62/12: 2 and 8 Oct. 1832, fols. 148,150; n.d., fol. 170; HO 64/13: 12 and 20 Nov. 1832, fols. 171, 177-78; 17 and 24 Dec. 1832, fols. 188, 192; McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 202. 218. Isis, 5 May 1832, pp. 193-95, 200-201, 12 May 1832, pp. 210-15, 19 May 1832, p. 231, 7 July 1832, pp. 337-39; PRO, HO 64/12: 15 Feb. 1832, fols. 38-39, 3 Mar. 1832, fol. 52. Carlile later published A Dictionary of Some of the Names of the Sacred Scriptures (Manchester, 1837). 219. For Carlile's final years, see Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain, chaps. 11, 12; W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennia-lists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1979), pp. 172-74, for his conversion to Christianity. 220. Richard Carlile, Jesus Christ the Only Radical Reformer (Manchester, 1838), pp. 1-3,7-8.

216

Notes to Pages 146-150

221. J. E. Smith, The Anti-Christ, or Christianity Refuted (London, 1832), pp. 15-16, copy in PRO, HO 64/18.

ChapterS. Rituals of Solidarity 1. Ashton Reporter, 30 Jan. 1869, p. 6. 2. For biographical details, see Ashton Reporter, 2 and 9 Oct. 1869; Ashton News, 9 and 16 Oct. 1869; Odd Fellows Magazine, July 1857, pp. 129-32; PRO, HO 20/10, examination of Aitken. As a very young man, Aitken was involved in the 1830 Ashton spinners' strike. He was also involved in the factory and anti-Poor Law movements. 3. Northern Star, 17 Nov. 1838, p. 5. 4. For a similar perspective, see Paul Pickering, "Class Without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement," Past and Present 112 (1986): 144-62. See also David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), chap. 1; Victor Turner, "Social Dramas and Stories about Them," Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 141-68. I find useful Kertzer's definition of ritual as "symbolic behavior that is socially standardized and repetitive." 5. See Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions," in The Invention ofTradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1-14. 6. Kathleen Wilson, "Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics," Journal of British Studies28 (1989): 347-86; Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, "Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian England," Journal of British Studies 28 (1989): 201-24; Kathleen Wilson, "Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vcmon," Past and Present 121 (1988): 74-109; Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age ofWalpole and Pitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), chap. 10; John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chap. 9; Frank O'Gorman, "Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780-1860," Past and Present 135 (1992): 79-115. 7. See, for example, David Allen, "Political Clubs in Restoration London," Historical Journal 19 (1976): 561-80; John Money, "Taverns, Coffee Houses and Clubs: Local Politics and Popular Articulacy in the Birmingham Area, in the Age of the American Revolution," Historical Journal 14 (1971): 15-47; John Brewer, "Commercialization and Politics," in The Birth of a- Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 197-262. For the concept of "the public sphere," see Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), particularly pp. 51-67 for the British case; Habermas, "The Public Sphere," New German Critique 3 (1974): 43-55; Geoff Eley, "ReThinking the Political: Social History and Political Culture in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain," Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte 21 (1981): 428-56; Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), particularly chaps. 1, 2. 8. Cf. James Vernon, "Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture and Communication, 1808-68" (Ph.D. diss., Manchester University, 1991),

Notes to Pages 150-151

217

pp. 403-4. The suggested "autonomy" of the working-class public sphere was never more than partially realized. See Habermas's own brief comment on the "plebeian public sphere" (Structural Transformation, p. xviii). 9. Champion, 24 Mar. 1838, cols. 1465-66; Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 17 Mar. 1838, p. 3; Northern Star, 14 Mar. 1840, p. 5, for Oldham celebrations for Cobbett. 10. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), pp. 104, 112-16; Robert L. Dozier, For King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983), pp. 64,83,90-92; Alan Booth, "Popular Loyalism and Public Violence in the North-West of England, 1790-1800," Social History $ (1983): 295-313; Clive Emsley, "Repression, 'Terror' and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution," English Historical Review 100 (1985): 801-25. 11. Archibald Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (London, 1851), pp. 7-8; Thomas Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events which have Occurred in Manchester (London, 1794), pp. 41-44; John Binns, Recollections of the Life of John Binns (Philadelphia, 1854), pp. 69-72; Samuel Ramford, Early Days (London, 1849), pp. 45—47; Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830 (New York: Longman, 1983), pp. 324-25. 12. Robert Hole, "British Counter-Revolutionary Propaganda in the 1790s," in Britain and Revolutionary France: Conflict, Subversion and Propaganda, ed. Colin Jones (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1983), pp. 53-69; H. T. Dickinson, "Popular Conservatism and Militant Loyalism, 1789-1815," in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789-1815, ed. H. T. Dickinson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 103-25. 13. Ben ~&ne.r\ey,Failsworth, My Native Village (Oldham, 1895), p. l4;Ashton Reporter, 29 Feb. 1869, p. 6. 14. Frida Knight, The Strange Case of Thomas Walker (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957), chaps. 6-9; James Walvin, "English Democratic Societies and Popular Radicalism, 1791-1800" (Ph.D. diss., University of York, 1969), chap. 13; H. O. Alves, "The Painites: The Influence of Thomas Paine in Four Provincial Towns, 1791-99" (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1981), pp. 29-33. See also Nicholas Rogers, "Crowds, Festivals, and Revolution, 1788-1795," in his Crowds, Culture and Polities in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 15. An Authentic Account of the Riots in Birmingham (Birmingham, 1791); R B. Rose, "The Priestley Riots of 1791," Past and Present 18 (1960): 68-88. For the continuing violence of Birmingham's church-and-king forces, see "General Illumination at Birmingham" (handbill), August 1793, copy in British Library. 16. T. B. Howell and T. J. Howell, eds., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1809-1826), vol. 24: 1794, cols. 571-72; State Trials for High Treason . . . Part Third: Containing the Trial of Mr. John Thelwall (London, 1794), p. 36; PRO, TS 11/959/3505, Crown brief for the case against John Thelwall, "List of Toasts, &c."; PC 1/22/A.36 (c), examinations pertaining to the activities of the Society for Constitutional Information; Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons (London, 1794), p. 26; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 330-31, 361-62; North-

