The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789-99

The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789-99 Stuart Andrews

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The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99

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Also by Stuart Andrews EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM METHODISM AND SOCIETY THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA

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The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99 Stuart Andrews

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© Stuart Andrews 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2000 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–73851–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Andrews, Stuart. The British periodical press and the French Revolution, 1789–99 / Stuart Andrews. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–73851–9 hardback 1. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Foreign public opinion, British. 2. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Journalists. 3. Press and politics—Great Britain—History—18th century. 4. English newspapers—History—18th century. 5. Public opinion—Great Britain– –History—18th century. 6. Great Britain—Politics and government– –1789–1820. I. Title. DC 158.8 . A53 2000 944.04—dc21 00–033321 10 09

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Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

For Marie

Figure 1 James Gillray, The Nightmare

vi

Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

1 Bastille Euphoria

1

2 Burke Rebutted

14

3 Instant History: Burke, Godwin and the Annual Registers

28

4 War, Sedition and Censorship

42

5 Pitt the Apostate: Beddoes, Coleridge and The Watchman

56

6 Canning’s Counterattack: the Weekly Anti-Jacobin

69

7 ‘Jacobin Poetry’: Southey, Cottle and Lyrical Ballads

83

8 Smears and Subsidies: the Monthly Anti-Jacobin

97

9 ‘Jacobin Morality’: the Wollstonecraft Memoirs

111

10 ‘Jacobin Prints’: Courier and Star, Chronicle and Post

124

11 Reviewers Reviewed: Monthly and Critical

138

12 Murder by Ridicule: the End of the Analytical

152

13 Cromwell’s Ghosts: Republicans and Dissenters

166

14 Millennialism and Popery

179

15 Transatlantic Comparisons: American Porcupine

192

16 Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins

204

Appendix: Burke’s Jacobins

217

List of Abbreviations used in the Notes

221

Notes

222

Bibliography

260

Index

263 vii

List of Illustrations Figure 1 Figure 8.1 Figure 12.1 Figure 16.1

James Gillray, The Nightmare James Gillray, New Morality (detail) James Gillray, A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism Thomas Rowlandson, A Charm for a Democracy, Reviewed, Analysed & Destroyed

vi 99 153 213

All the illustrations (including that on the jacket) are reproduced by permission of the British LIbrary from the bound volumes of the AntiJacobin Review, vols I and III (BL reference 261.i.22).

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Preface This work is offered as a contribution to what Alfred Cobban called the ‘Debate on the French Revolution’. Cobban’s anthology was drawn from parliamentary speeches and contemporary books or pamphlets. My own study embraces not only a wider range of publications, but also records what the reviewers of the day had to say about them. More than 20 years ago, Derek Roper’s Reviewing before the Edinburgh (1978) presented an overview of the London literary magazines, and encouraged us to take them more seriously than historians had generally done. Since then J.E. Cookson in The Friends of Peace (1982) has drawn on the pages of the provincial press, while Robert Dozier’s For King, Constitution and Country (1983), James J. Sack’s From Jacobite to Conservative (1993) and Marilyn Morris’s The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (1998) demonstrate the extent of loyalist sentiment and the wealth of writing and preaching against the Revolution. Most recent historiography has favoured the Burkean analysis, though the alternative theses of Mark Philp and the late John Dunwiddy come close to my own independent conclusions. My debt to other authorities is made clear in the endnotes for each chapter. My basic materials have been those literary reviews of the 1790s which had a continuous existence throughout the decade: the Monthly, the Critical and the Analytical. I have paid much less attention to the English Review, absorbed by the Analytical Review in 1796, or to the Monthly Magazine, first established in that same year. All five of these monthly journals were edited by Dissenters. Excluded from public office, Dissenters expressed their opposition through the periodical press. The Anglican British Critic, founded in 1793 and partly funded by the government, was intended as a corrective. But the AntiJacobin, or Weekly Examiner, and its successor, the monthly Anti-Jacobin Review, are a surer measure of Pittite propaganda. Secure in its overwhelming parliamentary majority, Pitt’s ministry was nevertheless losing the debate in the press; and part of my purpose is to contrast the shallow vituperation of the weekly and monthly AntiJacobin with the moderate, persuasive (though partisan) tone of the literary reviews. When in the late 1790s the battle of the reviews turned in the government’s favour, the anti-Jacobin press was free from restraint, while editors and publishers of anti-ministerial publications faced imprisonment. ix

x Preface

My study does not include the provincial press, whose reporting of national events usually relied on the reprinting of accounts from the London newspapers. Nor, except in the case of the Anti-Jacobin Review, have I paused to identify individual reviewers. Roper provides some useful general pointers to authorship, while the writers of most Monthly Review articles have been identified by Benjamin Christie Nangle in The Monthly Review: Second Series (1955). Beyond the reviews, I have included the Tory Gentleman’s Magazine, and also the Annual Register, founded by Burke, edited by him until 1789, and Burkean throughout the 1790s. [Reviewers in the Gentleman’s Magazine may be identified in Lorraine de Montluzin’s Electronic Version of James M. Kuist’s ‘The Nichols File of the “Gentleman’s Magazine”’ (Charlottesville, Virginia: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1999), accessible on the Web at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/]. Conversely, I cite the New Annual Register and Coleridge’s shortlived Watchman. The dailies are excluded, except for the four ‘Jacobin Prints’ – the Courier, Star, Morning Chronicle and Morning Post – which are examined in order to establish how Jacobin they really were. The impact of the Napoleonic Wars ensured that anti-Jacobin propaganda became assimilated into British patriotic history. The anti-government protests of the 1790s were further muffled because John Gifford, editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review, also wrote the first full-length life of Pitt, in suitably adulatory terms. I have tried to retrace lines of argument that were deliberately ‘rubbished’ by Gifford. In doing so, I owe personal debts of gratitude to individuals who drew my attention to relevant sources, or offered advice on particular chapters. First to Jenny Graham of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, whose two-volume The Nation, the Law and the King: Reform Politics in England 1789–99 (1999) appeared when this work was already in the press. Her impressively detailed analysis massively supports the view that Pitt’s radical opponents deserve to be taken more seriously. I record my thanks also to Professor Derek Beales of Cambridge, to Dr John Walsh of Oxford, and to Reggie Watters of the Friends of Coleridge. I am grateful for the stimulus provided by the biennial Coleridge conferences at Cannington, not least to Paul Magnuson (Professor of English at New York University) for his parallel and complementary research on the literary reviews. And as always, the resources of Bristol Reference Library, and the patience of the library staff, have together made my research not only possible, but enjoyable. STUART ANDREWS

Acknowledgements Extracts from the following journals are taken from copies in Bristol Reference Library: Analytical Review, Annual Register, Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, British Critic, Courier, Critical Review, Gentleman’s Magazine, Monthly Mirror, Monthly Review, Star and Sun. Extracts from the Monthly Magazine, Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, New Annual Register and True Briton come from copies in Cambridge University Library. The text of the Watchman is from Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and others, 16 vols (Princeton University Press, 1969– ), II. These and all other sources are recorded in the endnotes. A short bibliography of works not cited in the text, but useful for background or further reading, is also provided.

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1 Bastille Euphoria

The public response to the fall of the Bastille is enshrined in the much-quoted words of the poets. William Cowper has the distinction of predicting the popular reaction, writing of the Bastille in 1785: ‘There’s not an Englishman that would not leap/To hear that ye were fall’n at last.’ 1 Wordsworth’s more famous response – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/But to be young was very heaven’ – expressed emotion recollected in 1804, when Britain was at war with Napoleonic France. Wordsworth looks back 15 years to that ‘time when Europe was rejoic’d,/France standing on the top of golden hours,/And human nature seeming born again’. 2 Robert Southey, who was still a schoolboy at Westminster when the Bastille fell, conveyed the same sentiment more prosaically: ‘Few persons but those who lived in it can conceive or comprehend what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.’ 3 Southey and Coleridge would soon together try to give practical shape to their faith in perfectibility by means of their notorious yet unfairly ridiculed plan to set up their pantisocratic community in America. One of Coleridge’s earliest poems, written while he was still at Christ’s Hospital, was ‘Destruction of the Bastile’, containing the lines: I see, I see! glad Liberty succeed With every patriot virtue in her train! And mark yon peasant’s raptur’d eyes; Secure he views his harvest rise; No fetter vile the mind shall know, And Eloquence shall fearless glow. 1

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Yes! Liberty the soul of Life shall reign, Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro’ every vein!4 Wordsworth landed in France, en route for Switzerland, on the first Bastille Day, 14 July 1790. Like Helen Maria Williams, who described the Paris Fête de Fédération as ‘the triumph of human kind’, Wordsworth was impressed by the ceremony, performed ‘at the same hour’ (as he told William Frend) in ‘every principal town throughout France’. His letter to Frend continues: You may judge by these circumstances of the feelings & sentiments prevailing here, (which I think much finer than all the spectacles in the world) & how little credit is to be given to those vile libels in the London newspapers, & especially in the morning Herald on the subject of French politics. I assure you they do an Englishman no service here, for otherwise the French speak of us with great respect, & wish much for an alliance with England & peace with all the world.5 It was Frend, Coleridge’s tutor at Jesus College, Cambridge, who would remind the Vice-Chancellor in May 1793 of the mood of the university and of the country four years before: I did rejoice at the success of the French revolution, and is there an Englishman, who did not exult on this occasion? At what period did I rejoice?. … Was it not, Sir, at the time when that horrid dungeon was destroyed, in which had been tormented so many victims of caprice and effeminate cruelty? Was it a crime, Sir, to rejoice when the whole nation was of one mind, and this university thought it a duty to impress the sentiment on our young men, by giving them as a proper subject for their talents, the taking of the Bastile?6 Frend’s recollections are confirmed by Henry Gunning in his history of the university. Gunning recalled that many members of the Senate were ‘friendly to the French Revolution; and soon after the destruction of the Bastile there was a proposal for a dinner to celebrate that event’. Coleridge’s contemporary John Tweddell was awarded a prize for a speech made in Trinity Chapel, proclaiming that ‘Liberty has begun her progress, and hope tells us, that she has only begun.’ 7 The names of both Frend and Tweddell would be inscribed in 1794 on a presentation inkstand given to Joseph Priestley ‘on his departure into exile’ in

Bastille Euphoria 3

America.8 Frend, a Hebrew scholar who had cooperated with Priestley in translating the Scriptures (only to lose the manuscript in the Birmingham riots of 1791) was as notorious a Unitarian as Priestley himself. In 1788 the Analytical Review had noticed Frend’s Address to the Members of the Church of England and to Protestant Trinitarians in General. The reviewer commented: ‘The candid reader will soon be satisfied of the importance of the charge – “ye worship ye know not what” – and the duty of examining it.’9 And as late as November 1793, the Monthly Review could still record that Frend by his disregard of university statutes ‘certainly exposed himself to condemnation in the ViceChancellor’s court; but it by no means hence follows that he merits entire condemnation in a court of criticism’. The same reviewer nevertheless noted the political dimension of Frend’s Unitarianism: ‘What, we may ask, have Republicans and Anti-republicans as such, to do with religious systems and doctrines?’10 It was a more famous Unitarian, Richard Price, whose endorsement of events in Paris had the greatest practical consequences. In his sermon to the London Revolution Society on 4 November 1789, ‘On the Love of Our Country’, Price spoke approvingly of 30 million Frenchmen ‘demanding liberty with an irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects’. He called on the ‘oppressors of the world’ to recognize that a new age had dawned: ‘Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses before they and you are destroyed together.’11 And it was Price who suggested sending the congratulatory address to the National Assembly in Paris. When the sermon was published, with the French Declaration of Rights as an appendix, the Analytical Review welcomed it as ‘the animated sentiments of ardent virtue in a simple, unaffected, nay even negligent style’. The editors focused on the following extract: Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defence! The times are auspicious. Your labours have not been in vain. Behold kingdoms, admonished by you, starting from sleep, breaking their fetters, and claiming justice from their oppressors! Behold the light you have struck out, after setting AMERICA free, reflected to FRANCE, and then kindled in to a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates Europe.12 And in reviewing a dozen pamphlets on the Test Acts, the Monthly Review observed that, if the Anglican bishops would promote repeal of

4 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

the Acts, ‘it will certainly do them honour in the eyes of philosophers; and considering the advancement of liberty in Europe, it appears to be a measure politically expedient’.13 That same month Edmund Burke, already at work on his Reflections on the Revolution in France, wrote to Philip Francis: I intend no controversy with Dr Price, Lord Shelburne, or any other of that set. I mean to set in a full view the danger from their wicked principles and their black hearts. I intend to state the true principles of the constitution in church and state upon grounds opposite to theirs.14 That was on 20 February 1790. But Burke had made up his mind about the French Revolution at least three months before. In October 1789 he could still write to Dupont, perhaps with more tact than accuracy: You may easily believe, that I have had my eyes turned to the astonishing scene now displayed in France. It has certainly given rise in my mind to many reflections, and to some emotions. These are natural and unavoidable; but it would ill become me to be too ready in forming a positive opinion on matters transacted in a country, with the correct political map of which, I must be very imperfectly acquainted.15 It was the March of the Women to Versailles early in October, and Dr Price’s seeming endorsement in his allusion to ‘their king led in triumph’, that determined Burke to intervene. In a famous, though shamelessly rhetorical passage in his Reflections, Burke describes the royal family being ‘forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which was left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcases’. He proceeds to picture the ‘royal captives’ moving towards Paris amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were under a guard composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph,

Bastille Euphoria 5

lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a bastile for kings.16 While Burke was engaged in writing his highly coloured account of events in Paris, Charles James Fox was promoting a different view. In July 1789 Fox had famously hailed the French Revolution as ‘How much the greatest Event that has happened in the World! & how much the best!’17 Now, in the debate on the Army estimates on 20 February 1790, he argued that spending on the army could safely be cut, as the threat of French belligerence had been removed by the Revolution. Even Pitt himself, while opposing any weakening of the armed forces, observed in the same debate: The present convulsions in France must, sooner or later, terminate in harmony and regular order; and notwithstanding that the fortunate arrangements of such a situation might make her more formidable, it might also render her less obnoxious as a neighbour.18 Much of the periodical press took the same line. In March 1790, the Analytical commented in a notice of Thoughts on the probable Influence of the French Revolution: This author reprobates that narrow policy which induces many to depreciate the French revolution, because that nation has hitherto been our enemy. He asserts that its consequences will be most beneficial to Great Britain: it will tend to secure our liberties, which he thinks never would have been endangered by France, had France itself been a free country.19 The Monthly Review, commenting on the same pamphlet, concluded that, if the French succeeded in establishing their liberties ‘on the present noble plan’, it would cause a ‘great revolution in the political systems of Europe, and have a considerable effect on Great Britain’. While conceding that the author might be be expecting too much of a new French constitution, the Monthly would nonetheless ‘indulge the hope that it will produce in Englishmen the glorious ambition of not being surpassed in liberty’.20 During a debate in the British Parliament on 15 April 1791, Fox would tell the Commons that he ‘admired the new constitution of France, considered altogether, as the most stupendous and glorious edifice of liberty’, and that France was now a country ‘from which

6 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

neither insult nor injustice was to be dreaded’. 21 Three weeks, later in the resumed debate, Burke denounced the same constitution as ‘Pandora’s box, replete with every mortal evil’, causing ‘hell itself to yawn, and every demon of mischief to overspread the face of the earth’.22 It was in this debate on the Quebec Act that the breach between Fox and Burke became irreparable, and Burke accordingly deserted the Whigs and became a supporter of Pitt. Sympathy at the time was with Fox. The Whig William Roscoe wrote ‘The Life, Death and Wonderful Achievements of Edmund Burke’, beginning: Full tilt at all he met, And round he dealt his knocks, Till with a backward stroke at last, He hit poor CHARLEY FOX. Now CHARLEY was of all his friends The warmest friend he had; So when he dealt this graceless blow He deemed the man was mad. In cartoons of 1790–91 Burke was indeed often portrayed as Don Quixote.23 Yet it was Burke who ultimately turned public opinion against France. On 22 December 1790 the National Assembly decreed the erection of a statue to Rousseau, to carry the legend La Nation Française libre à Rousseau. This provoked Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. Written in January 1791, and published in Paris before publication in London, the 74-page pamphlet was a sustained denunciation of Rousseau, which (the Gentleman’s Magazine observed) ‘deserves to be heard, and will be heard in both France and England’. The new rulers of France, Burke declares, all resemble Rousseau: ‘His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their manners. Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the debauches of the night.’ The reviewer quotes with relish Burke’s description of Rousseau as the hardhearted father who ‘without one natural pang casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings’. It was for this Rousseau that the Paris foundries were busily producing statues ‘with the kettles of the poor and the bells of their churches’. Burke dismisses him as ‘a wild, ferocious, low-minded, hard-hearted father, of fine general feelings; a

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lover of his kind but a hater of his kindred’. 24 The Critical Review for August 1789 had drawn a similar contrast between Rousseau’s sympathy for humankind in the abstract and his scorn for individual men – without, however, thinking him in the least dangerous. He was not even likely to persuade Europeans to cross the Atlantic in search of Eldorado: ‘His works philosophical, can do no great injury: though our author loves humanity, man, in society, is his aversion; yet his reasoning, we believe, never drove anyone to the banks of the Mississipi or the Ohio.’25 The Critical was not perhaps very prescient. In June 1789 it reviewed a novel, The Bastile; or the History of Charles Townly, noting mildly that ‘the style and manner of this work are not unlike those of Roderick Random’.26 In August the Critical’s ‘Foreign Intelligence’ section began unsensationally with ‘some account of the different meteorological observations’. And even more poignantly, the September issue carried a 10-page review of Manuscripts in the Library of the King of France, including an extract from the preface: The golden era of science and letters is not yet passed; the king knows how these can contribute to his glory and that of the nation, and the minister of the academies, with as much knowledge as zeal, seconds the beneficent intentions of his royal master, in perpetuating these happy days; thus exciting an ardour for labour, by powerful encouragements directed to the public welfare.27 Not until October 1789 does the fall of the Bastille feature in the pages of the Critical, with short notices of a number of pamphlets. One of them (A Detail of the Wonderful Revolution at Paris) is described by the reviewer as ‘candid and dispassionate’; but noting that ‘their first revolution was conducted with infinite judgment and consummate address’, the report concludes less optimistically: The disasters of a moment no one could be blamed for; but what shall we say of the future conduct of the French? The mob is a furious wild beast; when its chain is loosened, its destructive ravages are excessive, and perhaps it is seldom easy in a first innovation, to draw the line between liberty and licentiousness.28 The Analytical had been quicker off the mark. In July 1789, it was already reviewing the two-volume Histoire Politique de la Revolution en France with a London imprint. Drawing a comparison with the

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English Revolution of 1688, the Analytical commented: ‘Such a fermentation as took place at that period in England, such a general sense of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind, exists at this moment in France.’ Among the author’s proposals, we are told, are a new system of education, ‘the extinction of the aristocratical spirit’ and the abolition of ‘monopolies and exclusive privileges’. The reviewer decides that the author’s expectations are formed ‘from a system more consonant to the abstracted ideas of a tacit original contract between king and people, but difficult in the height to be realized and rendered permanent’. The review nevertheless concludes that some of the suggestions ‘might easily be adopted in a practicable constitution’.29 The Analytical’s reference to ‘natural and unalienable rights’ echoes the American Declaration of Independence. As early as January 1789, the Monthly Review’s notice of the English translation of Brissot’s Considerations on the relative Situation of France and the United States of America had traced the transatlantic connection more explicitly. Commenting on Necker’s speech to the Assembly of Notables, and the prospect of the reconvening of the States-General, the Monthly observes: From the novelty of a popular assembly in France, composed of deputies from the different orders of the nation, reluctantly called together, after an interval of nearly two centuries, in an age when the rights of human nature are so well understood; and especially after that government has taken so recent and active a part in favour of American liberty, we are justified in forming high expectations.30 And in February, the Monthly reviewed Abbé Genty’s La Influence de la Découverte de l’Amérique sur le Bonheur du Genre humain. The reviewer noted that ‘the principal object of this judicious writer is to point out the manner of diminishing the evils occasioned by the discovery of the new world, and of multiplying the advantages that may result from it’. The concluding judgement, that ‘the work breathes a liberal spirit’, would have been confirmed had Genty’s own confident prediction been quoted: ‘The independence of the Anglo-Americans is the event most suited to hastening the revolution which must restore happiness on earth.’31 In August 1789 the Analytical, reviewing Debrett’s version of Necker’s proposals for the composition of the States-General, had this to say:

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The sullen murmurs of discontent that had gone forth throughout France, might have been appeased, perhaps, after the nobility had given up their claims of pecuniary exemptions, by other concessions favourable to the people, and natural rights of mankind, as the abolition of lettres de cachet &c. &c. without a formal convocation of a national assembly, the effects of which could not be foreseen.32 And in the same August issue, the Analytical commended Calonne’s Lettre Adressé au Roi as providing ‘at once a distinct view of the disorders that now agitate France, and the best plan for settling them, perhaps that human wisdom can devise, and, at the same time actually carry into execution’. The reviewer sounds closer to Burke than to Wordsworth.33 Yet in October, the Analytical was commenting approvingly on the instructions to deputies in the National Assembly. It noted requests for the abolition of monopolies, and quoted a number of pleas for the abolition of slavery, before going on to express admiration for ‘a nation of twenty-four millions of people, raising their unanimous voice in favour of liberty, and the rights of human nature!’ The reviewer predicts that ‘if the French nation support their freedom, there will be more books published in that kingdom, on the subject of trade, than there have been for a century. For the spirit of freedom and the spirit of commerce are sister spirits.’ And the review ends with a wish ‘in which we hope our readers will heartily join, that freedom may every where flourish, and liberty and happiness be diffused over the whole creation of God’.34 The Monthly Review had been equally emphatic in its notice of Mémoire pour le Peuple Francais. As the reviewer explains, the pamphlet argues that the tiers état should be given a more dominant voice in the Assembly. The author’s manner is censured for being ‘too declamatory’, but the review concludes: ‘His cause, however, is good; and he has happily fallen in with the prevailing side. May success attend the friends of FREEDOM in every part of the Globe!’ 35 And in the month when the Bastille fell, the Monthly announced that an enlarged and ‘in various respects improved’ version of the journal would be launched in January 1790.36 Meanwhile in a ‘Monthly Catalogue’ dominated by the trial of Warren Hastings, a notice of Lettre aux Etats Généraux de France, invites the Monthly’s readers to ‘rejoice at the late wonderful Gallic revolution’. The review concludes: The author entreats the States General to hasten the distribution of the sweets of equality; to seize the present moment, and give consistency

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and durability to their plans and operations… . We hope, and believe, that a conduct conformable to this advice, will be followed by our new enlightened and emancipated neighbours.37 Two months later, in a review of Tyranny annihilated, the Monthly referred in the past tense to ‘the late astonishing revolution in the government of France’, while commending the book’s frontispiece depicting ‘the demolition of the Bastille, and the release of the prisoners’.38 The Monthly and the Analytical were as enthusiastic as the poets in their early response to the Revolution. The Gentleman’s Magazine was less euphoric. In July 1789 it gave prominence to Necker’s memoire on the scarcity of grain. The account records: Paris, totally deprived of its usual resources, had been fed by wheat from England; almost every other city and district of the kingdom had been equally distressed. [Necker] foresaw the necessity they should be under of recurring to rye bread in Paris, or at least to a mixed bread of rye and flour. His Majesty was resolved that the same sort should serve rich and poor, and that no other should be served at table. Louis XVI at least, it seems, did not expect his subjects to eat cake. The same magazine applauds Necker’s eulogy on the ‘liberality’ of the king, ‘who had sold the grain thus purchased, at a great loss, that the markets might be kept down, and had also given subsidies to the bakers to indemnify them’. In short, Louis had ‘done all that a King and a father could do to alleviate the distresses of his people’. 39 The events of 23 June are then described: the king’s speech to the selfstyled National Assembly, the ‘immense multitude of persons of all ranks’ who had ‘with loud and menacing cries’ demanded that Necker should remain in office, and the chorus of ‘the most violent execrations against the Archbishop of Paris, and many other still higher personages’. The magazine then records the destruction of the barrières and the looting of ‘all the houses belonging to the King’s party’, before concluding that ‘the mob has risen to a degree of ferocity unexampled in the annals of the country’, and noting that ‘the spirit of insurrection reigns also in the provinces’.40 The August 1789 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine carried a letter complimenting the editors on the fact that the ‘learning and morality’ which their periodical displays ‘are so frequently employed to combat new-born errors, or discountenance prevailing enormities’.41 However,

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the correspondent makes clear that his true target is the enormity of duelling, rather than mob action in Paris, and the editors devote twice as many pages to the Regency Crisis as they do to news from France. In September, as in August, George III’s incapacity dominates reports of the parliamentary debates, though the magazine quotes Articles IV and V of the French Declaration of Rights, explaining that those ‘are the most striking’.42 In November the same journal reviewed A True and minute Account of the Destruction of the Bastille, by J.J. Calet, ‘who had been a Prisoner there upwards of Twenty Years, and assisted at the Demolition of that infamous prison’. The reviewer comments: ‘Infamous indeed, if it be true that in the whole twenty years the writer never spoke to a human being, during which he lay in the Bastille for the sole crime of speaking freely, at a friend’s table in Paris, against lettres de cachet.’43 Yet, by the following issue (December 1789) the Gentleman’s Magazine had set its face firmly against the Revolution. In four-and-a-half hardhitting pages on Price’s Revolution Society sermon, the reverend doctor is ridiculed for being ‘inflated with a false confidence in Gallic liberty’. Is Dr Price, the reviewer asks, ‘so uninformed in the History of Greece as not to know by what means it lost its liberty; that factious democracy brought on aristocratic, and afterwards monarchic, tyranny?’ And in an echo of Price’s own invocation of the Nunc Dimittis, the reviewer intones: Depart incendiary in civil, schismatic in religious, rights! No: live to see the success of the thirty millions of people, and to defend it, as you did of dear America. Live to be convinced that the world must be wickeder, and the passions of mankind more let loose. For the end is not yet. … Believe a layman for once, that the religion you profess to teach was made for the heart of individuals; that the rights of men and citizens, Magna Charta, and the Bill of Rights, with all the remonstrances and petitions and addresses engrafted on them, are not once to be found in the Gospel of Christ, or the Law of Moses, which he came not to destroy, but to fulfil.44 Burke himself would not chastise Price or his principles more severely. In that same December issue, the Gentleman’s Magazine prints a list of 26 toasts proposed at a dinner held by the Society for Constitutional Information, to celebrate the centenary of the English Bill of Rights. The list of toasts includes: 1. The Majesty of the People 6. The Liberties of Ireland…

12 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

10. The Liberty of the Press, the bulwark of liberty 14. May the cause of Freedom flourish in every region of the globe! 15. A speedy abolition of the slave trade 18. May our sailors be volunteers and not slaves 20. The President and Vice-President of the United States of America… 24. Dr Price, the friend of the universe 26. The glorious era in which the Bill of Rights was signed, and the privileges of Britons secured. The list was printed without comment, presumably because the editors considered it sufficiently damning as it stood.45 Yet the ‘Foreign Affairs’ section of the magazine reports events in Paris with surprising objectivity. An account of the Fête de Fédération, on the first Bastille Day, describes the French Revolution as having ‘raised to new life, as it may be called, so many millions who were dead to the feelings of freedom, and are now raised to be partakers of the blessings of independence’. The same account concludes: Grand illuminations crowned the triumph of the day; and the only breach of the peace that took place through the whole was provoked through the stubborn obstinacy of some inveterate Aristocrates, who did not light up their houses, or who had fled with their domestics, and had left their windows dark emblems of their own minds.46 And in the foreign reports for September, the magazine even carried the congratulatory address to the National Assembly from Price’s London Revolution Society, together with Charles de Lameth’s response: We ought to take occasion to address the people of England, through the medium of this Society, in order to be ascertained that this nation, formerly our rival, now our friend, has no intention of attacking our liberty by its present armament.47 It was this assumption that Price spoke for the people of England that so enraged Burke – hence his dismissive reference to grasshoppers. And the true editorial view of the Gentleman’s Magazine is better reflected in an assessment that appeared in February 1790. When, it sardonically suggested, the National Assembly had staved off national

Bastille Euphoria 13

bankruptcy, removed the prospect of famine, and guaranteed public safety, ‘then let us pronounce the Revolution in France permanent and useful’. But until then, ‘let us not suffer ourselves to be dazzled by plans, propositions and resolutions, which do not reach beyond words, and have as little efficacy as the resolutions of our own constitutional and other patriotic societies, or the unconnected axioms they adopt from theoretical writers’.48 This was indeed Burke before Burke. And when Reflections appeared in November 1790, neatly timed to coincide with the new parliamentary session, the Gentleman’s Magazine gave it 11–12 double-column pages, concluding with this tribute to its author: How far we, as REVIEWERS, concur with Mr B. in opinion on the present subject, will be seen from our account of the respective publications. If we have expressed ourselves with warmth about the favourers of the French Revolution in our own country, we have but acted as became CITIZENS of that happy country. Our sentiments of the Revolution and similar Societies have been uniform, and still are; that, like all other societies, they are made up of intriguing malcontents who guide, and weak enthusiasts who are led. But we have confidence in the judgment and prudence of our fellow-citizens that the majority will not easily be misguided or misled. To all who require the guidance and leading of sober reason and sage experience, we recommend Mr Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution.49 It is indeed the voice of Burke that has come down to posterity, but the following chapters will seek to make audible the protests of the too-often disparaged critics of Burke’s provocative hyperbole.

2 Burke Rebutted

Among Burke’s earliest critics were some of his closest associates. He sent a draft of the early part of Reflections on the Revolution in France to fellow-MP Philip Francis for comment. Francis was shocked, and asked Burke whether he really thought it was worthy of a Privy Councillor ‘to enter into a war of Pamphlets with Dr Price?’ Burke ought, Francis suggested, to adopt a grave, direct and serious tone: ‘In a case so interesting as the errors of a great nation, and the calamities of great individuals, and feeling them so deeply as you profess to do, all manner of insinuation is improper, all jibe and nickname prohibited.’ As for the portrayal of Marie Antoinette, Francis considers it ‘pure foppery’. As he explains: ‘If she be a perfect female character, you ought to take your ground upon her virtues. If she be the reverse it is ridiculous in any but a lover to place her personal charms in opposition to her crimes.’1 In the course of this correspondence, Francis contrasts the humane achievements of the Enlightenment with those priests, bishops and cardinals ‘which laid waste a province and founded a monastery’. Reminding Burke of the less chivalrous aspects of the ancien régime, Francis adds: ‘When the provinces are scourged to the bone by a mercenary and merciless military power, and every drop of its blood and substance extorted from it by the edicts of a royal council, the case seems very tolerable to those who are not involved in it.’2 Burke, like other authors who ask advice, brushed off such criticisms, writing tartly to Francis: ‘All that you have said against the despotism of Monarchies, you must be sensible that I have heard a thousand times before, though certainly not so neatly and sharply expressed.’3 In January 1791, two years before Britain went to war with France, Burke would write: ‘If ever a foreign prince enters into France, he must enter 14

Burke Rebutted 15

it as into a country of assassins. The mode of civilized war will not be practised, nor are the French who act on the present system, entitled to expect it.’4 And it is the vehemence of Burke’s language in Reflections that is censured by the monthly reviews. Even the Critical Review, still in 1791 sympathetic to Burke, would question his authorship of the anonymous Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs because the pamphlet’s ‘mild argumentative style’ was so at variance with the ‘perpetual brilliancy of spirit, fire and imagination, with new and unusual combinations, with the coruscations of metaphor and imagery’ normally associated with Burke’s mode of argument.5 The Monthly Review noticed Reflections on publication, in a 40-page review spanning the November and December issues. The Monthly notes that the form of Burke’s book ‘has more the air of a popular harangue, than that of a letter to a friend. It is declamatory, diffuse and desultory.’ Burke’s language, the reviewer decides, has ‘much more of the warmth and vehemence of Demosthenes, than of his force and energy’. The review continues: His metaphors are drawn from every object in the creation, divine and human, natural and artificial, ancient and modern, recondite and familiar, sublime and grovelling, gross and refined. He ranges from the angels of heaven to the furies of hell; from the aëronaut, soaring above the clouds in his balloon, to the mole, nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth; from the living grasshopper of the field, to the stuffed birds and the dead mummy of the museum… . The reviewer concludes his catalogue of metaphors by observing that Burke relies on a multiplicity of ‘light, airy and refined’ arguments, rather than on ‘the strength and solidity of any single and independent proposition’.6 The Monthly is aware that much of Reflections is intended for domestic application, and picks up Burke’s remark that ‘whenever our neighbour’s house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own’.7 Remembering that the immediate targets are Dr Price and the London Revolution Society, the reviewer describes how Burke ‘with the skill of an experienced fireman’ at first ‘directs his stream full on the powder-mill in Old Jewry; and plays away manfully on that magazine of mischief, whence, as he seems to suppose, the Guy Fawkeses of the present day draw the whole stock of their combustibles’. An editorial footnote challenges this alarmist view, arguing that the doctrines of the London Revolution Society are ‘much less

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fitted to produce revolutions, than those which the right honourable gentleman himself so zealously preaches’. 8 The reader is referred to Bacon’s remark that ‘a froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation’. Burke’s pleading for ‘antient usage, and precedent, and prescription, and non-resistance, with all the vehemence, and with much of the very sophistry, of the most determined tory’, the reviewer remarks, comes ill from a gentleman who ‘if we are not misinformed’ is a member of the Whig Club’. It is not, it seems, ‘in France alone that a new vocabulary has been adopted (or that new meanings have been affixed to old words) within these few years’.9 The Monthly, in giving a lengthy extract from Burke’s attack on the members of the National Assembly and their ‘perilous adventures of untried policy’, deplores his dismissive sneers: He finds the third estate to consist of obscure provincial advocates; of stewards of petty local jurisdictions; county attornies; notaries; and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation; the fomentors and conductors of the petty war of village vexation: mixed with a handful of country clowns, unable to read or write; about as many traders; and a tolerable number of physicians and stock-jobbers. The clergy is made up of mere country curates… .10 It is Burke’s lordly tone that irritates the editors of the Analytical Review. Concluding a notice that similarly extends over two issues, the Analytical for December 1790 remarks: On the whole, though we have been frequently pleased in the perusal of this curious publication, yet we must add that we have been more frequently disgusted; and not the least disgusting part is the extreme arrogance of our author, who, more than once, offers himself to the view of foreigners as the oracle of Great Britain, and as speaking the collective sense of the great body of the people.11 Whether Burke’s sentiments are indeed those of the nation, the Analytical insists, will be judged by the number and ability of the contestants in the controversy, and the editors conclude that it is ‘no very favourable omen for Mr B. that we have at this moment before us, not less than seven very able pamphlets in answer to his Reflections, without a single syllable on his side of the question’. The Analytical reviews those seven answers to Burke in the same December issue. The first, by a member of the London Revolution Society, questions the

Burke Rebutted 17

accuracy of Burke’s account of events in France ‘which he suspects to be as much overcharged as his representations on Indian affairs’. Another pamphlet, of 42 pages, similarly challenges the accuracy of Burke’s information on France. The author claims that ‘during the last five months, though he resided in that country, he never heard of a single robbery or murder, nor with the exception of the revolt of the regiment of Chateauvieux, any violence more notorious than the breaking of a few windows and the pulling down of some old coats of arms’. Indeed, the author adds that ‘not 2000 persons have proved the victims of a revolution which has broken the fetters of twenty-five millions’.12 Among the shorter pamphlets, the Analytical particularly welcomes A Letter to the Earl of Stanhope. The editors correctly identify the author as Catharine Macaulay Graham, whom they consider ‘a much abler and more profound politician than Mr Burke’, and who, they think, ‘completely oversets all his fundamental arguments’. The review asserts that ‘Mr Burke’s system is shown to be even more illiberal than Mr Hobbes, and peculiarly adapted to corrupt the minds and dispositions of those in government.’ As for the French: The moderation displayed by the populace of France, on finding themselves suddenly invested with supreme power, after having bent for so long a time under a grievous weight of oppression, is justly a subject of admiration with our author, whose coolness and judgment forms an excellent contrast to the exaggerated declamation of Mr B. The Analytical reviewers quote Mrs Graham’s view of what they call ‘the absurd principle’ on which Burke founds his theory of the British constitution: I have always myself considered the boasted birthright of an Englishman as an arrogant pretension built on a beggarly foundation. It is an arrogant pretension, because it intimates a kind of exclusion to the rest of mankind from the same privileges; and it is beggarly, because it rests our legitimate freedom on the alms of our princes. The extract continues: ‘We cannot with any grounds of reason set up our own constitution as the model which all other nations ought implicitly to follow, unless we are certain that it bestows the greatest

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possible happiness on the people which in the nature of things any government can bestow.’13 The minor pamphlets noticed by both the Monthly and the Analytical include the appendix to Thoughts on the Commencement of a New Parliament by Joseph Towers. The Monthly quotes Towers on Burke: He has a great profusion of rhetoric, but is very far from having an equal proportion of logic; and his statement of facts, relative to the French revolution, has often much more of the appearance of an historical romance, than of a just or impartial account of the real state of things. The author notes that Burke has ‘a great dislike to Old Jewry sermons’. But Towers has ‘never met with any Old Jewry sermon that contained so much of the false pathetic, as is to be found in the publication of Mr Burke’.14 The Analytical’s review focuses on the pamphlet’s defence of the political societies: Dr T. explains the nature of the Constitutional Society, and shews that it is most falsely represented by Mr Burke. It is wholly unconnected with booksellers, and its publications consisted of political tracts, essays, &c. from Sydney, Locke, Trenchard, Lord Somers, &c. That it is by no means an obscure club, since it numbers among its members, the dukes of Norfolk and Richmond, the earl of Effingham, Sir W. Jones, Mr Sheridan and a number of respectable members of parliament. The Analytical reviewer tells us that Dr Towers concludes with ‘an earnest recommendation to the people of England to cultivate the friendship of France, an alliance with which, he asserts, would be equally honourable and advantageous to both nations’.15 Noting, supposedly to Burke’s discomfiture, that ‘two of his boldest adversaries are women’, the Analytical commends Mary Wollstonecraft’s reply to Burke. Her Vindication of the Rights of Men, ‘notwithstanding it may be “the effusions of the moment” ’, may be read, the reviewer aptly predicts, ‘with pleasure and improvement when the controversy, which gave rise to them, is forgotten’.16 Wollstonecraft, friend and neighbour of Dr Price, championed the ‘rights of man’ before Paine appropriated the title. The Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1791), true to its name, was suitably supercilious:

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The rights of men asserted by a fair lady! The age of chivalry cannot be over, or the sexes have changed their ground. Miss Williams is half afraid of shivering lances, but Mrs Wollstonecraft enters the lists cap-àpie – as the ladies some years back took the field at Warley Common.17 Wollstonecraft censures Burke for his ‘mortal antipathy to reason’, but the Gentleman’s Magazine cannot find ‘a shadow of reason in her declamation’. While Scripture recognizes a distinction between rich and poor, ‘Mrs W.’s millennium is to restore mankind to the level of the golden age. Poverty in her eyes, whether occasioned by the vices of the rich, or the vices of the poor, is equally an object of pity.’ And the reviewer scornfully concludes: ‘The French reformers are groping blindfold in the chaos of their reason; and thus hold themslves out to the world, through the medium of a few puffing friends in England, as the models of legislation and right reason.’18 The Monthly complains that Wollstonecraft ‘overloads her sentences with foreign ideas and a multiplicity of words’, so that her meaning is ‘concealed among remote connections, dependencies, and allusions; and is sometimes involved in tropes and figures, which rather darken than illuminate’. But the reviewer nevertheless commends ‘the ardent love of liberty, humanity and virtue, which evidently actuates the heart, and directs the pen of the very ingenious author’. 19 Her publisher was the radical bookseller, Joseph Johnson, publisher of the Analytical, which had been founded in 1788 by Thomas Christie. Unlike Burke, Christie had lived in Paris, and his Letters on the Revolution of France was therefore based on personal though partisan observation. The Monthly devoted more than a dozen pages to reviewing Christie’s 276-page pamphlet, noting that Burke’s ‘sketch’ of the new French constitution was objectionable in being ‘made for the express purpose of censure’. The Monthly reviewer was less inclined than Burke to dismiss the work of the constitution-makers: …dark and narrow indeed must be the soul which can suppose it possible not to profit and improve by contemplating the result of such united wisdom, continually exerted for two whole years, and originally selected with care, expressly for the purpose, from every quarter of one of the most enlightened nations of Europe. The Monthly cites Christie’s’ claims that ‘no change short of a radical reform’ was possible, and that ‘the evils and calamities attendant on

20 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

that revolution have been comparatively small’ and ‘grossly and shamefully exaggerated’. The reviewer adds that ‘though nothing can justify, yet there are many things to palliate, the enormity of the few who were the perpetrators of them’.20 Among the many extracts from Christie’s pamphlet, quoted by the Monthly, is an attack on Burke’s view of monarchy: I believe that Mr Burke is the first writer, who ever imagined that the [1688] Revolution established the principle of an unchangeable hereditary succession, and abrogated the right of the people to interfere, at any future period, in the appointment of a sovereign, or to render that appointment elective. If that had really been the outcome of the 1688 Revolution, Christie asks, why did supporters of the House of Stuart see the revolution as having given ‘a death wound to their favourite principle of uninterrupted hereditary right’? Christie argues that patriotic Englishmen ‘may deduce important advantages’ to England from the French Revolution. ‘But’, he continues: it will not be by imitating Mr Burke in an indiscriminate abuse of the French legislators as fools and madmen. It will not be by censuring, upon newspaper information, measures which they do not understand. It will not be by indulging national vanity, and condemning without examination everything done in France, that differs in the smallest degree from the regulations in England, as if we had seen the end of all perfection… . Drawing on his personal experience in France, Christie asserts that ‘Mr Burke’s accounts of riots, murders and burnings, &c. &c. are exaggerated in the highest degree.’ During six months in Paris, ‘I walked about every-where, mixed with all classes of society, spoke my opinion publicly of every public measure, was abroad at all hours, and never met with injury nor even experienced alarm. Yet at this time my friends in England were writing almost every post, anxiously enquiring if I was in safety; and our newspapers were filled with stories of dreadful mobs, riots, assassinations, &c. that never existed.’ He concludes that the French will become a model: ‘I am well persuaded, that when the moment of passion and prejudice is past, those nations who now calumniate them, will, in many points become their imitators.’ The

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Monthly makes clear that it admires ‘Mr Christie’s manly sense, and extensive information’.21 It is no surprise to find the Analytical, Christie’s journal, agreeing that (in the reviewer’s words) ‘Mr B. has materially injured the cause he means to serve’, or endorsing Christie’s claim that ‘he has heard more talk about government, more sedition in Mr Burke’s sense of the word, since the publication of his book than ever he heard in all his life before’, and that ‘Mr B. might be indicted for writing a libel to disturb the peace of society.’ Christie was not alone in regarding Burke’s writings as irresponsibly provocative and his prophecies as self-fulfilling. The review likens Burke’s ‘curious idea of binding posterity by unalterable laws’ to the folly of Aurora who ‘asked immortality for her husband, but forgot to ask for him perpetual youth’. As Christie himself remarks of Burke’s insistence on reforming rather than overthrowing the institutions of the ancien régime: The ancient laws which fixed the constitution of the kingdom, if it deserves the name of constitution, were scattered through a thousand volumes, many of them uncertain, many become obsolete. … Mr Burke would have had the Assembly, like a society of antiquaries, to sit down and waste half a century in poring over all charters, in examining precedents, to form some kind of regular system out of a mass of dust, contradiction and confusion.22 Christie’s moderate tone sometimes gives way to the lurid language of Burke, as when he describes the government of the ancien régime as a system ‘where, though women are nominally excluded from the throne, yet the country was really governed by a set of prostitutes’.23 It was nevertheless Christie’s moderation that was praised in Literary Memoirs of Living Authors (1798), leading a reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine to comment tartly: ‘His moderation was most violent democratism, and his christianity socinianism. He possessed considerable merit, but was of a most unsettled disposition.’ 24 If the Gentleman’s Magazine found Christie’s language and political principles immoderate, it is not surprising that it condemned the republicanism of Paine, Burke’s most famous, though not necessarily most persuasive critic. Its review of Part I of Rights of Man, in August 1791, began: ‘Bold words, without depth of reasoning, characterize this performance. The rights of man are everything that men think proper to claim.’ The editors patronizingly ‘forgive Mr P’s language in respect to our Sovereign and

22 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

our Parliament, because it is plainly the language of a man in a passion, and springing from the resentment of an American’. The reviewer prefers the new Polish constitution to the American model, and urges ‘all lovers of Revolution’ to see in truncated but reformed Poland ‘an hereditary monarchy and a representative body of three orders established as fundamentals; and the Constitution of Great Britain made an example to a nation not a century ago reputed as barbarous’.25 Ironically, it was the cynical destruction of the new Poland, between 1793 and 1795, that intensified opposition to Burke’s crusade to restore the Bourbons with the troops of the partitioning powers. In its dismissive treatment of Paine, the Gentleman’s Magazine urged Englishmen not to ‘set up America as authority for rejecting, or France for degrading monarchy; at least till the experiment has been fairly tried’, and noted that neither America nor France had been a republic as long as England was when ‘she waded through a sea of blood to unmake and restore a king’. 26 Paine’s linking of the American and French Revolutions was implied in the Analytical’s review of Rights of Man in March 1791: ‘It is unnecessary to inform our readers of the influence which his celebrated pamphlet, entitled “Common Sense”, is supposed to have had in producing the declaration of American independence.’27 Attitudes to the American Revolution undoubtedly defined attitudes to what was happening in France. The Critical Review, quoting from Stedman’s History of the American War the author’s observation that the war was ‘a wonder to the present, and an example to all future ages’, laments the fact that the importance of that war ‘has never been generally acknowledged’. It continues: ‘From recent events it is with regret we surmise, that another generation of deluding and deluded politicians must pass away, before the history of the war will produce its full effect on the mind of man, and contribute to meliorate the state of nations.’28 For Burke, the American Revolution was merely a belated extension to colonial Englishmen of the benefits of the 1688 Revolution, whereas the French Revolution was a quite different phenomenon – an ‘armed doctrine’ as he would later call it.29 Paine, Price and Priestley, and other supporters of the French, saw the ideas of ‘89 as a carrying into Europe of the principles of the American Declaration of Independence. The Enlightenment’s political principles, exported to America, had now returned to their home soil. In concluding its treatment of Rights of Man, the Analytical drew a distinction between Burke and his most hard-hitting opponent:

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Mr Burke seduces us along by the charms of his eloquence; plain, but forcible, Mr Paine carries us away with him by the invincible energy of truth and sense. Fanciful and excursive, Mr B. delights the imagination by the beauty of his ornaments; while his opponent holds our judgment captive by the native vigour of his arguments, the originality of his sentiments, and the pointedness of his remarks. Mr B. is the polished and playful courtier who dances in his chains; Mr Paine is the stern republican, who exults in his liberty, and treats with equal freedom the monarch and the peasant.30 In thus focusing on differences in style rather than in substance, the Analytical appears to be treating Burke with uncharacteristic evenhandedness. True, the astonishing popular success of Paine’s pamphlet was not yet obvious to reviewers; but one nevertheless senses that even those periodicals most sympathetic to French liberty seek to keep Paine at arm’s length. Johnson might be happy to publish Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches, and the attacks on Burke by Wollstonecraft and Christie, but he reneged on his promise to publish the first part of Rights of Man. The Analytical was less equivocal in its praise of another champion of both the American and French revolutions. Its reviewer decides that Joseph Priestley’s Letters to Burke ‘proves’ that the French Revolution ‘is not the act of the national assembly only, but, if the nation acquiesces, must be considered as the act of the nation at large’. Priestley, the review continues, does not regard the new French constitutional arrangements as perfect, but thinks ‘it may easily undergo such convenient changes, as after-experience shall dictate’. The reviewer quotes Priestley’s claim that the expense of the American war alone ‘would have converted all the waste grounds of this country into gardens’. Priestley had asked: ‘What canals, bridges, and noble roads, &c. &c. would it not have have made for us. If the pride of nations must be gratified, let it be in such things as these and not in the idle pageantry of a court calculated only to corrupt and enslave a nation.’31 Priestley’s pamphlet was greeted even more effusively by the Monthly Review: these letters, we say, will give pleasure to every enlarged mind. The last letter, which delineates a bright prospect of the dawn of liberty,

24 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

peace, virtue, and happiness opened to both the new and the old world, by the American and French revolutions, will warm every benevolent heart… .32 And in a playful reference to the author’s chemical discoveries, the review notes that Priestley ‘condemns and analyzes several of the Right Honourable Gentleman’s highly rarified and attenuated vapours; and finds them to contain a greater quantity of noxious and impious gas, than of wholesome respirable air’. 33 When Priestley’s laboratory and Dissenting meeting-house became the targets of Birmingham’s ‘Church and King’ mob later in the year, the Gentleman’s Magazine showed scant sympathy. In reviewing Priestley’s complaints in Address to the Inhabitants of Birmingham, the magazine pronounced the ‘manifest tendency’ of Priestley’s defence as being ‘beyond the exculpation of an individual from a charge amounting to high treason’. Besides denying the charge, Priestley indulges in personal recrimination ‘unworthy a gentleman, a scholar and a Christian’. Priestley’s protest, the reviewer claims, exaggerates the importance of losing ‘a philosophical apparatus and a collection of MSS, from whose liberal source the world was to have been re-philosophized, re-policied and re-Christianized’.34 The Gentleman’s Magazine soon gave prominence to ‘An Occasional Correspondent’, who concluded helpfully: Permit me to add that, as a late factious and fanatical politician predicted that Boston would be the Land of Liberty, the Mount Sion, the Heavenly Jerusalem, you cannot do better than advise all discontented Democrats to cross the Atlantic immediately, and join their brethren in the Unites States.35 Three years later, when the Priestleys eventually sought asylum in Pennsylvania, a correspondent in the Gentleman’s Magazine called America ‘the Botany Bay of the whole world’.36 Strangely, the most persuasive opponent of Burke is little remembered today. His attack was admittedly couched in more measured and more cerebral terms, and he probably ensured his own eclipse by announcing in 1801 that he had come to regard the French Revolution as ‘that conspiracy against God and man’. James Mackintosh (1765–1832) had little success either as physician or as publicist until he wrote his Vindiciae Gallicae in answer to Burke’s Reflections. About one-third of the way into his 350-page pamphlet,

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Mackintosh challenges Burke’s claim that Louis XVI’s government could have been reformed. He writes: The three Aristocracies, Military, Sacerdotal, and Judicial, may be considered as having formed the French Government. They have appeared, so far as we have considered them, incorrigible. … They were not perverted by the accidental depravity of their members. They were not infected by any transient passion, which new circumstances would extirpate. The fault was in the essence of the institutions themselves, which were irreconcilable with a free Government. And to the suggestion that ‘the progressive wisdom of an enlightened nation’ would in time have remedied those defects, ‘without convulsion’, Mackintosh retorts: ‘To this argument I confidently answer, that these institutions would have destroyed LIBERTY, before Liberty had corrected their SPIRIT. Power vegetates with more vigour after these gentle prunings.’37 According to Mackintosh: All the governments that now exist in the world (except the United States of America) have been fortuitously formed. They are the produce of chance, not the work of art. They have been altered, impaired, improved and destroyed by accidental circumstances, beyond the control of wisdom.38 What the eighteenth century sought, he explains, was ‘a Government of art, the work of legislative intellect, reared on the immutable basis of natural right and general happiness, which should combine the excellencies, and exclude the defects of the various constitutions which chance has scattered around the world’. The ‘philosophers of Europe’ had produced such a pattern: the National Assembly had only to ‘affix the stamp of laws to what had been prepared by the research of philosophy’.39 Such tributes to the philosophes, as the architects of the French Revolution, would soon be used against the so-called ‘English Jacobins’ by cartoonists and columnists alike. But in June 1791, the Monthly Review devoted no less than ten pages to a detailed and sympathetic consideration of Mackintosh’s arguments. Asserting that the author of Vindiciae Gallicae had shown that what happened in France ‘was a Revolution, not of a party, but of the whole people’, the reviewer quotes extensively from Mackintosh’s text. He considers that ‘Mr M. ably

26 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

vindicates the National Assembly from the intemperate and unmerited aspersions cast on that illustrious body by Mr Burke’, and regards the author’s remarks on ‘unsoldiering the army’ by arming all citizens, as ‘truly admirable’.40 The Analytical accorded Vindiciae Gallicae less space than the Monthly had done, but it quoted with approval Mackintosh’s criticism of Burke’s misplaced sensibility ‘which seems scared by the homely miseries of the vulgar, and is attracted only by the splendid sorrows of royalty, and agonizes at the slightest pang that assails the heart of sottishness or prostitution, if they are placed by fortune on a throne’. The Analytical also applauds the author’s defence of the alienation of church lands: His principal arguments are, that it has never been supposed that any class of public servants are proprietors; the clergy are a class of public servants who have undertaken to instruct the people for a certain salary; the only difference between theirs and the salaries of other servants, is that it is paid in land or tythes. And the same journal cites not only Mackintosh’s assertion that ‘no commercial house of importance has failed in France since the revolution’, but also his conclusion: ‘Happy is the people, whose commerce flourishes in ledgers, while it is bewailed in orations; and remains untouched in calculation, while it expires in pictures of eloquence.’ 41 Mackintosh has left posterity a memorable description of Burke’s particular brand of eloquence: He can cover the most ignominious retreat by a brilliant allusion. He can parade his arguments with masterly generalship when they are strong. He can escape from an intolerable position into a splendid declamation. He can sap the most impregnable conviction by pathos, and put to flight a host of syllogisms with a sneer. Absolved from all the laws of vulgar method, he can advance a groupe of magnificent horrors to make a breach in our hearts, through which the most undisciplined rabble of arguments may enter in triumph.42 Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae is often regarded as ‘the only worthy answer’ to Burke’s Reflections.43 It certainly earned the author a European reputation and launched him on a successful legal career, which brought him a knighthood in 1803 – after his recantation of ‘Jacobin’ principles. But as we consider the range of response to Burke,

Burke Rebutted 27

what is striking is the number of contributions rather than their individual weight. Pitt’s most recent biographer reckons that there were at least 25 publications answering Burke in 1790–91 alone. And taking the 1790s as a whole, I have identified 65 books or pamphlets directly addressed to Burke’s attacks on the French Revolution, of which 55 are hostile. (See Appendix.)44 Whatever accolades may have been bestowed on Burke by posterity, he did not sweep the field when challenged by his contemporaries.

3 Instant History: Burke, Godwin and the Annual Registers

In June 1791 the Critical Review began its notice of Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly with the observation that ‘Mr Burke’s Reflections have excited the opposition of a host, while few have been his advocates and defenders.’ The review continues: To a careless or distant observer, it would appear that, on the first appearance of his work, the whole nation was to express its dissent or indignation; that it was rejected with contempt, as frivolous, absurd, illogical and contradictory. The fact is, however, we suspect, very different. The silent admirers are numerous, and they are among those who, averse from controversy, reflect with coolness, and decide with judgment.1 Silent admirers are invisible to the historian, and this study must rely on the notices and editorial comment of the periodical reviews. Who, then, came to Burke’s defence in print? In February 1791, the Analytical Review reminded its readers that it had earlier predicted that ‘the balance of ability and argument would be on the side of freedom; nor does the appearance of this almost solitary pamphlet induce us to alter our opinion’. The review considers that this ‘solitary’ defence of Burke, like the Reflections, is ‘powerful in invective, but impotent in argument’. The review concludes: ‘If this be the best vindication of Mr Burke that can be offered to the public, his opponents have great cause for triumph indeed.’2 The Analytical gave equally short shrift to Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, allegedly by a French curé, M. Rosibonne, which its reviewer characterized as an ‘ill-written and incoherent’ pamphlet that attempted to outdo Burke by depicting the French National Assembly 28

Instant History 29

as ‘hordes of forest-born boors, transformed into wild beasts, crowding together and vowing to exterminate our gentlemen’. 3 The Monthly Review decided that the same pamphlet was ‘entirely of Anglo-Gallican manufacture’, and mocked the author’s description of Burke’s opponents as those ‘who have raised their impotent pens against the prince of literature, [and] have produced nothing but a bundle of stitched trash’.4 More serious attention was given to Edward Tatham’s Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on Politics (1791). The Critical praised Dr Tatham for his ‘manly and dignified language’ directed against ‘the levelling innovations of the period’. It nevertheless considered that the author perhaps carried ‘the spirit of despotism and of the hierarchy, farther than is expedient at this time, farther than just reasoning and rational enquiry would support them at any era’.5 The Monthly challenged Tatham’s thesis more robustly: Taking men as we find them at this day, in this, or any other country, we would ask Dr Tatham, what it is that gives any man, here or elsewhere, a right to command another? or what it is that binds a man to submit himself, and his actions, to the direction of his neighbour, which does not equally bind his neighbour to submit to him? The editors added that they could not satisfactorily answer these questions ‘otherwise than by saying, that all right and authority to govern is derived from the consent and acquiescence of the governed; and that when this acquiescence ceases, the authority ceases also’.6 Earlier that year, the Monthly reported on Samuel Cooper’s attack on Priestley’s riposte to Burke, noting that Dr Cooper ‘is wonderfully delighted with the thoughts of his having demolished the principles of Mr Locke and his followers’. The review refers ironically to Cooper’s ‘firm trust and confidence, not only that the unsubstantial pageants called natural rights, are now dissolved; but that he has forever expelled the words from any future admission among the terms that appertain to the science of politics’. The reviewer adds that ‘after all the dust and smoke that he makes with his rusty hoe and dung fork, to root out this noxious weed, as he deems it, its seeds appear to us to have taken such a hold on the soil, that we verily believe it will shoot up again as vigorously as ever’.7 Does one sense that Burke’s supporting pamphleteers are damaging rather than promoting his cause? Events rather than polemics would ensure the success of Burke’s crusade against the ideas of ’89.8

30 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

As early as April 1790, in reviewing Stanhope’s answer to Burke’s speech on the Army estimates, and a clear six months before the appearance of Reflections, the Critical Review had admitted: ‘We have spoken in favour of the revolution, at a time when expectation was sanguine, and when the first steps were promising. … Each day’s experience adds, however, to the force of Mr Burke’s opinion …’. In the light of developments across the Channel, the Critical suggests that the ‘warmth of our language’ in the previous issue, when reviewing two pamphlets on Dr Price’s Old Jewry sermon, ‘is scarcely too strong for the circumstances of the situation in France’. 9 In 1790 the Critical Review had not yet acquired its later radical bias. Within a year Burke would break with his Whig allies and throw in his lot with Pitt. Burke would gradually move Pitt from his initial wary neutrality, first to a declaration of war in defence of the balance of power, and finally to a crusade against what Burke termed the ‘armed doctrine’ of the French Revolution. For Burke the war aim was nothing short of restoring the Bourbons to the French throne – an objective that was also insisted on by Prussia and Austria.10 Yet even after the unsuccessful flight of the French royal family, and their return from Varennes to Paris in the summer of 1791, Pitt could write to Hester, Countess of Chatham: ‘We are still anxious spectators.’11 And in the printed version of his budget speech on 17 February 1792, he is reported as predicting: We must not count with certainty on a continuance of our present prosperity … but unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation in Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than we may at the present moment.12 Despite Burke’s Reflections and his vehement Commons speeches, there is no hint yet of any ministerial plan for Britain to interfere in the affairs of France.13 When the French monarchy fell in August 1792, George III wrote to Grenville: ‘Undoubtedly there is no step I should not willingly take for the personal safety of the French king and his family that does not draw this country into meddling with the internal disturbances of that ill-fated Kingdom.’14 And when French victories at Valmy and Jémappes led to the invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, Grenville told Buckingham how thankful he was that ‘we had the wit to keep ourselves out of the glorious enterprize …, and that we were

Instant History 31

not tempted by the hope of sharing the spoils in the division of France, nor by the prospect of crushing all democratical principles all over the world’.15 Grenville and Pitt were evidently happy to leave Austria and Prussia to suppress the Revolution, but it was the Duke of Brunswick’s manifesto of 25 July, threatening the destruction of Paris, that decided the fate of the French monarchy, and brought Britain into the war. The French response to the Brunswick Manifesto was indeed provocative in its turn. Between 16 November and 3 December, not only did the National Convention decide to put Louis XVI on trial, but it ordered the Austrians to be pursued wherever they might retreat, it incorporated Savoy into France, it issued its Fraternal Decree to any country wishing to overthrow a despotic government, and it proclaimed freedom of navigation throughout the Scheldt estuary. The opening of the Scheldt provided Pitt with his casus belli in the timehallowed principle of the balance of power and the sanctity of treaties. French action certainly infringed the 1648 Treaty of Munster, reaffirmed in subsequent Anglo-French treaties; and it also breached the 1788 Anglo-Dutch treaty. But Pitt and Grenville had acted without consulting the cabinet when as early as 13 November (three days before the French decree on the Scheldt) they promised British assistance to Holland ‘as circumstances require, against any attempt to invade its dominions or to disturb its Government’. 16 The guarantee was meant to warn off the French, but the text did not reach Paris until after 20 November when the Convention ratified the Executive Council’s decree. Next day French gunboats entered the Scheldt, and on the 29th Britain promised the Dutch to send a squadron if necessary. While the British government declined to use diplomatic channels, on the grounds that it could not treat with an illegal regime, the ministry ordered the buying-up of published ‘libels’ with a view to prosecution, ordered the embodiment of the militia (thus necessitating the recall of Parliament) and on 19 December introduced a bill ‘for establishing regulations respecting Aliens arriving in this kingdom, or resident therein in certain places’.17 The previous day Paine’s trial had begun in his absence. Having refused to meet Chauvelin, the French envoy, Pitt stated the British position in his note of 31 December 1792, published in the True Briton and the Sun on 16 January: England never will consent that France shall arrogate the power of annulling at her pleasure, and under the pretence of a … natural

32 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

right, of which she makes herself the only judge, the political system of Europe, established by solemn treaties, and guaranteed by the consent of all powers. Pitt’s resort to threats rather than negotiation did not stop there. In a speech on 20 December he had condemned the French authorities for their treatment of Louis XVI, which he described as ‘a conduct which at once united the highest degree of cruelty and insanity’. If the death sentence were passed, it would be ‘to France eternally disgraceful, and to the world detestable’. And (already echoing Burke) he characterized France’s military activities as ‘a war of extirpation’. Despite Wilberforce’s plea that Pitt should take Parliament into his confidence, the secret negotiations with the central European powers, and with Spain and Holland, were not divulged.18 The French recalled Chauvelin in favour of Maret, but before the change took place, news of Louis XVI’s death sentence had reached London. Chauvelin was told to leave: when he arrived in Paris on 29 January, the news of his expulsion provoked fury. The French executive council responded by immediately rescinding the 1786 Anglo-French commercial treaty, and by voting to declare war on Holland and ‘the King of England’. The fact that France declared war first does not altogether settle the question of provocation. On 12 February 1793, Pitt told the Commons: ‘We have pushed to its utmost extent, the system of temperance and moderation: we have held out the means of accommodation: we have waited till the last moment for satisfactory explanation. These means of accommodation have been slighted and abused…’. It is difficult to reconcile this unambiguously with the sequence of events, or yet to regard it as evidence of Pitt’s early conversion to Burke’s view. But the Address to His Majesty, which Pitt now moved, contained the claim that: we are persuaded, that whatever his Majesty’s faithful subjects must consider as most dear and sacred, the stability of our happy constitution, the security and honour of his Majesty’s crown, and the preservation of our laws, our liberty and our religion, are all involved in the issue of the present contest… .19 No doubt Pitt had one eye on public opinion. According to Loughborough, the prime minister not only thought that war was inevitable, and ‘the sooner it was begun the better’, but believed that public opinion ‘was disposed for war, which might not be the case six

Instant History 33

weeks hence’.20 Pitt’s most recent major biographer exonerates him from charges of promoting a secret agenda, and sees him as ‘a statesman interpreting his case amid scenes which he did not fully understand’.21 It is not surprising that, against the background of the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence, Pitt should continue to think of France as Britain’s natural enemy. And Fox’s claim that we were now dealing with a new France, that had broken with her past, seemed naive even before the fall of the monarchy. Yet we need not sneer at Fox’s plea in mid-December 1792, that it was still not too late for a diplomatic solution, and that Britain ‘ought immediately to acknowledge the government of France and to adopt all honourable means of procuring peace’.22 Although that debate took place only two days after Louis XVI’s trial had begun, Burke responded characteristically by describing as fact what had not yet happened: And what was the peculiar time when we were desired to despatch an ambassador to them? At the very moment perhaps when the merciless savages had their hands red with the blood of a murdered King. The Koran which France held out was the declaration of the rights of man and universal fraternity; and with the sword she was determined to propagate her doctrines, and to conquer those whom she could not convince.23 And when Fox tried again a week later to persuade Pitt to send a minister to Paris, Burke thundered: ‘Let no ambassador go thither from Great Britain. If we condescend to acknowledge them by sending an ambassador might they not insult him by saying Who sent you? The King or the people?’ The French talked, Burke continued, as if England were not in Europe, and since France had declared war on Europe, Britain was already at war. And, playing the conspiracy card that he would soon flourish so effectively, he was reported as concluding: ‘If there must be a war, it had arisen from the proceedings of those among themselves, who by their seditious practices had provoked it.’24 Burke would be a member of the Parliamentary Committee of Secrecy, established in May 1794 to assess the evidence of plots to overthrow the government. Apart from 14 ministerialists, there were Pittite Whigs like Windham, but not a single Foxite from either House. The Analytical Review noted that the committee included ‘some of the most violent alarmists, and nearly all the great officers of the crown who sit in the house of commons’ – a view later endorsed by a historian of the

34 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

Whig party.25 Even more surprisingly, Burke was in attendance at the cabinet meeting on 13 January 1793 (while not a member of the cabinet) when the fateful decision was taken to disregard the conciliatory letter which William Miles had brought from Lebrun. 26 Burke shaped events not only through his writings, and his parliamentary rhetoric, but by his personal involvement in ministerial decisionmaking. There was a further way in which Burke influenced opinion, though a hidden one. The Annual Register for 1793, in describing the events leading to Britain’s declaration of war, gave proper attention to Fox’s speeches in favour of negotiation but nevertheless commented: That this was a period to send an ambassador to negotiate with the ruling powers, whoever or whatever they might be, with a view to prevent an impending war, is an opinion which, though supported by great talents and eloquence, met with a cold reception in Parliament and found no partizans among the people at large. It had all the appearance of a mere party question… .27 In other words, Fox opposed war with France because Pitt had proposed it. The Annual Register had begun as ‘a view of the history, politicks and literature of the year 1758’, published by James Dodsley with Burke (still in his twenties) as editor. Burke resigned the editorship 30 years later, just as the French Revolution was beginning, but the Annual Register continued to be compiled by a group of Burke’s friends, while the extent of Burke’s continued direct influence on its content remains uncertain. It was Dodsley who also published Burke’s Reflections, selling 18 000 copies in its first year. The objectivity of the Register as a journal of record was further undermined by production delays, which led to the volume for 1789 (ending with the fall of the Bastille) finally appearing in 1792, while the record of the events of October 1789 was not published until 1793, when we were already at war with republican France. In its account of 14 July 1789, the Annual Register records: On this day it was that the savage custom of insulting and mutilating the remains of the dead, and of exhibiting their heads to public view upon pikes, which had so long been the opprobrium of the governments and people in Constantinople, Fez and Morocco, was first introduced into the polished city of Paris.28

Instant History 35

The report, demonstrating the privilege of hindsight conferred by delayed publication, adds that ‘like other evil habits’, the custom ‘has since taken so deep a root, that it may seem a question whether it can ever be eradicated, except by some convulsion similar in violence to that from which it derived its origin’. While M. Bailly, ‘formerly known by his astronomical writings’, was appointed mayor of Paris, ‘the most barbarous and inhuman popular songs, but set to no unpleasing tunes, were fabricated for the people of Paris, in order, if possible to increase their native ferocity and cruelty…’. These songs, ‘like the war whoop of the savages in North America, became afterwards the death signal in every part of France’.29 And when the Annual Register for 1790 (published in 1793) described the march of the women in October 1789, it did so in Burkean tones: Besides the Dames du Halle, and all the other classes of female auxiliaries to Parisian liberty which we have heretofore described, and of which the lanes, allies [sic], cellars and garrets poured out so vast an abundance, they are said to have pressed every woman they met with into service.30 The same account portrays Louis and his family returning to Paris: dragged from their palace, and led captive in savage triumph, by bands of the meanest and most contemptible ruffians in his dominions, and by those modern furies the abandoned women of Paris, who, for every degree of infamy and wickedness, but particularly for ferocity and thirst for blood, have not, most fortunately for mankind, their similitude upon any part of the face of the globe.31 It is instructive to compare that version with the account of the same event, written by William Godwin in the New Annual Register for 1791, published in 1792. While noting that the day began at 5.30 a.m. when ‘crowds of women and other desperate persons, breathing vengeance and thirsting for blood, advanced to the castle [of Versailles]’, the record paints a different picture of the royal family’s return to Paris: During the preparations for the journey, the gardes du corps changed hats and swords with the grenadiers and national guards, and both they and the regiment of Flanders desired to mix indiscriminately in the ranks. It was two o’clock in the afternoon before

36 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

the procession set out. During the progress all was gaiety and joy among the soldiers and spectators; and such was the respect in which the French nation still held the name and person of their king, that the multitude were superstitiously persuaded that the royal presence would actually put an end to the famine.32 The historical record in the New Annual Register for 1791 ends on 13 September of that year, with the king, reinstated after the flight to Varennes, signing the new constitution. At the beginning of September, Godwin had ceased to be the journal’s annalist. He had criticized the 1791 Constitution for ‘the extreme weakness of the executive power’, but, he argued, it was: not a supply of politicians, but of mechanics, manufacturers and husbandmen, that must now give vigour and prosperity to France; and it is better to rest satisfied with even an imperfect form of government, than by a continued pursuit of ideal perfection to retain the country and the government in an unsettled and divided state.33 Thus, as Godwin took his leave of the New Annual Register, the debate on the French Revolution was still regarded as open. The New Annual Register had first appeared in 1781. Its editor was Andrew Kippis, a leading Dissenter and Godwin’s most influential tutor at Hoxton Academy. In July 1784 Kippis and his publisher, George Robinson, engaged Godwin to write the final chapters of the ‘British and Foreign History’ section of the 1783 volume. He was soon offered a permanent contract, which lasted through the next seven years – an assignment of approximately 150 double-column pages. In his retrospect of 1783 Godwin had condemned British policy in India, apportioned some of the blame to that ‘illustrious culprit’ Warren Hastings (whose impeachment proceedings would begin in 1786), and hailed the newly independent Americans as the ‘first enlightened people who have formed themselves an independent government in the Western hemisphere’.34 Fox and Burke receive equal praise for the East India Bill, and Godwin is clearly shocked by Burke’s later defection, which the New Annual Register describes as ‘a circumstance sufficiently to be wonderful that a man of so comprehensive an intellect, of so great natural and acquired powers, should have committed a mistake in so great and essential a point’.35 Henceforth Godwin and the New Annual Register would be ranged against Burke, as might be expected from Godwin’s

Instant History 37

assertion in the 1788 volume that ‘Liberty, humanity, and science are daily extending, and bid fair to render despotism, cruelty, and ignorance subjects of historical memory.’ 36 His words were published in 1789. In the 1789 volume, the account of events in France ends with the disbanding of the Assembly of Notables. Listing the benefits that the Assembly had achieved, the New Annual Register cites the institution of provincial assemblies, abolition of the corvée, free trade in corn and ‘unrestrained commerce’ between the provinces of the kingdom’. Godwin praises the Notables for insisting on the calling of the States General: ‘From hence we are to date a long series of years in which France and the whole human race are to enter into the possession of their liberties…’. His rhetoric did not, however, blind him to the Notables’ blatant pursuit of their own interests: ‘They were too deeply anxious to perpetuate their privileges and exclusive distinctions, to deserve the name of patriots.’ 37 The Critical Review in its notice of November 1790 gave its contemporary some blunt advice: ‘The editor is an idolater of liberty, and this bias, in itself laudable, may be carried to an improper height, when its sees the infringement of his darling liberty in circumstances which are not connected with it.’38 In their preface to the 1790 New Annual Register, published in 1791, the editors apologized for the lack of coverage of the Revolution, explaining that they were ‘desirous of accurately and minutely tracing the steps which led to so mighty a change’. The next volume, they promised, would contain a ‘compact and energetic account’ of events ‘down to the completion of the National Convention’.39 This promise was fulfilled, and from the 1792 volume onwards the New Annual Register’s record of events appeared only twelve months in arrears. The preface to the 1792 volume, published after Britain had declared war, was careful to insist on the journal’s impartiality: ‘We have censured with equal freedom and with equal severity the atrocious acts of the Republican party in France; and the profligate combination of despots formed expressly for the destruction of Liberty in that country.’ 40 A similar disclaimer had appeared in the 1791 preface, where the editor assured readers that ‘we have not been sparing of our strictures on the conduct of both parties, whenever the principles of justice were outraged; and whenever the cause of liberty was disgraced, as in too many instances it was, by the populace of France and their demagogues’. Yet the same preface expresses the hope that those who are hostile to the Revolution may yet admit ‘that such an amazing change in a despotic government, the abuses of which so many were intent on preserving,

38 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

could not be conducted without some acts of violence and outrage. – Where the people are to do every thing, they will do some things wrong.’41 In October 1792 the Critical Review described Godwin’s account of events in France as ‘sufficiently full, very clear, and on the whole both accurate and moderate’. The Critical agreed with the New Annual Register that the events of 6 October 1789 had arisen from ‘an accidental tumult occasioned by the women of Paris, particularly urged on by the scarcity of bread, and the imprudent entertainment given at Versailles’. Although the Critical considered that, in Godwin’s account, ‘the conduct of the assembly respecting the colonies is coloured a little too favourably’, his criticism of the 1791 constitution, was thought to ‘show the author to be a judicious though moderate reformer, a candid and enlightened politician’. Similarly his report of the revolt of the Netherlands ‘seems to be executed very ably, without idolizing, too wildly, a visionary goddess under the title of Liberty’.42 Nevertheless, at the end of its historical narrative for 1792, the New Annual Register was already pleading for an end to the war. The new ‘instant historian’ claimed that, as far as Britain was concerned, ‘we cannot more religiously fulfil our duty towards it than in wishing most fervently for the return of peace. Our commerce requires it; our finances require it; the preservation of our constitution, which can only be endangered by public distress, requires it’. We cannot, he continued, wish to see France ‘totally annihilated in the scale of European politics’. For what then is ‘the blood and treasure of Britain lavished?’ The section ends with an appeal to ‘the people as well as the ministers’ to consider the question ‘calmly and rationally’ in the hope that by the appearance of the 1793 volume there will have been a return to ‘that wise and pacific system which has hitherto constituted the wealth, the happiness, the political consequence, and the real dignity of Britain’. Instead, the 1793 volume blamed the British government for extending the war by diplomatic bungling.43 In the House of Commons on 17 June 1793, Pitt confidently declared: ‘Every circumstance concurs to favour the hope of being able to accomplish every object of the war.’44 On 28 August Hood captured Toulon. Historians have seen this as a moment when Pitt’s war objectives changed. By binding himself to what Holland Rose called ‘the irreconcilable Royalists’, Britain was involved in the ideological crusade for which Burke had campaigned. 45 As a threepenny pamphlet correctly if colourfully observed:

Instant History 39

France, it seems, is to be completely surrounded by the fleets and armies of every power in Europe. On the south and west, she is to be assailed by the persecuting Spaniard and the merciless Portuguese. The fleets of England, Holland, and the northern potentates are to block up her ports in the channel; whilst her eastern frontier is to be attacked by the ravenous Russian, by the hireling sword of the German boor, and the immediate vassals of Prussia. Hemmed in on every side by so formidable a confederacy, we are commanded to hope that 25 millions of people, because they prefer a republic to a monarchy, may be mercifully reduced to the horrors of famine, disease and war. The price of peace was the reinstatement of a king: Unless they betray their convention, destroy their present government, acknowledge the pope, renounce liberty and abjure the rights of man, they are to be presented with the mild alternative of famine and slaughter.46 Invective apart, it is not an unfair indictment. The Annual Register’s narrative of the year 1793 was not published until 1797, though it wisely omitted the date from the title-page. The preface announced that the death of James Dodsley, the original proprietor and publisher, had enabled his executors to regain control of the publication. The volume for 1791 had been published by ‘gentlemen with whom we have no concern’, and from whom a volume for 1792 was still promised. The new editors explained: To revive, therefore, the languid expectations of the former purchasers of DODSLEY’s Annual Register, and to free them from any disappointment in the delivery of those volumes which are wanting to render the work complete to the present time, the proprietors consider it their duty to declare, that they will publish two volumes a year till that object is attained.47 In spite of this promise, the volume for the year 1794 did not appear until 1799. Volumes for 1795, 1796, 1797 and 1798 were, however, all published in 1800. The Critical Review had been scathing about the 1791 volume published by Rivingtons in 1795, regretting that Dodsley’s Annual Register

40 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

had since 1789 ‘changed its tone of politics; and, instead of the liberal vehicle of public information’, had become ‘the dull and prostituted instrument of ministry’. But the new proprietors had proved no better. Examining the ‘lame, disjointed and feeble style’ of the 1791 volume, and noting the ‘vulgarisms and palpable blunders in which it abounds’, the Critical decides that ‘we can only in conscience consider it as a contemptible catch-penny, raised on the ruins of a oncerespectable publication’. The review complains of the inexplicable prominence given to ‘a tedious antiquarian narrative’ of Edward III’s reign, and of the space given to the quarrel between Fox and Burke. The reviewer ridicules the suggestion that Burke had heard ‘the imperious call of a public duty, more sacred than the dearest and strongest bonds of personal and political attachment’. That ‘imperious call’, the Critical bluntly comments, was ‘evidently the pension which Mr Burke has since received’. While allowing for the Critical’s known animosity towards Burke by 1795, it is hard to quibble with the reviewer’s further complaint that ‘late as the volume is in its appearance, the greater part of the foreign affairs related in it would have even been old news in the year 1791. Not only is the Polish constitution deferred until the next volume, but ‘not one syllable is inserted in this volume concerning the affairs of France’.48 The deaths of Dodsley and Burke, within five months of one another in 1797, seem to mark a new, more measured tone in the historical narrative of the Annual Register. In the 1794 volume (1799) prominence is given to a faithful summary of the French response to the belated British declaration of war aims. According to the French view, the British claim that most Frenchmen want a return of the monarchy is exploded by the failure of the royalist rising in the Vendée, where the rebels’ opponents ‘constituted an indubitable majority of the nation’. If Britain wanted peace, she had only to recall her fleets and armies, and leave Frenchmen ‘to settle their internal affairs as they thought proper’. The British experience of internal revolution should make them the first to make allowances for the exceptional nature of a revolutionary situation. Nor could Britain afford to be complacent about its own constitution or its laws: They were full of inconsistency and improprieties, and their uncertainty was so notorious, that it was a national complaint: it was not for the rulers of such a state to condemn the legal proceedings of their neighbours; but such was their arrogance, that they reprobated

Instant History 41

whatever differed from their own, without considering the difference of times and circumstances.49 No doubt the Annual Register saw these arguments, printed without editorial comment, as an example of predictable French propaganda. But the extract offers a corrective to the equally predictable Burkean or Pittite propaganda which generations of British historians have presented to posterity.

