Britain in an Age of Revolution

New blog

2008-03-19T19:56:00.000Z

I have just started a blog for our course for 2008-9, and have put up a suggested reading list. Click on the address below to access it or if that doesn't work, you can copy and paste it into the address bar of your browser.

http://nineteenthcenturybritain.blogspot.com/

Guillotined ancestors

2008-03-15T11:06:00.000Z

There's a fascinating article in today's Times which links to a new site in which French people can discover whether any of their ancestors were guillotined between 1792 and 1795.

The creator of the site, Raymond Combes, a computer programmer and amateur genealogist, believes that his work will force historians to reappraise the period. According to the official figure 17,500 people were guillotined in this period but M. Combes already has more than 18,000 names on his site, which is based on lists compiled for the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1789 and from documents sent in by users. He says:

'A lot of these guillotined were never registered in official records. I'm adding names all the time. But I don't put anyone down unless they are accompanied by documentary evidence.'

Nor has he included the tens of thousands of people massacred during the Revolution.

'It was an important part of out history. But I'm not sure all that violence really served a purpose.'

Quite.

The death of Pitt

2008-03-13T19:35:00.003Z

In spite of its iconic significance, Trafalgar did not decide the invasion. Napoleon had started to break up the camp at Boulogne on 23 August two days after the Combined Squadron entered Cadiz and at a point when he was faced with an alternative choice of swift action in Europe.

On 2 December the French defeated a combined Austrian-Russian force at Austerlitz (‘the battle of the Three Emperors’). On 6 December France signed the Treaty of Pressburg with Austria, which, in effect, ended the Holy Roman Empire. Francis II, the former Holy Roman Emperor, became Francis I of Austria.

When Pitt heard the news he was devastated:

‘Roll up the map; it will not be wanted these ten years’.

One of his last acts as Prime Minister was to erect a formidable coastal defence along the Channel. The landing beaches on either side of Dungeness were isolated by the Royal Military Canal. This programme was substantially in place by the end of 1806. However this did not decisively rule out the threat of a French invasion. Napoleon’s strategy now depended on outbuilding and outgunning the British navy - and his empire’s shipyard resources were fully capable of this undertaking.

From the end of 1805 Pitt’s health began to fail. When he received the news at Trafalgar, he was staying at Bath. He set out for London on 11 January. As he reached his rented house at Putney, Hester Stanhope was deeply shocked by ‘the changed tone of his voice and his struggle for breath as he climbed the stairs’. He died in the early morning of 23 January, leaving debts of up to £50,000. Fox:

‘One feels as if there was something missing in the world - a chasm, a blank that cannot be supplied.’

But there was no closing of ranks. With Pitt’s death Parliament was deeply fractured. Windham opposed an address for his monument in Westminster Abbey. The Common Council of London decided by only 77 votes to 71 to erect a monument to him in the Guildhall. On 22 February he was buried at Westminster Abbey.

The Talents Ministry
The passing of Pitt ushered in a new era of politics. The first priority was an urgent need to form a government. This forced George III to abandon his greatest political prejudice. In the aftermath of Pitt’s death he tried to shake the alliance between Fox and Grenville, but when he failed he recognized that it would not be possible to form a government without Fox. Grenville took office and appointed Fox Foreign Secretary - but on the understanding that the Catholic question was not raised. This was a serious blow to both Fox and Grenville and compromised them in the eyes of their supporters. But Fox gave way because he had two aims that he thought achievable: peace with France and the abolition of the slave trade. He failed to achieve the first aim though he lived to see the beginnings of the successful parliamentary drive for abolition.

He died on 13 September at the duke of Devonshire's house at Chiswick, leaving behind the memory of an intrepid (though flawed) reformer, whose memory would provide the inspiration for Victorian liberalism. His bust shows him in the garb of a senator of the Roman Republic - a fitting representation.

With the passing of Pitt and Fox a remarkable period in British political history had ended. But the war still went on.

Trafalgar: the historian's perspective

2008-03-10T09:02:00.003Z

This is a magisterial essay from the great naval historian N.A.M. Rodger, taken from the excellent BBC website.

The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) is a high point in British history - a famous victory, a famous tragedy, an event that everybody knows something about and everybody celebrates. It is rather surprising, therefore, that there is no easy consensus as to what it actually achieved.

At the time, and for long afterwards, the British believed that in the hour of his death Nelson had wrecked Napoleon's invasion plans and ensured Britain's ultimate victory over Napoleonic France.

In contrast, French historians preferred to dismiss the battle as an unfortunate but essentially marginal affair, not to be mentioned in the same breath as Napoleon's smashing victories at Ulm and Austerlitz in the same year as Trafalgar - victories that drove Austria and Russia from the war, and yet again confirmed France's unchallenged domination of Europe.

Amongst historians to-day, these opinions have changed surprisingly little, but they have changed sides. Distinguished French scholars such as Jean Tulard, the great authority on Napoleon, agree that,

'... after Trafalgar the emperor was beaten, though he did not yet know it.'

In Britain, meanwhile, historians for the past half-century have agreed that Trafalgar only confirmed what everybody had always known. Britain controlled the sea after Trafalgar, but then she had always controlled the sea, and would have continued to do so even if Napoleon's Combined Fleet had not put to sea in October 1805.

They have also often cited Trafalgar as the ultimate (if not the only) piece of evidence for their overall view of Britain's strategic situation in relation to the powers of continental Europe over the centuries. Their interpretation has been that British sea power, though certainly necessary for survival in the face of aggression from France, was not sufficient for victory over Napoleon, and that ultimately it was Wellington and the British army, fighting alongside a great coalition of military powers in 1814 and 1815, that secured Britain's triumph.

They believe that the great issues between the nations of Europe have always been decided by massed armies clashing on the plains of Flanders and Westphalia, while sea power has played only a supporting role. Articulated by eminent scholars such as Sir Michael Howard and Piers Mackesy - who themselves fought in the analogous campaigns of 1944 and 1945 - this has been the dominant view for half a century. This is strategic history for the age of NATO and the British Army of the Rhine.

We can hardly doubt that this judgement is correct, applied to the circumstances of 1815 or 1945. If it is necessary to fight a war of annihilation, as it was against Napoleon and Hitler, if nothing will do but the conquest and overthrow of the enemy regime, then certainly sea power alone will never suffice.

As a general interpretation of Britain's strategic situation over many centuries, however, the argument is a good deal less persuasive, for such wars have in fact been uncommon in history. Most British wars have been fought for more limited objectives, and the first gift of sea power was that these wars were always fought away from home - leaving Britain free to prosper in peace.

There are still a surprising number of determinist historians who think that being an island has somehow always guaranteed Britain against invasion, and that this has been easy and automatic. But they would perhaps do well to consider that England was successfully invaded by sea ten times between 1066 and 1688 - and that in reality it took the English a very long time to learn how to turn the sea to their own defence.

The determinists might also consider the history of Ireland, which illustrates what happens to an island that has never developed effective sea power. British seapower, by contrast, preserved the country from invasion and guaranteed peace and prosperity at home, up to the time of Trafalgar and beyond.

There is more to Trafalgar than this, however. Britain's command of the sea, in the face of Napoleon's Grand Army massing at Boulogne, was very far from secure in 1805, despite its successes of the preceding century. In three years as First Lord of the Admiralty, from 1801 to 1804, the megalomaniac Lord St Vincent had done as much as one man could to wreck British sea power. Obsessed with a nightmare vision of corruption which scarcely existed outside his own imagination, he had paralysed naval administration, emptied the storehouses, and dismissed a large fraction of the dockyard workforce. In 1804 his successor, Lord Melville, calculated that he had 81 ships of the line in commission, of which 18 were fit only for home waters, and none of the remainder had an estimated service life remaining of more than five years. When Spain entered the war, in December 1804, Napoleon had over 100 ships of the line available.

In the short term the British were able to hang on, thanks to the superior training of the ships' officers and men, but in the medium term Napoleon had an excellent prospect of winning command of the sea. The Royal Navy urgently needed a crushing victory to retrieve its position. There was not the slightest reason for Napoleon to offer it the opportunity, because by August 1805 the emperor's various invasion schemes had collapsed from the weight of their own absurdity, so completely that even he had noticed.

When he ordered his Combined Fleet to sea in October, his stated objective - to land a small force of troops in support of planned army operations in southern Italy, which formed a very minor part of his campaign plans against Austria - was so frivolous that it is hard to believe he meant it seriously. Recent French scholars have concluded that the order can only be explained in psychological terms, as the subconscious desire of wounded vanity to punish the hated navy for its failure to contribute to his glory.

After Napoleon's losses at Trafalgar, it seems to have taken him only a few months to realise what he had done. He spent the rest of his reign in a futile and immensely costly attempt to reconstruct his lost battle-fleet.

Without a battle-fleet Napoleon was condemned to an indirect strategy against his enemies, just as the British were. Britain, for want of a great army to commit to the European battlefield, could not win a decisive victory on land, but neither did she risk a decisive defeat. Similarly, Napoleon's defeat at Trafalgar made it impossible for him to intervene in the other decisive theatre of war, at sea.

Having thrown away his fleet, Napoleon had no direct means of attacking a maritime and commercial power such as that of Britain, and he was forced to resort to economic warfare. He believed in the orthodox French economics of his youth, according to which real wealth derived from land and people, while trade was essentially parasitic, and government borrowing was a system of fraud.

He thought a country like Britain, whose wealth derived from overseas trade and whose government waged war on credit, was nothing but a house of cards - which one good blow would bring down. In 1806 he imposed an economic blockade, known as the Continental System, which required his own trading subjects to sacrifice their livelihoods in order to wreck the British export economy. This did not concern him, as he had no opinion of the usefulness of merchants, especially as many of them were not even French.

The system did indeed damage the British economy, but it damaged European economies even more, and in the end it fatally undermined Napoleon's power. Everywhere in his empire merchants kept up their trade as much as they could, with the aid of bribery and false papers. His soldiers and officials, even at the highest levels, were eminently corruptible, so that behind the official façade the political glue of the regime was dissolving.

What was more, his strategy of economic warfare obliged Napoleon to attack every neutral European power that did not choose to participate in his system - but Portugal resisted, Spain rebelled, Sweden evaded his demands and Russia changed its mind. Thus the strategic logic of war against a naval power, without a fleet, drew French armies into campaigns that finally ruined them. Without Trafalgar none of this would have been necessary.

Moreover Napoleon's empire was never politically or economically stable. His revenues never covered the expense of government. To feed his armies, to endow the new military aristocracy which guarded his throne, he needed continual conquests. A lasting peace between France and her neighbours was impossible under his rule, or at least incompatible with his ambitions.
His enemies in continental Europe, who had the same interest in a balance of commercial and maritime power as the British had in the balance of power in Europe, desired to maintain France as a counterweight to Britain, and repeatedly (even as late as 1814) offered him terms that would have saved his throne and many of his conquests. He refused them all, however, and this in the end persuaded them that for their own survival they had to crush him, and force his consent to a peace treaty - the Congress of Vienna, 1815 - that secured Britain unchallenged naval supremacy. As the Prussian Field-Marshal August Gneisenau declared, in 1815:

'There is no mortal to whom Great Britain has greater obligations than this blackguard ... for it is the events which he has brought about which have raised England's greatness, security and wealth so high.'

Condemned by his character and situation to constant aggression, Napoleon could only have escaped his fate by finding some means of expansion outside Europe, where Britain was more vulnerable and the continental great powers were less concerned. With naval power he might have done it - but at Trafalgar he lost that option. Without a battle-fleet he was shut in a strategic box from which there was no escape - he had thrown away the key.

After Trafalgar, there was still long and hard fighting to be done to bring home to the emperor that he had exhausted his long-term options. Most of this fighting was done by the armies, though in effect it was paid for by the Royal Navy, which safeguarded the overseas trade by which Britain earned its own livelihood and subsidised its allies. Just as in World War Two, sea power had to win its war first, if the country was to survive and the soldiers were to have their chance.

Trafalgar did more, however, than hold the ring at the worst crisis of the war. It won Britain an unchallenged command of the sea, in quantity and quality, materially and psychologically, over all her actual and potential enemies, which lasted long after the age of Napoleon.
The victory allowed 19th-century Britain to reduce the Navy well below its present size without running any serious risks. Beyond the fall of Napoleon, the achievement of Trafalgar was to settle Britain's security for a century.

The battle of Trafalgar

2008-03-09T23:36:00.011Z

The Invasion Threat
Napoleon’s plan to invade England depended on his gaining temporary command of the Channel, which, he believed, would give him sufficient time to land an army of 350,000 in eastern Kent, which would then go on to occupy London and end the war.

His scheme depended on a concentrated break-out of the French fleets at Toulon and Brest, which would give the slip to the British navy, then in the Mediterranean, and make for the West Indies, picking up on the way Spanish squadrons from Cartagena and Cadiz. (Spain had entered the war on the French side in 1804.) These would be pursued by the British fleet. When the British navy was safely in the West Indies, the Combined [Franco-Spanish] Fleet was to double back, destroy the British near Ushant, off Brittany, and take control of the Channel while it was crossed by the invading army.

However, part of the scheme was foiled from the outset. The British blockade prevented Admiral Ganteaume from leaving Brest. In March Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve (left) broke out of Toulon under cover of bad weather, picked up Spanish ships at Cadiz and sailed across the Atlantic. (The news reached Britain at a time when there was no First Lord – hence Middleton’s sudden appointment.) This left Nelson with an agonizing decision. Where had Villeneuve gone? His hunch was that he was planning an attack on Jamaica. But suppose he was wrong and the Channel fleet was lost?

‘If they are not gone to the West Indies, I shall be blamed. To be burned in effigy or Westminster Abbey is my destiny.’