218

Notes to Pages 151-154

ern Star, 11 Nov. 1843, p. 7, radicals celebrating the forty-eighth anniversary of the acquittals. 17. William Field, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Opinions of the Rev. Samuel Parr, LL.D., 2 vols. (London, 1828), vol. 1, p. 309. 18. See Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, chap. 15; John Belchem, "Orator" Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 2-4; Robert Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (London: Groom Helm, 1983), chap. 9. 19. PRO, HO 40/4/1, pt. 2, Chippendale to Sidmouth, 4 Jan. 1817, fols. 7277. The following month, radicals protested against the practice of loyalist song sheets being distributed at Manchester's charitable soup kitchens. See Manchester Political Register, 1 Feb. 1817, pp. 70-72. 20. PRO, HO 42/177, enclosure in Fletcher to Home Office, 20 May 1818. 21. Manchester Observer, 20 Feb. 1819, pp. 476-77; PRO, HO 42/184, Lloyd to Hobhouse, 16 Feb. 1819; Livesey's report, enclosed in Norris to Sidmouth, 20 Feb. 1819. 22. Manchester Observer, 20 Feb. 1819, p. 477 (Stockport dinner), 19 June 1819, pp. 609, 612-13; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 26 June 1819; PRO, HO 42/188, Norris to Sidmouth, 15-17 June 1819. 23. See Chapter 3. 24. Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England, 1700-1880 (London: Juncton, 1982), chap. 3; David Cressy, "The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England," Journal of British Studies 29 (1990): 31-52; Linda Co\\ey, Britons: Forging the Nation, 17071837(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 19-20,189-90; Glen, Urban Workers, pp. 57, 63-64, for rituals of loyalism at Stockport. 25. Manchester Mercury, 15 Dec. 1818, p. 4; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 12 Dec. 1818, p. 4. 26. See report of Manchester Pitt Club dinner, in Manchester Mercury, 2 June 1818, p. 4; Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 30 May 1818. See also Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle, 4 July 1818, p. 4 (Oldham dinner for Yeomanry Cavalry), 8 Aug. 1818, p. 4 (Bolton Waterloo Club), 22 Aug. 1818, p. 4 (Bolton celebration of Prince Regent's birthday); Manchester Mercury, 18 Aug. 1818 (Bolton Lord Nelson Club). This is merely a brief selection of loyalist dining from one year. For Pitt Clubs, see Colley, Britons, pp. 189-90. 27. Hugh Cunningham, "The Language of Patriotism, 1750-1914," History Workshop Journal 12 (1981): pp. 9-18; Colley, Britons, pp. 284-91; Linda Colley, "Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750-1830," Past and Present 113 (1986): 108-9; Colley, "The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760-1820," Past and Present IQ2 (1984): 12729; Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987). 28. John Knight, A Full and Particular Report of the Proceedings of the Public Meeting Held in Manchester on Monday the 18th of January 1819 (Manchester, 1819), p. 22: Manchester Observer, 23 Jan. 1819, p. 445. At Hunt's trial in 1820, the government tried to have admitted into evidence the fact that Hunt had toasted "The Immortal Memory of Thomas Paine" at this dinner. 29. Black Dwarf, 21 Apr. 1819, cols. 259-60; A Full, Accurate and Impartial Report of the Trial of John Bagguley, of Stockport, John Johnston, ofSalford, and Samuel Drummond, of Manchester (Manchester, 1819).

Notes to Pages 154-156

219

30. In. Black Dwarf, 24 feb. 1819,col. 118, Wooler asserted, "Hampden was a revolutionist. . . Russell was a revolutionist, —Sydney another. Wallace, Bruce, and the patriots of all ages have been revolutionists." 31. J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796-1821 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 43-45; Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars, 1793-1815 (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 67; Roger Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795-1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), p. 156; John Deny, "The Opposition Whigs and the French Revolution, 17891815," in Britain and the French Revolution, ed. Dickinson, pp. 39-60, for the politics of the Foxite Whigs. 32. Barbara Whittingham-Jones, "Liverpool's Political Clubs, 1812-1830," Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 69 (1959): 131. At metropolitan dinners to celebrate Burdett's election triumphs, Whig-radicals followed the opening toast to "The King, the Constitution, the whole Constitution, and nothing but the Constitution," with a toast simply to "The People." See Proceedings of the Late Westminster Election . . . Also an Account of the Procession, and Dinner at the Crown and Anchor (London, 1808), p. 252. 33. Black Dwarf, 26 Aug. 1818, col. 529 (London dinner for Cartwright); Manchester Observer, 22 Aug. 1818, p. 267 (Birmingham dinner chaired by Sir Charles Wolseley). 34. Spence's Songs (London, n.d.). See Iain McCalman, "Ultra-Radicalism and Convivial Debating Clubs in London, 1795-1838," English Historical Review 102 (1987): 309-33. For popular parodies of "God Save the King," see Percy A. Scholes, God Save the Queenl The History and Romance of the World's First National Anthem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), chap. 19. 35. Northern Star, 16 Nov. 1839, p. 5; John Stafford, Songs Comic and Sentimental (Ashton, [ca. 1840]), copy in Tameside Local Library. See also Manchester Observer, 23 Oct. 1819, p. 798, which opened a new column for "National Songs." 36. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 735; F. K. Donnelly and J. L. Baxter, "Sheffield and the English Revolutionary Tradition, 1791-1820," International Review of Social History 20 (1975): 415. For London, see Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 20, 44-45, 68. 37. Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words (London, 1795), p. 148. 38. Manchester Observer, 23 Jan. 1819, pp. 447-49, 30 Jan. 1819, p. 455. See also Chapter 3. 39. The Trial of Henry Hunt, Esq . . . For an Alleged Conspiracy to Overturn the Government (London, 1820), p. 185; John MacDonell, ed., Reports of State Trials, n.s., 8 vols. (London, 1888-1898), vol. 1: 1820, col. 344. 40. Cited by Tim Hilton in his preface to Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (1844; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 5. 41. T. E. Tomlins, ed., The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1820), vol. 60, Geo. Ill, cap. 6; Belchem, "Orator" Hunt, p. 118; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, chap. 16, for workingclass radicalism during the 1820s. 42. Manchester Observer, 29 Apr. 1820, p. 1007,29 July 1820, p. 1107, 5 Aug. 1820, p. 1114,4 Nov. 1820, p. 1227; New Times, 1 May 1820, p. 2,29 July 1820, p. 2, 31 July 1820, p. 2; PRO, TS 11/1055/4763. I am grateful to Edward Thompson for this last reference.