4 War, Sedition and Censorship

The Address to His Majesty, proposed by Pitt in his Commons speech of 12 February 1793, described the conflict with France as ‘a just and necessary war’.1 By contrast, almost two years later, the Critical Review would quote with approval from Lord Lauderdale’s Letters to the Peers of Scotland: I must sincerely regret, that in December 1792, when every sort of security was offered to Holland; when an explanation of the decree of 19th December was given, which it will be difficult for those who have since united Corsica to the crown of England to arraign; when opening the navigation of the Scheldt seemed the only point in dispute – that we did not adopt the motion of Mr Fox, as a prelude to negotiation; and that we should have considered the punctilio, whether we should treat with an acknowledged minister or secret agent, to be of importance sufficient for us to sacrifice to it all chance of amicable arrangement.2 The New Annual Register for 1793 wondered whether Pitt’s ‘same puerile ardour to distinguish himself as a war minister, which induced him to expend four millions in a contest for the cat-skins of Nootka might prompt his warm imagination to anticipate the conquest of France’. The editors go on to ask: ‘If America, Sweden and Denmark could maintain peace with France, notwithstanding the decree of the 19th November, why could not England have done the same?’3 The New Annual Register published the correspondence between Grenville and Chauvelin to demonstrate ‘the temperate mode in which the French conducted themselves in the beginning of the dispute’, 4 and considered that, if Britain had stayed neutral, and ‘treated the 42

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French from the first with frankness, honour and humanity’, the course of the Revolution would have been different. The Girondins, ‘supported by such an influence’, would not have fallen and Louis XVI would ‘have been at this moment alive, and at ease in some foreign country; not indeed enjoying the pomp of royalty, but released from its cares’.5 The Register’s ‘Foreign History’ section for 1793 concludes: It is said, the French aimed at universal monarchy, and that there was a disaffected party in Great Britain. – But was it the way to avoid a war, directly to plunge into it? Was it a way to counteract the ambition of France to weaken ourselves? Or are the laws more readily enforced, and the disaffected and seditious more easily restrained, in a time of external trouble and calamity, or in a period of peace and general prosperity? If Britain had preserved her neutrality, ‘the trade of the whole world was in our hands’. Finally: ‘Whatever may be the crimes of the French, it is not the part of reasonable creatures to ruin ourselves in the idle attempt to punish them.’6 Earlier criticisms of the war are reflected in the Monthly Review’s ‘Monthly Catalogue’ for December 1793, where prominence is given to several anonymous pamphlets on the question of war aims. The author of Cursory Strictures upon the Injustice of the present War, while lamenting the spread of irreligion in France, regards the attempt to stamp out republican principles as fatally misguided: A war of this denomination can be no other than a war of bigotry, injustice and persecution; a war against the rights of reason and of conscience; a foul attempt to extirpate a philosophy, which ought to be tried by an impartial test, which discussion alone can pronounce to be false in theory, and experience alone can determine to be inexpedient in practice. The editors do not challenge the author’s view, but consider that he goes too far in suggesting ‘a suspicion, which we cannot suppose to be founded in truth, that the late measures of administration have been part of one great system, framed to betray Englishmen into a gradual surrender of their most valuable rights’.7 A second pamphlet, Objections to the War examined and refuted, is, however, received with the editorial comment that the author has

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refuted his refutation ‘by admitting it as a general principle, which has ever been held sacred, that one state has no right to interfere in the government of another’.8 Considerations preliminary to the Commencement of a War, though written before the outbreak of hostilities, is ‘not undeserving of attention during its progress’, since the author’s arguments ‘strongly represent the folly of fighting against opinion’. 9 And in a more ambivalent notice of The Errors of Mr Pitt’s present Administration, the editors remark: While the author disclaims, in the strongest manner, any intention of promoting republicanism, he does not hesitate to condemn the interference of the allied powers with the internal affairs of France; laying it down as a maxim, that the changing of a government in the eyes of foreign nations is to be considered only as the changing of a coat. But the Monthly does not expect ‘the allied kings’ to agree to ‘look with complacency, nor even with indifference on the new garment in which the French republicans have clothed themselves’.10 The ambitions of the despotic powers had been at issue in September 1793 when the Monthly reviewed Letters on the Subject of the Concert of Princes, and the Dismemberment of Poland and France. The author’s preface denies ‘the right of foreigners to interfere in the internal government of other countries’, even in cases of ‘invitation from one portion of the people’ – an argument which the Monthly finds ‘decidedly convincing’. The author is thinking of Poland as much as France, and is applauded for his ‘beautiful apostrophe’ on the new Polish constitution: And will you then, great Catherine, you, who already possess far more of the globe than any other power upon the face of it; will you spoil this fair work of human hands? will you, a lover of science, replunge a large district of the earth into the cruel barbarism, in which it has been held by means of its government for centuries… . Your power is certain; but despotism and injustice, whatever may be the fate of democratic principles, cannot now obtain the esteem or the praise of an European public.11 At the end of a six-page review, the Monthly accepts that the author has ‘certainly proved his leading positions’, which include the claim that,

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if the war continues, Europe ‘must break up into large masses; which in any case, will diminish the importance of Great Britain’, and that if France be dismembered, ‘some of these masses will be more dangerous to us than France’.12 The appeal to self-interest took a different form in the Analytical Review for November 1793. The author of a 30-page pamphlet argued that if the continental powers succeeded against France, they would probably discover ‘that there is too much jacobinism in the English constitution, and lend their humane interference to relieve us from this dangerous evil!’ The reviewer considers that ‘the late execrable violation of all ties, in respect to Poland, ought to be a warning to every nation in Europe’.13 Fox was not alone in distrusting the powers that partitioned Poland, when he remarked in his Letter to the Electors of Westminster (January 1793): ‘Anarchy, if it could be introduced into other nations, was in its nature temporary – despotism, we know by sad experience to be lasting.’14 Three weeks later the Critical Review noticed a pamphlet by his namesake, William Fox, whose Thoughts on the Death of the King of France ‘endeavours to show that the death of the King of France has been artfully made use of for the purpose of drawing the nation into the present war’. The Critical quotes (with seeming approval) the author’s conclusion: ‘The measures taken to effect the restoration of the old government, whether they succeeded or whether they miscarried, not merely threatened, but insured destruction to the unfortunate monarch. The hostile armies gathering round, were the sure presages of his fate.’15 The most unequivocal of the reviews of 1793 are found, perhaps predictably, in the Analytical. It demolishes William Playfair’s Thoughts on the present State of French Politics and the Necessity and Policy of diminishing France in a review of sustained irony. The author is mocked for his confident plan ‘to conquer and partition France in much the same manner and for precisely the same reasons, as the unhappy republic of Poland has lately been divided and plundered by a base, but powerful combination of monarchs’. Playfair’s proposed tariff of financial and territorial reparations includes such suggestions as ‘Holland might have the French possessions in the West Indies.’ The Analytical concludes: We have thus detailed this very humane, mild and equitable plan, that in addition to the superlative folly of disposing of the lion’s skin, before he has been hunted into the toils, the reader may

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perceive the full extent of a scheme of fraud, rapine and violence, unrivalled by aught, except the ravings of some moon-struck and insatiate despot.16 The Burkean Annual Register for 1793 (published in 1797) would write that the whole power of Parliament ‘seems to have been employed in guarding against dangers, with which our constitution and liberties were menaced, by the tremendous power, the revolutionary spirit and destructive principles of the French convention’. Yet it also reports Fox’s contention – amply proved in 1815 – that the country was as secure against French principles if it remained at peace, as it would be at the conclusion of a war.17 The New Annual Register for 1794 carried a preface protesting that it had itself been accused of ‘a predilection for French principles’, and reminded its readers that it was not alone in being thus misrepresented: It has been a source of serious evil to our country, that every man who was not prepared to go to every length with the adherents of ministry, has been, by profligate writers (whose sole employment and occupation consist in exploiting falsehood) too successfully represented as ‘an advocate for the French cause’. And the editors thought that ‘every rational person will agree, that it is possible to disapprove most heartily of the proceedings of the French, and yet to wish that our country had never interfered in those troubled scenes’.18 It was precisely the charging of opponents of the war and supporters of parliamentary reform with sedition and even treason, that would now characterize government policy. Ministerial attitudes are summed up in the words of John Gifford, editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review, in his biography of Pitt (1809). Writing of the political societies, he confidently asserts: ‘Reform was the pretext of all; revolution the object of most.’ Their members, he adds, ‘made common cause with the French Jacobins, whom they considered as their great models and masters’. According to Gifford, the ‘English Jacobins’ sought French peace and French liberty, which they considered could not be bought too dearly: ‘No loss, they thought, however bloody, could be comparable to the glorious and unexampled advantage of being able to say – The Universe is free! Tyrants and tyranny are no

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more! Peace reigns on the earth; and it is to the French that mankind are indebted for it!’19 How close do the leaders of the campaign for parliamentary reform come to this ex post facto caricature? Certainly Paine’s promotion of ‘representative democracy’, Cooper’s call for annual parliaments and the attacks of Frend and Priestley on the Anglican Church could appear as a concerted propaganda campaign, synchronized with events in France. In March 1791 the Society for Constitutional Information had expressed pride that the Rights of Man had been written by one of its members. It passed a vote of thanks to Paine ‘for his most masterly book’, and it welcomed the prospect of breaking the electoral power of the ‘usurping Borough sellers and profligate Borough buyers’. The Society went on to voice the hope that the people of England would recognize the ‘manifest importance’ of the topics discussed in Paine’s book, and committed itself to circulating Painite principles to ‘all our corresponding societies in England, Scotland and France’.20 It was in vain that Hardy and Thelwall, leading members of the London Corresponding Society, emphasized the priority of giving political education to the masses, or that Godwin wrote of the need for ‘universal illumination’, or that the reformers insisted that political equality need not mean social levelling. As one historian of the reform movement remarks, the government insisted on regarding parliamentary reform as ‘only a specious subterfuge intended to conceal the existence of a Jacobin conspiracy for the violent overthrow of established institutions in Church and State’.21 If this seems too harsh a judgement, one can only appeal to Burke’s reported contribution to the debate on Grey’s motion for parliamentary reform: ‘There were in this country men who scrupled not to enter into alliance with a set in France of the worst traitors and regicides that had ever been heard of – the club of the Jacobins. He asked if this was a time for encouraging visionary reforms in this country.’22 Burke’s use of ‘regicide’ in April 1792, four months before the Days of August toppled the monarchy, can be seen as either prophecy or provocation. Predictably, Grey’s motion was lost. More surprisingly, the declaration of war against France did not silence demands for reform. The Monthly’s review in December 1793 of Thoughts on Liberty and Equality, by Sir Lawrence Parsons, complained of the author: ‘Abhorring the principles of levelling democracy, he is driven into a train of reasoning which, if fairly pursued, must for ever prevent all political

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improvement, and operate as a condemnation of our Revolution of 1688.’ The reviewer denounces as ‘mere declamation’ the author’s suggestion that those who campaign for extension of the franchise would ‘maintain that the whole dominion of the state should be thrown into the mass of the people’. No one, the Monthly retorts, ‘ever dreamed of calling a common ploughman from his labour to make him first minister of state’.23 It was nevertheless the prospect of universal suffrage that alarmed the now anti-ministerial Critical Review. In March 1792 after a scathing notice of the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man, the Critical had fairly stated its dilemma over parliamentary reform: If we admit the universal right of election, it will be found extremely difficult to regulate the use of that right, in such a manner as not only to render it beneficial, but to prevent it from becoming actually injurious to public freedom. If, on the other hand, we attempt to avoid those effects, by any limitation of right, even under the most plausible pretext, we should offer violence to a principle which is, in fact, the basis of liberty.24 By the summer of 1795, the Critical had decided that there was no general demand for reform: When the table of the house of commons is covered with petitions from counties, cities and towns, we shall begin to think that the PEOPLE have expressed their will: at present, if we except the small societies called the Constitutional and Corresponding, and the Friends of the People, we know of no body of men who have met in a corporate or civic capacity to express their wishes on the subject.25 Yet despite the Critical’s dismissive reference to the political societies, Grey’s failure to move Parliament towards reform was followed by a coordinated campaign to deluge the Commons with petitions. It was decided that each society should petition separately. The London Corresponding Society collected 5000–6000 signatures, but found that many well-wishers ‘in the subordinate situations of life’ had already been coerced into signing addresses organized by Reeves’s Loyalist Associations. And Fox refused to present the petition in the Commons as he was ‘an avowed enemy of Universal Suffrage’, and so Philip Francis presented it instead.26 The Norwich petition of 3700 signatures was disqualified as a printed submission, while Grey’s own petition

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from London residents was unspecific in its proposals and disclaimed universal suffrage. Thirty-six petitions in all were presented, of which 24 came from Scotland – an instructive imbalance. Pitt had little difficulty in shrugging off the request for referral to an appropriate Commons Committee: the motion was defeated by 282 votes to 41.27 It was the scale of this defeat that led to the summoning of a British convention. Here, too, the Scots took the lead. When the Edinburgh Society of the Friends of the People held its brief convention in December 1792, the French National Convention had already put Louis XVI on trial. And although the Edinburgh Convention threatened to expel any of the 170 delegates who were guilty of disturbing the peace, it was from Edinburgh that William Skirving wrote in May 1793 to the London Corresponding Society, predicting that ‘when the tabernacles of oppression in the palaces of ambition are broken down under the madness and folly of their supporters, we may then, without anarchy and all dangerous delay, erect at once our tabernacle of righteousness, and may the Lord himself be in it’.28 The apocalyptic language did little to soften the tone of menace. In August 1793, Thomas Muir, himself a member of the Faculty of Advocates, was charged with sedition for distributing copies of Paine’s Rights of Man. He had been active in the Edinburgh Convention of December 1792, and had since been in France. The Lord Justice-Clerk (the Lord Justice General’s deputy) presided. He was the notorious Lord Braxfield, who reputedly said to friends who were hesitating to prosecute: ‘Bring me prisoners, and I’ll find you law.’ In his summing up, he ridiculed the notion that Parliament would listen to Muir and his propertyless rabble. The landed interest alone could expect representation. Personal property offered no security for the payment of taxes. Such men ‘may pack up all their property on their backs, and leave the country in a twinkling of an eye’. Muir was found guilty and sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. A fortnight later, in the circuit court at Perth, Thomas Fyshe Palmer (an Old Etonian and a Cambridge graduate) was sentenced to seven years in Botany Bay.29 It was Braxfield who again presided at the trial of Skirving and those delegates to the first British Convention from the London Corresponding Society, Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerrald. Held in Edinburgh in October 1793, the Convention passed various resolutions for abolition of the slave trade, annual parliaments and universal suffrage, before dispersing in early November. Reconvening later that month, it passed the significant resolution missing from the

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minute-book, but later found among Skirving’s papers, that if the government suppressed conventions or suspended habeas corpus or brought in foreign troops, the delegates should ‘repair to such place as the secret committee of this convention shall appoint, and the first seven members shall have power to declare the sittings permanent, and twenty-one shall constitute a convention, and proceed to business’. On the day following this resolution, the minutes bore the date ‘1st Year of the British Convention’. So the delegates were copying the French after all. But unlike its French counterpart, the British Convention could not call up artillery in its support. On 4 December the Lord Provost and his constable turned the delegates out of their meeting room – never to meet again. Braxfield had already defined sedition as ‘violating the peace and order of society’, and had no doubt that ‘when sedition has a tendency to overturn the constitution of the country, it borders on high treason’. Margarot and Gerrald were, like Skirving, sentenced to 14 years’ transportation. The impotence of the ‘friends of liberty’ in England was evident: the only consolation that Godwin could offer Gerrald in Newgate was a copy of his novel, Caleb Williams.30 In a generally sympathetic notice of Gerrald’s A Convention the only Means of Saving us from Ruin (1793), the Monthly Review had summarized his reasons for demanding a convention as: ‘that the people are not fully and fairly represented in parliament; and that the crown and peers have an overbearing influence in the house of commons’. The review continues: Were we to deny the truth of this answer, we should belie all our own opinions, so often repeated and enforced in our publications for many years past. We have always asserted, and we will continue to assert, that the people have an exclusive right to elect their own representatives; that the interference of the crown or the peerage to influence either the electors or the elected is unconstitutional.31 The reviewer reserves his criticism of Gerrald’s views for his claim that treaties extorted by force cannot be considered ‘sacred or binding’, and for the author’s inconsistency in that he one day urges the people of England ‘not to be guilty of obstructing the advancement of freedom in France; and, on another, exhorts them to steel their hearts against the appeals of those who wish to abolish slavery in the West Indies’.32 The Analytical’s review of Gerrald’s pamphlet is less explicitly partisan, but it conveys the same sense of disillusionment with Parliament:

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‘After being alarmed into a war hitherto uniformly unfortunate, the nation begins to feel that it has been completely deceived by one party, and yet, recurring to past events, it recollects how little confidence can be placed in another.’ And it agrees with Gerrald: ‘To the want of an adequate representation in parliament, the author, with great justice, attributes all our grievances.’33 The Analytical would soon be commenting on William Skirving’s trial: ‘We have often doubted the justice of the present numerous prosecutions, but we have not once hesitated as to their impolicy.’ The review continues: The encouragement of informers evinces a weak, and the multiplicaton of trials a suspicious government. Frivolous and vexatious attacks on the peace and security of individuals create a spirit of disaffection, and sentences passed and punishments inflicted, highly disproportionate to the guilt of the supposed offences … must in the end weaken the ties of government, and even of society.34 Reviewing Ramsay’s account of the Gerrald trial, within weeks of the acquittal of Hardy, Horne Tooke and Thelwall in the English trials for treason, the Critical brackets together the proceedings in England and Scotland: The peaceable intentions of the convention, and their incapacity to do mischief, if their intentions had been otherwise, have been proved from the evidence in both cases, although we do not find it so easy to acquit that and the other societies from many absurdities, and an extravagant opinion of their own consequence. Yet, though it censured the London Corresponding Society, it was scathing in its comments on the Scottish proceedings, begging to ‘differ in sentiment’ from Lord Henderland, who, before pronouncing sentence against Mr Gerrald, observed, that he could not think that the sentence had the appearance of severity, from Lord Swinton, who gave it as his opinion that Mr Gerrald’s crime comprehended every sort of crime, murder, robbery and rape, from Lord Dunsinane, who said that if he were to propose any difference of punishment, it would be rather to increase than to diminish it – and from the lord justice clerk, who ‘did not know whether Mr Gerrald’s principles were so pure as he

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professed or not; but if they were, he thought that it justified the punishment, just as much as if he had acted from the worst of motives …’.35 It is nevertheless doubtful whether Hardy, Horne Tooke and Thelwall would have been acquitted by their English juries, if the charge had been sedition rather than treason. Godwin exposed the ineptness of invoking the Treason Act of 1351 in his Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury. Appearing first in the Morning Chronicle on 21 October, Godwin’s article was published in pamphlet form by Kearsley for a shilling – until threats from the Treasury persuaded him to halt its sale. Eaton then obligingly reprinted it at half the price. The accused, Godwin argued, must be proved guilty of a crime against the law as it stands: it was not enough to bring a guilty verdict by the ‘mere names of Jacobin and Republican’.36 After the the acquittals, the Critical reviewed Cursory Strictures in tandem with An Abstract of the Habeas Corpus Act, remarking that Godwin’s arguments ‘will do honour to the author’ as long as ‘sound sense and unbiassed judgment shall be exercised upon the noblest of all human objects, rational liberty’. Godwin argued that the AttorneyGeneral had attempted ‘to render the venerable Statute of Treasons subservient to a particular object of cabinet intrigue and vengeance’. The Critical decides that ‘it would be unjust to the author, not to allow his arguments to be completely conclusive’.37 Similarly, the Monthly Review, in noticing An Enquiry into what Constitutes the Crime of ‘compassing and imagining the King’s Death’, remarked that ‘nothing can be more dangerous to the liberty of the subject than the doctrine, so cherished by the lawyers, of constructive treason’. The doctrine, the reviewer concludes, encouraged judges to go beyond their constitutional function, ‘for, surely, to extend the provisions of a law to a species of act not described in it, is not to expound but to make a law’.38 The Monthly had earlier decided, in reviewing Holcroft’s account of his prosecution, that despite his dedication to ‘the pursuit of what he conceived to be for the good of mankind’, he was clearly wedded to non-violence. The Monthly impugns the judgement of those who deemed ‘a person of this description a proper subject for a prosecution for the alleged crime of conspiring to murder the king, and forcibly to dissolve the present constitution of his country’.39 And the Critical, describing Horne Tooke’s trial as ‘the merriest trial for treason, which is to be found in the records of English judicature’, went on to remind its readers that ‘we have uniformly

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professed ourselves but little affected by the formidable rumours which were circulated of plots and conspiracies against the government’. The editors find their opinion ‘amply confirmed by these trials’, and the review concludes that both the ministry and the public would ‘be taught by the issue of these trials, not to be too hasty giving credit to vague reports of plots and conspiracies’.40 What the outcome of the trials actually taught the government was to proceed against its opponents by other means. The so-called Gagging Acts became law on 18 December 1795. They had been denounced, during their passage through Parliament, by Coleridge in his Bristol lecture, later published as The Plot Discovered or An Address to the People against Ministerial Treason. ‘The present Bills’, Coleridge declares uncompromisingly, ‘were conceived and laid in the dunghill of despotism among the other unhatched eggs of the old Serpent. In due time and in fit opportunity, they crawled into light. Genius of Britain! crush them!’ The bill against seditious publications was directed against the dead as well as the living: ‘All the names of past ages dear to liberty are equally proscribed! He who prints and publishes against monarchy, as well as he who writes against it, is a traitor. The future editions will be treasonable.’ If the people accept such restrictions, Coleridge predicts, ‘they will easily endure a domiciliary inquest which will go through our public and private libraries with the expurgatorial besom. This has been already done in Hanover…’.41 The Analytical quoted from Coleridge’s Conciones ad Populum his description of Robespierre as ‘a Caligula with the cap of liberty on his head’, but while seeing ‘much to admire in these addresses’, the reviewer adds: ‘We are sorry sometimes to remark a degree of vehemence in language, rather adapted to irritate than enlighten.’ And in the same issue (January 1796) the Analytical describes The Plot Discovered as written ‘in the same free spirit, and in the same bold and animated language’, but concludes that Coleridge’s observations ‘now that the bills are passed into law, it would be of little avail to repeat’.42 The Critical Review had devoted five pages of its ‘Monthly Catalogue’ (normally reserved for short reviews) to extensive quotations from Godwin’s attack on the two bills, including a passage on Grenville’s ‘national militia of spies and informers’. What kind of man is a spy? Godwin answers: ‘He is a man who insinuates himself into your confidence in order to betray you.’ Godwin continues: He pretends to be uncommonly vehement and intemperate, that he may excite you to be the same. He watches your unguarded

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moments, he plies you with wine that he may excite you to speak without restraint. … His very income depends upon the frequency of his tales, and he is paid in proportion as the tales that he brings, whether true or false, tend to the destruction of the persons to whom they relate… . Godwin admittedly conceded, much to Thelwall’s dismay, that ‘the system of political lectures is a hot-bed, perhaps too well adapted to ripen men for purposes more or less similar to those of the Jacobin society of Paris’.43 The Gentleman’s Magazine was predictably quick to pounce on this admission, noting with satisfaction that ‘speculative enquirers are to be consulted with soberness’ and that the London Corresponding Society ‘ought to be carefully watched in their operations as a formidable machine’. The review records that Godwin blames the Society ‘for proceeding too precipitately; though he is of opinion his Majesty’s Ministers have been far more precipitate’.44 In an equivalent display of evenhandedness, the London Corresponding Society denounced both ‘the FANATICAL ENTHUSIASM that would plunge into a sea of anarchy in quest of speculative theories and the VILLAINOUS HYPOCRISY that would destroy the essence of existing institutions, under pretence of preserving them from destruction’.45 The friends of liberty appeared to be in retreat. Fox tried to retract his remark in the debate of November 1795 that ‘if in the general opinion of the country, it is conceived that these bills attack the fundamental principles of our constitution’, then ‘the propriety of resistance instead of remaining any longer a question of morality, will become merely a question of prudence’. He now explained (probably quite sincerely) that he had ‘urged it as an advice to the governors, not an incitement to the governed’.46 The London Corresponding Society meanwhile turned to journalism. In early July 1796 it published the first volume of its Moral and Political Magazine, which ran for ten months. Thelwall, in his own journal Tribune (on which he would shortly lose £400 when the government suppressed it) sought to show the public that ‘if we have discrimination and courage at once to obey the law and persevere in every unprohibited duty, it is impossible for the Minister to frame restrictions that can effectually impede the progress of truth; and consequent reform’.47 He was too optimistic. In December, he was ejected from the Beaufort Buildings, where he had been continuing his programme of political education through lectures on Greece and Rome. He had to go

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to Norwich to find an appreciative reception for his lectures in ancient history, where his audience was ‘composed of all the different classes of society, and with a degree of impression surpassing anything I ever witnessed before, in any place on any occasion’. But on a second visit to Norfolk his lectures were disrupted by sailors ‘armed with cutlasses, bludgeons and other weapons’.48 The London Corresponding Society would hold its last mass meeting of the 1790s in a field at St Pancras in 1797. This was the year of the naval mutinies for which the society was blamed. The meeting was attended by magistrates on horseback, accompanied by 2000 constables, and with 6000 troops reputedly held in readiness nearby. When the magistrates proclaimed the assembly illegal, the crowds dispersed.49 Thelwall retired to Somerset to join a not altogether responsive Coleridge. So ended Burke’s English Revolution.

5 Pitt the Apostate: Beddoes, Coleridge and The Watchman

Norwich and Bristol, the major provincial cities in pre-industrial England, were centres of opposition to the Pitt ministry. The Norwich Society for Political Information actively corresponded with the London societies on the question of parliamentary reform.1 Bristol radicalism was represented not only by Coleridge’s 1795 Bristol lectures, but by the writings of Thomas Beddoes, founder of the Bristol Pneumatic Institution. It is easy to make fun of Dr Beddoes and his scheme for curing diseases by the inhalation of gases, even though it laid the foundation for the new science of anaesthetics. We smile at Southey and Coleridge offering themselves to Beddoes as human guinea-pigs, while in Joseph Cottle’s words, ‘they described and he recorded their sensations’; and we note indulgently Mrs Beddoes’s sense of ascending in a balloon, and finding that she could walk more easily up Clifton Hill.2 Contemporaries were scarcely less sceptical. The Critical Review cautiously refused to decide ‘whether or not the use of airs in diseases will ever become an important branch in the practice of medicine’. But the review clearly relished the verses that prefixed Beddoes’s pamphlet: Proceed high-toned enthusiast! coax mankind With idiot mouth to gape and suck the wind; To each forsaken belle and faded beau, In Hope’s gay glass alluring visions shew. Teach in terse phrase how chemic airs can spread O’er the wan cheek the rose’s opening red … Nor boast the airs cosmetic powers alone: Disease and vanquished Time their virtues own: Pneumatic art unfixes Cancer’s claw, 56

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And shields the victim doomed to Phthisis’ maw. See Palsy dance! his hollow Macies fill, And Asthma pace without a puff up hill!3 In a review of an earlier medical work by Beddoes, the Monthly Review had quoted the doctor’s optimistic conclusion: ‘Perhaps there may be a mixture of azotic [i.e. nitrous] and oxygene airs more favourable to the intellectual faculties than that which is found in the atmosphere; and hence chemistry be enabled to exalt the powers of future poets and philosophers.’4 But Beddoes was concerned with broader and more practical issues of human happiness than poetry and pneumatic medicine. His works include: Letter on Early Instruction, particularly that of the Poor, Manual of Health: or the Invalid conducted safely through the seasons and Good Advice for the Husbandman in Harvest. And he provided his sister-in-law, Maria Edgeworth, with what she called ‘the first hint of the chapter on toys’ for her two-volume Practical Education (1798). Beddoes also wrote History of Isaac Jenkins, which was still being printed in 1860. Primarily a temperance tract, it offered remedies for various symptoms, together with advice on sanitation, savings banks and the need to provide for one’s old age.5 In his published account of his experiments at the Pneumatic Institution, Beddoes wrote: ‘Man may, sometime, come to rule over the causes of pain and pleasure, with a domination as absolute as that which at present he exercises over domestic animals…’. 6 British governments of the 1790s saw no electoral advantage in improving the health of the nation. As Beddoes wrote in 1796: ‘The groans of the sick form no part of the budget.’7 Yet ministers were spending untold wealth and countless lives in seeking to subdue the Indian sub-continent. It is this perception that makes Beddoes’s own 500-line narrative poem Alexander’s Expedition a work of political protest. The ostensible theme is Alexander’s expedition down the Indus, and the fortunes or misfortunes of the Hindu race. But the detailed footnotes reveal that the true targets are Pitt’s government and the East India Company – at a time when impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings (begun in 1786) are still in progress. Thus a footnote reference to the 1771 famine in Calcutta records: ‘The moral character of the Hindoos can never begin to improve, if it needs improvement, till the last hour of their merciless tyrants from Europe shall arrive.’8 A more sardonic footnote explains why the Council of the East India Company ignored native complaints that the British had worsened the

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famine by engrossing all the rice: ‘It is probable that these gentlemen were thoroughly convinced of the futility of the principle, that the consent of the people governed is necessary to constitute a just government, and therefore very consistently disregarded their complaints.’9 Alexander’s Expedition is thus a critique, not only of the East India Company’s rule in India, but of the prodigal waste of resources by Pitt’s policy of colonial aggrandizement, and the human cost imposed by that policy on the poor of England and Hindustan alike. As Beddoes wrote elsewhere, if Pitt had retained our Indian trade, but abandoned our Indian possessions, he would ‘infallibly have earned the eternal gratitude of his own country as well as of India’.10 Those words appear in Essay on the Public Merits of Mr Pitt, written after Beddoes arrived in Bristol – following the loss of his Oxford lectureship in chemistry. Beddoes begins his 200-page attack on Pitt’s political career with the claim that medicine and politics are analagous professions. Among a series of diagnostic questions, which Beddoes regards as ‘the most essential for a reasonable political catechism’, are: How far am I secure against false alarm, fraud, violence? Is the distinguishing bounty of nature to man frustrated by infringements on the freedom of speech? Do the fruits of my industry or possessions go to delude the weak, bribe the corrupt, and slaughter the innocent? What share of the blessings of nature do my countrymen at large enjoy? And more provocatively: Do the less instructed begin to distinguish their preservers from their destroyers? or are they still ready, at the beck of a minister, to bawl for a war or light bonfires for victories which will bring the rot of famine upon all the human creatures that have the misfortune to belong to them?11 Beddoes charges Pitt with rising to power on promises of reform – notably reform of Parliament – and then reneging on his pledges. On taking office in the mid-1780s, the young Pitt had (says Beddoes) appeared as a veritable ‘HOTSPUR of innovation’, while ‘in virtue of his youth, he gained credit for incorruptible integrity’. 12 Yet by 1796 Beddoes concludes: ‘I have sought in vain for any work atchieved by our premier, to which Humanity would adjudge a civic wreath.’ 13

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Among the ‘innovations’ Pitt failed to introduce was a curbing of the brutalities of the criminal law, where the same punishment was assigned ‘to him who cuts a hop-bine as to him who cuts a man’s throat’.14 While the new American republic, and even the enlightened despots of Europe, had mitigated penalties, ‘neither pity nor policy’ had relaxed the severity of the British penal code. Moreover the high cost of obtaining justice ‘amounts to an actual establishment of premiums for knavery’.15 It was perhaps unrealistic of Beddoes to expect Pitt to abolish the unpopular system of tithes – ‘perhaps the only case where the anger of the clergy may be safely braved’ – or to expect Pitt to establish in every town ‘the whole furniture of science’ on the pattern of those places ‘by the courtesy of England called universities’.16 Yet (with Beddoes) we are likely to recoil from Burke’s uncompromising assertion: ‘The people must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained, and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their consolations in the final proportion of eternal justice.’17 Beddoes censures Burke for proposing sumptuary statutes against the luxury of the rich, when he should have been trying to free wage-earners from the ‘despotism of fancy’. The Doctor insists that the only remedy is ‘to set public opinion against the frivolous spirit, which can be pleased with toys, more elaborately wrought indeed, but not more valuable in the estimation of reason than the glass beads that catch the eye of the ignorant African’. And he adds: ‘Sugar is not the only luxury moistened with human tears or spotted with human blood.’18 More explicitly, he argues that, if Pitt had seized the initiative and abolished the slave trade, he would have so enhanced the nation’s moral stature that Britain ‘would have had friendship instead of enmity, applause instead of condemnation from mankind’.19 The Monthly Review opened its notice of the Essay on Pitt by describing Beddoes as ‘now well known to the public as a bold and original thinker … and a zealous and undaunted promoter of every improvement which may conduce, in his opinion, to the good of mankind’. The reviewer observes that ‘humour, argument, and elocution, have all flowed freely’ from Beddoes’s pen, but notes that ‘the acuteness of his research is rather employed in displaying defects than excellencies’. The Monthly declines to be an advocate ‘either for or against Mr Pitt’, but approves the doctor’s ‘moral portraiture’ of Pitt ‘as a patriot and reformer’ up to the point when he becomes ‘a prime minister of almost unexampled power’, and thinks that the comparison of ‘what he might

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have done for his country and mankind with what has been the actual result of his measures’, is ‘written with much vigour and keenness’. The review quotes an extract in which Beddoes exposes the exaggerated expectations that greeted ‘the appearance of a political Messiah’. The extract continues: ‘The inhabitants of Wapping, Cheapside, and St James’s took it for granted that Mr Pitt was inspired with a tenderness for their respective welfare, which they felt not for the welfare of each other.’20 The Analytical, though it would later call Beddoes’s Essay on Pitt ‘an excellent pamphlet’,21 now merely notes that the author ‘recollects that he was a citizen before he became a physician’, reflecting that in the medical profession ‘frequent opportunities occur of acquiring an intimate knowledge of the ills that attend government’. But in summarizing Beddoes’s arguments, it makes clear what it thinks of the Prime Minister: ‘The hero, in chap. v, arrives at the very acme of honour and glory, and actually lays out £3000, a year, (the clerkship of the rolls) in buying an additional stock of popular favour.’ And again: ‘The folly of attributing that prosperity on the peace [after the American War] to the minister, for which we are indebted to our immense capitals and proverbial industry alone, is justly ridiculed.’ 22 In the same vein, the Critical devotes a page to questions that would need to be answered before deciding whether Pitt can ‘aspire to the character of a great man or a great minister’. The reviewer’s own answer points to the premier’s inconsistency, noting that, before coming into office, Pitt was the loud advocate for those measures which have been lately reprobated by him, and not reprobated merely, but thrown aside in so bold and glaring a manner, that the persons who imitated his conduct and avowed his principles, were made to feel the effects of his bitterest resentment, – were sent to expiate their crimes at Botany Bay, or condemned to languish in prisons at home. The review concludes: ‘This versatility in Mr Pitt meets with deserved censure; his pretensions to merit, as a peace minister, are shown to be very inconsiderable.’ After such a ringing endorsement of Beddoes’s attack, it hardly matters that the reviewer objects to the author’s ‘prolixity of dialogue’.23 At the very time that Coleridge was boldly delivering his 1795 Bristol lecture attacking the slave trade, and proposing a boycott of sugar and rum, Beddoes and Edward Long Fox were becoming leaders of the antiPitt party in Bristol. They chaired the November protest meetings

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against the two ‘Gagging Bills’, and in December 1795 Beddoes wrote his own pamphlet attacking the Bills. 24 That December, Beddoes published in Bristol a pamphlet entitled Where would be the Harm of a speedy Peace? with its clarion call: ‘Inhabitants of Bristol! You who lately stood forth the assertors of LIBERTY! May you soon be summoned in the name of affected humanity to appear as advocates for PEACE!’25 The call for peace reminds us that their opposition to Pitt’s war against revolutionary France was at the root of the Beddoes group’s hostility to the Prime Minister, just as it was the raison d’être for Coleridge’s Watchman. It was the war that demolished the campaign for parliamentary reform, the war that provided the pretext for the government’s repressive measures against political opponents, the war that led to a trebling of taxes, and the war that intensified the sufferings of the poor. Beddoes denied the need for us to be at war with France at all. In Where would be the Harm of a speedy Peace? he thundered: To intrigue under pretence of maintaining the balance of power may be a pretty amusement to the persons who successively sit in the cabinet. But for the happiness and ease of the people, who, that has a head to consider, will doubt that it is requisite for us to follow the example of the prudent Swiss? The 1798 invasion of Switzerland would provide an unwelcome answer to that question, but Beddoes continued more persuasively: Let us improve our enclosures, enclose our wastes and keep our navy strong. To tempt to portion out the continent of Europe is to run amuck against impossibility; from which act of madness we can derive only wounds, death and distress.26 Reviewed in the same issue of the Analytical (March 1796), was another pamphlet by Beddoes, who (we are told) writes ‘with that unceremonious freedom which courtly delicacy may term rudeness’, and who also ‘charges the minister with a culpable neglect of forethought in a matter of such primary importance as a competent supply of corn’. The pamphlet, addressed to Pitt, was The Means of relieving the present Scarcity, and preventing the Diseases that arise from meagre Food. The reviewer records the Doctor’s suggestion that barley, oats and peas ‘might be brought into more general consumption for food and the quantity of barley made into strong beer be lessened’, or

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that ‘the general distribution of pilchards’ might form a nourishing ingredient of diet, or that to vary the flavour other seasonings might be used, of which ‘there is great choice between garlic of the French and oriental spices’ – or that (more surprisingly) ‘the author questions whether opium might not be introduced with advantage’.27 We may smile at Beddoes, but contemporaries did not. Reviewing his Alternatives compared: or what shall the Rich do to be safe? the Analytical paid him this tribute: Dr B. is an author of no common character. His mind is a perennial spring. His page displays a rich stream of copious eloquence, and the useful discoveries of a benign philosophy. In time of temptation he has been steady, in time of danger he has been bold. In a profession which depends on the rich for support, he has never deserted the cause of the poor… . Moreover: ‘He has followed Mr Pitt in every step of his career of blood and ruin; and again and again proclaimed to the country the destruction that threatens it.’ Beddoes had given due weight to Pitt’s ‘character and attainments’ which he has recorded with ‘an exactness worthy of the acuteness of his talents, and a candour worthy the benevolence of his unprejudiced mind’. The reviewer adds: ‘His criticisms, we are persuaded, will receive the verdict of posterity.’28 As it happens, posterity has been more ready to accept the verdict of the unsigned letter published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for November 1798. The writer posed a list of 17 questions which sought agreement that the French Revolution was ‘in a great measure effected by private cabals, popular clubs and Corresponding Societies, &c.’, and likened Tom Paine to ‘his infamous predecessors in riot and sedition, Jack Cade, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw’, before asking whether Pitt’s administration has not been marked by peculiar firmness and vigour, and whether under his auspices, and by the BLESSINGS OF THE ALMIGHTY, we have not very good reason to hope for a speedy and honourable termination to the vexatious, unnatural and unexampled war; and at the same time, for such stability of public peace as shall place ourselves and our posterity happily out of all danger of seeing the BRITISH LION pecked by the DUNGHILL COCK OF FRANCE?29 The same issue of the magazine recorded that Messrs Parry and Lambert, proprietor and printer of the Morning Chronicle, had been

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summoned to the bar of the House of Lords ‘for inserting in the said paper a libel on the House’. After ‘a very long discussion’, they were fined £50 each, and committed to Newgate for three months. 30 By 1798 the spectre of Napoleonic conquest had arisen, and the government’s campaign against the ‘Jacobin’ press was at its height. Coleridge (who wrote for the Morning Chronicle) had his faith in republican France shaken by the French annexation of Switzerland in March 1798. Yet only a few weeks earlier he had published in the Morning Post (8 January) a bitter attack on Pitt in ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’.31 The first draft of the poem had been written in 1796, the year that saw the rise and fall of The Watchman. Though it ran for only ten issues between March and May (appearing every eighth day to avoid paying stamp duty), Coleridge’s journal was, significantly, a provincial publication relying mainly on subscribers in Bristol and the Midlands, though there were metropolitan subscribers too. Coleridge had wanted Ridgway to publish the London edition, but he was still serving a four-year sentence in Newgate for publishing an edition of Paine’s Rights of Man and Charles Pigott’s supposedly subversive History of the Jockey Club. So Parsons handled the publication instead. Each issue numbered 32 pages and carried on its masthead the motto ‘THAT ALL MAY KNOW THE TRUTH; AND THAT THE TRUTH MAY MAKE US FREE’. The prospectus promised that the Watchman would contain domestic and foreign news, parliamentary reports, essays and poetry ‘chiefly or altogether political’. Because of its octavo form, ‘it may be bound up at the end of the year, and become an Annual Register’.32 The political bias of the Watchman was signalled in the first sentence of the prospectus: ‘In an enslaved State the Rulers form and supply the opinions of the People.’ The implicit condemnation of press censorship was followed by an extract from Arthur Young’s Travels in France (1792) which attacked the vested interests intertwined with the unreformed institutions of ‘all the old Governments of Europe’, including England: What a mass of People in every part of England are in some way or other interested in the present representation of the people, in tythes, charters, corporations, monopolies and taxation! and not merely in the things themselves, but in all the abuses attending them; and how many are there who derive profit or their consideration in life not merely from such institutions, but from the evils they engender!33 Coleridge’s choice of author had a polemical purpose. Young’s Example of France a Warning to Britain (1793) was written in the year Pitt made

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him secretary to the newly established Board of Agriculture, thus turning him from a critic of the ancien régime into a critic of the Revolution. In reviewing Warning to Britain, the Monthly Review had listed a number of the author’s more extreme propositions, including: That the best method of taming the many-headed monster would be a militia rank and file of property, consisting of a regiment of a thousand cavalry in every county of moderate extent. That the licentiousness of the press, permitted to so shameful and destructive a length as we have of late years experienced in England, ought to be restrained. Noting Young’s claim that the passion for starting Sunday schools is ‘because they prepare the people for revolt’, the Monthly concludes that, despite the example of France, the editors cannot think it necessary ‘to arm the rich against the poor; and to consign the lower classes of society to perpetual ignorance and slavery’.34 The Watchman’s prospectus proclaimed the Baconian belief that ‘KNOWLEDGE IS POWER’, and followed the logic of Coleridge’s Bristol lectures in warning that ‘without previous illumination a change in the forms of Government will be of no avail’. So the Watchman protested not only against the restriction of press freedom, but also against the subservience of the provincial newspapers, ‘the Editors of which receive the Treasury Prints gratis, and in some instances with particular paragraphs marked out for their insertion’.35 The Watchman would carry the beacon of political truth to the provinces. The theme is developed in the first number, which unexpectedly begins with the Turkish capture of Constantinople more than three centuries before. Whether or not this was a smokescreen to deceive an unconscientious censor, the editor is soon admitting that the Gagging Acts ‘will not have been useless if they should render the language of political publications more cool and guarded, or even confine us for a while to the teaching of first principles, or the diffusion of that general knowledge which should be the basis or substratum of politics’.36 Coleridge promises to relate facts ‘simply and nakedly, without epithets or comments’, and explains: ‘Though I may be classed with a party, I scorn to be of a faction.’ Less persuasively he expresses the hope ‘that I shall write what I believe to be the Truth in the spirit of meekness’.37 In keeping with the editor’s promise to adhere to simple and naked facts, the first issue prints without comment (though with profuse use of italics) extracts from the parliamentary debates on

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motions for peace. Starting with Dundas’s statement on 14 December 1792 that the cause of war was ‘the probability that the French Republic meditated an attack on Holland’, Coleridge takes us through the speeches of Lord Sheffield (15 December) ‘who averred the impossibility of negotiating with a gang of robbers and cut-throats, with murderous and savage banditti’, and Lord Loughborough (1 February 1793) ‘who stated the Atheism and Ambition of the French, as motives for the War against them’, to Earl Spencer (21 January 1794) ‘who “conceived the vigorous prosecution of the War with France the only means of preserving the British Constitution”’, and Pitt (in the same debate) ‘who “stated as motives for continuing the war, the necessity of security against future injuries from the French Government, and indemnity for the past; and thought the restoration of the Monarchy the most probable means of procuring both”’. The anthology of extracts contains the rejection of Wilberforce’s motion for peace (17 May 1795) which was ‘opposed by Mr Pitt, who deemed it “premature, though he looked forward to negociation at no remote period”’, and concludes with Pitt’s explanation (15 February 1796) that peace will depend on whether the French ‘were sufficiently distressed and exhausted to induce them to submit to terms very different from any which their Language and Professions for some time had pointed out’.38 The first issue also carried a review of Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord, covering some nine Watchman pages in the modern edition. Fixing on David Hartley’s description of the obsessive mentality as a mark of psychosis, Coleridge cites what he calls ‘an alarming passage’ in which Burke depicts the effects produced by ‘the French Revolutionists’: they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation.39 Coleridge, deploring such ‘phrenetic extravagance’, complains that in stressing French excesses, Burke never asks ‘what portion of them may be fairly attributed to the indignation and terror excited by the Combined Forces, and what portion ought to be considered as the natural effects of Despotism and Superstition, so malignant and so long-continued’.40 And reminding readers of the support Burke had

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given to the American rebels, Coleridge writes: ‘At the flames which rise from the altar of Freedom, he kindled the torch with which he has since endeavoured to set fire to her temple.’ 41 To reinforce the point, the Watchman prints in full President Washington’s acknowledgement of the French colours presented to the United States. Burke’s former hero writes approvingly of the French government ‘which, being formed to secure the happiness of the French people, corresponds with the ardent wishes of my heart, while it gratifies the pride of every citizen of the United States by its resemblance to their own’.42 More telling than such diplomatic niceties is the chillingly factual report of the fortunes of the 88th Regiment, newly arrived at Salisbury: This regiment, when embarked for the continent about two years ago, was 1100 strong: in the course of service, but principally by the severe winter of 1794–5, and the consequent hardships they encountered in evacuating Holland, their number was reduced when landed in England to about 250 men. Despatched to the West Indies, ‘a raging fever carried off about five a day’, and they were ordered to return. Back in the Channel, they were attacked by a French frigate and claimed as a prize. Eventually rescued, they were led by an American brig into Bristol, where a mere 100 survivors disembarked.43 The report is immediately followed with lines from Southey’s Joan of Arc, in which the royal proposal of a general fast is brusquely rejected: Severe the Maid replied: Monarch of France! and canst thou think that God Beholds well-pleas’d the mockery of a Fast!44 The Watchman’s second issue opened with an ‘Essay on Fasts’ under the lavatorial text from Isaiah: ‘Wherefore my bowels shall sound like a harp’. Coleridge ends, less offensively, by appealing to Isaiah’s apter words: Wilt thou call this a fast and an acceptable day to the Lord? This is the Fast that I have chosen, to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burthens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke: to deal thy bread to the hungry, to bring the unhoused poor to thy table, and when thou seest the naked that thou cover him.45

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The Watchman opposed the war because it intensified the hardships of the poor, and put money into the pockets of the profiteers: ‘What a fine thing it is to be a CONTRACTOR? Nothing but Calms ruffle, – nothing but Peace disquiets him! The slaughter of thousands makes him all alive; and Famine herself shakes the horn of Plenty over his head!’46 The third issue carried a three-page review of Beddoes’s Letter to Pitt on relieving the present Scarcity (1796). Coleridge concludes that Beddoes and his scientific friends could have suggested ‘modes of employing two hundred millions of money to more beneficial purposes than the murder of two millions of their fellow creatures’.47 The futility of the war is demonstrated by contrasting, in parallel columns, the professed objectives with actual results – invariably the opposite of what was aimed at. And in his report of the debate on 10 March 1796, in which the future Lord Liverpool, had ‘insisted that there had never been a more successful and glorious war’, Coleridge allows himself five exclamation marks by way of footnote.48 Later issues of the Watchman were generally more muted. Number IV was outspoken enough in its condemnation of the slave trade. Coleridge reacted angrily to a speech by the Duke of Clarence (later William IV) in the House of Lords in which he defended the slave trade: ‘Gracious God! enormities at which a Caligula might have turned pale, are authorized by our laws, and jocosely defended by our Princes; and yet we have the impudence to call the French a Nation of Atheists!’ And in response to the claim that the plantation slaves are as well off as our peasantry, Coleridge asks whether that is not the same as asserting that ‘our peasantry are as bad off as negro-slaves’.49 Number VI (11 April) reprints the Remonstrance of 1775 from the City of London, petitioning the King for peace in the American War. The address had ended with a plea that George III should dismiss his ministers and (in words italicized by Coleridge) put his future confidence in men ‘whose known and unshaken attachment to the Constitution, joined to their wisdom and integrity, may enable your Majesty to settle this alarming dispute, upon the sure, honourable and lasting foundation of general liberty’.50 Eight days later, the Watchman decided, in the light of the BarthélemyWickham correspondence (which it printed in full) that hopes for peace ‘have for the present completely vanished’. The ministers’ decision to continue the war, Coleridge claims, ‘is very spirited and very British; but it will not hold. The pressure is too heavy on the mass of the people already.’ Peace will have to come. Meanwhile the Watchman records without comment the important concerns of the Commons: ‘The House resolved itself into a Committee to take into consideration the Leicester

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and Worcester petition for a tax upon dogs.’51 The parliamentary report also recorded the Commons debate of 7 April on the cost (and true purpose) of barracks proposed for some 30 000 troops, so that ‘every town was become a citadel, and every village a garrison’.52 Parts of Fox’s speech were printed in italics, including its bold peroration that, in case of power used against the declared voice of the people, ‘RESISTANCE IS THE RIGHT OF THAT PEOPLE. Under these principles I have been bred, under these principles I have lived, under these principles it is my duty to die!’53 The Watchman kept up its attacks on the Pitt ministry to the end. Number IX carries a long and predictably favourable ‘analysis’ of Beddoes’s Essay on Pitt. But Coleridge is already becoming critical of France under the Directory. In his ‘Remonstrance to the French Legislators’, which opens the journal for 27 April, the editor challenges the French insistence on retaining the Netherlands; and he asks whether Frenchmen will fight ‘with the same enthusiasm for the Ambition as they have for the Liberty of their Country’. He warns the Directors that ‘the rising generation, who have only heard of the evils of Despotism but have felt the horrors of a revolutionary Republic’ may become royalist in their sympathies.54 Announcing that the tenth issue of the Watchman will be the last, Coleridge explains: ‘The reason is short and satisfactory – the Work does not pay its expences.’ Some readers had ceased to subscribe because they thought the journal did not contain sufficient original contributions, ‘and a still larger number because it contained too much’. He had tried to follow the pattern of the Cambridge Intelligencer whose editor, Benjamin Flower, had won praise ‘even among the productions of literary leisure’ while simultaneously breathing ‘the severest morality, fighting fearlessly the good fight against Tyranny, yet never unfaithful to that Religion “whose service is perfect freedom”’. But the Watchman could not compete with the newly established Monthly Magazine, which (says Coleridge) ‘has almost monopolized the talents of the Country’.55 Perhaps. Yet the truth is that, confronted by the Directory’s evident determination to wage a war of conquest, the Watchman was robbed of its raison d’être. And, as Coleridge noted, the Directory had even introduced press censorship. No wonder the last words of the Watchman were those which Coleridge attributed (not altogether accurately) to Ezekiel: ‘O Watchman! thou hast watched in vain!’56

6 Canning’s Counter-Attack: the Weekly Anti-Jacobin

In his Commons speech of 10 May 1796 announcing the failure of peace negotiations, Pitt predicted that the news would have ‘the important consequence of dividing the opinions of France, and uniting those of England’. 1 What, then, made a ministerial counterattack necessary? Why did the opposition press continue to excite the charge of ‘Jacobinism’? By the end of June 1796 the Cabinet wanted to bribe its allies into making peace: Prussia would be offered the Austrian Netherlands, while Austria would receive Bavaria in compensation. Under-secretary George Hammond was sent to sound out the courts of Vienna and Berlin.2 By 4 September, Pitt had finally overcome George III’s resistance to making overtures to France, and in the second half of October, Lord Malmesbury was despatched as Britain’s accredited emissary to Paris. And in October, only days before Malmesbury arrived in the French capital, Burke published his Letters on a Regicide Peace. The importance of Burke’s intervention is reflected in the space devoted to the Letters in the Monthly Review. In its issues for November and December 1796, a detailed review spreads over a total of 40 pages. Although paying tribute to the consistency of Burke’s singleminded crusade to reverse the French Revolution, and prudently leaving the final verdict ‘to the impartial judgment of history and posterity’, the Monthly sternly remarks: Whoever has successfully employed his powers in kindling such a war as the present has undoubtedly contracted the most awful responsibility, to which any human being can subject himself. It were well if every man, before he makes such an use of his talents,

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would maturely consider the admonition given by Henry V to one of his counsellors: For God doth know how many, now in health, Shall drop their blood in approbation Of what your reverence doth incite us to!3 The Monthly reprinted extensive extracts from Burke’s Regicide Peace, offering the following as ‘a specimen of the literary excellence of this production’: To those who do not love to contemplate the fall of human greatness, I do not know a more mortifying spectacle, than to see the assembled majesty of the crowned heads of Europe waiting as patient suitors in the ante-chamber of Regicide. They wait, it seems, until the sanguinary tyrant Carnot shall have snorted away the fumes of the indigested blood of his Sovereign. Burke further pictures the European ‘plenipotentiaries of royal impotence … sneaking into the Regicide presence’ and assuming a courtly smile ‘to meet the scornful, ferocious sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian, who, while he is receiving their homage, is measuring them with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of his Guillotine!’4 Burke’s alarmist fears of Jacobin plots are represented by his vision of the ‘venomous and blighting insects of The State’, being conjured into life: ‘The promise of the year is blasted, and shrivelled, and burned before them. Our most salutary and beautiful institutions yield nothing but smut: the harvest of our law is no more than stubble.’5 Turning from style to content, the December number of the Monthly addresses itself more directly to Burke’s arguments, stating the alternative positions succinctly: ‘If the war ought to have been commenced, it ought now to be continued:– If it ought not now to be continued, it ought never to have been commenced.’6 The only question at issue between Burke and his reviewer is ‘whether a war was a JUST, EFFECTUAL, and SAFE mode of averting the danger with which the French revolution might threaten the established governments of Europe; JUST in its principle, EFFECTUAL for its proposed end, and SAFE from the danger of collateral evil’. The reviewer answers: We are not convinced of the fact that the French government, in the year 1791, (when the royal confederacy originated) was of such a nature as to be incapable of being so ripened and mitigated by a

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wise moderation in the surrounding powers, that it might not become perfectly safe and inoffensive to neighbouring states. Until that could be proved, ‘the whole reasoning of Mr Burke appears to us inconclusive’.7 The Monthly’s closely argued 40 pages contrast with the more dismissive tone of the Analytical’s eight-page notice, placed at the beginning of the November 1796 issue. Adapting Archimedes, the review opens: ‘He who undertakes to move the world should be certain that he has fixed his station on firm ground.’ The reviewer relishes the admission of ‘this master alarmist’ that ‘the general disposition of the people is for an immediate peace with France’, and also Burke’s failure to contradict the report ‘that the minority in the House of Commons has long since spoken the general sense of the nation’.8 And reviewing an early pamphlet in reply to Burke, the Analytical quotes the anonymous author: What is the irremediable offence, the crime never to be atoned, that the people of France have committed against this country? Is it in having effected a change in their government by the revolution of 1789? They differ from ourselves in this instance, only by being a century behind us. Is it in subjecting their monarch to the axe? The British nation set the example.9 The Critical, introducing a dozen pages of extract from the Letters, ridicules Burke’s inflated rhetoric: it is the dreadful consequences of such a peace that present themselves to his perturbed imagination in every page of this performance: it is the ghost of Banquo that perpetually pushes him from his seat: he beholds it assume the shape of a tiger from Bengal; he hears its roarings in the lobby of the house of commons, while the trembling members precipitate their flight from the back windows of the house. It devours our sovereign, and his exemplary queen… .10 And when the Critical later criticizes the ‘wild comparisons’ of one of Burke’s opponents, it dismisses them as ‘but faint attempts to equal the extravagance of Mr Burke in his description of the French directory receiving an English ambassador and other passages’.11 Although the Critical thinks little of the half-dozen replies to Burke that it chooses to notice, it commends Waddington’s Remarks on

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Mr Burke’s Two Letters, agreeing that the timing of publication is ‘among the most extraordinary occurrences which have chequered our political world’. Waddington had written sarcastically: To brand the Directory of France with the stigmatising epithet of ‘Regicide’, and to pronounce that directory unworthy, and indeed incapable of being treated with, at the very moment in which it was so unequivocally declared by the king and ministry capable of negotiation, must surely be strongly indicative of that manly and dignified honesty of mind which would be little expected from a pensioner… .12 Burke’s views might be at odds with those of Pitt, who said in the Commons at the time of the Malmesbury mission that ‘the unguarded and warm expressions’ of that ‘great man, Mr Burke should not be regarded as an expression of Government policy’.13 But those same ‘unguarded and warm expressions’ set the tone of the Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner, which first appeared in November 1797. By then the French had tried (and failed) to land troops in Ireland and on the shores of the Bristol Channel, managing for a few hours to find a foothold at Fishguard. The invasion alarms occurred against the background of naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, and of Bonaparte’s military success in Italy. By November 1797 Burke himself was dead. But his Regicide Peace had achieved the improbable feat of rekindling the protests of the periodical press and reopening the debate as to whether we should have been at war at all. William Williams argued in his Reply to Mr Burke’s Two Letters (1796) that the glowing picture Burke had drawn of ‘the falsehoods, treachery, corruption, inconsistency, avarice, imbecility, stupidity and cowardice of all the courts of Europe, and of the English cabinet in particular, cannot fail to multiply, and that greatly, the votaries of jacobinism’.14 Canning’s Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner resulted from discussions with Pitt on ‘Measures to be taken for keeping the public Mind right upon all Subjects by the Press’. Canning’s suggestion would involve ‘particularly a newspaper to be set up to which a certain Number of persons are eager to engage to contribute – & those persons to live together – to dine once a week for instance at Pitt’s or elsewhere’.15 Canning’s easy intimacy with Pitt is all the more surprising in view of the premier’s reputation for aloofness. But the two men often dined together in London, and walked together in the park. As early as

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February 1794, Canning had written: ‘Pitt and I are upon very comfortable terms. I go to him when I like, and ask questions and get notions and take advice, and he does not seem bored.’16 In 1797 Canning was paying frequent visits to Holwood, Pitt’s country seat. Pitt’s biographer calls Canning ‘the privileged jester’, and considers that he was the only member of Pitt’s circle who could have persuaded him to contribute to the weekly Anti-Jacobin.17 Pitt may or may not have composed the poem (‘Written by a Traveller at Czarcoselo’) with its slighting reference to the bust of Fox, placed by Catherine II in her cabinet between those of Cicero and Demosthenes. But Canning’s own copy of the Anti-Jacobin attributes four financial articles to Pitt, in addition to ‘Review of the Session’ in no. 35.18 Pitt certainly claimed to have spent ‘above a fifth of one of the finest Mornings possible’ on one such article.19 The nominal editor was William Gifford, later editor of the Quarterly Review, but the moving spirits were Canning and his fellow Etonian, John Hookham Frere, both of whom had won their journalistic spurs on the Microcosm in their Eton days. A third Etonian, though some 20 years older, was George Ellis, veteran of the Whig Rolliad of the 1780s. All had now deserted the Foxites for Pitt, who rewarded Canning with an under-secretaryship at the Foreign Office.20 The prospectus to the Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner begins in unambiguously Burkean vein: We have not arrived (to our shame, perhaps, we avow it) at that wild and unshackled freedom of thought, which rejects all habit, all wisdom of former times, all restraints of ancient usage; and of local attachment; and which judges upon each subject, whether of politics or morals, as it arises, by lights entirely its own, without reference to recognized principle, or established practice. The editors pride themselves on not having ‘so far imbibed that spirit of liberal indifference, of diffused and comprehensive philanthropy, which distinguishes the candid character of the present age’, and declare themselves unwilling to put at risk ‘the smallest part of the practical happiness of this Country; though the sacrifice should be recommended as necessary for accomplishing throughout the world an uniform and beautiful system of theoretical liberty’. And in words that foreshadow the verses attacking the ‘New Morality’ with which the journal would take leave of its readers in July 1798, the editors avow their opposition to that ‘new and liberal system of

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ETHICS, whose operation is not to bind but to loosen the bands of order’ and whose teaching is based not on a system of reciprocal duties, ‘but on the supposition of individual, independent, and unconnected rights’.21 The frankly propagandist purpose of the new publication was epitomized in the declaration: Of all these and the like principles, – in one word, of JACOBINISM in all its shapes, and in all its degrees, political and moral, public and private, whether as it openly threatens the subversion of States, or gradually saps the foundations of domestic happiness, We are the avowed, determined and irreconcileable enemies. How was this crusade to be promoted? By providing ‘a contradiction and confutation of the falsehoods and misrepresentations’ concerning such events as ‘may be found in the Papers devoted to the cause of SEDITION and IRRELIGION, to the pay or principles of FRANCE’.22 In the introduction to the bound volumes, the Anti-Jacobin would later claim that its campaign was directed against ‘those Writers with whom France and French Freedom are all in all’, and who regard the war as ‘one of unexampled disaster and disgrace’. On the contrary, the editors claim, the war as far as Britain was directly concerned ‘has been from the beginning, eminently glorious’, and the nation’s resources are ‘not only unexhausted, but abundantly flourishing’.23 Although the first issue was preoccupied with a consideration of socalled ‘Jacobin poetry’ (see Chapter 7), it began with an essay ‘On the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution’. The author calls for an alliance between ‘the few Countries which have hitherto resisted the progress of Jacobin Arms, and the infection of Jacobin Principles’. He denounces France’s new theory of government as ‘false, visionary and impracticable; – inconsistent with the nature of men, and with the frame of civil society’. The piece concludes with a patriotic call to ‘stand or fall with the Religion, Laws and Liberties of our Country’.24 The Anti-Jacobin’s recurrent theme is that Robespierre’s death was not the end of Jacobinism, noting of its alleged British adherents ‘that in venting all their rage against the reign of ROBESPIERRE, they lose nothing of their respect for his faithful Disciples and Imitators, the present Directory of France’. 25 Thus, spread over the third and fourth issues, is a spurious account of a meeting of the ‘Friends of Freedom’. The fictitious nature of the report is advertised in the editors’ pretence to be laying before their readers ‘an Authentic Copy of a part of a

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future Morning Chronicle, which a Correspondent of ours has had the good fortune to anticipate’. In a speech justifying the actions of the Directory, Fox is reported as having defended mutinies: ‘Now for my part, I like them – And for this plain reason, because in every Mutiny, as it arises, I see the possibility at least, of the accomplishment of our great ultimate object – a change of system.’26 In the second instalment of the report, after a reputedly three-hour speech by Erskine, Fox is made to praise ‘MacFungus’, who in his reply makes clear that he expects Britons to follow the French example: The national energies will awake, and shaking off their lethargy, as their fetters drop from them, they will follow the Angel of their Revolution, while the Genius of Freedom, soaring aloft beneath the orb of Gallic Illumination, will brush away, as with the wing of an Eagle, all the cobwebs of Aristocracy.27 The success of parody requires the element of exaggeration to be held sufficiently in check for the bogus version to seem almost authentic. (Fox had spoken in Parliament against the government’s handling of the naval mutinies.) But at the end of the second instalment of the report, the Anti-Jacobin again discloses its persuasive forgery by printing a poem La Sainte Guillotine, ‘a new song attempted from the French’, with the explanatory introduction: ‘We are informed (we know not how truly) that it will be sung at the Meeting of the Friends of Freedom; an account of which is anticipated in our present Paper.’ The poem begins: From the blood bedew’d valleys and mountains of France See the Genius of Gallic INVASION advance! Old Ocean, shall waft her, untroubled by storm, While our shores are all lin’d with the Friends of Reform. Confiscation and Murder attend in her train With meek-ey’d Sedition, the daughter of PAINE While her sportive Poissards with light footsteps are seen To dance in a ring round the gay Guillotine.28 A similar spoof report, in the issue for 29 January 1798, purports to be an account of Fox’s birthday celebration at the Crown and Anchor, taken from the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post, ‘whose statements we have carefully read and corrected from the information of several gentlemen who were present’. This time the account is more an

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embroidering of facts than an outright invention. The occasion was attended by Horne Tooke; and the Duke of Norfolk did propose a toast to ‘the Majesty of the People’, besides making an ill-judged comparison with revolutionary America – all of which could easily be made to suggest that the Foxites were siding with traitors. 29 The next issue of the Anti-Jacobin, which refers back to ‘our burlesqe account of the FESTIVAL of MR FOX’s NATIVITY’, was able to reprint the Morning Chronicle’s actual text of the birthday toast that cost Norfolk his lord-lieutenancy and the command of his militia regiment: WE are met, in a moment of most serious difficulty, to celebrate the Birth of a Man dear to the Friends of Freedom. – I shall only recall to your memory, that not twenty years ago, the Illustrious GEORGE WASHINGTON had not more than Two Thousand Men to rally round him, when his Country was attacked: America is NOW free. This day full Two Thousand Men are assembled in this place: I LEAVE YOU TO MAKE THE APPLICATION. – I propose to you the health of CHARLES JAMES FOX.30 The Anti-Jacobin thought the Duke’s loss of his lieutenancy justified since he had given ‘the sanction of his presence, and the authority of his name’ to what the editors called ‘the ceremony of a formal act of alliance between the remains of the PARLIAMENTARY OPPOSITION of this country, and the leaders of a faction, French in principle, French in inclination, and French in conduct…’.31 At the beginning of May, the journal harked back to this notorious occasion in its report of ‘Proceedings of the Whig-Club’. Fox’s toast at the club – ‘The Sovereignty of the People of Great Britain’ – recalls (say the editors) ‘the absurd toast which cost the Duke of NORFOLK his Lieutenancy and his Regiment.’32 Objecting to Fox’s comparison of Pitt’s government with Robespierre’s reign of terror, the Anti-Jacobin finally focuses on Fox’s denial that his supporters should be ‘slack or remiss, or inactive in resisting the Enemy’. The true inference, Fox, explains, is: that the Friends of Liberty should with the spirit and zeal that belong to their manly character, exert themselves in averting a Foreign Yoke – never forgetting, that in happier and more favourable times, it will be EQUALLY their duty to use EVERY EFFORT – (I mean every justifiable and legal effort), TO SHAKE OFF THE YOKE OF OUR ENGLISH TYRANTS.