On 7 May Nelson passed Gibraltar. In 24 days he crossed the Atlantic (it had taken Villeneuve 34 days). On his arrival he found Villeneuve had sailed back to Europe. His despatches, sent by fast frigate, warning of Villeneuve’s probable return, were in London almost a fortnight before the French fleet arrived back in European waters. The element of surprise had been lost and the British forces were ranging against him to the northward. On 22 July Calder fought an indecisive battle off Cape Finisterre. The Combined Fleet made port in Cadiz on 21 August, and after this, the invasion scare was effectively over.

Nelson made depositions for the blockade of Cadiz and returned to England to a hero’s welcome. He saw Lady Hamilton and Horatia for the last time. On 4 September Barham drew up a memorandum on what was to be done: Nelson was to cover Gibraltar, Cape St Vincent and Cadiz. On 15 September he sailed from Portsmouth.

The Third Coalition
During 1805 Russia and Austria began to move against France. In April an Anglo-Russian accord bound the two powers to face Napoleon with a demand for French withdrawal from Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. (Ultimately Tsar Alexander wanted the annihilation of the Turkish Empire and for him the alliance with Britain was one of convenience.)

In May Napoleon assumed the crown of Italy and seized Genoa. This proved the last straw for the Austrians, who allied with Britain on 9 August. Having raised income tax by a further 3d in the £, Pitt was making lavish promises to support the military efforts of the European powers. Already, in July, Naples and Sweden were drawn into the Third Coalition and at the War Office Castlereagh, Secretary for War and the Colonies, began to prepare for military intervention on the Continent.

But with the calling off of the invasion of England, Napoleon’s first priority was to destroy the Austrian army. Accordingly he withdrew his troops from Boulogne. By October 100,000 French troops were on the Danube. On 7 October the Austrian general Mack was defeated at Ulm.

Trafalgar
On 20 October, obeying unmistakable orders from Napoleon Villeneuve sailed out of Cadiz in order to join the fleet off Naples for a minor engagement. Historians are still debating about why Napoleon gave his unfortunate admiral such a crazy order. On the following day the Combined Fleet was defeated at Trafalgar, an astonishing achievement for Nelson. Turner's version of the battle is left. Go here for the BBC's wonderful account of the battle and related issues.

Here is the line-up of the two fleets. Nelson's controversial tactic was to sail
head-on into the French fleet and take the inevitable punishment until he could get near enough to inflict huge damage on the enemy. It was a tactic that
relied on an extraordinary degree of skill and professionalism.

The death of Nelson (see Arthur William Devis's painting above) was obviously a serious blow, but Admiral Collingwood (left) who succeeded him as commander of the fleet, kept the French fleet in a state of psychological subservience after 1805.

On 5 November news of Nelson’s death reached London. Later in the month, Pitt delivered his speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. To the Lord Mayor’s toast to the ‘saviour of Europe’ he replied,

‘Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.'

On 9 January 1806 Nelson was given a state funeral of great magnificence – far more than that afforded to any monarch. He had become the national icon.

Brilliant women

2008-03-08T06:07:00.001Z

There is an excellent article by Amanda Vickery in the Guardian on the exhibition 'Brilliant Women' at the National Portrait Gallery from 13 March to 15 June. This exhibition celebrates the Bluestockings, the group of intellectual eighteenth-century women that became celebrated for their achievements in scholarship and the arts. I shall of course be going.

Amanda has some pertinent comments about how intellectual women are regarded today in our youth- and celebrity- dominated culture. Could any woman presenting a TV history programme get away with being as un-glamorous as Starkey or Shama?

Rant over (for the time being).

The second Pitt administration

2008-03-03T14:10:00.004Z

Pitt’s second administration was hampered by serious weaknesses. The king, who had been reluctant to part with Addington, was no longer a reliable ally and was suffering from increasingly frequent bouts of insanity. He was no longer able to command the Commons as he had done in the past. Wilberforce noted that

‘the old opposition are extremely angry with Pitt for coming in without Fox’.

Because of the failure of Grenville to join his government, he was forced to head a narrowly based ministry, almost devoid of talent, except for his First Lord of the Admiralty, Henry Dundas, who had been ennobled as Lord Melville. Though he had talented young supporters in the Commons (Viscount Castlereagh, George Canning) they lacked experience. Addington (having patched up his quarrel with Pitt) was brought back into the government as Viscount Sidmouth (Jan 1805) and made Lord President of the Council, but this was not enough to give the administration a broad base. It looked to many as if Addington had been victimised not to form a coalition but to make way for Pitt’s ambition. In particular, the alliance with Melville smacked of cronyism. This was Pitt’s situation at the beginning of 1805, the year his biographer John Ehrman has described as the most traumatic of his life.

Martello Towers

Pitt’s weak administration faced the most serious invasion threat of the war. In May 1804 Bonaparte confirmed his position as dictator by his elevation as Emperor (he was crowned in Notre Dame on 2 December 1804). In the summer of 1804 more than 80,000 Frenchmen were assembled at and around Boulogne. As a response the Royal Military Canal was constructed in haste to provide a water obstacle to seal off the Dungeness Peninsula and Romney Marsh. The sluice gates were protected by Martello towers. These were constructed following a survey of the coastline of south-east England from Beachy Head to Dover. On 21 October 1804, the idea to erect towers along the English coast was discussed at a conference at Rochester. The proposal that emerged from the conference was to build 83 towers along the Kent and Sussex coast, though the onset of winter initially delayed the building. A total of 73 circular martello towers were built by the end of 1806 - by which time they were no longer needed.

The Impeachment of Melville
In response to growing concerns about corruption, Sidmouth set up a series of enquiries into naval administration. These unearthed grave financial irregularities reflecting on Melville in the days when he had been Treasurer of the Navy. He had, in fact, in a way that was probably more negligent than corrupt, mingled public and private accounts. In April 1805 the Commons voted on the Speaker’s casting vote for impeachment. In May he was forced to resign.

This was a great blow for Pitt. He had come to power at the end of 1783 as the spokesman for a cleaner type of politics - now he seemed associated with corruption. In the following May-June the impeachment failed in the Lords, but Melville’s career was over and Pitt’s hopes of forming a broadly-based coalition were over. As a sign of the fragility of his coalition, Sidmouth had voted with the opposition for impeachment. In June 1805 he too resigned. By the end of the year Pitt was desperately casting around for new allies.

However, Melville’s replacement, his cousin the 80 year old Sir Charles Middleton, Evangelical, abolitionist and friend of Wilberforce. He was ennobled as Lord Barham proved an extremely able strategist and administrator.

The resumption of war

2008-02-28T17:50:00.009Z

The second phase of the French wars entailed far greater sacrifices for the British people than the first. Subsidies to allies were much larger, taxation was higher. Nearly two thirds of government expenditure went directly on the army and navy.

The years 1803 to 1805 saw the greatest danger of invasion by the French and later the Spanish (from December 1804 Spain became a French ally). Napoleon’s chief of staff, Berthier, was told that Chatham with its dockyards and the port of Dover would have to be attacked. Napoleon envisaged a short and decisive campaign, with London as the great objective. The port-superintendent at Calais was reported to have offered a toast at a town dinner:

‘to the first review of the French troops in St James’s Park’.

This was reported in the London papers. These threats were taken so seriously that General Sir David Dundas, the main author of defence plans on the British side, wanted to withdraw towards Dover in the event of a British defeat on the coast, with a view to deflecting French attention away from London. For more on this see John Cookson, 'What if Napoleon had landed?' History Today, 53 (September 2003), 10-17.

For most of this anxious period Britain was alone without allies, while thousands of soldiers - regulars, militiamen, volunteers - stood by awaiting a landing.

1803 saw a flood of legislation for the home defence. In March 1803 (before the declaration of war) the militia was embodied. In April regulating officers opened up houses in seaports. Bounties were offered for volunteers, magistrates handed over petty felons and vagrants, and the press gangs were active. The excess of zeal provoked riots in Chester and Carmarthan.

On 27 July the Levy en Masse Act required the Lords Lieutenant and their deputies to draw up lists of all men between the ages of 17 and 55. In the event the enormous number of volunteers (hundreds of thousands – including Pitt) rendered this act superfluous. One reason for the popularity of the volunteers was that it was a way to avoid being balloted for the Supplementary Militia and the Army of Reserve. But it can be argued that it was fear of invasion that mobilized most of the volunteers. This helps to explain why support for the volunteers was uneven. It was in the counties that had most to fear from invasion (eg Kent, Somerset) that men were most ready to join. However there were also those who refused to fight - possibly for political reasons.

'In the last analysis British plans for defence were founded on the idea of the British as a people of "national spirit" whose "military energies" would be unleashed with a vengeance in the event of a foreign invasion.' Cookson, 15.

But would this have happened? Sir Henry Bunbury, at the time a staff officer in the Southern District, later recalled,

‘Our troops where not then of a quality to meet and frustrate the manoeuvres of such an army as that which Napoleon would have led to the attack… Our best reliance was upon the numbers and the daring courage of Englishmen; upon the resolution of millions to vanquish tens of thousands.’ Quoted Cookson, 15.

The Realignment of Party
With the resignation of Pitt, politics was in flux. The experience of the Addington ministry changed the character of the opposition in a fashion that would have seemed inconceivable only a few years earlier.

Throughout the 1790s Pitt’s cousin, William Wyndham, Baron Grenville (left) had been Pitt’s foreign secretary and one of his closest associates. The triumvirate of Pitt, Dundas and Grenville had been the mainstay of the struggle against France. As Foreign Secretary, Grenville had developed an impressive command of the skills of diplomacy but he had been so disappointed by the failure of the Second Coalition that he regarded any repetition of such a bold strategy as doomed to fail. He wholeheartedly believed in Catholic relief and when Pitt allowed himself to be cajoled into promising never to raise the issue again during the king’s lifetime, he refused to give such an undertaking himself. He was also frustrated by Pitt’s lethargy in opposing Addington. This drew him into ever closer co-operation with Charles James Fox (right), even though they disagreed deeply over the question of war with France.

With the support of the Prince of Wales, a stealthy realignment took place in British politics, which formed the nucleus of a revitalised opposition. By the end of 1803 a Fox-Grenville understanding was effectively in place, though it laid Fox open to the same charges of opportunism that he had had to face during the Fox-North coalition.

Pitt’s role was much more equivocal. He had no taste for political manoeuvres with the Foxites in order to bring down Addington’s government. His disdain for party affiliation encouraged uncertainty and squabbles among his henchmen and prevented the formation of a conservative coalition with a strong base. Although he repeatedly attacked the government’s preparedness for invasion in early1804, he made no alliance with Grenville and Fox who were mounting their own assaults on Addington. In spite of a divided opposition Addington’s position had become untenable. On 29 April he announced to the cabinet his intended resignation after he had delivered his budget.

Addington had not been as bad a prime minister as many had feared. He had done better than Pitt in providing a fiscal underpinning for the war. His property tax (a shilling in the pound on all incomes over £150 pa) had adopted the principle of deduction at source. Nevertheless he was seen as an uninspiring leader at a time of national danger.

The Return of Pitt
Fox noted correctly that the beneficiary of their assault on the government was Pitt.

‘We are the pioneers, digging the foundation; but Mr Pitt will be the architect to build the house and to inhabit it.’

But it was not clear that he could form a strong administration. In May the king turned down a request to include both Fox and Grenville in his government and vetoed Fox though after a meeting with Pitt, he declared himself ready to accept Grenville. But Grenville ruled himself out of office, out of sympathy for Fox and for the cause of Catholic emancipation. To complicate matters further, the king succumbed to this third bout of illness. At the beginning of the year he suffered a relapse and then for a time grew progressively worse.

On 18 May 1804 Pitt returned as Prime Minister and Chancellor. On the same day Napoleon was proclaimed hereditary Emperor of the French. (Scroll down.)

The Peace of Amiens

2008-02-27T20:49:00.008Z

Between 1801 and 1812 Britain endured five weak governments, which highlighted the continuing power of the monarchy to choose ministers. George III not only selected Addington to replace Pitt, but also kept Fox out of office in 1804. All the ministries were weakened by internal divisions but ministerial instability owned much to disenchantment with governments unable to make peace or defeat Napoleon.

Addington, the former Speaker of the Commons, was despised because he was not an orator, an aristocrat, or Pitt. Fox contemptuously referred to him as ‘the Doctor’. Across the Commons he faced a rejuvenated Foxite group as well as disgruntled Pittites like George Canning.

Pitt had resigned at a crucial point in the war when Napoleon seemed to have Europe within his grasp. He had defeated Austria at Marengo (14 June, 1800 and Hohenlinden (3 December 1800) and the subsequent treaty of Lunéville (1801) left him in control of all territory west of the Rhine and parts of Italy, while also occupying Holland and Switzerland. Only Britain barred Bonaparte’s way to greater world domination.

The year 1801 saw some encouraging British victories. In protest against the Royal Navy’s search of neutral shipping, Russia and Denmark had joined the League of Armed Neutrality against Britain. But on 2 April Nelson defeated the Danish fleet at Copenhagen and thus confirmed Britain’s control of the Channel. The assassination of the Tsar Paul on 23 March ended the League. The British under Sir Ralph Abercromby finally defeated the French in Egypt and forced their withdrawal. But nothing could disguise the fact that Britain was facing the war without allies at a time when she was exhausted, over-stretched financially and war-weary. Under these circumstances, the demand for peace was irresistible.