220

Notes to Pages 156-159

43. PRO, TS 11/48/186. Taylor also declared that he "wished Hunt had 50,000 men as good as himself. . . and Hunt would clear the country of 'them,' meaning the army and Royal family. "See also TS 11/939 (3356) for the case against Thomas Wells, a journeyman brassfounder, sentenced to three months' imprisonment for having toasted "Confusion to the King and Present Government" at the Star public house in Birmingham. 44. Henry Hunt, To the Radical Reformers, Male and Female, of England, Ireland and Scotland (1820-1822), 28 Aug. 1820, p. 1, 24 Aug. 1821, pp. 21-22, 30, 24 Sept. 1821, pp. 25-27; Manchester Observer, 19 Aug. 1820, pp. 1130-31, for commemorations at Ashton, Manchester, Oldham, Royton, Stockport, and Bolton; PRO, HO 40/14: Chippendale to Sidmouth, 16 Aug. 1820, fols. 14849; Lloyd to Hobhouse, 17 Aug. 1820, fol. 160; HO 40/16, Eckersley to Byng, 13 and 17 Aug. 1821, fols. 413-17. The "National Prayer" was composed by Hunt for the Peterloo commemorations. 45. Wooler'sBritish Gazette and Manchester Observer, 31 Aug. 1822; Republican, 6 Dec. 1822, pp. 828-29; Manchester Guardian, 26 Oct. 1822, p. 3,2 Nov. 1822, p. 4, 12 Apr. 1823, p. 3. The Seditious Meetings Act banned the display of seditious flags and banners. The case eventually went to Lancashire assizes, where the defendants pleaded guilty to sedition in return for being released on their own recognizance. 46. For the 1820, see Nicholas Cotton, "Popular Movements in Ashton-underLyne and Stalybridge before 1832" (M.Ldtt. thesis, Birmingham University, 1977), pp. 135-59; Vernon, "Politics and the People," pp. 414-28. 47. Manchester Observer, 11 Nov. 1820, p. 1235; Wooler's British Gazette and Manchester Observer, 17 Nov. 1821, pp. 98-99. 48. Cf. Thomas W. Laqueur, "The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV," Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 417-66. 49. Manchester Observer, 29 Jan. 1820, p. 906, declared, "If it were the last words we were doomed to utter to the British People, we should call upon them to cherish to their expiring moments, the IMMORTAL MEMORY OF THOMAS PAINE." 50. See Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), chap. 6. See also Chapter 4. 51. Isis, 16 June 1832, p. 296. Support for Carlile in the Ashton district remained remarkably steady during the early 1830s. See Prompter, 30 July 1831, p. 688; Isis, 18 Feb. 1832, pp. 23-24, 12 May 1832, p. 215; Gauntlet, 12 May 1833, p. 223. 52. Republican, 8 Mar. 1822, pp. 302-7. In 1821 Higson had hosted a dinner to celebrate Paine's birth. See Manchester Observer, 3 Feb. 1821, p. 37. For Hobson, see obituary, Northern Star, 24 Mar. 1838, p. 6. 53. Republican, 21 Mar. 1823, pp. 370-71, the dinner again held at the Claytons'. Wooler's British Gazette and Manchester Observer ceased publication in September 1822. The Manchester Observer had been the major organ of the Lancashire movement. 54. Republican, 25 Jan. 1822, pp. 98-99; Lion, 18 Jan. 1828, p. 71, 7 Nov. 1828, p. 577. 55. John Belchem, "Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England," Social History 6(1981): 1-32. In contrast to the movement at Stockport, Ashton's radicals avoided serious divisions between Huntites and Carlilcites. Sec Glen, Urban Workers, pp. 257-70.