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Fastening on Fox’s closing phrases, the Anti-Jacobin interprets the words as an incitement to the disaffected to ‘turn to purposes of REBELLION at home, the SAME ARMS which shall have been placed in their hands to repel an invading Enemy’.33 Two days after this issue of the Anti-Jacobin appeared, the government deleted Fox’s name from membership of the Privy Council. 34 Fox had earlier explained that he used ‘sovereignty of the people’ in its 1688 sense to describe men of property, ‘for it is impossible to support the Revolution [of 1688] upon any other principle’.35 But it was not difficult to place a sinister construction on Fox’s incautious words, spoken against the background of a continuing fear of French invasion. The Anti-Jacobin had begun 1798 with a New Year’s Day issue addressed to this ‘unexampled crisis’. Referring back to the breakdown of the peace negotiations at Lille, and to the French proclamation that followed it, the editorial observed: They professed it to be their object to dictate, on the Banks of the Thames, such Conditions of Peace as should humble our Naval Power – extort from us a Fine and Ransom sufficient to reimburse their Expences in conquering us – and finally to secure their Auxiliaries and Confederates here, the full benefits of a RADICAL REFORM. The details of such reform they had not ‘condescended to explain’, but it appeared that it would be ‘the joint work of the Whig Club, the London Corresponding Society and the French Executive Directory’.36 The following issue contained not only an Ode to Anarchy ‘by a Jacobin’, but also a song ‘recommended to be sung at all Convivial Meetings convened for the purpose of opposing the Assessed Tax Bill’. The song purported to come from a correspondent who had tried it with great success ‘among many of his well-disposed Neighbours, who had been at first led to apprehend that the 120th part of their income was too great a sacrifice, for the preservation of the remainder of their Property from French Confiscation’. 37 By 12 February the journal was printing Admiral Hoche’s instructions for the previous year’s failed attack on Bristol (which had fizzled out so ignominiously at Fishguard), and challenging the Morning Chronicle’s attempt to dispute their authenticity.38 Turning from such improbable yet undeniable events, the AntiJacobin reminds us of its patriotic purpose. Its ‘general design’, the editors explain, is to:

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expose the deformity of the French Revolution, counteract the detestable arts of those who are seeking to introduce it here, and above all to invigorate the Exertions of our Countrymen against every Foe, Foreign and Domestic, by showing them the immense and inexhaustible Resources they yet possess in British Courage and British Virtue! A sample of this invigorating tonic follows, in the shape of verses addressed to ‘The Author of the anti-Jacobin’. The poem, supported by footnotes with Latin quotations from Sallust, begins: FOE TO THY COUNTRY’S FOES! ’tis THINE to claim From Britain’s genuine Sons a British Fame – Too long French Manners our fair Isle disgrac’d; Too long French Fashions sham’d our Native Taste. Still prone to change, we half-resolv’d to try The proffer’d charms of FRENCH FRATERNITY. But classical analogies suggest the remedy: In vain had Pompey crush’d the Pontic Host, And chas’d the Pirate swarm from every Coast; Had not the Civic Consul’s watchful eye Track’d through the windings of Conspiracy, The Crew that leagued their Country to o’erthrow; The base Confederates of a Gallic Foe: Expos’d, confounded, sham’d and forc’d away The JACOBIN REFORMER of his day.39 Luckily for the aptness of the author’s analogy, Bonaparte had not yet declared himself First Consul. Another historical parallel is drawn in March with a four-page article denying any analogy between the French Revolution and the English Civil War. The correspondent attacks not only Robespierre, but the Constitution of 1791, exclaiming: ‘How strangely must that mind be formed, which could find any resemblance between the tinsel foppery of LA FAYETTE, and the high spirit, fine taste, and enlarged understanding of Lord FALKLAND.’40 On 17 April the Morning Post observed: ‘The thoughts of every man are now occupied about an invasion.’ Volunteer formations were attracting recruits, the Senate at Cambridge allowed

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undergraduates leave of absence in order to enlist, while the Archbishop of Canterbury had to dissuade clergy from part-time enlistment. Yet the regular army seems to have been some 50 000 short of its establishment of 255 000, and to counteract the shortfall, control of the militia was transferred from the Home Office to the Secretary of State for War. When Tierney, in the Commons, opposed Pitt’s plan to extend the naval quota to exempted men in maritime and river trades, the prime minister’s accusation that Tierney wished ‘to obstruct the defence of the country’ led to the two men fighting a duel.41 In June it became legal for the militia to serve in Ireland. The Anti-Jacobin had earlier printed a letter from Dublin reporting a resolution from a provincial committee of the United Irishmen, meeting at Leinster, a month before their arrest: Resolved, That we will pay no attention whatever to any attempt that may be made by either House of Parliament to direct the public mind from the grand object we have in view, as nothing short of the complete Emancipation of our Country will satisfy us. The editors point out that the resolution was passed on the very day that Lord Moira ‘made his Motion of Conciliatory Measures in the House of Lords, and when his Lordship represented the UNITED IRISHMEN as a set of injured INNOCENTS whose only aim was a temperate REFORM of the House of Commons, and a permission for Catholics to sit in Parliament!’42 Yet when Arthur O’Connor, executive member of the United Irishmen, editor of their journal and future son-in-law of Condorcet, was acquitted of treason in May 1798, Fox hailed his acquittal as evidence that ‘Robespierrism’ could still be resisted in England.43 The Anti-Jacobin chose to focus instead on James O’Coigly, Irish delegate to the French republic. He was charged with being found in possession of a paper proving his links with England’s enemies, and was the only member of the ‘Margate Five’ not to be acquitted. Reminding readers that the acquittals in the 1794 treason trials had been cited as proof that no conspiracy existed, the editors now castigated that line of argument as ‘just as conclusive, as if, on the acquittal of a man charged with theft, it should be contended to be proved that nothing had been stolen’. Unless the Address, which O’Coigly was found guilty of carrying, had been framed, written and carried for himself alone, the Anti-Jacobin had no doubt that ‘the VERDICT of the Jury does establish the melan-

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choly fact that there are Traitors in the Country’. The editors also see the Maidstone trials as evidence of there being in Ireland ‘a deep-rooted Conspiracy to subvert the Government and Constitution, and to introduce there all the wild and horrid excesses of anarchy, blood and desolation, under which the Continent of Europe is now groaning …’.44 Burke had predicted trouble in Ireland, but saw that it was more likely to come from the repressive policies of the anti-Jacobin Protestant ascendancy than from invasion by French troops or French principles. For this reason, and because he was himself Irish, Burke’s stance on Catholic emancipation was contorted. His friend Fitzwilliam had been the most vehement voice at the fateful Cabinet meeting (June 1794) in urging a Burkean policy of total war against France. Yet Pitt had summarily recalled Fitzwilliam as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, because of his encouragement of Grattan’s Catholic Relief Bill. 45 The Anti-Jacobin was untroubled by such paradoxes. It applauded prompt government action in putting down the 1798 Rebellion. While deploring ‘the necessity which has forcibly drawn the sword of Government against its subjects’, the editors unhesitatingly declaimed: ‘To the propagators of the doctrines of Liberty and Equality, be ascribed the shame and the guilt, of the enormities which have created this necessity.’ The editorial looks forward, somewhat too optimistically, to the time when the deceived and injured multitude, who have been made the sport and the victims of a mad and desperate Faction will fly for shelter to the pardon which awaits their repentance; and will pour their execrations on those traitorous demagogues, who, having first maddened them with the poison of French principles, would have sacrificed their happiness and their lives at the shrine of French ambition.46 A correspondent to the Anti-Jacobin was equally optimistic that the crowned heads of Europe would soon ‘unite to compel a a satisfactory Peace on a broad foundation’, and that peace when it came would probably be permanent: A few years of wise economy and redoubled industry, will place us again in the rising scale; and if the pressure of the times may have rendered it necessary sometimes to have cast a temporary veil over the Statue of Liberty, she may again safely be shewn in an unimpaired lustre.47

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By the summer of 1798, the statue of liberty appeared well veiled indeed. The suspension of habeas corpus had been renewed in April, passing both Houses of Parliament in one day. The renewal of the Aliens Act gave the Alien Office greater freedom of action in its counter-espionage activities at home and abroad. Perry, editor of the Morning Chronicle, was already in the Tower for a libel on the House of Lords, while Johnson (the Analytical’s publisher) was indicted in July for publishing Gilbert Wakefield’s Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff.48 The Monthly Review had thought Wakefield ‘too much animated by passion, and by his aversion to certain ministerial men and measures’, and quoted his assertion towards the end of his 50-page pamphlet: My life and my books are all the personalities that I value; and neither of them (for I have not tasted lotus) shall be hazarded in defence of the present administration. If the French come, they shall find me at my post, a watchful centinel in my proper box, MY STUDY, among the venerable dead. It does not seem a particularly seditious stance for a clergyman, yet the Monthly dubs it ‘this very indiscreet and objectionable passage’.49 The Monthly’s uncharacteristic caution suggests that, faced by the ministerial campaign against the opposition press, the editors were getting cold feet. The same March issue of the Monthly carried a notice of Paine’s Letter to the Honourable Thomas Erskine. After four pages, the reviewer observes: ‘The letter concludes with an account of the new deistical sect lately sprung up at Paris, called the society of THEOPHILANTHROPISTS, or Lovers of God and Man, or Adorers of God and Friends of Man; and with Mr Paine’s Sermon on the Existence of God.’ The Theophilanthropists had been examined in some detail in the appendix to the bound volume of the Monthly Review for 1797, and it was the same Paris sect that would provide the cue for Canning’s lines on the ‘New Morality’ in the weekly Anti-Jacobin’s last issue.50 The last two numbers (35 and 36) are both dated 9 July. The first carries Pitt’s own self-justifying ‘Review of the Session’. At the start, Britain had stood alone: ‘The weakness or timidity of the rest of Europe, had left [the French] at liberty to direct the whole of their remaining force against the British Empire.’ The French strategy had been built on three prongs: ‘the expectation of the total failure of our Finance, and the downfall of our Public Credit’, the ‘boasted project’ of invading England and promoting an English revolution and ‘the establishment of an Irish Jacobin Republic under the auspices of France’.51 Each threat had been

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averted. As for the editors, they had kept their promise to maintain publication of their journal throughout the parliamentary session, and now took leave of their readers with the proud boast that ‘THE SPELL OF Jacobin invulnerability is now broken’.52 In listing their practical achievements, the editors claimed to have corrected each week six lies or misrepresentations from other papers, and six mistakes – a total of 420 corrections. They had sold 2500 copies a week but, allowing for family readership, thought the true circulation was 17 500. When the borrowing of copies was also allowed for, the editors claimed a readership of 50 000, which they rightly described as ‘a most respectable minority of the Readers of the whole Kingdom’. Those readers had been put on their guard ‘against the artifices of the seditious, and the more open attacks of the profligate and the abandoned Foes of their Constitution, their Country and their God’. Trusting that they had ‘done the State some service’, the editors concluded: We have driven the Jacobins from many strongholds to which they most tenaciously held. We have exposed their Principles, detected their Motives, weakened their Authority and overthrown their Credit. We have shown them in every instance, ignorant and designing, and false, and wicked and turbulent, and anarchical – various in their language, but united in their plans, and steadily pursuing through hatred and contempt, the destruction of their Country.53 No. 36 ends with Canning’s ‘New Morality’ verses, which reappear in the first number of the monthly Anti-Jacobin Review (see Chapter 8). Meanwhile we notice the echo of Burke’s famous description of ‘thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak’: So thine own Oak, by some fair streamlet’s side Waves its broad arms, and spreads its leafy pride, Tow’rs from the Earth, and rearing to the Skies Its conscious strength, the Tempest’s wrath defies. Its ample branches shield the fowls of air, To its cool shade the panting herds repair, – The treacherous Current works its noiseless way, – The fibres loosen, and the roots decay; Prostrate the beauteous Ruin lies; and all That shared its shelter, perish in its fall.54

7 ‘Jacobin Poetry’: Southey, Cottle and Lyrical Ballads

The Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner complained in its first issue that it could not find ‘one good and true Poet, of sound principle and sober practice’ who could be relied on to provide ‘a handsome quantity of good and approved Verse – such Verse as our Readers might be expected to get by heart and to sing …’. The editors were reluctant to go to ‘the only market where it is to be had good and ready made, that of the Jacobins’. They had nevertheless decided to print some of ‘those effusions of the Jacobin Muse which happen to fall in our way’, in order to illustrate ‘some of the principles on which the poetical doctrine of the NEW SCHOOL is established.’1 What were the characteristics of the ‘new school’? The Anti-Jacobin explains: The poet in all ages has despised riches and grandeur. The Jacobin Poet improves this sentiment into a hatred of the rich and great. The poet of other times has been an enthusiast in the love of his native soil. The Jacobin Poet rejects all restrictions on his feelings. His love is enlarged and expanded so as to comprehend all human kind… . The old poet was a warrior, at least in imagination; and sung the actions of the heroes of his country, in strains which ‘made Ambition Virtue’, and which overwhelmed the horrors of war in its glory. The Jacobin Poet would have no objection to sing battles too – but he would take a distinction. The prowess of Bonaparte, indeed, he might chant in his loftiest strain of exultation. There we should find nothing but trophies, and triumphs, and branches of laurel and olive, phalanxes of Republicans shouting victory, satellites of

83

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despotism biting the ground, and geniuses of Liberty planting standards on mountain-tops. 2 The first ‘Jacobin’ poem to be printed in that November 1797 issue was Southey’s ‘For the Apartment in Chepstow Castle, where Henry Marten, the Regicide, was imprisoned thirty years’. Although Southey’s subject is drawn from the English Civil War, the word ‘regicide’ had recently acquired a new resonance through the execution of Louis XVI, and (more immediately) through Burke’s Thoughts on a Regicide Peace (1796). Southey’s text is printed in full, followed by a self-styled ‘imitation’ entitled ‘For the Door of the Cell in Newgate where Mrs Brownrigg, the ‘Prentice-guide, was confined previous to her Execution’. Mrs Brownrigg had whipped two female apprentices to death: For this act Did BROWNRIGG swing. Harsh laws! But time shall come, When France shall reign, and Laws be all repealed! Those lines echo Southey’s original: Blessed hopes! awhile From man with-held, even to the latter days When Christ shall come, and all things be fulfill’d!3 The parody was the work of those two Eton alumni, George Canning (future Prime Minister, and already Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office) and John Hookhan Frere. They were assisted in other productions of their satirical enterprise by an older Etonian, George Ellis, whose cousin had been with Canning at Eton. 4 Ellis had been a contributor to the Whig ‘Rolliad’, which included verses based on the real-life incident when a Wandsworth resident fired a blunderbuss at Pitt after dinner at the elder Jenkinson’s: How as he wander’d darkling o’er the plain, His reason drown’d in Jenkinson’s champagne, A rustic’s hand, but righteous fate withstood, Had shed a Premier’s for a robber’s blood.5 One consequence of Burke’s unexpected alliance with Pitt was that the Whig wits transferred their armoury of poetic propaganda to the Pittite camp, and turned their fire on the Foxites.

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The Duke of Wellington would later pay tribute to Canning’s verbal facility: ‘Canning, I think, was readier at writing than even at speaking; I never in my life knew so great a master of his pen.’ 6 It was Canning who attack’d the ‘universal man’ in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin: No narrow bigot he; his reasoned view – Thy interest, England, ranks with thine, Peru! France at our doors, he sees no danger nigh, But heaves for Turkey’s woes th’impartial sigh. A steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country – but his own.7 In similar vein, the Anti-Jacobin’s second issue mocked the ‘Jacobin creed’, which held that in cases of criminal justice, ‘the truly benevolent mind will consider only the severity of the punishment without reference to the malignity of the crime’. The same number of the journal accused those sympathetic to the poor of deliberately exaggerating (and even intensifying) their misery in order to make political protest more effective. This was the point of the second parody, ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-grinder’, where the philanthropist is so infuriated by the needy knife-grinder’s passive acceptance of his lot, that this friend of humanity kicks over the poor man’s grinding-wheel in a fit of frustrated benevolence.8 And in the fifth issue, Southey’s ‘The Soldier’s Wife’ is parodied as ‘The Soldier’s Friend’. The poet’s dactylic lines are quoted: Weary Way-wanderer, languid and sick at heart, Travelling painfully over the rugged road, Wild-visag’d Wanderer – ah for thy heavy chance. The Anti-Jacobin pretends to see that the poet is ‘fumbling in the pocket of his blue pantaloons; that the splendid shilling is about to make its appearance, to glitter in the eyes, and glad the heart, of the poor Sufferer’. But instead ‘the Bard very calmly contemplates her situation, which he describes in a pair of very pathetical Stanzas; and … concludes by leaving her to Providence’. There follows ‘The Soldier’s Friend’, also in dactylics, including the lines: Here’s Half-a-crown for you – here are some handbills too; Go to the Barracks, and give all the Soldiers some: Tell them the Sailors are all in a Mutiny.9

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The last line is a reminder of the 1797 background against which the ‘friends of humanity’ continued to denounce the war, and regarded feeding the suffering poor as a higher priority. In January 1798 the Anti-Jacobin printed ‘Lines written at the Close of the Year 1797’: Yes! happy BRITAIN, on thy tranquil Coast No Trophies mad Philosophy shall boast; Though thy disloyal Sons, a feeble band, Sound the loud blast of Treason through the Land, Scoff at thy dangers with unnatural mirth And execrate the Soil which gave them birth, With jaundiced eye thy splendid Triumphs view And give to FRANCE, the palm to BRITAIN due; – Or, when loud strains of gratulation ring, And lowly bending to the ETERNAL KING Thy Sovereign bids a Nation’s praise arise In grateful incense to the fav’ring Skies – Cast o’er each solemn scene a scornful glance, And only sigh of ANARCHY and FRANCE.10 Southey was vulnerable to accusations of French sympathies because of his Joan of Arc (1796), the second edition of which the the AntiJacobin Review would later condemn for taking as its subject ‘the ignominious defeat of the English’.11 Southey’s poem is clearly not simply a pacifist plea, since the brutality of the French is excused and that of the English condemned. His target is not simply war, but this particular war and England’s unjust intervention in the affairs of France. Its shrieking inconsistencies result from Southey’s attempt to combine condemnation of England’s war against France with a tacit recognition that revolutionary violence may be the only means of overthrowing oppression. The Monthly Review recognized that Joan of Arc is an unpatriotic, even subversive poem, and decided that Southey had ‘chosen the subject with a view to modern application’. The review continues: With respect to the sentiments, they are less adapted to the age in which the events took place, than to that of the writer; being uniformly, noble, liberal, enlightened, and breathing the purest spirit of general benevolence and regard to the rights and claims of human kind. In many parts, a strong allusion to later characters and events is manifest; and we know not where the ingenuity of a crown lawyer would stop, were he employed to make out a list of innuendos.

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But the reviewer concludes patronizingly: ‘Far be it from us to check or blame even the excesses of generous ardour in a youthful breast! Powerful antidotes are necessary to the corrupt selfishness and indifference of the age.’12 It was probably not so much Southey’s youth that shielded him from the notice of crown lawyers, as the lavishness of the edition in which Joan of Arc first appeared. The quarto volume of some 400 pages was handsomely bound, and cost one guinea. The Critical Review’s notice of Joan of Arc declared: ‘The poetical powers of Mr Southey are indisputably very superior, and capable, we doubt not, of producing a poem that will place him in the first class of English poets.’13 The review notes Southey’s imprudence in choosing ‘a heroine who was an active champion against his own countrymen’, and predicts that the public ‘will not be over forward to compliment his patriotism’; yet the reviewer sides with the poet, in words that read as a topical political comment: We profess to accord in sentiment with those who think the cause of truth of higher importance than any particular interest, – that national claims may be ill-founded, and that patriotism is something worse than enthusiasm, unless guided by moderation, and settling in justice.14 The Analytical, in a six-page review, complained that ‘a manifest incongruity runs through the piece, in ascribing to characters of the fifteenth century, the politics and metaphysics of an enlightened philosopher of the eighteenth’. But it went on to admire ‘the noble spirit of freedom, which is evidently the poet’s inspiring muse’. The reviewer concludes with the hope that Southey will ‘present the public with a more elaborate production in his Madoc, an epic poem on the discovery of America by that prince, on which he is engaged’.15 Meanwhile Charles Lamb wrote to Coleridge: With Joan of Arc I have been delighted, amazed. I had not presumed to expect anything of such excellence from Southey. Why, the poem is alone sufficient to redeem the character of the age we live in from the imputation of degenerating in Poetry, were there no such beings extant as Burns and Bowles, Cowper and – fill up the blank as you please, I say nothing.16 Southey’s poems of social protest, like those of Burns, Coleridge and Wordsworth, were also an attack on Pitt’s war, in the sense that the

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sufferings of the poor were exacerbated by the prolonging of hostilities with France. Southey’s ‘The Complaints of the Poor’, written in 1798, begins: And wherefore do the poor complain? The Rich Man ask’d of me… Come walk abroad with me, I said, And I will answer thee. As they walk the streets, poet and rich man meet ‘an old bare-headed man’ who has no fuel for a fire at home, a ‘young bare-footed child’ sent out to beg on behalf of a sick father, and a woman struggling to carry two babies: I ask’d her why she loiter’d there When the night air was so chill; She turn’d her head and bade the child That scream’d behind, be still; Then told us that her husband served, A soldier far away, And therefore to her parish she Was begging back her way.17 Four years earlier, Southey had exposed the perils of taking the King’s shilling in his Botany Bay Eclogue, ‘Humphrey’: The sergeant eyed me well; the punch-bowl comes, And as we laugh’d and drank, up struck the drums. And now he gives a bumper to his wench, God save the King! and then, God damn the French! Then tells the story of the last campaign, How many wounded and how many slain, Flags flying, cannons roaring, drums a-beating, The English marching on, the French retreating… ‘Push on… . push on, my lads! They fly before ye, March on to riches, happiness and glory!’ The new recruit soon ‘long’d to tend the plough again/Trudge up the field and whistle o’er the plain’. Instead he catches the pox:

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At last discharg’d, to England’s shores I came, Paid for my wounds with want instead of fame; Found my false friends, and plunder’d as they bade me. Tried and condemn’d, His Majesty transports me. So ends my dismal and heroic story, And Humphrey gets more good from guilt than glory.18 Coleridge’s War Eclogue entitled ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’, written in 1796–97 and published in the Morning Post (8 January 1798), is a more vehement personal attack on Pitt. It brackets together Britain’s disastrous intervention in the Vendée, in tardy support of a royalist rising, and Lord Camden’s ruthless coercion of Ulster. Pitt is not named, But: Letters four do form his name – And who sent you? [Slaughter asks] The same! the same! [Fire and Famine reply] He came by stealth, and unlocked my den, And I have drunk the blood since then Of thrice three hundred thousand men. Coleridge’s notoriously damning profile of Pitt would be published in the Morning Post on 19 March 1800. By 1817, however, in Sibylline Leaves, Coleridge decided that the republished War Eclogue needed an apologetic preface in which he implausibly denied any propaganda purpose.19 Wordsworth had mingled with Jacobins in Orleans in 1791–92, while Annette (the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Caroline) came from a family of royalist sympathizers. Descriptive Sketches, published by Johnson – in itself a presumption of radicalism – may have overdone the portrayal of Alpine scenery, as the Monthly Review evidently thought: ‘More descriptive poetry! Have we not had enough? Must eternal changes be rung on uplands and lowlands and nodding forests and brooding clouds, and cells, and dells and dingles?’ 20 But, as the Analytical noted, Wordsworth’s Alpine scenery is ‘occasionally enlivened by human figures’. There is the Grison gypsy who ‘solitary through the desert drear/Spontaneous wanders, hand in hand with fear’; her fears are real, as ‘nearer howls the famish’d wolf’ while her baby’s cries ‘lead him to his prey’.21 The gypsy can hardly be seen as a casualty of war, but the 800-line poem ends with a paean to revolutionary violence:

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Tho’ Liberty shall soon, indignant raise Red on his hills his beacon’s comet blaze; Bid from on high his lonely cannon sound, And on ten thousand hearths his shout rebound. His larum-bell from village-tow’r to tow’r Swing on th’astounded ear its dull undying roar: Yet, yet rejoice, tho’ Pride’s perverted ire Rouze Hell’s own aid, and wrap thy hills in fire, Lo! from th’innocuous flames a lovely birth! With its own Virtues springs another earth: Nature, as in her prime, her virgin reign Begins, and Love and Truth compose her train… .22 No wonder Wordsworth took his poem to Johnson for publication. Though published in 1793, Descriptive Sketches had been begun in 1791, when Wordsworth himself witnessed revolutionary fervour at first hand, and when (according to his recollections recorded in the 1805 Prelude) he encountered on the banks of the Loire ‘a hungerbitten girl’. The poet recalls the reaction of his companion, Michel Beaupuy: and at the sight my friend In agitation said, ‘’Tis against that That we are fighting’, I with him believed That a benignant spirit was abroad Which might not be withstood, that poverty Abject as this would in a little time Be found no more, that we should see the earth Unthwarted in her wish to recompense The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil.23 It was during 1791–93 that Wordsworth also composed (but did not publish) his ‘Incidents upon Salisbury Plain’, much of which was to reappear as ‘The Female Vagrant’ in Lyrical Ballads (1798). A recent biographer has seen the Salisbury Plain poems as the first significant sign of Wordsworth’s ‘empathy with the poor’, whose sufferings the outbreak of war in February 1793 would do so much to intensify.24 Joseph Cottle, Wordsworth’s Bristol publisher, himself contemplated human suffering amid sublime scenery. His Malvern Hills (1798), describing a Whit-Monday walk, concludes with a promise to:

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review with memory’s musing eye Your lofty summit, mark its subject vales And hear the magic orisons of birds, Breaking the silence with their melody; But earlier in the poem, Cottle had attacked the commercial impulse that drew young men from their rural environment to those ‘haunts of wickedness’, the cities and towns: Where Commerce with a grin of extacy Sits counting o’er her votaries’ tears and sighs; Urged by your splendid poisons, what a host Of inexperienced sons have left their homes, The cot’s calm comfort and the quiet shades, To taste your bitter dregs, and be immured From morn’s first dawn till evening far is spent In dust and stench and pestilence. In a series of footnotes, Cottle laboriously explains that he has particularly in mind ‘the pin manufacture and that for white lead’. Adam Smith had much admired the division of labour to be found in a pin factory, but Cottle complains that ‘the pointing of pins is attended with the almost certain sacrifice of those who are employed in it’. The damage is done, Cottle explains, by the number of minute metallic particles in the air, and he insists that ‘if property had been concerned, and not lives, ingenuity would long ago have discovered some mode for supplying the lungs with air uncontaminated with this destructive medium’. As for white lead, ‘What are these manufactures but an union of suicide and murder?’25 The Monthly Review deplored this mingling of social protest with descriptive poetry, complaining that it was ‘out of character for the author of a poem, which is descriptive of grand or beautiful scenery, to write a laboured preface on the sufferings of the poor, mixed with severe reflections on the conduct of the higher ranks in society, and accusing them indiscriminately of luxury, selfishness and insensibility’. The reviewer charges Cottle with perfectionism: That there is an abundant store of misery in human life, we all know, and in a certain degree experience. Entirely to eradicate evil, we also know, is beyond the reach of human wisdom, and the exertion of human power: but to mitigate it and lessen it are possible

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and very sacred duties. … It is the misfortune of theorists, however, to form to themselves pictures of perfection and happiness which never did and never can exist in our present state; and then to ascribe every deviation from these golden dreams, to some defect in the laws, or some error in the government.26 The Monthly was being rather too hard on Cottle, who (like Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth) was a member of the Bristol circle of the practical Dr Beddoes whose own attack on avoidable industrial diseases had focused on ‘the pestilence that so frequently visits the cotton works’, and on ‘the palsy contracted during the fabrication of certain metallic toys’.27 It was Cottle who printed the anonymous 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads, though publication was transferred to London. Apart from the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, which opened the volume but which Wordsworth clearly considered to be out of key with the rest of the collection,28 portraits of suffering humanity outnumber hymns to the healing powers of nature. Thus ‘To My Sister’, ‘Goody Blake’, ‘Simon Lee’, ‘We are Seven’, ‘The Last of the Flock’, ‘The Mad Mother’, ‘The Indian Boy’ and ‘The Thorn’ (all composed by Wordsworth between March and May 1798) succeed in matching the promise of the advertisement to focus on ‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’. By contrast, Coleridge’s ‘The Dungeon’, taken from his play Osorio, contrives to bring together Nature and human nature in the most overtly political poem of the collection.29 The poet begins by implicitly blaming crime on the unjust organization of society: ‘Each pore and outlet shrivell’d up/By ignorance and parching poverty,/His energies roll back upon his heart/And stagnate and corrupt.’ With the criminal consigned to prison, the poet asks: And this is their best cure! uncomforted And friendless solitude, groaning and tears, And savage faces at the clanking hour, Seen through the steams and vapours of his dungeon, By the lamp’s dismal twilight! So he lies Circled with evil till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed By sights of ever more deformity. How different, Coleridge suggests, are the ministrations by which Nature heals her ‘wandering and distempered child’:

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Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, Thy sunny hours, fair forms and breathing sweets, Thy melodies of woods and winds and waters, Till he relent, and can no more endure To be a jarring and a dissonant thing, Amid this general dance and minstrelsy; But, bursting into tears, wins back his way, His angry spirit healed and harmonized By the benignant touch of love and beauty.30 Such optimism is in stark contrast to the social reformer’s more literal portrayal of human misery, offered by Southey, historian of Brazil and future biographer of Nelson and John Wesley. Modern editors have seen Lyrical Ballads as a retreat from social protest – an abandonment of political activism for the passive contemplation of Nature and human nature. Thus critics note a tendency ‘to ignore the larger current scene in favour of more personal, fanciful or allegorical subjects’, and regret the replacement of Southey’s individual sufferer by personifications of suffering humanity.31 Was it the subtle shift in sensibility that so enraged Southey, and led to his searing criticism of Lyrical Ballads in the pages of the Critical Review? Some critics have thought so.32 Yet Southey’s severest strictures are reserved for the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, famously described as ‘a Dutch attempt at German sublimity’, with many stanzas which are ‘laboriously beautiful’ but ‘absurd or unintelligible’. He is also critical of Wordsworth’s ‘tiresome loquacity’ in ‘The Thorn’, and regards the story of Goody Blake and Harry Gill (which Wordsworth called ‘well authenticated’) as a possible incitement to ‘the popular superstition of witchcraft’. Southey quotes 16 stanzas of ‘The Idiot Boy’ before deciding that ‘No tale less deserved the labour that appears to have been bestowed on this. It resembles a Flemish picture in the worthlessness of its design and the excellence of its execution’. In contrast Southey admires ‘Lines Written above Tintern Abbey’, claiming that ‘in the whole range of English poetry, we scarcely recollect anything superior to it’. Such compliments did not mollify Wordsworth, particularly when mixed with the pained lament that the author of ‘Tintern Abbey’ should ever have ‘condescended to write such pieces as the Last of the Flock, the Convict and most of the ballads’. Yet Southey praises Coleridge’s ‘Foster Mother’s Tale’ as being ‘in the best style of dramatic narrative’, considers that ‘The Dungeon’ and ‘Lines upon a Yew-tree Seat’ are ‘beautiful’, before noting more equivocally that the ‘The Tale

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of the Female Vagrant’ is written ‘in the stanza, not the style, of Spenser’. As for the claims made in the advertisement, Southey concludes that the boasted ‘experiment’ has failed ‘not because the language of conversation is little adapted to “the purpose of poetic pleasure” but because it has been tried on uninteresting subjects’.33 Wordsworth’s famous preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads is in part a response to Southey’s censure. In Biographia Literaria (published in 1817) Coleridge expresses doubts about many parts of the preface, with which ‘in the sense attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred’. Coleridge evidently thought that the poems could speak for themselves: Had Mr Wordsworth’s poems been the silly, childish things which they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr Wordsworth’s admirers. They were found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds… .34 But if Wordsworth wrote the 1800 preface with one eye on Southey, the somewhat pompous advertisment to the 1798 edition can be seen as an answer to the weekly Anti-Jacobin. The campaign of Canning, Frere and Ellis against Southey set out to demonstrate both the political absurdity and stylistic banality of poetry devoted to the lives of the poor. The implication was that poems written about those whom the advertisement to Lyrical Ballads calls the ‘lower classes of society’, inevitably descend into doggerel. The Advertisement presents Lyrical Ballads as a stylistic challenge to that claim.35 Wordsworth’s seeming emphasis on the unpolitical thrust of Lyrical Ballads explains the unexpectedly favourable notice of the 1800 edition that appeared in the monthly Anti-Jacobin, where the volume was praised for possessing ‘genius, taste, elegance, wit and imagery of the most beautiful kind’. The ‘Ancient Mariner’ was accepted at its own valuation as an admirable ‘imitation of the style as well as the spirit of the elder poets’, while the whole collection of poems convinced the reviewer that ‘the author possesses a mind at once elevated and accomplished’.36

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By contrast, the Monthly Review had been surprisingly hostile in the eight full pages it devoted to the 1798 version of Lyrical Ballads. While commending ‘the fancy, the facility, and (in general) the sentiments’ of the poems, the reviewer could not ‘regard them as poetry, of a class to be cultivated at the expence of a higher species of versification’. The ‘Ancient Mariner’ is notoriously dismissed as ‘the strangest story of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper’, and as ‘a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence’. More surprising, is the Monthly’s objection to the political message of the individual poems. Thus ‘The Female Vagrant’ is censured for seeming ‘to stamp a general stigma on all military transactions, which were never more important in free countries than at the present period’. The reviewer asks whether, in imitation of Goody Blake, ‘all the poor are to help themselves, and supply their wants from the possessions of their neighbours’, or whether she should not have been relieved ‘out of the two millions annually allowed by the state to the poor of this country, not by the plunder of an individual’. As for ‘The Last of the Flock’: We are not told how the wretched hero of this piece became so poor. He had, indeed, ten children: but so have many cottagers; and ere the tenth child is born, the eldest begins to work, and help, at least, to maintain themselves. No oppression is pointed out; nor are any means suggested for his relief. And the reviewer asks: ‘Why does not the spectator, if he is a gentleman of means, intervene to spare the last lamb?’ The Monthly’s review concludes: ‘What but an Agrarian law can prevent poverty from visiting the door of the indolent, injudicious, extravagant, and, perhaps, vicious? and is it certain that rigid equality of property as well as of laws could remedy this evil?’ Similarly the ‘Old Man Travelling’ is too ‘pointed against the war’, while in ‘The Dungeon’ (the reviewer decides) ‘candour and tenderness for criminals seem pushed to excess’. Have not not jails been built ‘on the humane Mr Howard’s plan, which have almost ruined some counties, and which look more like palaces than habitations for the perpetrators of crimes?’37 It is paradoxical that the Monthly should be so sensitive to a vein of social protest running through Lyrical Ballads, while the Anti-Jacobin detects no such political motivation. Was the monthly Anti-Jacobin of 1800 perhaps right? Had Wordsworth moved from the overt political protest of Southey’s Botany Bay Eclogues to universalized human narratives? By the time he wrote the 1800 preface, and (with the addition

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of another 3000 words) the preface of 1802, Wordsworth had reinterpreted the 1798 poems in a universal sense.38 Yet in the late 1790s, he and Coleridge were so much part of the radical Beddoes circle in Bristol that it is difficult to discount an underlying political theme – though expressed in subtler and more sophisticated modes than Southey achieved. As Coleridge wrote to Cottle in the spring of 1797: ‘Wordsworth complains with justice that Southey writes too much at his ease.’ Coleridge fears that Southey ‘will begin to rely too much on story & event in his poems to the neglect of those lofty imaginings that are peculiar to, and definitive of the POET’.39 Coleridge was admittedly criticizing Southey’s attempts at epic poetry, and he himself was not disclaiming the poet’s reforming role. As he would write in 1809, when commenting on Wordsworth’s pamphlet Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal: My own heart bears me witness, that I am actuated by the deepest sense of the truth of the principles which it has been and still more will be my endeavour to enforce, and of their paramount importance to the Well-being of Society at the present juncture: and that the duty of making the attempt, and the hope of not wholly failing in it, are far more than the wish for the doubtful good of literary reputation … my great and ruling motives. Mr Wordsworth I deem a fellow-labourer in the same vineyard, actuated by the same motives and teaching the same principles… .40 Like Beddoes, Coleridge never lost his commitment to the improvement of society. Beddoes might parody Lyrical Ballads by having his own Domiciliary Verses set up in almost identical type, and bound in his copy of Cottle’s 1798 edition.41 But he and the poets were at one in their sympathy with the aspirations as well as the language of ordinary men and women. It was Francis Jeffery, of the newly founded Edinburgh Review, who in 1802 reinforced the Lake poets’ reputation for Jacobinism. He linked Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth with the ‘simplicity and energy’ of Kotzebue and Schiller, adding that ‘a splenetic and idle discontent with the existing institutions of society, seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments’. 42

8 Smears and Subsidies: the Monthly Anti-Jacobin

In the last issue of the weekly Anti-Jacobin in July 1798, a footnote announced: A NEW MAGAZINE AND REVIEW is already advertised, under the same name which we had adopted, and professedly on the same Principles. We have no knowledge of the undertaking, but from report, which speaks favourably of it; but we heartily wish this, and every work of a similar kind, a full and happy success.1 Despite the disclaimer, Canning and his colleagues seem to have had a hand in establishing the new monthly version, the first number of which appeared in July 1798, thus ensuring continuity of publication. Improbably enough, the new editor was also called Gifford, though it was an assumed surname: his real name was John Richards Green. How far Canning deliberately wished to create an appearance of continuity between the two titles is not altogether clear. Gifford had already demonstrated his Pittite credentials in his Letter to Lord Lauderdale, noticed by the Monthly Review in December 1795. Acknowledging that Gifford’s philosophy ‘is rather inflammable, and occasionally blazes out’ the review nevertheless considers that the 179-page pamphlet is ‘one of the most able and best written defences of the war that has yet issued from the press; the one, that, in point of composition, comes nearest in merit to Mr Burke’s famous “Reflections”’.2 The prospectus to the monthly Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine claimed that there was no need to define Jacobinism or ‘anti-Jacobin’ as was ‘absolutely necessary’ twelve months before: ‘All that is requisite on this head has been already done by our predecessors, whose princi-

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ples we adopt, and whose paths we mean to pursue.’ The anti-Jacobin campaign must continue: The existence of a Jacobin faction in the bosom of our country, can no longer be denied. Its members are vigilant, persevering, indefatigable; desperate in their plans and daring in their language. The torrent of licentiousness, incessantly rushing forth from their numerous presses, exceeds in violence and duration all former examples. In spite of the fact that ‘their falsehoods have been detected, their errors exposed, their misrepresentations corrected, and their malignity pointed out and chastised’, the Jacobins persist in their unpatriotic propaganda: The Regicides of France and the Traitors of Ireland find ready advocates in the heart of our metropolis, and in the seats of our universities. At such a time, what friend of social order will deny, that the Press requires some strong control? And what control is more effectual than that which the Press itself can supply? As its own contribution to this campaign, the Anti-Jacobin Review would shift the attack from ‘the daily and weekly vehicles of JACOBINISM’ which have already been ‘subjected to an examination, the beneficial effects of which have been universally felt and acknowledged’. The new editor’s object was now to ‘subject the monthly and annual publications to a similar process’.3 The inaugural issue of the monthly Anti-Jacobin was accompanied by an engraving of a famous Gillray cartoon. It depicts the ‘High Priest of the THEOPHILANTHROPES, with the Homage of Leviathan and his suite’. Leviathan has the face of the Duke of Bedford, on whose back ride Charles James Fox, John Thelwall and other figures waving revolutionary caps. Some appended verses help to identify other participants: the ‘wandering bards’ Coleridge and Southey, Charles Lloyd (their protégé) and Charles Lamb; the Unitarian Priestley, and those exponents of the ‘New Morality’, Paine, Godwin, Wakefield and Holcroft. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman is among a pile of pamphlets spilling from a ‘Cornucopia of Ignorance’, while representatives of the radical press cluster round the ‘holy hunchback’, Larevellière-Lépaux of the French Directory. A sack stuffed with ecclesiastical mitres and communion plate, labelled

Figure 8.1

James Gillray, New Morality (detail)

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‘Philanthropic Requisitions’, implies the imminent confiscation of church property in order to relieve the poor.4 Continuity with the new journal’s predecessor is demonstrated by the incorporation into Gillray’s cartoon of lines from Canning’s ‘New Morality’ which had appeared in the last issue of the weekly AntiJacobin. Canning’s verses had aimed to associate all British opponents of the Pitt ministry with their atheistical counterparts in the French Directory, ‘the men without a God’. This was an early example of the modern McCarthyite weapon of guilt by association. The poetry section of the new monthly begins with an ‘explanation of the satyrical print’, announcing that in one stanza, where the names of noted ‘Jacobins’ had been left blank, it has helpfully reprinted the lines with a positive identification of the true targets: With NORFOLK, GREY, TIERNEY in thy train And – WHITBREAD wallowing in the yeasty main – Still as ye snort, and puff, and spout, and blow, In puffing, and in spouting, praise LEPEAUX! A footnote explains that, if any readers object to the particular names chosen to fill in the blanks, ‘they are requested to substitute, in their place, such others as, to them, may appear more appropriate’.5 How had James Gillray been pressed into the ranks of the antiJacobins? He had celebrated the fall of the Bastille with a cartoon entitled Freedom and Slavery (27 July 1789). It depicted Necker standing on the ruins of the Bastille, with Pitt, his counterpart, trampling on the British crown, with king, nobility and people bound in chains. In 1790 Gillray’s more famous Smelling out a Rat, or the Atheistical Revolutionist Disturbed at his Midnight Calculations (3 December 1790) shows the ‘atheistical’ Dr Price seated at his desk, in the act of writing a tract ‘on the benefits of Anarchy, Regicide, Atheism’, while Burke in the shape of an enormous bespectacled cat looms over the doctor’s shoulder. This seems to be very much a Burkean view of both Price and the French Revolution, but (as Gillray’s biographer points out) while the content criticizes Price, the form ridicules Burke.6 After the flight to Varennes, Gillray focused on the indignities suffered by the French royal family, as in French Democrats surprizing the Royal Runaways (27 June 1791) and Louis XVI taking leave of his Wife and Family (20 March 1793). But the ambiguity persists in the disturbing mock execution of George III in The Hopes of the Party, prior to July 14th (19 July 1791) where the King is portrayed as a figure of fun – a reflection on monarchy as much as on the pro-French Foxites.

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Canning used his franking privilege as a junior minister to contrive an introduction to Gillray, through the mediation of the Rev. John Sneyd. Canning had written to Sneyd in January 1796: You may probably at some time soon have prints or drawings to transmit to Mr G. or he to you, which will be too heavy for a common Post letter. Now my privilege extends to franking and receiving of packets of any weight however large – and in such a case therefore you might very naturally enclose what you have to send, to me, and direct Mr G. to call for it… .7 Sneyd followed this suggestion. In October of the same year, Gillray published his Promis’d Honours of a Regicide Peace, timed to coincide with the publication of Burke’s first two Letters. Gillray depicts Pitt, stripped and tied to a Liberty Tree, with Canning and Jenkinson strung up on a lamp-post, while Lord Lansdowne works the guillotine. Presumably the cartoonist was siding with Burke, rather than mocking his alarmist visions, but even here the ambiguity remains. Was Gillray bought by the government? In the 1830s, the Athenaeum noted that ‘he first appeared as a sharp caricaturist on the side of the whigs: time, or some other remedy, softened his hostility’. William Cobbett, also writing after the event, reminded his readers in 1818 that Gillray ‘received a pension of 200 pounds a year’ from the Tories.8 Cobbett, still himself a Tory in 1798, was given pride of place in the first issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review. The journal’s first specimen of ‘Original Criticism’ is a review of his Republican Judge, or the American Liberty of the Press, with its claim that ‘the French Directory have newspapers in their pay, not only in America, but in every country in Europe’.9 Other notices in the same issue censure Fox’s decision to absent himself from parliamentary sittings, and denounce the ‘monkey-like jargon’ of Paine’s Letter to the People of France and the French Armies (Paris, 1797).10 A patriotic poem, ‘The Crisis, or the British Muse to the British Minister and Nation’, is warmly commended at a time when (writes Gifford) ‘venal writers and unprincipled orators prostitute their pens and their tongues to the justification of French crimes and the exaggeration of French prowess’. 11 Notice is taken of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman in Godwin’s newly published edition of her Memoirs and Posthumous Works. The reviewer comments that ‘the moral sentiments and moral conduct’ of Mary Wollstonecraft and her American lover, Gilbert Imlay, ‘exemplify and illustrate JACOBIN MORALITY’.12

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Plays, as well as novels, are targeted. In Robert Bisset’s review of Knave or Not by Thomas Holcroft, a comedy withdrawn from the stage but later published by the author, the Anti-Jacobin makes clear that it is not concerned with the play’s literary merit: ‘Were we to estimate the work before us by its merit as a production of comic genius, and apportion the length of our criticism accordingly, we should dismiss it after a very brief review.’ But Holcroft’s main character, Monrose, seems to the reviewer ‘to have been framed for the purpose of expressing certain opinions and sentiments, inimical to the present orders and gradations of this country’. Those opinions, ‘totally unnecessary to the conduct of the piece or the development of the plot’, are given deliberate prominence, and ‘the poison is infused into the palatable parts of the entertainment’. Dr Bisset finds that the ‘political scope’ of the play coincides with that of Holcroft’s novel, Hugh Trevor, and considers it ‘a sameness which manifests a consistency of design’. The novel had ‘exhibited the higher ranks as generally vicious, and ascribed that viciousness to their political situation’. Holcroft’s play goes further: Riches and even reputation are, according to the play before us, the result of successful roguery. Lords are unprincipled, profligate and abandoned. The vices and villainy of the rich and noble are the causes both of the misery of the poor in their oppressions and distresses, and their wickedness from example, self-defence or retaliation. If such assumptions are admitted, the reviewer concludes, ‘the direct inference from such premises is, LEVEL RANK AND PROPERTY’.13 The monthly Anti-Jacobin’s first issue ends with a dozen pages headed ‘HISTORY: SUMMARY OF POLITICS FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC’. Noting that the new journal has begun publication at ‘a period peculiarly calamitous to all who feel an interest in the welfare of mankind’, the editor adds the gloomy observation: ‘To whatever part of the continent of Europe we direct our attention, we find much matter for regret, and little ground of consolation.’ More specifically: From the Texel to the Garonne, from the Seine to the Tiber, the tricoloured standard of SOCIAL REBELLION, guarded by TERROR, is seen to float unmolested; in Principalities and Republics the venom of disorganization has produced its natural effects; and the few remaining Monarchies and States of Europe now totter on their bases!

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The French Directors, the editor is convinced, do not want permanent peace: ‘They know that the tyranny which they have established by force, that obedience which they have secured by terror, cannot possibly subsist in time of peace; they know, in short, that WAR IS ESSENTIAL TO THE EXISTENCE OF JACOBINISM.’14 Similarly, the Irish rebellion is ‘nothing more than a mere Jacobin Conspiracy, originally formed at the instigation of, and in conjunction with, the exercising supreme power in France’.15 The August issue objects to Fox’s speech at a meeting of ‘the English Jacobin clubs (for the Whig Club really deserves no other appellation)’,16 which had implied that participation in the ‘Armed Associations’ to repel invasion would be a dress rehearsal for overturning the home government. Although in normal times the Anti-Jacobin would not wish ‘to lay down any general rule to regulate the politics of individuals’, the writer (John Bowles) has no hesitation in saying that at a time, when every possible motive should be enlisted in behalf of the great cause which we have to defend, every one ought to be convinced, that a refusal to join in vigorously opposing the common enemy, will inevitably be attended with the entire sacrifice of all estimation and respect in society.17 In a continuation of the review of Letter to the People of France, Paine is quoted as saying that he had met ‘several of the original patriots of the revolution; I do not mean the last order of the Jacobins, but of the first of that name’. Gifford retorts: ‘We shall only remind our readers that the first Jacobins were the very men who in violation of the most solemn oaths, destroyed the monarchy and murdered their sovereign. They were therefore very fit companions of Thomas Paine.’18 And in a notice of letters from Paris to Joseph Priestley from J.H. Stone and Helen Maria Williams, the editor regrets that ‘these self-transported patriots triumph, by anticipation, in the conquest of England, the downfall of her monarchy, and the consequent establishment of a republic under which their pious friend, Dr Priestley, may live unmolested by Kings, by Tythes or by Bishops’.19 Frenchmen could nevertheless sometimes be called in to buttress anti-Jacobin propaganda. The August 1798 issue also reviewed Camille Jordan’s Address to his constituents after his banishment by the victors of Fructidor – an address carrying (in its English translation) a preface by John Gifford himself. The review quotes Gifford’s description of Jordan’s sentence of banishment as ‘extorted by a Turkish Directory

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from a prostituted Divan, which, after the memorable events of the 4th September, 1797, swept away what little remained of talent and integrity in republican France’. Gifford, the review explains, together with ‘other informed and intelligent supporters of the old system of British government, religion and morals, saw and shewed that not only Marat and Robespierre, but Brissot, Condorcet and their associates, entertained similar notions of justice with Lepeaux’.20 The seamless web of Jacobinism was extended even further back to encompass the philosophes, who (we are told) ‘foresaw the Revolution, foretold it, and proposed the manner of achieving it by the adhesion of the people’.21 Conversely, a review of Gifford’s Short Address to the Members of the Loyal Associations warns readers of the protean nature of Jacobinism: ‘Defeat it in one shape, it springs up in another.’ Gifford’s 40-page pamphlet purports to disclose French plans to divide Great Britain and Ireland into ‘three distinct and independent Republics’, and includes a list of ‘the Directories and Ministers of the same, as prepared by the Directory at Paris’. Gifford insists on the authenticity of the list, though the reviewer (Bisset, not Gifford himself!) explains that ‘the author disclaims the most distant intention of imputing to those persons mentioned in the list who are resident in this country, the smallest knowledge of their intended promotion by the French Directory’.22 But the plainest characterization of Jacobinism in the pages of the Anti-Jacobin Review is seen in a long article spread over two issues. ‘The Rise, Progress, Operation, and Effects of Jacobinism’ revealingly ends its record with the ‘Association against Republicans and Levellers in 1792’. By Jacobinism, the author explains: I understand, principles, doctrines and conduct similar to those which have proceeded from the Jacobin clubs in France, their imitators and coadjutors in other countries. These may be reduced to three general classes – hostility to religion, hostility to monarchy, and hostility to social order, property and virtue. And he adds: ‘Whoever is the enemy of Christianity and natural religion, of monarchy, of order, subordination, property and justice, I call a Jacobin.’ In modern Jacobinism, the author continues, ‘there are, with all the bad ingredients of ancient democracy, mingled many much worse’, in particular the modern attempt to ‘establish a system of equality of rank and property; a system so obviously inconsistent with the intention of Providence, as appears in the different endowments

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which it bestows on different minds’. Voltaire is denounced as ‘inimical himself to Christianity’, and desirous of its overthrow, ‘which the ardour of his temper and the vivacity of his imagination made him suppose would be speedy’. The Frenchman is even accused of infecting Frederick the Great, thus rendering ‘a man, in talents superior to all the philosophists, his tool in spreading the most pernicious doctrines’.23 The message is reinforced by propagandist poetry. First ‘A JACOBIN COUNCIL’: Scene a Reading Room – the Chairman speaks: From open Rebellion we’ve no hopes at all, If we throw off the mask we are certain to fall – Let our vot’ries then follow the glorious advice In the gunpowder legacy left us by Price, Inflammable matter to touch grain by grain; And blow up the state with the torch of Tom Paine!24 Then a paraphrase of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man: The Ages of Reason First, Philosophic Infants Nurs’d by Voltaire and mewling for reform: Then Tiers-Etat; with scraps of Rights of Man, And front rebellious, with monarchic pow’r Unwittingly combin’d. Then Citizens, Frantic as Hell, with many a fête and hymn To strumpet Goddesses. The Jacobins Full of strange projects bloody as the pard, Jealous of neighb’ring nations, quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble, dear Equality Even in the cannon’s mouth. Then Regicides, In foul convention, drench’d with Louis’ blood, With red-capt heads, or heads cut off sans form, Full of old Rome and modern Guillotine… .25 By October 1798 the Anti-Jacobin considers that its diagnosis of Jacobinism at work in Ireland has been fully vindicated in the twopenny pamphlet An Account of the late Insurrection in Ireland; in which is laid open the Secret Correspondence between the United Irish and the French Government, through Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Mr Arthur O’Connor, James Quigley and Others … (London, 1798). Gifford quotes with approval the author’s conclusion:

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May England take warning from it. May they learn to be on their guard against those designing men, who, in the name of liberty, would bring them into slavery; who would overthrow that happy constitution under which we have grown so great and flourishing, and would render even Great Britain herself a province of France.26 By contrast O’Connor’s 80-page State of Ireland is dismissed as ‘an account of imaginary grievances, stated as an incitement to rebellion’. Indeed, the review continues: ‘It is scarcely possible for an invitation to rebellion to be expressed in more clear and forcible terms, or for any tract to contain a greater number of inflammatory falsehoods.’ Yet ‘not one word of reprehension’ does it extort from the Analytical Review, which ‘seems tacitly to acquiesce in the sentiments which it breathes’. But what, the reviewer asks, ‘could be expected from the work of a TRAITOR reviewed by a JACOBIN?’27 Earlier in the October 1798 issue, the Anti-Jacobin Review does allow itself some respite from political smears and innuendo, when it begins a review of Samuel Henshall’s comparison of the Saxon and English languages by admitting: ‘It is with pleasure we turn from the bustle and controversy of politics to the relaxation afforded by literary disquisitions.’28 But a notice of Henry Wansey’s anonymous reply to the Bishop of Salisbury’s charge to his diocesan clergy, swiftly demolishes the author: ‘In this crude and hasty production having given ample specimens of a restless and uncultivated mind, he now presents to the public the natural produce of the soil, a farrago of illiberality, ignorance and scurrility.’ The reviewer is equally ready to wager that ‘with all his boasted loyalty, he would gladly undertake the destruction of church and state, for a good post under the French Directory’. 29 It is hardly necessary to add that Wansey was a Dissenter. The November number carries a notice of A true Account of the deplorable Malady of H- - -y W- - -y, a Wiltshire Clothier: showing, how he mistook a Barber for a Clergyman in a red Coat; and a Lancet, with which it was attempted to bleed him, for a Scymitar. Being an Epistle from his Cook-maid, Doll Dish-clout, to Mrs Bacon, the Tallow-chandler’s Wife. The tone of this publication is sufficiently clear from its title, but the Anti-Jacobin describes it mildly as ‘a poetical jeu d’esprit’,30 and proceeds to print an extract from another ‘poetical’ attack on Wansey: My Lord, I don’t commend the French; Their fields and streets in blood they drench; But still, of France, I don’t despair,

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For true religion triumphs there. They have, my Lord, a strange machine They call the holy guillotine. On which they place the sinner blinking, To teach him their true way of thinking; Besides, my Lord, I’m free to say That once upon a sacred day, With hymns and worship they ador’d – And in the very church, my Lord – An harlot whom they call’d a goddess Without a shoe, a shift, or bodice… .31 The same issue carries a cartoon of Horne Tooke’s ‘Two Pairs of Portraits’, showing Chatham and the Younger Pitt, Holland and Charles James Fox. The editor provides his own verbal comparison: Fox. Entered early on the turf, at gaming, clubs, &c – Pitt. Pursuing early the painful study of the laws and constitution of his country… . Fox. Without any avowed, or even professed public principle as his object, declares for party; and that often changed. – Pitt. Without the proscription of any individual, as such, declares for principles; and those religiously.32 John Gifford would later write a laudatory life of Pitt, and be rewarded by being appointed a police magistrate. His namesake and editor of the weekly Anti-Jacobin, William Gifford, was made Commissioner of the Lottery, and (later) Paymaster of the Band of Gentleman Pensioners.33 Was the anti-Jacobin press subsidized in the 1790s from Pitt’s secret service fund? The fund was not under parliamentary control, and could be used either at home or abroad ‘in detecting, preventing or defeating treasonable and other dangerous conspiracies against the State in any place within this kingdom’. The secretaries of state had to swear that the secret-service money had been used in a bona fide manner, and an Act of 1782, introduced (ironically enough) by Burke, had limited to £10 000 the amount that could be taken from the civil list for pensions. An undated secret-service account (evidently for 1784) shows that Pitt, in the very first year of his ministry, paid at least £500 in subsidies to the press.34 That was admittedly pretty small beer. The only other secret-service accounts known to have survived cover the years 1788–93. These

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show that the government regularly divided £2800 p.a. between nine morning and evening papers. Additionally, in the year ending June 1793, at least £1637 was paid to those writing articles for newspapers, while the cost of printing and circulating pro-ministry pamphlets, and placing advertisements, brought the total press subsidies for 1792–93 to nearly £5000.35 William Miles, despite earlier protestations that he would support the ministry ‘without any pecuniary recompense, from a sense of duty’, was by 1792 himself receiving £500 p.a. – though this ceased when he opposed the war. 36 Canning freely altered contributions to the weekly Anti-Jacobin. He told Lord Morpeth: ‘I take the liberty of leaving out one sentence, which I think does not clearly express what I suppose you to mean, and I have tried in vain to satisfy myself with any emendation of it. It is that about the separation of the Government and the people.37 We know that in 1798 the Alien Office was given extended powers to promote counter-espionage at home and abroad, while the government withdrew its advertisements from the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Post and the Courier – an action for which the weekly Anti-Jacobin claimed some of the credit, having suggested it a month before. 38 As for the strident anti-Jacobin campaign against editors allegedly in the pay of France, one can only say that it looks suspiciously like a smokescreen. When the Morning Chronicle castigated ‘Ministerial Writers’ as mere ‘labourers for hire’, the weekly Anti-Jacobin had distinguished between such patriotic polemicists and those ‘Jacobin Editors’ who write for hire ‘and for French hire – not in defence of Religion, &c of their Country’. The inference seems inescapable.39 The preface to the second bound volume of the Anti-Jacobin Review (January to April 1799) remarks: That the Jacobins continue their criminal projects undismayed by detection, unawed by defeat, the Report of the Secret Committee of the British House of Commons too clearly demonstrates. But, though not less desperate in their end, they display more caution and prudence in their means. Among their less overt methods, the preface identifies ‘the diffusion of Jacobinical principles, through the medium of Children’s Books’, and roundly condemns what it calls ‘this truly diabolical effort to corrupt the minds of the rising generation, to make them imbibe, with their very milk, as it were, the poison of atheism and disaffection, and so to contaminate the very source of social order and social happiness’.40 In

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a notice of Bowles’s Retrospect; or, a Collection of Tracts, &c, Gifford agrees with the author (one of the ministry’s paid retainers) that ‘the whole hypothesis of Locke is so very repugnant to every idea of practicability that it deserves only to be considered as a fable, yet, alas! how long has this fable served to impose on mankind, and to what fatal consequences has it led!’41 So the rogues’ gallery of ‘Jacobins’ must now include John Locke. By contrast, George Walker’s novel The Vagabond is praised by Bisset as ‘a lively sketch of the more obvious absurdities, follies and wickedness of the new philosophy’. At the same time the editors are pleased to announce that ‘a much more comprehensive exposure of the ravings of Wollstonecraft, Holcroft, Godwin, Paine, Thelwall and other abettors, principal or subordinate, of the new philosophism, is the subject of a Novel of four volumes, now in the press, by that zealous Anti-Jacobin, Dr Bisset’.42 In March 1799 the monthly Anti-Jacobin welcomes an anthology of extracts from its weekly predecessor. The reviewer had hoped that the entire weekly journal would be republished ‘in such form as would bring its purchase within the reach of that class of society to which the instruction it imparted was, perhaps, more immediately necessary’. But the full new octavo edition was priced at 18 shillings, which (says the reviewer) will ‘confine it to the shelves of the opulent’. But the anthology (Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner) cost five shillings, and was ‘intended to occupy a place on the tables, or in the pockets, of the middle class of society’. The monthly Anti-Jacobin’s review of the Beauties quotes with approval the statement that ‘in the present state of Europe, it is as much the duty of those who are entrusted with the government of states, to attend to the Press, as to the army or to the revenue’. The reviewer is also pleased to find that the anthology contains ‘the whole of the Poetry’, which he judges ‘includes many excellent specimens of genius, humour and taste, that will outlive the age in which they were first exhibited’. Of these, ‘the Poem entitled “New Morality” indisputably claims the pre-eminence’.43 This brings us back to Canning who, with John Gifford, is the principal creator of the Pitt of popular legend – the Pitt whom Canning would later celebrate as ‘The Pilot who Weath’rd the Storm’.44 By the time Canning’s poetic tribute to Pitt was written, the prime minister was confronting not the Directory, but Bonaparte’s Consulate. The coup d’état of Brumaire was the only item of political news in the Anti-Jacobin Review for November 1799. The editor cautioned his readers against ‘the hasty adoption of what appears to us to be a crude, indigested and erroneous opinion, that this is an Anti-Jacobin

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Revolution, tending to favour the cause of Royalty. To us it wears a very different aspect’.45 And while Bonaparte waited to reveal his true colours as Coleridge’s ‘imperial Jacobin’46 and so enlist even the poets in Pitt’s crusade, the Anti-Jacobin Review turned its fire against the Germans. The preface to Volume IV (September to December 1799) declared: It is, with an equal portion of surprize and alarm, that we witness in this country, a glaring depravity of taste, as displayed in the extreme eagerness for foreign productions; and a systematic design to extend such depravity by a regular importation of exotic poison from the envenomed crucibles of the literary and political alchymists of the new German school.47 In the German universities (we are told) the paths of true science ‘are forsaken for the labyrinths of the new philosophy’, which now dominates the curriculum: That species of false metaphysics which has been attended with such wonderful consequences in Republican France, in levelling the Throne and the Altar with the dust and in eradicating from the public mind every principle of religion and morality, is here cultivated with the same industry, and evidently in the hope of producing the same effect. As a result, the students ‘display a manly contempt of discipline, a patriotic dislike to subordination, and a philosophical aversion from every kind of restraint’. At Jena, the editor claims, there are 200–300 students who are ‘almost to a man’ republican, and who ‘go about the country arrayed in Republican uniforms!’ They are all formed into secret clubs, ‘which are the scenes of perpetual broil, riots and disorders’.48 After such a portrayal of academic anarchy, it is scarcely surprising to find Göethe described as ‘one of those Literati who contribute, by their writings, to deprave the minds of their countrymen’. 49 Like Burke himself, the Anti-Jacobin Review had no doubt that Pitt’s war was a war of ideas.