During the summer of 1801 the Foreign Secretary Lorhttp://www.napoleonguide.com/leaders_paul1.htmd Hawkesbury (the future Earl of Liverpool) was negotiating with the French. On 1 October the peace preliminaries were signed and accepted by Parliament with comparatively little opposition (William Windham in the Commons, Pitt’s cousin Lord Grenville and Samuel Horsely, bishop of Rochester in the Lords, the journalist William Cobbett outside Parliament). In a Commons speech Pitt strongly endorsed the peace. The Peace of Amiens was signed on 27 March 1802. The terms were not advantageous to Britain, who finally acknowledged French hegemony in Europe, and took no account of recent British victories.

1. Almost all British overseas conquests, apart from Trinidad (taken from Spain) and Ceylon (taken from the Dutch) were handed back. Egypt was to be restored to Turkey.
2. The Cape of Good Hope was handed back to the Dutch.
3. Malta, which had been captured by Britain, was to be restored to the Knights of St John within three months.
4. In Europe Holland, Spain and northern Italy remained effectively under French domination.

The peace settlement has been condemned by historians as over-generous to Bonaparte, but at the time it was vindicated by a war-weary over-taxed nation, who responded with public celebrations. The undercover opposition of the king (who was said to be contemplating a change of government) and the hostility of Cobbett, Windham and Horsley probably did not represent the view of the nation as a whole. The settlement was vindicated in the election of June 1802 when Windham lost his Norwich seat. Sheridan probably summed up the situation best when he observed that it was ‘a peace which all men are glad of but no man can be proud of’.

The general election was a comfortable win for Addington’s government. But this did not mean that Pitt’s political career was over. A cult was developing round him, which can be seen as marking the origins of the ‘second Tory party’. On May 28 there was a huge celebration of Pitt’s forty-third birthday at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall organized by George Cannning. Nearly a thousand people attended (though not Pitt). The culmination of the evening was Canning’s song:

If hushed the loud whirlwind that ruffled the deep,
The sky if no longer dark tempests deform,
When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?
No - here’s to the pilot that weathered the storm.

And O if again the rude whirlwind should rise,
And the dawning of peace should fresh darkness deform,
The regrets of the good and the fears of the wise,
Shall turn to the Pilot that weather’d the storm.

In the interval of peace, there was a spate of British visitors to France. Wordsworth went with Dorothy to make contact with his mistress, Annette Vallon and their daughter. Fanny Burney travelled there with her husband. Charles James Fox travelled to France in the autumn of 1802 with Mrs Armistead (he had married her in 1795) but only now acknowledged her as Mrs Fox). On 2 November he finally met Bonaparte (the meeting is here satirized by Gillray) and was disillusioned. Far from being a champion of liberty, Napoleon turned out to be a dictator! Fox returned to England a disillusioned man, though he continued to believe, against the evidence, that France's intentions were fundamentally peaceful.

The Resumption of War
Addington was not fooled into believing that Amiens represented a final settlement. In the year of uneasy peace which followed, he made only moderate cuts in army and navy manpower and his revision of the Militia Acts in 1802 added 75,000 ‘occasional’ troops. Troops were left in the West Indies to facilitate the easy reconquest of territory given back to France should the need arise.

Napoleon never had any intention of maintaining the status quo. Even before the Amiens treaty had been signed he had, by private negotiations with Spain acquired Louisiana, Elba and the Duchy of Parma. (The Louisiana Purchase has to be the biggest bargain in history!) Within months of Amiens, he had been ‘elected’ President of the new Cisalpine Republic (now renamed the Italian Republic), thus effectively controlling northern Italy. He invaded Switzerland to impose a new constitution and found a pretext to continue the occupation of Holland, close West Indian Dutch and Italian ports to British merchandise, and to seize the property of the Knights of St John in Spain. The French occupation of Switzerland finally ended Wordsworth’s sympathy for him and for the French Revolution.

Two Voices are there -one is of the Sea,
One of the Mountains; each a mighty Voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice;
They were thy chosen music, Liberty!
There came a tyrant, and with holy glee
Thou fought'st against him; but hast vainly striven:
Thou from thy Alpine holds at length art driven
Where not a torrent murmurs heard by thee.
Of one deep bliss thine ear hath been bereft;
Then cleave, O cleave to that which still is left;
For, high-souled Maid, what sorrow would it be
That Mountain floods should thunder as before,
And Ocean bellow from his rocky shore,
And neither awful Voice be heard by Thee!
Thoughts of a Briton on the occupation of Switzerland (1803)

However, from the French point of view, Britain’s failure to evacuate Malta was also a provocation, though in view of Napoleon’s expansionism it would have been unwise to have surrendered such a strategically important base. By December 1802 anti-French feeling in Britain was reaching fever pitch.

By the spring of 1803 Britain’s defences in were sufficiently good for Addington to take the initiative, declare war on 18 May and, having called his bluff, take Bonaparte by surprise. In the Commons Pitt lent his support to the government in a brilliant and impassioned speech that highlighted the contrast between him and Addington.

Rather prematurely, Gillray saw the resumption of war as marking the end of Napoleon!

The Industrial Revolution

2008-02-10T07:52:00.000Z

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The term
The term was first used in English by the historian Arnold Toynbee in 1884. However it had been used earlier by a French diplomat in 1799 who claimed that his own country had already embarked on ‘la révolution industrielle’. Clearly he saw this as a parallel to the political revolution in France. Yet it is misleading to treat these two movements as the same type of revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a set of cumulative changes in Britain’s economic and social structure. The long time-scale has led some historians to question the word revolution and substitute evolution instead. However, arguably such an enormous change merits the title of revolution as it was a change in world history comparable to the neolithic revolution in Mesopotamia c. 10,000 BC.

Debates
The historiography of the Industrial Revolution has been beset with debates.

1. Why did the revolution begin first in Britain and not in another European country or in India, China, the Ottoman Empire?
2. Should the revolution be ascribed primarily to geographical or social factors?
3. Were its consequences disastrous or beneficial? Did the standard of living of the workers rise or fall?
4. Was it a major discontinuity in society or were the changes more gradual?
5. Did it bring about a new separation between work and home, and confine women to the separate sphere of home?
6. Has the 'take-off' model (a metaphor derived from aeronautics and space exploration) any validity?
7. How far should global trends such as the collapse of the Mogul Empire and the defeat of Ottoman power be factored in?
8. What was the role of the British state? Did the state provide the conditions for industrialization or did it stand back from the process?

Pre-industrial Britain
It is misleading to make a rigid distinction between industrial Britain and pre-industrial Britain. Before the industrial revolution, domestic industrial production was widespread in Britain. It was dominated by cloth manufacture based on wool and woollen products such as worsteds. Spinning and weaving in the home provided an important addition to the family budget. In 1700 more than half Britain’s exports were of woollen cloth. In Scotland linen was the main manufacturing industry.

Great expansion was also apparent in the metal trades before the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Iron had been smelted with coke since 1709 at Coalbrookdale, where the Quaker ironmaster, Abraham Darby I, perfected the process. In 1759 the Carron ironworks at Scotland became a major manufacturing centre.

In the 18th century Britain experienced significant urban development, though not all of it was attributable to manufacturing. Ports expanded rapidly to cater for both overseas and domestic trade. Newcastle supplied London with coal. West coast ports developed quickly because of trade with America. Urban society demanded an increased number of consumer goods. These factors provided some of the preconditions for industrial expansion.

In the late 18th century the economy was already well-developed. In 1750 income per head was £12 pa - higher in real terms than any other country. This led to a rising demand for manufactured goods, which was clearly one of the factors behind industrialization.

The nature of industrialization

(1) The rationale for the industrial revolution was mass production.
(2) This went hand in hand with urbanization. In 1750 Britain was already a heavily urbanised country with about 15% of its population living in towns. By 1800 this was 25%, by 1880 80%.
(3) The pattern of employment changed. By 1801 combined employment in industry and commerce was 36% of the occupied population; employment in agriculture was 37%. However there was not a rigid separation between industry and agriculture and many industrial workers also occupied small farms. A miner or weaver might head a mixed family economy in which his wife and children worked on the family small-holding. But the trend was away from this type of economy even though it continued until well into the 19th century.

Cumulatively the industrial revolution generated

‘a fundamental and irreversible structural change in the economy’. (John Rule, The Vital Century, Longman, 1992, p. 93)

However, the British Industrial Revolution was uneven and entailed decline as well as expansion. South-east Lancashire and central Scotland exploded into vigorous industrial and commercial life, but the Weald of Kent and Sussex, prime suppliers of iron, glass, timber and textiles in the 17th century de-industrialised. The same thing happened to the woollen cloth industry in the West Country which was outstripped by that of the West Riding.

Huge areas of the economy were unchanged by 1851 - for example, techniques in the building industry. Most units of production were not factories. Most rural counties were untouched. There was a continued use of traditional forms of energy - the diffusion of the steam engine was slow.

Population
The British population grew substantially from c. 11 million in 1760 to c. 16 million in 1801. (A possible cause was a lowering of the age of marriage for women.) This provided a potential work force and also rising demand. But it came to be seen as a problem. In 1798 Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population argued that demographic growth must, sooner or later, overtake the resources available to sustain it. The inevitable outcome will be famine or social catastrophe.

Malthus’s pessimism was a reversal of earlier thinking , which tended to assume that a rise in population was beneficial. He wrote at a time of economic crisis. Population had risen progressively since the mid-century and food prices had reached unprecedented peaks, accentuated by war and harvest failure. Wages had not kept pace with prices and the 1790s was a decade of widespread distress. But Malthus proved a false prophet and his threatened crisis did not emerge. Even in the bad years of 1795 and 1800 no part of the British Isles experienced famine comparable to that of France in the 1780s.

Colonies
The role of the colonies was vital. Between 1716-20 and 1784-88 exports and re-exports increased by 240%. The independence of the American colonies did not break this pattern. Following the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 the southern states of the USA became Britain’s chief supplier of raw cotton. About 2/3 of all cotton manufacturers were exported, with the American market taking the lion’s share. In the first decade of the 19th century finished textile goods represented 3/5 of Britain’s total exports.

However the overseas market remained smaller than the domestic one. The home market remained vital. This required a population wealthy enough to buy mass-produced goods. It also required a strong agricultural sector as an increasingly urbanised population needed to be fed.

Agriculture
There is no doubt that English agricultural productivity grew during the second half of the 18th century yet no agreement on how much. Older studies that concentrated on the improvements of Charles ‘Turnip' Townsend and Thomas Coke of Holkham (who used nitrogen-fixing clover and turnips as a field crop for cattle) ignore the wide regional variation. But livestock husbandry seems to have been important, both as a source of manure and of power. England had perhaps 700,000 farm horses, compared with France which had a million horses to work an arable area approximately four times as large. French travellers commented on the numbers of cattle, sheep and horses in England.

In spite of the difficulties of getting the data, it seems that the British agricultural base was more efficient than in other European countries. Recent estimates put French agricultural productivity in 1801 at half that of England.

What part did enclosure play in this? Enclosure was the replacement of open fields whose strips were owned individually (see left) by smaller individually owned fields. It transformed a traditional method of agriculture into a system of holdings by physically separating one person’s land from another’s. It also meant the subdivision of commons, heaths and wastes into separate landholdings and again involved the abandonment of obligations, privileges and rights.

Eighteenth-century parliamentary enclosure was only part of a long movement. It has been estimated that only about a quarter of England and Wales remained to be enclosed after 1700. The south-west, the border counties and the south-east were hardly affected. But the traditional open-field areas in the south and east Midlands (Oxfordshire, Northants, Cambridgeshire) saw a huge change in the eighteenth century.

To many historians the enclosure movement was seen as a form a class expropriation of the landed interest. The loss of the common rights was certainly a blow to the very poor, and substantially added to the number of landless labourers. In pre-enclosure times there seems to have been a reasonable prospect of farm servants saving enough to gain some sort of holding, which, with common grazing rights, was more or less adequate to support a family. The hardships caused by enclosure were condemned by the agriculturalist Arthur Young. To an unknowable extent, enclosure must have added to the numbers of those seeking waged employment. Large numbers were reduced to total wage dependency. This did not necessarily mean a huge rural exodus to the towns (there was still plenty of work in the countryside), but the contribution of the agricultural sector towards the feeding of the growing population was made with a declining share of the total labour force.

Geographical and social factors
Natural resources
Britain had certain innate geographical advantages. She was a small country with fertile land and plenty of navigable rivers to facilitate movements of bulky goods. Access to the sea is easy from most parts of the country. The fast flowing streams of the north and north Midlands, Wales and Scotland provided motive power for the early mills. When water gave way to steam, coal was available in South Wales, the East Midlands, South Yorkshire, the North-east and central Scotland. The climate of the North-west was conducive to the processing of raw cotton. Britain’s varied topography enabled a rich variety of agricultural specialisation to develop.

Each single advantage could be replicated in other European countries, but no other nation enjoyed such a rich combination.

Social factors
The social origins of the entrepreneurs were diverse. Many of them began as apprentices. Some rose socially. Richard Arkwright was the first manufacturer to be knighted. Robert Peel (father of the future prime minister) bought the Staffordshire manor of Tamworth in 1790 which formed the basis of his and his son's parliamentary careers.

Dissenters such as the Darbys of Coalbrookdale and Wedgwood of Etruria. played an important role. Exclusion from public office spurred able Dissenters, though the Protestant work ethic can be exaggerated. Quakers and Unitarians were among the most prominent though this may be due to rank (they were the most socially superior of the Dissenters) than religion. Modest wealth, allied to a kinship network, could help to establish a business on a sound footing.
Aristocratic and land-owing entrepreneurs, such as the duke of Bridgewater cannot be ignored. Unlike their European counterparts, they owned the mineral rights on and under their land. The inter-connection of land and industry is one of the most important factors behind industrialisation.