Notes to Pages 159-160

222

56. There were occasional attempts to reopen platform agitation in Lancashire. See PRO, HO 40/22, Eckersley to Hobhouse, 13,17, and 19 Mar. 1827, fols. 43, 52-53, 59-61. 57. PRO, HO 40/26 (1), Foster to Melbourne, 6 Dec. 1830, fols. 160-63 HO 40/26 (2), Astley to Melbourne, 9 Dec. 1830, fols. 178-9; Manchester Guardian, 4 Dec. 1830, p. 4,11 Dec. 1830, pp. 3-4,18 Dec. 1830, p. 3; Robert G. Hal "Work, Class, and Politics in Ashton-under-Lyne, 1830-1860" (Ph.D. diss.,Vanderbilt University, 1991), pp. 101-12; Cotton, "Popular Movements in Ashton-underLyne," pp. 211-34; R. G. Kirby and A. E. Musson, The Voice of the People: John Doherty, 1798-1854: Trade Unionist, Radical and Factory Reformer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), chap. 5. 58. A republican and freethinker, Higgins (born ca. 1805) was a cotton spinner turned small greengrocer; he was secretary to the Ashton Chartist Association. When he was arrested in the summer of 18 39, a small arsenal was found at his house. See PRO, HO 20/10, examination of Higgins; TS 11/1030/4424 A. 59. Northern Star, 15 Nov. 1839, p. 5,14 Nov. 1840, p. 3,2 Feb. 1839, p. 5, 15 Feb. 1840, p. 5. In 1841 the census enumerator listed John Clayton, age seventyfive, as a cotton weaver and Nancy, age sixty-six, as a cotton-bobbin winder (PRO, HO 107/532 [1]). James and Abel Duke, active Chartists, were veteran republicans. James Duke, imprisoned for his Chartist activities in 1839, operated the Bush Inn, a key Chartist meetingplace. He had been forced out of employment as a mule-spinner because of his politics. See PRO, HO 20/10, examination of James Duke. 60. See "Address of the Female Radicals of Ashton," Northern Star, 2 Feb. 1839, p. 3. Their chairwoman, Mrs. Williamson, was the wife of the radical printer Abel Williamson. For the involvement of women in Chartism, see Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1984), chap. 7; Jutta Schwartzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (London: Macmillan, 1991); David J. V. Jones, "Women and Chartism," History 68 (1983): 1-21; Anna Clark, "The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s," Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 62-88. Ashton also had a large and active Juvenile Radical Association. See Northern Star, 29 June 1839, p. 4, 13 July 1839, p. 5, 25 Apr. 1840, p. 5. 61. Republican,24May 1822,pp. 666-67,17 Jan. 1823,p. 87,12 Aug. 1824, pp. 183-84, 4 Aug. 1826, pp. 109-10. 62. Northern Star, 14 Nov. 1840, p. 1, 21 Aug. 1841, p. 1; Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 12 Dec. 1840, p. 2; posters in PRO, HO 40/54,19 Dec. 1840, fols. 887, 901. 63. "And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, / Shall long keep his memory green in our souls." 64. See James Epstein, The Lion of freedom: Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832-41 (London: Groom Helm, 1982), p. 17; more generally, Stanley H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 9. 65. Arthur Redford, Labor Migration in England, 1800-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), pp. 36-39, 151-55; Hall, "Work, Class, and Politics," pp. 66-67. 66. There had been strong links between Lancashire radicals and the Irish revolutionary movement in the 1790s. See Alan Booth, "The United Englishmen and Radical Politics in the Industrial North-West of England, 1795-1803," International Review of Social History SI (1986): 271-97.

222

Notes to Pages 160-165

67. T. M. Kemnitz and F. Jacques, "J. R Stephens and the Chartist Movement," International Review of Social History 19 (1974): 211-27; Gwyn A. Williams, Rowland Defroster: A Working Class Infidel, 1800-34 (York: St. Anthony's Press, 1965), p. 3, for the importance of d'Holbach's Systeme de la nature. 68. J. R. Stephens, The Political Pulpit! A Collection of Sermons (London, 1839); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 33-34. I see no compelling reason, however, to follow Joyce's view that such language is at odds with class. For Stephens's religious followers, the overwhelming majority of whom were working people, see E. A. Rose, Methodism inAshton,pt. 2:1797-1914 (Ashton: Andrews, 1969), pp. 36-52 passim. 69. McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 10 Apr. 1841, p. 15. 70. For the importance of Volney's Ruins, see Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 98-99; I. J. Prothero, "William Benbow and the Concept of the 'General Strike,'" Past and Present 63 (1974): 161-62. 71. James K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna, Southeott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 77-79; J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 139-19; Hall, "Work, Class, and Politics," pp. 81-84. 72. Prothero, "Benbow and the 'General Strike,'" pp. 159-62; Gareth Stedman Jones, "Rethinking Chartism," in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 104-6. 73. Northern Star, 16 Nov. 1839, p. 5. 74. For a general discussion of the relationship between time, work, and public assembly, see Mark Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790-1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 5. 75. Northern Star, 29 Sept. 1838, p. 5, 6 Oct. 1838, p. 8,13 Oct. 1838, p. 8; Champion, 7-21 Oct. 1838; Manchester Guardian, 29 Sept. 1838, p. 3. 76. Epstein, Lion of Freedom, pp. 119-21. See also Robert Sykes, "Physical Force Chartism: The Cotton District and the Chartist Crisis of 1839," International Review of Social History 30 (1985): 207-36. 77. For the importance of Chartist expectations of another incident like Peterloo, see Dorothy Thompson, The Early Chartists (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 23-24. 78. Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 30 June 1838, p. 3. For the decline of trade-union participation in such events during the 1830s, see Robert Sykes, "Early Chartism and Trade Unionism in South-East Lancashire," in The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-60, ed. James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 160-61. See, more generally, Steven Lukes, "Political Ritual and Social Integration," in his Essays in Social Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 52-73. 79. Ashton Reporter, 30 Jan. 1869, p. 6. Aitken misdated this incident to 1838. 80. Northern Star, 22 Aug. 1840, p. 5, 21 Aug. 1841, p. 8., reporting that the flag was displayed "as usual" at the Claytons'. 81. At Hunt's trial, the prosecution had argued that the black flag that the Saddleworth radicals carried to Peterloo was the ensign of piracy. 82. Ashton Reporter, 14 Nov. 1857, 5 Feb. 1859; Ashton and, Stalybridge Reporter, 20 Aug. 1859, commented, "Formerly parties who took such a course of

Notes to Page 165

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showing their feelings [i.e., displaying black flags], were threatened with all the vengeance of the law." 83. Neville Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (London: Groom Helm, 1985), pp. 272-301; Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), chaps. 4, 8; Joyce, Visions of the People, pp. 183-85.