9 ‘Jacobin Morality’: the Wollstonecraft Memoirs

In Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon of 1 August 1798, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft are yoked in obloquy. Among the supposedly seditious publications littering the ground, are Godwin’s Political Justice and Wollstonecraft’s Maria or the Wrongs of Woman. Godwin included this unfinished novel among his wife’s Posthumous Works, which he published in January 1798, alongside his edited version of her Memoirs. Canning’s ‘New Morality’ verses chose to catalogue Godwin with Paine, Holcroft and Helen Maria Williams among ‘all creeping creatures, venomous and low’. The Anti-Jacobin’s charge was that the ‘new’ morality was an insidious method of undermining the state. Gillray’s cartoon and Canning’s verses sought to trace the contagion to French revolutionary principles. In the full version of his verses (published in the last issue of the weekly Anti-Jacobin) Canning wrote: How do we ape thee, France – nor claim alone Thy arts, thy tastes, thy morals for our own, But to thy WORTHIES tender homage due, Their ‘hair-breadth ‘scapes’ with anxious interest view; Statesmen and Heroines whom this age adores, Though plainer times would call them Rogues and Whores.1 The same theme had surfaced as early as July 1793, after six months at war with France, when the Gentleman’s Magazine published ‘Modern France: a Poem’ by George Richards, Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. It contained the lines: See at the helm a daring band reclin’d Loaded with every crime of human kind, 111

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Men who o’er patriot chieftains forc’d their way, By bold injustice, to imperial sway; Bow’d a great people whom they seem’d to free By foulest wrong and ruthless tyranny, Loos’d social man from every mild controul That sweetens life and purifies the soul, And back return’d him, Nature’s rugged child, To roam a savage through the woods and wild. Thence, justly dreading Heaven’s vindictive rod, To hush their terrors they denied their God, And, giving earthly crimes more ample room, Struck from their faith the realms beyond the tomb.2 Now, in June 1798, the same journal, in an eerie premonition of Orwell’s newspeak, commented on the strange reversals of meaning in Jacobin phraseology: Are not prisoners, women, priests and children butchered by thousands at a time, in cold blood, and with every aggravated circumstance of cruelty? These are called revolutionary incidents, ebullitions of popular zeal. But if, by the just resentment of a people whose religion he is insulting, and whose government he is labouring to overthrow, a Jacobin should perish in a riot of his own exciting, this becomes a massacre, for which no satisfaction will suffice, short of delivering over a whole nation to pillage and conscription, to anarchy and atheism.3 Mary Wollstonecraft could not herself be accused of easily dismissing French revolutionary barbarities. Her own History of the Revolution sees France of the ancien régime as a scene of depravity relieved only by ‘a taste for majestic frivolity’, and ends at the removal of the royal family from Versailles to Paris. However, her preface speaks of ‘the rapid changes, the base and nefarious assassinations, which have clouded the vivid prospect that began to spread a ray of joy and gladness over the gloomy horizon of oppression’. 4 And in the first of a promised but unfulfilled series of ‘Letters on the Present Character of the French Nation’, which Johnson was to publish for her, she wrote: I would I could first inform you that out of the chaos of vices and follies, prejudices and virtues, rudely jumbled together, I saw the fair form of Liberty slowly rising, and Virtue expanding her wings to

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shelter all her children! I should then hear the account of the barbarities that have rent the bosom of France patiently, and bless the firm hand that lopped off the rotten limbs. But, if the aristocracy of birth is levelled with the ground, only to make room for that of riches, I am afraid that the morals of the people will not be much improved by the change… . She found in the France of 1793 that ‘the same pride of office, the same desire of power are still visible’, and saw that ‘every petty municipal officer … stalks like a cock on a dunghill’.5 The Letter was published by Godwin in Posthumous Works. In the Memoirs, Godwin plays down the years 1792–94, which Mary Wollstonecraft spent in Paris. He regards it as ‘almost unnecessary to mention that she was personally acquainted with the majority of the leaders of the French Revolution’. And he describes the anguish she felt on hearing of the execution of Brissot, Vergniaud and the other Girondin deputies, as ‘one of the most intolerable sensations she had ever experienced’. Yet, while skating over her association with the Brissotins, Godwin plunges into more dangerous waters. He explains that, although Mary had posed as Gilbert Imlay’s wife in order to obtain the immunities enjoyed by American citizens, she had refused to marry him. She had nevertheless (according to Godwin) ‘considered their engagement as of the most sacred nature; and they had mutually formed the plan of emigrating to America, as soon as they should have realized a sum enabling them to do it in the mode desired’. Godwin does not hide the fact that in the meantime Wollstonecraft and Imlay lived together in Paris as man and wife. And to compound the damaging effects of his candour, Godwin writes blithely of those persons (like Mary) ‘whose minds seem almost of too fine a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is transport and disappointment is agony indescribable’. He adds: ‘This character is finely portrayed by the author of the Sorrows of Werter. Mary was in this respect a female Werter.’6 This admission would confirm the worst suspicions of anti-Jacobin critics, for by 1798 ‘German’ and ‘Jacobin’ were interchangeable terms. Contemporary reviews of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, published that year, spoke disparagingly of the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in terms of ‘German sublimity’ and ‘the extravagance of a mad German poet’.7 The charge would be echoed by Hazlitt in his Lectures on the English Poets (1818) where he asserts that the Lake School of poets ‘had its origins in the French revolution, or rather in those sentiments and

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opinions which produced the revolution’. Such ideas were ‘indirectly imported into this country in translations from the German about that period’. Similarly in his Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (1820), Hazlitt explains why he regards ‘the Goethes, the Lessings, the Schillers, the Kotzebues’ as ‘the only incorrigible Jacobins, and their school of poetry the only real school of Radical Reform’. German drama, Hazlitt complains, overthrows all established maxims of poetry, politics and society: ‘We are no longer as formerly heroes in warlike enterprise; martyrs to religious faith; but we are all the partisans of a political system, and devotees to some theory of moral sentiments.’ He continues: All qualities are reversed: virtue is always at odds with vice, ‘which shall be which’… . Opinion is not truth: appearance is not reality: power is not beneficence: rank is not wisdom: nobility is not the only virtue: riches are not happiness: desert and success are different things: actions do not always speak of the character more than words.8 Twenty years earlier the monthly Anti-Jacobin Review was equally hostile to what Hazlitt would call ‘the romantic extravagance of the German muse’.9 Its March 1799 issue quotes lines from T.J. Mathias’s ‘The Shade of Alexander Pope’: No Congress props our Drama’s falling state, The modern ultimatum is, ‘Translate’, Thence spout the morals of the German School: The Christian sinks, the Jacobin bears rule. A footnote explains that ‘the modern productions of the German stage, which silly men and women are daily translating, have one general tendency to Jacobinism. Improbable plots, and dull scenes, bombastic and languid prose alternately, are their least defects. They are too often the licensed vehicles of immorality and licentiousness, particularly in respect to marriage.’10 The very first issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review (July 1798) devoted a total of a dozen pages to Bisset’s notices of both Maria or the Wrongs of Woman and the Wollstonecraft Memoirs. Bisset sees the novel as an attempt to illustrate ‘the doctrines which Mrs W. had attempted to establish in her “Rights of Woman”’. He notes that the opinions ‘have a very great coincidence’ with those principles advanced by Godwin in

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Political Justice ‘in which he described the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, as one of the highest improvements to result from political justice!’ The plot of the novel concerns Maria’s marriage to a man who, having squandered much of her fortune, ‘contrives to have her kidnapped and sent to a private mad-house’. The Anti-Jacobin’s summary continues: This misfortune arising from her own injudicious choice of a husband, she imputes to the unequal state of women in society. In the mad-house, she gains the confidence and affections of her attendant Jemima. This person had been a prostitute and a thief; these occupations had sharpened and invigorated her understanding; in such degree indeed, as to make her a political philosopher without the advantage of any other education. Maria falls in love with another (sane) inmate who, the reviewer tells us, was not only ‘a handsome man, but peculiarly remarkable for muscular strength’. Having ‘with her paramour’ escaped from the asylum, she ‘openly and boldly manifests her conduct’. Her husband prosecutes her lover for ‘criminal conversation’. Maria herself appears in court and ‘pleads her feelings, not as her apology, but as her justification’. Bisset comments: ‘This was indeed a conduct, according to Godwin’s own heart.’ It avowed a disregard for the institution of marriage, and it forbade concealment – ‘the only evil according to the philosopher, that can detract from the political and moral blessings of a promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, guided by the the feelings of the parties’. The reviewer notes, however, that the trial judge is of the old school, and does not admit Maria’s plea of her feelings as a vindication for her adultery, ‘however conformable it may be to the new philosophy’. Maria (we are told) sees the restrictions upon adultery as ‘A MOST FLAGRANT WRONG TO WOMEN’. Godwin has ‘laboured to inform the world, that the theory of Mrs Wollstonecroft [sic] was reduced to practice; that she lived and acted as she wrote and taught’.11 The Wollstonecraft Memoirs, the Anti-Jacobin explains, are indeed useful, though not for the reasons Godwin supposes: ‘Intended by him as a beacon, it serves as a buoy; if it does not show what it is wise to pursue, it manifests what it is wise to avoid.’ Noting that Mary had begun her career in the Analytical Review, the Anti-Jacobin reviewer records that ‘learning and sound reasoning were not then esteemed indispensably necessary any more than they are at the present time’. Her doctrines are dismissed as ‘all obvious corollaries from the theorems

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of Paine’, though Bisset significantly concedes that ‘if we admit [Paine’s] principles, that all men have an equal right to be governors and statesmen, without any regard to their talents and virtues, there can be no reason for excluding women or children’. Continuing to focus on Mary’s sex-life, the Anti-Jacobin review records: Her constitution, as the philosopher, her husband, bears testimony, was very amorous. Her passions were farther inflamed ‘by the state of celibacy and restraint in which she had hitherto lived, and to which the rules of polished society condemn an unmarried woman. …’ Here we must observe, that Mary’s theory, that it is the right of women to indulge their inclinations with every man they like, is so far from being new, that it is as old as prostitution.12 And Bisset adds acidly: ‘Among other advantages, which this just woman planned from her amour, was a trip to America, where she might have eluded her creditors.’ This was a particularly unfair inference, as Mary had earlier rejected the suggestion that she might escape her creditors by fleeing to Ireland.13 The Anti-Jacobin’s attack on Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Jacobin Morality’ is pressed home in the reviewer’s reaction to extracts from the Analytical Review’s notice of the Wrongs of Woman. The Analytical had stated that Wollstonecraft’s aim in writing the novel was to show a woman abandoned by her husband, ‘without the dissolution of the marriage, and in defiance of the laws, connecting herself with another man, bearing all the PERSECUTION that the laws in this respect authorize, and at last sinking into voluntary death, overcome with the weight of her calamity’. The Anti-Jacobin now comments: ‘Here the virtuous and constitutional Reviewer informs us that the proceedings against adultery, authorized by the laws, are persecution.’ If women were to be allowed freedom to exercise what Godwin calls their natural and social rights, ‘it would loosen and finally dissolve the tie of marriage, destroy one of the chief foundations of political society, and thus promote jacobinical politics’. It would also have the effect of ‘diminishing regard for vows, and so tend to a neglect of the Supreme Being, and coincide with jacobinical religion’. The AntiJacobin adds sententiously: ‘The law of this country confines divorce to the case in which it was allowed by our Saviour. An authority, however, might be cited much more respected by the Analytical Reviewers. The French have established divorce in many other cases.’14

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The Analytical, after noting sadly that Wollstonecraft’s name ‘is pursued by the censures of the licentious and malignant’, had offered Mary this assurance: But better times approach, and thy vindication is secure. Thy name shall yet be mentioned with those who have been distinguished for virtue and talents; and, under this persuasion, we are contented, that for a time thou shouldst suffer the reproach of married and unmarried prostitutes.15 The Anti-Jacobin pretends to see in those words an expectation of a French invasion: ‘From the cooperation of English Jacobinism, its votaries might expect that their Gallic friends would be successful.’ And a few pages further on, amid various miscellaneous notices, the editor welcomes the appearance of the first issue of the Anti-Gallican with the confident claim: ‘To cherish an anti-Gallican spirit has in all times been deemed an effort of genuine patriotism, a mark of that love of one’s country, which distinguishes the true-born Englishman from the mongrel cosmopolite.’ The only exceptions are ‘men, who, till very lately, have not been considered as fair themes for praise, or laudable objects of imitation – we mean TRAITORS, persons leagued with the enemy for the overthrow of the British constitution’. The Anti-Jacobin’s readers were left to make the obvious connection.16 It is scarcely surprising that the Analytical Review, published by Johnson, Wollstonecraft’s own publisher, should return a more sympathetic verdict. Noting that, in living with Imlay, Mary ‘took upon her the duties of marriage, without the ceremony’, the Analytical argues that exceptional talents deserved exceptional indulgence: If any think that, without accusing Mrs G. of immorality, a charge of indelicacy will fix, on account of the neglect of the established rules of the community, we have only to observe that Mrs G. was an original thinker, differed from the vulgar in most things, had long reflected on the subject and drawn decisive conclusions. But, doubtless to the delight of anti-Jacobins, the Analytical reviewer added the reminder, that the Wollstonecraft–Imlay union took place ‘in France, at a moment when the discussion of the subject of marriage agitated the national councils, and when a new system of thinking on that point almost universally obtained’. This seeming acknowledgement of the superiority of French principles is scarcely effaced by the

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reviewer’s admission that Wollstonecraft’s conduct was ‘imprudent, while men continue as they are, and we are far from holding it up for imitation’. In reviewing Posthumous Works, the Analytical is at least critical of Wollstonecraft’s literary style. The reviewer quotes from the Wrongs of Woman an example of sentences that ‘are full of sentiment and energy, but want simplicity’: One recollection with frightful velocity following another, threatened to fire her brain, and make her a fit companion to the terrific inhabitants, whose groans and shrieks were no unsubstantial sources of whistling winds, or startled birds, modulated by a romantic fancy, which amuse while they affright; but such tones of misery as carry a dreadful certainty directly to the heart. However, her letters to Imlay, the Analytical decides, are in a different class: ‘We have no scruple in saying they will be valued as long as the language of the heart is held dear.’17 The Critical Review was similarly impressed by the Imlay letters, quoting with approval Godwin’s own description of them as containing ‘the finest examples of the language of sentiment and passion ever presented to the world’, and adding its own verdict: ‘It is impossible to read them without feeling a lively interest in the sufferings of the writer. Hard must that heart be upon which they could make no impression.’ But the general tenor of the six-page review, treating both the Memoirs and the Posthumous Works, is hostile. While conceding that Wollstonecraft was ‘possessed of great genius’, and commending her ‘undaunted and masculine spirit’, the review reports that it is not ‘without disgust that we have read these Memoirs, and some of the posthumous pieces’. The Critical is not pleased with ‘what the author considers as firmness … in braving all dangers in the pursuit of an object which her own mind represented to her as praiseworthy’. And in a stern footnote the editors add: ‘This is the cant of modern philosophy, often a handsome disguise to give appearance of heroism to old-fashioned pride and self-will.’ The review gives prominence to Mary’s affair with Fuseli, and, while condemning Imlay’s treatment of her, censures their relationship as ‘certainly a connection begun in passion and imprudence’. The reviewer has little patience with the Wrongs of Woman for blaming Mary’s misfortunes on the inequitable laws and customs of society: She married Mr Venables, because she was in love with him, and had not sufficient discernment to perceive that his love was feigned,

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and his character detestable. No laws of society, nor the absence of all law, could prevent a misfortune of this kind. … Why should any persons over-charge the picture of real oppressions from the laws and customs of society, by fictions which tend to discredit the whole?18 The Critical had clearly not forgotten that there are laws and social customs that it would like to see reformed, yet it is content to be ‘ranked with the votaries of the old system, whose dark minds the rays of the new philosophy have never been able to penetrate’. It has no doubt that Wollstonecraft’s principles are ‘unfriendly to human happiness, and, if practically followed, would injure the sex they were intended to vindicate and protect’. 19 The Monthly Review, another former champion of reform, is equally emphatic. Novels, it thinks, are not as influential as is commonly supposed, and an author must be ‘vain indeed who fancies that, by a fictitious tale, however well told, and interspersed with fine sentiments, he can give a new impulse to the manners of the world’. Wollstonecraft‘s unfinished novel is designed to justify an opinion respecting marriage which ‘circumstances of her own history, together with her husband’s system’ may have convinced her of. The Monthly reminds its readers that a recital of ‘matrimonial vice and misery, is no argument against the institution of marriage; which on the whole, as Dr Johnson says, “is no otherwise unhappy than human life is unhappy”’. 20 In reviewing the Memoirs, the Monthly is as critical of Godwin as of Wollstonecraft: Blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands, if they were forced to relate those anecdotes which Mr Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme eccentricity of Mr G.’s sentiments will account for this conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with respect, nor to suicide with horror. The Monthly considers that ‘society is at an end if every individual be permitted to redress his own grievances; – and we add that religion is at an end if every female, who is crossed in love, or disappointed in her husband, is to be encouraged to commit an act of suicide’.21 The Anglican and pro-establishment British Critic, in a six-page review, is still more censorious. After quoting 22 lines of Godwin’s account of the Fuseli affair, the reviewer notes how quickly Mary turned to Imlay, who ‘felt no objection to gratify all her desires’, and

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how soon she enjoyed with him what Godwin calls that ‘happiness of which her ardent imagination was continually conjuring up pictures, during her intercourse with the celebrated painter’. The reviewer notes that although Mary ‘refused to be actually married to her lover’, she nevertheless did not expect, in the early months of ‘her sensual delirium’, that the relationship would end in desertion. Abandoned by Imlay, the review continues, ‘it appears that her senses were now so completely awakened, that she could not exist without their gratification’, and she was prevented from quitting England only by meeting in Godwin ’a man able and willing to satisfy her desires‘. And in a verdict revealing familiarity with Godwin’s arguments in Political Justice, the reviewer records: after seven months of sexual intercourse, she had acquired such an ascendancy over her lover, that she prevailed with him to marry her, though he had, not long before, declared to the world, that ‘so long as he should seek to engross one woman to himself, and to prohibit his neighbour form proving his superior desert, and reaping the fruits of it, he would be guilty of the most odious of all monopolies …’.22 Turning to the Wrongs of Woman, the British Critic asks whether it is not ‘very far nobler, and more generous, rigidly to obey the claims of duty, than, like our puny moralist, to whine and complain, because her own frail and fallible views of things are checked by obstacles and opposed by disappointments’. Wollstonecraft in her unfinished novel, ‘puts the hopes and consolations of religion out of the question; and the idea of this being but a probationary state is never permitted to intervene’.23 The British Critic concludes that the volume of letters to Imlay ‘might well have been denominated the English Eloisa’, but the only part of the Posthumous Works which can be read ‘without disgust’ is ‘the latter part of the fourth volume’, which, ‘if we could separate it from the rest, [we] would, but not too warmly recommend’. 24 This damningly faint praise is a reminder of the damage Godwin did by ‘stripping his dead wife naked’, as Southey so memorably expressed it. 25 By exposing Mary, in his revelations, to what the Monthly Magazine called ‘the charge of multiplied immorality’, 26 Godwin diverted attention from Wollstonecraft‘s far from immoral proposals for improving marital relationships, both legally and domestically.

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His insistent frankness destroyed her reputation, even among later feminists. Wollstonecraft’s championship of female rights was notably distinct from more recent feminist campaigns. She hated the idea of marrying in order to gain financial security. As she told Godwin: ‘At fifteen, I resolved never to marry from interested motives, or to endure a life of dependence.’27 And when the break with Imlay seemed imminent, she wrote to her unfaithful lover: ‘Do not suppose that, neglected by you, I will lie under obligations of a pecuniary kind to you! – No; I would sooner submit to menial service, – I wanted the support of your affection – that gone, all is over!’ In her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786) she had emphasized the need for girls to be taught to think, and she urged that they should be trained to be mothers rather than simply to adorn fashionable society; she also argued that women should suckle their children, and show them maternal affection. Such sentiments were echoed in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): ‘Whatever tends to incapacitate the maternal character takes woman out of her sphere.’28 Hannah More might tell Horace Walpole that she was determined not to read Rights of Woman, finding ‘something fantastic and absurd in the very title’.29 But the Monthly had accorded it a generally favourable review of 12 pages. Recognizing that ‘among the most enlightened people of antiquity, Wisdom, as well as Beauty, was deified under female form’, the Monthly records: ‘The fundamental principle, on which the whole argument of this work is founded, is that, except in affairs of love, sexual distinctions ought to be disregarded, and women be considered in the light of rational creatures.’30 The reviewer rightly treats the book as a work of education, and among the substantial extracts quoted is one beginning: ‘To improve both sexes they ought, not only in private families, but in public schools, to be educated together. If marriage be the cement of society, mankind should all be educated after the same model…’. The reviewer notes that ‘this project has perhaps a better claim than its novelty’, and cites the author‘s insistence that ’marriage will never be held sacred till women, by being brought up with men, are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses’. And, in a strange foreshadowing of the political correctness of a later century, the review ends by asserting that men and women should ‘certainly, in the first place, regard themselves, and should be treated by each other, as human beings’, and regrets the lack of ‘some general appellation to denote the species’, which it regards as ‘a material defect in our language’. The Monthly

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does not regard Wollstonecraft‘s arguments as an assault on the moral fabric of society, though it does question the political implications of her educational programme: We do not, however, so zealously adopt Miss W.’s plan for a REVOLUTION in female education and manners, as not to perceive that several of her opinions are fanciful, and some of her projects romantic. We do not see, that the condition or the character of women would be improved, by assuming an active part in civil government.31 Even Johnson’s Analytical Review expected its readers to disagree with ‘Miss W.’s proposal of enlarging the representation in favour of the female sex’, while it nevertheless declared: The lesser wits will probably affect to make themselves merry at the title and apparent object of this publication; but we have no doubt, if even her contemporaries should fail to do her justice, posterity will compensate the defect; and have no hesitation in declaring that if the bulk of the great truths which this publication contains were reduced to practice, the nation would be better, wiser and happier than it is upon the wretched, trifling, useless and absurd system of education which is now prevalent.32 The Critical Review was entirely dismissive, describing Rights of Woman as ‘vague, inconclusive reasoning, strung together with little art, and no apparent plan’. The reviewer posed the question: ‘Have the qualifications of the two sexes been mistaken? Are the ladies entitled from their natural powers, taken collectively, to lead, or even to rival the men in scientific pursuits, in the labours of the mind?’ His readers had little doubt what the answer must be. 33 Even Godwin, with his remorseless honesty, described his wife’s book as ‘undoubtedly a very unequal performance, and eminently difficult in method and arrangement’, though he added that the author ‘will perhaps here-after be found to have performed more substantial service for the cause of her sex than all the other writers, male or female, that ever felt themselves animated in behalf of oppressed and injured beauty’.34 Godwin’s unlooked-for candour only ensured that Rights of Woman would in future be read in the sexually permissive perspective of the Wrongs of Woman and the Memoirs. More immediately, his decision to publish had presented the anti-Jacobin press with a perfect propaganda

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opportunity, not only to invoke the spectre of French atheistical immorality but to remind its readers that Godwin’s disparagement of marriage went hand in hand with his ‘Jacobin’ views on politics. Thus, as one of his biographers has written, ‘the cause of women’s equality like the cause of reform was decisively lost, and Godwin’s simple honest memoir contributed heavily to the defeat’.35

10 ‘Jacobin Prints’: Courier and Star, Chronicle and Post

The weekly Anti-Jacobin for 9 July 1798 claimed that the Jacobin enemy, unable to conquer England by force, sought to subvert by fallacies and lies ‘the judgment of those he could not openly hope to subdue’. To further this aim, ‘the Press was engaged, and almost monopolized in all its branches: Reviews, Registers, Monthly Magazines, and Morning and Evening Prints, sprung forth in abundance’. And of the daily prints, ‘it is not too much to say that they have laboured in the cause of infamy, with a perseverance which no sense of shame could repress, and no dread of punishment overcome’.1 Four months earlier the Anti-Jacobin’s tone had been even more strident: Is a fellow too dishonest for a ticket-porter, too idle for a chairman, or too dull for a ballad-maker? he immediately commences Jacobin, raves as loud as Mr Fox for a Radical Reform, and, as a reward for his zeal, is entrusted with the care of enlightening his countrymen in the Courier, Post or Chronicle.2 Similarly, in an attack on the Cambridge Intelligencer, the provincial newspaper that Coleridge so much admired, the Anti-Jacobin describes Flower’s journal as containing: a mass of loathsome ingredients, a sort of ‘hell-broth’, made up of the worst parts of the worst public papers that ever disgraced the metropolis of any Country, with added filth and venom of its own. – More false than the Morning Post, more blasphemous than the Morning Chronicle, and more devoted to the cause of Anarchy and Blood than that exploded vehicle of idiot frenzy, the Courier.3 124

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The Morning Chronicle, though started in 1769 in the Whig interest, had received government funding in the late 1780s. But in 1789 it was bought by the Scotsmen, Gray and Perry, who made it ‘not only the chief Opposition journal, but the most influential of all newspapers’, until eclipsed by The Times in the 1820s. The Morning Post, founded in 1772 by a group of London businessmen, supported the government in the 1780s, but deserted to the Opposition as a result of what Aspinall calls ‘the delicate matter of the Prince’s secret marriage’. 4 In 1788 the Stuart brothers, Daniel and Peter, started printing the Post for Richard Tattersall, and in 1795 bought it from Tattersall for £600 including plant and copyright. The Post had already absorbed the World, and within two years Daniel Stuart had raised his paper’s daily circulation from 350 to 1000, absorbing the Telegraph along the way. In 1797 James Mackintosh introduced Coleridge to Stuart, and the poet was a frequent contributor until he left for Germany with the Wordsworths in the summer of 1798. On his return, Coleridge became the Post’s highest paid columnist, and when Stuart disposed of the paper in 1803, circulation had reached 4500. Coleridge wrote the editorial for 2 January 1798, which found in Pitt’s new taxes ‘all contrarieties of evil reconciled in ruin’, and warned that ‘we ought not to forget that worse and heavier measures must take place, UNLESS THERE BE A PEACE’. Stuart was soon asking Coleridge for more of his ‘excellent’ pieces: something ‘on the approaching Downfall of the Pope’, and of ‘Pitt’s Air Castle of conquering France; of making Ireland happy by coercion; of paying off the national debt &c. &c.’5 Stuart had also acquired the Courier, an afternoon paper first published in September 1792. He ultimately increased its circulation from 1500 to 7000, but found himself doubly the target of Canning’s ‘New Morality’ verses: While countless votaries thronging in his train Wave their Red Caps, and hymn this jocund strain: ‘Couriers and Stars, Sedition’s Evening Host, Thou Morning Chronicle, and Morning Post, Whether ye make the Rights of Man your theme, Your Country libel, and your God blaspheme, Or dirt on private worth and virtue throw, Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise LEPEAUX.6 The Star, also an afternoon paper, claimed in its new-year message on 1 January 1792 that it had acted as ‘the friends of order, good govern-

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ment and proper subordination, and inculcated the true spirit and principles of the BRITISH CONSTITUTION’. The editors admitted having ‘displeased individuals by our candour’, but the paper’s published views had been ‘publicly avowed as the genuine sentiments of such respectable bodies as the Merchants, Bankers and Traders of London, Glasgow and other Commercial cities’. The Star argued that it had a harder task than its contemporaries, ‘for, all of them are the avowed supporters of some party; and from them impartiality is not to be expected’. At the beginning of 1793 there were 15 London dailies.7 All these newspapers consisted of four printed pages in four colummns, of which the front page was mainly occupied by advertisements. That allowed a maximum of 16 columns when advertisements were displaced to devote all four pages to Parliamentary debates. The Star allowed 11 columns to the Commons slave-trade debate on 26 April 1792, and more than ten to the debate on Grey’s motion for Parliamentary reform.8 The full text of the ‘Manifesto of the Emperor and the King of Prussia relative to the Affairs of France’ was spread over no less than nine issues between 18 August and 4 September 1792, while on 14 December the debate on the King’s Speech and the embodying of the militia occupied all 16 columns. 9 In October 1795, when reporting the State Opening of Parliament, the editors of the Star promised that ‘the Parliamentary debates of the present session, which are expected to be the most interesting that have occurred in our history, will be given in the STAR with the same fidelity and accuracy that have hitherto distinguished it from all its compatriots’. Next day the debate on the King’s Speech occupied 15 –12 columns.10 Fidelity and accuracy in parliamentary reporting were not always easy to achieve. Shorthand did not apparently come into use before about 1812, and although from 1783 onwards reporters in the Strangers’ Gallery had been allowed to make written notes, there was no hope of recording debates verbatim. Lord John Campbell, who had briefly been a parliamentary reporter in 1800–2, considered shorthand writers as useful for taking down evidence in the courts, but ‘wholly incompetent to report a good speech’, since (he explained) ‘they attend to words without entering into the thoughts of the speaker’. 11 Such creative reporting tended to reflect the emphasis expected by the paper’s editors or readers, and in the debates on the Triple Assessment Bill in late 1797, John Nicholls’s speech appeared in contrasting versions. According to both the Chronicle and the Star, he criticized the bill for placing the heaviest burden ‘upon the middle classes’, while the ministerial True Briton, Evening Mail and The Times reported him as

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objecting that it ‘went to destroy the comforts of the lower classes’. 12 In 1798 Wilberforce complained in the Commons of what he saw as ‘a studied design to misrepresent, and even to vilify the members and their proceedings’. Four years later, he wrote to Hannah More: ‘You talk of my speech; whatever it was, the newpapers would have given you no idea of it. Never was anyone made to talk such arrant nonsense.’13 The Morning Chronicle was less critical of such discrepancies, seeing ‘the best security against misrepresentation, in the number and rivalry of the prints’.14 It is easy to overstate the degree of misrepresentation. At the height of the protest against the ‘Gagging Bills’, the Star reported a debate on the Secretary of War’s motion to increase the Fencible Cavalry (troops raised solely for defensive purposes at home) to 10 000 men. The editors gave prominence to criticisms of the proposal. General McCleod was ‘at a considerable loss to know what ministers proposed, keeping up this enormous body of Fencible Cavalry, except it were to make the people submit to the despotic laws, which it was their object to introduce and enforce’. He was supported by General Tarleton, who ‘was of opinion that half a million of public money ought not to be expended on men, for whom he could not see the least public utility’; and by General Smith, who ‘originally voted for the Fencible Cavalry, and thought them useful while a great military armament was engaged abroad; but now he conceived them both useless and expensive’. 15 Yet four days later, the Star gave prime space to Pitt’s rejoinder to the ‘shameful misrepresentation’ of the ‘Gagging Bills’. It reports him as asserting that, if opponents of the bills would waive the effect of that stupid misrepresentation, and compare the real sense of the People, he should not be afraid to meet them, and to argue the popularity of the two Bills now before the House. If they would compare the sense of the People, as it had been fairly called for and candidly taken, he would debate the question on that ground. As for weighing the merit of the petitions against the bills, Pitt is reported as claiming that provenance was more important than number of signatures: ‘By what he knew of the circumstances, by the inflammatory language that had been held out at public meetings, he was at liberty to judge of them by that language, which language had indeed been reverberated in the petitions themselves.’16

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The Star’s own assessment is admittedly revealed in its editorial for 21 November: It cannot now be denied, that the public voice of London and Westminster (an eighth of the population of England) as well as of many of the most respectable and independent places in the kingdom, is decidedly against the unconstitutional Bills which have caused so much alarm; yet we shall see the addresses procured by Placemen, Pensioners and Government Contractors, and signed by their dependents, held up by the supporters of the Bill as the voice of the People of England. Let the people learn from the debates in Parliament last night, what is to be their fate as soon as these Bills shall pass – A military force will then answer all their remonstrances.17 But editorials were relatively rare. In 1793 the Courier expressed its censure of the war against France by the transparent but unchallengeable device of recording anniversaries. Thus that of Prince Eugene’s death (10 April 1756) suggests lines from Pope: Triumphant leaders – at their army’s head – Hemm’d round with glories, PILFER CLOTH AND BREAD; As basely plunder, as they bravely fought – Now save a country – and then STEAL A GROAT. The more recent deaths of Captain Blair, Captain Bayne and Lord Robert Manners – all killed in the American war – are recorded ‘amidst a miserable multitude of our inestimable countrymen’. 18 More explicitly, a reference to orders given by ‘His most Christian Majesty, the thirteenth Louis’ to the captain of his guard to murder Marshal D’Ancre ‘with pistols, on the draw-bridge of the Louvre’, prompts the question: ‘Is it such a court, which the Heroes and Gentlemen of the Continent would wish to re-establish?’ 19 Other self-explanatory examples are: April 27, 1773. – Propositions for the PARTITION OF POLAND between Russia, Prussia and Germany! April 27, 1711. – The Mohocks at the height of their sanguinary enormity! stripping many and maiming more. May 21, 1095. – The PEOPLE were plunged into the first CRUSADE!

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May 28, 1712. – The Duke of Ormond declared to Prince Eugene that the British Troops under his command were no longer to act offensively against France, in a war which concerned only the interests of Austria.20 The Courier adopted a less oblique form of editorial comment well before Stuart took over the direction of editorial policy. Early in 1794 the paper reminded readers that ‘while the prints devoted to the Administration have been endeavouring to delude the public by exultations of successes which have not been gained, THE COURIER has been contented with stating events as they have really occurred’, leaving its readers to arrive at their own judgement. But the loss of Toulon – ‘perhaps the most disastrous that has ever attended the arms of Great Britain’ – has provoked a change of editorial policy. The Courier blames the failure on ‘the ignorance which planned our operation! to our want of knowledge, and, perhaps, too great contempt for the foes we were to encounter!’ It adds acidly: ‘Ministers conceived that the power of engaging in a war carried with it the talents for conducting it.’21 Six months later, the Courier was pointing to the lack of foresight in preparing maps – the habitual curse of the British army. The mapmakers, taking it for granted that the war would be fought on French soil, had ‘crowded with names of places all within the French frontier, and marked but very few without’, so that ‘our troops must often retreat over inches of blank paper, before the most pains-taking Gazette reader can find out where they are’. 22 Other Courier editorials of 1794 were prompted by the annexation of Corsica to the British crown, and by the fall of Robespierre. 23 1795 opened with editorial comment on the King’s Speech from the Throne: ‘Another campaign is to be undertaken, and a war commenced with dishonour, and conducted with disgrace, is yet to be continued, and we are still insulted with the extravagant expectation that 26 millions of free men can be subdued.’ Even if victory were attainable, the economic cost would be too great: ‘From the loom and the plough they must send 30 000 more men to supply the deficiency occasioned by the secession of Prussian troops.’ The Courier then prints verses ‘On the King’s Speech’, beginning: My Lords and Gents (the Monarch cries) What tho’ the Dutch, our late Allies, Are making Peace with Gallia’s powers,

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And tho’ our armies are destroyed, Still be our tongues in praise employed; For Corsica you know is ours!24 And in October, disappointed by the unpacific tone of another Speech from the Throne, the editorial asks: ‘Does the ELECTOR OF HANOVER think that the prospect of the Allies has been materially improved? No – for he has made peace.’25 The Morning Post offered only occasional editorial comment in the early 1790s, but in July 1794 it was stung (like the Courier) into pronouncing on Corsica: The miserable policy of the British Cabinet has never been more lamentably displayed during the course of the present awful contest than in the acceptance of the sovereignty of Corsica. It has displayed its vanity and lust for dominion at the expence of its honour, and to the most serious prejudice of its professed object in this just and necessary war. … Let the cession of Corsica be compared with the fraternity granted to the Belgians by Dumouriez, and little or no difference will be found.26 Four days later the Post, under the headline ‘Crusading’, claimed that ‘in all the wars of Britain, never was there a war, which in equal time, brought more calamity and has left so fatal a sting in the body politic, as the present melancholy contest’.27 Between 29 October and 6 November 1794, the Post accorded some 67 columns to the Treason Trials, culminating in an editorial on 7 November: Every true friend to justice, to humanity, and to his country must rejoice in the result of Mr Hardy’s trial. Had that innocent man been convicted on the evidence produced, we may bid for ever adieu to the Liberties of England. The mind shudders in contemplating the thousands which may be brought to a sanguinary death if he had suffered on the evidence brought against him; for where is there an honest and independent man in the kingdom who has not also taken an active part to procure the salvation of his country, by means of a Parliamentary Reform?28 There was no lack of editorial comment on the war itself. On 21 January 1793, the Chronicle had reported that the Dutch ‘were never so indisposed to go to war, nor so unprepared for one’. It

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added: ‘If they are to be hurried into it at our instigation, and are forced to join the conspiracy against French doctrines, they do not scruple to say that the measure will be pregnant with every sort of ruin, not merely to their external commerce, but to their internal government.’ 29 Ten days later the same paper devotes a full column to ‘War with France’, examining the probable impact on ‘thinking men’, and on manufacturing, commercial and landed interests. ‘THINKING MEN,’ it decides, ‘who support the cause of humanity and freedom, abominate the idea of interfering with a great and populous nation in its attempt at internal regulation’, even though ‘the effervescence of its zeal for the cause may have hurried some of its citizens into acts of wanton arrogance and atrocious cruelty.’ 30 Meanwhile the Post, after encouraging Fox to continue his opposition to ‘a war, by which we can get nothing, and by which we risk the loss of everything’, 31 reminds its readers that war is ‘neither the innocent, amusing, nor honourable pastime’ which ministers and their supporters represent it to be: ‘Armaments, reviews, drums, flags, crowds and acclamations, are the hacknied stage-tricks to cover a measure which will not bear cool examination.’ Like the Chronicle, the Post emphasized that Holland had not asked for help, as our interference over the Scheldt ‘might precipitate her into a war with France, a thing of all others she wishes most carefully to avoid’. 32 The same day the Chronicle has strong words on Poland’s treatment at the hands of our allies: That brave and gallant people, who, in their virtuous effort to establish a free Government, drew even from the versatile Mr Burke the loftiest commendation, are to be again parcelled out, and delivered over to the devouring despots; and this dreadful ruin of a whole people the British Court views with complacency, while it pours forth its anathemas against the atrocious principles, and the projects of aggrandizement entertained by the French.33 And on 7 February 1793, ‘in this dearth of reasons for war’, the Chronicle refers ministers to the reasons offered by the servingmen in Coriolanus, Act IV, Scene 5. The afternoon papers pursued the same theme. In July 1792 the Star had printed the text of the 1790 Treaty of Alliance between Prussia and Poland so that ‘our readers may form some judgment how far the Poles had or had not a right to call upon Prussia for aid in the present contest with the Empress’.34 And after the third partition of Poland, at a

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time when French refusal to evacuate the Netherlands was an obstacle to peace, the Courier ran an editorial recalling that the Balance of Power was destroyed before the French conquered the Netherlands: that there are three Potentates in Europe whose system is to aggrandize themselves, and to extend their territories; and that we have suffered those Potentates to carry their system into effect with impunity. Does not the infamous Partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia and Austria destroy the Balance of Power?35 A second January editorial in 1796 points to the ‘want of defined objects at the outset of the war’, and to the ‘perpetual change of the objects’, as obstacles to peace, while characterizing Burke as ‘The PETER of the Crusade’.36 Prompted by Grey’s motion for peace in February, another Courier editorial notes that the House had expected to be told of ‘the steps that had been taken to obtain a knowledge of the disposition and terms of the French Government; of the future intentions of Ministers; and the prospects to which the Country might look’. Instead, the Courier complains, Pitt’s speech was notably unspecific: The language is of so equivocal a nature, selected with great caution, and arranged with such art, that while one sentence appears to contain something specific and substantial, the succeeding sentence deprives it of that character, and leaves the mind in doubt, distrust and uncertainty.37 When the peace negotiations are broken off in April 1796, the Courier challenges the sincerity of ministers who knew, before negotiations began, that the Directory claimed that it could not constitutionally alienate the incorporated territories of Nice, Savoy and the Netherlands. So, in breaking off the treaty on this pretext, ministers ‘evince in the clearest manner their insincerity in pretending to commence it, since it is plain they determined to insist upon what was impossible to be granted’.38 An editorial declares: Another loan of six million and a half sterling? Let the country reflect on the situation in which it is now placed. We are to continue the war; for what? for the purpose of reconquering territory that formerly belonged to us? no; for the purpose of preserving the balance of European power? No; we have sufficiently proved a carelessness about the balance of power, by suffering the abominable plunder

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and partition of Poland. We continue the war for the purpose of restoring Savoy to Sardinia and the Netherlands to the Emperor.39 By the autumn of 1796, less than a fortnight before Lord Malmesbury arrived in Paris, the Courier commented on Burke’s Regicide Peace, observing that Burke proved ‘incontestably’ that there could be no real grounds for war ‘unless the utter opposition to the new system of things, and the object of restoring the ancient Monarchy, were the motives which induced us to draw the sword’. The editorial continues: It was not a particular aggression, but the general principle avowed by the enemy, that Mr Burke considers as the ground of the war. Unless Mr Burke’s principle be admitted to be just, it is very plain that the present war was a war of aggression upon the part of this country; and as Ministers now disclaim the objects for which Mr Burke contends, they find in him an antagonist who exposes with great force and eloquence the folly of their conduct, and the injustice of their pretensions.40 In February 1797 the Courier introduced Erskine’s Causes and Consequences of the War with the complacent observation: ‘It is not a slight triumph to the cause of Literature that its most vigorous exertions have been adverse to the combination against France; and that the independent intellect of the Country has decidedly opposed the present war.’ 41 Eleven days later the French arrived off Fishguard. The Anti-Jacobin’s charge against the ‘Jacobin Prints’ was not merely that they opposed the war and Pitt’s conduct of it, but that they actively sided with Britain’s enemies. In January 1798 Canning’s journal quoted extracts from the Chronicle and Post, adding that it wished ‘to call the attention of our readers to the conduct of the editors of these two Jacobinical, or rather French papers’. Two pages later, it was referring to the ‘Jacobinical Conductor of the Courier’.42 The Anti-Jacobin regarded the Courier as its prime target. It would later characterize it as: the Paper which applauded the massacres of September, the bloody proscriptions of ROBESPIERRE, the plunder and devastation of Italy, the murder of the brave but misguided Swiss – the Paper, in short, which has not once ventured, in the long course of seven years of horror and blood, to cast the slightest reflection on any one act of the French Government. …43

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The Courier, like its ‘Jacobin’ contemporaries, devoted a surprising amount of space to the proceedings of the National Convention, which frequently occupy a quarter, and sometimes two-thirds of the 16 columns available. This compares with a normal maximum of three columns in the Sun, though in the late summer of 1797, the other ministerial daily, the True Briton, matched and sometimes even outdid the Star in its coverage of French news.44 Among French news reported in the Courier are debates in the Paris Jacobin Club, sometimes extending to two full columns, and sittings of the Revolutionary Tribunal, with the names of those condemned and acquitted.45 French military victories are sometimes reported with apparent admiration or even near-jubilation. Thus, in three successive weeks in June 1796, the Courier reports that Bonaparte is determined to ‘extend his conquests, and threatens to display the tri-coloured flag on the very walls of Rome’, observes that ‘Victory seems to be the order of the day in the French army upon the Rhine, as well as in the French army of Italy’, and begins an editorial with the words: ‘Victory still attends the operations of the French armies.’46 A month later, the Courier declares: ‘The French Republic, it will at length be acknowledged, has disappointed all hopes, defeated all the views, and annihilated the greater part of the means of the coalition formed against it.’47 The issue for 4 February 1797 carries a front-page headline, ‘VICTORIES OF THE FRENCH’, and devotes more than six columns to Bonaparte’s successes in Italy, adding the editorial reflection that ‘another Austrian army has been destroyed; and another Austrian General has fallen before the victorious arm of BONAPARTE.’ In May 1797 a hard-hitting Courier editorial laments that the British, ‘whose pride it was that our Constitution was founded upon Republican Principles’, were now ‘the only People of Europe who are left to contend against the Liberties of France!’ When would Englishmen open their eyes? ‘Will not all the miseries, in which we have been involved, convince us that, as long as the Ministers remain in power, we can have neither Peace, nor Prosperity, nor Freedom in England?’ 48 The Courier may be thought to have gone rather further in that editorial than mere opposition to an unnecessary war fought with the wrong allies. A year later the Anti-Jacobin would triumphantly record the ‘official’ French declaration that ‘the Courier was the only Republican Paper in this Country’. The same issue of the Anti-Jacobin goes on to portray the Chronicle and the Post as trying desperately, by

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their sympathetic coverage of French treatment of prisoners, to earn a similar tribute.49 The Chronicle’s editorial applauding Duncan’s victory over the Dutch at Camperdown, admittedly has a sting in the tail: That the brilliant victory of Admiral Duncan does honour to the British flag every man must feel, but it remains to be seen whether Ministers will employ it to the advantage of the country. The true way of following up victory is to render it conducive to that object for which war is undertaken – Peace. The same editorial mocks a ‘Ministerial writer’ who feared that ‘Jacobinism may be imported from Italy in the quavers of an opera singer.’ The Chronicle professes ironical surprise that ‘these alarmists never suggested an amendment to the Alien Bill that the French and Italian languages, which may serve as the vehicles of Jacobinism, should be prohibited to be read on pain of transportation to Botany Bay’.50 The Anti-Jacobin amuses itself by printing contradictory accounts from the Morning Chronicle and the Echo de la République Française as to whether Count Bernadotte, as French ambassador in Vienna, had properly or improperly flown the tricolour from his embassy flagstaff: ‘We leave the Morning Chronicle to make out this business as well as it can, with its fellow Echo of the French Republic.’ 51 But the Anti-Jacobin grotesquely misrepresents the Chronicle’s alleged support of French principles. On 18 December 1797 the Chronicle had reported: General BUONAPARTE is at Paris, and that metropolis is all gaiety and feasting on the occasion. It is probable that they will have a holiday thanksgiving for their successes on the same day that we have ours. They will beat us, however, out of the field, for they have Robespierre’s solemn thanksgiving as a model! The Anti-Jacobin quotes an abbreviated version of the report, which it chooses to interpret as approval of the notorious ‘solemnity’ when Hébert’s ‘miserable prostitute’ represented the Goddess of Reason: she was fantastically tricked out, and led to the head of a Grand Procession to the Church of Notre Dame, the Cathedral of Paris. Here she was solemnly placed on a Throne of Turf and Flowers, while Gobet and the rest of the Revolutionary Clergy burnt Incense on an Altar erected just before her.

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This, claims the Anti-Jacobin, was ‘the ceremony which the Morning Chronicle now recommends us to adopt, instead of a grateful and pious prostration of ourselves before the Almighty Ruler of the Universe!’ Apart from the trick of substituting Hébert for Robespierre, the AntiJacobin, profuse in its own use of exclamatory punctuation, carelessly (or maliciously) omits the Chronicle’s exclamation mark that signalled the ironical thrust of the passage. And the Anti-Jacobin audaciously made its accusation under the heading ‘Misrepresentations’.52 The Morning Post retaliated against this smear campaign by noting that ‘a weekly publication called the Anti-Jacobin, said to be the work of some Treasury Hirelings’, had for some time printed a so-called ‘weekly list of lies, mistakes and misrepresentations of the Opposition Papers; or, as it describes them, “the Jacobin Journals”.’ The Post continues: We would not rescue from oblivion, by our notice, so contemptible a publication as the Anti-Jacobin, nor thrust on our readers its Billingsgate trash, if it were not to show a specimen of Ministerial Candour, and to give some idea of the ignorant and false and palpably malicious charges against this, and other Papers, which the Treasury circulates. The Post then provides its own list of falsehoods from the Anti-Jacobin, and objects to the charge that the Post is guilty of ‘circulating the base calumnies of the Directory, and endeavouring to accredit them’. More specifically, the Post indicates that it had indeed printed the ‘calumnies’ of the Directory regarding the British treatment of French prisoners, only to claim (8 February 1798) that ‘we have every reason to believe the reports of the ill treatment of the French prisoners in England are much exaggerated, if not wholly unfounded’. The Post asks: What can be thought of the Treasury which circulates such abominable libels and lies? What can be thought of Mr PITT, who in a British House of Commons boasts of reading such a publication, and calls it an ingenious and instructive work?!!! The Attorney General is preparing a Bill for the protection of persons against libel. Is not a property like the Morning Post, paying six or seven thousand pounds to the revenue to be protected? Or is it to be libelled with impunity, because it will not praise an Administration hurrying on the country to ruin?

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Did the Attorney-General think ‘there ever was published a libel more atrocious than the paragraph in the Anti-Jacobin which in plain terms says this paper receives and obeys instructions from the Directory, in whose interest it is retained?’ The Post declines to ‘stoop to contradict so infamous a falsehood’, though it could prove that ‘this paper during the last three years has repeatedly attacked the misconduct of the French, with as much severity as it has the misconduct of the British Ministers’. The Post concludes: ‘If the AttorneyGeneral views the British Press through [the Anti-Jacobin’s] distorting and false medium, no wonder he should complain of its licentiousness.’53 It is not only the Attorney-General of the day whose vision has needed to be corrected.

11 Reviewers Reviewed: Monthly and Critical

The prospectus announcing the birth of the monthly Anti-Jacobin Review began with a confident assertion that the channels of criticism have long been corrupted; that many of the Reviews, sinking the critic in the partisan, have insidiously contributed to favour the designs of those writers who labour to undermine our civil and religious establishments, and, by a shameless dereliction of duty, to cast an odium on their opponents. In order to ‘counteract the pernicious effects of this dangerous SYSTEM’ and to ‘restore criticism to its original standard’, the new AntiJacobin would ‘frequently review the Monthly, criticise the Critical, and analyse the Analytical Reviews, on the principle already adopted by the WEEKLY EXAMINER in its comments on the daily prints’.1 The Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner was itself subjected to critical appraisal in the Anti-Jacobin Review, which carried a regular section headed ‘The Reviewers Reviewed’. In a notice of the collected twovolume edition of the weekly Anti-Jacobin, the editors of the new monthly applauded their weekly predecessors who ‘had every qualification requisite’ for countering the ‘intolerable and unexampled profligacy’ of the ‘Jacobin’ daily papers. Those same editors had possessed ‘genius, wit, diversified talents, and the best possible sources of political information’. (The last of these boasted advantages was undeniable, as Canning was already a junior minister in Pitt’s administration.) Canning’s team (we are now told) ‘had a decided superiority over their adversaries; for men of more spotless characters never stood forth in defence of religion, virtue and social order’. 2 The monthly AntiJacobin would soon attack the Critical Review’s judgement that these 138

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same superior editors had ‘not been studious in preserving their work uncontaminated by the faults of virulence and misrepresentation’. Unsurprisingly, the Anti-Jacobin Review retorted: ‘We deny their assertion in toto.’3 The Monthly Review fared no better. In a notice of the second edition of Walker’s Elements of Geography, the monthly Anti-Jacobin ridicules the Monthly’s editors for praising Walker on having ‘interspersed his narrative with a variety of remarks and reflections, which do equal honour to the man and the philosopher!’ The Anti-Jacobin Review comments: No doubt the condemnation of the English government, so decidedly pronounced by the author, and his admiration of the French, as decidedly expressed, for their abolition of the ‘debasing and insulting ESTABLISHMENTS’, contributed not a little to extort from the Reviewer this liberal acknowledgment.4 The Monthly Review had been started in 1749 to provide serious book reviews of the kind that the Gentleman’s Magazine did not then carry. The bookseller Ralph Griffiths, who launched the Monthly, had a shrewd eye for a burgeoning market. Seven years later, one of his contributors, Tobias Smollett, founded the Tory Critical Review as a rival to the Whig Monthly. By 1797 the Critical’s circulation of 3500 did not match the Monthly’s 5000, but it equalled the British Critic (3500) and was more than double that of the now less flourishing Analytical Review (1500).5 The British Critic had an Anglican emphasis, but the owner-editors of the Monthly, Critical and Analytical were all Dissenters. Despite the trio’s nominally distinct political affiliations before the 1790s, the French Revolutionary Wars would make them allies. A correspondent in the Anti-Jacobin Review in May 1799 could write: The Critical and Monthly Reviews have been built on the bases of opposition and dissent; their opposition has manifested itself in the false statements of splenetic contradiction, or in the more specious manoeuvres of uncandid misconstruction; their dissent declares itself by their self-sufficient exclusion of those religious and moral truths which militate against their own infidel doubts and imperious scepticism.6 How far can these charges be sustained? In 1789 the disabilities of Dissenters attracted more column-inches than events in France. The

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Monthly Review for July, recording that the Commons motion for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts had been lost by only 20 votes, declared: ‘The division of the house, on this occasion, was so nearly equal, that it affords the Dissenters great encouragement to renew their application: which, we hear, they intend.’ 7 At the same time, the Monthly announces that, from 1 January 1790, a larger version of the journal will be published, in recognition that ‘the productions of English, exclusive of the Foreign, presses, are so astonishingly multiplied, that no exertions of THE MONTHLY REVIEWERS have enabled them to satisfy the demands of public curiosity’.8 The Critical would follow suit by embarking on a new and expanded series in January 1791, in time to absorb the flood of pamphlets unleashed by Burke’s Reflections. But in 1789 the Regency Crisis, triggered by George III’s insanity, dominated its pages. The Critical’s first number of the year carried no less than ten reviews of pamphlets on the Regency, to be followed in March by short notices of a further 11 publications. The March issue confined its news from France to a French critique of Voltaire’s ‘misrepresentations of the sacred writings and his sneers at Christianity’. 9 And in April the Critical devoted its ‘Foreign Intelligence’ section to scientific discoveries of mainly French scientists. The May, June and July issues recorded a total of 16 publications on slavery and the slave trade, while succeeding months featured Letters on the Works and Character of Rousseau, and three volumes of Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, made newly topical by his account of a French regency. Current French politics would not be reflected in the Critical’s pages until October 1789, when there appeared a seven-page notice of Histoire du Gouvernement François. The French government so described was that of 1787, but the Critical’s notice began: The late events in France have furnished a spectacle at once astonishing, and unexpected. A nation, sunk under the fetters of despotism, has exerted its efforts to shake them off, and has had the address to convert the instruments of tyranny into the supports of freedom. This change had been accomplished not only ‘without degenerating into anarchy’, but even without ‘that turbulence and violence, which the absence of authority might occasion’. An editorial footnote in the bound edition acknowledges that ‘unfortunately this is not quite correct’. But the review itself praises France’s attempt ‘to combine what antiquity has rendered in some degree sacred, with what a more

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particular inquiry into the rights of mankind, or the confirmation of the freest nations have taught’.10 In 1790 A Discourse on the Love of our Country (the printed version of Price’s Old Jewry sermon) would change the whole temper of debate, and find Monthly and Critical on opposite sides. In a three-and-a-half page review, the Monthly admits that some readers would consider the preacher ‘as entirely carried away by the turbulent spirit of party, and condemn him as deficient in true patriotism’. But the Monthly Review could see no reason to load him with so harsh a censure. We believe him to be a conscientious man; and as philosophers and citizens of the world, we do not hesitate in expressing our general approbation of those sentiments of freedom and benevolence, which glow in the pages before us. The review nevertheless points to Price’s tactlessness, and asks whether it is appropriate in a congratulatory address, ‘to inform the king, in plain English, that he is only the servant of the people’. The notice concludes by printing, without comment, Price’s famous nunc dimittis. The Monthly’s criticism is reserved for the doubtful accuracy of Price’s estimate of the population of France.11 In its next issue the Monthly took up the cudgels on Price’s behalf. Among the numerous pamphlets provoked by the debate over the Test and Corporation Acts, one publication was singled out with some acerbity: Dr P. does not say it is an iniquity in the members of the church to receive the sacrament kneeling; but this may be introduced to have a fling at the Dissenters for receiving it, according to our author’s phrase, on their bums. No lover of decency can approve of one church thus ridiculing the religious rites of another.12 The Critical would later quote Priestley’s strictures on Burke’s treatment of Price. The Doctor, Priestley explains, wishes to recommend the French Revolution and ‘therefore is sorry for every thing that disgraces it’, while, as for the author of Reflections: ‘You wish to discredit it; and are evidently not displeased with any circumstance that favours your purpose.’ Dr Price ‘rejoices in the good, and you most uncandidly represent him as rejoicing in the evil that has necessarily accompanied it’.13 Yet the Critical had condemned Price’s sermon on publication, refusing

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to quote his more ‘strenuous exhortations’, and rejecting his outspoken criticism of the British Constitution with the words: ‘We are too truly lovers of our country to disseminate such a degrading prospect’, since, an enemy ‘capable of attacking us with success, might be induced by this representation to attack us’. The peroration in favour of the American and French Revolutions is admitted to be ‘bold and animated’, but (like the Monthly) the Critical doubts Price’s computation of the French population, calculating that, at 30 million, he ‘has added one fifth to the real population’.14 Reviewing the published version of Burke’s speech in the February 1790 debate on the Army Estimates, the Critical sides unquestioningly with Price’s opponent. Quoting in full Burke’s distinction between the English and French Revolutions, the reviewer concurs: ‘Nothing can in our opinion be so different, so opposite in the appearance, tendency and effects as the revolutions of 1688 and 1789: the one was conducted by a set of wise, enlightened politicians, the other by the eager violent phrenzy of innovation.’ 15 The Monthly’s response to Burke’s speech was different: We cannot agree with Mr Burke in his intemperate and unqualified condemnation of the French, and their efforts to erect a free constitution on the ruins of despotism. Their political machine would no longer perform its office, and they thought it more advisable to make a new one, than to repair that which was become worse than useless.16 What brought the Monthly and Critical back on to the same track so that the Anti-Jacobin Review could, however implausibly, regard them as fellow-agents of Jacobinism? Paine is not a true test, though both Monthly and Critical opposed him. The Monthly regarded the first part of Rights of Man as by no means the most effective response to Burke; and while commending Paine’s defence of religious liberty, the review denounces his ‘desultory, uncouth and inelegant’ style.17 The Critical, two months earlier, dismissed Paine in a four-page review as ‘more apt for “treasons, stratagems and spoils”, than for suggesting useful remarks with respect to the government of a free and enlightened people’.18 Yet in a review of Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly in June 1791, the Critical, while characterizing Paine’s writing as ‘the malignant effusions of the weakest of zealots’, does venture some mild criticism of Burke’s polemical tone: ‘It is with regret that we must con-

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clude that, in this additional Letter, Mr Burke has not added greatly to his former fame. It is the railing of an angry man, hasty from resentment, undistinguishing from impetuosity’. 19 And the Critical is soon justifying having devoted a total of 20 pages (spread over the July and August issues) to Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae. Noting that ‘Mr Mackintosh answers Mr Burke’s objections with different degrees of force’, the reviewer concludes: ‘We have engaged in this enquiry also for our own sakes, for we wish not to be stigmatized as the servile followers of despotism, or as hastily deciding without being acquainted with, or having examined the subject.’ 20 And the Critical marked the end of the Constituent Assembly, in notably muted tones: ‘We have not hesitated to blame the conduct of the assembly in many respects; but their work is now finished, and they are returning to their constituents for praise or censure. In this crisis let us wait the event.’21 More than a year later, the Critical was apparently still keeping an open mind on the likely outcome of events in France. Reviewing Benjamin’s Flower’s analysis of the French constitution, and an English translation of Saint-Etienne’s history of the Revolution, the Critical concedes that it would be unfair to judge the Constitution of 1791 solely in the context of the recent forcible overthrow of the monarchy.22 And the nine-page review of Saint-Etienne’s History supplies the Critical’s interim assessment of the Revolution. Noting that ‘a short time must determine whether the late events in France are to be styled a revolution, or a temporary anarchy, the reviewer sheds few tears for the disappearance of the limited monarchy of the 1791 Constitution: ‘As a political system, it had neither basis nor connection. It was a mass of sounding words, and regulations, sometimes indeed good; but, as a whole unsatisfactory, and, as a constitution, inconsistent and impracticable.’ The review ends by drawing a distinction between principle and practice: We may repeat, that the principle of the revolution deserves commendation: if in the progress, turbulent spirits have eagerly seized an occasion of exciting confusion for their own purposes, it ought not to be attributed to the first authors. The fault, is what we have often stated, the establishing a visionary system on abstract speculative propositions, without allowing for the passions, the factious, the interested, the ambitious views of mankind.23 Though expressed in more moderate language than Burke’s, the concluding sentence is not far removed from his position. The editorial

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stance certainly does not correspond with the Anti-Jacobin Review’s later characterization of the Critical. When reviewing Helena Maria Williams’s Letters from France, the Critical recorded archly: The patriots of France have adopted new and powerful measures, for adding to the number of converts in this kingdom. We feel that we can resist the torrent of Mr Mackintosh’s eloquence, the calm persuasive arguments of Mr Flower, the majestic energy of M. Rabaut St Etienne, more firmly than the seductive insinuations of Miss Williams.24 Yet the conversion of the Critical still had some distance to run. Its November 1792 notice of Flower of the Jacobins criticized the anonymous author for exaggeration: ‘Though we have no particular respect for the worthy leaders of the Jacobins, we have an idle prejudice in favour of truth, and think it possible to paint the devil too black.’25 However, when Thomas Cooper replied to Burke’s parliamentary censure of his alliance with the Paris Jacobins, the Critical supported Burke, declaring: Mr Cooper’s work is strongly tinctured with the absurd philosophy of the age, which grounds everything on habit, without allowing anything to passion; and which by supposing man a machine, concludes that he may be as mechanically acted upon as any of the common instruments which are employed in our manufactories. The reviewer confidently asserts that ‘the example of France has acted in this country as a complete antidote to the epidemic rage of innovation’.26 Before concluding its damning review of Cooper in January 1793, the Critical allows that ‘the profession of arms is very properly a subject of Mr Cooper’s animadversion’. Cooper’s words are then quoted: Were it not that thought and reflection are either totally laid aside, or seduously suppressed, how can we account for a man becoming a soldier? For in the eye of reason and reflection, what is a soldier? A person who professes to renounce all free agency, to have no will of his own, and to submit himself, body and mind, to the will of another – whose particular trade it is to hold himself in readiness to put his fellow-creatures to death, whether friend or enemy, citizen

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or foreigner, at the command of another, without enquiring into the reason or propriety of the command… .27 Before the end of the month, Britain was at war. The first war pamphlet to be reviewed by the Critical was Comments on the Proposed War with France in February 1793. The author is praised for ‘the moderation with which it is written’. The reviewer thinks ‘it will be read by posterity, as furnishing materials to the future historian, and matter of reflection to the speculative politician’. The author’s arguments against what was, at the time of writing, the ‘projected’ war are summarized: He very pertinently observes, that it should be the wise policy of Great Britain to induce the French to revert to their original principles, viz. that of ‘disclaiming all conquest whatever’, and to endeavour to mediate a general peace; instead of inflaming them to desperation, and squandering wantonly our own blood and treasure. While evidently sympathizing with this line of argument, the reviewer notes sadly that ‘the nation is, perhaps, too far engaged to retract with respect to the war’.28 Indeed the prospect of war was being treated with ‘indifference and unconcern’, according to another author, who placed the blame squarely on the ‘mean and despicable artifices’ which governments employ to ‘make war (the curse of the human race) a subject palatable to the people’.29 The same month (May 1793) the Monthly reviewed Thomas Hearn’s Rise and Progress of Freedom in Modern Europe. We learn that although Hearn ‘writes against Mr Paine, he appears to be by no means a friend to measures which are inconsistent with the liberty of the press, or with any of the established rights of free citizens’. The Monthly quotes the author’s contention that governments are unwise to underestimate ‘the strong and irresistible influence’ of public opinion. Dr Hearn (we are told) is ‘an enemy to precipitate and violent innovations, and thinks it unreasonable that the present race should be sacrificed for the convenience of posterity’. He nevertheless acknowledges ‘that modern governments abound with absurdities and abuses, and that the growth of general knowledge and rational inquiry has been such, as will oblige the ruling powers to lower their tone and relax their severity’. So the Monthly reviewer is surprised to find the same author condemning as seditious the notion that ‘the succession to thrones and empires’ depends upon ‘the sovereign voice of the elementary assemblies of the nation

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convened, and constituting the social compact’. And the reviewer asks: ‘Can it, then, ever be seditious for free citizens to assert those principles, to which the British constitution itself owes its existence?’30 The Monthly and Critical both opposed government prosecution of delegates to the self-styled British Convention, and similarly joined forces in protest at the tightening of government censorship. The royal proclamation ‘for the preventing of Tumultuous Meetings and Seditious Writings’ had been issued on 21 May 1792, before the fall of the French monarchy and well before Britain was at war. 31 Now in 1795, following the collapse of the Treason Trials, the Pitt ministry’s ‘Gagging Acts’ were under attack. In January 1796, the Monthly thought that Symonds’s Abstract of the Two Bills, &c., published with an editorial preface, was unduly alarmist: We have no idea that the effects of these formidable bills will, in fact, prove so fatal to our constitution, rights, liberties, and so particularly obnoxious to our booksellers, printers, public meetings, &c, as the highly alarmed editor apprehends.32 But by April, the Critical was convinced of the pernicious tendency of the two bills, now passed into law. In a nine-page notice of The History of Two Acts, the reviewer is confident that the book will exhibit to ‘ministers and their partisans’ what they seem to be ‘but imperfectly acquainted with’, namely ‘an interesting picture of the state of public opinion at this important crisis’. The reviewer extracts from the author’s index the comparative numbers of petitions provoked by the Two Acts: in favour 65, against 94.33 It was the lack of equivalent numbers of petitions in favour of giving the vote to unfranchised Englishmen that led the Critical to differ from the Monthly over the necessity for constitutional change. In June 1795, in its hostile review of An Address to the Prime Minister of the King of Corsica, the Critical argued that ‘a majority of the people never sought or petitioned in any shape for parliamentary reform’. Indeed the question ‘has not been taken up by the nation at large: and, till that happens, we cannot consider it as being more important than any other plan of public amelioration, sketched out by ingenious men in their closets’.34 That same summer, before the furore over the ‘Gagging Acts’, the Monthly was objecting to Major Cartwright’s campaign for universal suffrage, and questioning ‘whether it would be prudent to entrust the defence of property to those who have none themselves’.35 Yet the Monthly’s conviction that demand for moderate reform of the

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constitution was wholly within the spirit of 1688 is instanced by the review of The Spirit of John Locke … revived by the Constitutional Society of Sheffield. The notice concludes: The constitutional society of Sheffield, whatever other occasions of offence they may have given, certainly cannot offend the rulers of a free people by the circulation which they give to knowledge of such principles, by publishing in a cheap form an abridgement of Locke on government.36 Yet Locke would be a target of the Anti-Jacobin Review, which declared in January 1799: ‘In his Treatise on Civil Government, Mr Locke made the world a present which has proved fatal to its repose and happiness.’ In the same review of John Bowles’s survey of recent political tracts, the Anti-Jacobin cites Bowles’s objection to the insinuation of one of his selected authors that, by failing to save Louis XVI, ‘the Combined Powers had confederated for the dismemberment and partition of the country’.37 This was precisely the suspicion entertained by both the Monthly and the Critical. In May 1794 the Critical had welcomed The Concert of Princes, and the Dismemberment of Poland and France by ‘a Calm Observer’. The review began: While the press daily teems with political pamphlets, overflowing with loose declamation, or dictated by intemperate heat, or fabricated for interested purposes, the friends of liberty and peace have perused with peculiar pleasure a series of letters in which sound reasoning is joined to brilliancy of expression, and accurate information to dispassionate candour. This opening accolade suggests that the Critical does not wish to distance itself from the author’s contention that ‘there exists between the three powers of Austria, Russia and Prussia a most formidable league of mutual aggrandizement’; it also implies an editorial endorsement of the author’s claim that ‘in joining ourselves to their alliance we not only give a sanction to their rapacity, but are acting in direct opposition to all the maxims of sound policy, by directing our arms against the only power capable of balancing this mighty triumvirate’.38 By February 1796, in its critique of a fast sermon, the Critical was itself commenting on the Pitt ministry’s shifting war objectives: ‘We engaged in the war, to fight for religion; we understand we are to persist

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in it, to fight for peace!!!’39 A year later, the Critical chose to meet its anti-Jacobin critics head-on, declaring: ‘The people will soon see that those who have opposed the calamitous war, are not the ‘English Jacobins’; but that the real jacobins are those who have servilely copied every oppressive measure of the jacobins in France.’ Such home truths were perhaps all the more provocative as the work under review was A Residence in France, edited by none other than John Gifford, soon to be editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review. The Critical’s notice began with a calculated insult: Who John Gifford, esq. may be, we pretend not to know; nor can it be of great consequence to the public to inquire. We only know that under this name was published some time ago (we believe in numbers) a catch-penny history of the reign of Louis XVI, the whole of the latter period of which was printed verbatim from the Impartial History of the French Revolution, and the New Annual Register. The Critical professes itself uncertain whether Gifford’s publication has been compiled in part from real letters, ‘or whether the whole be a fabrication’. But it has no doubt that, in the form in which it is now presented ‘it can only be regarded as a party pamphlet’. 40 So outspoken a review can have done little to endear the Critical to the future editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review. The Critical gave equally short shrift to two other polemical pieces against Jacobins. In April 1797, it devoted some nine pages to William Playfair’s History of Jacobinism. The prospectus (undated, but issued in 1795) had proposed publishing by subscription ‘an inquiry into the manner of disseminating, under the appearance of philosophy and virtue, principles which are equally subversive of order, virtue, religion and happiness’. The prospectus further claimed that a study of Jacobinism reveals that it is not a difference of opinion which divides us, that it is a different system of moral conduct, such precisely as there exists between the highwayman and the traveller. … Such is the nature of Jacobinism, it assumes at first the appearance of philanthropy and philosophy, and by degrees, as it gains credit and power, shows itself by pillage and murder. Playfair’s prospectus reads like a preface to the Anti-Jacobin Review itself. Playfair explains that he proposes to treat Jacobinism ‘as a physician

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would do the yellow fever which raged some time ago at Philadelphia’.41 In reviewing the actual History, the Critical challenges the author’s claims that jacobinism is embodied in ‘the Declaration of the Rights of Man’ and that ‘pillage, murder, and cruelty are the fruits of it’. The review continues: There certainly was a club in Paris, called the Jacobin Club; and the word jacobin was there and is still used both there and in England as a nickname; but there was no such system embodied as that of jacobinism. If the Rights of Man were the laws of the jacobins, the case would be otherwise, and jacobinism might be admitted as a historical designation: but the Rights of Man justify no cruelty, nor is there an enormity recorded in this work which is not forbidden both by the letter and the spirit of these rights; nor, indeed, has he proved that they were ever quoted in defence of the tyranny of Robespierre, &c.42 The other major anti-Jacobin work reviewed by the Critical in 1797 was the second edition of Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy, which was accorded a dismissive review of eight pages. Robison’s conspiracy theory centres on the German Illuminati and the French Freemasons. The Critical unkindly depicts the author as having discovered the cause of the French Revolution at the Leipzig and Frankfurt book fairs, where he is alleged to have read ‘the productions of the Cagliostros, the Meiners, et hoc genus omne, with which Germany has always abounded’. He had there allegedly ‘found out, that the crown and altar of France have been overset by the visionary projects of some contemptible German empirics’. To Robison’s supposed conspiracy, the Critical opposes its own matter-of-fact diagnosis of the causes of the Revolution: The change was not produced by a set of men acting in concert; but the men who produced eventually the great change in Paris, were thrown together by a number of concurrent causes, and were decided in their conduct by the general wishes of their country. We reject therefore entirely, as we said before, all the conclusions on free-masonry in the present work.43 The Critical’s crime in the eyes of the anti-Jacobin press was not only to oppose the war, but to deny its ideological character. How far had the Monthly Review kept pace with its contemporary? The Monthly opened the year 1797 with a notice of Cartwright’s

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Constitutional Defence of England. The reviewer, while admiring the Major’s persistence in promoting parliamentary reform, had no doubt that the timing of his pamphlet was unpropitious. The country itself had lost interest in reform. As the reviewer observed with depressing realism: When persons in the habits of comfortable enjoyment are alarmed with the apprehensions of losing their property, it is difficult to excite an ardour for liberty; when men of rank and title fear degradation, they become insensible to the rights of the people; when the appeal is made to the sword, and it is dipped to the very hilt in blood, the wars of the press become a mere platitude… .44 In its next issue, the Monthly quoted extensively from Erskine on the war, including his remark that our cheerful reliance on providentially stormy weather for the defeat of French plans to conquer Ireland, ‘is in itself, a condemnation of the measures pursued in that country’. By 1798, the Monthly is finding a connection between Lord Moira’s criticism of Pittite policy in Ireland and the ministerial interest shown in Robison’s charge of Masonic conspiracy. 45 The Monthly nevertheless devotes a further 11 pages to reviewing Robison’s work. In the appendix to the volume for January–April 1798, the Monthly devotes a similar number of pages to Abbé Barruel’s History of Jacobinism. Noting that the first volume concerned ‘the conspiracy of the philosophers against the altar’, and the second described ‘that of the sophisters of rebellion against the throne’, the Monthly’s reviewer concludes: The third conspiracy of the pretended sophists of anarchy to abolish social order, property and science, is so wholly the work of the Abbé’s imagination, that, although he makes France the theatre of its exhibition, he is reduced to seek for its apostles in an outlandish tongue and in a Bavarian cloister.46 The Monthly remained sceptical both as to the likelihood of a French invasion, and the need to continue the war. A Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt by ‘a clergyman of the Church of England’ is treated with gentle irony. The reviewer summarizes the author’s advice to the premier as: ‘1st, to keep his place, 2d to persevere in the war, and 3d to persist in a strong government’. The reviewer adds: ‘It must be highly

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gratifying to this gentleman to learn that Mr Pitt so closely follows this good counsel’.47 In 1798, irony was a safer tactic than frontal attack. In September the Monthly mocks Considerations upon the State of Public Affairs in the Year 1798: The introductory pages of this pamphlet are occupied in congratulating the country on its deliverance from the Negotiation at Lisle, which the author in the language of triumph represents as ‘a prosperous defeat, a happy calamity, a fortunate disgrace’; since which ‘our affairs have assumed another aspect, every sun has shone out brighter, and a warmer glow has gilded our horizon’.48 The Monthly had already noticed The Monthly Reviewers reviewed by another clergyman, the Rev. J. Howlett, Vicar of Great Dunmow. In its own response, the Monthly’s editors complimented themselves on being ‘subjects of a state in which not only our judgement, but the decisions of the highest tribunals, may be arraigned with freedom’. And any critic of the journal is optimistically advised that ‘when he feels himself hurt by any remark that we have made, we require that he be under no other restraint in contradicting what he thinks wrong, than that which good manners, and a respect for his own character, may impose’.49 The Anti-Jacobin Review, by then just one month old, was not to be noted for good manners.