Josiah Wedgwood was ahead of his time in developing his own sales strategy. He pandered to royal and aristocratic knowledge, relishing his description as ‘Queen’s potter’. He made North Staffordshire the ceramic centre of the world.

The role of the state
In contrast to the late 19th century German and Russian industrial revolutions, the role of government was indirect and this has led free-market ideologists to argue that only a laissez-faire economy can produce economic growth. But from the Cromwellian period there had been the notion of a large, publicly financed navy. The National Debt was a product of the Glorious Revolution. From 1783 to 1825 there was havoc in other economies, and Britain with its massive investment in the navy was poised to take advantage. Government stimulated industrial production by its frequent wars. War-time production stimulated the production of armaments and to a lesser extent the textile industry.

The government also contributed by failing to uphold the various statutes restricting trade. The new metal towns like Birmingham and Sheffield operated almost in conditions of free labour. The absence of internal tolls and tariffs also made Britain, since the union of 1707 the largest integrated market in Europe.

Aspects of industrialisation
The transport infrastructure
A revolution in transport took place between 1760 and 1820. Before 1760 high transport costs were a major hindrance to the development of the market.

The most familiar mode of transport was the turnpike road. In the early 18th century the principle that the user pays began to be widely applied to road usage. Turnpikes were administered by bodies of statutory commissioners. By the mid 18th century there was a particularly dense network of turnpikes in the industrial Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the south-west. Stage coach services averaged less than 5 miles per hour in the 1750s; by 1790s speeds were 6.7 mph. In 1792 it was possible to travel from Bristol to London by an all-night mail coach, though this was very expensive.

In 1761 the self-taught millwright-engineer, James Brindley, constructed a canal which linked the Bridgewater mines at Worsley with Manchester. The Barton aqueduct, depicted here, was regarded as one of the wonders of the world. Capital for this high- cost ventures was provided by the duke of Bridgewater; when the canal was opened, it immediately halved the price of coal in Manchester.

The involvement of aristocrats indicates the entrepreneurial nature of British landowners, who were unhampered by constraints of custom and caste.

In 1761 the potter Josiah Wedgwood, then 29 years old, began to look into the possibility of creating a canal to link his works to the coast. In 1766 the Grand Trunk Canal (later known as the Trent and Mersey Canal) received its Act of Parliament and a massive celebration was held in the Potteries. (For a vivid description see Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (Faber and Faber, 2002, pp. 111-117). Wedgwood cut the first sod, and James Brindley was employed as engineer. By the time Brindley died in 1772 the stretch of the canal fr the Trent to the Potteries was finished. The Trent and Mersey met the Bridgewater Canal at Preston Brook Tunnel (right). Wedgwood's famous Etruria works were built on the canal and the carriage costs of coal and raw materials from Liverpool, including the china clay shipped from Cornwall, fell dramatically in price.

In the 1770s the construction began of the 127 mile Leeds and Liverpool Canal, which by the time of its completion in 1816 linked Liverpool to the Humber estuary. By the 1820s, 4,000 miles of navigable waterway were open to trade. Canals made it possible to overcome the restrictions of nature and topography which had previously advantaged waterways and navigable rivers.

The appearance of steam-powered ships and railway locomotives by 1815 was the culmination of incremental transport innovation.

Together all these improvements gave early 19th century Britain the world’s most efficient and reliable transport infrastructure.

Power
By 1800 perhaps 20% of the mechanical energy generated in Britain came from steam engines powered by coal rather than human animal, wind and water power. This is a huge break with the past. Newcomen's engine (left) was a major break-through. In 1763 James Watt, a mathematical instrument maker in Glasgow, produced an improved version by constructing a separate condenser. He went into partnership with John Roebuck, who owned the iron works at Carron. But Roebuck had no money for further trials and the partnership was broken up. For eight years Watt earned his living as a canal surveyor. In 1774 he entered into partnership with Matthew Boulton, who owned a metal-goods factory at Soho in Birmingham. By 1786 it was estimated that a Boulton and Watt steam engine was doing the work of 24 relayed horses and was well worth the cost of a bushel of coal an hour. By 1795 the Watt steam engine (right) was used in coal-mining, canals, (mainly for pumping), the breweries and (above all) cotton. Watt’s patents were defended by Parliament until 1800 when the field was thrown open.
But Watt had become increasingly conservative with success. He was reluctant to experiment with road or rail traction or engines for boats, and set his face against the development of high pressure steam engines. By 1790 engineers such as Richard Trevethic were developing steam engines, but Watt’s engine was still the most reliable.

By this time Britain was leading Europe in the use of coal. A quarter of this coal came from Scotland and Wales. The largest English coal field was the Northumberland and Durham. Coal mining was a labour-intensive industry. In 1700 15,000 miners were employed and the number had reached 50,000 by 1800.

The time-scale of the switch to coal-fired steam power was not uniform. The big change came in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and in some areas progress was slower. Before 1800 most textile mills were water-powered, and even in 1830 2,230 British textile factories still used waterwheels, as against some 3,000 steam engines. But however modest its beginnings the steam engine’s ability to turn heat into power represented a ‘wholly new, massively potent and extremely versatile source of mechanical energy’.

Technology
The gadgets which revolutionized textile and metal production were invented to meet specific demand. But it is misleading to focus too much on individual inventors. ‘

The names that have reached the text books are those few out of a large crowd who were feverishly working on every one of the major inventions developed. ... Progress is always impossible at a speed greater than that at which the economy created demand for new techniques, and at a speed greater than technical standards allow’. (Wilfred Prest, Albion Ascendant, Oxford, 1998, p. 247)

James Watt, trained at Glasgow university, under Joseph Black, who undertook specific experiments on the elasticity of steam and the conductivity of metals. Watt was one of the few university trained entrepreneurs and inventors. The majority were amateurs.

Cotton
The first genuine textile factory was a silk throwing mill (which prepared yarn for weaving) put up on the River Derwent in Derby in 1719 by Thomas Lombe, whose brother had brought back the secrets from Italy. But raw silk was still inelastic in supply and expensive. The silk market was a narrow luxury market.

Cotton had the advantage of a rising demand. There was an enormous market in Britain. Moreover it adapted more easily to machinery than more delicate complex fibres, such as cotton and wool. It was also a new industry set up in green field sites in Lancashire, in areas free of guild control. As early as 1733 the Bury weaver John Kay invented the flying shuttle. This made the weaver’s work easier and less tiring, but many feared they would be put out of worth. After his house was raided, Kay fled abroad and never benefited from his invention.
In 1766 James Hargreaves, a Blackburn weaver, invented the spinning jenny (left) which, by fixing a handle to the spinning wheel, enabled a single workman to turn six or eight threads simultaneously and still work at home. This should have rendered the spinning wheel obsolete, but he lacked the sense of market opportunity to capitalise on his invention. In 1768 domestic spinners wrecked his home. To escape trouble he moved to Nottingham and opened a jenny workshop there. But he went bankrupt.

The jenny was compatible with cottage industry. It could be worked by hand by the single worker in cottages and small workshops and fitted into a traditional family economy. The great innovation came in 1769 when Richard Arkwright, a Preston barber and wig-maker, patented a machine for roller spinning (drawing the thread through pairs of rollers). In 1762 he had heard about the attempts being made to produce new machines for the textile industry. He met John Kay, a clockmaker from Warrington, who had been busy for some time trying to produce a new spinning-machine with another man, Thomas Highs. Kay and Highs had run out of money and had been forced to abandon the project. Arkwright was impressed by Kay and offered to employ him to make this new machine. He also recruited other local craftsman to help, and it was not long before the team produced the spinning frame. Arkwright's machine involved three sets of paired rollers that turned at different speeds. While these rollers produced yarn of the correct thickness, a set of spindles twisted the fibres firmly together. The machine was able to produce a thread that was far stronger than that made by the jenny.

The spinning-frame was too large to be operated by hand and so Arkwright had to find another method of working his machine. After experimenting with horses, he decided to employ the power of the water-wheel.

In 1771 he set up a large factory next to the River Derwent in Cromford, Derbyshire and his machine now became known as the Water-Frame. Local workers soon finished a single building with four storeys of low rooms, where more than 300 hands were employed - several hundred child and female workers, together with male mechanics and overseers; by 1791 he was employing 900. When Arkwright died in 1792 he was a wealthy man with a knighthood. By then many had copied him. His partner, Jedediah Strutt built huge spinning mills in Derby. Arkwright’s massive machinery made unprecedented capital demands, of a different order of magnitude from those made by any previous innovation.’ He was the father of the factory system though it was established only for one part of British industry.

Arkwright’s spinning innovations caused a problem of location, which was determined by the existence of massive water power. Because the factory system was pioneered on water power rather than steam, industrialists were forced away from the centres of population. But once steam power had been harnessed to a cotton mill at Papplewick in Nottinghamshire in 1785 power became mobile. From 1800 the water frame was no longer the dominant technology in the industry. Other forces slowly took charge of location and factories went up in towns on the plain, such as Stockport. Even so the progress was slower than one might imagine. In 1838 a fifth of cotton mills were still water powered.

The dominant cotton-spinning machine by 1800 was the mule, invented in 1779 by Samuel Crompton, a Bolton cotton weaver. A cross between a water-frame and a jenny, it spun a strong but finer thread, which, from 1790, was driven by the new Boulton and Watt steam-engines just coming onto the market. By 1811 there were more than 4 million steam-mule spindles spread over more than 50 mills in the Manchester district alone. As a result of the improved technology of cotton spinning, raw cotton imports soared and the price of cotton yarn plummeted, while cotton textile exports rapidly outstripped those of woollen cloth. Cotton cloth sold well because it was cheap and light, but also because it could be as brightly coloured and patterned as the much more expensive silks.

Weaving continued to be domestic-based, creating a bottle-neck which, in the short-term benefited the handloom weavers, an elite, skilled male labour force. In 1785 Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom, but he had no success in selling it. The first successful looms were patented after 1813 by William Horrocks, a Stockport manufacturer. But and they were not widely used in weaving until the 1820s. It was only after this period that the handloom weavers began to be supplanted by factory workers.

Iron, coal and steam
Abraham Darby I probably chose Shropshire for his iron works because it gave access to the Severn and there was coal and iron ore in the vicinity. The iron works probably cost about £3500 to set up as an operating concern. From his first year at Coalbrookdale he smelted with coke. But his innovation was not taken up widely by other iron-masters until 1760. His innovation of 1709 released the blast furnace from charcoal but not from water power for its bellows. In 1779 his grandson Abraham Darby III constructed the world's first iron bridge. Left is Philip de Loutherbourg's 'Coalbrookdale by Night'. The Coalbrookdale furnace was one of the sights visited by tourists on a quest for the 'sublime'.

In 1784 Henry Cort invented the puddling furnace (a reverberatory furnace) and a rolling mill. This made it possible to convert brittle-cast pig-iron into malleable bar iron used for tools and precision parts. It released the second stage of manufacture from charcoal and water power. After this the iron industry came together in integrated concerns at sites determined by coal and ore. Watt’s steam engine by then had made its main power-source mobile. Soon after this Staffordshire, Yorkshire and South Wales began to dominate the location of iron manufacture. Between 1788 and 1806 there was a four-fold growth in the output of pig-iron, which ended Britain’s dependence on Swedish bar-iron. This made iron and steel production far more directly dependent on coal and steam than was the cotton industry, thus encouraging the growth of ever larger and more capital-intensive plants on the coalfields.

At a seminar at the Institute of Historical Research held on 30 October 2002 Professor Patrick O'Brien argued that the Industrial Revolution was a case of slow, unbalanced growth of confined technological change that rested on (a) favourable natural endowments and (b) massive investment in geopolitical power.

The resignation of Pitt

2008-02-04T20:15:00.000Z

It had not needed the insurrection of 1798 to bring Ireland to Pitt’s attention as he had always been prone to refer to ‘the unlucky Subject of Ireland’. As early as 1792 he had written to the then Lord Lieutenant, Lord Loughborough, putting forward a dual strategy for dealing with Ireland: a union of Parliaments and ‘the admission of Catholics to the suffrage’. In the following year Catholics were given the vote and it was clear that Pitt had no objection to their being allowed to sit in Parliament. He believed that in a Westminster Parliament, Catholics would be in a minority, so Protestants would have nothing to fear, and that a united Parliament would protect Catholics from Protestant bigotry.

The traumatic events of 1798 confirmed his existing opinions. They furnished ultimate proof that the Dublin parliament could not provide the order necessary for British as well as Irish security and that the Rockingham government’s constitutional experiment of 1782 that had set up an independent Irish parliament, had failed. He believed it was essential to find a political solution; as it was, far too much of Britain’s increasingly stretched resources were put into the defence of her back door when they could be deployed more effectively in Europe, North Africa or the Caribbean. Following the revolt, he therefore enquired of the earl of Camden (minister without portfolio and former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland):

‘Cannot Crushing the Rebellion be followed by an Act appointing Commissioners to treat for an Union?’

He believed that a union of parliaments would have prevented the growth of mass support for the United Irishmen.

On 31 January 1799 Pitt addressed the Commons on the subject of legislative union in what William Hague has described as one of his greatest speeches. (It was one of the few he ordered to be circulated.) Only 25 votes were cast against it. It was a different matter in Dublin, where far too many careers were bound up with the Protestant ascendancy. Pitt overbore this using ‘pork-barrel methods’, making use of the talents of his new Chief Secretary, Viscount Castlereagh (see left) and his Lord Lieutenant, Lord Cornwallis. He bribed the Dublin parliament into surrendering its authority with talk of further concessions. Thirteen new Irish peers were created and four British peerages were bestowed on Irish peers. Since only 100 Irish seats in the lower house were transferred to Westminster, many boroughs had to be disenfranchised and their owners bought out at an average cost to the British taxpayer of £15,000 per seat - a total cost of £1.5m. By August Cornwallis could report ‘cordial approbation of the measure of Union’.