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Index

Abbott, Charles (judge), 40,42-44, 46, 48,52-55,61,108 Act Against Tumultuous Petitioning (1661), 15 Act of Settlement (1701), 27 Affleck, James (bookseller, Edinburgh zetetic), 113,121,128 Aitken, William (schoolmaster, Ashtonunder-Lyne Chartist), 147-49, 157, 159,161,163-64 Albert (Prince Consort), 11 American Revolution, 18, 85,112,164 Ancient constitution. See Constitutionalism Anglo-Saxon constitution. See Constitutionalism Annet, Peter (deist), 124 Anticlericalism. See Free thought Ardwick conspiracy (1817), 16, 74, 153 Arming, 13. See also Constitutionalism as based on constitution, 4 citizenship linked to, 12-13, 23 Armstrong, Robert (watch- and clockmaker, Stokesly zetetic), 125 Ashton-under-Lyne, 73-74,131,147-65 passim Chartism in, 147-65 passim cotton spinners strike in (1830-1831), 159

radical dining and rituals in, 147-65 passim women's participation in radicalism in, 87,160 zetetics in, 158-59 Bacon, Thomas (stockinger, Derbyshire revolutionary), 60 Bagguley, John (Stockport radical), 15-17, 64,68,153 Bamford, Samuel (weaver, Middleton radical), 66,83,152,154-55 Barnsley, 92 Bath, 123,131 Baxter, John (London Corresponding Society leader), 24 Benbow, William (shoemaker, radical printer-journalist), 15, 17, 117,128, 135 Bentham, Jeremy, 57,116, 135 Belts, John Joseph (cotton spinner, Ashtonunder-Lyne radical), 159 Bill of Rights (1689). See Constitutionalism Birmingham, 11, 19, 151 Black Lhww/( 1817-1824) 37-39,45,47, 57-58, 61, 65,102. See also Wooler, Thomas Jonathan Blackburn, 74, 131 225

226

Index

Blackburn Female Reform Society, 87-89, 91,98 Blackstone, Sir William, 4, 30-31, 59 on jury, 33 on right to arm, 12 Blake, William, 121,144 Blanketeers (1817), 14-17, 74,153 Bolivar, Simon, 122, 158 Bolton, 8,94, 123, 131,133 Bracton, Henry, 4 Brandreth, Jeremiah (stockinger, Derbyshire revolutionary), 60 Brewer, John, 33 Broadbent, Elijah (watchmaker, Ashtonunder-Lyne radical), 148, 161 Brougham, Henry, 16 Brown, Edward (silversmith, Birmingham radical), 11 Burdett, Sir Francis, 14, 54, 65, 80 Burke, Edmund, 30, 52, 104, 112 on language, 9 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 5, 30 Burns, Robert, 160 Burrow, J.W., 111 Bury, 75 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 116 "Ca Ira," sung or played by radicals, 8, 83, 105,152,154 Camden, First Earl (Charles Pratt; judge), 46 Campion, William (shoemaker, Lancashire zetetic), 126, 135 Canning, George, 40, 106, 153 Cannon, George (lawyer, freethinker), 102, 117 Cap of liberty, 21, 70-99 passim, 106-7, 152,164 and American Revolution, 78 banned from public display, 96 and claims to public space, 74, 97 class meanings of, 92, 95, 98-99 classical origins of, 77 and constitutionalism, 75-76, 97 display of, at elections, 80 as English symbol, 77, 92 and Irish rising (1798), 80 in loyalist cartoons, 78 at Pcterloo, 82-86 and radicalism (1830s), 97 presentations of, by women, 86-92 as symbol of French Revolution, 72-73, 77-80 Cap of Liberty (1819-1820), 106-7

Carlile, Jane (wife of Richard), 101, 109, 132-33 Carlile, Mary Anne (sister of Richard), 109, 122,132 Carlile, Richard, 10, 22, 59, 60, 64, 68, 96, 100-46 passim, 149,157,159,161. See also Paine, Thomas; Republican; Zetetic movement Address to Men of Science, 127 Ajje of Reason, reprinting of, 103 antihistoricism of, 120-21 atheism of, 124-26, 139 as birth-control advocate, 132, 135 commitment of, to free discussion, 109, 114 commitment of, to gender equality, 132, 134 commitment of, to science, 123—29 passim, 134—35 conversion of, to Christian belief, 145 conversion of, to deism, 104 Deist: or Moral Philosopher (1819-1820), 104 early career of, 101-9 Every Woman's Book, 132-33,135 and Hunt, 96, 109, 113, 120 influence of Paine on, 101-2, 105, 111, 115,119-26,144-45 on language, 111-20 passim, 124-25 Lion (1828-1829), 114,138 New Tear's Address to the Reformers of Great Britain, 121 opposition of, to constitutionalism, 12022 opposition of, to deistic ceremonies, 126, 139 opposition of, to rituals, 111, 122-23, 139 Republican (1819-1826), establishment of, 105,109 and republicanism, 10, 105, 119-23, 126 Rights of Man, reprinting of, 103 and Rotunda, 136, 144 and Sharpies, 133,145 and Sherwin, 102-3, 105 support of, for Caroline of Brunswick, 110-11 support of, for political economy, 135 and Taylor, 137-39, 142, 144-15 and Temple of Reason, 104 trial and imprisonment of (1819), 68, 107-9,114 trial and imprisonment of (1831), 144