12 Murder by Ridicule: the End of the Analytical

The preface to the bound volume of the Anti-Jacobin Review for 1798 congratulates the journal on the part it played in the ‘dissolution’ of the Analytical Review.1 And in March 1799, a correspondent would write mockingly to the Anti-Jacobin’s editor: We are informed, upon the best authority, that the untimely death of the Analytical Review is deeply regretted by all the friends of liberal enquiry. Tom Paine, in Paris, is miserable; the expatriated illustrious sufferer, in America [Joseph Priestley], is inconsolable; and the virtuous Godwin laments it nearly as much as the departure of his immaculate consort [Mary Wollstonecraft].2 The Anti-Jacobin employed similr irony in its ‘Reviewers Reviewed’ for April. Explaining that they would have expected Bowles’s Song of the Battle of the Nile to ‘have escaped censure except in France, had we not been fully acquainted with the nature of Jacobinism’, the editors ridicule the Analytical’s dismay at seeing poetry ‘solicitous to deck herself in the dazzling steel and gaudy trappings of Bellona’. On this principle, the Anti-Jacobin reviewer concludes: ‘If a British bard were to rival Horace or Virgil, in celebrating the heroic deeds of his countrymen, he would only prove, in the estimation of these critics, the degeneracy of the age in respect of poetic talents!’3 At end of July 1799 the Anti-Jacobin was commemorating the first anniversary of Nelson’s victory on the Nile with ‘Lines on the First of

152

Figure 12.1

James Gillray, A Peep into the Cave of Jacobinism

153

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August, 1798’, in which an explicit link is made between Napoleon’s ‘Jacobinism’ and that of the monthly reviews: When too, at home, domestic traitors (leagu’d With foreign foes), who long had rul’d the press, The key of learning, sciences, and arts, And would that none should govern but themselves; Lords of mis-rule, who burst the social tie, Gave to fell anarchy, a troubled world, And with their deadly poison strove to taint The faith and morals of the wise and good. Then, fortunately for England, the anti-Jacobin ‘patriot band’ o’er th’usurping critics’ heads, Themselves the rod of criticism shook; Reviewing in their turn, the bold Reviewers, Distinctly criticizing their critiques, And analyzing their Analysis; And, with the torch of heav’n-descended truth, Beaming into the dark and dismal cave, That hiding-place of Jacobin retreat, Straight dragg’d the hideous monster forth to light… .4 The Anti-Jacobin’s claim to have murdered the Analytical is nevertheless questionable. A more compelling explanation for the collapse of the journal can be found in the conviction in the Court of the King’s Bench, on 17 July 1798, of Joseph Johnson, the Analytical’s publisher. Johnson’s offence was to sell Gilbert Wakefield’s Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff. Johnson was described in the indictment as ‘a malicious seditious and ill-disposed person and being greatly disaffected to our said sovereign Lord the King’, and was so charged on the grounds that he ‘wickedly and seditiously did publish and cause to be published a certain scandalous and seditious libel’. Johnson had been convicted a fortnight before the first issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review was published, but he was not committed to prison until mid-November, and not finally sentenced until 12 February 1799. Between conviction and sentence, he sought to prove that, wherever possible, he had ‘uniformly recommended the circulation of such publications as had a tendency to promote good morals instead of such as were calculated to mislead

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and inflame the Common people’. The last few issues of the Analytical must be read in the light of Johnson’s impending sentence.5 The June 1798 issue of the Analytical Review had already offered little in the way of political comment. A Tour in Switzerland, by Helen Maria Williams, focused less on French politics than on neoclassical female fashions. The review records: The most fashionable hair-dresser of Paris, in order to accommodate himself to the classical taste of his fair customers, is provided with a variety of antique busts as models, and when he waits on a lady, enquires if she chuses to be drest that day à la Cleopatre, la Diane or la Psyche?6 The June Analytical admittedly also reviewed an account of Louis XVI’s imprisonment in the Temple, recommending ‘this tender tale’ to ‘the humane of every party’, and expressing the hope that ‘it will soften all hearts, and dissolve all prejudices connected with the subject on which it is occupied’.7 And in reviewing the correspondence of John Hurford Stone with Joseph Priestley, the Analytical is careful to emphasize that ‘we see nothing lovely or desirable in revolutions, and we wish that a peaceful reform may yet prevent one in this country’.8 In July 1798, the month of the launch of the Anti-Jacobin Review, the Analytical devoted a dozen pages to Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, published by Johnson, and expressing sentiments worthy of his former protégé, Mary Wollstonecraft: Let men endeavour to make women happy – not by flattering their follies and absurdities – but by every reasonable means; and above all by considering them as rational beings on a footing with themselves, – influenced by the same passions – and having the same claims to all the rights of humanity.9 The lack of political bite in the Analytical’s reviews in the summer of 1798 is partly explained by uncertainty as to Bonaparte’s intentions. As the journal’s ‘Retrospect’ of the year observed at the end of August: ‘The world is in suspense with regard to the designs of the man, on whose single mind its destinies seem so much to depend.’ 10 Even the editors’ long-running campaign against prolonging the war becomes deflected into more oblique lines of attack. Reviewing another Johnson author, Anthony Robinson, whose account of wars throughout English

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history may be seen as a disguised condemnation of Pitt, the Analytical records: ‘Commencing with the conquest of Britain by the Romans, the author shows that few of our conquests have been either just or necessary; and that all have been attended with disastrous consequences.’11 Even a Freemason’s attack on Barruel’s History of Jacobinism (itself savagely reviewed by the Analytical the previous September) is dismissed as containing ‘very little wit, and very little argument’.12 The Analytical soon hurries on to Gilpin’s Observations on the Western Parts of England, which focuses on notions of the picturesque. Within weeks of the Anti-Jacobin Review’s first attack on the Critical, Monthly and Analytical, readers of the Analytical are being instructed by Gilpin that ‘the ground about a cottage should be neat but artless. There is no occasion to plant cabbages in the front.’ The lawn, brought up to the door, should be ‘grazed rather than mown’, while would-be improvers are advised that ‘the sunk fence, the net and the painted rail, are ideas alien to the cottage’.13 Admittedly a review of an anonymous Letter to Charles James Fox quotes with approval the author’s criticism of the war: ‘If all the soldiers, sailors and other appendages, had been employed in facilitating the communication between different counties, by canals and other works of lasting utility, Great Britain would now have an expanse of garden, extended to the farthest wilds of Scotland.’14 Yet the final issue of the journal for 1799, in a notice of the Transactions of the Linnaean Society, expresses satisfaction that despite ‘the din of a protracted war … the progress of science has met with comparatively little interference’.15 The war reappears in a brief notice of the State of the Country in the Autumn of 1798. The reviewer reports that, despite the author’s tally of military successes in the West Indies, the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon, and his calculation that ‘we have taken, burnt and destroyed more than sixty ships of the line, and more than a hundred frigates’, it appears that ‘we have only destroyed “ONE ARM OF JACOBINISM”’ and that the author wishes us to ‘continue the war until we lop off the other’. A 35-page pamphlet, The Crimes of Democracy, briefly noticed as ‘an attempt to throw all the odium and all the guilt of the war on the enemy’, is accorded less space than the Bather’s Companion; or Complete Art of Swimming.16 The last page of the last issue of the Analytical Review, dated 1 January 1799, announces that ‘a copious index to the twenty eight volumes of this work’ will ‘speedily be published’, together with ‘a preface, and some reviews already prepared, but hitherto not inserted for want of room’.17 The first of those 28 volumes had appeared in May 1788, when Thomas Christie, contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine, founded the Analytical

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Review or History of Literature, Domestic and Foreign, with Johnson as publisher. The title-page promised that ‘an enlarged plan’ would embrace: scientific abstracts of important and interesting works published in English; a general account of such as are of less consequence, with short characters; notices or reviews of valuable foreign books; criticisms on new pieces of music and works of art, and the literary intelligence of Europe, etc. Christie’s preface to the first volume explained that the new journal sought ‘not only to give a larger account than other Journalists do, of the few truly great works which occasionally appear from the press’, but also ‘to be equally full and accurate in giving a list of the titles of the rest’, and to ‘endeavour in some brief expression to convey a true and candid idea of their value’. The reviewers would ‘give no opinion of their own’, as to the factual content of the works they analyze, considering themselves only as ‘the HISTORIANS of the Republic of Letters’.18 One of the earliest reviews censured Edward Gibbon for ‘so frequently and unnecessarily obtruding his particular prejudices on the eye of his readers’, especially with regard to ‘subjects which the majority of mankind continue to hold in the most sacred veneration’.19 The new journal might promise to have ‘more of an analytical cast in it than any other’, but it was clearly not setting out to shock. 20 A notice of two pamphlets on ‘the new French Chemical Nomenclature’ points to what the review calls ‘the absurdity of adopting new systems of names’, and deplores ‘the injury they do to science’, 21 while a new French method of determining longitude is dismissed as having ‘not only changed the order of the universe’, but introduced such principles ‘as are totally incompatible with science and observation’.22 This seeming hostility to things French is relieved by a favourable notice of Quesnay de Beaurepaire’s proposed Academy of Science and the Fine Arts. The foundation stone had been laid at Richmond, Virginia, in June 1786, and Quesnay was now visiting London and Paris ‘to procure masters, models and instruments’. 23 Meanwhile the Analytical notes that the Royal Society of Medicine in Paris is offering a ‘prize of 600 livres founded by the King’ for proposals to mitigate the effects of scrofula. More topically, a prize essay from the Academy of Châlons-sur-Marne is noticed on ‘The Best Means of creating and promoting Patriotism in a Monarchy’.24

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In contrast to those writings of Gilbert Wakefield that would land Johnson in court ten years later, the 1788 Analytical treated its readers to a critique of Wakefield’s edition of Virgil’s Georgics. Objecting to some of his emendations, the reviewer assures Wakefield that such censure proceeds ‘purely from the love of Virgil and sound criticism and not a disposition to cavil’.25 But by autumn 1788, political events in France were beginning to attract the Analytical’s attention. Listing a number of publications in the pamphlet war between Necker and Calonne, the reviewer comments: Liberty begins to dawn again on France, after a long night of two hundred years. A dispute arises between two ministers of state, concerning the receipt and expenditure of the public revenue. An appeal is made to the nation at large: homage is paid to reason, truth and justice; and the way is thus prepared for the reign of freedom.26 Such optimistic assumptions were not confined to the Analytical reviewers (see Chapter 1 above), and the same notice predicts that ‘the subjects of monarchy will discuss the conduct of the servants of the government, and pronounce just judgment, after first, as is natural, calumniating them’.27 The Analytical chose to open the new year with a review of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, and a report on the Transactions of the Royal Society of Arts that applauds the Society’s offer of a premium for the successful manufacture of paper from raw materials.28 In June 1789 the Analytical considers a pamphlet on electoral reform, which proposes equal electoral districts, annual elections, the exclusion of placemen and the giving of the vote to 18-year-olds and above ‘of every denomination of religion, as well aliens as natives’. The reviewer comments that, although such plans ‘cannot be carried into execution’, they nevertheless ‘serve the good purpose of supporting the spirit of liberty, and making the people conscious of their own rights and importance’.29 Yet in the month that the Bastille fell, some 70 pages are devoted to such publications as: The Rural Economy of Gloucestershire, Gregory’s Life of Thomas Chatterton, a biographical essay on Frederick the Great, Transactions in Bengal, Military Operations on the Coromandel Coast, and Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera – before the editors reach Histoire Politique de la Revolution en France. The last title seems premature in July 1789, but the author evidently regards the summoning of the States-General as a revolution.30

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Late in 1789, Christie himself went to France, where he got to know Mirabeau, Necker and Siéyès. The impact of the months he spent in Paris is seen in his Letters on the Revolution in France, published by Johnson, and reviewed in the Analytical in June 1791. Christie was provoked into writing his Letters by Burke’s Reflections, which the Analytical had condemned on publication for ‘the extreme arrogance of our author’. Christie’s journal gave full prominence to the many replies to Burke, and (like the Critical and the Monthly) opposed ‘Burke’s War’.31 Early in 1792 the Analytical quoted with approval a pamphlet challenging the compliments bestowed on Pitt: ‘Peace not Pitt; trade, not tax; commerce, not revenue; tranquillity, not negotiation; improvement, not regulation are the only real causes that have brought this country to its present unexpected and unparalleled state of prosperity.’32 Soon after Britain and France went to war, the Analytical summarized Charles Grey’s arguments in the ‘Remonstrance’ he had moved in the House of Commons on 21 February. The very ministers who were so keen to support the balance of power ‘had, with apparent unconcern, beheld the invasion of Poland and the suspension of its constitution’, and had been content to stand by ‘with supine indifference, if not with secret approbation’ while other powers ‘in evident concert with the oppressor of Poland’ advanced towards ‘the invasion and subjugation of France’.33 The same theme would be echoed in the next issue, when the Analytical charged William Playfair with proposing to partition France in much the same manner as Poland. Playfair appears a second time in the same issue, in a two-page review of his Better Prospects to the Merchants and Manufacturers of Great Britain. The Analytical quotes the author’s confident assertion that ‘in three months more our enemies will not have a single frigate upon the seas’. The review continues: Mr P. assures ‘the reviewers’, who accuse him of being in the pay of government, ‘that they have been too rash’, and refers to his publishers for proof of his assertion. He, however, adds that were it so, he should not contradict them, but should say ‘that being paid for writing is no more disgraceful than being paid for speaking, which all our gentlemen of the law are… .’34 The editors clearly have no inhibitions about attacking the government. A notice of the Rev. Edward Wilby’s Address to the People of Great Britain begins: ‘The late fictitious alarm in the capital seems to have increased in proportion as it is spread into the distant counties, and

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many of the inhabitants duped, partly by their own fancy, and partly by the terror so strenuously inculcated for political purposes… .’ 35 In July of 1793, James Currie, under the pseudonym ‘Jasper Wilson’, is reported as loudly condemning Pitt for ‘neglecting an excellent opportunity of making peace’, and as complaining that ‘after conquering opposition at home, he stalks forth like another Hercules, and traverses the continent of Europe, in search of monsters whom he may subdue’.36 A few pages later, Joseph Towers’s claim that so-called ‘French principles’ are in fact seventeenth-century English principles, is echoed by the Analytical: The French principles have been assigned as a reason for engaging in a war with France; but are we to carry on a war against France … to eradicate the principles of SYDNEY and LOCKE? Of all the nations on earth, are the people of England to be selected to engage in a crusade to prevent the propagation of the principles of liberty?37 The liberty of the press is at issue in a pamphlet which the Analytical describes as ‘replete with the dangers likely to result from the exertions of “English jacobins”, and with compliments to those who sounded an alarm, at a moment, as is now fully proved, when there was not even the most distant prospect of public danger’.38 By contrast, the courage of Robert Hall’s Apology for the Freedom of the Press is warmly welcomed ‘at a period when the freedom of discussion, on matters of such high importance as the principles of government, is decried as foolish and lamented as dangerous; when the friends of liberty are loaded with calumny, and even the terms liberty and philosophy are mentioned with contempt’.39 The next 18 months would see show-trials for sedition and treason, to be followed at the end of 1795 by the notorious ‘Gagging Acts’. Well might the Analytical comment in December 1795: ‘The origin and progress of periodical publications form a curious and entertaining subject.’40 How effectively was the Analytical gagged? In a notice of Helen Maria Williams’s third volume of Letters from France, which covered Robespierre’s Terror, the reviewer hailed ‘a tale at which liberty blushes, and humanity shudders’, and likened it to ‘the savage scenery of Salvator, where all is wildly horrible, and where every figure on the canvas is a murderer’. Yet the review concludes with the hope that a fourth volume is destined to appear in which Miss Williams will present a French Republic (in Williams’s words) ‘casting aside her

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dismal shroud, stained with the blood of the patriot and bathed in the tears of the mourner, while justice and humanity are employed in healing the deep wounds of her afflicted bosom’.41 The Analytical does not deviate from the view that to admire French principles is not to condone the Terror, or that to question the necessity for a war against French principles is not to betray British interests. But, as in Coleridge’s Watchman and Thelwall’s lectures, parallels from ancient history are sometimes invoked as a comment on contemporary politics. Thus Dr Bisset is reminded that ‘while the Roman state continued republican, it rose to a degree of splendour wholly unparalleled in the history of the ancient world, and that when it fell into the hands of despots, its glory and prosperity vanished’. 42 Two months later, the journal’s 11-page political section was divided between what the reviewer called ‘the comparative benefit to the public of large and small farms’, and Essay on the Policy and Legislation of the Romans, translated from the Italian, but printed in Paris.43 However, when Burke published his Letters on a Regicide Peace, the editors of the Analytical were not deterred from opposing ‘this masteralarmist’ – or from endorsing extracts from the rash of replies that Burke provoked.44 And when it reviewed A Residence in France, edited by John Gifford, the Analytical rivalled the belligerence of the Critical. Gifford’s preface complained that he had ‘seen the British press, the grand palladium of British liberty, devoted to the cause of Gallic licentiousness, that mortal enemy of all freedom, and even the pure stream of British criticism diverted from its natural course, and polluted by the pestilential vapours of Gallic republicanism’. The Analytical, for its part, deplored ‘the secret bias of a pre-established theory’ which led writers to ‘direct their attention to those facts only which appear to favour it, and view even these through the magnifying glass of prejudice’. The Analytical notes that ‘the writer of these letters has, through the whole, steadily pursued one single object, the indiscriminate condemnation of the principles, the agents and the friends of the French Revolution’.45 Similarly, the Analytical’s notice of Gifford’s Letter to the Hon. Thomas Erskine, in May 1797, records with studied incredulity: Mr Erskine attempted to prove the French were not the aggressors. Mr G. with much bitterness of sarcasm and malignity of reproach, urges the ministerial declamation, and quotes from many party writers, to prove, that England has only acted on the defensive, and that France actually and resolutely planned, provoked, and began the contest.46

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And in its notice of Christopher Saunders’s Who were the Aggressors? the Analytical observes with satisfaction that ‘the writer opposes, to the dogmatical assertions of Mr Gifford, the evidence of State Papers’.47 The animus shown by Gifford’s Anti-Jacobin Review from July 1798 on cannot, however, be entirely blamed on an editor’s wish to level old scores. Throughout 1797, the Analytical continued to campaign for peace, and (despite the French landing at Fishguard in February) to play down the risk of invasion. Thus in its August review of Arthur Young’s collected addresses to the Suffolk yeomanry, the Analytical notes that such statements ‘abound with aggravated accounts of French cruelty, and pompous declaration on the dangers of Great Britain’. The reviewer decides that Young is ‘anxious only to arm the men of property, and it seems to be his aim to arm them against the men of no property’. The review concludes: ‘We are advocates for general arming, on condition that, on becoming soldiers we do not cease to be citizens, on condition that we are not put under the mutiny act.’48 A month later, in the ‘National Affairs’ section of its ‘Retrospect of the active World’, the Analytical notes that ‘to restore monarchy by force of arms is now found to be impracticable’. It adds: ‘While we prepare with vigour for the prosecution of the war, let a solemn renunciation of all future interference in support of the cause of royalty in France prepare the way for peace.’49 And in reviewing Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy, the Analytical sarcastically proclaims its own innocence of any conspiratorial involvement: ‘We are not of the initiated, neither masons, nor illuminati, brothers of the union, nor members of the corresponding, revolution or jacobin societies.’ The review continues: Conspiracy is a cry, which naturally awakens the curiosity of the public, and we doubt not that the multitude will take up this book with great earnestness; for if men be interested in reports of a petty conspiracy, with what emotions must they be agitated when they hear of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, of which proofs are proclaimed by a grave and learned professor!50 The Analytical ended 1797 with a notice of the second part of Abbé Barruel’s History of Jacobinism, entitled The Anti-Monarchical Conspiracy. Objecting to single-cause explanations of the French Revolution, and stressing that, in England, established libertarian traditions had ensured the political loyalty of Freemasons, the reviewer nevertheless

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hints that loyalty may be stretched too far: ‘The two gagging bills, as they have been significantly called, are not lifeless, nor do they slumber; the twin tigers crouch indeed, but it is only to spring on some hapless prey.’51 The new year found the Analytical’s publisher himself among the victims. The January 1798 issue begins inoffensively enough with a review of The Natural History of the rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia, while the ‘Retrospect’ (customarily more hostile to France than the Analytical’s other editorial matter) protests at the news that the French have started to seize and confiscate English merchandise, even in neutral ships. But faith in the ideals of 1789 is not yet quite dead. The same section thinks that ‘still there is a party in France friendly to order and moral principles, at the head of which are Barras and Bonaparte’. The concluding words of the review conjure up an even more improbable vision: It is a pity that it is only by dreadful misfortunes that Europe will learn that her real glory, as well as happiness, consists in the union, peace and harmonious intercourse of one federative state. It is to the language of moral principles and reasonable concession, that we must return, if we really wish for peace.52 Bonaparte would soon reveal his own vision of European union. Meanwhile, at a more practical level, the Analytical attacks the burden of taxation imposed by the continuing war. Reviewing an anonymous pamphlet by ‘one of the 80,000 incorrigible Jacobins’, the journal quotes with approval the author’s assertion that ‘by imposing such burthens on the people, you take from them the power of maintaining their former connexion and intercourse with the higher orders. … When a man is reduced to plebeian circumstance, he imbibes plebeian malignity.’53 And when a writer calls on even the poorest in the country for voluntary contributions to aid the war effort, the reviewer asks: ‘Does he mean that the labourer, who has eight children, should give four of them to the state? We believe the labourer has nothing else to give.’54 Were such complaints unpatriotic? In May 1798, when news of the Directory’s seizure of Switzerland was already reflected in its pages, the Analytical quotes Philip Francis’s reminder of England’s unpopularity in Europe: They see us stand aloof, commanding the sea, and apparently in safety, encouraging, bribing or bullying nations to persecute and

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destroy one another. On the continent the English government and not the French, with all their enormities, are considered as the incendiaries and common enemy of mankind. The French, they say, plunder the house, but the English set it on fire.55 This sobering perspective is notably absent, not only from the AntiJacobin Review and Gifford’s Life of Pitt, but from most British historical writing ever since. Yet the Analytical became a prime target of the Anti-Jacobin, as much through alleged atheism, as through a supposed lack of patriotism. In July 1799, after a year of publication, the Anti-Jacobin Review accused the Critical’s reviewers of being ‘semi-Christians, when compared with the Analytical conductors of irreligious trash’.56 This seems over-severe. The editors of the Analytical had been unwise enough to welcome publication of the Manual of the Theophilanthropes. The Anti-Jacobin Review notoriously subjected the new sect to merciless ridicule in cartoon and verse in the journal’s very first number. Earlier, in October 1797, the Analytical described the sect’s activities for the benefit of those ‘who have lately looked upon the French as a nation of atheists’. The review explains: ‘The theophilanthropes admit no other dogma than the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul.’ Their injunctions include: ‘Worship God, cherish your kind, render yourselves useful to the country’. Children are urged to honour their parents, obey them and ‘comfort their old age’. The Almighty is addressed as ‘Father of the Universe’, and is (we learn) often worshipped in the open air. But the Analytical reviewer is surprised to find ‘in an institution of religion grounded upon simple principles, and intended to attract attention by its rationality’, that the door should be opened to superstition by ‘introducing the puerile ceremony of presenting flowers and fruits to the Eternal on an altar’. Such concessions to ‘the national love of spectacle may soon lead to other superstitious deviations from the simplicity of theophilanthropic worship’.57 Yet in June 1792, two years before Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being had excited such ridicule, the Analytical had dismissed a Jacobin defence of the ‘Religion of Reason and Nature’ with this uncompromising criticism: The theological doctrine of this piece is pantheism, which confounds the ideas of God and the universe, and supposes only one being in nature. Its moral system admits no distinction between the mechanical laws of nature, and the moral laws of God, and

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precludes all ideas of reward and punishment, except what arises from the natural and necessary consequences of men’s actions.58 The Analytical might prefer Theophilanthropists to atheists or deists; it might doubt the aptness of xenophobic sermons; it might deplore the continued exclusion of Dissenters from public office. But this hardly justifies the Anti-Jacobin’s readiness to ridicule its rival as a purveyor of ‘irreligious trash’. One might be tempted instead to share the Analytical’s objection to a prayer proposed for use on a Fast Day, which spoke of the French as ‘unprovoked enemies’ and as deluded by ‘following the vain imaginations of reprobate minds’. And to ask, with the Analytical reviewer, whether ‘the language of crimination against their brethren be that which best becomes sinful mortals in addressing their Maker’.59

13 Cromwell’s Ghosts: Republicans and Dissenters

The Gentleman’s Magazine for October 1789 published ‘original letters’ of Oliver Cromwell, Charles I and Speaker Lenthall. It also printed the views of a correspondent who signed himself ‘Catullus’: Let us hope the happy era is arrived when … the philosopher and theologian have no reason to apprehend the exercise of that pitiful, though cruel, spirit which confined a Galileo in a dungeon, and bound a Servetus to the stake; when the press is not only open to the literary of all classes, and to the advocates of all religious denominations, but when the public papers, under the conduct of enlightened editors, become vehicles of important information, and moral improvement, to the meanest peasant in the land. Although the writer describes himself as ‘a friend to the Dissent’, the letter is surprisingly headed ‘On the Reasonableness and Policy of the Laws against Dissenters’. The inference is that, since so much tolerance of opinion exists in the enlightened 1780s, the exclusion of Dissenters from political and municipal office is an insignificant disability.1 Four months later, the same journal would welcome The Danger of repealing the Test Act with the sardonic observation that ‘the subject of the slave-trade being nearly exhausted in the press, the public attention is to be engaged this session with the Test and Corporation Acts’. Noting that the author ‘gives a good comprehensive view of the progress of the Reformation and Puritanism, and of the Acts now complained of’, the reviewer quotes the writer’s charge against Cromwellian Republicans: ‘All their merit in this period, was that of pushing liberty, which the patriotism of the nation had always sufficiently secured against the exorbitant claims of prerogative, to enormous excesses of the most disgraceful and 166

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ruinous consequences.’ The Gentleman’s Magazine evidently saw the pamphlet as a tract for the times, commenting that the Dissenters demand, but cannot practise toleration: They can no more bear it than the Negroes who never knew a different state, or the French, born under a feudal system can bear liberty, or the poor labourers can bear a sudden influx of wealth. But the natural order of things is to be inverted, to establish equality of ranks; an idea as impracticable as equality of sentiments.2 The same issue quotes approvingly from another defence of the Test Acts: ‘Let not the friends of the Church be deceived by fair speeches. The signs of the times, and the principles that are stirring among us, are by no means such as to encourage us to dismantle our fortifications, but rather to see that they be kept in thorough repair and doubly manned.’ And in case readers had missed the topicality of the subject, the extract concludes: I love liberty as well as any man, but not the particular species of it which allows only seven minutes to prepare for death, before one is hanged up by fish-women at a lamp-iron; and, though superstition may be a very bad thing, I hope never to see the BRITISH National Assembly possessed by the spirit of – VOLTAIRE.3 This was guilt by association indeed. Yet the Dissenters had lent colour to the charge, not only by welcoming the French Revolution as Frend, Price and Priestley had done, but by embracing Unitarianism. As the Anti-Jacobin Review would later claim: The attacks on Christianity did not rise to deism, which openly disavows the religion of Jesus, but were carried on by the sap of Socinianism, which professing to believe in Christ, degrades his character, denies him as the saviour of the world, as the atonement of the sins of mankind, and thus would destroy the purposes of the divine mission. From Socinianism to Deism the passage is not long.4 In that same August 1798 number, the editors of the Anti-Jacobin reminded their readers that the editor of the newly founded Monthly Magazine, Richard Phillips, had a few years before ‘endeavoured to instil some of the new lights into the yeomanry and peasantry of the county, by industriously circulating Paine’s Rights of Man’. Despite

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having been allowed ‘two years for reflection in the county gaol’, Phillips had now provided his readers with a volume of Anecdotes of the French Revolution ‘and threatens them with another’.5 The Anti-Jacobin did not choose to record that the denominational complexion of the Monthly Magazine was avowedly Unitarian. By 1798 the Dissenters had abandoned hope of repeal of the Test Acts while the war lasted. Yet in 1790 the controversy eclipsed not only the debate on the slave trade, but the news from Paris. The Analytical Review listed 74 pamphlets published during the first six months of 1790 on the question of repeal, together with a further dozen reprints of earlier works. Among the new publications was An arranged Catalogue of works published on the question of toleration for Dissenters since 1772. In noticing this catalogue of 96 separate entries, the Monthly Review reported: ‘The Test pamphlets, pro and con, are become so numerous that it was thought necessary, and with good reason, to make a catalogue of them.’6 The catalogue was published by Johnson, proprietor of the Analytical. He had also published 30 of the 74 titles from 1790, besides Simon Catlow’s earlier Address to the Dissenters. Reviewing Catlow in January 1789, the Analytical had remarked optimistically: What the body of Dissenters have already attempted, in order to relieve themselves of the Test and Corporation Acts, is well known. Their success has been considerable in persuading men of all parties that the laws against them are unjust and impolitic, and although they have not prevailed with the legislature, it is a great advantage to their cause that it is now well understood, and has been ably defended.7 And in February 1790 the Analytical would devote a dozen pages to noticing various tracts arguing for or against repeal.8 That same month, the question of the Dissenters’ civil disabilities had been debated at Guildhall, and in March 1790 the Gentleman’s Magazine reported several of the speeches. First, Mr Syms, professing himself a supporter of toleration, appealed to ‘all those principles which we have imbibed from our infancy … respecting the preservation of the constitution in all its parts sacred and inviolable’. Everyone knew ‘that the Church forms an essential part thereof; and so intimately is it connected with the compound frame, that touch one stone of that pillar, and the whole pile is endangered’. As for Dr Price’s recent sermon:

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He is not content with the liberty of exercising his own free opinion on our Church liturgy, and of censuring our expressions of regard to the person of our sacred monarch; but he quotes in different parts of his discourse, the example of a neighbouring nation to enforce this doctrine that the civil rights of citizens are and ought to be equal, let their persuasion be what it may. Pearkes seconded Syms by citing ‘the unhappy misguided fate of the Italian – who being well – would be better – took physic and died’. 9 In its April issue the same magazine reported the ‘very able’ arguments of Joshua Toulmin (an Analytical reviewer), who claimed that ‘in this enlightened age, when priestcraft, bigotry and superstition were giving way all over Europe, it would be highly disgraceful to this country, to the city of London, and the members of the Corporation, to be advocates for intolerance, or supporters of ecclesiastical tyranny’. Turning to the question of loyalty, Toulmin continued: If the Dissenters had joined the High Church and Jacobites, it is not improbable that the Pretender, in 1745, might have got safe to London, instead of stopping at Derby. – Are these the men that this Government is afraid of trusting! Can it be supposed that the great body of Dissenters, men of enlightened minds, and men of liberal principles, want only the power to overthrow the monarchy, and lay the constitution in ruins? – The idea is preposterous. The Gentleman’s Magazine concludes by recording that ‘after a calm investigation of nearly five hours’, the motions against Repeal were nevertheless ‘all carried by a very large majority’. 10 The same column begins an eight-page report of the Commons debate of 2 March 1790, when Fox’s motion for repeal was defeated by 294 votes to 105. Despite Pitt’s reliance on the Dissenters in the 1784 election, he voted against repeal of the Test Acts in 1787, 1789 and 1790. In the 1790 debate, he drew a distinction between ‘a discreet, liberal and fair toleration, and the new-fangled toleration which levelled all distinction’. Although the plea was for toleration of religious opinions, the true object was political. Once in power, Pitt claimed, the Dissenters ‘must be expected to employ every engine for the subversion of the Established Church’. Burke supported Pitt, declaring his ‘apprehension of real danger to the Church from the present application’; and, in a pre-run for his notorious dagger speech, offered to supply ‘proofs’ of the danger. These included a printed catechism ‘containing no one

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precept of religion, but consisting of one invective against Kings and Bishops’, and a reported meeting of Dissenting ministers at Boston, Lincolnshire, where it was allegedly claimed that ‘they did not care the nip of a straw for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; but they designed to try for the abolition of the Tithes and the Liturgy’. He also cited Priestley’s declaration that ‘he hated all religious establishments, and thought them sinful and idolatrous’, and quoted from Priestley’s letter ‘in which he talked of a train of gunpowder being laid to the Church Establishment’. As Burke was already at work on his Reflections, it is no surprise to find him pointing to Price’s famous sermon, and treating it ‘with great severity’. Burke offered to meet the Dissenters to enable them ‘to refute the proofs which he had adduced’, but he also reminded the Commons of ‘Lord George Gordon’s mob, which had nearly levelled the Constitution in Church and State, by surrounding that House and attacking the Bank’.11 The defeat of the motion for repeal by 189 votes was a rude shock to the Dissenters. It was a far worse result than they had achieved in 1789, when the margin of defeat was only 20 votes.12 Amid reviewing no fewer than 38 pamphlets on the Test Acts in its March and April issues of 1790, the Monthly Review expressed its sympathy for the Dissenters’ demand for the rights of subjects: Of the Test Laws they complain as being unjust and unnecessary abridgments of these rights. All moderate men, we apprehend, see those laws in this point of view; and, notwithstanding parliament has thought fit to continue them, we cannot think them honourable to a land of freedom… .13 By contrast, in a favourable review of A Scourge for Dissenters the Gentleman’s Magazine thought it ‘well observed’ that the Dissenters ‘are forced to go back to the years 1715 and 1745 for proofs of their loyalty; they cannot bring them of later date, and in time within memory, when they fomented the American rebellion’.14 Space was nevertheless given to a correspondent who retorted that the Dissenters’ enemies ‘make no scruple to go back a century further to rake up abuse against them’.15 Anglicans had celebrated their victory in the March vote with cartoons showing Dissenters not only plotting with the National Assembly of France, but brandishing anti-monarchical tracts from the English Civil War.16 Those same Civil War tracts had linked not only the French Revolution, but the American Revolution with seventeenth-century

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precedents. Thomas Hollis (whose adopted heir Thomas Brand Hollis would take the key of the Bastille to George Washington) possessed an impressive collection of texts from the 1640s and 1650s. Dr Johnson described Hollis as ‘one who mis-spent an ample fortune in paving the way for sedition and revolt in this and neighbouring kingdoms, by dispensing democratical works’. 17 Hollis’s tracts crossed the Atlantic in Catharine Macaulay’s eight-volume History of England, published between 1763 and 1783. Hollis had given her some 175 seventeenthcentury tracts and pamphlets, besides books lent from his library. Such varied sources contrasted with Hume’s History of England (1754–62) which provided a Tory version of Civil War events. Hume boasted: ‘I have inserted no original Papers, and entered into no Detail of minute, uninteresting Facts.’18 Catharine Macaulay condemned Cromwell’s rule for its sacrifice of ‘all those principles of Liberty and Justice which had been established by the successful contests of the people with the crown … all the advantages which had been gained by a long and bloody war’. Yet she justified the execution of Charles I, and described the Commonwealth period as ‘the brightest age that ever adorned the page of history’.19 And in a separate work, written while still composing her magnum opus, she argued that the 1688 Revolution, far from safeguarding the gains of the Commonwealth, had inaugurated a system with the vices of ‘all the monarchical, oligarchical and aristocratical tyrannies in the world’. Like Hollis, she was primarily concerned, not with social revolution, but with purging the corruptions of the British Constitution, and reversing the steady growth of crown patronage and executive encroachment.20 Macaulay’s History found favour in America. In 1765 Franklin bracketed her with Robertson and Hume in what he called that ‘honest set of writers … who always show their regard to truth’.21 It was one of Jefferson’s recognized authorities, and he would later place all eight volumes in the University of Virginia library. John Adams read the History ‘with much admiration’, writing to Macaulay in 1770 that it was ‘calculated to strip off the gilding and false lustre from worthless princes and nobles, and to bestow the reward of virtue and praise upon the generous and worthy only’.22 Her publisher would later send Adams four copies of her Address to the People of England on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs (1775), in which she made a desperate plea to avert war, predicting that ‘if a civil war commences between Great Britain and her colonies, either the Mother Country, by one great exertion may ruin both herself and America, or the Americans, by a lingering contest, will gain an independency’.23 Well before this thirteenth-hour appeal,

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Macaulay had sent a copy of her History to Jonathan Mayhew. He told Hollis that she wrote ‘with a Spirit of Liberty, which might shame many great men (so called) in these days of degeneracy, and tyrannysm and oppression’. Perhaps the most unexpected tribute to her importance in such transatlantic connections was paid by Nathaniel Barber, a Boston Son of Liberty, who named his three children: John Wilkes, Oliver Cromwell and Catharine Macaulay.24 By the time the sixth volume of her History appeared in 1781, after a gap of ten years, Macaulay evidently felt the need to defend herself from the charge of republicanism. She knew that ‘republican principles and notions have always been too unpopular in this country to found on them any rational scheme of interest or ambition’. It was ‘from the conviction only of the integrity of their motives’ that she had seemed in her History to be ‘partial to the leaders of the republican party’. 25 Hume had written ill-temperedly of her championship of seventeenthcentury republicans: I grant that the cause of liberty which you Madam, with the Pyms and Hampdens have adopted, is noble and generous, but most of the partizans of that cause, in the last century, disgraced it by their violence, and also by their cant, hypocrisy and bigotry, which more than the principles of civil liberty, seems to have been the motive of all their actions.26 Hume’s charge would haunt the Dissenters throughout the 1790s. In 1770 Burke had described Macaulay as ‘our republican Virago’. 27 In that year she had challenged his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, admiring his style but castigating his argument for containing ‘a poison sufficient to destroy all the virtue and understanding of sound policy which is left in the nation’. 28 She also called for a bill against placemen, which Burke had opposed. Twenty years later she was one of the first and most effective challengers of his Reflections. She died in 1791, having lived long enough to visit America in 1784–85, when she was Washington’s guest at Mount Vernon. A few weeks before she died, the ‘Monthly Catalogue’ of the Critical Review noticed Edward Tatham’s pamphlet in support of Burke. The review considered that Dr Tatham was too critical of the Dissenters, and the editors took the opportunity to state their own position. Tatham (says the Critical) had charged the Dissenters with ‘a deep-laid design, which they have been secretly practising from the age of puritanism …’. The resumé continues:

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They fomented the American rebellion, in order to distress the state, that it might be induced to seize on the revenues of the church: they have endeavoured to destroy the connection between church and state that they might more easily conquer each separately; and they are constantly cherishing the seeds of innovation by their pamphlets, advertisements, Sunday’s schools, societies and sermons. The Critical explains that it has decided to change its own stance, and oppose the repeal of the Test Act ‘on the suspicion we entertained that the Dissenters wished to go farther and add some innovations, which would be detrimental to the constitution. That this whole design is laid, we do not believe.’ Yet the editors thought it ‘prudent at this time, to resist any attempt to change, though even in the specious guise reformation’.29 In 1791 the Critical had only just begun to move from its earlier Tory position, and as late as August 1792 it challenged Christopher Wyvill’s Defence of Dr Price and the Reformers of England. Although conceding that ‘on the subject of the Dissenters’ petition for the repeal of the test laws, we may allow that their conduct was at first manly, temperate and respectful’, the reviewer complained that they did not retire after their defeat ‘with that firm and manly dignity which is attributed to them; many were wildly clamorous, and some weakly complaining; all pretended to feel an injury, because they could not obtain a favour, which their own conduct had precluded them from’. 30 The Critical’s editorial policy changed more markedly in 1793, which saw not only the outbreak of war but the founding of a new Anglican and progovernment review, the British Critic. The Rev. Robert Nares, editor and part-owner of the new journal, was Chaplain to the Duke of York and a committee member of John Reeves’s Association against Republicans and Levellers. Nares twice received payments of £50 from secret service funds, in March 1792 and March 1793, probably to launch the new review. He continued as editor until 1813, with help from the classical scholar William Beloe. The British Critic, published by Rivingtons, owed its origin to a campaign by a group of Tory churchmen for a literary review to counteract ‘evil principles and what may be called a monopoly of the press’.31 In the preface to the first volume, the editors sought to defend themselves against the charge of partiality, which had been levelled at the prospectus. They now explained: We commenced, indeed, by avowing our principles, and we purposely declared them strongly as a pledge to the public, that if we

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were to err on any side, which yet we meant most studiously to avoid, it certainly would not be in opposition to the favourite opinions of our countrymen… . The new review, the preface continues, would be ‘a literary register, in which their general sentiments would be respected, and in which the most scanty measure of justice would not be allotted to those writings which defend their established religion, and the unperverted form of their political constitution’. The editors’ double negative does not mask their intention of making the British Critic a Church and King publication.32 The first issue carried a notice of the sermon preached in Westminster Abbey by Bishop Samuel Horsley on the 1793 anniversary of Charles I’s execution. The review begins: It must have been foreseen by the learned Bishop, that, when he wrote constitutionally on the subject of the 30th of January, he would subject himself to the same fate as the constitution itself at present experiences, that of being cavilled at, attacked, and declared to have no merit even in matters indifferent, on account of the one crying sin of opposing certain opinions. The Bishop, preaching within days of the execution of another monarch, condemns the treatment of Louis XVI: A monarch deliberately murdered! A monarch – whose only crime it was that he had inherited a sceptre, the thirty-second of his illustrious flock – butchered on a public scaffold, after the mockery of arraignment, trial and sentence. Butchered, without the merciful formalities of the vilest malefactor’s execution! The sad privilege of a last farewell to the surrounding populace refused! Not the pause of a moment allowed for devotion! Honourable interment denied to the corpse!33 The implication, echoed from the English Civil War, is that republicanism and regicide go together. The review of the bishop’s sermon is followed immediately by a notice of Priestley’s Letters to the Philosophers and Politicians of France. The British Critic begins by commending the author for seeking to respond to what it calls ‘the melancholy truth, that the modern philosophy and modern politics of France absorb in one common vortex of destruction all that social duty demands, and

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all that morality reveres’. But the reviewer points to Priestley’s apparent attempt to ‘make converts to what he calls Christianity, by relinquishing every point which might offend the pride of philosophical reasoners’. The review concludes revealingly: ‘The inhabitants of England are not likely to be soon persuaded that the man who has no dread of future punishments, nor hope of future reward, can be made as good a subject to the state, as he who adds these motives to all other reasons for right conduct.’34 So the ‘rational Christianity’ of the Unitarians is as dangerous a solvent of the fabric of society as rhetorical appeals to republican principles. A threat of a different kind was posed to the Established Church by the spread of Methodism, which, unlike Unitarianism, touched what a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine would call ‘a credulous and uninformed multitude’.35 In 1795 the British Critic warmly commended a 32-page printed sermon, How far Methodism conduces to the Interests of Christianity, and the Welfare of Society, as ‘a discourse of singular importance’ and one that deserves the attention ‘of every clergyman as well as of every Methodist in the kingdom’. The review lists the author’s explanations for the success of Wesleyanism: the flattering doctrines of Methodism – their great attention to singing – the periodical change in their preachers – the familiar intercourse of these with their several hearers – and their misrepresentations of the clergy, as preaching Salvation by Works. The want of religious intercourse betwixt clergy and people – an injudicious choice of subjects in preaching – the largeness of parishes – and the preaching only once a day.36 This seeming evenhandedness over Methodists needs to be set against the 27 pages of review (spread over three issues) devoted to The Scholar armed against the Errors of the Time, published by Rivingtons under the auspices of the Society for the Reformation of Principles – which had supplied the original impetus for Nares’s journal. In a long preamble to the first instalment of its review, the British Critic argues that in ‘times like the present, when men are divided by differences more distant in their principles, active in their operations, and awful in their consequences, than at any former period of civilized society’, impartiality is a weakness. ‘In such times, to remain in a perfect suspense of thought and judgment, would be to sacrifice, to an affected semblance of moderation, our duty both as men and citizens.’ The editors tell us they are persuaded

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that the best interests of Christianity in these kingdoms, are intimately connected with the permanence of the national church, and … with the preservation of the English constitution. We wish not to suppress or evade any arguments which may be brought against either; our sole wish is that neither may be condemned without securing for them a full, fair and impartial hearing.37 Such pro-establishment language was surprisingly low-key for November 1795, the month when Coleridge delivered his scathing Bristol lecture against the ‘Gagging Bills’. And by the summer of 1796 the British Critic was busying itself in support of the payment of tithes.38 In terms of circulation the British Critic was a success. Its contributors included William Vincent (Headmaster of Westminster School), the economist John Brand, the astronomer John Hellins and perhaps Thomas Rennell (Master of the Temple). They are hardly household names in the anti-Jacobin pantheon, but thanks to some good articles in the early numbers, together with Tory and ministerial support, circulation soon grew to 3500 – the figure achieved by the Critical Review. Horace Walpole was among the new journal’s subscribers. But its tone was too gentlemanly to please the government. More to Pittite taste was the Rev. John Ireland’s Vindiciae Regiae (1797), which compared seventeenth-century Puritans with eighteenth-century Jacobins, and accused both the Long Parliament of the 1640s and the French Assembly of the 1790s of legislating upon ‘certain imaginary wrongs’.39 Pitt would later tell George III that he wanted to introduce a test against Jacobin principles to be administered only to Dissenters. 40 So it is no surprise to read the opening paragraph of the Anti-Jacobin Review’s notice in October 1798 of The Lives of the English Regicides: Religious fanaticism was the engine which, in the last century, in the hands of ambition, produced the atrocities here recorded. We have seen in our own day that political fanaticism, and pretended philosophy, under the same guidance, have been productive of evils which now are, and are likely to be, infinitely more destructive to society, both by their duration and extent. But French philosophers and ‘their pupils in other lands’ have exceeded their forerunners: They behold with contempt the petty doings of the narrow-minded fanatics of the grand rebellion. These contented themselves with

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murdering their own king. Our philosophers attempt, with an ardour all their own, the more glorious achievement of overturning every throne on the face of the earth.41 The Anti-Jacobin was soon quoting approvingly Jonathan Boucher’s contention in his American Revolution that the loss of the colonies was not the fault of His Majesty’s ministers, but of ‘that spirit of republicanism which overturned the constitution of Great Britain in 1648, and a large portion of which was carried over to America by the first puritan emigrants’. The review continues: The descendants of the puritans are still found among us, in great numbers; they retain the same principles which in England and America have produced so much disturbance; they take care, by their offspring and their seminaries, to transmit those principles to their posterity; and they have, with few exceptions, admired, extolled, nay even encouraged and promoted, to the utmost of their power, the French Revolution, because it was formed upon their own principles. The reviewer concludes that the Dissenters’ doctrines – ‘not only unfavourable to Monarchy, but incompatible with the good order of society’ – can be traced back to ‘the French refugee, Calvin’. 42 And in September 1799, the Anti-Jacobin observes that ‘if our constitution be destroyed, it will be but a poor consolation to us to reflect that, as in the last century in this country, it has been destroyed by saints, rather than, as is now the case in France, by profligate sinners’.43 The robust phrases of the Anti-Jacobin Review are strikingly at variance with the language of the Address to the People of England from the Protestant Dissenters of Yorkshire, to which the Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1791 had devoted four double-column pages. The Address, prompted by the Birmingham riots of that year, complains: ‘The specious cry of Church and King hath been artfully assumed by our enemies, with an evident design to make the ignorant believe that we are enemies to both, and that neither can be safe while we are suffered to exist.’ The Dissenters concede that they are opposed to the Established Church, since ‘we cannot discover in the discourses of Christ, or the writings of the Apostles, any foundation for that distinction of ranks in the Christian ministry, which is prescribed in the Episcopal form of church government’. But since they rely on ‘the sufficiency of the Scriptures, and the right of private judgment’, they

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would think it ‘impious to intrude between the conscience of a brother and that venerable Being who alone knoweth his heart’. The address points persuasively to the vested interest in public order represented by ‘the aggregate of the property which is possessed by individual dissenters’, particularly as much of it is ‘in commercial stock, or the machinery of manufactories’ which may easily be ‘dissipated in an hour by the fury of the bigoted or the rapacity of unprincipled insurgents’. As for the Dissenters’ loyalty: ‘The experience of a century has witnessed our quiet submission to the laws, and our active regard to the welfare of our country.’ They did indeed ‘sincerely congratulate’ France on her revolution, but they deny any wish for a revolution in England: ‘It is our deliberate judgment that the evils we lament will admit of a ready redress, and may be constitutionally remedied without the violation of personal right, and with equal advantage to the monarch and the people.44 It is difficult to equate the Dissenters of the Address with the subversive republicans of anti-Jacobin demonology, even allowing for six intervening years of war and the persistent fears of a French invasion. The contrast is some indication of the hysterical tone of Pittite propaganda. Yet in 1772, the unsensational Lord North, when Prime Minister, had opposed removing compulsory subscription to the 39 Articles as a test of orthodoxy, on the implausible grounds that the petitioners wanted to bring back the days of the Fifth Monarchy Men and overthrow the Church of England.45 A recent historian of loyalism has claimed that ‘long before 1789, the linkage between non-conformist churches and treason was a firm one in at least certain loyalist circles’.46 Yet it seems undeniable that, of all sections of educated English society, the Dissenters were the greatest short-term sufferers from the public reaction against the French Revolution.

14 Millennialism and Popery

Revived fear of Puritan republicanism was not the only shadow cast by the seventeenth century over the 1790s. Millennialist prophecies were also given fresh currency by events in France. The link with seventeenth-century millennialism is made explicit in The French Revolution foreseen in 1639. In its notice of the work in September 1791, the Analytical Review identifies the original author as Dr Thomas Goodwin, who had conjectured in his commentary on Revelation 11:13 ‘that some great and special honour is reserved for the saints and churches belonging to the kingdom of France; and that this kingdom will have the honour to have the last great stroke in the ruining of Rome’. According to the Fifth Monarchy Men of Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the first four empires or monarchies of human history (since the Flood) were the Assyrian, the Persian, Alexander’s Macedonian or Greek Empire, and the Roman Empire – which began with the accession of Augustus Caesar, and had continued ever since. The Fifth Monarchists had petitioned the Council of Officers in 1649 that the government should be vested in an assembly elected by the Independent congregations in order that the reign of Christ and his saints upon earth might at once begin. As for the tract under review, the Analytical was suitably sceptical. While agreeing that ‘the Revelation contains many sublime passages, and some of the grandest imagery’, the reviewer considers that, even with the author’s assistance, ‘it is not easy to trace the fulfilment of the prophecies without granting weight to conjectures that might have leaned to the other side, had circumstances varied’. 1 The particular verse in Revelation spoke of an earthquake, and had persuaded the preceding generation of millennialists to see the fulfilment in the Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years War.

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In a review of Some Prophetical Periods, or a View of the different Prophetical Periods mentioned in Daniel and St John, the Analytical could scarcely hide its derision. The reviewer wonders why ‘so many of our modern English writers continue to waste their time and talents’ in commenting on the books of Daniel and Revelation, which ‘for almost eighteen hundred years, have been the rocks, on which all the best interpreters have, more or less, been shipwrecked of their reputation’. The reviewer concedes that this particular author is ‘rather the historian of the voyages of preceding navigators, than an original investigator’, but still thinks that such speculations are pointless: Our author adds an 8th Prophetical Period, or the Last Great Day: but as this is ‘unknown even to the angels’; and as those who are most ‘skilful in understanding the words of prophecy’ can ‘only form near guesses concerning it’, we shall here conclude our review.2 The Apocalypse’s confusing chronology of events that would usher in the Millennium is set out in Revelation 19:19 to 20:3. And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him who sat on the horse, and against his army. And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that worshipped his image… . And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years. And cast him into the bottomless pit, and set a seal upon him that he should deceive nations no more till the thousand years should be fulfilled … and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.3 In its 1796 review of Alexander Pirie’s French Revolution exhibited in the Light of the Sacred Oracles, the Analytical took the trouble to cite the author’s detailed application of scriptural references. The reviewer explains that Pirie understands ‘the earthquake, predicted at the beginning of the eleventh chapter of Revelation’ to denote ‘the political concussion produced by the French Revolution’; and the ‘seven thousand

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names of men slain by the earthquake’ are, according to this interpretation, ‘the titles, honours and offices which the Revolution abolished’. The review continues: In the late convention he discovers every feature of the beast rising out of the bottomless pit, ‘its politics being mischievous and deep as Hell, and its actions the works of the devil’. In the members of this assembly he recognizes ‘the spirit of devils, like frogs; a natural emblem of Frenchmen, as frogs furnish a dish of food very common in that country’. In the Jacobin power alone he discovers the full and perfect character of Antichrist, the man of sin.4 Three years earlier, the Analytical had dismissed A Prophecy of the French Revolution, and the Downfall of Antichrist. Noting that the earthquake is taken to refer to France, as one of the ten kingdoms ‘into which the great city Romish Babylon was divided’, the reviewer decides that this ‘borrowed conjecture on the meaning of the prediction’ may be ‘as well applied to any other kingdom as to France’. The same May 1793 issue had noticed more than a dozen sermons addressed to the revolutionary situation, including the Vicar of Kidderminster’s claim that Europe is besieged and undermined, not so much by armed men as by ‘the hideous systems of atheistical policy’.5 Antichrist in the French Convention (1795) appeals not only to Revelation, but to Daniel 7:8, where ‘among Daniel’s three first horns plucked up by the roots’, the reviewer records that the author ‘discovers the late king of France, and the present king of Poland’; while ‘the eye of a man, beheld in the little horn’ is decoded as ‘an allusion to the telegraphe’.6 The Gentleman’s Magazine, in a review of the same publication, notes the author’s contention that France is ‘the eldest son of the Pope, and the great toe of Nebuchadnezzar’s image’, and that ‘this Anti-Christian power has arisen exactly at the time it should have been expected, according to St John, 1260 years’. The review quotes the author: That the power which rules in France takes its date from Aug. 10 1792, every one knows; that, soon after its ascension, it made war upon the Old and New Testaments, by declaring all revealed religion to be an imposture, and death an eternal sleep, is also known; and it is clear that three years and a half from that time will bring down the date to 1796; in which year the aforementioned term of 1260 years will expire.

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Like the Analytical, the Gentleman’s Magazine notices the author’s reference to the newly invented telegraph, and, in recording the prediction that we may yet see ‘the bringing down fire from heaven more literally fulfilled’, the editors allow themselves an ironical footnote: ‘Perhaps the electric batteries, which electricians have hitherto only imagined but been afraid to put in practice, may be realized.’7 More serious notice was taken of Priestley’s Present State of Europe compared with antient Prophecies (1794). While the Gentleman’s Magazine is less interested in Priestley’s eschatological views than in his reasons for emigrating to the United States, the Analytical adopts a respectful tone. The reviewer mildly notes that Priestley ‘thinks it highly probable that the present disturbances in Europe are the beginning of the calamitous times foretold in Scripture’ and that he ‘interprets the language of Jesus concerning the kingdom of heaven as referring to his future reign upon earth’. The review adds that Priestley concludes that, before the restoration of the Jews, great and dreadful judgments will fall upon those nations by whom they have been oppressed, and that this will involve almost all the nations of the world, but more especially those of the western parts which have been subject first to the Roman empire, and then to the see of Rome. The Analytical is evidently reluctant to criticize such views, in a work published by its own publisher, at a time when Priestley has chosen to emigrate. ‘Yes, much injured man!’ it concludes, ‘depart from a country which has so disgracefully proved itself unworthy of thy services.’ And it reminds its readers: ‘Among the Athenians, the interval was short between the condemnation of Socrates, and the day when his exiled friends were recalled, a general mourning was decreed, and a statue erected to his memory.’8 New England, where Puritan millennialism had taken deeper root than in the mother country, had not discarded Apocalyptic language by the mid-eighteenth century, and later wove scriptural prophecies into the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1760s and 1770s. Jonathan Edwards had earlier seen the Millennium as a time when ‘the absolute and despotic power of the kings of the earth shall be taken away, and liberty shall reign throughout the earth’. 9 John Nathan Hutchins, in his Almanack … for the Year of Our Lord 1762, prophesied the defeat of the French in the Seven Years War, after a period of terrible bloodshed, to be followed by the bountiful production of crops and flourishing

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trade as never before, and the beginning of real ‘happiness’ in Europe and America. In 1759, Jonathan Mayhew similarly predicted that postwar America would boast ‘mighty cities’ and ‘commodious ports’, ‘pastures cloathed with flocks’ and ‘vallies cover’d with corn’.10 Such bland visions of the promised land contrast with the starker images drawn by the Sons of Liberty in 1766, when an address given at the Liberty Tree in Boston proclaimed that Scripture ‘foretold the great waste that would be committed in the world by monsters in the shape of men, who under a pretence of governing and protecting mankind have enslaved them’. Two of these monsters – the Beasts of Revelation – were indentified with Lord Bute and Lord Grenville, while the audience was warned not to touch any stamped document ‘lest by touching any paper with this impression, you may receive the mark of the beast’.11 And the Maryland Journal reported soldiers celebrating the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence by throwing down and decapitating ‘the IMAGE of the BEAST’ in the person of George III.12 Less crudely, Apocalyptic imagery was invoked by the poets. Freneau’s Rising Glory of America (1772) promised: And when the train of rolling years are past (So sang the exil’d seer in Patmos isle) A new Jerusalem sent down from heav’n Shall grace our happy earth, perhaps this land, Whose virgin bosom shall then receive, tho’ late, Myriads of saints with their almighty king, To live and reign on earth a thousand years Thence called Millenium. Paradise anew Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost.13 Similarly Joel Barlow’s Prospect of Peace (1778) took its imagery from Daniel, and looked towards a scriptural millennium: Then love shall rule, and Innocence adore, Discord shall cease, and Tyrants be no more; ‘Till yon bright orb, and those celestial spheres In radiant circles, mark a thousand years. Barlow’s lines show what a short step it is from the millennialism of New England to the secular Utopia of the philosophes.14 Joel Barlow, friend of Thomas Christie and Mary Wollstonecraft from the Analytical, features frequently in the English periodical press of the

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1790s. His Vision of Columbus (1787) was reviewed by the Analytical, where Barlow’s nine books of rhymed couplets were criticized for setting too long a time-scale – though he was somewhat equivocally commended for ‘a strain of versification and expression not unequal to the grand occasion’. Vision of Columbus was dedicated to Louis XVI, but five years later Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders in the several States of Europe was almost too much for the Monthly Review, which declared that full freedom of speech ‘was never demanded, asserted and practised, in so unlimited a degree, as by writers of the present age; and by none, no – not by Mr Paine himself – has the liberty been carried farther, more boldly claimed, nor more fully exemplified, than by the author of the present pamphlet’. Barlow is ready to give advice to everyone, whether in Letter to the National Convention of France (1792) or his Letter addressed to the People of Piedmont (1795) or (most notoriously) in The Conspiracy of Kings (1792): Show me your kings, the sceptred horde parade, – See their pomp vanish! see your visions fade! Indignant MAN resumes the shaft he gave, Disarms the tyrant, and unbinds the slave.15 Barlow’s vision of the fall of kings is not quite the Millennium of Jonathan Edwards, but amid what the Monthly Review calls the poem’s ‘American thunders’, the Conspiracy of Kings has not entirely lost the apocalyptic tones of New England Puritanism. Barlow’s millennialist contemporaries in America remained securely rooted in Scripture. A letter in the Boston Gazette for 19 April 1793 reported that ‘all is working in Europe for the freedom of men [and] the downfall of Antichrist’, while Samuel Stillman’s Thoughts on the French Revolution (Boston, 1795) saw the French Revolution as leading to ‘the universal establishment of the rights of man, and the peaceful kingdom of Jesus Christ’. The English Baptist, James Bicheno, argued that the second beast with two horns in Revelation 13:11 stood for the Capetian dynasty, and found that the mysterious number of the Beast (666) corresponded to the numerical letters in LUDOVICUS XVI – Louis XVI’s name written in Latin. And according to Bicheno, Satan would be bound and the Millennium would begin in 1819.16 Meanwhile the Gentleman’s Magazine was doggedly reviewing millennialist publications in England. Little space was allowed (beyond its cumbersome title) for Conjectures on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St John, in order to ascertain the Periods when the Vials of

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Wrath will finish, agreeably to the Dates given in Daniel, Chap xii as they appear to respect Russia, Germany, England, France, Constantinople and Russian Provinces in Asia (1795). Not surprisingly, the reviewer decides that the author will be disappointed in his hopes of a second edition.17 And though reviewing seven millennialist pamphlets in a single issue, the Gentleman’s Magazine regards them all ‘in our humble opinion, of the same class, the reveries of madmen and enthusiasts’.18 Two months later the same journal would complain: We must, like some of our brethren, open a new article of review, if we attend to all the testimonies and warnings which these mock messengers of heaven are daily trumping up; a list of which amounting to a dozen, may be seen on the last page of the present, making 13; and serving to show how easily artful and designing enthusiasts play into each other’s hands. The reviewer was noticing a tract in defence of Richard Brothers, ‘dictated by the Spirit of the Lord, and wrote by Thomas Taylor’. Brothers was an enthusiast to be reckoned with, since his prediction that the world would end on 4 June 1795, the King’s birthday, caused thousands to leave London – though he was first arrested and then confined in a private lunatic asylum.19 The discrediting of Brothers did not prevent the Gentleman’s Magazine from devoting 14 columns in August 1797 to a new translation from the German of An Illustration of the present great and important Occurrence by the prophetical Word of God … (1794).20 And in July 1798 the magazine would allot three double-column pages to Edward King’s Remarks on the Signs of the Times. In a long passage quoted by the reviewer, King explains that ‘the events of the pouring out of the seventh vial correspond with other prophecies’, notably in the psalms, where it is predicted that ‘the sun, moon and stars shall be darkened; and the powers of heaven shall be shaken’. King applies the prophecies thus: The sun is darkened and perished in France and Poland; darkened in Holland, Sardinia and Savoy, and was in Sweden when the King was assassinated; as the moon is in Portugal, by the Queen’s incapacity to govern; the sun is in danger of being darkened in Naples and Spain, and the stars, the nobles, are fallen in France. King also insists that there are passages in Isaiah which ‘do expressly declare, both by what people, from what place, and at what time, the Jews

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shall be restored’. The review seems to applaud the author’s modest wish ‘only, if possible, to be a means of leading others also to apprehend more fully what is written’. This aim the Gentleman’s Magazine considers ‘most laudable’ in ‘this eventful period, which some of our brethren discourage the study of, with a view to Scripture predictions; while others studiously pervert the sense of those predictions; and others, however serious and well-meaning, deny the genuineness of the predictions’.21 In October 1796 a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine, signing himself ‘CHRISTOCOLA’, sought to correct a bishop’s interpretation of Revelation: If we adopt Bp. Newton’s idea of the little book in Revelations being a codicil or appendix to the sealed book, and a resumption of the subject, we may equally apply it to these later times. The beast rising out of the sea cannot so well be Rome as France; to whom the dragon, or the devil, delegates his power, instigating her to the total abolition of true religion.22 The millennialist interpretation of the beast as atheistical Jacobinism rather than Roman Catholicism, is a striking feature of the 1790s.23 In The Fall of Papal Rome, recommended to the Consideration of England, Charles Daubeny argued that the ruin of Rome was already accomplished: ‘Those, therefore, who do not see the accomplishment of one prominent part of this prophecy, in the present fallen state of the Papal power, must either lack discernment or be in the unhappy condition in which Josephus described his countrymen to have been when “they made a jest of divine things, and derided, as so many senseless tales and juggling impostures, the sacred oracles of their prophets, which were then fulfilling before their eyes”.’ 24 And Daubeny would later defend the Roman Church against identification with the Whore of Babylon. Even the High Church Samuel Horsley, Bishop of St Asaph, who had defended divine-right doctrine in his King Charles Day sermon to the House of Lords in 1793, denied that the Pope was Antichrist. In 1795 Pitt took the surpising step of securing the foundation of Maynooth College, to train Catholic priests now that the French seminaries were closed. Less surprisingly Burke, an Irishman, was sympathetic to Irish Catholicism, but he also remarked to Catherine II that the cause of French Catholicism was the cause of all churches. Popular acceptance of Burke’s case for championing French Catholics was

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tested by the arrival in England of numbers of emigrant Catholic clergy. A correspondent in the Gentleman’s Magazine observed that ‘the admission of so many French Roman Catholics into this kingdom is one of the many evils of the French Revolution’. But he was quick to add: ‘Let it be remembered that this admission was not a matter of choice, but, in some degree, of necessity. They were thrown upon our coast, as it were, by the hand of God, to rescue them from the cruel persecution of their merciless countrymen.’25 The Analytical had earlier welcomed a published sermon entitled The Duty of relieving the French Refugee Clergy (1793) with the remark: ‘The claims of the emigrant clergy of France to charitable relief, exclusive of political considerations, are sufficiently obvious to impress every benevolent mind.’ 26 Political considerations could not be entirely excluded, however, especially when English Catholics seemed to be making common cause with the Dissenters. Despite editorial support for the campaign against the Test Acts, the Monthly’s reviewer found some difficulty in blending the case of our domestic Presbyterians, Baptists and Quakers, with a class of Dissenters, members of a foreign church, that asserts a claim of supremacy over all Christendom, and actually exercised it over all princes and potentates who were weak enough to submit to its control.27 The Anglican British Critic’s review of McKenna’s Political Essays would later express similar misgivings: ‘With respect to the established church, the members of the Roman communion are dissenters: and they will make a common cause with all other dissenters, in points of interest, as far as their religious opinions permit them.’ But it was the Irish Catholics, the British Critic believed, who would most damagingly unbalance the political equation: ‘The weight of two thirds of the inhabitants of Ireland, added to the dissenting interest in parliament, must greatly endanger the security of the possessions belonging to the establishment.’ The review continues: ‘The rudiments of the doctrine, that all secular power, including that of Kings, was founded on the consent of the people, was first advanced by the Italian canonists of the Roman communion …’.28 The British Critic seems to come close to equating Catholic and Jacobin. The Anti-Jacobin Review lent its weight to similar contortions, in reprinting lines celebrating Nelson’s victory on the Nile. These began: ‘When Popish plots by furious Bigots hatched …’ and went on to praise William III’s preservation of Protestant England. The verses then

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contrast Bonaparte’s fleet under ‘their Jacobinic flag’ with England’s ‘Christian hero with his gallant crew’. 29 A correspondent in the AntiJacobin was soon complaining of the increasing belief ‘that the papal is not the anti-christian power predicted in the apocalypse’. He paints an alarming picture: ‘Schools are opened in various parts of the kingdom, nunneries established, and even the habit of the professed worn, and, under the fostering hand of noble patronage, the errors of Popery are disseminated among the poor and ignorant.’ The writer begs his readers to take care that ‘because they are shocked at the shameless appearance of Atheism in the highways, they do not open private roads for the approach of something, which under another name, will, in effect, prove the same’.30 In the Ireland of 1798, Catholicism and Jacobinism seemed to be genuinely in alliance. Burke complained that Arthur O’Connor, the only member of the Irish Parliament to uphold the ‘United Irishmen’ line in his speeches, would ‘Jacobinize all the Energies and all the active Talents of that Country’. 31 Although Protestant Dissenters in England were seen as crypto-republicans who, even in 1798, were still sympathetic to the French Revolution, Irish Protestants had been anti-Jacobin since 1795. Canning’s weekly Anti-Jacobin saw the conviction of James O’Coigly (Irish delegate to the French republic) as evidence of a Catholic Jacobinic plot to subvert the Irish government, 32 while those extreme representatives of ‘Catholic Jacobinism’, the Defenders, issued a catechism which blended allegiance to the National Convention with professed obedience to the Holy See: Are you concerned? I am. To what? To the National Convention. What do you design by that cause? To quell all nations, dethrone all kings, and to plant the true religion that was lost at the Reformation. Who sent you? Simon Peter, the head of the Church. Signed by order of the Chief Consul. As Burke’s biographer comments: ‘The last rays of the Enlightenment as they penetrated the mists of rural Ireland, in the middle of the last decade of the eighteenth century, produced some strange and ominous rainbows.’33 In February 1798, after Camden’s ruthless disarming of Ulster but before the southern uprising, the Monthly Review could write of the anti-ministerial View of the present State of Ireland:

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As to the narrative of facts, it is impossible for us to express the sense of the monstrous barbarities which it contains! If but a small number of the recitals be true (which we hope is not the case), the name of a British soldier will long be mentioned with the utmost execration among the poor natives. And in a review of A Letter to the Earl of Moira, in Defence of his Majesty’s Ministers, the Monthly reminds the author that it was not the laws that were the subject of complaint, but ‘a government exercised without any law at all; the subject seized without accusation, and condemned and barbarously executed without trial’. The reviewer admits that he has no means of knowing whether the complaints are well founded, but ‘if they be not groundless, it is futile to talk about the laws or the constitution of Ireland’. 34 In printing Grattan’s Address to his Constituents, the Monthly regretted that ‘his genius is not under the direction of better taste’. 35 But its notice of the latest Report from the Committee of Secrecy does not disguise the Monthly’s sympathies: From this report it appears that nearly one hundred thousand men are formed into military corps, in the different counties of Ireland, – for the purpose of obtaining parliamentary reform and the emancipation of the Catholics, as the Society of United Irishmen asserts; – or, as the Secret Committee assert, for the purpose of robbery and massacre. To point the contrast, the review quotes the text of the ‘Test of United Irishmen’, including the promise to seek to ‘forward a brotherhood of affection, an identity of interests, a communion of rights, and an union of power among Irishmen of all religious persuasions’, without which all parliamentary reform must be ‘partial, not national, inadequate to the wants, delusive to the wishes, and insufficient to the freedom and happiness of this country’.36 In a brief notice of Reflections of the Irish Conspiracy, the Monthly for April 1798 dismisses the author’s attempt to ‘show that there is one great conspiracy throughout the two islands to subvert all order, all government, all religion, &c. &c. &c.’ And if such a conspiracy exists, the Monthly is convinced it will fail: If Ireland were put into full possession of her claims; if all religious disqualifications were abolished; if full, free, and adequate representation

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of the people were granted; and if the guilty were brought to condign punishment by competent tribunals; then we should venture to hope that no conspiracy in Ireland would be formidable.37 Yet the events of 1798 ensured that the Irish conspiracy would be written into history. The editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review, John Gifford, in his Life of Pitt (1809) would quote Lord Clare’s confident assertion that the Irish Catholics ‘consider themselves secure of French aid, and of the support of the lower orders, whom they have seduced by the hope of plunder, and the promise of an Agrarian distribution of land’. Gifford comments that ‘the whole diabolical plan was formed with systematic precision; the French model had been so far followed, that no mean scruple of delicacy, no unmanly feelings of remorse, were suffered to interpose the slightest obstacle to the accomplishment of the murderous project’. The insurgents would be equipped with weapons, as Gifford explains: ‘The fabrication of those murderous instruments of rebellion, pikes, was now carried on with the utmost industry, and with such barefaced effrontery, that blacksmiths, were detected in making them at noon-day: while leaden gutters were stripped off the houses to be converted into bullets.’38 Gifford’s sources included Sir Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1801). This two-volume work cast the Catholics as the irredeemable villains. Musgrave’s Memoirs, despite what the Dictionary of National Biography calls its ‘blind prejudice’, did for early nineteen-century Protestants what Foxe’s Book of Martyrs had done for Elizabethan Englishmen. Meanwhile the British Critic would equate the popery of 1798 with the popery of the massacre of St Bartholomew.39 In his ‘Fire, Famine and Slaughter’ (1797) Coleridge linked Pitt’s brutal treatment of Ireland with the government’s disastrous intervention in the Vendée. In 1796 Coleridge published ‘Religious Musings’, written two years earlier and containing the lines: Rest awhile Children of Wretchedness! More groans must rise, More blood must steam, or ere your wrongs be full. Yet is the day of Retribution nigh: The Lamb of God hath open’d the fifth seal: And upward rush on swiftest wings of fire Th’innumerable multitude of Wrongs

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By man on man inflicted! Rest awhile Children of Wretchedness! The hour is nigh: Coleridge’s footnotes elucidate the Apocalyptic references. Thus ‘E’en now the storm begins’, he explains, refers to the French Revolution, while the Whore of Babylon, ‘The abhorred form … She that work’d whoredom with the DAEMON POWER’ does not, the poet thinks, ‘apply to Rome exclusively; but to the union of Religion with Power and Wealth, wherever it is found’. Similarly he explains that the ‘THOUSAND YEARS lead up their mystic dance’ refers to the Millennium ‘in which I suppose, that Man will continue to enjoy the highest glory of which he is capable’. Coleridge adds, without irony: ‘I suppose that this period will be followed by the passing away of this Earth, and by our entering the state of pure intellect; when all Creation shall rest from its labours.’40 The frequent effectiveness of millennialist rhetoric in the hands of Jacobin and anti-Jacobin alike, should not mislead us into thinking that it was merely a rhetorical device – even when used by the poets.