By the summer of 1799 Pitt had managed to bring together a new coalition (the second): Britain, Austria, Russia, Turkey. (However, Prussia refused to join.) But after a series of reverses the French rallied and at the same time a new expedition to Holland under the duke of York was unsuccessful and the British had to negotiate a withdrawal. In November the coup of 18 and 19 brumaire abolished the Directory and set up the Consulate (see earlier post), headed by Bonaparte. Napoleon put out peace overtures which Britain rejected.

In July 1800 the Act of Union, creating a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (with a new flag) received the royal assent and was to come into operation on 1 January 1801. In addition to the 100 MPs added to the existing 558 in the British House of Commons, the Union added 28 peers and 4 bishops to the Lords. The system of government and administration for Ireland was largely retained, with a Chief Secretary appointed by the Crown, acting as chief executive. Castlereagh had secured twenty years’ modest protection for Irish textile manufacturers before full free trade between the two countries came about. The Anglican churches of England and Ireland were united in the Church of Ireland, and Ireland was to contribute almost 12% to the UK budget.

Castlereagh was deeply disappointed by this settlement, regarding it as an inadequate compromise.

‘Irish Union was a constitutional job carried for British convenience, bought with British determination and mostly British cash. It did nothing to solve the underlying tensions and contradictions of Irish society.’ Eric Evans, The Forging of the Modern State, 3rd edition (Pearson, 2001), 125.

The key unresolved issues were Catholic emancipation – the right of Catholics to sit in parliament – and the tithes which non-Anglicans paid to the Church of Ireland. Successive Lords Lieutenant, the Chief Secretary, Castlereagh, and most of the cabinet were agreed on the necessity of emancipation. Yet Pitt underestimated the major obstacle: the king, who saw emancipation as the violation of his coronation oath. At the time of the Fitzwilliam lord lieutenantship he had made his views well known:

‘each respective state [in Germany] has but one church establishment ... and those holding any civil employment must be conformists’

and he had condemned Fitzwilliam for seeking to undermine the revolution settlement. In 1798 he had told Pitt

‘No further indulgences must be granted to Roman Catholics as no country can be governed where there is more than one established religion’.

There is no evidence that Pitt discussed his views with the king or made any attempt to win him over. No-one seems to have pointed out to the king that since 1690 the United Kingdom had encompassed two established churches: the Church of England and the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland.

During the autumn of 1800 Lord Chancellor Loughborough broke ranks and wrote a memorandum on the Catholic question which the king read. The fact that George heard if from the Lord Chancellor rather than the Prime Minister shows that Pitt was careless with the king, who was already irritated with him because he did not go to drawing rooms and levées. He had also failed to bring over his cabinet colleages. By January 1801 other members of the government (including Portland and Pitt’s brother, Chatham, first lord of the Admiralty) were having second thoughts.

At a levée on 28 January 1801 George announced that he would look on anyone who voted for Emancipation as ‘personally indisposed’ towards him. He then told Henry Dundas (Secretary for War) that the move was

‘the most Jacobinical thing I ever heard of’.

When Dundas attempted to argue that there was a difference between the king’s personal and constitutional situations, he was told,

‘None of your Scotch metaphysics!’

In seeking for political allies, the king turned to the Speaker of the House, Henry Addington, (depicted here in his Speaker's robes) whose father had been the Pitt family’s doctor.

Belatedly, on 31 January, Pitt sent the king a long letter defending his proposals, requesting him not to allow his name to be used to influence the debate and saying he was prepared to submit his resignation if he and the king were at odds on the matter. George replied:

‘I cannot sacrifice my duty’.

The king then turned to Addington and asked him to undertake ‘a new arrangement’. After a few days’ hesitation Addington accepted office on 5 February following Pitt’s resignation. The king:

‘My dear Addington, you have saved your country!’

The king plainly assumed it was the end of Pitt's career, and addressed him a friendly letter beginning ‘my dear Pitt’. It concluded: ‘You are closing ... Your Political Career’. All Pitt’s senior colleagues went out with him: his friend, Dundas, his cousin, Grenville, and the former Whig Earl Spencer.

Addington’s premiership was greeted with astonishment. George Canning:

‘Pitt is to Addington
As London is to Paddington’.

He was widely regarded as a stop-gap.

Although he had resigned as Prime Minister, Pitt stayed in office as Chancellor in order to deliver his budget on 18 February. The on 19 February the king went mad again, though in early March he recovered. On his recovery, he blamed his illness on Pitt for having unsettled him by wanting Catholic emancipation. Pitt responded by promising that he would never again raise the question. He finally handed over the seals of office on 14 March. He had been Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer for seventeen years.

Ireland 1798: 'the Year of the French'

2008-01-30T17:07:00.000Z

This post owes a great deal to R.R.Foster's classic Modern Ireland, 1600-1972 (Penguin, 1988)

The Protestant Ascendancy
In 1800 the population of Ireland comprised:
Roman Catholic Irish: 3,150,000
Protestant Anglo-Irish 450,000
Presbyterians 900,000

The 18th century was the period of the Protestant Ascendancy, buttressed by harsh penal laws modelled on those in England.

1695: Acts restricting the rights of Catholics to education, to bear arms or to own a horse worth more than £5; priests were forbidden to exercise their functions and Catholics were preventing from inheriting of buying land or sending their children abroad unless they abjured their religion.
1697: Catholic clergy banished by act of Parliament.
1704: a further penal law restricted land-owning rights for Catholics and imposed `tests' for public office.
1720: the Declaratory Act defined the right of the British Parliament to legislate for Ireland.
1727: Irish Catholics were deprived of the right to vote.

The mouthpiece of the Protestant ascendancy was the Irish Parliament in Dublin. The English government was represented by the Lord Lieutenant, who was approved by the government of the day. The parliament was dominated by the Anglo-Irish, an exclusive group that monopolized political power and saw themselves as both English and Irish. Deprived of a political role, the Catholic gentry tended to go into trade. The alternative to trade - land-owning was made very difficult for them - they were confined to 31 year leases. The result was that in 1700 Catholics owned 14% of the land, in 1776 5%. (On the other hand, lease-holding was the norm in Ireland, even for Protestants and the 31 year lease gave a reasonable security of tenure.)

The largest grievance was the poverty of the rural labourers (except in Ulster where there was a flourishing linen industry). It was less easy to resolve the economic problems than to revoke the penal laws. Ulster Presbyterians and other Protestants had fewer grievances but until 1780 they were excluded from corporations, and though not legally barred from Parliament, only a handful of Dissenters was ever returned.

In the later 18th century the harshness of the penal laws was toned down. Freedom of worship was allowed in by the back door. Catholic chapels were built and the land tenure laws were liberalised.

1772: Catholics were allowed to lease bogland.
1778: Catholics gained increased rights of land tenure, and were allowed to hold land on nearly the same terms as Protestants. They were allowed to purchase land on leases of 999 years or 5 lives and had full testamentary rights.

The Volunteer Movement
At the same time there were moves for greater political independence for Ireland. In the Irish Parliament, Henry Grattan and Henry Flood challenged the rights of Dublin against London. This was continued with far greater intensity by the Ulster Presbyterians. During the American War many of them enthusiastically took up the cause of the colonists (many of whom were 'Scotch-Irish'). Restrictions on Irish trade were a particular grievance and this enabled many to identify with the colonists. A Dublin newspaper argued:

By the same authority which the British Parliament assumes to tax America, it may also with equal justice presume to tax Ireland without the consent or concurrence of the Irish Parliament.

In 1778 with French entry into the war, the Volunteer Movement began in Ulster and spread over the whole country. It was not a militia under government control but a national volunteer army, and exclusively Protestant, affirming its rights of citizenship. In 1779 the Volunteers paraded in Dublin with a decorated brass cannon with the placard: ‘Free trade - or else’. In response the British Parliament passed acts removing the restrictions on Irish trade. In 1780 Presbyterians were freed from the sacramental test for local appointments.
In February 1782, the Dungannon convention of Volunteers addressed by Grattan and Flood called for independence for the Irish Parliament. A new ‘constitution’ was granted by the reluctant Rockingham government.

1. Catholics were allowed to own land outside parliamentary boroughs. The Declaratory Act was repealed so that the British Parliament could no longer veto acts of the Irish Parliament.
2. Catholics were given education rights - allowed to become schoolmasters. Laws banning Irish Catholic bishops and clergy were repealed.
3. Catholics were allowed to own a horse worth more than £5.

The period of ‘Grattan's Parliament’ was the greatest period of independence Ireland ever knew under British rule. It was a fitting end to the 18th century and coincided with an upsurge in national pride - the Bank of Ireland, the building of Dublin. But it was still very partial. The Volunteer movement was militantly Protestant. Catholics were still not allowed to vote or to stand for Parliament and the liberalizing measures only served to emphasize their disabilities.

The United Irishmen
The French Revolution had a profound effect in Ireland. In the 1790s the Volunteer movement revived in Ireland. Unlike the gentlemanly movement of the late 1770s support for the movement now concentrated among shopkeepers and skilled urban workers - exactly the same classes as the corresponding societies in England and Scotland. In 1790-1, the Catholic Committee, a movement of members of the Irish Catholic middle class, began to campaign for the abolition of the penal laws.

On 18 October 1791 the Belfast Society of United Irishmen was founded. Among the founders was Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), a young Protestant lawyer from Dublin. He had already published An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics (August 1791) even though he did not at that stage know any. For Tone radical political reform and nationalist identity went hand in hand, with no place for sectarian divisions. The first resolutions of the United Irishmen asserted

That the weight of English influence in the Government in this country is so great, as to require a cordial union, among ALL THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND. ... No reform is practicable, efficacious, or just, which does not include Irishmen or every religious persuasion.

In his posthumously published autobiography Tone described his aim as

To subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connexion with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country - these were my objects. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter - these were my means.

(However, recent studies have shown that Tone was not an ‘active separatist’ until 1795.)

The United Irishmen sought to forge a new political alliance between the middle-class politically aware Presbyterians of Belfast and Dublin and the rural Catholic majority. In fact the two groups were largely incompatible. Lawyers and skilled workers looked to an enlightened non-sectarian republic; rural Catholics wanted revenge on the Protestant ascendancy. The future lay with the rural Catholics rather than the Presbyterian radicals.

Pitt and Ireland
The outbreak of war with France caused republicans like Tone, Napper Tandy and Thomas Addis Emmet to pin their hopes on a French invasion to coincide with a home-grown rebellion. This made the United Irishmen a potentially subversive body. One of their leaders, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, first cousin of Charles James Fox, had corresponded with Paine in 1792. But when the French sent an agent to Ireland in May 1793, he was not impressed by the preparedness of the Irish.

Both the French and the British knew that the weakest link in Britain's defences was going to be Ireland. In 1784 the duke of Rutland, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, had told him,

‘Ireland is too great to be unconnected with us, and to near to be dependent on a foreign state, and too little to be independent.’

In order to conciliate the Catholic majority he introduced a Catholic Relief Bill in 1793 which gave Catholics the vote on the same terms as Protestants, permitted them to bear arms and allowed them to occupy most civil and military posts. There was now only one major disability facing Catholics: exclusion from membership of Parliament. In practice, the small number of Catholics who became army officers or lawyers did not succeed in tilting the balance of power. However one promising young Catholic lawyer was called to the Irish bar in 1798: Daniel O'Connell.

The extension of the franchise was mocked by Tone as merely buttressing

‘a disgrace to our constitution and our country, the wretched tribe of forty-shilling freeholders, whom we see driven to their octennial market by their landlords’.

Pitt's repression of dissent also applied to Ireland. Between 1793 and 1796 a Militia Act was passed, a new Protestant Yeomanry formed and an Insurrection Act, making oath-taking a capital offence and increasing the power of magistrates to search for arms, became law. Finally Habeas Corpus was suspended. Pitt had thus reluctantly acquiesced in strengthening the grip of the Protestant ascendancy.

In 1795 following his coalition with the Portland Whigs in the previous summer, Pitt sent the Portland-ite Earl Fitzwilliam to Ireland as Chief Secretary. Fitzwilliam rapidly went native. Without any authority from Westminster he promised full Catholic emancipation. As a result he was recalled and replaced with the more amenable Lord Camden. Fox declared that this placed the Irish ‘in a state of degradation beyond any former period’. Fitzwilliam's dismissal ended all hopes of legitimate reform in Ireland. Tone left for America and then headed for France to seek French aid, arriving there in February 1796. He took the nom de guerre of citoyen Smith in a vain attempt to elude Pitt's spies, and entered into negotiations with Lazare Carnot, one of the Directors who governed France at this time. In a memorandum produced for French agents he described Ireland as

‘a conquered and oppressed and insulted country’

where

‘the name of England and her power is universally odious.'

Even while Fitzwilliam was trying to implement his reforms, sectarian passions were rife in parts of Ireland as Catholic ‘Defenders’ clashed frequently with Protestant ‘Peep O’ Day Boys’ who sought to terrorise Catholics and frighten them off their land. Both sides employed secret oaths, maimed cattle, terrorised juries and murdered those who infringed their codes. After some particularly vicious fighting in 1795, which reached its climax in September in the Battle of the Diamond (a piece of ground near Armagh now marked by a memorial monument) the Peep O’ Day Boys formed an Orange Society. The initial oath reflected a highly conditional loyalism: ‘To support the King and his heirs as long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy’.