Index Caroline of Brunswick (Princess of Wales, queen), radical campaign for, 97, 110,157 Carpenter, William (radical journalist), 143 Cartwright, John, 6,21, 37, 65, 76, 108, 120,153 on arms bearing and citizenship, 13 on origins of jury, 63 and petitioning, 14 trial of (1820), 66, 67 Castlereagh, Viscount (Robert Stewart, Second Marquis of Londonderry), 37,40,57,96,106 Cato Street conspiracy, 68 Charles I (king), 15, 27, 48, 51, 62 celebration of martyrdom of, 152 Charles II (king), 15 Chartism, 12-13, 17, 22, 70, 97, 147-65 passim as class movement, 70,162 and Kersal Moor Meeting (1838), 162 and national "holiday" (1839), 13 and National Petition (1839), 4,13,1718 and right to arm, 12, 13 and torchlight demonstrations, 162 Chartist Convention (1839), 4, 13,17-19 Chartists dining and toasting by, 147—65 passim trials of, 69 Cheshire, 97-98 Christian Evidence Society, 136, 138, 145 Citizenship, notions of, 40, 117, 121 Clarke, John (mechanic, zetetic), 130 Class, 27-28, 64, 69-70,162 language of, 71,98 and nationalism, 99 ritual solidarities of, 164 symbols of, 94, 95 Clayton, John (weaver, Ashton-under-Lyne radical), 147, 159-60 Clayton, Nancy (bobbin winder, Ashtonunder-Lyne radical), 147, 159-60, 163-64 Clayton, Samuel (Ashton-under-Lyne radical), 157 Cleave, John (radical journalist-publisher), 143 Cobbett, William (radical journalistpublisher), 10, 22, 37, 63, 81, 136, 148,150,153 defense of Blackburn Female Reform Society by, 91 attraction of, to free thought, 107 Cobbett's Political Register, 37, 76

227

Coke, Sir Edward, 51 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 24, 140 Colley, Linda, 78 Collins, Anthony (deist), 124 Common law. See Law Commonwealth tradition, 6, 18 Condorcet, Marquis de (Marie-Jean Caritat; philosophe), 123, 126, 149 Constitutionalism, vii, 3-28 passim, 68, 75 ancient constitution, 6, 22, 31,43 Anglo-Saxon constitution, 4-5, 7, 19, 21,64,76 and Bill of Rights (1689), 7,12, 14, 21, 25,43,48,51-52 and campaign for Caroline of Brunswick, 110 English constitution compared unfavorably with French, 7 and jury, 62-63 and language of legal defense, 29-69 passim and lawful assembly, 66, 74, 76,159, 162 legitimating force of, 4, 26, 76 and Magna Carta (1215), 7, 15, 21, 25, 43

and radical forms of action, 11 and right of resistance, 14, 50 and right to arm, 4, 12 and rights of women, 23, 88 Convention, 18,85,110 Chartist (1839), 4, 13, 19 of 1793 (Edinburgh), 18 schemes (1819), 67 schemes (1832-1833), 19 Convention parliaments (1660 and 1688),

19

Country ideology, 6 Cover, Robert, 30 Cruikshank, George (cartoonist) "The Belle Alliance," 89-90 "Death or Liberty," 92-93 Davenport, Allen (shoemaker, journalist, Spencean), 105, 113, 125, 145 Davison, Thomas (printer-publisher, Spencean), 20, 65, 76, 106-7 Debating clubs, in London, 23, 36, 131 Deism. See Free thought Deists' Magazine (1820), 106 Despard, Edward Marcus (revolutionary), 24 Detrosier, Rowland (scientific lecturer, deist), 128,139 Devil's Pulpit (1831-1832), 142

Index

228 Diderot, Denis (philosophe), 126,149 Drummond, Samuel (Stockport radical), 15-16,64,68,85,153 Drummond, Sir William (scholar of comparative religion), 138 Dublin, 138 Dupuis, Charles (anthropologist of religion), 138 Origine de tous Us cultes, 142 Durham, 80 Eaton, Daniel Isaac (radical publisherbookseller), 103, 108,116 trials of (1794,1812), 32,108,116 Edinburgh, 8, 113 Edmonds, George (schoolmaster, journalist, Birmingham radical), trial of (1820), 66 Ellenborough, Edward Law (Lord Chief Justice), 53, 57, 59, 61 Emmet, Robert (Irish revolutionary), 148, 160 Enlightenment, 101, 111-12, 124, 130 Erskine, Thomas (barrister, Foxite Whig), 32,34 Ethelston, Rev. Charles (Manchester magistrate), 94 Favell, Samuel (City reformer), 57 Fitch, Josiah (Christian Universalist minister), 139 Fitton, William (Oldham radical), 87, 131 Fletcher, Matthew (Bolton Chartist), 12, 18 Fox, Charles James, 78, 154 Free thought, 22-23, 100-46 passim. See also Carlile, Richard; Paine, Thomas; Taylor, Robert; Zetetic movement and anticlericalism, 107, 118, 143 and deism, 10, 100,139 instability of, 145 and materialism, 22, 101, 106, 124-26, 139

and millenarianism, 145 postwar influence of, 106-9 and science, 123-29 French Revolution, 5-7, 9-10, 18-19, 2426,31,42,54,71,80,99,106, 112,117,122,152 and anti-Christianity, 23, 104 and image and role of women, 88-89, 96 influence of, on British radicalism, 6-7, 24-26,161 and notions of patriotism, 25, 164