15 Transatlantic Comparisons: American Porcupine

The first issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review in July 1798 devoted nine pages to William Cobbett, who was then still in America. The ‘Original Criticism’ section opens with his Republican Judge, or the American Liberty of the Press, singling out Cobbett’s claim that the French Directory has foreign newspapers in its pay: That there should exist such MERCENARY TRAITORS as TO RECEIVE THE WAGES OF REGICIDES AND ASSASSINS is still less astonishing, than that there should be found men, in the different countries, and men of rank too, so base, so degenerate, and so foolish as to give encouragement to their treasonable productions. The reviewer comments: ‘The author speaks truth – there is at least one newspaper of this description in London, which is encouraged – to their shame be it spoken! – by men of rank and by members of the legislature.’ Cobbett’s work is commended to English readers, particularly those who are ‘disposed to question the superior advantages which they enjoy over ALL republican states, under our own well-poised and limited MONARCHY’. The review concludes with an extract from Cobbett’s ‘Address to the People of England’: Such, BRITONS, is the fruit of republican government here; not among the apish and wolfish French; but among a people descended from the same ancestors as yourselves. When your monarchical government bears such fruit, let it, I say be hewn down, and cast into the fire; but, till that disgraceful and dreadful day comes, watch over it with care, and defend it to the last drop of your blood… .1 192

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Cobbett’s first sight of the New World was not auspicious. He thought that the coast of Nova Scotia had nothing but novelty to commend it: ‘Everything I saw was new: bogs, rocks and stumps, musquitoes and bull-frogs. Thousands of captains and colonels without soldiers, and of squires without stockings or shoes.’ 2 He had then been a soldier and unmarried. In 1792 he returned to America as a would-be settler and with a wife. They had come not from England, but from France, where Cobbett had spent what he called ‘the six happiest months of my life’. But he saw that Englishmen had little future under a French government which ‘had laid aside even the appearance of justice and mercy’. He set off for America, carrying a letter of recommendation to Jefferson, and (he tells us) ‘ambitious to become the citizen of a free state’.3 The ambition was soon abandoned. But he began teaching French emigrés at Wilmington on the Delaware, and his first published book (1795) was an English grammar for Frenchmen (Le Tuteur Anglais). He soon attracted notice by attacking Priestley, whose arrival in New York had been greeted by addresses from various learned societies. Observations on the Emigration of Dr Joseph Priestley marked the start of Cobbett’s pamphleteering career in the United States. He objected to Priestley’s portrayal of America as the asylum of liberty. Emigrants came to America, Cobbett insists, for economic not political reasons. He concludes that ‘a cobler with his hammer and awls, is a more valuable acquisition than a dozen philosophers’.4 During the six years he and his wife spent in America, Cobbett published some 20 different pamphlets, running (according to his own estimate) to more than half a million copies. American liberties, he argued, owed more to the laws of England than to the philosophes of France. More specifically, he set himself to prevent a new FrancoAmerican alliance against England, and although his writings may not themselves (as he later claimed) have prevented that alliance, he did succeed in destroying the reputations of three successive French ministers in the United States – Genet, Fauchet and Adet. Talleyrand went so far as to try to bribe Cobbett to moderate his anti-French campaign. 5 An anonymous critic remarked that Cobbett ‘pricked his enemies with his quills like a porcupine’. The Englishman was delighted with the simile, and the 1796 American edition of Mackenzie’s An Answer to Paine’s Rights of Man carried a ‘Letter from Peter Porcupine’. Cobbett would soon incorporate his new pseudonym into the title of his daily newspaper, but he first founded a monthly review called The Political Censor.6 The January 1797 issue was praised by the Anti-Jacobin

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Review for its ‘great freedom of remark’ in relating ‘the unwearied, but happily unsuccessful pains that were taken by the partisans of France to secure the election of Mr Jefferson, whose political and religious principles are reprobated in the strongest terms of indignant abhorrence of Jacobinism’.7 After the monthly Political Censor was replaced by the daily Porcupine’s Gazette, the Anti-Jacobin quoted a long extract from the new journal, ending: I have without ceasing, with a repetition calculated to produce disgust, dinned in the ears of my Readers that France had a potent faction here, devoted to her will, and ready to strike at her command: and have a thousand times said, that the only terms to be obtained in any Negotiation with her, must fix everlasting disgrace on America. – All this has come true. The mask is thrown off, and the stupid standers-by wonder they did not sooner perceive it. The reviewer praises Porcupine for the ‘vigour’ of his style and the ‘manly firmness’ of his principles, which have done more to open the eyes of Americans to the real designs of France than ‘all the poisoned pens of the Jacobin Writers of Great Britain have been able to do’ towards promoting French principles and French practice.8 In the same issue, the editors note that the Aurora of Philadelphia (‘a Paper notoriously in the PAY OF THE FRENCH DIRECTORY’) has excused the Directors’ conduct ‘nearly on the grounds which has been taken by the Courier here’. The Anti-Jacobin adds that it ‘cannot avoid remarking the wonderful sympathy which subsists between the Jacobins of Great Britain and those in America’. And the editors conclude their comments on the American press by claiming that the United Irishmen have been communicating with one another in cypher, through advertisements in the Aurora.9 Cobbett’s most wide-ranging attack on American ‘Jacobinism’, A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats, was published in January 1795 in response to the American edition of James Callender’s Political Progress of Britain. Callender, a Scot, had accused the British government of an ‘endless catalogue of massacres in Asia and America’. If they were looking for massacres, Cobbett retorted, let American democrats look to France, where Louis XVI, supporter of American independence, had been butchered. ‘Our Democrats’, Cobbett wrote in typically antiJacobin vein, ‘are continually crying shame on the satellites of Royalty, for carrying on a Crusade against Liberty; when the fact is, the sattelites [sic] of Liberty are carrying on a Crusade against Royalty…’. A footnote reminds Cobbett’s readers that Liberty does not mean

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freedom from oppression, but is a more comprehensive term ‘signifying, among other things, slavery, robbery, murder and blasphemy’. As evidence he cites Joel Barlow’s rewriting of ‘God Save the King’ as ‘God Save the Guillotine’, which (we are told) was sung ‘at the Celebration of the fourth of July, by a number of French and American citizens at Hamburg’. Cobbett quotes all three verses, ending with: When all the sceptred crew Have paid their homage, due The Guillotine. Let freedom’s flag advance, ‘Till all the world like France, O’er tyrants graves shall dance And peace begin.10 No wonder even the more radical London periodical press found Barlow’s belligerent republicanism too strident. Turning to the Western Rebellion (known to historians as the ‘Whiskey Rebellion’) which he describes as ‘an epoch of American sans-culottism’, Cobbett recalls ‘the manoeuvres that were employed to prevent the Militia of Pennsylvania from turning out, and the sarcasms that were thrown out on the Jersey Militia, only because they did turn out’. Nobody could doubt that the object of the Democrats was, ‘by means like these, to deaden the limbs of Government, and then seize the reins themselves’. Cobbett’s advice to all ‘understrappers of Democratic Clubs’ was to ‘leave off your bawling and your toasting, go home and sell your sugar and your snuff, and leave the care of “Posterity” to other heads’.11 The toasting was certainly somewhat overdone. Cobbett lists 16 toasts ‘drunk on the 6th of Feb. 1794 by the French and American Citizens’. Among the toasts are: 1. The Democratic Societies throughout the world – may they ever be the wakeful guardians of Liberty. 2. Citizen Maddison and the Republican party in Congress. 4. The Guillotine to all Tyrants, Plunderers, and funding Speculators. 6. The 6th of February, 1778, the day which secured liberty to Americans, and sowed its seeds in the soil of France. 11. The courageous and virtuous mountain, may it crush the moderates, the traitors, the federalists and all aristocrats, under whatever denomination they may be disguised.

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16. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity – may they pervade the Universe. Three cheers, and a salute of three guns.12 French republican religion, no less than republican politics, comes under Porcupine’s attack. Citing La Fontaine’s opinion that a man can never bend his knee too often before his God and his Mistress, Cobbett attacks that ‘outlandish Goddess of Liberty’ worshipped by the French: ‘Our Democrats have laid aside both God and Mistress, and have taken up with a strumpet of a Goddess, who receives the homage due to both.’13 Rather than looking to France, Cobbett argues, America should mend fences with Britain: Do the English publish to the world that they wish to see our Constitution subverted? Have they a Marat to mark out our beloved President and his Lady for the Guillotine? Do their Governors, Magistrates, Military Officers, &c. assemble with cannon firing, drums beating, and bells ringing to celebrate every little advantage gained over our troops by the Indians? Do they hoist the colours of our enemy, and trample our own under their feet and even burn them?14 In Cobbett’s view, it is time to bury the antipathies of the past. A Bone to Gnaw, for the Democrats went through three editions in as many months. Its popularity gives some substance to Cobbett’s boast to William Gifford in 1799: ‘It is astonishing, but not less astonishing than true, that it was I, and I alone, that re-exalted the character of Great Britain in America.’ 15 Even more popular was The Bloody Buoy, written in March 1796, subsequently translated into German, reprinted in England, and noticed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in April 1797. Cobbett’s title refers to Abbé Maury’s speech to the National Assembly: ‘You will plunge your country into an abyss of eternal detestation and infamy; and the annals of your boasted revolution will serve as a bloody buoy, warning the nations of the earth to keep aloof from the mighty ruin.’ The Gentleman’s Magazine then prints a long extract in which Cobbett challenges the claim that ‘all the crimes which have disgraced [the Revolution] are to be ascribed to the hostile operations of their enemies’, and ridicules the notion that the September massacres were simply an ill-directed security operation. As for the ‘butcheries at Lyons’, Cobbett remarks that ‘Carrier, lolling at his ease, sent the victims to death by hundreds. The blood never flowed from the guillotine in such torrents as at the very time when their armies were driving

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their enemies before them in every direction.’16 Thus Cobbett foreshadows the preoccupations of the British anti-Jacobin press, in insisting that the atrocities of the Terror were not the wartime reponse of a beleaguered republic confronted by the European confederacy of kings, but were implicit in the decrees of the Constituent Assembly: It was they that rent the Government to pieces; it was they that first broached the destructive doctrine of equality; it was they that destroyed all ideas of private property; and finally it was they that rendered the people hardened, by effacing from their minds every principle of the only religion capable of keeping mankind within the bounds of justice and humanity.17 Like Burke and the anti-Jacobin periodicals, Cobbett blamed the abstract principles of the philosophes. And (like the two Giffords) he deplored the Jacobin bias of the daily newspapers. Explaining, in his introduction to the Bloody Buoy, that his aim is ‘TO GIVE THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA a striking experimental proof of the horrible effects of anarchy and infidelity’, Cobbett attacks Bache for writing of France that ‘it would be an easy matter to apologize for all the massacres that have taken place in that country’. Cobbett admits that ‘some few prints have not dishonoured themselves’ by going to such lengths, but even these ‘have observed a timid silence, and have avoided speaking of the shocking barbarities of the French… .’ As a result, the liberty of the press has ‘been not only useless to us during this terrible convulsion of the civilized world, but has been so perverted as to lead us into errors, which had well nigh plunged us into the situation of our distracted neighbours’.18 Cobbett’s third American pamphlet, History of the American Jacobins, first appeared as an appendix to William Playfair’s History of Jacobinism. Cobbett dedicated his own pamphlet to Playfair, and the epigraph came from Burke: ‘History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her awful censure over all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget these events.’ Cobbett’s opening words were equally uncompromising: ‘When the Jacobins of Paris sent forth their missionaries of insurrection and anarchy, their professed object was to enlighten the ignorant and unchain the enslaved.’ Yet, he reminds us, ‘the newlyenlightened missionaries were dispatched to those countries alone where the greatest degree of civil liberty was already to be found’. The Jacobins are ‘a sort of flesh flies, that naturally settle on the excremental and corrupted parts of the body politic’.19 In less scabrous language,

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Cobbett ridicules the way in which American anti-Federalists allowed themselves to be cultivated by Citizen Genet, the Brissotin minister to the United States. Genet had been particularly welcomed in South Carolina: ‘In a state where sans-culottism had already made such a progress, the animating presence of the Parisian Missionary was all that could be wanted to complete the farce.’ In Charleston, ‘the French flag was seen waving from windows in this sans-culotte city, just as if it had been a sea-port of France’.20 Genet did not (says Cobbett) ‘judge it prudent’ to call the American Jacobins by the same name as those in France: ‘That would have been too glaring an imitation. Democratic was thought less offensive… .’ The first Democratic society met at Philadelphia on 3 July 1793, less than two months after Genet’s arrival in the city, ‘during which space,’ adds Cobbett, ‘it is well ascertained, more than twenty thousand Louis d’ors had been distributed’. He then prints the society’s constitution, together with their first circular letter. In terms that the English periodical press would recognize, the letter attacks the Coalition powers: The European Confederacy, transcendent in power, and unparalleled in iniquity, menaces the very existence of freedom. Already its baneful operation may be traced in the tyrannical destruction of the Constitution of Poland; and should the glorious efforts of France be eventually defeated, we have reason to presume, that, for the consummation of monarchical ambition, and the security of its establishments, this country, the only remaining depository of liberty, will not long be permitted to enjoy in peace, the honours of an independent, and the happiness of a republican government. The object of the Democratic Society was said to be ‘a constant circulation of useful information, and a liberal communication of republican sentiments’. Such was the ‘indefatigableness’ of the Democratic Clubs, claimed Cobbett, that ‘more enmity to the General Government was excited in the space of six months, than was excited against the colonial government at the time of the declaration of Independence’. French sans-culottism became the Philadelphia fashion: All the new fangled terms of the regenerated French were introduced and made use of. The word citizen, that stalking horse of modern liberty-men, became almost as common in America as in France. People, even people of sense, began to accustom themselves

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to be-citizen each other in as shameful a manner as the red-headed ruffians of the Fauxbourg St. Antoine.21 Jean Fauchet (Jacobin successor to the Girondin Genet) referred in a dispatch home to Madison le Robespierre des Etats-Unis.22 This surprising appellation was intended as a tribute to Madison’s civic virtue, and did not imply political ruthlessness. But Robespierre’s Reign of Terror did not at first diminish American admiration for their French ally. The victims of the guillotine were seen as traitors. New York’s Fourth of July celebrations in 1794 began (according to a French emigré observer) with ‘a long procession of French Jacobins, marching two by two, singing the Marseillaise and other republican songs’. Though no longer French minister to the United States, Genet took his place in the procession as Governor Clinton’s new son-in-law.23 This was less than a week before Robespierre’s fall. Barely a week after Robespierre’s death, James Monroe presented his credentials to the National Convention, together with fraternal messages from Congress. The Senate tendered to the Committee of Public Safety ‘their zealous wishes for the French Republic’ and assured the French nation that ‘the full establishment of their peace and liberty’ would be a source of happiness both for the United States and for mankind. Monroe’s own speech expressed pleasure that ‘France, our ally and our friend and who aided us in the contest, has now embarked in the same noble career’. He added that ‘whilst the fortitude, magnanimity and heroic valor of the troops command the admiration and applause of the astonished world, the wisdom and firmness of her councils unite equally in securing the happiest results’. The President of the Convention responded by announcing that the letters of credence, Monroe’s speech and the fraternal messages would be ‘printed in the two languages, French and American’. He added: ‘The flags of the United States of America shall be joined with those of France, and displayed in the hall of the sittings of the Convention in sign of the union and eternal fraternity of the two people.’24 The US government may have intended these courtesies as a diplomatic smokescreen to buy time while John Jay was sent to London to negotiate an Anglo-American trade treaty. The unpopularity of the Jay mission with much of the American public was noisily exploited by the Democratic and Republican societies, and by Jefferson’s Republican press. The new French minister, Pierre Auguste Adet (who had in turn succeeded Fauchet) managed to leak part of the Jay Treaty while it was

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still being secretly debated by the Senate. As he reported to his masters in Paris: I managed to transmit an extract from the Treaty to Franklin’s grandson without his being able to suspect it came from me. He printed it in his sheet and on the following day it appeared in the other papers. Its publication has produced the effect I expected.25 Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, was editor not only of L’Aurore Journal Patriote, but of the Philadelphia General Advertiser and Aurora, the main Republican Party journal. Cobbett considered that there was nothing to choose between ‘the Democratic news-printers in the United States of America’ and the ‘versatile mob of Paris, who first canonized Mirabeau and Voltaire, and afterward scattered their remains to the winds’, and who, having given Marat a place in the Pantheon and his name to a city, ‘dug him up, put his ashes into a chamber-pot by way of urn, and then threw him into the common sewer’. Cobbett’s footnote makes clear which editor he has in mind: ‘At the head of these we venture to place Benjamin Franklin Bache, a grandson (whether in a straight or crooked line, I know not) of Old Doctor Franklin …’.26 Adet was pleased with his coup. When the Senate’s approval of all but one article of the Jay Treaty provoked hostile demonstrations, the French minister reported delightedly to Paris: ‘The People is far from having, concerning the Treaty between the United States and England, the same opinion as that of the Senate’. He went on to describe how Jay was burned in effigy, holding scales in his right hand: ‘On the lighter scale was written Liberty and Independence of America: the heavier scale read England’s Gold …’.27 Washington, angry at misrepresentation of the treaty, wrote to Hamilton that ‘the string which is most played on, because it strikes with most force the popular ear, is the violation, as they term it, of our engagements with France’.28 Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, was well placed to put pressure on newspaper editors – as Secretary of State Jefferson had learned in 1790. Hamilton’s view of the French Revolution was Burkean. The Anti-Jacobin quoted with approval what Hamilton had written in 1796: ‘The spirit of Jacobinism, if not entirely a new spirit, has, at least, been clothed with a more gigantic body, and armed with more powerful weapons than it ever had before.’29 He had earlier written to Lafayette: ‘I dread the reveries of your philosophic politicians who appear in the moment to have great influence and who being mere speculatists may aim at more refinement than suits either

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with human nature or the composition of your Nation.’30 Jefferson had written in more flattering terms to Lafayette, and (when he was no longer Secretary of State) wrote effusively to Adet. But in 1790, Hamilton detached the Gazette of the United States from Jefferson’s camp by offering its editor valuable government advertisements. 31 Jefferson now had to rely on Bache, and on Freneau’s National Gazette, the first number of which appeared on 31 October 1791. Jefferson had prudently appointed Freneau clerk-translator in the Department of State. By the summer of 1792, Freneau’s Gazette was in full cry after Hamilton, who retaliated in the columns of the Gazette of the United States: ‘Is it possible that Mr Jefferson, the head of a principal department of Government can be the patron of a Paper, the evident object of which is to decry the Government and its measures?’32 Jefferson admitted to Washington that he had supplied Freneau with copies of the pro-French Gazette de Leide, but protested that he did not attempt to influence Freneau’s paper, nor did he ‘directly or indirectly, write, dictate or procure any one sentence or sentiment to be inserted in his or any other gazette to which my name was not affixed or that of my office’. This was surely to protest too much. Not even Julian Boyd, the sympathetic editor of Jefferson’s papers, can quite believe the disclaimer. Just before the first issue of Freneau’s Gazette appeared, William Short sent Jefferson a number of French journals to show how far the Paris press went in appealing to popular prejudice. Short’s view was that ‘at any other period, such publications would be disgusting and unworthy of being read’. Yet Freneau had no inhibitions about reprinting such reports, including one from L’Argus Patriote which claimed that freedom of the press, though stifled in England had been revived in France.33 In September 1795, the Analytical Review carried a three-page notice of David Ramsay’s Independence Day oration at Charleston. The reviewer devotes most of his space to Ramsay’s own words extolling the fruits of independence, among them press freedom: The liberty of the press is enjoyed in these states, in a manner that is unknown in other countries. EACH CITIZEN THINKS WHAT HE PLEASES, AND SPEAKS AND WRITES WHAT HE THINKS. Pardon me, illustrious Washington! that I have inwardly rejoiced on seeing thy much-respected name abused in our newspapers. Slanders against thy adamantine character are as harmless as pointless arrows shot from broken bows; but they prove that our printing presses are free.34

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Admittedly the first amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1791, gives a guarantee against ‘abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’. The space accorded by the Analytical to Ramsay’s celebration of American liberties was probably not unconnected with the Pitt ministry’s decision in 1794 to suspend habeas corpus. But in September 1795 the Analytical reviewer could not know that the ‘Gagging Acts’ would soon be on the statute book.35 When Cobbett returned to England in 1800, he was invited to dine with the Burkean Whig, William Windham, now a junior minister at the War Office. Among the other guests were Pitt, Canning and the future Lord Liverpool. Cobbett was surprised by Pitt’s politeness, since (we are told) ‘Mr Pitt never admitted newspaper writers to such an honour.’ Pitt evidently hoped that Cobbett’s journalistic talents might be harnessed to a government newspaper, the True Briton. Cobbett preferred to start his own daily paper, drawing on his American experience, and The Porcupine appeared in October 1800. Its stated objective was to ‘check the spirit and oppose the progress of levelling innovation, whether proceeding from clubs of Jacobins, companies of traders, synagogues of saints or boards of governments’. The Porcupine ran for just over a year, but at a time of peace negotiations, was too antiFrench even for English tastes. In January 1802 Cobbett resorted instead to a weekly newspaper – the Weekly Political Register, which was to run for 30 years.36 Its continuing success would vindicate Cobbett’s promise to Windham that ‘he who makes the best use of the press will finally triumph’.37 The Gentleman’s Magazine for September 1798 noticed the English edition of Cobbett’s Horrors of the French Revolution. The review incorporates Cobbett’s censure of pro-revolutionary periodicals in America: There are few actions of the French Revolution but have not been palliated and excused in our public papers, and many of them in our public assemblies. Anarchy has its open advocates! How many numerous companies have issued under the form of toasts, sentiments offensive to humanity, and disgraceful to our national character? If drunken men, as is usually the case, speak from the bottom of their hearts, what quarter should we have to expect from wretches like these? Cobbett is censuring the American press, but the analogy with British ‘Jacobins’ hardly needs his officious footnote to the English edition: ‘It

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is a truth that no one will deny, that the Opposition papers of this country have become its scourge. I speak with a few exceptions. It is said they enlighten the people; but their light is like the torch of the incendiary.’38 The same issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine reviewed Cobbett’s Republican Judge. The reviewer commented: ‘What liberty the press enjoys in France, where printers are transported by dozens, we all know; and we can believe that other republicks are ripe to admit the same dangerous principle, if some Porcupine did not stand in their way.’ 39 It is small wonder that the first issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review gave Cobbett so much prominence. Yet ironically it was a later suspension of habeas corpus, this time by Lord Liverpool’s postwar government in 1817, that convinced Cobbett it was time to return to America. But the farm he bought there accidentally burned down, and he came back to England in 1819, bringing with him the bones of Tom Paine – whom he had earlier reviled so vehemently. 40 Cobbett was no longer the scourge of the ‘Jacobins’. Instead he attacked the British government’s repressive policies as vigorously as the Coleridge circle had attacked Pitt’s repression of the 1790s. The new nineteenth-century Cobbett did not share Castlereagh’s Burkean belief that Jacobin principles remained a threat even in peacetime.41

16 Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins

The underlying theme of the preceding chapters is that anti-Jacobin propaganda of the 1790s has coloured modern perceptions of what Cobban called ‘the Debate on the French Revolution’. Robert Birley, writing in the 1920s, admittedly claimed that ‘it is the custom now to consider Pitt too exclusively a reactionary’. Birley was inclined to sympathize with Pittite policies, remarking that ‘a time when men searched in Holcroft’s plays for sedition was not a time for change’. 1 And E.P. Thompson’s insistence on the revolutionary potential of the political societies has unintentionally validated government repression and anti-Jacobin smear campaigns.2 More recent studies of the period have demonstrated in detail that the conservatives won the contemporary debate, while literary critics still sneer at the youthful political idealism (and subsequent ‘apostasy’) of the Romantic poets. 3 Yet we recall that Cobbett, hammer of the American ‘Jacobins’ in the 1790s, and darling of the Anti-Jacobin Review, recanted his anti-Jacobinism on returning to England.4 By the time Cobbett wrote Rural Rides in the 1820s, he chose to ridicule the scale of defensive measures taken against the French. Describing a visit to Dover, where he inspected a hill honeycombed with ‘line upon line, trench upon trench, cavern upon cavern, bombproof upon bomb-proof’, Cobbett has no doubt about the Pitt ministry’s true objectives: What they wanted, was to prevent the landing, not of Frenchmen, but of French principles; that is to say, to prevent the example of France from being alluring to the people of England. The devil a bit did they care for the Bourbons. … They wanted to keep out of

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England those principles which had a natural tendency to destroy borough-mongering, and put an end to peculation and plunder.5 Cobbett was writing a decade after the restoration of the Bourbons, whom Burke’s crusade had sought to reinstate. Brougham, while praising Burke’s ‘finest fancy’, his ‘rarest knowledge’ and his ‘cautious and calculating habit of mind’, thought he would have ranged himself with Charles X and the ‘Ultras’. Brougham wrote acidly: [Burke] insisted on an invasion, for the avowed purpose of restoring monarchy, and punishing its enemies; he required the advance guard of the attacking army to be composed of the bands of French gentlemen, emigrants, and to be accompanied by the exiled priests; and, in order to make the movement more popular, they were to be preceded by the proclamation of solemn leagues among the allies never to treat with a republic that had slain its king, and formal announcements that they entered the country to punish as well as to restore.6 John Gifford, editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Pitt’s first serious biographer, took a predictably different view of Burke’s sagacity: He had reviewed the recent transactions in France, not only through a statesman’s glass, but with a prophetic eye … he perceived that the principles and the actions of the Gallic reformers were neither meant to be, nor in their nature could be, limited to the country which gave them birth; but that they were calculated for all nations, and for all ages, to eradicate every thing that was settled, every thing that was good, every thing that was worthy of preservation, and to substitute in their place every thing that was infamous, impious and unholy.7 Burke had argued (wrote Gifford) that ‘at a time when open and avowed attempts were made to circulate pamphlets, and to disseminate doctrines subversive of the prerogative … it was unwarrantable for any good subject to be, day after day, holding out a parade of democracy, in order to set the unthinking many raging against the Crown’. By contrast, Fox asserted ‘that the constitution was more liable to be ruined by an increase in the power of the Crown, than by an increase in the power of the people’.8

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It is easy to be misled into thinking that, although attempts to extend the franchise were effectively blocked, the campaign for ‘economical reform’ – to reduce the number of places of profit under the crown – had succeeded. Yet Fox and his followers claimed that crown patronage was daily increasing, and feared that the war offered many new patronage opportunities for the executive. Thus the Courier for 8 January 1798 lists those members of parliament who had supported Pitt’s Assessed Taxes Bill, adding the editorial comment: The harassed, the oppressed, the ruined, the insulted People of England, will also find enumerated in this black catalogue, the Places, the Pensions, and the Sinecures, which are in possession of men that thus receive, as it were, pay for supporting those Ministers who, in the language of Mr Fox, have added more to the Burthens, and taken away more from the Liberties of the People, than any preceding Administration in this Country. During the general election of 1796, Fox had castigated the Pitt ministry as a government which ‘has destroyed more human beings in its foreign wars than Louis the Fourteenth; and attempted the lives of more innocent men at home, than Henry the Eighth’.9 Fox’s stance is too easily seen as a yearning for the spoils of office, or as exemplifying the duty of a parliamentary opposition to oppose. Gifford would describe the Foxites as ever anxious to display what they are pleased to term a constitutional jealousy, and an earnest desire to promote the public welfare, but what their opponents considered as the effect of disappointed ambition, an effusion of political spleen, and an unworthy attempt to acquire popularity at the expense of the best interests of the country.10 Was Fox insincere (or naive) in believing that the France of 1790 could be the ally, rather than the inveterate enemy of Britain? In October 1791, the Aix branch of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution (the Jacobins) circulated Hyacinthe Morel’s Adresse aux Nations, in which he declared: ‘Nothing would be more worthy of France than to seize the initiative in this project, to invoke peace with the same ardour with which others seek war. Let us instruct peoples! … Appeal to them as brothers. … Let us renounce war!’11 Yet that summer Leopold II and Frederick William II had signed the preliminaries of an

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alliance. Leopold intended to exert diplomatic pressure rather than provoke war, but rumours circulated that a large emigré army was about to march on Paris, and that Austrian troops would march with it. This was the background to Brissot’s maiden speech in the Legislative Assembly calling for a pre-emptive strike. By the end of November, the Electors of Mainz and Trier were given two weeks in which to disperse the emigré armies or face war. As Isnard famously declared in support of the ultimatum: ‘Let us tell Europe that if the cabinets engage kings in a war against peoples, we will incite the people to combat kings.’ Of 154 provincial Jacobin clubs known to have expressed their views, 141 wanted an offensive war. The news of the declaration of war was greeted with bonfires and Te Deums, while the correspondence committee of the Paris Jacobins wrote to the Le Mans club: ‘Your wishes are fulfilled. War is declared. The Society of Friends of the Constitution of Paris was divided in its opinion on this subject; but like you, nearly all of the societies of the kingdom have indicated their wish for it.’12 Yet the hostility of the Jacobin clubs was not directed against Britain. A week before the French declaration of war against Austria, Thomas Cooper and James Watt presented a fraternal address from the Manchester Constitutional Society to the Jacobin Club of Paris, and joined in a procession to the Champs de Mars. In their response to the Manchester address, the Paris club envisaged ‘the English and the French, re-united for ever by the ties of justice, humanity and the most brotherly affection’, and reported that the British flag, ‘united and entwined with the three-coloured flag of France and the thirteen stripes of the brave Americans, is suspended from the roofs of almost every patriotic society in France’. 13 Hearing of the Paris Jacobins’ decision to install the flags of the ‘three free peoples of the universe’ in their assembly hall, the provincial clubs followed suit, in some cases adding the Polish flag as well. 14 By September 1791, no less than 50 French clubs were corresponding with the London Revolution Society.15 In January 1792, the Montauban club called for a ‘sacred alliance’ of Britain and France as a ‘prelude to the confederation of the human race’, and suggested a meeting between club representatives and the Whigs. At least seven French societies announced their support for the Montauban plan. 16 And when the newly elected Convention decreed the holding of civic festivals to celebrate French military successes, the festivities at Annonay included a procession in which three young girls carried the flags of France, Britain and the United States, representing ‘the nations which had cast off the yoke of tyranny’.17

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In February 1793, with England and France at war, the French Jacobin societies, though taking down the Union Jack, were often reluctant to discard it. The Libourne club proclaimed: ‘English! Out of respect for the rights of man, your flag will remain folded up in our hall until the time when your actions show that it again warrants placement next to ours. If you prove, after all, to be slaves of royalism, we will deliver it to the flames.’ 18 How seriously can we take the evidence of such fraternal crosschannel rhetoric? The French clubs seem to have accepted at face value the sentiments expressed by the London Revolution Society and the Manchester Constitutional Society, failing to realize that Priestley, Price and Cooper did not speak for England. Thus in January 1792 the belligerent Brissot was advocating an alliance with Britain, and did not think it would be difficult to achieve. Condorcet thought there was now ‘a community of interest’ between two free peoples.19 And on 1 May Louis XVI himself wrote to George III (poignantly, as it now seems): ‘I thank you for not having become a party to the concert formed by certain powers against France’. 20 And even at the end of October, Lebrun was still hoping for an alliance with England. He was evidently out of touch with the British political scene, as he expected ‘an insurrection, if not on a national then at least on a partial scale, including all the towns surrounding the capital’.21 Yet if we insist on separating Jacobin rhetoric from diplomatic reality when assessing the possibility of continued British neutrality, then we should discount anti-Jacobin rhetoric too. The fact is that, in the 1790s, rhetoric shaped events. It was the peroration of Price’s famous sermon that first implied a link between the French societies and the English reform movement, and led Condorcet to call Price ‘one of the formative minds of the century’. 22 It was Price’s rhetoric which provoked the vehement retaliatory rhetoric of Burke, which in turn had an impact in France as well as Britain. The French societies were outraged by the treatment of Priestley in the Birmingham riot of 1791, and wrote to the Revolution Society denouncing Burke and the Pitt ministry. On 4 November 1790, the first anniversary of his Old Jewry sermon, Price had presided at the Society’s dinner, where a toast was proposed: ‘If Mr Burke be ever prosecuted for such a libel on the constitution, may his impeachment last as long as that of Mr Hastings’. Carl Cone, historian of the English Jacobins, comments: In the light of the circumstances of November 1790, it may be asked whether [Burke’s Reflections] was as necessary or the dangers as great as he thought when he began writing it nine months earlier. If he

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had not written it, the reform movement might have died for want of attention, both from its adherents and from opponents. The movement thrived on controversy; it could not survive indifference.23 Not for the last time in the Revolution, rhetoric helped to provoke the event it seemed to predict. The Declaration of Pillnitz, issued by Leopold and Frederick William in August 1791, pledging themselves to intervene if the other powers would cooperate, was rhetorical bluff. Yet Leopold believed that the Declaration had opened up the internal divisions in the French government, when moderate members seceded from the Jacobin Club to the Feuillants. The Emperor had misread the situation, but, since rhetorical threats seemed to have worked once, the Austrians were encouraged to repeat their sabre-rattling. When France demanded the dispersal of the emigré forces in Trier, Kaunitz brusquely warned that any French invasion would mean not only war with the Emperor, but also with ‘the other sovereigns who have united in a concert for the maintenance of public order and for the security and honour of monarchs’. The threat gave substance to Brissot’s talk of a Koblenz conspiracy at the emigré court.24 Similarly the Brunswick Manifesto led to the fall of the monarchy (which it had been intended to prevent) and provoked the Edict of Fraternity. 25 And the Edict itself was, in Sorel’s words, ‘nothing more than a pompous parliamentary incident; beyond the frontier it was a dead letter’.26 However much the Edict of Fraternity seemed to corroborate Burke’s belief in the missionary zeal of Jacobinism, it was nevertheless French designs on the Netherlands that led Pitt and Grenville to abandon their jealously guarded neutrality.27 Viewed against the background of the Anglo-French wars of the century, hostilities must have seemed the inevitable response – a judgement historians tend to endorse. 28 Yet from the perspective of the mid-1790s, let alone after two centuries, it is hard not to sympathize with those who thought that war could and should have been avoided. As an opponent of Burke argued in 1796, France had ‘held out to us the right hand of friendship, yet unpolluted with blood, and looked with anxious eye for the encouragement, the countenance and the alliance of England’. 29 The British, like Russia, Prussia and Austria, may have gone to war for such old-style strategic reasons as denying France control of the Channel ports, obstructing her expansion to the Rhine, and pursuing their own territorial or commercial ambitions. But the ideological rhetoric of Burke, of the

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Emperor and of the French Jacobin clubs helped to turn a war for limited objectives into an ideological crusade.30 The public response owed more to longstanding animosities towards the French than to ideological considerations. Ministers were admittedly surprised by the widespread loyalist response evoked by the royal proclamation against seditious literature in May 1792. The government was quick to exploit the unexpected tide of support for church and king, whether or not ministers actually sponsored John Reeves’s initiative in launching the Loyal Association. Following the establishment in November 1792 of branches of the Association throughout London, there were soon some 2000 branches nationwide. At the trial for sedition of a Shoreditch pumpmaker, Felix Vaughan for the defence claimed that the Association provided a network of informers in the metropolis: not even words ‘spoken by any of you in a butcher’s shop’ were beyond their notice. 31 The fear of sedition now seems exaggerated. Yet when that same November the government heard of plans to plant a Tree of Liberty at Kennington, they marched troops of the 15th Dragoons from Maidenhead to camp on the common. And early in 1793, Pitt gave as his reason for building barracks in various towns that ‘a spirit had appeared in some of the manufacturing towns which made it necessary that troops should be kept near them’. 32 The Lords Committee of Secrecy, like its Commons counterpart, could not believe that the London Corresponding Society could flourish without leadership from men of ‘superior education and more cultivated talents’, and mistakenly assumed that the society was ‘planned and directed by leading members of the Society for Constitutional Information’.33 The Commons Committee of Secrecy decided, in its second report, that ‘a traitorous conspiracy hath been formed’, that the proposed parliamentary reforms would be a ‘total subversion of the constitution’, that the English and French societies were closely connected, and that firelocks and pikes were being gathered, though the number so far found was ‘inconsiderable’. 34 These conclusions were unsurprising since the committee included: Pitt, Dundas, Windham and Burke, the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General, the Lord Advocate, the future Lord Liverpool and Charles Townshend of the Loyal Association.35 The Courier printed the report over 17 days and a total of 48 columns, between 16 June and 8 July 1794. When Pitt defended the suspension of habeas corpus until 1 February 1795, he explained: ‘Who was there that knew what Jacobins and Jacobin principles were, but must see, in the pretences of reform in parliament held out by these societies, the arrogant claims of the same class of men as those who lorded it in

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France…?’ Whether Pitt believed his own rhetoric is not altogether clear, but the session ended with George III confidently welcoming the prospect ‘of speedily and effectually repressing every attempt to disturb the public peace, and of defeating the wicked designs which have been in agitation’.36 The next session would see the introduction of the ‘Gagging Bills’. Loyalty to King and Constitution was naturally fostered by the Established Church. The polemical balance tips dramatically in favour of the Burkean analysis, if the reams of published sermons in support of the status quo are added to the scale.37 Jonathan Clark has emphasized the extent to which Burke’s own arguments were set in ‘the broad and sophisticated tradition of Anglican theology’, and sees Burke’s achievement as having given ‘eloquent but unoriginal expression to a theoretical position largely devised by Anglican churchmen’. 38 Burke had opposed relieving the civil disabilities of Dissenters as early as 1772, when he saw no reason why Dissenters should ‘receive the emoluments appropriated for teaching one set of doctrines, whilst they are teaching another’.39 And the true enemy, lurking behind the Dissenters, was Jacobinical atheism: If ever the Church and constitution of England shall fall in these islands, (and they will fall together), it is not Presbyterian discipline nor Popish hierarchy that will rise upon their ruins. It will not be the Church of Rome nor the Church of Scotland, nor the Church of Luther nor the Church of Calvin. On the contrary, all these churches are menaced, and menaced alike. It is the new fanatical religion, now in the heat of its first ferment, of the Rights of man … which will destroy your distinctions, and which will put all your properties to auction, and disperse you over the earth.40 The Anglican British Critic was as vital a weapon as the Anti-Jacobin Review in the government’s propaganda armoury.41 Operating at a different level in the defence of the political and ecclesiastical establishment was the Evangelical Anglican, Hannah More. In her Village Politics, specifically addressed to ‘mechanics, journeymen and labourers’, Tom Hod convinces Jack Anvil that a democrat is ‘one who likes to be governed by a thousand tyrants, and yet can’t bear a king’, that equality is ‘for every man to pull down every one that is above him’, that the rights of men are ‘battle, murder and sudden death’, and that the new patriot is ‘a man who loves every country better than his own, and France best of all’. It reads like a prospectus

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for the Anti-Jacobin Review.42 The monthly circulation of the AntiJacobin was 2500, while More’s Village Politics and her other ‘Cheap Repository Tracts’ had together sold two million copies by 1795. Compared with such sensational statistics, and the number and frequency of pro-Establishment sermons from pulpits and publishers, the circulation figures of the Dissenting literary reviews at first seem insignificant. By the end of the 1790s, the Monthly, Critical and Analytical sold a combined monthly total of 10 000 copies.43 Yet these figures compare favourably with those of the most famous literary journals of the early 1800s. As Derek Roper reminds us: Much larger figures were to be achieved by the Edinburgh and Quarterly, but not for many years: in 1803 sales figures for the Edinburgh, then reckoned a dazzling success, were around 2000, and in January 1805 its initial printing was still only 4000 copies. Even the Analytical, which by 1797 was doing relatively badly, had a sale nearly equal to that of the London Magazine of Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey in the greatly expanded market of 1821–25.44 In the late 1820s it was calculated that on average every London newspaper was read by 30 people, and Aspinall records that in 1793 the London Corresponding Society kept coffeehouses and taverns in Edinburgh supplied with copies of the Courier. 45 Edinburgh University Library carried copies of the Monthly, Critical and Analytical, while the university libraries of Glasgow, St Andrews and Cambridge all took the Monthly and Analytical. Roper also gives details of provincial subscription libraries, including Bristol which took (and still has) the Analytical, Monthly, Critical and Monthly Mirror, as well as the British Critic and Anti-Jacobin Review. 46 In 1798 the Anti-Jacobin remarked that in book clubs ‘few publications are purchased until the lords paramount of literature, the Reviewers, have fixed on them the seal of approbation’.47 Writing his Regicide Peace (1796) shortly before his death, Burke calculated the size of the British public: In England and Scotland, I compute that those of adult age, not declining in life, of tolerable leisure for [political] discussions, and some means of information, more or less, and who are above menial dependence … may amount to about four hundred thousand. … This is the British public; and it is a public very numerous.

Figure 16.1

Thomas Rowlandson, A Charm for a Democracy, Reviewed, Analysed & Destroyed

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Of the 400 000, Burke reckons that one-fifth are ‘pure Jacobins; utterly and incapable of amendment’ – hence his opponents’ references to ‘80,000 Jacobins’.48 In 1796 a Jacobin was (for Burke) anyone who opposed the war with France, which he argued they saw as an obstacle to their political programme. Writing in that year, Thelwall accepted the label ‘Jacobin’ because ‘it is fixed upon us, as a stigma, by our enemies’.49 Thelwall stood for those who disagreed with Burke, whom he called the ‘grey-headed procurator of proscription and blood’. Thelwall called for freedom of expression so that ‘the opinions, not of a tenth part, but of the whole nation can be freely delivered and distinctly heard’. He wanted equal rights for all, ‘not in equality of distribution; but in equal opportunities of benefiting from the things distributed’. The only crime of the ‘Jacobin’ is that ‘he looks forward to a state of society more extensive in its refinements than any which has yet been known’.50 By October 1798, when the Anti-Jacobin Review was newly established, the Monthly Magazine wanted to insist on a strict definition, tied more closely to its French context. Thus the essence of Jacobinism ‘according to its true signification’ was: To hold that a majority may lawfully be governed by a minority upon the pretext of the public good. To pay no regard to the will of the nation, as declared by those who have been fairly delegated for the purpose. To scruple no means, however base or violent to compass a political end. To consider absolute anarchy, and the destruction of all natural and civil rights as a cheap purchase for speculative improvements in a constitution. On the other hand, the Monthly Magazine continues, ‘it is not Jacobinism to maintain – That government was instituted for the good of the many, not the emolument of the few’. Readers are reminded: ‘It has at all times been so common an artifice of party to stigmatize its adversaries by some opprobrious name, that particular examples of the fact may be deemed unworthy of notice.’51 It is ironic that the Anti-Jacobin Review, with its unbridled invective and immunity from prosecution, should have been launched at the very moment when government censorship had stilled domestic demands for reform, achieving what Sheridan later called the silence of the gagged: ‘You have gagged the people, and bound them hand and

Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins 215

foot; and then you say, look how quiet they are.’ 52 European events were already compounding the effects of government repression: Bonaparte’s Italian successes, the French invasion of Switzerland and attempts to invade Ireland, together with growing fears of a French landing on the English coast, all made for more muted opposition. Yet the success of Erskine’s Causes and Consequences of the Present War (1797) showed that opposition was muted rather than silenced. The pamphlet sold nine editions in its first week, and 48 editions in all. The Critical Review sagely remarked: ‘To wage war against opinion, is of all things the most absurd, unless you can by some means in your own country check every species of discussion.’ 53 The Analytical’s reviewer agreed with Erskine that Englishmen ‘once proverbially watchful and jealous of their government’ were now ‘as supine and indifferent to the measures of administration and to public events in general, of whatever magnitude and importance’. And endorsing Erskine’s charge that Pitt’s over-reaction, rather than the French Revolution itself, was responsible for destroying the movement for constitutional reform, the Analytical quotes Erskine’s appraisal of ministers’ conspiracy theories: The spirit which became prevalent about this time, which bore down everything before it, and prepared the nation for war, was an absolute horror of every thing connected with France, and even for liberty itself, because France avowed to be contending for it. It confounded the casual intemperance of an enlarged and warm zeal for the freedom and happiness of mankind with a tendency to universal anarchy…54 Concluding its own notice of the same pamphlet, the Monthly Review commended the civility with which Erskine treated Burke: ‘If men illustrious for their talents were always to treat each other with such candour and generosity, they would better consult the common interest which they have in preserving, unimpaired, the veneration of mankind for splendid accomplishments and extraordinary endowments.’55 Was this a veiled thrust at Erskine’s illustrious opponent? Burke’s vituperative tone was perpetuated in the pages of the AntiJacobin. Most of the journal’s early articles were written by Bisset, the eulogistic biographer of Burke, and by Gifford, the eulogistic biographer of Pitt.56 Erskine became Lord Chancellor, Gifford a London police magistrate and permanent secretary to the Pitt Club. With the exception of Burke, Canning, Hannah More and the Anglican bishops Horsley and Watson, the names of Pittite propagandists are forgotten

216 British Periodical Press and the French Revolution

by posterity, while the writers whose names have worn best were all critics of the ministry and opponents of the war. And although the anti-Jacobins did not have a monopoly in invective, their tone is notably more strident than that of their ‘Jacobin’ counterparts. At the very least, we can perhaps admit that the polarization of the debate by Burkean propaganda has misleadingly obscured a variety of rhetorical nuances, and the existence of an albeit shifting middle ground.57 Pitt’s deputy and successor, Addington, who as Viscount Sidmouth would be Home Secretary in Lord Liverpool’s administration, may have made peace with France in 1802, but he shared the assumptions of Pitt and Burke, and had been one of Burke’s pallbearers. Addington’s biographer writes: France stood for revolution, murder, anarchy. The English reformers supported the cause of France. Therefore reform in England must lead to revolution, murder and anarchy. To Addington’s eyes the syllogism was demonstrably true. Nothing was ever to shake his belief or to convince him that Robespierre and the Radicals were but a step apart. It was this case of mistaken identity, based upon the abnormal circumstances of the 1790s, which distorted the judgment of a generation of politicians and exaggerated the miseries of the post-war years.58 And if we dislike the notion of mistaken identity we can appeal to the delphic pronouncement of the Annual Register for 1796, published in 1800: The spirit of innovation, imported into this country from France, became strong, rampant and daring. The established order of affairs was boldly threatened. … In such circumstances, the British government deemed it necessary to take strong measures of prevention. On the conduct of the administration the nation was divided, according as they were, more or less, forcibly struck with the dangers to be apprehended from popular encroachments on the one hand, or those of the executive government on the other. The apprehensions of both parties were abundantly justified by experience.59

Appendix: Burke’s Jacobins Listed below in alphabetical order are the authors and titles of publications that I have identified as being specifically directed against Burke’s writings and speeches on the Revolution. Where short titles only are given, full bibliographical details will be found (as indicated) in the chapter notes. Full titles are given for publications not individually noticed in the text. Also given are references to the Analytical Review (AR), Critical Review (CR), Gentleman’s Magazine (GM) and Monthly Review (MR). I have not included pamphlets defending Burke’s critics such as Paine and Priestley. Not all those who opposed Burke supported Paine and Priestley; not all those who opposed Paine and Priestley supported Burke. A comparable (though not identical) list appears as an appendix to James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics.

Reflections and parliamentary speeches An Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude (AR Aug. 1793), (MR Oct. 1793). An Address to the National Assembly of France; containing Strictures on Mr Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (AR Dec. 1790), (MR Jan. 1791). [Belsham, William] Historic Memoir on the French Revolution: to which are added Strictures on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (MR July 1791). Boothby, Sir Brooke, A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (AR Feb. 1791), (MR May 1791). Bousfield, Benjamin, Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Pamphlet on the Subject of the French Revolution (AR Mar. 1791), (MR May 1791). Butler, John, Brief Reflexions upon the Liberty of the British Subject; in an Address to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke. Occasioned by his late Publication on the Revolution in France (AR Mar. 1791), (CR Feb. 1791). Christie, Thomas, Letters on the Revolution in France (AR June 1791), (MR Aug. 1791). See Ch. 2, note 20. The Confederacy of Kings against the Freedom of the World … In Three Letters, addressed to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (MR Oct. 1792). Cooper, Thomas, A Reply to Mr Burke’s invective in the House of Commons (AR Apr. 1793). See Ch. 16, note 13. [Courtenay, John] A Poetical and Philosophical Essay on the French Revolution Addressed to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (CR Mar. 1793), (MR Mar. 1793). Depont, M. Answer to the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (MR June 1791). Fox, William, A Defence of the Political and Parliamentary Conduct of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke [ironical title] (MR Sep. 1794). Graham, Catharine Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections (AR Dec. 1790), (GM Dec. 1790), (MR Jan. 1791). See Ch. 2, note 13. An Heroic Epistle to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (AR Aug. 1791), (CR Sep. 1791). 217

218 Appendix: Burke’s Jacobins A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly containing … Strictures on the political doctrines of Mr Burke and Mr Paine; and a View of the Progress of the British Constitution (MR Dec. 1791). A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke Esq. from a Dissenting Country Attorney in Defence of his Civil Profession and Religious Dissent (MR June 1791). Lettre d’un Citoyen François à Edmund Burke (CR July 1791). Lofft, Capel, Remarks on the Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, concerning the Revolution in France (CR Dec. 1790), (MR Mar. 1791). Mackintosh, James, Vindiciae Gallicae (AR July 1791), (CR July, Aug. 1791), (MR June 1791). See Ch. 2, note 37. Observations on the Rev. Dr Hurd’s (now Lord Bishop of Worcester) Two Dialogues, on the Constitution of the English Government. Addressed in a Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (CR June 1791). Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man Part I (AR Mar. 1791), (CR Mar. 1791), (MR May 1791), GM Aug. 1791. See Ch. 2, notes 25, 26, 27. Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man Part II (AR Mar. 1792), (CR Mar. 1792), (MR Mar. 1792). Parallel between the Conduct of Mr Burke and that of Mr Fox in their late Parliamentary Contest, in a Letter to the former (MR Sep. 1791). Pigott, Charles, Strictures on the New Political Tenets of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, illustrated by Analogy between his different Sentiments on the American and French Revolutions (MR Jan. 1792). Priestley, Joseph, Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France &c (AR Jan. 1791), (CR Jan. 1791), (MR Apr. 1791). See Ch. 2, note 31. [Rous, George] Thoughts on Government; occasioned by Mr Burke’s Reflections, &c (MR Feb. 1791). [Scott, John] A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in Reply to his Reflections on the Revolution in France. By a member of the Revolution Society (AR Dec. 1790), (MR Jan. 1791). Scott, John, A Letter from Major Scott to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (MR Jan. 1792). A short Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on his strange Conduct in the House of Commons on Friday May 6th … (MR July 1791). Short Observations on Reflections (AR Dec. 1790), (MR Jan. 1791). See Ch. 2, note 12. Stanhope, Lord, A Letter from Earl Stanhope to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (CR Apr. 1790), (MR Apr. 1790). See Ch. 3, note 9. Stone, Francis, An Examination of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, interspersed with Hints of Improvement of the New Constitution of the French (MR Feb. 1792). Strictures on the Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France, 173 pp. (CR Mar. 1791), (MR July 1791). Strictures on the Letter of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, and Remarks on certain Occurrences that took place in the last Session of Parliament relative to that Event 59 pp. (AR Jan. 1791), (CR Feb. 1791), (MR Apr. 1791). Temperate Comments on intemperate Reflections, or a Review of Mr Burke’s Letter (AR Jan. 1791), (CR Jan. 1791), (MR Apr. 1791).

Appendix: Burke’s Jacobins 219 Towers, Joseph, Thoughts on the Commencement of a new Parliament (AR Dec. 1790), (MR Feb. 1791). See Ch. 2, note 14. Cf. Ch. 12, note 37. Translation of a Letter from Mr de Tracy, Member of the French National Assembly, to Mr Burke, in Answer to his Remarks in the House of Commons on the French Revolution (AR Jan. 1791), (MR Sep. 1790). A Vindication of the Revolution Society against the Calumnies of Mr Burke (MR May 1792). [Williams, David] Lessons to a Young Prince, on the present Disposition in Europe to a general Revolution (CR Feb. 1791), (MR Jan, Mar., 1791). Wollstonecraft, Mary, Vindication of the Rights of Men (AR Dec. 1790), (GM Feb. 1791), (MR Jan. 1791). See Ch. 2, note 16. Woolsey, Robert, Reflections upon Reflections … in two Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in Answer to his Pamphlet (AR Jan. 1791), (CR Jan. 1791), (MR Apr. 1791).

An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs and Regicide Peace Another Coruscation of the Meteor Burke (CR Jan. 1797), (MR Dec. 1796). See Ch. 6, note 11. Belsham, William, Examination of an Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs; to which is prefixed an Introduction, containing Remarks on Mr Burke’s Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (MR Aug. 1792). Boothby, Sir Brooke, Observations on the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs; and on Mr Paine’s Rights of Man (MR Aug. 1792). Dinmore, Richard, An Exposition of the Principles of the English Jacobins (AR Jan. 1797). See Ch. 16, note 48. Erskine, Thomas, Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France (AR Mar. 1797), (CR Feb. 1797), (MR Feb. 1797). See Ch. 11, note 45, Ch. 16, note 53. Neal, George, A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in Answer to a Letter respecting the Duke of Bedford and Lord Lauderdale; to which is appended some Anticipation of Mr Burke’s Thoughts on a Regicide Peace (CR Apr. 1796), (GM June 1796). Rous, George, A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke in Reply to his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (MR Jan. 1792). Strictures on Mr Burke’s Two Letters, addressed to a Member of Parliament (AR Dec. 1796), (CR Apr. 1797), (MR Mar. 1797). See Ch. 16, note 29. Thelwall, John, The Rights of Nature (AR Dec. 1796), (MR Dec. 1796). See Ch. 16, note 49. Thoughts on a Peace with France; with some Observations on Mr Burke’s Two Letters on Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory (CR Jan. 1797), (MR Dec. 1796). Thoughts on the Prospect of a Regicide War, in a Letter to the R.H. Ed. Burke (MR June 1796). Waddington, S.F. Remarks on Mr Burke’s Two Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (AR Dec. 1796), (GM Dec. 1796), (CR Jan. 1797). See Ch. 6, note 12.

220 Appendix: Burke’s Jacobins Williams, William, A Reply to Mr Burke’s Two Letters on the Proposals for Peace &c (AR Dec. 1796), (CR Jan. 1797), (MR Dec. 1796). See Ch. 6, note 14. Williams, William, Rights of the People; or, Reasons for a Regicide Peace (CR Oct. 1796), (MR Oct. 1796). Workman, James, A Letter to his Grace the Duke of Portland, in Defence of the Conduct of his Majesty’s Ministers, in sending an Ambassador to treat with the French Directory, against the Attack upon that Measure by the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (GM Apr. 1797).

List of Abbreviations used in the Notes Sources are listed in the chapter notes that follow. Full title is given on the first occasion that the work is cited, unless otherwise indicated. Unless given, place of publication is London. The bibliography is confined to background works on the period that are not cited in the notes. Major sources are indicated by the following abbreviations: AR ANR AJW AJM BC CO CR EM GM MMG MMR MR MC MP NANR PH ST SU TB W

Analytical Review Annual Register Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine British Critic Courier Critical Review European Magazine Gentleman’s Magazine Monthly Magazine Monthly Mirror Monthly Review or Literary Journal Morning Chronicle Morning Post New Annual Register Parliamentary History Star Sun True Briton Watchman in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and others, 16 vols (Princeton University Press 1969– ).

221

Notes

1

Bastille Euphoria

1. William Cowper, ‘The Task’, V, lines 389–90. But he would write to William Hayley 29 January 1793: ‘I will tell you what the French have done. They have made me weep for a king of France, which I never thought to do, and they have made me sick of the very name of liberty which I never thought to be.’ See Philip Anthony Brown, The French Revolution in English History (Cass, 1918), 89. Robert Burns responded to the uprising of ordinary men and women, but as an excise officer he was somewhat muzzled. The first volume of William Blake’s ‘The French Revolution, A Poem in Seven Books’ was printed in 1791 by Johnson but not published. Blake did wear a red cap of liberty in English streets. See Brown, 32–5. 2. William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’ (1805 version), XI, 11.108–9 and VI, 11.352–4. 3. The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. Edward Dowden (Dublin, 1881), 52. 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer (London and Vermont: Everyman, 1993), 5–6. 5. See Nicolas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 21–2. 6. Roe, 106. 7. Roe, 15–16. 8. Roe, 96. 9. William Frend, An Address to the Members of the Church of England and to Protestant Trinitarians in General, exhorting them to turn from the false Worship of THREE PERSONS to the Worship of the ONE TRUE GOD, 2nd edn (Johnson, 1788) in AR II (Dec. 1788), 455–6. See also CR LXVII (Feb. 1789), 153. 10. Frend, Peace and Union as recommended to the Associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans (Robinsons, 1793) in MR XII (Nov. 1793), 353–4. 11. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, delivered on Nov. 4, 1789, at the Meeting-house in Old Jewry, to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain …, 5th edn (Cadell, 1790) appendix, 11–13. 12. AR V (Dec. 1789) 475. 13. MR new series I (Feb. 1790), 234–5. 14. 20 February 1790 Burke to Sir Philip Francis in Correspondence of Edmund Burke ed. T. Copeland, 10 vols (Cambridge and Chicago, 1968–78), VI, 88–92. 15. The Debate on the French Revolution ed. Alfred Cobban, 2nd edn (Black, 1960), 53. 16. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France … (Dent, Everyman, 1910), 69. 222

Notes 223 17. C.J. Fox to R. Fitzpatrick 30 July 1789 in L.G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 111. 18. John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, II, The Reluctant Transition (Constable, 1983), 47. 19. Thoughts on the probable Influence of the French Revolution in Great Britain (Debrett, 1790) in AR VI (Mar. 1790), 337. 20. MR new series I (Apr. 1790), 448. 21. PH XXIX 249 in Mitchell, 111. 22. PH XXIX 368 in Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: a Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), 419. 23. See Mitchell, 117 and 294–5n. 24. A Letter from Mr Burke to a Member of the National Assembly in answer to some Objections to his Book on French Affairs (Paris; and London: Dodsley, 1791) in GM LX1 (July 1791), 653. 25. Germaine Necker [later Baroness de Staël], Letters on the Works and Character of J.J. Rousseau … trans. from French (Robinsons, 1789) in CR LXVIII (Aug. 1789) 130. For CR’s comments on Burke’s view of the Revolution, see CR new series II (June 1791), 203. For CR’s changing response to the Revolution, see Ch. 11 below. 26. The Bastile; or a History of Charles Townly, a Man of the World (Lane, 1789) in CR LXVII (June 1789), 475. 27. CR LXVIII (Aug. 1789) 141 and Accounts and Extracts of the Manuscripts in the Library of the King of France … trans. from French (Faulder, 1789) in CR LXVIII (Sep. 1789), 209. 28. A Detail of the wonderful Revolution at Paris. By M.D**C** (Ridgway, 1789) in CR LXVIII (Oct. 1789), 323. This is one of six pamphlets on French affairs noticed in CR’s ‘Monthly Catalogue’ for October, besides a seven-page notice of Histoire du Gouvernement François depuis l’Assemblée de Notables … (London and Paris, 1788) 29. Histoire Politique de la Revolution en France, 2 vols (London 1789: ‘printed abroad’) in AR IV (July 1789), 332, 336–7. 30. Considerations on the relative Situation of France and the United States of America: shewing the Importance of the American Revolution to the Welfare of France … Translated from the French of Etienne Clavière and J.P. Brissot de Warville (Robson, 1788) in MR LXXX (Jan. 1789), 86. 31. Abbé Genty, L’Influence de la Découverte de l’Amérique sur le Bonheur du Genre humain (Paris, 1788) in MR LXXX (Feb. 1789), 165. 32. The Speech of Mr Necker, Director General of the Finances, at the Meeting of the Assembly of Notables, held at Versailles, November 16, 1788 … (Debrett, 1789) in MR LXXX (Jan. 1789), 86 and AR IV (Aug. 1789), 472. 33. Lettre adressé au Roi, par M. de Calonne, le 9 Février (Spilsbury, 1789) in AR IV (Aug. 1789), 473. 34. The Instructions were published in Anquetil de Perron’s Dignité du Commerce, et de l’Etat de Commercant (‘presumed Paris’, 1789) in AR V (Oct. 1789), 145–50. 35. Mémoire pour le Peuple Français &c. (Paris, 1789) in MR LXXX (June 1789), 664–5. 36. MR LXXXI (July 1789), iii.

224 Notes 37. Lettre aux Etats Généraux de France (Ridgway, 1789) in MR LXXXI (Aug. 1789), 184. 38. Tyranny annihilated; or, the Triumph of Freedom over Despotism (Adlard, 1789) in MR LXXXI (Oct. 1789), 363. 39. ‘Substance of Mr Necker’s Memorial on the Scarcity in France’ in GM LIX (July 1789), 653. 40. ‘Minutes of the Royal Sitting of the States held at Paris’ in GM LIX (July 1789), 653–60. 41. GM LIX (Aug. 1789), 686. 42. GM LIX (Sep. 1789), 850. 43. J.J. Calet, A true and minute Account of the Destruction of the Bastille (London: Stalker, 1789) in GM LIX (Nov. 1789), 1019. 44. GM LIX (Dec. 1789), 1121–5. Yet GM would print a surprisingly generous obituary, predicting that Price’s name ‘will be mentioned among those of Franklin, Fayette and Paine’. See GM LXI (Apr. 1791), 389–91. 45. GM LIX (Dec. 1789), 1183–4. 46. GM LX (Aug. 1790), 754–8. 47. GM LX (Sep. 1790), 845. 48. The Danger of Repealing the Test Act … (Lowndes, 1790) in GM LX (Feb. 1790), 147. 49. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in certain Societies in London relative to that Event. In a Letter intended to have been given to a Gentleman in Paris (Dodsley, 1790) in GM LX (Nov. 1789), 1032. See also James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; and Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press 1975).

2

Burke Rebutted

1. 19 February 1790 Francis to Burke in Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. T.W. Copeland and others, 10 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1958–78), VI, 86–7. 2. 3 November 1790, Francis to Burke in Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: a Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), 408. 3. Correspondence VI, 171. For evidence that Lansdowne as much as France was the target of Burke’s venom see Derek Jarrett, The Begettors of Revolution: England’s Involvement with France, 1759–1789 (Longman, 1973), 281–6. 4. A Letter from Mr Burke to a Member of the National Assembly in answer to some Objections to his Book on French Affairs (Paris and London: Dodsley, 1791) printed in Reflections (Dent Everyman, 1910), 269; and quoted in GM LXII (June 1792), 531. 5. Burke, Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs … (Dodsley, 1791) in CR new series, II (Aug. 1791), 457. 6. MR new series, III (Nov. 1790), 314–5. 7. Reflections, 8. 8. MR III (Nov. 1790), 316, 316n. 9. MR III (Nov. 1790), 319–20.

Notes 225 10. MR III (Nov. 1790), 323. MR notes ‘the advantage here taken of the word curés, which answers to our rectors or vicars’. 11. Reflections in AR VIII (Dec. 1790), 414. 12. Short Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Reflections (Kearsley, 1790) in AR VIII (Dec. 1790), 414–15. 13. Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France. In a Letter to the Earl of Stanhope (Dilly, 1791) in AR (Dec. 1790) 419. In 1770, when still plain Catharine Macaulay (before her second marriage) she had challenged Burke’s Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents. See Ch. 13 below and Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: the Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 74–6. 14. Joseph Towers, Thoughts on the Commencement of a New Parliament, with an Appendix, containing Remarks on the Letter of the Rt Hon. Mr Burke on the Revolution in France (Dilly, 1790) in MR IV (Feb. 1791), 227. 15. AR VIII (Dec. 1790), 429–31. 16. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Johnson, 1790) in AR VIII (Dec. 1790), 419. Wollstonecraft’s advertisement had explained: ‘Mr Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution first engaged my attention as the transient topic of the day; and reading it more for amusement than information, my indignation was roused by the sophistical arguments, that every moment crossed me, in the questionable shape of natural feelings and common sense.’ See William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. with preface, supplement and bibliographical note by W. Clark Durant (London: Constable; New York: Greenberg; 1927), 196–7. 17. GM LXI (Feb. 1791), 151. GM LXI (Jan. 1791), 63 had reviewed Helen Maria Williams’s Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790 to a Friend in England; containing various Anecdotes relative to the French Revolution (Cadell, 1790). Commenting on Williams’s description of ‘solemnities perfectly calculated to awaken the general sympathy’, the editors observed: ‘Every trait that Miss W. relates bespeaks the levity, fickleness and fantasticalness of the French. The whole is pantomime.’ 18. GM LXI (Feb. 1791), 153. 19. MR IV (Jan. 1791), 96–7. 20. Thomas Christie, Letters on the Revolution in France, and on the new Constitution established by the National Assembly: occasioned by the Publications of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, M.P. and Alexandre de Calonne, late Minister of State. Illustrated with a Chart of the new Constitution …, Part I (Johnson, 1791) in MR V (Aug. 1791), 444–5. 21. MR V (Aug. 1791), 447–57. 22. AR X (June 1791), 204–6. 23. AR X (June 1791), 206. 24. Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain; arranged according to an alphabetical Catalogue of their Names, and including a List of their Works. With occasional Opinions on their Literary Characters, 2 vols (1798) in GM LXVIII (Sep. 1798), 774. CR V (Aug. 1792), 429 describes Christie’s Letters as ‘one of the most able of the replies to Mr Burke and M. Calonne’.