The Bantry Bay expedition
On 16 December 1796 a French expedition of a 43 ship fleet and 15,000 men under General Lazare Hoche sailed from Brest for Ireland, accompanied by Wolfe Tone in the uniform of a chef de brigade. By December 22 they were in sight of Bantry Bay, Co. Cork. There were only 11,000 troops in the area and the effect of a successful landing is incalculable. But storms prevented a landing and the expedition was abandoned. Perhaps it was one of the great near misses of British history. Tone:

‘England has not had such an escape since the Spanish Armada’.

However, for the next two years Ireland was a vital part of French strategy. In response the number of British troops in Ireland increased to 65,000, but they had to be scattered over the whole country.

In Ulster General Lake ruled with extreme ruthlessness, carrying out martial law, free quarterings, house burnings and floggings on the flimsiest of suspicions. The fear that the United Irishmen would be completely suppressed forced them into desperate action. They would have to rebel, with or without French aid and in preparation they were forging pikes and concealing guns and ammunition.

Links between Irish exiles in Paris and Britain with subversive forces in Ireland were maintained by a Catholic priest, James Coigly, who was arrested with two members of the London Corresponding Ssociety as he prepared to cross from Margate to France in 1798. Coigly was carrying an Address from the `Secret Committee of England' ensuring support for a French invasion to maintain `the sacred flame of liberty'. He was tried in May and executed on 12 June 1798. Following Coigly’s arrest, virtually all the leading members of the United Irishmen in Britain and the LCS were arrested and, following a new suspension of Habeas Corpus, were kept in prison until 1801.

1798
The rising of 1798 has been described by the historian Roy Foster as

‘probably the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history’.

It had been prepared for over a year, with United Irishmen forging pikes and concealing guns and ammunition. It was fixed for 23 May with Lord Edward Fitzgerald commander in chief. However on 19 May he was betrayed by a government spy, arrested and fatally wounded as he was captured. He died on 4 June. The Catholic Church promptly dissociated itself from the rebellion.

Meanwhile Dublin and the adjacent counties rose on 24-25 May. On 30 May the rebels captured Wexford town. The rebellion spread from Wexford and Wicklow in the east to Sligo and Mayo on the west. Ulster and the south west were barely affected, apart from some action in Antrim and Down (6-13 June) from those who still adhered to the cause of radical Presbyterianism. Local pressures and local antipathies seem to have been more important than ideology. The Dublin outbreak was controlled in a week but Wexford, an area of poor Catholic/Protestant relations, with a higher than average proportion of Protestant settlers saw ferocious fighting.

The insurgents took Enniscorthy and attempted to spread out the rebellion into Wicklow, but failed. The campaign was marked by horrific atrocities on both sides. Protestants only saved their lives by converting to Catholicism. The United Irishmen set up a camp on Vinegar Hill (see picture) outside the town and on an old windmill there set up a green flag. A hundred Protestant prisoners were massacred in a barn at Scullabogue. The main part of the rebellion ended with the rout of the insurgents on Vinegar Hill and the capture of Wexford on 21 June. One of those rounded up and executed was Father John Murphy, who was hanged, his body burned in a tar barrel and his head set on a pike.

By this stage the rebellion was interpreted on all sides as a straightforward Catholic-Protestant conflict. The icons of the rebels were the apparently incompatible rosary and cap of liberty.

On 21 August General Jean Humbert landed at Killala Bay in County Mayo with a force of 900 men. He defeated a numerically superior English force under General Lake at Castlebar (‘the races of Castlebar’) on 23 August and set up a provisional government in Connaught. He recruited and armed many thousands of Irish peasants and reached the centre of Ireland, halfway on the road to Dublin when he was surrounded at Ballinamuck by two numerically superior armies of English and loyal Irish under the newly appointed commander-in-chief, Cornwallis, and forced to surrender on 8 September.

On 6 September another French fleet of one flagship, eight frigates and 3000 men sailed from Brest, with Tone on board. Unaware that the English knew of their movements the fleet headed for Lough Swilly in Co Donegal, where they found eight British frigates waiting for them. In the ensuing chase most of the French ships escaped. Tone was urged to escape with them, but he remained on board the flagship Hoche. At the end of a five hour battle on 12 October his ship was almost a total wreck. The commander surrounded and went to dine with the English at Letterkenny. It met with an impressive local force but it was forced to surrender to the British, and Tone was captured. He claimed that he was a French officer and at his court martial he appeared in French uniform. In spite of this, on 10 November he was sentenced to be hanged – an indignity he had not anticipated. On 12 November he cut his throat with a penknife and died seven days later on the 19th.

In the twentieth century Tone's grave at Bodenstown, Co Kildare became 'a permanent fixture in the republican calendar. Here IRA followers become "re-dedicated" to their republican faith and to the "armed struggle to break the English connection and set up a secular Republic... the dream of our founding father, Wolfe Tone". While constitutional nationalist go to Bodenstown to re-state their commitment to Irish unification, preferring to single out "the common name of Irishman" theme in Tone's wriitng in the hope of some day reconciling the Ulster Protestants to their ultimate aim of a united Ireland.' (Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence, Yale, 1989, p. 416.)

In the aftermath of 1798 the revelations of the extent of the French connection in Ireland stunned contemporaries. The deaths of Fitzgerald and Tone established a potent Irish martyrology. Look at W.B. Yeat's poem, September 1913:

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son'
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

For the first time the idea of an independent Irish republic had been planted.

The legal mopping-up operation continued until 1801. Courts martial tended to punish the leaders harshly but to give amnesties to the followers. Many were transported to Australia, exiled to the United States or made to serve in regiments in the unhealthy West Indies rather than executed. But the statistics of execution will never show the numbers killed. Roy Foster estimates the death-toll on both sides from various causes as 30,000 - a figure comparable to the deaths in the Reign of Terror.

War and taxation

2008-01-24T17:11:00.000Z

Over the eighteenth century the fiscal system became more dependent on excise duties, tariffs and stamp duties.

The most important direct tax was the land tax. In theory this was a national rate of 1s, 2s, 3s or 4s in the £ on the income not only of land but also of personal property and office; in principle it should rise in line with rents, profits, and salaries. But in reality the tax was confined to land and its yield did not reflect the actual income from rents.

The land tax was supplemented by a range of ‘assessed taxes’: these aimed to tap the income of the rich by taxing signs of conspicuous wealth and display such as windows, male servants, horses and carriages.

However land and assessed taxes declined from 40.1% in 1696-1700 to 17.4% in 1791-5. The result was an increasing reliance in indirect taxes in the form of excise duties on a limited range of goods; and duties on exports and imports. The share of customs duties was also falling, in part because of the inefficiency of the customs service. Many officials held their posts through political patronage and they were jobs for life. There was also a desire to protect strategic goods and encourage colonial trade.

The greatest increase in revenue over the 18th century came from excise duties – these were collected by ‘efficient bureaucrats’ rather than by lay commissioners; they were paid salaries rather than fees, were promoted on merit and given retirement pensions, and controlled and monitored by supervisors based at Somerset House. The share of central government revenue from the excise increased from 28.9% in 1696-1700 to 51.55 in 1791-5.

As a general rule government worked though the justices of the peace. Collection of the land tax, assessed taxes and later the income tax was delegated to commissioners drawn from the ranks of the local taxpayers, which contributed to a high level of consent. Local structures of power were reinforced rather than subverted. The government’s revenue was closely monitored by the Treasury Commissioners who produced accounts for parliamentary scrutiny. Burke argued that, compared with France, this created a ‘patriotic alliance’. However the system of bargaining had its weaknesses that could be exploited by powerful vested interests.

The outbreak of war placed strains on the fiscal constitution and exposed the inadequacy of existing taxes. From 1792-8 the national debt increased by about 80%.

At the end of 1797 Pitt introduced the so-called ‘Triple Assessment’, a form of graduated income tax based on the payment of the assessed taxes of the previous year. Individuals with the largest taxable establishments of carriages and male servants paid five times the previous amount, while smaller establishments paid less than a quarter more. For the first time this required the state to know more of an individual’s financial circumstances, and was a major change in the principles of taxation. The Triple Assessment was met with mockery and outrage. ‘The budget was passed in January 1798 but it raised the question of how much longer Pitt could go on increasing the assessed taxes.

In the spring the Speaker Henry Addington’s suggestion of a voluntary contribution caught on. Pitt gave £2,000 (which he did not have!), the king £20,000. The provincial newspapers reported the names of subscribers, which included the very poor. The success of the Voluntary Contribution helped convince Pitt that the nation was ready for more sacrifices.

In that spring Pitt was preoccupied with forming a new coalition against France. A new wave of arrests spelled the end of the London Corresponding Society. In April Habeas Corpus was again suspended. At the end of the month he took the huge gamble of sending a fleet through the Straits of Gibraltar in order to disrupt the French Mediterranean fleet. Though this decision was to be vindicated, it left Ireland dangerously exposed. On 19 May the Irish revolutionary, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was arrested. At the end of May Pitt was engaged in a heated parliamentary exchange with the radical Whig, George Tierney. The following day he accepted his challenge to a duel, which took place on Putney Heath on 27 May 1798. This led to a critical Commons motion from Wilberforce, which was only withdrawn under pressure.

At the end of May the United Irishmen rose in revolt. (See later post.)

The Battle of the Nile

2008-01-24T17:10:00.000Z

The war situation continued to be grim. The victory in October 1797 over the Dutch fleet at Camperdown was gained by a navy that had been in mutiny four months before. It was a powerful moral booster and eased the strategic problem of patrolling the North Sea. But in the same month Austria signed the Treaty of Campo Formio with General Bonaparte (leaving Britain with no allies), in the new year French armies ‘liberated’ Switzerland and Rome and a French force under Bonaparte’s command was assembling in the Channel ports.

In February 1798 Bonaparte abandoned the invasion of Britain as impracticable and forced on the Directory a scheme to invade Egypt, perhaps to disrupt Britain’s communications with India. Over 30,000 troops were prepared, carried by 300 transports, escorted by seven frigates and thirteen ships of the line, including the 120 gun L’Orient, the largest warship in the world.

On 20 May the French sailed from Toulon, giving Nelson the slip, leaving the British bewildered about their plans. On 9 June the French arrived at Malta, which they seized from the Knights of St John. In a piece of inspired guess-work Nelson realized that Bonaparte’s ultimate destination was Egypt. On 28 June the British reached Alexandria, but because there was no sign of the French, they sailed to Sicily. On 1 July the French fleet anchored off Alexandria. On 21 July they defeated the Mamluks at the Battle of the Pyramids near Cairo. On 24 July Nelson, convinced that the French must be in the eastern Mediterranean, sailed back to Egypt. On 1 August the French fleet was decisively defeated by Nelson at Aboukir Bay, twenty miles north of Alexandria; the most dramatic event was the blowing up of L’Orient (graphically portrayed by the painter Philip de Loutherbourg). The French army were now marooned in the eastern Mediterranean. Three months later the news reached Britain; it was the greatest morale-booster of the war so far and made Nelson a popular hero. In the autumn Pitt was engaged in putting together the Second Coalition with Russia and Turkey now firmly in the anti-French camp. However his attempt was hindered by Nelson’s disastrous intervention in Neapolitan politics.

Income tax

2008-01-24T17:00:00.000Z

In his budget speech of 3 December 1798 Pitt outlined his proposal to phase out the land tax and replace the assessed taxes with a new tax which no longer fell upon expenditure but upon incomes and in theory at least allowed the yield to rise in line with the income of the country. The idea was not new in principle: the oldest surviving annual levy, the Land Tax, included an element of income through rents. Pitt himself had considered the possibility of a comprehensive tax on either property or income in 1797. He followed familiar lines of consultation, with a handful of colleagues and officials and with figures outside the government.

He gained approval from the principal moneyed men in the city. His hopes of Parliamentary success rested on the impression that the necessity of such a measure appeared ‘to be so strongly felt ... both among the landed and the Commercial Interest’.
He proposed:
• A general tax of 2/- in the £ on all incomes of £200 or more.
• Incomes under £60 pa were exempt.
• Those between £60 and £200 were to pay on a graduated scale.
• Individuals were to draw up their own assessments and swear an oath as to their accuracy. If they did not do this, Crown commissioners, sworn to confidentiality, would assess them.

The Morning Chronicle had already described it as

‘a daring innovation in English finance’.

In the Commons there was bitter opposition: George Tierney:

‘This puts a tenth of the property of England in a state of requisition ... a measure which the French have followed, in their career of revolutionary rapine, and which the Chancellor of the Exchequer has, with all his eloquence, justly branded with the hardest epithets.’

In the ensuing parliamentary debates, income tax was called a confiscation of property, and it was alleged that it would impair investment in both trade and industry. It would permit spies to become acquainted with men’s private concerns; it would encourage the indolent at the expense of the hardworking. Fox believed that it would fall heaviest on those with incomes of between £200 and £600 pa.

‘If people will not resist this inquisition, they will resist nothing’.

But the bill became law within five weeks. In the last resort it commanded patriotic war-time assent.

How was it collected?
11 May: Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal:

We hear the Commissioners of the Division of Wrington have directed short printed Forms of estimating Incomes to be distributed throughout the Division, which are drawn in so perspicacious a manner as to render further directions unnecessary and ignorance no plea for an improper statement.

This might be an over-optimistic statement. The investigative powers held at the discretion of Commissioners and Surveyors aroused a sense of outrage. It was repealed at the first opportunity after the war ended, and in a quite unprecedented step Parliament ordered that the Commissioners’ records be destroyed.