symbols of, 8,11,24, 72, 77-78, 80-81, 85, 96. See also "Ca Ira"; Cap of liberty; "Marseillaise" and Terror, 23 French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 10,25,42,71,99 Galloway, Alexander (machine-maker, London radical), 54 Cast, John (shipwright, London freethinking radical), 145 Geertz, Clifford, 27 Gerrald, Joseph (London Corresponding Society leader), 18,29,151 Gibbon, Edward, 104 Gibbs, Vicary (barrister), 34 Gillray, James (cartoonist), 78 Glorious Revolution, 4, 27, 48, 52, 77. See also Constitutionalism "God Save the King," 152 loyalist singing of, 153 at Peterloo, 83, 85 radical refusal to sing, 83, 85,154, 155 Godwin, William, 6, 29, 31, 116 Great Northern Union, 114 Gregory, Mary (London zetetic), 132—33 Griffin, James (radical journalist), 65,106—7 Habeas corpus suspension of (1794), 23 suspension of (1817), 11,15, 37, 74 Habermas, Jilrgen, 114 Halifax, 92 Hampden, John (patriotic martyr), 25, 27, 30,39,48,55,82,153-54 Hardy, Thomas (shoemaker, London Corresponding Society founder), 33-34,151 trial of (1794), 23, 33, 54 Harney, George Julian (Chartist), 19, 69 Harris, Joseph (London zetetic), 143 Harrison, Rev. Joseph (Stockport radical), 73 Hassell, Richard (carter, journalist, zetetic), 129-31,133,135 Hawles, Sir John (pro-jury legal writer), 62-63 Hay, Rev. W. R. (Manchester magistrate), 73 Hazlitt, William, 140 Healey, Samuel (surgeon, Middleton radical), trial of (1820), 66 Helvetius, Claude-Adrien (philosophe), 123,126,158 Hetherington, Henry (radical publisherjournalist), 136

Index Hibbert, Julian (London freethinking radical), 136,144-45 Higgins, Timothy (former cotton spinner, Ashton-under-Lyne Chartist), 148, 159-60 Higson, James (Ashton-under-Lyne radical), 157 Historical reasoning, 10, 41, 50-51. See also Carlile, Richard; Constitutionalism; Paine, Thomas; Wooler, Thomas Jonathan; Zetetic movement Hobsbawm, Eric, 98 Hobson, Joshua (bookseller, Ashton-underLyne freethinking radical), 157-58 Hogarth, William, 78 Holbach, Baron Paul-Henri-Dietrich d' (philosophe), 118,123,132,158 influence of, on zetetics, 126 System of Nature, 100,106,126 Holmes, William (Sheffield zetetic), 132 Holt, Sir John (judge), 46 Hone, William (radical journalistpublisher), 35, 37, 39, 54, 68,1023,108 trials of (1817), 55,59 Hooper, John (shoemaker, Spencean), 55, 81 Huddersfield, 74-75,92 Hull, 92 Hume, David, 124 Hunt, Henry (radical orator), 72, 80-83, 85, 105,108,113-14, 120, 13637,149,153,155-56,159 celebrations of birthday of, 147,150, 157,165 dissociation of, from Carlile, 96,109 toasting of, 155 trial of (1820), 66, 77 white hat as symbol of, 94,156 Hunt, Lynn, 26, 76 Ings, James (Spencean revolutionary), 85 Internationalism. See Patriotism; Zetetic movement Ireland, 81,138,160 coercion of, 12 English radical support for, 160 rising (1798), 78, 160 Isis( 1832), 145 Jacobinism, 8, 11, 18-19, 23, 26, 29, 72, 105,117,154 literary expression of, 116 repression of, 24, 74, 150, 1S1

229

Jacobites, 150-51 James II (king), 15, 27,48, 62 Jeffreys, George (Lord Chief Justice), 30, 62 John (king), 51 Johnson, Isaac (smith, Stockport Chartist), 94 Johnson, Joseph (brush maker, Manchester radical), 66, 74-75,152 Johnston, Charlotte (Salford radical), 89 Johnston, John (tailor, Salford radical), 15— 16, 64, 68,153 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 70-71 Jones, John Gale (Jacobin orator, London Corresponding Society leader), 7, 36,107-8,136,144 Jones, William (orientalist), 138 Jury, 29-69 passim. See also Law; London; Wooler, Thomas Jonathan as judges of law, 34 loss of radical confidence in, 64, 68 qualifications for, 59 radical views of, 33, 36,43, 59-65 selection of, 67 special, 39, 56 legality of, 67 reformed in London, 56-58 Kemble, Charles (actor), 137 Kitchen, Alice (Blackburn radical), 89 presentation of cap of liberty by, 87 Knight, John (Oldham radical), 87 trial of (1820), 66 Lancashire, 81, 97-98,147-65 passim Law, 29-69 passim. See also Constitutionalism; Jury; Wooler, Thomas Jonathan ancient constitution, 31 common, 30-31, 62 language of, 30, 32,49, 50 of libel, 42-43, 44, 46 natural, 30 statute, 31 Lawrence, William (professor of anatomy), 127-28 Lawton, Joseph (Salford zetetic), 123 Lawyers, radical distrust of, 32 Lee, Richard "Citizen" (JacobinSpencean), 8, 19 Lees, John (Peterloo victim), 66 Legislatorial attorney scheme (1819), 19, 66 Leigh, 74, 94 female radicals in, 89