226 Notes 25. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Jordan, 1791) in GM LXI (Aug. 1791), 737–9. 26. GM LXI (Aug. 1791), 739. 27. AR IX (Mar. 1791), 312. NANR 1793 records that Part I of Rights of Man ‘was generally regarded as a complete answer to Mr Burke’. See CR XII (Nov. 1794), 243. 28. C. Stedman, The History of the Origin, Progress and Termination of the American War, 2 vols (Murray, 1794) in CR XIII (Mar. 1795), 306. 29. See AR XXIV (Dec. 1796), 622–3. 30. AR IX (Mar. 1791), 312–13. 31. Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France (Birmingham, 1791) in AR IX (Jan. 1791), 73–6. 32. MR IV (Apr. 1791), 430. 33. MR IV (Apr. 1791), 425. Burke had invited this analogy by applying the same metaphor to the spirit of liberty: ‘The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface.’ See Reflections (Dent Everyman, 1910), 6–7. 34. GM LXI (July 1791), 597. 35. GM LXI (Aug. 1791), 695. 36. GM LXIV (Supplement), 1171. Two pages on, another correspondent admits to welcoming ‘the refusal of the University [of Oxford] to grant a degree to Abbé Raynal; and rejoicing that the rector of Whittington had been honoured by the unanimous suffrages of that learned body’. 37. James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae. Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers against the Accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, including some Strictures on the late Production of M. Calonne (Robinsons, 1791) in Debate on the French Revolution, ed. Alfred Cobban (Black, 1960), 92–3. 38. MR V (June 1791), 209. 39. Cobban, 164–5. 40. MR V (June 1791), 206–12. In 1795 Mackintosh would become a MR reviewer. 41. AR X (July 1791), 309–12. 42. Cited in O’Brien, Great Melody, 413–14. 43. E.g. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th, edn (1929). 44. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, II, 77. See also Boulton, The Language of Politics, 265–71 for table of titles.

3

Instant History

1. A Letter from Mr Burke to a Member of the National Assembly in CR, new series II (June 1791), 201. 2. A Vindication of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in answer to all his Opponents (Debrett, 1791) in AR IX (Feb. 1791), 220–2.

Notes 227 3. Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke. By M. Rosibonne … Ex-member of the National Assembly (Ridgway, 1791) in AR IX (Feb. 1791), 220. 4. MR, new series V (May 1791), 96–7. 5. Edward Tatham, Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on Politics (Rivingtons, 1791) in CR II (May 1791), 109. 6. MR VI (Dec. 1791), 382. 7. Samuel Cooper, The First Principles of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government delineated, – (in two Parts) in Letters to Dr Priestley, occasioned by his to Mr Burke (Robinsons etc., 1791) in MR V (July 1791), 332. 8. Boulton, The Language of Politics, 96 argues that Burke’s few supporters damage his cause by their efforts. See also Boulton’s list of publications generated by the controversy, 265–71. 9. Substance of the Speech of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in the Debate on the Army Estimates, in the House of Commons on Tuesday, the 9th Day of February, 1790. Comprehending a Discussion of the present Situation of Affairs in France, 4th edn (Debrett, 1790) and A Letter from the Earl of Stanhope, to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, containing a short Answer to his late Speech on the French Revolution (Elmsly, 1790) in CR, first series, LXIX (Apr. 1790), 474. 10. CR LXIX (Apr. 1790), 475. 11. 2 July 1791 Pitt to Hester, Countess of Chatham in Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, II, 48. 12. Ehrman, II, 52. 13. As late as 1795, Pitt was writing to Auckland that Burke’s ‘French’ writings contained ‘much to admire but nothing to agree with’. See Ehrman, II, 80. 14. 22 September 1792 George III to Grenville in Ehrman, II, 203. 15. Ehrman, II, 205. 16. 13 November 1792 Grenville to Auckland in Ehrman, II, 208. 17. The Bill became an Act on 8 January 1793. See Ehrman, II, 225. 18. PH XXX (1817), cols 143–5. For Wilberforce, see Emma Vincent Macleod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars Against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802 (Aldershot and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998), 131–3 and Ehrman, II, 243–4. 19. Orations on the French War to the Peace of Amiens by William Pitt (Dent Everyman, 1906), 32–3. 20. Ehrman, II, 243. 21. Ehrman, II, 248. 22. PH XXX (1817), col. 6. 23. 13 December 1792 in PH XXX, col. 6. 24. 20 December 1792 in PH XXX, col. 111. 25. The First Report of the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons, on the Papers belonging to the Society for Constitutional Information and the London Corresponding Society, seized by Order of the Government … (Debrett, Chapman, 1794) and The Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons, &c. to which is added the First and Second Reports of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords, with an Appendix (Debrett, Chapman, 1794) in AR XIX (July 1794), 322. Cf F.O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, New York etc., 1967), 190: ‘It would be difficult to find a more alarmist group of conservative Whig members of parliament.’

228 Notes 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

48. 49.

See Ehrman, II, 250–2. ANR 1793 (Dodsley’s executors [1797]), 34. ANR 1789 (Dodsley 1792), 250. ANR 1789 (1792), 250–3. ANR 1790 (Dodsley, 1793), 47. Lafayette is reported to have had great difficulty in dispersing ‘a second army of Amazons’, 48. ANR 1790 (1793) 55. CR’s judgement on 1790 ANR was severe: ‘Not only the style is uncommonly careless, involved, colloquial, vulgar and incorrect; but the work itself is totally destitute of what can stamp any value on an historical production, research and authenticity.’ Dodsley was advised to dismiss ‘his present incompetent auxiliaries’ and to have the last two volumes rewritten by ‘men of real ability’. CR X (Jan. 1794), 66–70. NANR 1791 (Robinsons, 1792), 58–9. NANR 1791 (1792), 118. NANR 1783 (Robinsons, 1784), 172, 187. NANR 1790 (Robinsons, 1791), 74–5. NANR 1788 (Robinsons, 1789), 108. NANR 1789 (Robinsons, 1790), 15–16. CR, 1st series, LXX (Nov. 1790), 511. NANR 1790 (1791), i. NANR 1792 (Robinsons 1793), [3]. BC challenged this claim to impartiality, pointing to ‘the profligate combination of despots’ as one among several phrases that were ‘rather violent for impartial writers’. BC was on the side of the despotic powers, observing that ‘our own sovereign’ had acceded to the alliance. BC III (Apr. 1794), 448. NANR 1791 (1792), v. CR VI (Oct. 1792), 218–19, 221. NANR 1792 (1793), 208; NANR 1793 (1794), 207. See also Ch. 4 below. Ehrman, II, 284. J.H. Rose, William Pitt and the Great War (1911), 163. See also Steven Watson, The Reign of George III 1760–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 367–8. A Letter from a Member of Parliament to one of the People, upon the fatal Consequences of the present War, 2nd edn, price 3d ‘or one Guinea a Hundred’ (Debrett, 1793) in AR XVII (Nov. 1793), 326–7. ANR 1793 [1797], v–vi. Greeting NANR 1793, CR XII (Nov. 1794), 241 notes that its editors ‘anticipate their rivals by three years; as the old Annual Register for 1791 has not yet made its appearance’. CR XIV (June 1795), 169–71. ANR 1794 (Faulder, Cuthell etc, 1799), 111.

4

War, Sedition and Censorship

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

1. Orations on the French War, to the Peace of Amiens, by William Pitt (London, New York etc.: Dent Everyman, 1906), 33. T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (Longman, 1986) provides useful background to the issues discussed in this chapter.

Notes 229 2. Letters to the Peers of Scotland. By the Lord Lauderdale (Robinsons, 1794) in CR XIII (Jan. 1795), 65. 3. NANR 1793 (Robinsons, 1794) in AR XXI (Jan. 1795), 18–19. 4. NANR 1793 (1794), 35. 5. NANR 1793 (1794) in AR XXI (Jan. 1795), 20. 6. NANR 1793 (1794), 207. 7. Cursory Strictures upon the Injustice of the present War, and upon the Necessity of an immediate Parliamentary Reform (Debrett, 1793) in MR XII (Dec. 1793), 460. AR XVII (Nov. 1793), 325 echoes the author in asking whether France is being territorially ambitious because ‘she opposes everywhere an undaunted front to Prussian bayonets, and refuses to have her constitution new modelled by the assassins of Polish liberty, or a convention of German despots!’ 8. Objections to the War examined and refuted. By a Friend to Peace (Debrett, 1793) in MR XII (Dec. 1793), 461–2. 9. Considerations preliminary to the Commencement of a War, with Remarks upon a late melancholy Event (Debrett, 1793) in MR XII (Dec. 1793), 463. 10. The Errors of Mr Pitt’s present Administration many, recent, important, and dangerous. By a Gentleman totally unconnected with foreign Interests or internal Parties (Ridgway, 1793) in MR XII (Dec. 1793), 466. 11. Letters on the Subject of the Concert of Princes, and the Dismemberment of Poland and France (Robinsons, 1793) in MR XII (Sep. 1793), 79–80. 12. MR XII (Sep. 1793), 81–3. 13. Extermination: or an Appeal to the People of England, on the present War with France (Eaton, 1793) in AR XVII (Nov. 1793), 324. 14. F.O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London, New York, etc.. 1967), 132. 15. William Fox, Thoughts on the Death of the King of France (Richardson, 1793) in CR VII (Apr. 1793), 464–5. 16. William Playfair, Thoughts on the present State of French Politics and the Necessity and Policy of diminishing France, for her internal Peace, and to secure the Tranquillity of Europe (1793) in AR XVI (June 1793), 194–7. 17. ANR 1793 (Dodsley’s executors, [1797]), 97, 51. 18. CR XV (Sep. 1795) 2, quoting preface of NANR 1794 (Robinsons, 1795). 19. John Gifford [John Richards Green], A History of the Political Life of the Right Honourable William Pitt including some Account of the Times in which He lived, 3 vols (Cadell and Davies, 1809), I, 158–9. 20. Cited in Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: the English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (Hutchinson, 1979), 176–7. 21. Goodwin, 25. 22. PH XXIX, 1322. 23. Sir Lawrence Parsons, Thoughts on Liberty and Equality (Stockdale, 1793) in MR XII (Dec. 1793), 464–5. 24. An entire and complete History, political and personal of the Boroughs of Great Britain, vol. I (Riley, 1792) in CR IV (Mar. 1792), 310. 25. An Address to the Prime Minister of the King of Corsica on the subject of its late Union with the British Crown, developing the real Planners of the Measure, and demonstrating that the Constitution which was so graciously ratified in June last, to his Majesty’s Corsican Subjects, contains, in Principle, that very System of

230 Notes

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Representation, which has been so long and unsuccessfully sought to be obtained by the People of Great Britain and Ireland, from a Parliamentary Reform (Glindon, 1795) in CR XIV (June 1795), 217–18. Goodwin, 280. See Goodwin, 275–81. Alan Wharam, The Treason Trials, 1794 (London and Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 48. Wharam, 48–50, 67. Wharam, 51–67. Joseph Gerrald, A Convention the only Means of Saving us from Ruin. In a Letter addressed to the People of England (Eaton, 1793) in MR XIII (Feb. 1794), 203. MR XIII (Feb. 1794), 210–12. AR XVIII (Jan. 1794), 77, 81. The Trial of William Skirving, Secretary to the British Convention, before the High Court of Judiciary, on the Sixth and Seventh of January, 1794; for Sedition … (London and Edinburgh, 1794) in AR XIX (June 1794), 189. The Trial of Joseph Gerrald, Delegate from the London Corresponding Society, to the British Convention … Taken in short hand by Mr Ramsay (Kearsley, 1794) in CR XIII (Jan. 1795), 103. Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 136. William Godwin, Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, Oct. 2, 1794 (Eaton, 1794) and An Abstract of the Habeas Corpus Act; with Remarks: As also an Abstract of the Suspension Act. Shewing how much of that great Bulwark of English Liberty has been suspended … (Allen and West, 1795) in CR XIII (Apr. 1795), 470–1. An Enquiry into what Constitutes the Crime of ‘compassing and imagining the King’s Death’, according to the Statute of Edward III (Cadell and Davies, 1795) in MR XVII (July 1795), 355. Thomas Holcroft, A Narrative of Facts relating to a Prosecution for High Treason … (Symonds, 1795) in MR XVI (Jan. 1795), 79–81. The Trial of John Horne Tooke, on a Charge of High Treason … Taken in Shorthand at the Old Bailey (Allen and West, 1794) in CR XII (Dec. 1794), 462. S.T. Coleridge, The Plot Discovered or An Address to the People against Ministerial Treason (Bristol, 1795), 7, 9–10. S.T. Coleridge, Conciones ad Populum. Or Addresses to the People (Bristol, 1795) in AR XXIII (Jan. 1796), 90–1. William Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills, concerning Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Unlawful Assemblies (Johnson, 1795) in CR XV (Dec. 1795), 448–9. GM LXVI (Feb. 1796), 142–3. For the number of petitions for and against the two Bills, see Goodwin, 391n. An Explicit Declaration of the Principles and Views of the London Corresponding Society in Goodwin, 393. PH XXXII, cols 385, 455–6. John Thelwall in Tribune, III, 328. John Thelwall, An Appeal to Popular Opinion against Kidnapping and Murder; including a Narrative of the late atrocious Proceedings at Yarmouth … (Johnson, 1796). CR XVIII (Dec. 1796), 453 calls it ‘a very disgraceful riot’ in which

Notes 231 sailors ‘armed with cutlasses, bludgeons and other weapons, knocked down the door-keeper, burst into the room, in which were two hundred persons of both sexes, and cut, beat down, and maimed between twenty and thirty of them, some very dangerously’. 49. Goodwin, 412.

5

Pitt the Apostate

1. See Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty 275–6. 2. F.F. Cartwright, The English Pioneers of Anaesthesia: Beddoes, Davy and Hickman (London and Bristol, 1952), 119, 110. 3. Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Consideration on The Medicinal Use and Production of Factitious Airs, Part III (Johnson, 1795) in CR XVI (Feb. 1796), 203. The verses appear in a letter from Sir Jeremiah Morrison to Dr Renshaw. 4. Beddoes, Observations on the Nature and Cure of Calculus, Sea Scurvy, Consumption, Catarrh and Fever; together with Conjectures upon several other Subjects (Murray, 1793) in MR XII (Nov. 1793), 273. 5. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education, 2 vols (Johnson, 1798) in AR XXVIII (Dec. 1798), 631. Beddoes, The History of Isaac Jenkins and of the Sickness of Sarah his Wife, and their three Children (Bristol: Mills, 1792). 6. Beddoes, Notice of some Observations made at the medical Pneumatic Institution (Longman and Rees, 1799), 45. 7. Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Medical Cases and Speculations (Johnson, 1796). 8. Beddoes, Alexander’s Expedition down the Hydaspes and the Indus to the Indian Ocean. With Historical and Philosophical Observations [Murray, 1792], 60n. 9. Alexander’s Expedition, 35n. 10. Beddoes, Essay on the public Merits of Mr Pitt (Johnson, 1796), 70. The Duchess of Devonshire, who helped Beddoes to establish the Pneumatic Institution, wrote that his ‘proposals are very fair and candid and he is full of genius and good sense in everything but the one subject of politics, in which he has neither judgment, taste or temper’. 25 September 1794, Georgiana to Earl Spencer, in Amanda Foreman, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (HarperCollins, 1998), 293. 11. Beddoes, Essay on Pitt, 14–15. 12. Essay on Pitt, 51, 59. 13. Essay on Pitt, 201. 14. Essay on Pitt, 129. 15. Essay on Pitt, 131. 16. Essay on Pitt, 133, 138. 17. Essay on Pitt, 142. 18. Essay on Pitt, 169. 19. Essay on Pitt, 199. 20. MR XX (July 1796), 258–9. 21. AR XXV (June 1797), 653. 22. AR XXIII (May 1796), 549–51.

232 Notes 23. CR XIX (Feb. 1797), 214. 24. Beddoes, A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights against Gagging Bills (Bristol: Biggs [1795]) in Appendix B3 of Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds Kathleen Coburn and others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969– ), I, 373–84. 25. Beddoes, Where would be the Harm of a speedy Peace? (London: Johnson; Bristol: Biggs [1795]) in Cartwright, 77. 26. Cartwright, 9. See also AR XXIII (Mar. 1796), 295–6. 27. Beddoes, Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt, on the Means of relieving the present Scarcity, and preventing the Diseases that arise from meagre Food (Johnson, 1796) in AR XXIII (Mar. 1796), 299–300. 28. Beddoes, Alternatives compared: or what shall the Rich do to be safe? (Debrett, 1797) in AR XXV (June 1797), 653–4. 29. ‘Queries respectfully submitted to the impartial Consideration of the Friends of the Constitution in Church and State, by an independent Englishman’ in GM LXVIII (Nov. 1798), 941–3. 30. GM LXVIII (Nov. 1798) 953. 31. Coleridge: Selected Poems, ed. Richard Holmes (Harper Collins, 1996) 277, 349n. 32. W (Prospectus) in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, II, 5. 33. W (Prospectus) in Collected Works, II, 4. 34. MR XI (May 1793), 113. 35. W (Prospectus) in Collected Works, II, 4. Coleridge underestimated the sturdy independence of William Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette, which (like the Watchman) grew out of opposition to the ‘Gagging Bills’ and continued to rival the Cambridge Intelligencer in its anti-ministerial stance. 36. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 13–14. 37. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 14. 38. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 16–22. 39. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 33. Coleridge’s italics. 40. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 33. 41. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 39. 42. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 42. 43. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 43–4. 44. W (1 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 44. 45. W (9 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 55. 46. W (9 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 63. 47. W (16 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 100–3. See also note 27. 48. W (16 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 108–9. Reprinted from MP (9 March 1796). 49. W (25 Mar. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 140. 50. W (11 Apr. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 207. 51. W (19 Apr. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 255, 235n. The correspondence between François Barthélemy (French ambassador to Switzerland) and William Wickham (British Minister to Switzerland) was published in most London papers. 52. W (19 Apr. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 258. 53. W (19 Apr. 1796) in Collected Works, II, 261. 54. W (27 Apr, 1796) in Collected Works, II, 269–73.

Notes 233 55. W (13 May 1796) in Collected Works, II, 374. 56. W (13 May 1796) in Collected Works, II, 375.

6

Canning’s Counter-Attack

1. Orations on the French War, 145. 2. John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: II, The Reluctant Transition (Constable, 1983), 625. 3. Burke, Two Letters addressed to a Member of the present Parliament, on Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (Rivingtons, 1796) in MR XXI (Nov. 1796), 307. 4. MR XXI (Nov. 1796), 318. 5. MR XXI (Nov. 1796), 320. 6. MR XXI (Dec. 1796), 430. 7. MR XXI (Dec. 1796), 440–1. 8. AR XXIV (Nov. 1796), 449–50. 9. Strictures on Mr Burke’s Two Letters addressed to a Member of Parliament (Robinsons, 1796) in AR XXIV (Dec. 1796), 621. 10. CR XVIII (Oct. 1796), 198. 11. Another Coruscation of the Meteor Burke. The Retort Politic on Master Burke; or a few Words en passant: occasioned by his Two Letters on a Regicide Peace … (Jordan, 1796) in CR XIX (Jan. 1797), 97. 12. S.F. Waddington, Remarks on Mr Burke’s Two Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (Johnson, 1796) in CR XIX (Jan. 1797), 95. 13. PH XXXII, 1132. 14. William Williams, A Reply to Mr Burke’s Two Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France (Jordan, 1796) in CR XIX (Jan. 1797), 96–7. 15. Canning’s diary (18–21 Oct. 1797) in Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: III, The Consuming Struggle (Constable, 1996), 111. For the elaborate steps taken to disguise the publishing operation and conceal the identity of contributors, see Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800 … (Macmillan, 1988), 22. 16. 22 February 1794 Canning to Rev. John Sneyd in George Canning and His Friends, ed. Josceline Bagot, 2 vols (Murray, 1909), I, 47. 17. Ehrman, III, 93. 18. Selections from the Anti-Jacobin together with some later poems by George Canning, ed. Lloyd Sanders (Methuen, 1904), xvii–xviii. 19. 6 February 1798, Pitt to Canning in Ehrman, III, 111. 20. Canning used his franking privilege as a junior minister to contrive an introduction to the cartoonist, James Gillray (see Ch. 8 below). Ellis was the friend of Wordsworth, Southey and Scott, and edited Specimens of Early English Poetry (1790). 21. AJW I (Prospectus), 4–6. 22. AJW I (Prospectus), 7. 23. AJW I (Introduction), 15–16. 24. AJW I (20 Nov. 1797), 22–6. 25. AJW I (27 Nov. 1797), 86.

234 Notes 26. AJW I (30 Nov. 1797), 91, 98. 27. AJW I (4 Dec. 1797), 133. 28. AJW I (4 Dec. 1797), 136–7. The poem was composed jointly by Canning and Frere, and is a parody of William Roscoe’s ‘O’er the vine-covered hills and gay regions of France/See the day star of Liberty rise …’. 29. AJW I (29 Jan. 1798), 408. AJW cheekily introduces its report with the editorial comment: ‘The public, distracted with the various accounts of the celebration of Mr Fox’s Birth-day, naturally turn to us for an authentic detail of that important event – from a recollection of the correct and impartial statement we gave in a former Number of what passed at a MEETING OF THE FRIENDS OF FREEDOM.’ 30. AJW I (5 Feb. 1798), 431. 31. AJW I (5 Feb. 1798), 433. 32. AJW II (7 May 1798), 261. 33. AJW II (7 May 1798), 262–3. 34. 5 May 1798 Pitt to Grenville in L.G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 151. 35. 4 February 1798 Fox to Lauderdale in Mitchell, 152–3. Mitchell insists that ‘Foxite Whiggery and Radicalism remained two quite distinct political traditions, which eyed each other with justifiable suspicion.’ 36. AJW I (1 Jan. 1798), 244. 37. AJW I (8 Jan. 1798), 303. For reactions in different sections of the press to Pitt’s Triple Assessment Bill, see Dror Wahrman, ‘Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and Languages of Class in the 1790s’ in Past and Present (136), 83–113. 38. AJW I (12 Feb. 1798), 486. 39. AJW I (12 Feb. 1789), 486–7. 40. AJW II (19 Mar. 1798), 21. 41. Ehrman III, 122–8. 42. AJW II (19 Mar. 1798), 35. 43. 25 April 1798 Fox to Denis O’Bryen in Mitchell, 155. 44. AJW II (28 May 1798), 372–5. See also Ch. 14 below. 45. On Burke’s reaction to Fitzwilliam’s recall, see O’Brien The Great Melody, 513–21. See also Burke to Thomas Hussey in Correspondence, IX, 161–72. 46. AJW II (4 June 1798), 405. 47. AJW II (21 May 1798), 341. 48. Gilbert Wakefield, A Reply to Some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff’s Address to the People of Great Britain (Cuthell, 1798). For Johnson’s indictment, and its effects on AR see Ch. 12 below. See also Elizabeth Sparrow ‘The Alien Office 1792–1806’ in Historical Journal, XXXIII (2). 49. MR XXV (Mar. 1798), 315–16. 50. Paine, A Letter to the Honourable Thomas Erskine, on the Prosecution of Thomas Williams for publishing The Age of Reason (‘printed at Paris for the Author 1797’) in MR XXV (Mar. 1798), 286. For Gillray’s cartoon and Canning’s verses see Ch. 8 below. 51. AJW II (9 July 1798), 585, 593. 52. AJW II (9 July 1798), 616. 53. AJW II (9 July 1798), 621–2. 54. Burke, Reflections (Dent Everyman, 1910), 82; AJW (9 July 1798), 637.

Notes 235

7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

‘Jacobin Poetry’ AJW I (20 Nov. 1797), 32–3. AJW I (20 Nov. 1797), 33. AJW I (20 Nov. 1797), 35–6. See Ch. 6 above. Selections from the Anti-Jacobin together with some later Poems by George Canning, ed. Lloyd Sanders (Methuen, 1904), xi. George Canning and His Friends, ed. Josceline Bagot, 2 vols (Murray, 1909), I, 1. Bagot, I, 3. AJW I (27 Nov. 1797), 70–1. AJW I (11 Dec. 1797), 168–9. Dactylic stress marks are omitted. AJW I (15 Jan. 1798), 330. AJM III (June 1799), 121. Richard Polwhele’s review is of the two-vol. duodecimo edn at 12 shillings (Longman and Rees, 1799); the review also covers the second vol. of Southey’s Poems (Longman and Rees, 1799). The 1796 edn of Joan of Arc was published by Cadell and Davies. MR XIX (Apr. 1796), 362–3. CR XVII (June 1796), 191. CR XVII (June 1796), 182–3. AR XXIII (Feb. 1796), 173–7. 10 June 1796 Lamb to Coleridge in Robert Southey: the Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 45. For the critics’ response to Madoc, see Madden, 100–12. Southey, Poetical Works, 15 vols (Longman etc., 1798–1826) XII, 55–7. ‘Botany Bay Eclogues’ in Poetical Works, XI, 75–7. Coleridge: Selected Poems, ed. Richard Holmes (HarperCollins, 1996), 277, 349. In MP Coleridge accused Pitt of resorting to abstractions and generalities (‘Atheism and Jacobinism – phrases which he learnt from Mr Burke’) with unhappy results: ‘Press him to specifiy an individual fact of advantage to be derived from a war – and he answers, SECURITY! Call upon him to particularise a crime, and he exclaims – JACOBINISM!’ See Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London, Sydney, Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), 261–5. MR XII (Oct. 1793), 216–17. AR XV (Mar. 1793), 294. Wordsworth, ‘Descriptive Sketches’ (1793 version), lines 199–200, 240–2, 774–85, in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchings, revised by Ernest de Selincourt (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1936). Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, Book ix (written 1805, published 1850), lines 516–24 in Poetical Works. ‘An Evening Walk’ set on the banks of the Derwent, and also published by Johnson in 1793, describes the widow who ‘bids her soldier come her woes to share/Asleep on Bunker’s charnel hill afar’ (lines 253–4). The battlefield is American, but (like the Gryson gypsy) ‘all blind she wanders o’er the lightless heath/Led by Fear’s cold wet hand and dogg’d by Death’ (lines 285–6). Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (London and New York: Norton, 1998), 346. MR XXVIII (Jan. 1799), 23–5. Cottle claims that the white-lead processes are so dangerous that the manufacturers never advertise for workers: ‘They

236 Notes

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

simply open their doors, and receive such as are starving and can find no other employment.’ MR XXVIII (Jan. 1799), 21–2. Beddoes, Essay on the Public Merits of Mr Pitt (Johnson, 1796), 160. See Wordsworth’s dismissive note in the 1800 edition, quoted in Holmes, Early Visions, 285n, and discussed in Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: a Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Ch. 7. See John E. Jordan, Why Lyrical Ballads? (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976), 33–5. In Ch. 3 Jordan devotes 30 pp. to reviews of Lyrical Ballads. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems, ed. John Beer (Dent Everyman, 1993), 145–6. Jordan, 139, 167. Jordan writes of Wordsworth’s ‘virtual eschewing of the topical in favour of the eternal’, 3. But see E.P. Thompson on the political background of Somerset in ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’ in Power and Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Dean Vanech (London University Press and New York University Press, 1969), 156–69. Typically Marilyn Butler, in an address to a Bristol conference in 1998. CR XXIV (Oct. 1798), 197–204. Coleridge, Literaria Biographia (Dent Everyman, 1956), 170. It was not only the wits of the AJW who were sceptical. MR XXXI (Mar. 1800), 262 accuses Southey of having attempted ‘to make the Muse descend a step lower, and has, in reality, brought her to the level of prose’. And MR XXXI (Mar. 1800), 321 claims: ‘The fashionable affectation of simple diction is more disquieting than the over-refinement of the last age’. Wordsworth’s 1800 preface concedes the point. See Appendix to Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads 1798, ed. W.J.B. Owen, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). AJM V (Apr. 1800) 434. But AJM VI (May 1800) 111–18 has sport at the expense of the Beddoes circle in ‘The Pneumatic Revellers: an Eclogue’. Among the concluding lines are: ‘Then hail, happy days! when the high and the low,/All nourish’d alike from this air – hospitality,/Shall together with Gasborn benevolence glow,/And prove that true bliss must arise from equality.’ MR XXIX (June 1799), 202–10. That Wordsworth later chose to emphasize the universal rather than the particular character of Lyrical Ballads is instanced by his deletion of the last six lines (with their reminder of the wartime context) from the 1815 version of ‘Old Man Travelling’. The excised lines are: I asked whither he was bound, and what/The object of his journey; he replied/‘Sir! I am going many miles to take/A last leave of my son, a mariner,/Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth/And there is dying in an hospital.’

The editors of Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads, ed. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), xxx draw an analogy with Wilfrid Owen’s famous words: ‘Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’ 39. [April 1797] Coleridge to Cottle in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Letters, ed. H.T. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988), 57.

Notes 237 40. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eds Kathleen Coburn and others, 16 vols (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1969– ), II (2nd part), 108. 41. See Duncan Wu, ‘Lyrical Ballads (1798): the Beddoes Copy’ in The Library sixth series, XV (4), 332–5. Coleridge had set the fashion for parodying one’s friends (and perhaps oneself) in his three mock sonnets by ‘Nehemiah Higginbottom’, which appeared in MMG IV (Nov. 1797) and greatly upset Lamb, Lloyd and Southey. The Pneumatic Institution did not open until March 1799, but Beddoes had begun his experiments in Bristol six years earlier, and was known to Coleridge from late 1795. 42. See Magnuson, 98.

8

Smears and Subsidies

1. AJW II (9 July 1798), 616. 2. John Gifford, A Letter to Lord Lauderdale, containing Strictures on his Lordship’s Letters to the Peers of Scotland (Longman, 1795) in MR XVIII (Dec. 1795), 423, 428. 3. AJM I (July 1798), 1–2. For the campaign against the monthlies, see Chs 11 and 12 below. 4. Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ is frequently reproduced in black and white. The colour-tinted original is reproduced in History Today XLVIII (Sep. 1798), 49. 5. AJM I (July 1798) 116. Samuel Whitbread, the brewer, had incurred antiJacobin displeasure by proposing that the government fix, at least temporarily, maximum prices or a minimum wage. See The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), 40. 6. Draper Hill, Mr Gillray the Caricaturist: a Biography … (Phaidon, 1965), 138. See also Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution 1789–1820 (London and Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1983), 183–206. 7. George Canning and His Friends, ed. Josceline Bagot, 2 vols (Murray, 1909), I, 59. 8. Weekly Political Register XXX (30 May 1818), 625. 9. The Republican judge, or the American Liberty of the Press, as exhibited, explained and exposed in the base and partial Prosecution of WILLIAM COBBETT, for a pretended LIBEL against the King of Spain and his Embassador, before the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. With an Address to the PEOPLE OF ENGLAND. By Peter Porcupine (Wright, 1798) in AJM I (July 1798), 8. For further extracts, see Ch. 15 below. 10. Letter of Thomas Paine to the People of France and the French Armies on the Events of 18th Fructidor … (Paris, 1797) in AJM I (July 1798), 23. 11. AJM I (July 1798), 34. For the identity of individual contributors, see Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins 1798–1800: the Early Contributors to the ‘Anti-Jacobin Review’ (Macmillan, 1988). Most of the extracts from AJM in this chapter are either by Gifford himself or by Robert Bisset, author of a fulsome life of Burke. 12. AJM I (July 1798) 98. See Ch. 9 below. 13. Thomas Holcroft, Knave or Not. A Comedy. In Five Acts (Robinsons, 1798) in AJM I (July 1798), 52–3. A copy of the play spills out of the Cornucopia of

238 Notes

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

Ignorance in Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon. For the arbitrary powers wielded by the Lord Chamberlain, see MMR III (Sep. 1796), 302–3. AJM I (July 1798), 119–20. AJM I (July 1798), 128–9. AJM I (Aug. 1798), 138. AJM I (Aug. 1798), 140. AJM I (Aug. 1798), 145. Copies of Original Letters recently written by Persons in Paris to Dr Priestley in America. Taken on Board a neutral Vessel (Wright, 1798) in AJM I (Aug. 1798), 150. Address from Camille Jordan … on the Revolution of the 4th September [18th Fructidor], 1797 (Longman, 1798) in AJM I (Aug. 1798), 181. AJM I (Appendix) 753. John Gifford, A Short Address to the Members of the Loyal Associations, on the present State of public Affairs; containing a brief Exposition of the Designs of the French upon this Country, and of their proposed Division of Great Britain and Ireland, into three distinct and independent Republics; with a list of the Directories and Ministers of the same, as prepared by the Directory at Paris, 7th edn (Longman, 1798) in AJM I (Aug. 1798), 184–5. The reviewer is Bisset. Cf GM LXVIII (Aug. 1798), 695–6: ‘This address has already gone through nine editions.’ GM concludes: ‘We have little doubt of the authority of Mr G.’s assertions, though we do not pretend to be acquainted with the sources whence it is derived; and we concur with him that, to render the threats of the French Government abortive, vigour and unanimity at home are indispensably required.’ AJM I (Aug. 1798), 223–4, 227. The author is Bisset. AJM I (Aug. 1798), 235. The author is William Thomas Fitzgerald, Clerk to the Navy Pay Office and Vice-President of the Literary Fund, founded to relieve indigent authors and their widows and orphans. AJM I (Aug. 1798), 236–7. AJM I (Oct. 1798), 424. Arthur O’Connor, State of Ireland. To which are added his addresses to the electors of the county of Antrim (1798) in AJM I (Oct. 1798), 464. Samuel Henshall, The Saxon and English Languages reciprocally Illustrative of each other … (Nicol, Payne, White, 1798) in AJM I (Oct. 1798), 381. Henshall was himself a major contributor to AJM, with at least 19 articles to his credit. [Henry Wansey] A Letter to the Bishop of Salisbury on his late Charge to the Clergy of his Diocese. By a Dissenter (Wilkie, 1798) in AJM I (Oct. 1798), 409. AJM I (Nov. 1798), 544. The publisher was Rivingtons. The Dissenter done Over; or the woeful Lamentation of H.W. a Wiltshire Clothier … (Rivingtons, 1798) in AJM I (Nov. 1798), 546. For the campaign against Dissenters in general, see Ch. 14 below. AJM I (Nov. 1798), 576–8. A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, 176. See also Montluzin, 93–6. For Gifford’s Life of Pitt, see Ch. 16 below. Aspinall, 68. Aspinall, 68–9.

Notes 239 36. William Augustus Miles, Correspondence on the French Revolution, 1789–1817, ed. C.P. Miles, 2 vols (1890), I, 16. See Aspinall, 163. 37. Quoted in Aspinall, 199–200. 38. AJW II (14 May 1798), 307, and II (18 June 1798), 490. 39. AJW II (19 Mar. 1798), 14–15. 40. AJM II, ii–iii. 41. John Bowles, The Retrospect; or, a Collection of Tracts, published at various Periods of the War. Including some Reflections on the Influence of Mr Locke’s Theory of Government, in producing that Combination of Anarchy and Oppression, which has assumed the Name of Jacobinism (Longman, 1798) reviewed by Gifford in AJM II (Feb. 1799), 129. See also Ch. 11 below. For a list of ‘Treasury hirelings’ (including Bowles), see Aspinall, 163. 42. George Walker, The Vagabond. A Novel, 2 vols (1798) in AJM II (Feb. 1799), 140. 43. The Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner; containing every Article of permanent Interest or permanent Utility in that valuable and highly esteemed Paper, Literary and Political; the whole of the excellent Poetry; together with Explanatory Notes, Biographical Anecdotes, and a Prefatory Advertisement by the Editor (Chapple, 1799) in AJM II (Mar. 1799), 302–4. 44. Written by Canning, and sung at the dinner to celebrate Pitt’s birthday on 28 May 1802, in Bagot, II, 419–20. 45. AJM IV (Nov. 1799), 368. 46. S.T. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual in Collected Works, VI, 34n. 47. AJM IV, vi–vii. 48. AJM IV, viii. 49. AJM IV, xiv. Canning had earlier collaborated with Ellis and Frere in writing The Rovers (a parody of Schiller’s The Robbers) published in AJW IV (4 and 11 June 1798). See Selections from the Anti- Jacobin, ed. Lloyd Sanders (Methuen, 1904), xxiv.

9 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

‘Jacobin Morality’ AJW II (9 July 1798), 626, 632. GM LXIII (July 1793), 649. GM LXVIII (June 1798), 515. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the Effect it has produced in Europe, 2nd edn (Johnson, 1796), v–viii. Ralph W. Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Critical Biography (University of Kansas Press, 1951), 182–3. Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft written by William Godwin, ed. W. Clark Durant (London: Constable; New York: Greenberg, both 1927), 67–77. See Ch. 7 above. See Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 98–9. Magnuson, 99. AJM II (Mar. 1799), 283.

240 Notes 11. Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (in Posthumous Works) and Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (both Johnson, 1798) in AJM I (July 1798), 91–3. 12. AJM I (July 1798), 94–7. AJM insists on calling Mary ‘the concubine of Mr Imlay’. And in the index to this volume of AJM, ‘Wollstonecraft’ carries the reference: ‘see Helen Maria Williams, Godwin, Prostitution’, while the entry for ‘prostitution’ reads: ‘see Mary Wollstonecraft’. See Memoirs ed. Durant, 344. 13. AJM I (July 1798), 97. The suggestion of fleeing to Ireland came from George Blood. See Wardle, 47. 14. AJM I (July 1798), 98–101. 15. AR XXVII (Mar. 1798), 245. 16. AJM I (July 1798), 102, 107. 17. AR XXVII (Mar. 1798), 239–42. 18. CR XXII (Apr. 1798), 419, 414–16, 418. 19. CR XXII (Apr. 1798), 414. 20. MR XXVII (Nov. 1798), 325. 21. MR XXVII (Nov. 1798), 321–2. 22. BC XII (Sep. 1798), 231–2. ‘Intercourse’ here does not imply sexual intercourse. 23. BC XII (Sep. 1798), 234. 24. BC XII (Sep. 1798), 234–5. 25. See William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: the Biography of a Family (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), 224. 26. MMG V (July 1798), 493–4. 27. Wardle, 7. 28. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin, 1992), 304. 29. Memoirs, ed. Durant, 216. 30. MR VIII (June 1792), 198. 31. MR VIII (June 1792), 208–9. 32. AR XII (Mar. 1792), 248–9. 33. CR IV (Apr. 1792), 397–8. 34. Memoirs, 56–7. 35. St Clair, 188. Bisset wrote in AJM I (Sep. 1798), 335: ‘Godwin theoretically, could not more thoroughly reprobate marriage, and admire concubinage, than Jove did practically.’

10

‘Jacobin Prints’

1. AJW II (9 July 1798), 617–18. 2. AJW I (12 Mar. 1798), 613. 3. AJW II (7 May 1798), 264. Two weeks later AJW was consoling itself with the optimistic reflection that ‘the Courier cannot possibly exist many weeks’. AJW II (21 May 1798), 332. For Coleridge on Cambridge Intelligencer, see Ch. 5 above. 4. A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press c. 1780–1850 (Home and Vanthal, 1949) 69–72. In January 1789, the Prince of Wales bought an interest in MP to silence criticisms of his marriage to Mrs Fitzherbert. (See Aspinall, 272–4.)

Notes 241

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

The same month John Walter, founder of The Times, accepted a government subsidy of £300 p.a. The Times remained a ministerial paper until summer 1799, when it was held by ministers to have breached the privilege of the House of Commons. David V. Erdman, ‘Coleridge as Editorial Writer’ in Power and Consciousness, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Dean Vanech (London University Press and New York University Press, 1969), 192. Mackintosh was Daniel Stuart’s brother-in-law. AJW II (9 July 1798), 635–6. See also Chs 6 and 8 above. Lucyle Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England 1792–3 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1967), 163. ST 1 May 1792. ST 18, 20, 25, 27, 29, 31 August 1792; 1, 3, 4 September 1792; 14 December 1792. ST 29 and 30 October 1795. This was the session that saw the introduction of the ‘Gagging Bills’. Life of John Lord Campbell, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, ed. Mary Scarlett Hardcastle, 2 vols (1881), I, 105. For discussion of such discrepancies in ‘social language’, see Dror Wahrman, ‘Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and the Language of Class in the 1790s’, in Past and Present (136), 83–113. R.L. and S. Wilberforce, Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols (Murray, 1838), III, 75. For his complaint in the House (20 Dec. 1798) see PH XXXIV, col. 110. MC 31 December 1798. Cf CO (2 July 1794) on TB’s reporting of Commons debate on Report of Secret Committee: ‘Mr True Briton seems to have been so conscious that even misrepresenting the speeches or, as usual, wholly suppressing those of the opposition, would so little answer his purpose on this occasion, that he suppressed all that was said on both sides of the subject …’. ST 21 November 1795. ST 25 November 1795. ST 21 November 1795. Cf CO editorial (21 Nov. 1795): ‘It is with the most cordial satisfaction that we congratulate the country upon the increasing opposition to the PITT and GRENVILLE Bills.’ The previous day’s CO printed parallel columns showing how the two Bills were opposed to provisions of the Bill of Rights. CO 12 April 1793. CO adds: ‘On a retrospect of such guilt and folly, who does not stand aghast? And let every man politic and virtuous, rational and humane, be admonished also! Let him SHUN THE BEGINNINGS OF STRIFE! from the WOEFUL EXPERIENCE OF THEIR END!’ CO 24 April 1793. CO 27 April, 21 May, 28 May 1793. CO 4 January 1794. CO 3 July 1794. CO 24 July, 16 August 1794. CO 2 January 1795. CO 29 October 1795. MP 24 July 1794. The italicized phrase is Pitt’s; for its context, see Ch. 4 above.

242 Notes 27. MP 28 July 1794. 28. MP 29, 30, 31 October 1794; 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 November 1794; this was more than half the total available space (128 cols) in the issues listed. For the editorial, see MP 7 November 1794. 29. MC 21 January 1793. 30. MC 31 January 1793, The ministerial press had denounced MC as ‘that Jacobin print’ as early as December 1792. See Werkmeister, 167. 31. MP 30 January 1793. 32. MP 1 February 1793. 33. MC 5 February 1793. 34. ST 12 July 1792. The Prussian king (Frederick William II) had used the new Polish constitution of 1791 as a pretext for evading his treaty obligations. 35. CO 13 January 1796. 36. CO 15 January 1796. 37. CO 16 February 1796. 38. CO 12 April 1796. 39. CO 14 April 1796. 40. CO 16 October 1796. See Thomas Macknight, History of the Life and Times of Edmund Burke, 3 vols (Chapman & Hall, 1858) III, 675. 41. CO 11 February 1797. A year later CO cautiously prefixed a copy of Hoche’s orders (’yesterday published in an obscure ministerial print’) with this disclaimer: ‘For their authenticity we cannot vouch. – Indeed they bear, we think, evident marks of being a Home Fabrication. Mr Canning, probably, can afford some information on the subject.’ (CO 13 Feb. 1798). The ‘obscure ministerial print’ was AJW I (26 Feb. 1798) 539 and I (5 Mar. 1798) 573 which mocked the ‘Jacobin’ prints for their scepticism. 42. AJW I (22 Jan. 1798), 348–50. 43. AJW II (21 May 1798), 331–2. CO welcomed the creation of the Helvetic Republic, challenging MC to deny the oppressiveness of the displaced cantonal governments, and calling on Edward Gibbon’s youthful essay as testimony to the lack of liberty in Berne. (CO 1 and 5 Feb. 1798). Cf CO 21 August 1794 when a correspondent argues that the need for Robespierre’s severity was ‘generally admitted’ in order to ‘crush the conspiracies which were hatching in every corner of France’, and pointedly remarks: ‘Those whose opinions hang upon events, who so easily decide that Robespierre was guilty, would have had little difficulty in deciding if Robespierre had been triumphant and his enemies had fallen.’ 44. CO 15 January and 3 April 1795. From 31 July to 24 September 1797, ST has eight days when it devotes six or more columns to French news, compared with TB’s 11 days. 45. CO 16 January 1794 (Jacobin Club) and 16 August 1794 (30 deathsentences and 46 acquittals are listed). 46. CO 7 June, 13 June and 20 June 1796. 47. CO 20 July 1796. 48. CO 4 May 1797. 49. AJW II (25 June 1798), 519–21. 50. MC 20 October 1797. 51. AJW II (7 May 1798), 283. CO (11 May 1798) prints letter from Bernadotte which, the editorial claims, proves that ‘the long, laboured reports on this

Notes 243 subject in the weekly Journal of our Treasury Clerks, were from beginning to end A GROSS FABRICATION à la Gifford’. 52. AJW I (25 Dec. 1797), 218–19. See also AJW I (11 Dec. 1797), 157–8 for its similar response to MC’s description of the royal thanksgiving at St Paul’s as a ‘Frenchified farce’. 53. MP 7 April 1798. For the controversy over treatment of prisoners, see also CO 2 February 1798. MP made a practice of specifying at its masthead: ‘Price in 1783, 3d/Taxed by Mr Pitt, 3d/Price 6d.’

11

Reviewers Reviewed

1. AJM I (July–Dec. 1798), 2–3. 2. AJM II (Mar. 1799), 309–11. For Canning’s role in the weekly Anti-Jacobin, see Ch. 6 above. 3. CR XXV (Feb. 1799), 193. AJM II (Mar. 1799), 315. 4. John Walker, Elements of Geography, and of Natural and Civil History, 2nd edn (1799), in AJM III (July 1799), 331. AJM notes (332–3) that reviews of Walker’s first edition (1795) had ‘displayed the cloven hoof of Jacobinism, without fear of control or dread of exposure’. But since the establishment of the anti-Jacobin periodicals, critics ‘have found it expedient to alter their tone, and to encourage their circumspection’. 5. See Marilyn Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: the Role of the Review’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 125. The figures come from Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 24. 6. AJM III (May 1799), 64. 7. MR LXXXI (July 1789), 90. Yet in 1790 the margin of defeat greatly increased. See Ch. 13 below. 8. MR LXXXI (July 1789), iii. 9. Observations sur les Ecrits de M. de Voltaire, principalement sur la Religion, en forme de Notes. Par M.E. Guibert, Ministre de la Chapelle Royale de St James, 2 vols (Hookham, 1789) in CR LXVII (Mar. 1789), 202–3. 10. Histoire du Gouvernement François depuis l’Assemblée des Notables tenue le 22 Fevrier, 1787, jusqu’à la Fin de Décembre de la même Année (London and Paris, 1788) in CR LXVIII (Oct. 1789), 315–21. 11. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country … (Cadell, 1790) in MR new series I (Jan. 1790), 114–17. 12. Observations on Dr Price’s Revolution Sermon, and on the Conduct of the Dissenters and Mr Pitt, respecting the Repeal of the Test Act, and the English Representation in Parliament (Fores, 1790) in MR I (Feb. 1790), 230. The title does not appear in AR’s list of 86 pamphlets on the Test and Corporation Acts, published or republished in the first half of 1790. (AR VII, 337–9). 13. Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France &c (Johnson, 1791) in CR, new series, I (Jan. 1791), 77. 14. CR LXIX (Jan. 1790), 72–3. 15. Substance of the Speech of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in the Debate on the Army Estimates, in the House of Commons on Tuesday, the 9th Day of February,

244 Notes

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

1790. Comprehending a Discussion of the Present Situation of Affairs in France (Debrett, 1790 in CR LXIX (Apr. 1790), 475. For CR’s early support of Burke, see Ch. 4 above. MR I (Apr. 1790), 447–8. MR V (May 1791), 93. CR I (March 1791), 341. A Letter from Mr Burke to a Member of the National Assembly (Paris and London, 1791) in CR II (June 1791), 204–5. CR II (Aug. 1791), 439, 446. For Vindiciae Gallicae, see Ch. 2 above. A Letter from the Abbé Raynal to the National Assembly of France on the subject of the Revolution, and the Philosophical Principles which led to it. (Robinsons, 1791) in CR II (Aug. 1791), 469. Benjamin Flower, The French Constitution; with Remarks on some of its principal Articles … (Robinsons, 1792) in CR VI (Sep. 1792), 16. Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, The History of the Revolution of France (Debrett, 1792) in CR VI (Oct. 1792), 153, 161–2. Williams, Letters II in CR VI (Sep. 1792), 65. Flower of the Jacobins, containing Biographical sketches of the leading Men at present at the Head of Affairs in France … (Owen, 1792) in CR VI (Nov. 1792), 352. Thomas Cooper; A Reply to Mr Burke’s invective against Mr Cooper and Mr Watt, in the House of Commons on the 30th April, 1792 (Johnson, 1792) in CR VII (Jan. 1793), 57. CR VII (Jan. 1793), 59. CR’s more hostile stance towards Pitt’s ministry is also explained by the launching in 1793 of the Anglican British Critic (BC). See Ch. 13 below. Comments on the Proposed War with France, on the State of Parties and on the New Act respecting Aliens. With a Postscript, containing Remarks on Lord Grenville’s Answer of Dec. 31, 1792, to the Note of M. Chauvelin (Dilly, 1793) in CR VII (Feb. 1793), 205–7. The Crisis stated; or serious and seasonable Hints upon War in general, and upon the Consequences of a War with France (Debrett, 1793) in CR VIII (May 1793), 100. Thomas Hearn, A Short View of the Rise and Progress of Freedom in Modern Europe, as connected with the Causes which led to the French Revolution … (Richardson, 1793) in MR XI (May 1793), 39–43. The text is (significantly) reproduced in Gifford’s Life of Pitt. For the Sedition and Treason Trials, see Ch. 4 above. Symonds’s Abstract of the Two Bills, &c. To which are added, the Bill of Rights; the Coronation Oath; and Magna Charta (Symonds, 1796) in MR XIX (Jan. 1796), 213. The History of Two Acts … with an Appendix and Index, &c. to which are prefixed Remarks on the State of Parties, and of Public Opinion, during the Reign of his present Majesty (Robinsons, 1796) in CR XVI (Apr. 1796), 427. The comparative figures are given on p. 420. CR XIV (June 1795), 217–18. For full title of pamphlet and further extracts from CR’s review, see Ch. 4 above. John Cartwright, The Commonwealth in Danger; with an Introduction, containing some Remarks on some late Writings of Arthur Young Esq. (Johnson, 1795) in MR XVII (Aug. 1795), 439. See also Ch. 4 above.

Notes 245 36. The Spirit of John Locke on Civil Government revived by the Constitutional Society of Sheffield (Symonds, 1795) in MR XVIII (Sep. 1795), 104. 37. John Bowles, The Retrospect; or a Collection of Tracts published at various Periods of the War … in AJM II (Jan. 1799) 16, 11. Full title in Ch. 8, note 41 above. 38. Letters on the Subject of the Concert of Princes, and the Dismemberment of Poland and France (Robinsons, 1793) in CR XI (May 1794), 1–2. First published in MC on 5 February 1793. See Ch. 10, note 33 above. 39. J.H. Williams, War the Stumbling-Block of a Christian; or, the Absurdity of defending Religion by the Sword (Robinsons, 1795) in CR XVI (Feb. 1796), 225. 40. A Residence in France, during the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795; described in a Series of Letters from an English Lady: with general and incidental Remarks on the French Character and Manners. Prepared for the Press by John Gifford, Esq. Author of the History of France, Letter to Lord Lauderdale, &c, 2 vols (Longman, 1797) in CR XIX (Mar. 1797), 265–72. For John Gifford [John Richards Green], see Ch. 8 above. His History of France (1793–4) seems first to have brought him to the notice of Pitt’s government. The Impartial History of the late Revolution in France, from its Commencement to the Death of the Queen, and the Execution of the Deputies of the Gironde Party, 2 vols (Robinsons, 1794) itself quoted verbatim from NAR’s account of the King’s journey from Versailles to Paris. See BC IV (Sep. 1794), 292, which does not notice the plagiarism. The Impartial History attracted an eight-page review in AR XVIII (Mar. 1794), 283–90, though the notice began: ‘An impartial history of the French revolution is perhaps more than ought at present to be promised.’ 41. The History of the French Revolution. Proposals for publishing by Subscription the History of Jacobinism, Its Crimes, Cruelties and Perfidies [1795], 1–3. 42. William Playfair, History of Jacobinism. Its Crimes, Cruelties and Perfidies (Stockdale, 1795) in CR XIX (Apr. 1797), 376. 43. John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and reading Societies. Collected from good Authorities (Edinburgh: Creech; London, Cadell and Davies; 1797) in CR XXI (Dec. 1797), 426–30. 44. John Cartwright, The Constitutional Defence of England internal and external (Johnson, 1796) in MR XXII (Feb. 1797), 69. By now Griffiths had distanced himself from the Foxites, and dropped Sheridan as a major contributor, though pieces from Sheridan continue appear until July. See Roper, 175–6. 45. Thomas Erskine, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France, 11th edn (Debrett, 1797) in MR XII (Feb. 1797), 198. Erskine’s pamphlet went through nine editions in its first week and 48 editions in all. Erskine asks (MR reports): ‘If Ireland were conducted as she ought to be, what dependence, in God’s name, could we have to place upon the winds?’ For Moira and the Freemasons see MR XXV (Mar. 1798), 303. 46. Memoirs illustrating the History of Jacobinism. A Translation from the French of the Abbé Barruel, Parts I and II (Booker, 1797), Part III (Booker, 1798) in MR XXV (Appendix), 511. 47. A Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt, shewing the Necessity and Facility of continuing the War; with a few seasonable hints to Mr Fox and his Friends (Rivingtons, 1797) in MR XXVI (June 1798), 230.

246 Notes 48. Considerations upon the State of Public Affairs in the Year 1798. Part 3d – the Domestic State and General Policy of Great Britain (Rivingtons, 1798) in MR XXVII (Sep. 1798), 99. 49. J. Howlett, The Monthly Reviewers reviewed, in a Letter to those Gentlemen; pointing out their Misrepresentations and fallacious Reasonings … (Richardson, 1798) in MR XXVI (Aug. 1798), 433.

12

Murder by Ridicule

1. AJM I v. The volume incorporates a cartoon by Rowlandson (1 Feb. 1799) entitled ‘A Charm for a Democracy. Reviewed, Analysed & Destroyed’ and depicting in the bottom right-hand corner AR ‘fallen never to rise again’. See Ch. 16 below. In fact AR continued briefly under new management, until finally expiring in June 1799. See Roper, 23, 264n. 2. AJM II (Mar. 1799), 327. 3. W.L. Bowles, Song of the Battle of the Nile, published for the Benefit of the Widows and Children of the brave Men who fell on that memorable Day … (Cadell and Davies, 1799) in AJM II (Apr. 1799), 427. The AR referred to is the resurrected AR (Jan. 1799). 4. AJM III (July 1799), 367–8. 5. Gilbert Wakefield, A Reply to some Parts of the Bishop of Llandaff’s Address to the People of Great Britain (Cuthell, 1798). For Johnson’s indictment and his defence see Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: a Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979), 159–61. Cited also in Magnuson, 68. 6. Helen Maria Williams, A Tour in Switzerland, 2 vols (Robinsons, 1798) in AR XXVII (June 1798), 563. 7. A Journal of what happened at the Tower of the Temple, during the Captivity of Lewis XVI, King of France. By Mr Cléry, the King’s Valet de Chambre (Bayliss, 1798) in AR XXVII (June 1798), 587. 8. Copies of original Letters, recently written by Persons in Paris to Dr Priestley in America … (Wright, 1798) in AR XXVII (June 1798), 647. 9. Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (Johnson, 1798) in AR XXVIII (July 1798), 36. 10. ‘Retrospect’ in AR XXVIII (July 1798), 107. 11. Anthony Robinson, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the English Wars, from the Invasion of this Country by Julius Caesar to the Present Time (Johnson, 1798) in AR XXVIII (Aug. 1798), 203. 12. First Letter of a Free Mason to L’Abbé Barruel, Author of the Memoirs of Jacobinism (Wright, 1798) in AR XXVIII (Aug. 1798), 209. Part I of Barruel’s history had itself been savagely reviewed in AR XXVI (Sep. 1797), 234–8. 13. William Gilpin, Observations on the Western Parts of England, relative chiefly to picturesque Beauty … (Cadell and Davies, 1798) in AR XXVIII (Aug. 1798), 249. 14. A Letter to the Hon. Charles James Fox: showing how Appearances may deceive, and Friendship be abused!! (Wright, 1798) in AR XXVIII (Oct. 1798), 423. 15. Transactions of the Linnaean Society (White, 1798) in AR XXVIII (Dec. 1798), 561. Other December notices include not only ‘the studied simplicity’ of Lyrical Ballads, but Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude, written in 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion. To which is added, France, an Ode; and Frost

Notes 247

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

at Midnight (Johnson, 1798). For Lyrical Ballads and AR’s criticism of the German extravagance of the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ see Ch. 7 above. State of the country in the Autumn of 1798 (Wright, 1798) in AR XXVIII (Dec. 1798), 651. AR XXVIII (Dec. 1798), 670. AR I (May–Aug. 1788), iv. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vols 4, 5, 6 (Cadell, 1788) in AR I (June 1788), 129–30. AR I (May–Aug. 1788), iv. Two articles reproduced from the Journal de Physique (Jan. 1788) in AR I (May 1788), 124–5. Nouvelle Théorie Astronomique, pour servir à la détermination des Longitudes (London: De Boffe; Paris: Volland; 1788) in AR I (June 1788), 197. ‘Literary Intelligence. History of Academies’ in AR I (July 1788), 353. AR I (June 1788), 225 and AR I (Appendix), 559. P. VIRGILII MARONIS GEORGICA LIB. IV, illustrabit, explicabit, emendabit by Gilbert Wakefield (Deighton, 1788) in AR II (Sep. 1788), 26. AR II (Nov. 1788), 325. AR II (Nov. 1788), 335. AR III (Jan. 1789), 24. AR notes: ‘We have seen a paper that was made of a certain species of pond-weed, with very little preparation, that appeared to be of a very fine quality.’ Political Reformation, on a large Scale; or a Plan of a House of Commons … (Kearsley, 1789) in AR IV (June 1789), 217–18. For reviews of the titles listed, see AR IV (July 1789), 257–306. For AR’s reaction to Histoire Politique and other publications in late 1789 and early 1790, see Ch. 1 above. AR VIII (Dec. 1790), 414. For replies to Burke and Christie’s Letters, see Ch. 2 above. The Question considered, How far the present flourishing State of the Nation is to be ascribed to the Conduct of the Minister in AR XIII (May 1792), 100. Charles Grey, The Remonstrance moved in the House of Commons, February 21, 1793 against a War with France (Ridgway, 1793) in AR XVI (May 1793), 72. William Playfair, Thoughts on the present State of French Politics and the Necessity and Policy of diminishing France, for her internal Peace, and to secure the Tranquillity of Europe (Stockdale, 1793) and Better Prospects to the Merchants and Manufacturers of Great Britain. Dedicated to Members of the House of Commons (Stockdale, 1793) in AR XVI (June 1793), 194, 198. Edward Wilby, An Address to the People of Great Britain (Crowder, 1793) in AR XVI (June 1793), 202–3. Jasper Wilson [James Currie], A Letter, commercial and political, addressed to the Right Hon. William Pitt; in which the real Interests of Britain in the present Crisis are considered, and some Observations are offered on the general State of Europe (Robinsons, 1793) in AR XVI (July 1793), 323. [Joseph Towers] A Dialogue between an Associator and a well-informed Englishman on the Grounds of the late Associations, and the Commencement of a War with France (Evans, 1793) in AR XVI (July 1793), 330.

248 Notes 38. Thomas Barnard, Observations on the Proceedings of the Friends of Liberty of the Press, &c. December 22, 1792. And an Answer to Mr Erskine’s Speech, of January 19, 1793 (Evans, 1793) in AR XVI (Aug. 1793), 442. 39. Robert Hall, Apology for the Freedom of the Press, and for General Liberty (Robinsons, 1793) in AR XVII (Sep. 1793), 63. 40. AR XXII (Dec. 1795), 586, reviewing ANR (1791). 41. H.M. Williams, Letters containing a Sketch of the Scenes which passed in various Departments of France during the Tyranny of Robespierre, and of the Events which took place in Paris on the 18th of July, 1794, vol. III (Robinsons, 1793) in AR XXIII (Jan. 1796), 19–25. 42. Robert Bisset, Sketch of Democracy (Matthews, 1796) in AR XXIV (Aug. 1796), 205–6. 43. AR XXIV (Oct. 1796), 421, 412–18. 44. For reactions to Burke’s Regicide Peace, see Ch. 6 above. 45. A Residence in France during the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795; described in a series of Letters from an English Lady: with general and incidental Remarks of the French Character and Manners. Prepared for the Press by John Gifford, 2 vols (Longman, 1797), in AR XXV (Jan. 1797), 71–2. For CR’s response, see Ch. 11 above. 46. John Gifford, Letter to the Hon. Thomas Erskine; containing some Strictures on his View of the Causes and Consequence of the present War with France (Longman, 1797) in AR XXV (May 1797), 524–5. 47. Christopher Saunders, Who were the Aggressors? Addressed to John Gifford, Esq., in Consequence of his Letter to the Hon. T. Erskine (Symonds, 1797) in AR XXVI (Aug. 1797), 180. 48. Arthur Young, National Danger and the Means of Safety (Richardson, 1797) in AR XXVI (Aug. 1797), 181. 49. AR XXVI (Sep. 1797), 318. 50. John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all Religions and Governments of Europe in AR XXVI (Oct. 1797), 401. For reactions of MR and CR, see Ch. 11 above. 51. Memoirs illustrating the History of Jacobinism in AR XXVI (Dec. 1797), 560–2. See also Ch. 11 above. 52. AR XXVII (Jan. 1798), 109–10. 53. The Case of the People of England, addressed to the ‘Lives and Fortune Men’ both in and out of the House of Commons; as a Ground of National Thanksgiving by one of the 80,000 incorrigible Jacobins (Westley, 1798) in AR XXVII (Feb. 1798), 204. The reference to Jacobins echoes a phrase of Burke’s. 54. An Appeal to the Head and Heart of Every Man and Woman in Great Britain respecting the threatened French Invasion, and the Importance of immediately coming forward with voluntary Contributions (Wright, 1798) in AR XXVII (Feb. 1798), 209. 55. [Sir Philip Francis] The Question as it stood in March 1798 (Faulder, 1798) in AR XXVII (May 1798), 536. 56. AJM III (July, 1799), 341. 57. Manual of the Theophilanthropes, or Adorers of God, and Friends of Men. Containing the Exposition of their Dogmas, of their moral and of their religious Practices; with Instruction respecting the organization and Celebration of their Worship. Arranged by certain Citizens, and adopted by the Theophilanthrope

Notes 249 societies established in Paris, 2nd edn, trans. John Walker (Darton and Harvey, 1797) in AR XXVI (Oct. 1797), 380–2. 58. The Sentiments of a Member of the Jacobins, in France, upon the Religion of Reason and Nature … (Stace, 1792) in AR XIII (June 1792), 192. 59. A Sermon preached in Greenwich Church, on Sunday, November 4, 1792. By the Rev. A. Burnaby, D.D. Archdeacon of Leicester and Vicar of Greenwich (Payne, 1793) in AR XV (Apr. 1793), 434.

13

Cromwell’s Ghosts

1. GM LIX (Oct. 1789), 585. 2. The Danger of repealing the Test Act; in a Letter to a Member of Parliament from a County Freeholder (Lowndes, 1790) in GM LX (Feb. 1790), 147. 3. Observations on the case of the Protestant Dissenters; with Reference to the Corporation and Test Acts … (Robson, 1790) in GM LX (Feb. 1790), 148–9. AR and MR notice it as A Review of the case of the Protestant Dissenters … in AR’s catalogue VII (July 1790), 337, and MR I new series (Feb. 1790), 231. 4. AJM I (Aug. 1798), 225. 5. AJM I (Aug. 1798), 198–200. 6. An arranged Catalogue of Publications on the Enlargement of the Toleration of Dissenting Ministers, and the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts 1772 to 1790 (Johnson, 1790) in MR III (Sep. 1790), 99. See also AR VII (July 1790), 337–9. 7. S. Catlow, An Address to the Dissenters, on the state of their Political and Civil Liberty, as Subjects of Great Britain (Johnson, 1788) in AR III (Jan. 1789), 87. 8. AR VI (Feb. 1790), 210–22. 9. GM LX (Mar. 1790), 267–9. 10. GM LX (Mar. 1790), 271 and (Apr. 1790), 365. 11. GM LX (May 1790), 423–6. 12. See J.E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England 1793–1815 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 11. Cookson remarks: ‘The experience was nothing short of traumatic. It converted what had been a relatively quiescent and inward-looking social minority into a powerful political force.’ 13. Reasons for seeking a Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts by ‘a Dissenter’ (Buckland, 1790) in MR I (Mar. 1790), 343. 14. A Scourge for Dissenters; or, Nonconformity unmasked … with Animadversions on Dr Price’s Sermon … (Parsons, 1790), in GM LX (Mar. 1790), 253. 15. GM LX (June 1790), 502. 16. See Derek Jarrett, The Begettors of Revolution: England’s Involvement with France 1759–1789 (Longman, 1973), 286. 17. John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, 6 vols (1817–31), VI, 157. For Hollis see Caroline Robbins, ‘The Strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn’ in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, VII (1950). 18. E.C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1970), 316. 19. Catharine Macaulay, History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols (Dilly, 1763–83), V, 381–2.

250 Notes 20. Macaulay, The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend (Dilly, 1778), I, 5. Only one volume appeared: it stops at 1733. 21. The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. A.H. Smyth, 10 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1905–7), IV, 370. 22. 9 August 1770 Adams to Macaulay in The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L.H. Butterfield, 4 vols (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), I, 360. 23. Macaulay, An Address to the People of England, Scotland and Ireland on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs (Bath, 1775), 26. 24. For Macaulay’s links with America, see Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: the Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 184–204. For the transatlantic connection in the careers of Price, Priestley, Paine and Cooper, see Stuart Andrews, The Rediscovery of America: Transatlatic Crosscurrents in an Age of Revolution (London and New York: Macmillan and St Martin’s Press, 1998). 25. History of England, VI, viii. 26. European Magazine, IV (1783), 331. 27. [Before 15 August 1770] Burke to Richard Shackleton in Correspondence, II, 150. 28. Macaulay, Observations on a Pamphlet entitled ‘Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’ (London: Dilly; Dublin: Faulkner; both 1770), 6. For her Observations on the Reflections of the Rt Hon. Edmund Burke, see Ch. 2 above. 29. Edward Tatham, Letters to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on Politics (Rivingtons, 1791) in CR II (May 1791), 109. 30. Christopher Wyvill, A Defence of Dr Price, and the Reformers of England (Johnson, 1792) in CR V (Aug. 1792), 390. 31. Sheridan told the Commons on 26 November 1795 that Reeves ‘represented the Dissenters to be a race not fit to exist, and as worthy of being exterminated as the Caribs of St Vincent’s and the Maroons of Jamaica’. PH XXXIII, 629. On government payments to Nares see Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 23–4. 32. BC I (May–Aug. 1793), iii. 33. A Sermon preached before the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in the Abbey Church of St Peter Westminster, on … the Anniversary of the Martyrdom of King Charles the First. With an Appendix concerning the political Principles of Calvin. By Samuel Lord Bishop of St David’s (Robson, 1793) in BC I (May 1793), 25–8. Horsley was successively Bishop of St David’s, Rochester and St Asaph’s. See F.C. Mather, High Church Prophet: Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733–1806) and the Caroline tradition in the Later Georgian Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 34. Priestley, Letters to the Philosophers and Politicians of France, on the Subject of Religion (Johnson, 1793) in BC I (May 1793), 29–31. 35. GM LXVIII (Sep. 1798), 750. 36. Samuel Clapham, How far Methodism conduces to the Interests of Christianity, and the Welfare of Society … (London: Johnson and Deighton; Cambridge: Melville; Oxford: Fletcher; all 1794) in BC VI (July 1795), 44. 37. The Scholar armed against the Errors of the Time; or a Collection of Tracts on the Principles and Evidences of Christianity, the Constitution of the Church, and the

Notes 251

38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

14

Authority of Civil Government … (Rivingtons, 1795) in BC VI (Nov. 1795), 481–2. The Society for the Reformation of Principles had provided the impetus for founding BC. BC VII (May 1796), 495–501 and VIII (July 1796), 32–43. See James J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 87, 201. 31 January 1801, Pitt to George III in Stanhope, Life of the Right Honourable William Pitt, 4 vols (Murray, 1861), III, xxv. Mark Noble, The Lives of the English Regicides, and other Commissioners of the pretended High Court of Justice, appointed to sit in Judgment upon their Sovereign, King Charles the First, 2 vols (Stockdale, 1798). Dedicated to ‘The Regicides of France’ in AJM I (Oct. 1798), 445. Jonathan Boucher, A View of the causes and consequences of the American Revolution in thirteen discourses preached in North America between the years 1763 and 1775 … (Robinsons, 1797) in AJM II (Jan. 1799), 86–7. AJM IV (Sep. 1799), 35. GM LXI (Oct. 1791), 924–6. PH XVII (6 Feb. 1772) 274. See also Alan Valentine, Lord North, 2 vols (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), I, 244–5. Sack, 201.