The final net collection from 5 April 1799 to 5 January 1800 reached the surprisingly low sum of £1,671,000 out of an aggregate of £6, 446,000 from ‘Land and Assessed Taxes’. The trouble lay with evasion. In April 1800 Pitt tried to remedy this: the taxpayer would now be required to itemise his income ‘divided and distinguished’ in amended schedules and likewise his claims for deductions, specifying the names and addresses of creditors and others concerned. He would not be allowed to aggregate the items: that would fall to the Commissioners in making their assessment of the net payment. The degree of secrecy allowed to commercial returns would be abolished. This aroused such hostility that it did not reach the statute book. A milder one was introduced instead.

Overall, the tax was collected with reasonable efficiency and it indicates the overall wealth of the nation.

Website on Napoleon

2008-01-24T16:46:00.000Z

This BBC website gives a brief but useful account of Napoleon's career.

Here is a dramatic (and dubiously accurate) portrayal of Napoleon's confrontation with the Council of Five Hundred in the Brumaire coup of 1799.

Here are the main features of the Constitution of the Year VIII which established the Consulate.

Moral Economy

2008-01-18T10:28:00.001Z

This is a follow-on from the class discussion on moral economy in the context of the food riots of 1795.

The concept was set out by E. P. Thompson in an article, ‘The moral economy of the English Crowd (Past and Present,1971), and reprinted in Customs in Common (1991). He argued that, far from being merely responses to hunger or outbreaks of disorder, eighteenth-century food riots were a complex, rational form of direct action, the actions of the crowd being informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights and customs. Riots arose out of the popular mentalité. In an increasingly capitalist society, the rioters were looking back to an older paternalism which existed in a body of statute law, common law, and customary usage (set out, for example, in Charles I's Book of Orders of 1630). The paternalist model insisted

Foodstuffs should be marketed at or near their place of origin.
Marketing should be, as far as possible, direct from the farmer to the consumer.
Markets should be controlled. Dealers were hedged round with many restrictions. They must not buy standing crops, nor might they purchase to sell again (within three months) in the same market at a profit.
The needs of the poor should always take precedence over those of dealers and middleman. Millers and bakers were servants of the community, working not for a profit but for a fair allowance.

This community consensus can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. Its guarantors were the ‘crowd’; the moral economy was not the value system of the few but of an entire plebeian society. Thompson argued that the crowd’s actions were orderly and restrained. He considered it significant that women frequently initiated riots, as they were most exposed to price fluctuations.

Context
The market economy did not begin in the eighteenth century. Farmers, farm labourers, craftsmen, and artisans had always operated in a ‘market’, but it was a market subject to internal regulation. Significant changes took place in later eighteenth-century England, the result of rapid population growth, improved communications, industrialization, and war. The transport revolution opened up new regions to a trade in foodstuffs, above all grains. The development of ever-increasing volumes of grain shipments depended on a growing body of dealers and merchants (middleman) who had always been targets of popular hostility.
In addition, Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776) set out an increasingly influential free market ideology: prices should not be fixed by local regulations but should find their own level in the open market. Corn must be left to flow freely from areas of surplus to areas of scarcity; hence, the middleman played a necessary, productive and laudable role, and prejudices against forestallers were on a par with witchcraft beliefs.

Criticisms
1. Thompson was a sophisticated Marxist, but he was still a Marxist committed to a model of class struggle. Yet his ‘gentry/plebeian’ model ignored the ‘middling sort’. Recent research suggests that many of the middling sort shared the rioters’ hostility to ‘jobbers’ and ‘forestallers’.
2. There were too few riots in the eighteenth century to have sustained a tradition of food rioting. Why were some communities more willing to protest than others? ? Were there specific local factors rather than a generalized ideology of ‘moral economy’?
3. The transition from an economy primarily based upon local, partly regulated, exchange to a national, consumer-driven, unregulated market was neither fast nor uniform.
4. Is the concept, as subsequently interpreted, too wide and too vague? Does it apply to both agrarian and industrial workers? Can it be extended to other countries and regions such as India? (Thompson was doubtful.)

The debate continues

Wartime hardship

2008-01-15T16:20:00.000Z

The summer of 1794 was one of prolonged drought and intense heat and the result was a disappointing though not a disastrous harvest. This was followed by a severe winter, creating a grain shortage in early 1795. The spring saw rapid price rises. Shortages intensified in the summer, with garrison and naval towns suffering particularly. The mayor of Plymouth complained about the costs of feeding the army and navy and prisoners of war.

Bread riots
Bread riots were one response to the grain shortages. For example in May the colliers of Kingswood near Bristol rioted and the riots had to be suppressed by the Worcestershire militia regiment that was quartered in the city. Sometimes the rioters set fire to mills, sometimes they attacked those whom they believed to be hoarders or selling short measure; at other times they tried to prevent grain from leaving an area. At other times they commandeered goods and sold them at what they regarded as a fair price. Women were prominent in these riots, partly because they had to bear the burden of trying to feed their families and partly because they were often judged to be less liable to the legal penalties. Soldiers were also involved, as troops quartered at home were expected to provide for themselves out of their weekly pay. Men from the newly raised 122nd Foot fixed prices at bayonet point in the market at Wells. Men of the 114th Foot threatened to destroy bakers’ ovens at Wantage and sell bread and meal at their own price.

These incidents all indicate the concept famously defined by E. P. Thompson of ‘moral economy’ - a set of customs and traditions geared round the concept of a fair price. Either through expediency or because they shared this conviction, paternalist magistrates tried to enforce ‘just’ prices. At the end of 1795 the government released wheat on the London corn market at or just below the market price, a little at a time in order to keep prices steady. For the first time the collection and publication of accurate statistical information became a government responsibility.

In an attempt to deal with the food shortage, the newspapers recommended recipes such as rice or potato bread. The rich were urged to stew their meat rather than roast it. The royal family tried to give a lead by reducing its consumption of white bread and eating more brown bread. The poor were urged to cook rice puddings - but the problem was that they did not have the ovens to cook them. They were also encouraged to eat potatoes rather than bread, but proved resistant. The same recommendations were found in Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts. (Click on the pictures to enlarge.)

The imposition of excise duty on hair powder (with a £20 fine for those caught breaking the law) was designed to lessen the use of flour. Legislation forbade the use of wheat in distilling and in making starch.

It is not clear that anyone starved to death during the shortage - but it must have had a devastating effect on health.

Poor relief
One solution to rural poverty was found by the magistrates of Speenhamland in Berkshire in May 1795. This provided variable amounts of relief according to the size of a labourers’ family and the prevailing price of bread. It was bitterly attacked by political economists as encouraging large families and encouraging farmers to pay the lowest possible wage. It was also criticised for failing to discriminate between the idle and the industrious worker. However the system was quite widely adopted in the southern counties and probably served to cushion the poor from the major price rises.

Private charity played a large role. The Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor (founded in 1796) and similar societies distributed relief. Friendly societies might have encouraged the poor to a greater degree of self-reliance.

The year 1795-6 saw poor rates rise to an estimated total of £5 million to which was added, on one calculation, £6 million in private charity.

In 1796 Pitt attempted to revise the poor law and to introduce family allowances and old age pensions paid for out of the rates as a weapon against ‘Jacobinism’. His bill failed for lack of parliamentary support, with his critics complaining of its complexity.

The crisis of 1795 was eventually ended in the spring of 1796 by a combination of imports and government sales of corn, together with enhanced consumption of non-wheaten grains and an increased acreage of wheat sown in the autumn of 1795. However following the cold spring and wet summer of 1799 the harvest was again poor. A prolonged drought in 1800 led to another harvest crisis, only brought to an end by the abundant harvest of 1801.

Finance
The ever-increasing cost of the war had a drastic effect upon finance.
The budget of 1795: a new loan of £18m and a series of new levies on wines and spirits, tea, life insurance, insurance of ships’ cargoes, hair powder (annual fee of 1 guinea for a licence to wear hair powder). Fox warned that the tax on tea would hit the poor.

The budget of 1796: the assessed taxes were raised 10%. There was a new levy on tobacco. The tax on horses kept for pleasure was doubled to reach £1; there was a new tax of 2/- on horses kept for industry. The levy on printed calico was increased from 3 1/2 d to 6d. Discounts in the salt trade were reduced. The most significant new tax of 1796 was directed at property owners. A duty on legacies (sliding scale according to the closeness of the relationship) had to be withdrawn in May because of the hostility it provoked. Fox said it would be better to levy a tax on income.

The budget of 1797 increased the duty on spirits, but the ‘coarser’ variety was exempted from the duty on tea. A new tax on sugar was introduced ‘with regret’.

Invasion scares
The fear of invasion was real. In December 1796, Lazare Hoche’s abortive attempt to land in Ireland was beaten back by bad weather. On 14 February a Spanish fleet, ultimately destined to combine with the French for the invasion of Britain, was intercepted off Capt St Vincent by a far smaller force of British warships under Sir John Jervis, joined from the Mediterranean by Commodore Nelson, and defeated, with three of their ships sunk. (Nelson was probably the first British flag-officer to lead a boarding party in person since 1513.) This removed for a time the threat of Franco-Spanish domination of the Channel, and Jervis was rewarded with an earldom and Nelson with a knighthood.

On 23 February 1797 three frigates landed 1,500 French troops at Fishguard. But within 24 hours they had surrendered to the Pembrokeshire militia.

Currency crisis
News that French troops were ashore on the British mainland led to a run on the county banks. Combined with loans to foreign powers, this led to a shortage of gold. The Bank of England was forbidden by the government to hand out cash payments. People were therefore forced into paper currency - an important psychological change. This was of long-term benefit economically as it ensured a gentle reflation, ensuring maximum production and employment. But at the time all that was visible was an acute financial crisis and huge anxieties among wage-earners. Gloucestershire clothiers feared their cloth workers would riot if they were not paid in cash. But by 1803 a Scottish banker said it was an ‘agreeable surprise’ to see how quickly the country had accepted paper money.

Mutiny
In April 1797 a ‘shattering blow’ occurred when the fleet at Spithead mutinied. The mutineers took over warships, put the officers ashore and refused to weigh anchor until the French actually put to sea. The demands of the mutineers were: an increase in wages (unchanged since 1652), security against embezzlement by pursers, improved medical service, shore leave at the end of a voyage, removal of unpopular officers. After some delay the government was compelled to accept the demands, and grant a royal pardon to the mutineers, though at the same time it raised army pay to forestall an army mutiny.

In general, the Spithead mutiny was orderly; sailors ran ships without their officers in a disciplined manner and elected delegates to negotiate with the admiralty. But the second mutiny on 12 May at the Nore at the Medway estuary,(a focal point where ships coming from Chatham and the river yards, or those returning from sea, often spent a few days) on 12 May was more serious. The mutineers fired on two frigates. After they were joined by mutineers from Yarmouth, they attempted a complete blockade of the Thames. But private merchantmen put their ships at the government’s disposal and in June all the rebel ships were captured. Twenty-nine ringleaders were eventually executed.

The mutinies were extremely serious, depriving the nation of its chief military arm and leaving it largely defenceless against foreign invasion. There were fears that a Jacobin plot was behind the Nore mutiny. The Home Secretary granted permission to the magistrates to intercept the correspondence of the mutineers. However, they were unable to identify these ‘wicked and designing men’ and N.A.M. Rodger, the latest historian to study the evidence, has not found known radicals or United Irishmen among the mutineers. (For an alternative view, see Royle, Revolutionary Britannia.) Fortunately for Britain, the French were unable to make use of this chance. In October Duncan’s naval victory over the Dutch at Camperdown showed clearly how the French had missed a great opportunity. This eased the problem of controlling the North Sea and the Royal Navy began to acquire the aura of invincibility which was attached to the French armies.

But at the end of the year Pitt learned of Bonaparte’s Treaty of Campo Formio with Austria, following his brilliantly successful Italian campaign. The First Coalition was over. In the New Year a French invasion force under Bonaparte’s command was assembling in the Channel ports.

This was clearly a troubling time for Pitt. His leadership was questioned and his cabinet was divided on the question of peace. He himself wished to make peace but the advent of a more hard-line government in France made this impossible. He was also troubled in his private life by financial worries. But it was also a time of depression and disillusionment for Fox and the Opposition. There was no enthusiasm in the country for reform, and the king was more popular than ever. In despair (and much to the anger of Sheridan and his Westminster constituents) Fox seceded from parliament for the next three years. In May 1798 he was dismissed from the Privy Council for toasting ‘our sovereign, the people’.

Pitt's 'Reign of Terror'

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A threat of revolution?
There is no doubt that Pitt’s government was fearful of a home-grown revolutionary insurrection and that in the mid 1790s there was what Boyd Hilton has described as ‘a significant increase in the coercive powers of the state’. (A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? Oxford, 2007) But were the fears justified? The Home Office files for the last months of 1792 show that alarmist reports were being received of Frenchmen armed with daggers on the road from Harwich to London, and of a disturbance in Dundee where the liberty tree was planted. Did the government manipulate the information for its own purposes? (Hilton). Or did it show a reasonable reaction to what it thought was a genuine threat? (See Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Manchester, 2000)

The Scottish trials
The full weight of the growing loyalist reaction was first felt in Scotland where a vigorous parliamentary reform moving had grown up in the course of 1792. Scottish societies, modelled on the London Corresponding Society, spread rapidly. There were disturbances in some parts of Scotland and the reformers’ protestations that they did not want violence were taken as merely hypocritical.

Scottish political life was controlled by the Home Secretary (1791-4), Henry Dundas (‘King Henry IX’). He probably over-estimated the revolutionary threat in Scotland. However when a group of English and Scottish reformers summoned an unfortunately named (?) Convention in Edinburgh in December 1792, the government became deeply alarmed.

In January 1793 a series of trials for sedition or seditious libel took place in Edinburgh. These trials were remarkable for the freedom with which the judges expressed themselves. They were the preliminaries to the sensational trials in the late summer.