230

Index

Levellers, 45, 103, 164 Lewis, William Greathead (schoolmaster, journalist, Coventry radical), 65 trial of (1820), 65-66 Lilburne, John (Leveller), 30, 54, 59, 62 trial of (1649), 34-35 Lion (1828-1829), 114,129,138 Liverpool, 154 Liverpool, First Earl of (Charles Jenkinson), 153 Lloyd, John (Stockport magistrate), 73-75 Locke, John, 21-22 London, 8,16, 22, 36, 55, 92,100,103-6, 133, 138, 154. See also London Corresponding Society; Rotunda; Spa Fields meetings; Spenceans plans to march on (1817), 14-16 Smithfield meeting in (1819), 74 trials and role of juries in, 34-35, 56-58, 60,65,68,108 zetetic movement in, 22 London Alfred (1819), 20, 106 London Corresponding Society, 6,18, 2425,63, 100, 104,107 London Democratic Association, 20 Lorymer, James (radical journalist), 19 Louis XVI (king of France), 78 Loyalism, 23-25, 72, 77, 83, 86, 92,150 Loyalists attitude of, toward women's political activity, 88-91 celebrations by, 152-53 violence of, 151 Lushington, Edmund Henry (master of Crown Office), 56-57 Mably, Abbe de (Gabriel Bonnot de Mably; philosophe), 126 Macclesfield, 16 Maddocks, Charles (pawnbroker, Birmingham radical) trial of (1820), 66 Magna Carta. See Constitutionalism Malthus, Thomas, 135 Manchester, 8, 14-17, 19, 72, 74, 81-94 passim, 105, 131, 151, 153, 155, 156. See also Peterloo female radicals in, 87 Manchester Constitutional Society, 151 "Marseillaise," 83, 152 sung by radicals, 8, 105, 154 Marx, Karl, 4, 26 Materialism. See Free thought Matley, Abraham (bricklayer, Ashtonunder-Lyne radical), 160

Matley, Josiah (Ashton-under-Lyne radical), 158 Maule, George (treasury solicitor), 66 McCalman, Iain, 49, 110, 140, 143, 144 Mechanics' Institutes, 128-29 Medler, Henry (carpenter, London freethinking radical), 145 Medusa (1819-1820), 76,106 Mee, James (carpenter, London freethinking radical), 145 Middleton, 83,155 Mill, James, 135 Millenarianism, 6,145, 162 Mirabaud. See Holbach, Baron d' Muir, Thomas (Scottish Jacobin), 160 Napoleon Bonaparte, 80,122 National Union of the Working Classes, 136,144 Natural rights, 5-8,10, 20-21, 26, 76 Nelson, Viscount (Horatio Nelson), 152 Nenner, Howard, 30 New Times, 72, 76, 88-89 Newark, 9 Newgate Monthly Magazine (1824—1826), 129,135 Newton, Sir Isaac, 129 Newtonianism, 125 Northern Star, 148 Norwich, 8 Nottingham, 8, 87,109 Oastier, Richard (factory movement leader), 149,160 O'Connell, Daniel, 160 O'Connor, Feargus (Chartist leader), 10, 148-49,160 Ogden, William (Manchester radical printer), 16 Oldham, 75, 83, 85,150,152,156 female radicals in, 87 Oliver the spy (W. J. Richards), 39 Owen, Robert, 23,134 Owenites, 23, 132, 136 Paine, Thomas, 5, 9-10, 17-18, 21, 51, 54, 57,100,106-7,109,115,119, 129,131,146,149,153 Age of Reason, 32, 64, 100,103-4,1078,115-16,126,129,158 Agrarian Justice, 6, 135 attraction of writing of, 6 burned in effigy, 75, 101, 151 celebrations of birthday of, 122-23, 150, 157-58,160,165

Index on language, 9, 111-12, 125 Letter Addressed to the Addressers, 103 Rights of Man, 5-6,10-11, 23, 75, 111, 119 on science, 125 and theophilanthropy, 126,139 toasting of, 10, 76, 148 works of, reprinted by Carlile and Sherwin, 103 works of, suppressed, 23,102 Palmer, Elihu (American deist), 104, 123 Principles of Nature, 107,109 Palmer, Rev. Thomas F. (Scottish reformer), 160 Parr, Samuel, 151 Patriot, 25,41,55, 76 changing meaning of word, 7-8, 71, 80 martyrs, 25, 30, 34, 55, 82,153 Patriotism, 25, 77, 80, 150 arming linked to, 162 and internationalism, 121, 158, 164 loyalist notions of, 72, 80, 153 radical notions of, 25, 99, 153, 161 symbols of, 80-81, 85, 92 Pearson, Charles (attorney, City radical), 40, 53, 64, 67 campaign of, to reform special juries, 56-60 Penn, William, 54 Pentridge rising (1817), 16, 39, 60 Perry, William (Stockport zetetic), 115 Peterloo (1819), 4,12,19,64, 72, 77, 82-86,92,94, 96,105,108, 14748,156,159,163 banners displayed at, 85, 86 celebrations of anniversary of, 150, 15657 role of women at, 86, 160 trials relating to, 65-66 Petitioning, 11,14,15, 18, 50, 51 constitutional right of, 47-48, 52 public meetings for, 18, 74 Phillips, Sir Richard, 57 Golden Rulesfor Jurymen, 63 Pigott, Charles (radical publisher) Political Dictionary, 8, 116, 155 Pitt, William, the Younger, 23, 154 honored at dinners, 152—53 Pitt Clubs, 153 Place, Francis (tailor, Westminster reformer), 104,135,140 Pocock, J. G. A., 26 Politics for the People (1793-1795), 116 Poor Laws, 12,22,161, 163

231

Preston, Thomas (shoemaker, Spencean), 55,81,131 Priestley riots, 151 Prince Regent (Prince of Wales), 16-17 Ranciere, Jacques, 131 R«wo»