Millennialism and Popery

1. The French Revolution foreseen in 1639. Extracts from an Exposition of the Revolution by an eminent Divine of both Universities, in the Beginning of the last Century … (Johnson, 1791) in AR XI (Sep. 1791), 85. On Fifth Monarchists, see J.R. Tanner, Constitutional Conflicts of the Seventeenth Century, 1603–1689 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928, reprinted 1948), 159–60. 2. Some Prophetical Periods, or a View of the different Prophetical Periods mentioned by Daniel and St John – wherein Events that have happened under each Period, are briefly stated from History, and compared with the Predictions (Robinsons, 1790) in AR IX (Appendix), 535–7. 3. Authorized Version, Revelation 19:19–20; 21:1–4. 4. Alexander Pirie, The French Revolution exhibited in the Light of the Sacred Oracles: or a Series of Lectures on the Prophecies now fulfilled (Perth, Scotland: 1795) in AR XXIII (Mar. 1796), 267. 5. A Prophecy of the French Revolution, and the Downfall of Antichrist; being two Sermons preached many Years ago by the late Rev. Mr Willison (Forbes, 1793) and R.G. Butt, A Sermon upon the general Fast, preached in the Parish Church of Kidderminster, on Friday the 19th of April, 1793 (Downes, 1793) in AR XVI (May 1793), 97. 6. Antichrist in the French Convention; or an Endeavour to prove that some Part of the Prophecies of Daniel and St John is now fulfilling in Europe. Addressed to all Mankind who believe in the Old Testament. To the Jew as well as the Christian (Cadell and Davies, 1795) in AR XX (Appendix), 485. 7. GM LXV (Feb. 1795), 141. 8. Priestley, The Present State of Europe compared with antient Prophecies; considered in a sermon preached … Feb. 28, 1794 … the day appointed for a General

252 Notes

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

Fast. With a preface containing the reasons for the Author’s leaving England (Johnson, 1794) in AR XVIII (March 1794), 334, 339 and GM LXIV (Apr. 1794), 344. For Priestley’s millennialism as a ‘religion of the oppressed’, see W.H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1978), Ch. 3. Jonathan Edwards, ‘Notes on the Apocalypse’, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–97), V, 136. For the Millennialism of New England, see Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millenial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 27, 48. Hutchins’s Improved. Being an Almanack … for the Year of Our Lord 1762 (New York [1761]), 17–27 and Jonathan Mayhew, Two Discourses delivered October 5th, 1759 (Boston, 1759), 61. A Discourse, Addressed to the Sons of Liberty, at a Salem Assembly, near LibertyTree in Boston, February 14, 1766 (Providence, 1766), 5–6. Bloch, 56. A Poem on the Rising Glory of America by Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Philadelphia, 1772), 25. See Bloch, 85–93. She writes: ‘Revolutionary millenialism quite comfortably straddled traditional Protestant and Enlightened world views.’ Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787; Dilly, 1788) in AR VI (Appendix), 537–41; Advice to the Privileged Orders in the several States of Europe, resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government, Part I (Johnson, 1792), in MR VII (Mar. 1792), 314 and AR XII (Apr. 1792), 452–60; A Letter to the National Convention of France, on the Defects in the Constitution of 1791, and the Extent of the American which ought to be applied (Johnson, 1792; also trans. into French), in AR XIV (Oct. 1792), 226–8; A Letter addressed to the People of Piedmont, on the Advantages of the French Revolution, and the Necessity of its Principles in Italy (Eaton, 1795) in AR XXII (Oct. 1795), 388–9; The Conspiracy of Kings; A Poem: addressed to the Inhabitants of Europe from another Quarter of the World (Johnson, 1792) in AR XIII (May 1792), 62–3 and MR VIII (July 1792), 336. For these and other examples of American millennialist arguments in the 1790s, see Bloch, 154–60. She thinks that millennial hopes for the French Revolution in this period have been overlooked by historians, and argues that (almost without exception) hostile millennial pamphlets in America date from as late as 1798. GM LXV (Dec. 1795), 1033. GM LXV (Mar. 1795), 223–9. Thomas Taylor, An additional Testimony given to vindicate the Truth of the Prophecies of Richard Brothers; to which is added a Warning to the Inhabitants of Great Britain to forsake their evil Deeds before the full appearance of the approaching Day of Fire which burneth the Wicked of the Earth as an Oven [1795] in GM LXV (May 1795), 404. On Brothers. See J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millennialism 1780–1850 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 58–85. GM LXVII (Aug. 1797), 681–8.

Notes 253 21. Edward King, Remarks on the Signs of the Times (Nicol, 1798) in GM LXVIII (July 1798), 591–3. King’s pamphlet drew a response from Bishop Horsley in Critical Disquisitions on the Eighteenth Chapter of Isaiah (London, 1799; Philadelphia, 1800). See Oliver, 51–4. 22. GM LXVI (Oct. 1796), 829. 23. Admittedly James Bicheno’s The Signs of the Times; or the Overthrow of the Papal Tyranny in France, the Prelude of Destruction to Popery and Despotism; but of Peace to Mankind (Parsons, 1793) linked together, according to AR, ‘the utter downfall of the papacy, the final overthrow of despotism, the restoration of the Jews, and the renovation of all things’ among events that were ‘near at hand’ in AR XVI (July 1793), 342. See also Oliver, 46–50. 24. Charles Daubeny, The Fall of Papal Rome, recommended to the Consideration of England in a Discourse of Isaiah xlvi 9, 10 (Cadell and Davies, 1798) in GM, LXVIII (Aug. 1798). For Daubeny, see Sack, 218. CR from 1760s to 1791 considered Roman Catholics as persecuted rather than persecutors. Cf. Sack, 224–30. 25. GM LXVII (Mar. 1797), 204. 26. James Chelsum, The Duty of relieving the French Refugee Clergy stated and recommended. A Sermon preached in the Parish Church of Droxford, Hants, on Sunday, May 26, 1793 (Rivingtons, 1793) in AR XVI (Aug. 1793), 431. 27. Joseph Berington, The Rights of Dissenters from the Established Church (Robinsons, 1781) in MR first series, LXXXI (Aug. 1789), 146. 28. Theobald McKenna, Political Essays relative to the Affairs of Ireland in 1791, 1792, 1793. With Remarks on the present State of that Country (Debrett, 1794), in BC V (Jan. 1795), 32–3. 29. AJM III (July 1799), 367. 30. AJM III (Aug. 1799), 484–8. 31. Burke, Correspondence, VIII, 242–6. 32. AJW II (28 May 1798), 372–3. See Ch. 6 above. 33. O’Brien, The Great Melody, 531–2. 34. A View of the present State of Ireland, with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the Disturbances in that Country; and a Narrative of Facts, addressed to the People of England by ‘an Observer’ (Jordan, 1797) and A Letter to the Earl of Moira, in Defence of the Conduct of his Majesty’s Ministers, and of the Army in Ireland (Stockdale, 1798) in MR XXV (Feb. 1798), 212–13. 35. Henry Grattan, Address to his Constituents, the Citizens of Dublin on his retiring from the Parliament of Ireland, 2nd edn (Jordan, 1797), in MR XXV (Jan. 1798), 95. 36. Report from the Committee of Secrecy, appointed to take into Consideration the Treasonable Papers presented to the House of Commons of Ireland on 29th April last … (Stockdale, 1797) in MR XXV (Jan. 1798), 95–6. 37. Reflections on the Irish Conspiracy; and on the Necessity of Armed Association in Great Britain … (Sewell, 1797) in MR XXV (Apr. 1798), 451. 38. Gifford, Life of Pitt, III, 231, 245–9. 39. Sir Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland from the Arrival of the English. Also, a Particular Detail of That Which Broke Out the 23rd of May 1798, With the History of the Conspiracy Which Preceded It, 2nd edn (London: Stockdale; Dublin: Milliken; both 1801) and A concise Account of the material Events and Atrocities which occurred in the present Rebellion

254 Notes (Dublin, 1799), in Sack, 240–2. See also AJM IV (Sep. 1799), 82–3 and BC XVIII (Oct. 1801), 384–5. 40. Coleridge, Poems (Dent Everyman, 1993), 180–2. For Coleridge on Pitt, see Chs 5 and 7 above.

15

Transatlantic Comparisons

1. William Cobbett, The Republican Judge, or the American Liberty of the Press … (Wright, 1798), in AJM I (July 1798), 8–17. For full title of London edn, see Ch. 8, note 9 above. Philadelphia edn (1798) is entitled The Democratic Judge. 2. The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, with a full and fair Account of all his Authoring Transactions; being a sure and infallible Guide for all enterprising young Men who wish to make a Fortune by writing Pamphlets by Peter Porcupine Himself (Philadelphia, 1796), in Peter Porcupine in America: Pamphlets on Republicanism and Revolution, ed. David A. Wilson (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 168. 3. Porcupine in America, 170–1. 4. Cobbett, Observations on the emigration of Dr J. Priestley, and on the several addresses delivered to him on his arrival at New York (London and Philadelphia, 1794), 62–3. GM LXV (Jan. 1795), 47–9 devotes six columns to reviewing Observations, calling it ‘perhaps a severer attack than any which Dr P. has ever experienced’. 5. Weekly Political Register 10 April 1830. 6. Political Censor June 1796. 7. AJW I (5 Feb. 1798) 837. Cf. Porcupine’s Gazette in Daniel Green, Great Cobbett: the Noblest Agitator (Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), 161. 8. AJW II (21 May 1798), 361. 9. AJW II (21 May 1798), 401–2. 10. Cobbett, A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats; or Observations on a Pamphlet entitled ‘The Political Progress of Britain’ (Philadelphia, 1795) in Porcupine in America, 95–6. See also AJM I (Sep. 1798), 342–9. 11. Porcupine in America, 99. For the Democratic Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion of autumn 1794, see Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), 210–18, and Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: a Democratic Source-Book (Westport, Conn., 1976). 12. Bone to Gnaw in Porcupine in America, 106–7. 6 February 1778 was the date of the Franco-American alliance that led to the British surrender at Yorktown three years later. 13. Bone to Gnaw in Porcupine in America, 113. 14. Porcupine in America, 118. 15. See George Spater, William Cobbett: the Poor Man’s Friend (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), I, 86. 16. Cobbett, The Bloody Buoy thrown out as a Warning to the political Pilots of America … (1796) in GM LXVII (Apr. 1797), 315. For original American title, see below. 17. Cobbett, The Bloody Buoy thrown out as a Warning to the political Pilots of all Nations: or, a faithful Relation of a Multitude of Acts of horrid Barbarity, such as

Notes 255

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

the Eye never witnessed, the Tongue expressed, or the Imagination conceived, until the Commencement of the French Revolution to which is added an instructive Essay tracing these dreadful Effects to their real Causes (Philadelphia, 1796), in Porcupine in America, 147. Bloody Buoy in Porcupine in America, 140. Richard Franklin Bache was Benjamin Franklin’s grandson and editor of the General Advertiser and Aurora, usually referred to as the Aurora. History of the American Jacobins, commonly denominated Democrats by Peter Porcupine (Philadelphia 1796), in Porcupine in America, 184–5. For Playfair, see Chs 11 and 12 above. American Jacobins, in Porcupine in America, 189. Porcupine in America, 194–8. 4 June 1794, Fauchet to Minister for Foreign Affairs in O’Brien, Long Affair, 198. Moreau de St Méry’s American Journey, trans. and ed. Kenneth and Anna Roberts (New York, 1947) in O’Brien, Long Affair, 199. For exchange of compliments, see O’Brien, 208–9. AJW I (5 Feb. 1798), 825–6 described Monroe as being ‘deep in the most dangerous of the Jacobin doctrines’ and anxious to promote the ‘tacking of the United States as a province of the French Republic’. 3 July 1795, Adet to Citizen Representatives of the People in O’Brien, Long Affair, 222–3. American Jacobins in Porcupine in America, 204n. 6 July 1795, Adet to Citizen Representatives in O’Brien, Long Affair, 223. 29 July 1795, Washington to Hamilton in Douglas S. Freeman and others George Washington: a Biography, 7 vols (New York, 1948–57), VII, 273. For Bache’s campaign against the Jay Treaty, and his abusive attacks on Washington, see O’Brien, 223–4. Observations on certain Documents contained in No. V and VI of the History of the United States for the Year 1796 … in AJW I (5 Feb. 1798), 841. 6 October 1789 Hamilton to Lafayette in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton eds Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961– ), V, 425. See The Papers of Thomas Jefferson ed. Julian P. Boyd and others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950– ), XVI, 245. ‘T.L.’ [Hamilton] in Gazette of the United States, 25 July 1792. 9 September 1792, Jefferson to Washington in Boyd, XXIV, 351–60. On Boyd’s ‘unavoidable conclusion’ see O’Brien, Long Affair, 120–1. For Short on French newspapers, see Boyd, XX, 744. David Ramsay, An Oration delivered on the Anniversary of American Independence, July 4, 1794, in St Michael’s Church, to the Inhabitants of Charleston, South Carolina (Ridgway, 1795) in AR XXII (Sep. 1795), 303–5. Suspension of Habeas corpus, though subject to periodic renewal by Parliament, was not finally revoked until 1801. For ‘Gagging Acts’, see Chs 4 and 5 above. Weekly Political Register 1 January 1817. William Baring Pemberton, William Cobbett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), 43. Democratic Principles illustrated Part II, containing an instructive Essay, tracing all the Horrors of the French Revolution to their Causes, the licentious

256 Notes Politicks and infidel Philosophy of the Present Age by Peter Porcupine (Wright, 1798) in GM LXVIII (Sep. 1798), 778. For the original and slightly longer American text, which was printed with the Bloody Buoy in the same publication, see Porcupine in America, 152–3. Cobbett’s footnote refers to John Gifford’s A short Address to the Members of the Loyal Associations noticed by GM LXVIII (Sep. 1798), 695–6. See also Bisset in AJM I (Aug. 1798), 184–5. 39. GM LXVIII (Sep. 1798), 779. 40. For Cobbett’s account of farming in America, see his Journal of a Year’s Residence in the United States of America (first published in 1819; new edn Centaur Press, 1964; republished Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983). 41. By the 1820s, Cobbett blamed Pitt’s ruinous war against France rather than the Jacobins: ‘Let them, therefore, now take the full benefit of the measures of Pitt and his crew. … The Jacobins did not contract the Debt of £800,000,000 sterling. The Jacobins did not create a Dead Weight of £150,000,000. The Jacobins did not cause a pauper-charge of £200,000,000 by means of “new enclosure bills”, “vast improvements”, paper money, potatoes, and other “proofs of prosperity”. See Cobbett, Rural Rides (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1985), 120.

16

Jacobins and Anti-Jacobins

1. R. Birley, The English Jacobins From 1789 to 1802 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 40. 2. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1980 reprint). Thompson (p. 109) did defend the ‘Jacobins’ against the more extreme Pittite charges: ‘Paine and his followers did not preach the extermination of their opponents, but they did preach against Tyburn and the sanguinary penal code. The English Jacobins argued for internationalism, for arbitration in place of war, for the toleration of Dissenters, Catholics and free-thinkers, for the discernment of human value in “heathen, Turk and Jew”.’ 3. Thompson cites the famous conversation on ‘treason’ between Coleridge and Thelwall on the Quantock Hills in the summer of 1797 as foreshadowing ‘the decline of the first Romantics into political “apostasy”’, 193. 4. See Ch. 15 above. 5. Cobbett, Rural Rides (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), 199–200. 6. Henry Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen who flourished in the Time of George III, first series, 2nd edn (Charles Knight, 1839), 166. 7. Gifford, Life of Pitt, II, 3. 8. Gifford, II, 30. 9. Thompson, English Working Class, 181. 10. Gifford, II, 313. 11. Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs and the French Revolution: the Middle Years (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1988), 123. Morel’s oration was intended to assert the practicability of Abbé de St Pierre’s Project of Perpetual Peace (1713). 12. Kennedy, 125–6, 129–32. Kennedy’s figures relate to the period 1 December 1791 to 20 April 1792.

Notes 257 13. Appendix to Thomas Cooper, A Reply to Mr Burke’s invective against Mr Cooper and Mr Watt, in the House of Commons on the 30th April 1792 (Manchester, 1793), 86–7. See also S. Andrews, The Rediscovery of America: Transatlantic Crosscurrents in an Age of Revolution (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press; 1998), 95–8. 14. See M.L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs and the French Revolution: the First Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 233–41. 15. Kennedy, The Middle Years, 151–2. 16. Kennedy, The Middle Years, 154. 17. Kennedy, The Middle Years, 138–9. 18. Kennedy, The Middle Years, 159–60. 19. Archives parlementaires XXXIV 314 in T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars (Longman, 1986) 135. That summer (1792) Priestley’s son, William, addressed the Legislative Assembly, which he hailed as ‘the first Magistrates of a free people’. See GM LXII (July 1792), 657. 20. For the full text, see ST 5 May, 1792. 21. See Blanning, 153. 22. See Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins: Reformers in Late 18th Century England (New York: Charles Scribner, 1968), 81. 23. Cone, 92. 24. See Blanning, 84–104. For correspondence between Louis XVI and the Emperor, see GM LXII (Jan. 1792), 76–9. 25. For text of manifesto, see ST 3 August 1793, with the threat of retribution printed in italics. 26. Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Révolution française, III, 170. 27. See Blanning, 148–52. 28. E.g. Blanning, 141: ‘It is difficult to see how the British government could have avoided a confrontation. A stark choice had been presented: abandon the Dutch to their fate or fight.’ 29. Strictures on Mr Burke’s Two Letters addressed to a Member of Parliament (Robinsons, 1796) in AR XXIV (Dec. 1796) 621. 30. For a careful weighing of ideological factors, see E.M. Macleod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars against Revolutionary France 1792–1802 (Aldershot and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998). 31. Cone, 145. 32. Cone, 115–16. 33. Cone, 124. 34. Cone, 196. 35. For AR’s comments on the committee’s composition, see Ch. 3 above. 36. Cone, 197–8. 37. See Robert Hole, ‘English Sermons and Tracts as Media of Debate on the French Revolution 1789–99’ and John Dunwiddy, ‘Interpretations of AntiJacobinism’ in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Gayle Trusdel Pendleton in ‘Towards a Bibliography of the Reflections and Rights of Man Controversy’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 85 (1982), 65–103 gives full weight to sermons, and thus presents a 2:1 advantage to Burke’s supporters. 38. J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 249.

258 Notes 39. Clark, 251. 40. Burke, A Letter to Richard Burke, Esq. on Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland (1793), in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 6 vols (Bohn, 1883–6), VI, 398. For ministerial involvement in BC, see Ch. 13 above. 41. J.E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) ranks Anglican clergy with the best of government pamphleteers. 42. Hannah More, Village Politics: Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Labourers in Great Britain. By Will Chip, a Country Carpenter, 2nd edn (Rivingtons, 1793) in Cone, 150. See Susan Pedersen, ‘Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks and Popular Culture in Late EighteenthCentury England’ in Journal of British Studies XXV (1986), 84–113. Burke’s Reflections sold 19 000 copies in the first two months, and a total of 30 000 in the first two years. Paine estimated that Rights of Man eventually reached 400 000 to 500 000 in various versions and translations. 43. AR had absorbed ER in 1796. 44. For individual circulation figures of AR, CR and MR, see Ch. 11 above. See also Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 24, and C.H. Timperley, Encyclopaedia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote, 2nd edn (Bohn, 1842), 795. Timperley gives the circulation of NANR as 7000–8000. 45. Aspinall, 24. 46. According to Roper, Leeds library took AR, CR, MR, BC, while Worcester took AR, MR and BC. For Roper’s complete list, see Reviewing before the Edinburgh, 25. 47. AJM I (Oct. 1798), 475. 48. Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford and others, 10 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981–91), IX, 223–4. Richard Dinmore in An Exposition of the Principles of the English Jacobins … (London: Jordan; Norwich: March; both 1796) expressed his pride that ‘their great enemy Edmund Burke admits there are eighty thousand men yet in England, thinned as they have been by emigration, who hold these doctrines’. See AR XXV (Jan. 1797) 85 and Ch. 12, note 53 above. 49. Thelwall, Rights of Nature, against the Usurpations of Establishments; in a Series of Letters to the People in reply to the False Principles of Burke, Part II (Symonds, 1796), in Cone, iii. See also MR XXII (Feb. 1797), 229 and (for Part I) MR XXI (Dec. 1796), 468–71. 50. Cone, iii–iv. Cf. John Dunwiddy, ‘Interpretations of anti-Jacobinism’, in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, 40, where he argues that the confrontation of the 1790s should be seen as being ‘not between conservatism and revolution, but between conservatism and distributive radicalism’. 51. MMG VI (Oct. 1798), 245. Cf. OED definition of anti-Jacobin: ‘opposed to the French Revolution, and to those who sympathized with it, or with democratic principles, who were nicknamed Jacobins by the partisans of Mr Pitt’s administration’. 52. 2 February 1801 Sheridan in PH XXXV, 934. 53. Thomas Erskine, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France (Debrett, 1797) in CR XIX (Feb. 1797), 203–4.

Notes 259 54. 55. 56. 57.

AR XXV (Mar. 1797), 308–9, 311. MR XXII (Feb. 1797), 204. For the contributions of Bisset and Gifford to AJM, see Ch. 8 above. See Mark Philp, ‘The Fragmentary Ideology of Reform’, in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, 71–6. 58. Philip Ziegler, Addington: a Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (Collins, 1965), 77–8. Sidmouth’s last speech in the Lords was against Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and his last vote was against the 1832 Reform Bill. 59. ANR 1796 (1800), iii–iv.

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262 Bibliography Thomas, D.O. Response to Revolution: How the Opening Events of the French Revolution were Perceived by Some Prominent Welshmen (Cardiff, 1989). Thrale, Mary. (ed.) Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society (Cambridge, 1983). Veitch, G.S. The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform (1913). Ward, W.R. Religion and Society in England 1790–1850 (London, 1972). Watson, Richard. Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson Written by Himself (1817). Wells, Roger. Insurrection: the British Experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983). Wells, Roger. Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1801 (Gloucester, 1988). Windham, William. The Windham Papers, ed. L.S. Benjamin (1913). Wordsworth, Jonathan. Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (Oxford, 1991). Young, Arthur. Autobiography of Arthur Young, ed. M. Bentham-Edwards (1898).

Index Published works (with abbreviated title and date of publication) appear under author’s name, except that, where there is only a single reference to the author, an asterisk indicates that the title appears in the corresponding endnote. Other exceptions are newspapers, periodicals and anonymous works: these titles appear in alphabetical order of first significant word. Where the page reference is shown in square brackets, the title or author’s name does not appear in the text, but only in the endnote. Page references in bold type relate to illustrations. Adams, John, 171 Addington, Henry, 1st Viscount Sidmouth, 216, 259n Address to the Prime Minister of the King of Corsica (1795), [48], 229–30n Adet, Pierre Auguste, 193, 199–200, 201 Aliens Act, 31, 81, 135 Alien Office, 81, 108 allied powers, 37, 44, 69, 80, 126, 198, 206–7 Barlow’s Conspiracy of Kings, 184 Brissot on ‘Koblenz conspiracy’, 209 Burke on, 72 Cobbett on, 197 condemned by CR, 147 and partition of Poland, 22, 44–5, 131, 229n; and of France, 45–6, 147 America, 8, 76 ‘the Botany Bay of the whole world’, 24 see also United States of America American Revolution, 172, 201–2 Boucher on, 177 Burke on, 22 Dissenters and, 170, 173, 177 and French Revolution, 22 and millennialist rhetoric, 182–3 American War of Independence, 22, 23, 33, 128 Analytical Review AJM on, 99, 106, 115–17, 138, 152, 154, 156, 164 263

aims of, 156–7 on ‘alarmists’, 160, 161 and Barruel, 156, 162–3 on Beddoes, 60, 61–2 on Burke, 16–18, 21, 22–3, 28–9, 71, 161 and Christie, 19, 21, 156–7, 159 circulation of, 139, 212 on Coleridge, 53 on Commons Committee of Secrecy, 33 on concert of princes, 45, 229n demise of, 152, 154–5, 156, 213 on Erskine, 161 on French Revolution, 5, 7–8, 9, 155, 158–60, 161–3, 180–1, 245n on William Frend, 3 and ‘Gagging Acts’, 160, 163, 202 on John Gifford, 161–2 on Ireland, 106 on Jacobinism, 156, 160, 162–3, 164–5, 248n and Johnson’s indictment, 154–5 on Catherine Macaulay, 17–18 on Mackintosh, 26 on millennialism, 179–81 on Paine, 22 on parliamentary reform, 50–1, 158 on partition of Poland, 45–60, 159, 229n on Pitt, 60, 62, 159, 160, 163 on Playfair’s pamphlets, 45–6, 159 on Price, 5 on Priestley, 23, 182

264 Index Analytical Review continued Revolutionary War and, 139, 155–6, 159, 161–2 on Robespierre’s Terror, 161 on Robison, 162 on science, 157, 158, 163, 247n on Scottish sedition trials, 51 on Southey, 87 on Test and Corporation Acts, 168 and Theophilanthropists, 164–5 on Joseph Towers, 18, 160 on votes for women, 122 on Gilbert Wakefield, 158 on Helen Maria Williams, 155, 160 on Mary Wollstonecraft, 18, 116–18, 122 on Wordsworth, 89 censures Arthur Young, 162 Anglican Church, 141, 177, 178, 210 BC and, 173–4, 175–6 Burke and theology of, 211 Methodism and, 175 Priestley and 141, 170, 174–5 pro-government sermons, 211 Edward Tatham on, 172–3 see also clergy, Dissenters, Test and Corporation Acts, tithes Annual Register and Burke, 34 condemned by CR, 39–40, 228n on French response to peace terms, 40–1 on French Revolution, 35 Antichrist in the French Convention (1795), 181 Anti-Gallican, 117 Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, 200 and AJM, 97 Canning and, 72–3 circulation of, 82 and Duke of Norfolk, 76 on Fox, 74–7, 234n on Godwin, 111 on government advertising, 108 on Ireland, 79, 188 on Jacobinism, 73–4, 82, 85, 108 on ‘Jacobin poetry’, 74, 83–4, 85, 86, 94

on ‘Jacobin prints’, 74–5, 108, 109, 124, 125, 133–6, 137, 240n ‘New Morality’ verses, 73, 81, 82, 97, 110, 111 on Paine, 111 on peace negotiations, 77 Pitt and, 73, 81, 136 prospectus of, 73–4 on Robespierre, 74 on Helen Maria Williams, 111 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 148, 177, 212, 236n and AJW, 97, 100, 109, 138–9 on American Jacobins, 193–4 on Anti-Jacobin poetry, 101, 105, 152–4 on AR, 106, 115–17, 138, 152, 154, 156, 164 on Bonaparte, 109–10, 154, 187–8 on Cobbett, 192, 193–4, 203 on CR, 138, 139, 142, 144, 156, 164 first issue of, 97, 192 on German Jacobinism, 110, 114 on Goethe, 110 on Irish Jacobinism, 105–6 on Jacobinism and war, 103, 110 on ‘Jacobin morality’, 101, 114–16, 240n on ‘Jacobin press’, 98, 138 on Paine’s Jacobins, 103 on Jefferson, 194 on La Revellière-Lépaux, 98, 99, 100, 104 on John Locke, 147 on Lyrical Ballads, 94, 95 on MR, 138, 139, 142 ‘New Morality’ verses in, 82, 100 preface to bound volumes of, 108, 148 prospectus of, 97–8, 138 on Southey, 86 on Voltaire, 105 Apocalypse, 179–83, 184–6 see also millennialism Appeal to Men in Behalf of Women (1798), 155 Appeal to the Head of Heart respecting the threatened French Invasion (1798), [163], 248n

Index 265 Argus Patriote, 201 Arranged Catalogue, (1790), [by John Disney], 168 Aurore Journal Patriote, 200 Athenaeum, 101 Austria, see allied powers Aurora, see Philadelphia General Advertiser and Aurora Bacon, Francis, 16 Bache, Richard Franklin, 197, 200–1 balance of power, 30, 31, 132, 147, 159 Barlow, Joel, 195, 213 Advice to the Privileged Orders (1792) and other writings on French Revolution, 184 Prospect of Peace (1778), 183 Vision of Columbus (1787), 184 Barnard, Thomas, 248n* Barras, Paul Vicomte de, 163 Barruel, Abbé Augustin History of Jacobinism (1797), 150, 156, 162 Bastile; or a History of Charles Townly (1789), 7 Bastille, 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 34, 100, 171 Beaupuy, Michel, 90 Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin (1799), 109 Beddoes, Thomas, 231n Alexander’s Expedition [1792], 57–8 AR on, 60, 61–2 AJM and, 236n and Bristol Pneumatic Institution, 56, 57 Considerations on Factitious Airs (1795), [56–7], 231n; and other medical works, 57 CR, 56, 60 Defence on the Bill of Rights [1795], 61 Essay on Pitt (1796), 58–60 History of Isaac Jenkins (1792), 57 on industrial diseases, 92 Means of relieving the present Scarcity (1796), 61–2 MR on, 57 and Romantic poets, 56, 92, 96

What shall the Rich do to be Safe? (1797), 62 Where would be the Harm of a Speedy Peace? [1795], 61 Bedford, Francis Russell, 5th Duke of, 98, 99 Beloe, William, 173 Berington, Joseph, [187], 253n* Bicheno, James, 184, 253n* Birmingham riots (1791), 3, 24, 208 Bishop of Llandaff, see Richard Watson Bisset, Dr Robert contributes to AJM, 102, 104, 109, 114–16 Sketch of Democracy (1796), [161], 248n Bonaparte, Napoleon, 78, 83, 155, 163, 215 AJM on, 109–10, 188 CO on, 134 MC on, 135 Botany Bay, 24, 49 Boston Gazette, 184 Boucher, Jonathan, 177* Bowles, John and AJM, 103 Retrospect of Jacobinism (1798), 109, 147 Bowles, Rev. William Lisle (poet), 87 Braxfield, Robert Macqueen, Lord, 49–50 Brand, John (contributor to BC), 176 Brissot, Jean-Pierre, 113, 207, 208 and ‘Koblenz conspiracy’, 209 On the relative Situation of France and America (1788), 8 Bristol, 56, 58, 60–1, 72, 77 British Convention (Edinburgh), 49–50, 51 British Critic, 244n circulation of, 139, 176 contributors to, 176 founding of, 173–4 on Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Imlay, 119–20 and government propaganda, 211 on Irish Catholics, 187, 190 on Methodism, 175

266 Index British Crictic continued on NANR, 228n on Priestley, 174–5 and Society for the Reformation of Revolutionary Principles, 175–6, 251n Brothers, Richard, 185 Brougham, Henry Peter, Baron Brougham and Vaux on Burke in Historical Sketches (1839), 205 Brunswick Manifesto, 31, 209 Burke, Edmund, 36, 100, 188 and AJM, 215 and American Revolution, 22, 65–6 and ANR, 34–5 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), 15 On the Army Estimate (1790) 5, 30, 142, 227n and Committee of Secrecy, 33, 210, 227n his critics, 14, 16–27, 28, 59, 65–6, 70–2, 142–3, 172, 214–15, 217–20, 225n his defenders, 28–9, 197 and Dissenters, 170, 211 and English ‘Jacobins’, 47, 70, 208–9, 214, 248n, 258n on French Constitution, 6, 19, 142 and Fox, 6 and Ireland, 80, 186, 188 and Lansdowne, 224n Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), 6, 28, 142–3 Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) 65 Letter to Richard Burke [211], 258n and Paine, 23, 142 and Pitt, 30, 32, 33, 72 on Price, 11, 12, 141–2, 170 and Priestley, 141 on the reading public, 212 Reflections on the revolution in France (1790), 4–5, 13, 14–17, 34, 97, 170, 258n Regicide Peace (1796), 69–72, 84, 101, 133, 161, 212 on Rousseau, 6–7

on Test and Corporation Acts, 169–70 and Revolutionary war, 14–15, 30, 33, 205, 209–10 Burns, Robert, 87, 222n Burnaby, Rev. Andrew Sermon in Greenwich Church (1793), [165], 249n Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of, 183 Butt, R. G., Sermon upon the general Fast (1793), [181], 251n Calet, J.J., 11* Calonne, Charles Alexander de, 158 Lettre Adressé au Roi (1789), 9 Callender, James, 194* Cambridge Intelligencer, 68, 124, 232n Camden, John Jeffreys Pratt, 2nd Earl, 1st Marquis, 188 Campbell, Lord John, later 1st Baron Campbell, 126 Camperdown, battle of, 135 Canning, George, 242n and AJM, 97 and AJW, 72–3, 84, 94, 234n, 239n and Gillray, 101 and ‘New Morality’ verses, 73, 81, 82, 100, 109, 111, 125 and Pitt, 72–3, 109, 239n Carnot, Lazare, 70 Cartwright, Major John Commonwealth in Danger (1795), [146], 244n Constitutional Defence of England (1796), 150 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 203 Case of the People of England (1798), [163], 248n Catherine II (Empress of Russia), 44, 73, 131, 186 Catholics defenders of, 186 disabilities of, 187, 189, 259n in Ireland, 79–80, 186, 187, 188–9 and millennialism, 179, 181, 186, 188, 253n Catlow, Simon, 168* Charles I of England, 71, 174, 176–7

Index 267 Charles X of France, 205 Charleston, 198 censorship, see ‘Gagging Bills’, press Chatham, Hester Countess of, 30 Chatterton, Thomas, 158 Chauvelin, François Bernard, 31–2, 42 Chelsum, James, [187], 253n* Christie, Thomas, 183 founds AR, 19, 156–7 attacks Burke, 19–21, 159 in France, 20, 159–1 Letters on the Revolution of France (1791), 19–21 Civil War, English and French Revolution, 71, 78, 84, 170, 176–7 Horsley on, 174 Catherine Macaulay on, 171 Clapham, Samuel, [175], 250n* Clarence, William, Duke of (later William IV), 67 clergy, 26, 59, 106, 187 BC on, 175 as government propagandists, 211, 258n Cobbett, William and AJM, 101, 192, 193–4, 203 on American Jacobinism, 194–6, 197–8 and American press, 101, 192, 197, 200, 202 abandons anti-Jacobinism, 203, 204–5, 256n Bone to Gnaw for Democrats (1795), 194–6 Bloody Buoy (1796), 196–7 GM on, 196, 202–3 History of American Jacobins (1796), 197 Horrors of French Revolution (1798), 202–3, 255–6n and Jacobin press, 192, 194, 197, 202–3 Journal of Residence in the USA (1819), [203], 256n Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796), [193], 254n On the emigration of Dr Priestley (1794) 193

and Pitt, 202, 203, 204–5, 254n Republican Judge (1798), 101, 192, 203 Rural Rides (1830), 204–5 Le Tuteur Anglais (1795), 193 Weekly Political Register, [193], 202, 254n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 87, 203 Apocalyptic rhetoric, 190–1 and fall of Bastille, 1–2 and Beddoes, 56, 92, 96 Biographia Literaria (1819), 94 Bristol lectures, 53, 60, 176 on Burke, 65–6 and Cambridge Intelligencer, 68, 124 Conciones ad Populum (1795), 53 on ‘Gagging Acts’, 53, 64 Fears in Solitude (1798), 246–7n his ‘Jacobinism’, 96, 98, 99 and Lyrical Ballads (1798), 92–4 in MC, 63; and in MP, 63, 125 Plot Discovered (1795), 53 on Revolutionary war, 63, 65, 66–7, 89, 190, 235n and social protest, 92–3, 94 on taxation, 125 and Thelwall, 55, 256n see also Watchman Comments on the Proposed War with France (1793), 145 Committee of Secrecy, see Parliament Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de, 79, 104, 208 Congress, US, 199, 200 Conjectures on the Prophecies of Daniel (1795) 184–5 Considerations preliminary to the Commencement of a War (1793), 44 Considerations on the State of Public Affairs (1798), 151 Constituent Assembly, French, 143, 197 Constitution, British, 17, 32, 171, 176, 126, 210 French criticism of, 40–1 ‘Jacobins’ and, 46, 82, 117

268 Index Constitution, British continued MR on, 146 as model for Poland, 22 Price and, 141–2 Constitution, French (1791), 5–6, 19, 23, 36, 78, 143 Constitution, Polish (1791), 22, 40, 44, 198, 242n Constitution, US, 202 Cooper, Samuel, 29* Cooper, Thomas, 47 and French Jacobins, 207–8 Reply to Mr Burke’s Invective (1792), 144, 257n Corsica, British annexation of, 42, 129–30, 229–30n Cottle, Joseph and the poets, 56, 90, 92, 96 Malvern Hills (1798), 90–1 and social protest, 91–2, 235–6n Courier, 99, 212, 213, 241n, 242n, 243n and AJM, 194 and AJW, 124–5, 133, 134, 240n, 242–3n on Burke, 132, 133 and Committee of Secrecy, 210 on Corsica, 129–30 editorial comment in, 128–9, 132-3, 134, 206, 241n French news in, 133–4, 242n; and French subsidies, 194 and Helvetic Republic, 242n on partition of Poland, 132–3 on Pitt’s war aims, 132–3, 134 on Robespierre, 129, 242n Cowdroy, William, 232n Cowper, William, 1, 222n Critical Review and AJM, 99, 138–9, 148 and allied powers, 45, 147 on ANR, 39–40, 228n on fall of Bastille, 7, 140 on British Convention, 51–3, 146 hostile to Burke, 40, 71–2, 142–3, 144 sympathetic to Burke, 15, 28, 30, 144, 172 circulation of, 139, 176, 212

editorial policy of, 140, 142–3, 173, 244n hostile to French Revolution, 30, 141, 142 sympathetic to French Revolution, 140–1, 143, 149 on ‘Gagging Bills’, 53–4, 146 on ‘Jacobinism, 144, 148–9 on Mackintosh, 143, 144 on NANR, 37, 38 on parliamentary reform, 48, 146 on Pitt, 60 on Price and Priestley, 141–2 on Revolutionary War, 42, 139, 145, 147–8, 149, 215 on Rousseau, 7, 140 and Southey, 87, 93 on Test and Corporation Acts, 173 on Wollstonecraft, 118–19, 122 Crisis stated, The (1793), [145], 244n Cromwell, Oliver, 166, 171, 179 see also Civil War, regicides Currie, James [‘Jasper Wilson’], 160 Cursory Strictures on the present War (1793), 43, 229n Czarcoselo [Tsarkoe Selo], 73 Danger of Repealing the Test Act (1790), 166–7 Daubeny, Rev. Charles, 186* Declaration of Independence (1776), 8, 22, 183, 198 Declaration of Rights (1789), 3, 11, 33 deism, 135–6, 164–5, 167 Detail of the Wonderful Revolution at Paris (1789), 7 Devonshire, Duchess of, see Georgiana Dinmore, Richard, 258n* Directory of France AJM on 98, 101, 103, 104 AJW on, 74, 75, 77 AR on, 163 and British press, 101, 136–7, 192 Burke on, 70, 71–2 W and, 68 seizes Switzerland, 61, 63, 163, 242n and peace, 132

Index 269 Discourse Addressed to the Sons of liberty (1766), [183], 252n Dissenter done Over, The, (1798), [106], 238n Dissenters, 250n AJM on, 106–7, 167, 177 and American Revolution, 170–1, 173, 176–7 Burke on, 4, 169–70, 211 and Catholics, 187 and French Revolution, 2–4, 11, 23–4, 141–2, 167, 170–1, 176, 177–8, 188 and periodical press, ix, 36, 167–8, 170 Pitt and, 169, 176 and republicanism, 172, 176-7, 188 see also Test and Corporation Acts Dodsley, James, 34, 40 Dundas, Henry, 1st Viscount Melville, 65, 210 East India Company, 57 Eaton, Daniel, 52 Edgeworth, Maria, 57 Edict of Fraternity, 31, 42, 209 Edinburgh Review, 96, 212 Edinburgh Society of the Friends of the People, 49 Edwards, Jonathan, 182 Ellis, George, 233n and AJW, 73, 84, 94, 239n emigrés, 187, 205, 207, 209 English Revolution (1688), 48, 77, 171 Burke on, 20, 22, 142 Enquiry into the Crime of ‘compassing and imagining the King’s Death’ (1795), 52 Errors of Mr Pitt’s Administration (1793), 44 Erskine, Thomas (later Lord Chancellor) AJW on, 75; and AR on, 161 Causes and Consequences of the War (1797), 133, 150, 215 on Ireland, 245n Evening Mail, 126 Eyre, Lord Chief Justice, 52

Falkland, Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount, 78 Fauchet, Jean, 193, 199 Feuillants, 209 Fifth Monarchists, 178, 179 Fishguard, French landing at, 72, 77, 133, 162 First Letter of a Free Mason (1798), [156], 246n Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 105 Flower, Benjamin as editor of Cambridge Intelligencer, 68, 124 CR on his French Constitution (1792), [144], 244n Flower of the Jacobins (1792), 144 Fox, Charles James, vi, 36, 77, 99, 156, 213 AJM and, 98, 101, 107 AJW and, 73, 75–6, 234n breach with Burke, 6 and French Revolution, 5–6, 33, 42, 46 and ‘Gagging Bills’, 54 Letter to the Electors of Westminster (1793), 45 and MC, 131 on partition of Poland, 45 and Pitt, 76, 77, 79, 206 and ‘sovereignty of the people’, 76 opposes universal suffrage, 48 Fox, Edward Long, 60 Fox, William, 45* Francis, Sir Philip, 4, 14, 48 The Question as it stood in March 1798, [163–4], 248n Fraternal Decree, see Edict of Fraternity Frederick II (‘the Great’) of Prussia, 105, 158 Freemasons, 149, 156, 245n French Revolution, 1–3, 24, 139, 199 Assembly of Notables, 37, 140–1 Bonaparte’s victories, 134, 215 Burke and, 4, 14–16, 29, 33, 38, 65, 69–72, 133 Christie on, 19–21, 159 Cobbett on, 192, 194–9 Constituent Assembly, 143

270 Index French Revolution continued Constitution (1791), 5–6, 19, 23, 36, 78, 143 Consulate, 109 Directory, 68, 70, 71–2, 74, 75, 77, 103, 194 Dissenters and, 2–4, 11, 23–4, 141–2, 167, 170–1, 176, 177–8, 188 and English Civil War, 71, 78, 84, 170, 176–7 Fˆete de Fédération, 2, 12 Fox on, 5–6, 33, 42, 46 Fishguard landing, 72, 77, 133, 162 and Freemasons, 149 histories of, 112–13, 148, 158, 245n invasion of England, 78–9, 81, 215; and of Ireland, 72, 215; and of Switzerland, 61, 63, 163, 215 Louis XVI’s trial/execution, 31, 33, 43, 71, 105, 174 and millennialism, 179–81, 182, 184, 191 National Assembly, 6, 10 National Convention, 31, 181, 188, 199, 207 Pitt’s war against, 31–4, 38, 65, 132–3, 134–5, 147–8, 160, 256n Price on, 3, 12, 141–2 Robespierre’s ‘Terror’, 74, 76, 133, 160, 199 Helen Maria Williams on, 2, 103, 160–1 Mary Wollstonecraft on, 113 Frend, William Address to the Church of England (1788), 3 charged with blasphemy, 2–3 Peace and Union (1793), [2–3], 222n Freneau, Philip, 201 Rising Glory of America, The (1772), 183 Frere, John Hookham and AJW, 73, 84, 94, 234n, 239n ‘Gagging Bills’, 127, 176, 211 and AR, 160, 163, 202

attacked by Beddoes, 61; and by Coleridge, 53, 64; and by C. J. Fox 54; and by Godwin, 53 CO on, 241n CR and MR on, 146 ST and Pitt’s defence of, 127 Symonds’s Abstract of the Two Bills (1796), 146 Gazette de Leide, 201 Gazette of the United States, 201 Genˆet, ‘Citizen’ Charles-Edmond, 193, 198, 199 Gentleman’s Magazine, 139, 156, 166, 187 on Burke, 6, 13 on Christie, 21 on Cobbett, 196–7, 202–3 on Dissenters’ loyalty, 170, 177–8 and French Revolution, 10–13, 62, 111–12 on Godwin, 54 on Methodism, 175 on millennialist publications, 175, 177, 181–2, 185–6 on Paine, 19, 21–2, 62 on Pitt, 62 on political societies, 11–12, 13, 54, 62 on press freedom, 202 on Price, 11–12, 224n on Priestley, 24, 182 on republicanism, 22, 170 on Test and Corporation Acts, 166–7, 168–9 on Helen Maria Williams 19, 225n on Wollstonecraft, 19 Genty, Abbé Louis, 8 George III of England, 71, 140 Gillray on, 100 as ‘image of the Beast’, 183 and Louis XVI, 30, 208 and Pitt, 176, 211 and Regency crisis, 11 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 231n Gerrald, Joseph, 49–52* Gibbon, Edward, 157

Index 271 Gifford, John [John Richards Green], 109 Address to the Loyal Associations (1798), 104 editor of AJM, 97 and AR, 161–2 on Burke, 205 CO on, 243n CR on, 148 Letter to Erskine (1797), 161 on Fox and Foxites, 206 and William Gifford, 107, 190 on Ireland, 105–6 Letter to Lord Lauderdale (1795), 97 and Paine, 103 on the press, 161 Life of Pitt (1809), 46, 107, 164, 190, 215 see also Anti-Jacobin Review Gifford, William, editor of AJW (later editor of Quarterly Review), 73, 107, 196 Gillray, James, vi, 99, 100–1, 111, 153 Gilpin, William, 156* Girondins, 113 Godwin, William, 47, 109 Caleb Williams, (1794), 50 Considerations on Lord Grenville’s and Mr Pitt’s Bills (1795), [82], 362n Cursory Strictures (1795), 52 [on Treason Act] in Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon, 98, 99, 111 and NANR, 35–7 Political Justice (1793), 111, 115, 120 Wollstonecraft’s Memoirs and Posthumous Works, 113–16, 119–20, 122–3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 110, 113, 114 Goodwin, Dr Thomas, 179* Gordon Riots, 170 Graham, Catherine Macaulay, see Catherine Macaulay Grattan, Henry Address to his Constituents (1797), 189 and Catholic Relief Bill, 80

Green, John Richards, see Gifford, John Grenville, George, 2nd Earl his foreign policy, 30–1, 42, 209 as the Beast of Revelation, 183 Grey, Charles, 2nd Earl and parliamentary reform, 47, 48, 126 his motion for peace (1796), 132 in ‘New Morality’ verses, 100 Remonstrance against War with France (1793), 159 Griffiths, Ralph, founder of MR, 139, 245n Gunning, Henry, 2 Habeas Corpus Act Abstract of 52 suspended by Pitt, 202; suspension renewed, 81, 255n suspended by Lord Liverpool, 203 Hall, Robert, 160 Hamilton, Alexander, 200–1 Hammond, George, 69 Hardy, Thomas, 51, 130 Hastings, Warren, 9, 157 Hazlitt, William, 113–14, 212 Hearn, Thomas, 145–6* Hellins, John, 176 Henshall, Samuel, [106], 238n* Histoire du Gouvernement Francois (1788), [142], 243n Histoire Politique de la Révolution en France (1789), 7, 158 History of the Boroughs (1792), [48], 229n History of the Two Acts (1796), 146 Hobbes, Thomas, 17 Hoche, General Lazare, 77, 242n Holcroft, Thomas accused of sedition, 52, 204 attacked in AJM, 98, 99, 102, 109, 111, 237–8n Hugh Trevor (1794–7), 102 Knave or Not (1798), 102, 237–8n Narrative of Facts (1795), 52 Holland, 31, 32, 42, 65, 130 Hollis, Thomas, 171–2 Hollis, Thomas Brand, 171

272 Index Hood, Admiral Sir Samuel, 1st Viscount, 38 Horsley, Rt Rev. Samuel, Bishop successively of St David’s, Rochester and St Asaph’s 215 on identity of Antichrist, 186 Critical Disquisitions on Isaiah (1799), 253n Sermon on the Martyrdom of Charles I (1793), [186], 250n Howlett, Rev. J, 151* Hoxton Academy, 36 Hume, David, 171–2 Hutchins’s Almanack [1761], 182 Illuminati, 149, 162 Imlay, Gilbert and ‘Jacobin morality’, 101, 113, 117, 240n Wolstonecraft’s letters to, 118, 121 India, 36, 57–8 Impartial History of the Revolution (1794), 148 Ireland, 11 AJW on 79–80 Burke and, 80, 186, 188 Coleridge and, 63, 89, 125, 190 French attempts on, 72, 215 Grattan and, 80, 189 Jacobinism in, 81, 103, 105–6, 187–8 Musgrave on 190 United Irishmen, 79, 105–6, 188, 189–90 Ireland, Rev. John, 176* Isnard, Henri-Maximin, 207 Italy, 134, 135, 215 Jacobinism, 99, 135, 153 AJM on, 97–100, 101, 103–6, 108–9 AJW on, 74, 81–2, 85, 100 and Bonaparte, 109–10, 154, 188 Cobbett on, 192, 194–9, 204–5, 256n as an international conspiracy, 149–50 CR and MR accused of, 142 histories of, 148–9, 150, 156 in Germany, 96, 110, 113–14, 149 in Ireland, 81, 103 ‘Jacobinical religion’, 116

‘Jacobin morality’, 101, 111–16, 122–3 ‘Jacobin poetry’, 74, 83–6, 94 MMG on, 214 philosophes and, 25, 104–5, 176 and rights of man, 149 war essential to, 103 likened to yellow fever, 148–9 Jacobins, American, 192, 194–9 Jacobins, English, 256n AJM on, 97–100, 101, 103–5, 108–9 AJW claims success against, 81–2; and ridicules in verse, 85, 86 and American Jacobins, 192 Burke and, 47, 70, 208–9, 214, 248n, 258n and French Jacobins, 46, 54, 207–8, 210–11 Holcroft and, 102, 111, 204 and philosophes, 25 Pitt and, 210–11, 256n Thelwall as, 54–5, 99, 111, 214 Jacobins, French (Society of the Friends of the Constitution), 54, 148, 199, 209 AJM on, 104, 105, 106–7 Bonaparte as, 109–10, 154, 188 on Burke, 208 and English ‘Jacobins’, 46, 54, 207–8, 210–11 provincial branches of, 206–8 Wordsworth and, 89 Jacobites, 169, 170 Jay, John, 199–200 Jefferson, Thomas and Cobbett, 193, 194 and Catherine Macaulay, 171 and Republican press, 200–1 Jeffery, Francis, 96 Jena, University of, 110 Jenkinson, Charles, 1st Earl Liverpool, 84 Jenkinson, Robert, 2nd Earl Liverpool (later prime minister), 67, 203, 210 Johnson, Joseph, publisher and AR, 19, 23, 154–5, 157 indicted, 81, 154–5, 158 and Test and Corporation Acts pamphlets, 168

Index 273 Jordan, Camille, 103* Journal of the Captivity of Lewis XVI (1798), [155], 246n Kaunitz, Count Wenzel Anton von, 209 Kippis, Andrew, 36 King, Edward, 185* Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand von, 96, 114 Lafayette [formerly La Fayette] Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Guilbert du Motier, Marquis de, 78, 200, 201 Lamb, Charles, 87, 98, 99, 212, 237n Lameth, Charles de, 12 Lansdowne, Sir William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, 1st Marquis of Lansdowne, 224n Larevellière-Lépaux, Louis Marie, vi, 98, 99, 100, 104 Lauderdale, James Maitland, 8th Earl Letters to the Peers of Scotland (1794), 42 John Gifford’s Letter to, 97 Legislative Assembly, French, 207, 257n Lebrun, Charles François, Duc de Plaissance, 34, 208 Leopold II (Emperor of Austria), 206–7, 209 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 114 Letter to Charles James Fox (1798), 156 Lettre aux Etats Généraux de France (1798), 9 Letter to the Earl of Moira (1798), 189 Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt (1797), 150 Letter upon the fatal Consequences of the War (1793), [38–9], 228n Letters on the Concert of Princes (1793), 44, 147 Linnaean Society, 156 Literary Memoirs of Living Authors (1798), 21 Liverpool, Lord, see Jenkinson Lloyd, Charles, 98, 99, 237n Locke, John, 29, 109, 147, 160

London Corresponding Society AJW on, 77 and British Convention, 49 and Lords Committee of Secrecy, 210 distributes CO, 212 GM on, 54 Explicit Declaration of Principles and Views (1795), [54], 230n Moral and Political Magazine, 54 and naval mutinies, 55 London Magazine, 212 London Revolution Society, 11, 15, 207–9 Loughborough, 1st Baron, 32, 65 Louis XVI, 7, 25, 148, 155, 184, 194 allies seal his fate, 45, 147 and bread shortage, 10 enforced return to Paris, 3, 4–5, 35–6 and George III, 208 in Gillray cartoon, 100 his trial and execution, 31, 32, 33, 45, 71, 105, 174; and possibility of exile, 43 Loyalist Associations, 48, 104, 173, 210 Macaulay, Catherine [later Catherine Macaulay Graham] Address to the People of England (1775), 171 and America, 171–2 and Burke, 17–18, 172 on Cromwell’s Commonwealth, 171, 172 History of England [8 vols] (1763–83), 171–2 History of England [1 vol.] (1778), [171], 250n Observations on ‘Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’ (1770), 172 Letter to Stanhope (1791), 17–18 McKenna, Theobald, 187* Mackintosh, James, 125 challenges Burke in Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), 24–6 recants ‘Jacobin’ principles, 24

274 Index Madison, James, 195, 199 Magna Carta, 11 Maidstone trials, 80 Malmesbury, James Harris, 1st Earl of, 69, 133 Manchester Constitutional Society, 207, 208 Manchester Gazette, 232n Manual of the Theophilanthropes (1797), 164 Manuscripts in the Library of the King of France (1789), 7 Marat, Jean-Paul, 196, 200 Margarot, Maurice, 50 Marie Antoinette, of France, 14 Maryland Journal, 183 Maury, Abbé Jean Siffrein, 196 Maynooth College, 186 Mémoire pour le Peuple Francais (1789), 9 Methodis, 175 Miles, William, 34, 108 militia, 31, 79, 126 millennialism Antichrist as Jacobinism, 180–1; and as Pope, 186 AR on, 179–81 ‘the Beast’, 183, 184, 186 Joel Barlow and, 183–4 James Bicheno and, 194, 253n Coleridge and, 190–1 and French Revolution, 179–82, 185–6, 190–1 Philip Freneau and, 183 GM on, 182, 184–5 of New England, 182–3 Priestley and, 182 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, 200 Moira, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquis of Hastings and 2nd Earl of Moira, 79, 150, 189, 245n Monroe, James, 199, 255n Monthly Magazine, 54, 120, 167–8, 214 Monthly Mirror, 238n Monthly Review, 91–2 AJM on, 99, 138, 139 on Barlow, 184 on Beddoes, 57, 59–60

on British Convention, 50, 146 on Burke’s critics, 18–21, 25–6 on Burke’s defenders, 29 on Burke’s Reflections, 15–16, 226n; and on his Regicide Peace, 69–71; and on his speeches, 142 on Catholics, 187 circulation of, 139, 212 and Erskine, 150, 215 on French Revolution, 5, 8, 9–10, 19–21, 141, 150 on William Frend, 3 on John Gifford, 97 on Ireland, 150, 188–90 on Jacobin conspiracy theories, 150 on Lyrical Ballads, 95, 236n on Paine, 81, 142, 184 on parliamentary reform, 47–8, 50, 146–7, 149–50 on Pitt, 44, 59–60, 150–1 and press freedom, 108, 145–6, 151 on Price, 141 on Revolutionary War, 43–5, 70–1, 150 on Southey, 86–7 on Test and Corporations Acts, 3–4, 139–40, 168, 187 on Treason Trials, 52 on Gilbert Wakefield, 81 on Wollstonecraft, 19; and her relations with Godwin, 119, 120 on Wordsworth, 89–90 Moral and Political Magazine, 54 More, Hannah on Rights of Woman, 120 Village Politics (1793), 211–13 Morel, Hyacinthe, 206* Morning Chronicle, 99 attacked by AJW, 124, 125, 134–6 editorial comment in, 130–1 and Fox, 75–6 Godwin’s Cursory Strictures in, 52 on Hoche’s instructions, 77 on Jacobinism in opera, 135 as ‘Jacobin print’, 242n and ministerial hacks, 108 and parliamentary debates, 127 on partition of Poland, 131

Index 275 Morning Chronicle continued proprietor and printer imprisoned, 62–3, 81 on Revolutionary War, 130–1, 134–5 Morning Post, 99 absorbs World and Telegraph, 125 and AJW, 124, 125, 133, 135, 136–7 Coleridge in, 63, 89 and Corsica, 130 on Directory, 136 editorial comment in, 130 and Fox, 75–6, 131 and French invasion scare, 78 and French subsidies, 136 loses government advertising, 108 and Prince of Wales, 240n on Revolutionary War, 130, 131 on Treason Trials, 130 Morpeth, George Howard Vincent, Viscount (later Earl of Carlisle), 108 Muir, Thomas, 49 Musgrave, Sir Richard, 190* Napoleon, see Bonaparte Nares, Rev. Robert, 173, 175 National Assembly of France, 10 Burke and, 6, 16, 28, 142–3 Dissenters and, 3, 170 Mackintosh on, 25 National Convention of France, 188 Antichrist in, 181 and civic festivals, 207 Fraternal Decree of, 31 Monroe and, 199 natural rights, see rights of man naval mutinies, 55, 72 Necker, Germaine, [later Boroness de Sta¨el], 223n Necker, Jacques, 100, 158 Memorial on the Scarcity in France (1789), 10 Speech of Mr Necker, Director General of the Finances (1788), [8–9], 223n Nelson, Horatio, 152, 187 Netherlands, 30, 69, 132, 209

New Annual Register BC on, 228n on Burke’s defection, 36 on French Revolution, 35–6, 37–8, 46 John Gifford plagiarizes, 148 Godwin and, 35–8 and Grenville-Chauvelin correspondence, 42–3 on Revolutionary War, 38, 42–3, 46 on Rights of Man, 226n Newgate prison, 50, 63, 84 ‘New Mortality’ Gillray’s cartoon, 98, 99, 111 verses in AJM, 100, 109; and in AJW, 73, 81, 82, 100 Nicholls, John, 126 Noble, Mark, [176–7], 251n Nootka Sound, 42 Nore mutiny, 55, 72 Norfolk, Charles Howard, 11th Duke of, 76, 100, 213 Norwich (‘the Jacobin city’), 48, 55, 56 Nouvelle Théorie Astronomique (1788), [157], 247n Objections to the War examined and refuted, (1793), 43–4 Observations on the Conduct of the Dissenters (1790), [141], 243n Observations sur les Ecrits de Voltaire (1789), [140], 243n O’Coigley, James [or Quigley], 79–80, 105, 188, 213 O’Connor, Arthur, 79, 105, 188, 213 Paine, Thomas, 105, 145, 203 AJM on, 98, 99, 103, 109, 111, 115–16 AR, 22 compared with Barlow, 184; and with Burke, 22–3 Common Sense (1776), 22 CR on, 142–3, 226n GM on, 21 on Jacobins, 103 Letter to Erskine (1797), 81 MR on, 81, 142, 184

276 Index Paine, Thomas continued To the People of France (1797), 101, 103 Rights of Man (1791, 1792), 21–3, 47, 48, 49, 63, 142, 193, 226n, 258n and Society for Constitutional Information, 47 his trial, 31 Palmer, Thomas Fyshe, 49 pantisocracy, 1 Papacy, see Catholics Parliament AJW praised in, 136 Committee of Secrecy (Commons), 33–4, 108, 210, 241n Committee of Secrecy (Lords), 210 debates on slave trade, 67, 126; and on Test and Corporation Acts, 140, 169; and on war, 31, 38, 64–5, 67, 68, 132 see also parliamentary reform, Pitt parliamentary reform, 56, 61, 171, 189, 210 and annual parliaments, 47, 49 AR on, 50–1, 158 British Convention and, 49–50 Cartwright and, 146, 150 CR on, 146 disillusionment with, 50–1 and ‘economical reform’, 205–6 Grey and, 47, 48–9, 126 MP on, 130 MR on, 146–7, 149–50 Pitt and, 49, 58, 210 Society for Constitutional Information and, 47 and universal suffrage, 47, 49, 146–7 Philadelphia General Advertiser and Aurora, 194, 200 philosophes AJM on, 104–5, 176 Barruel on, 150 Cobbett on, 193, 197 Mackintosh on, 25 and millennialism, 183 Playfair on, 148 Phillips, Richard, 167 Pigott, Charles, 63* Pillnitz, Declaration of, 209 Pirie, Alexander, 180*

Pitt, William, the younger, 100, 101 and AJM, 107 and AJW, 73, 81, 136 Beddoes on, 58–60, 61 and Burke, 32, 72 and Canning, 72–3, 109, 239n Cobbett on, 202, 256n Coleridge on, 63, 89, 190, 235n and Dissenters, 169, 176 on ‘Gagging Bills’, 127 Gifford’s Life of, 46, 107, 164, 190, 215 and habeas corpus, 202, 210 and Ireland, 80, 81, 125, 186, 190 MR on, 44, 59–60, 150–1 and neutrality, 30–1, 209 and parliamentary reform, 49, 58, 210 and peace negotiations, 69, 160 and public opinion, 32–3 likened to Robespierre, 76 and taxation, 61, 67-8, 77, 125, 126–7, 206 his war policy, 31–3, 38, 42, 61, 65, 87, 125, 132, 147–8 Playfair, William, 197 Better Prospects to Merchants (1793), 159 History of Jacobinism (1795), 148–9 Present State of French Politics (1793), 45–6, 159 political societies, 204 in America, 195–6, 198–9, 199 Commons Committee of Secrecy and, 210 GM on, 11–12, 13 see also London Corresponding Society, London Revolution Society, Society for Constitutional Information Poland constitution (1791) of, 22, 40, 44 partition of, 22, 45, 131, 159, 198 Political Reformation on a large Scale (1789), [158], 247n Porcupine’s Gazette, 194 press, 126 in America, 101, 192, 194, 197, 200, 201, 202

Index 277 press continued AJM and curbs on, 98, 109, 243n AJW on, 74, 109, 124, 125, 133, 135, 137 BC on, 173 and editorial content, 128–33 and French news, 134–5 GM on, 203 and parliamentary debates, 126–7, 241n subsidized by government, 107–8, 125, 202, 240–1n; and by French, 101, 136–7, 192, 194 Price, Dr Richard, 12, 105, 173, 213 and American Revolution, 22, 142 and Burke, 4, 12, 14, 15, 100, 141, 170, 208 Discourse on the Love of our Country (1790), 3, 11, 141–2, 168–9 and French Jacobins, 208 Priestley, Joseph, 103, 155 and America, 3, 22, 23, 24 and Birmingham riots (1791), 24, 208 and Cobbett, 193, 254n and French Revolution, 23–4, 141, 167, 208 in Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon, 98, 99 Letters to Burke (1791), 141 Letters to the Philosophers and Politicians of France (1793), 174–5 Present State of Europe compared with antient Prophecies (1794), 182 on Test and Corporation Acts, 141 his ‘train of gunpowder’, 170 Priestley, William, 257n Prince Regent (later George IV), 11, 125, 140, 240n Prophecy of the French Revolution (1793), 181 Puritans Dissenters and, 172–3, 177 GM and, 167 Jacobins and, 176 and republicanism, 166, 177, 179

Quarterly Review, 212 Quebec Act, 6 Quesnay, François de Beaurepaire, 157 Question Considered, The (1792), [159], 247n Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, Jean Paul, 143* Ramsay, David, 202* Raynal, Abbé Guillaum, 226n Letter to the National Assembly (1791), [143], 244n Reasons for a Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), [170], 249n Reeves, John, 48, 173 Reflections on the Irish Conspiracy (1797), 189 Regency Crisis, 11, 140 regicides, 192 English, 71, 84, 174, 176 French, 33, 47, 98 see also Burke: Regicide Peace republicanism; 134, 174, 198 AJW on, 84 Association against Republicans and Levellers, 48, 173 Barlow and, 195 Cobbett’s Republicans Judge, 101, 192, 203 Gallic republicanism, 161 GM on, 22 ‘Irish Jacobin Republic’, 81 Catherine Macaulay and, 172 and Puritanism, 166, 177, 179 Thelwall on Roman Republic, 161 Review of the case of the Protestant Dissenters (1790), [167], 249n Richards, George, 111–12 rights of man, 3, 149 AR on, 8 AJW on, 74 GM on, 19, 21 Jacobinism and, 149, 208 and the Millennium, 184 MR on, 8, 142 Paine’s Rights of Man, 21–3, 47, 48, 63, 142, 193, 226n Wollstonecraft on, 19

278 Index rights of woman AR on, 122 Appeal in Behalf of Women (1798), 155 CR on, 122 MR on, 121–2 Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, 114, 121–2 Robespierre, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de, 53, 199, 216 AJW on, 74, 78 CO on, 129, 133, 242n and cult of the Supreme Being, 135–6, 164 MC on, 135 Pitt likened to, 76 Helen Maria Williams on, 160 Robinson, Anthony, 155* Robinson, George, publisher, 36 Robison, Professor John Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797), 149, 162 Roscoe, William, 234n Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 6–7, 140 Rowlandson, Thomas, 213 Royal Society of Arts (London), 158 Royal Society of Medicine (Paris), 157 Saunders, Christopher, 162* Scheldt estuary, 31, 42, 131 Schiller, Johann Cristoph Friedrich, 96, 114 Scholar Armed, The (1795), 175–6 Scotland, 74–5, 49–52 Scourge for Dissenters, A (1790), 170 Sentiments of the Jacobins in France (1792), [164–5], 249n Seven Years War, 33 Sheffield, 1st Earl of, 65 Sheffield Constitutional Society, 147 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 18, 214, 245n, 250n Sidmouth, Viscount, see Addington Shelburne, Earl, see Lansdowne Sidney, Algernon, 18, 160 Skirving, William, 49–50, 51 slavery/slave trade abolition of, 9, 12, 49, 50, 140 W condemns 67

Smith, Adam, 91 Sneyd, Rev. John, 101 Society for Constitutional Information, 11–12, 18, 47, 210 Society for the Reformation of Revolutionary Principles, 175 Society of Friends of the Constitution, see Jacobins Socinianism, see Unitarianism Some Prophetical Periods (1790), 180 Southey, Robert, 1, 120, 236n AJW’s parodies of, 84–5 and Beddoes, 56, 92 Botany Bay Eclogues, 87–9, 95 Coleridge and, 96, 237n in Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon, 98, 99 as ‘Jacobin’, 84–7, 96 Joan of Arc (1796), 66, 86–7 and Lyrical Ballads (1798), 93–4 Madoc (1805), 87 his poems of social protest, 87–9, 93 Spencer, George John, 2nd Earl, 65 Spirit of John Locke revived (1795), 147 Spithead mutiny, 55, 72 Stanhope, Charles, 3rd Earl Letter to Burke (1790), 30 Catherine Macaulay and, 17–18 Star, The, 99 attacked by AJW, 125 French news in, 134, 242n on ‘Gagging Bills’, 127 and parliament debates, 126, 127 on partition of Poland, 131 States-General, 8, 37 State of the Country in 1798 (1798), 156 Stedman, C., 22* Stillman, Samuel, 184 Stone, John Hurford, 103, 155 Strictures on Mr Burke’s Two Letters (1796), [71], [209], 233n Stuart, Daniel, editor of MP, 125 Sun, The, 31 Sunday schools, 64, 173 Switzerland, 61, 63, 215, 242n Symonds’s Abstract of the Two Bills (1796), 146

Index 279 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice, 193 Tatham, Edward Letters to Burke (1791), 29, 172–3 taxation, 61, 63, 67–8, 125 AJW on, 77 AR on, 163 CO on, 206 and MP’s masthead, 243n Triple Assessment Bill, 77, 126–7 see also tithes Taylor, Thomas, 185* Test and Corporation Acts, 141, 249n AR on, 168 Burke and, 169–70 CR on, 173 GM on, 166–7; and on Guildhall debate on, 168–9 MR on, 140, 168 pamphlets on, 3, 168, 170 parliamentary debates on, 140, 169–70 Thelwall, John, 54, 230–1n acquitted of treason, 51 Appeal to Popular Opinion (1796), 55 and Burke, 214 and Coleridge, 55, 256n edits Tribune, 54 his historical lectures, 54–5, 161 as ‘Jacobin’, 214 in Gillray’s ‘New Morality’ cartoon, 98, 99 Rights of Nature (1796), 213, [214], 258n Theophilanthropists, 81, 98, 99, 164–5 Tierney, George, 79, 100 Times, The, 125, 126, 241n tithes, 59, 63, 103, 170, 176 Tooke, John Horne, 76 acquitted of treason, 51 AJM on, 107 CR on, 52–3 Toulon, 38, 129 Toulmin, Joshua, 169 Towers, Joseph Dialogue between an Associator and a well-informed Englishman (1793), [160], 247n

Thoughts on a New Parliament (1790), 18 Townshend, Charles, 210 Transactions of the Linnaean Society (1798), 156 Treason Act (1351), 52 Treason Trials, 52-3, 79 Trial of Joseph Gerrald (1794), 49, 51–2 Trial of William Skirving (1794), 51 Trial of John Horne Tooke (1794), 52–3 Tribune (Thelwall’s journal), 54 True Briton, 31, 202 French news in, 242n and parliamentary debates, 127, 241n Tweddell, John, 2 Tyranny Annihilated (1798), 10 Unitarianism, 3, 21, 167, 168, 175, 213 United Irishmen, Society of, 188, 194 AJM on, 105–6 AJW on, 79–80 MR on, 189–90 United States, 1, 3 Cobbett in, 193–9 constitution of, 22, 25 Declaration of Independence, 8, 22 and French Revolution, 42, 193–5, 195–201, 207 ‘Jacobin’ press of, 101, 197, 200–1 ‘Jacobin’ societies in, 195–6, 198 Jay Treaty, 199–200 see also American Revolution, American War of Independence, George Washington Varennes, 30, 36 Vendée, La, 40, 190 Vergniaud, Pierre, 113 Versailles, march of women to, 35–6, 38, 112 View of the present State of Ireland (1797), 188–9 Vincent, William (Headmaster of Westminster), 176 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet, 105, 167, 200

280 Index Waddington, S.F., 71–2* Walker, George (anti-Jacobin novelist), 109* Walker, John, 243n Elements of Geography (1799), 139 Wakefield, Gilbert, 99 his edition of Georgics, 158 Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff (1798), 81, 154 Wansey, Henry, 106–7* Walpole, Horace, 121, 176 Washington, George, 76, 172, 196 and key of Bastille, 171 and French colours, 66 and Jay Treaty, 200 and press freedom, 201 Watchman, 64–8 Watson, Richard, Bishop of Llandaff, 81, 154, 215 Watt, James Jnr, 207 Weekly Political Register, [193], 202n Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 85 Wesleyanism, see Methodism Whig Club, 16, 76, 77, 213 Whitbread, Samuel, 100, 237n White, Gilbert, 158* Wilberforce, William, 32, 65, 127 Wilby, Rev. Edward, 159–60* William III of England, 187 William IV of England, see Clarence, Duke of Williams, Helen Maria, 2 AJM and, 103, 111 GM on, 19 Letters on France I (1790), 225n; III (1793), 160–1 Tour of Switzerland (1798), 155

Williams, J.H., [147–8], 245n Williams, William, 72* Wilson, Jasper [pseudonym], see Currie, James Windham, William, 33, 202, 210 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 109, 183 History of the French Revolution (2nd edn 1796), 112–13 and Imlay, 101, 113, 117–18, 119–20, 240n and ‘Jacobin Morality’, 101, 114–17, 240n Maria or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), 98, 99, 101, 111, 114–15, 118–20, 112 Memoirs (1798), 101, 111, 113–14, 115–16, 118–20, 122 Rights of Men (1790), 18–19, 225n Rights of Woman (1792), 114, 121–2 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786), 121 Wordsworth, William Descriptive Sketches (1793), 89–90 Evening Walk (1793), 235n and French Revolution, 1, 2, 90, 96 Lyrical Ballads (1798), 90, 92–6; and (1815), 236n Prelude (1805), 90 Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal (1809), 96 Young, Arthur Example of France a Warning to Britain (1793), 63–4 National Danger and the Means of Safety (1797), 162 Travels in France (1792), 63