In August 1793 the lawyer, Thomas Muir (1765-1799), vice-president of a Jacobin discussion group in Glasgow, was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation after an outrageously biased trial. In September the English Unitarian, Thomas Palmer (1747-1802), then minister at Dundee was sentenced to seven years.

In October 1793 the National Convention of British reformers met at Edinburgh. The London Corresponding Society, the Society for Constitutional Information and the Sheffield Society all sent delegates. Its two London delegates were Joseph Gerrald (1760-1796) and Maurice Margarot (1745-1815). The meeting declared itself a British Convention and appointed a secret committee to act in case of emergency. The authorities broke up the meeting and placed Gerrald and Margarot and the Scottish secretary William Skirving (d. 1796) under arrest. Margarot was accompanied to his trial in early 1794 by a procession holding a ‘tree of liberty’ in the shape of a letter M above his head. He was sentenced to 14 years transportation, Gerrald received the same sentence a month later (he had tuberculosis).

The London trials
The government was greatly alarmed by the success of the London Corresponding Society’s new tactic of open air meetings and by its decision to hold an English Convention in the summer of 1794. In May and the authorities arrested seven members of the LCS, including Hardy, John Thelwall, its best orator and six members of the Society for Constitutional Information, including John Horne Tooke, but excluding Cartwright.

At the same time Pitt proposed the suspension of Habeas Corpus, provoking the fiercest Commons debate of the century. He opened the debate with a fierce attack on the ‘monstrous’ doctrine of the Rights of Man. Grey responded by calling Pitt an apostate. Fox and his diminished band divided the Commons fourteen times over the legislation, but could muster only 28 votes.

Of the thirteen arrested only three were brought to trial. The first was Hardy charged in the Old Bailey in October with high treason under the statute of 1351: ‘imagining the king’s death’. The Whig politician Charles Grey wrote to his wife: ‘

If this man is hanged, there is no safety for any man ... and I do not know how soon it may come to my turn.’

In his defence of Hardy, his barrister Thomas Erskine insisted that for the London Corresponding Society, as for earlier reforming organizations, it was never a question of using force but rather

‘a design to undermine monarchy by changes wrought through public opinion, enlarging gradually into universal will’.

The medium was to be the works of Thomas Paine; even the name (LCS) testified that the society was concerned with ideas rather than violent action. But though no convincing evidence was produced that Hardy had been gathering arms, some of his correspondence seemed damning and treasonable, with provincial societies urging a convention that by implication could overrule Parliament. But how far was Hardy to be responsible for letters addressed to him? After a short recess the jury found him not guilty. The verdict transformed popular sentiment from approving the prosecution of lionising the acquitted shoemaker and his defending council.

The trial of Horne Took a fortnight later attracted more attention. He was an ex-parson who had been a well-known political figure since the days of Wilkes. The defence subpoenaed Pitt to show that many people in the 1780s had been advocating parliamentary reform. Tooke was also acquitted as was Thelwall after a trial of a day. The tension generated by the possibility of a guilty verdict and the death sentence were relaxed and the trials were held in something like a carnival atmosphere.

The difference between the English and Scottish trials reflects the different legal systems. Ironically, the acquittals made the loyalist case - that England was a country where a man could have a fair trial. It contrasts with Paine’s treatment at the hands of the revolutionaries - arrested in December 1793 with his life was saved by mere chance.

The Whigs split
Although Fox asked shrewd questions about the purpose of the war and though his attacks on government repression were arguably ‘right’ he did not gain politically. His refusal to support the war eventually split his party. The duke of Portland, the leader of the party, supported the war and at the turn of 1793/4, following a series of allied disasters in the Low Countries, he decided to break with Fox and the radical Whigs who had formed the Friends of the People. In May Pitt invited Portland to discuss the possibility of a ‘ministerial arrangement’ which ‘might make us act together as one Great Family’ against the 'Jacobin threat’. The negotiations took place over several weeks during which mixed news arrived from the war: Lord Howe’s naval victory of the Glorious First of June, and the French victory at Fleurus, which forced the duke of York’s retreat. At a meeting at Burlington House on 13 June conservative Whigs unanimously supported a coalition.

By early July a new cabinet was formed. Five posts went to the Whigs, with Portland becoming Home Secretary, Fox’s friend, the earl of Fitzwilliam becoming Lord President of the Council (with the understanding that he would soon become Lord Lieutenant of Ireland), the earl of Loughborough Lord Chancellor and Spencer Lord Privy Seal and (from Dec 1794) First Lord of the Admiralty. An aggrieved Dundas had to give up his post as Home Secretary, but he retained responsibility for War and the Colonies, previously a Home Office responsibility (thus creating a third office of Secretary of State). Burke’s friend William Windham became Secretary at War under Dundas.

Pitt intended the coalition to outlast the war and add to his security in any future regency crisis. The Foxites were reduced to a parliamentary rump of perhaps only fifty members of the Commons and a dozen peers. As Fox's biographer Leslie Mitchell notes,

‘They were no longer a credible opposition, bur rather a band who could only engage in guerrilla tactics on the edge of politics.’

A few days after the formation of the new cabinet Robespierre fell in the Thermidor coup (27 July). His execution marked the end of the Terror, but not the war. By the end of 1794 the French had not only retaken Belgium, but had driven the Austrians completely from the west bank of the Rhine and secured the way into northern Italy. In December Wilberforce moved an unsuccessful amendment to the King’s speech advising negotiations with the French. War weariness had already crept in and intensified when Amsterdam fell to the French in January and Holland was knocked out of the war. Pitt himself wished to negotiate peace with France, though by 1796 he came to believe that France was unwilling to enter realistic negotiations.

The Gagging Acts
The hardships of 1795 gave a final lease of life to the embattled LCS. A meeting near Copenhagen House, Islington on 26 October 1795 was followed three days later by an ugly demonstration against the king. The radical Francis Place reported that many in the crowd hissed the king, and called our

‘No Pitt, No War, Peace, Peace, Bread, Bread.’

When passing through a narrow street near St Margaret’s Church, a pane of glass in the king’s coach window broke - either by accident or a stone. When the coach returned empty, it was destroyed by protesters.

At the end of the year the government brought in the acts known colloquially as the Gagging Acts.

1. The Treasonable Practices Act forbade the expression of views calculated to bring king or government into contempt.
2. The Seditious Meetings Act forbade assemblies of more than 50 persons without prior notice and gave the magistrates power to disperse the onlookers if seditious observations were being made.

These measures were bitterly opposed by the Foxites. Petitions poured into parliament for and against the bills - the majority against. Wilberforce travelled to York to persuade a public meeting held there to back the bills. They passed into law on 18 December. Round the country magistrates took action against radicals.

A 'Reign of Terror'?
The consensus among historians has been that Pitt’s actions were excessive and there is no doubt that many innocent people suffered. This case has been recently reinforced by John Barrell’s The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006), which argues that eighteenth-century notions of privacy were constantly ‘invaded’ by the public and political concerns raised by war and the fear of revolution. But perhaps it is unfair to blame the government, as Europe seemed to be descending into war and anarchy. Pitt's repressive acts can be put into the context of other war-time legislation (1914, 1939). The cabinet believed it was faced with the threat of invasion, with the problem of maintaining food supplies, with the problems of manpower and war finance. The war against revolutionary France had an ideological aspect new to the 18th century, the opposition failed to support the government and within Britain radicals were openly subscribing to the enemy’s ideology. The majority of the country seems to have accepted the Acts without question.

There is also the fact that British wartime governments in the twentieth century adopted draconian powers. In the Second World War Oswald and Diana Mosley together with other Fascist sympathisers, lost their habeas corpus rights and were imprisoned under this emergency legislation. In retrospect, it does not seem very democratic.

Though the mass of the country seem to have remained loyal to the government, there were insurrectionary pockets. Very inflammatory literature was produced at Hardy’s trial. Wilberforce noted the presence of such literature in 1795. There was a religious dimension to the atmosphere of alarm. Paine’s Age of Reason (1794) was a direct attack on Christianity.

The End of the LCS
In the wake of the Gagging Acts the LCS began to experience serious internal divisions over the most appropriate tactics for combating government repression, with some urging violence - both to defend civil liberties and to complete a prepared revolution. In 1798 a clandestine organization called the United Englishmen was set up in London. But while debating whether to support this movement, its members were arrested.

The Terror

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Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94)

‘Nobody had dreamed of establishing a system of terror. It established itself by force of circumstances.’ William Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution.

Nevertheless, the Terror was the policy of the Jacobin government from the autumn of 1793 until its abandonment in August 1794. It is associated above all with Maximilian Robespierre

What was the Terror?
It was the period beginning on 5 September 1793 and ending with the death of Robespierre in July 1794. Famous victims included Marie Antoinette, the Girondins and eventually the Dantonist faction, but the bulk of the victims were ordinary people. In the course of the Terror, around 16,000 people were formally condemned to death, most of them in the provinces. An unknown number died in custody or were lynched without trial. Nearly 2,000 were executed in Lyon after the city fell to the revolutionaries. Over 3,500 were guillotined when the revolt in the Vendée was finally suppressed after terrible loss of life on the battlefield and the murder of an estimated 10,000 rebels and civilians in retreat. The most horrific event of the provincial Terror occurred in Nantes, the scene of the noyades (drowings) At a rough estimated 30,000 died (though it should be noted that more people died in Ireland in 1798 and in Poland in 1794). In Paris, the scene of these executions was the Place de la Révolution.

The Terror was accompanied by a policy of de-christianization – churches were closed and the calendar redrawn.

It was triggered by war, resistance within France to the Revolution, the increasingly violent actions of the sans-culottes in the face of economic hardship. It also developed its own momentum.

The ideology of the Terror
The Terror was prefigured in an article by Robespierre in September 1792 at the time of the meeting of the Convention:

‘It is not enough to have overturned the throne: our concern is to erect upon his remains holy equality and the imprescriptible Rights of Man. It is not in the empty word itself that a republic consists, but in the character of the citizens. The soul of a republic is vertu – that is love of la patrie, and the high-minded devotion that resolves all private interests into the general interest. The enemies of the republic are those dastardly egoists, those ambitious and corrupt men. You have hunted down kings, but have you hunted out the vices that their deadly domination has engendered among you? Taken together, you are the most generous, the most moral of all peoples…but a people that nurtures within itself a multitude of adroit rogues and political charlatans, skilled at usurpation and the betrayal of trust.’

The Terror was therefore inspired by the quest for vertu and the hunt for the enemy within.

Robespierre went on to quote Rousseau and to develop his prescriptions. The austerely virtuous lawgivers should be

‘treading underfoot vanity, envy, ambition and all the weaknesses of petty souls, inexorable towards crime armed with power, indulgent toward error, sympathetic toward misery and tender and respectful toward the people’.

‘The point was to ensure the triumph of the good, pure, general will of the people – what the people would want in ideal circumstances – and this needed to be intuited on their own behalf until they received sufficient education to understand their own good.’ Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution.

St-Just, February 1794: ‘The republic is built on the ruins of everything anti-republican. There are three sins against the republic: one is to be sorry for State prisoners; another is to be opposed to the rule of virtue; and the third is to be opposed to the Terror.’

The coming of the Terror
On 10 March 1793 the Convention was persuaded by Georges-Jacques Danton to revive the Revolutionary Tribunal with its extraordinary powers to put people to death. He saw it as a necessary weapon for a country torn by war, civil strife and hunger, and never imagined that this would be the body that would condemn him to death. The Tribunal consisted of twelve jurors and a public prosecutor (Antoine Fouquier-Tinville). There could be no appeal against its judgements.

Following the defeat at Neerwinden and the defection of Dumouriez to the Austrians, Danton, returned from the front, urged the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, a provisional revolutionary government of twelve men briefed to supervise and accelerate the exercise of ministerial power. It was to work alongside the larger Committee of General Security that had been set up in September 1792. Members had to be re-elected every month. None of the members was a Girondin.
The second result of the disaster at Neerwinden was the fall of the Girondins. Brissot and his associates were accused of being in leave with Dumouriez and in the pay of Pitt. On 31 May a crowd of Parisian petitioners arrived at the Convention (recently moved from the Manège to the Tuileries) and took possession of the deputies’ seats. On 2 June the Girondin leaders who had not already fled were provisionally arrested. Their fate was sealed by Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Marat.

On 27 July Robespierre was finally elected to the Committee of Public Safety. It was he and his associates who decreed the levée en masse and decreed mass executions after the fall of Lyons on 6 October.

The Terror arrives
Although the summer of 1793 was good and the harvest plentiful the dry weather meant that the watermills could not word and food became scarce in Paris. At the same time news reached Paris of the surrender of Toulon to the British. On 5 September the mob once more invaded the Convention, pressurizing the Convention into a series of radical emergency measures. It declared terror ‘the order of the day’ and expanded the Revolutionary Tribunal. On 17 September the Law of Suspects empowered watch committees to arrest anyone who had in any way shown themselves hostile to the Revolution. Up to 10,000 people, arrested under the Law of Suspects, may have died in custody in over-crowded prisons; others were murdered or lynched with no official record.

On 29 September a General Maximum Law imposed price controls on a wide range of goods. In October the Committee of Public Safety took on the central direction of the entire state apparatus.
The queen’s trial began on 14 October. On 9 July she had been separated from her son and during the two day trial she was accused of having sexually abused him. She was guillotined on 16 October. David sketched her on her way to execution. The picture speaks for itself.

The trial of twenty-one Girondins began on 24 October. Brissot had been captured at Moulins. Roland committed suicide on hearing of the execution of his wife in early November. Their ‘treason’ had been their federalism and their comparative political moderation.
In October the republican calendar was adopted, backdated to 22 September 1792, in spite of Robespierre’s misgivings (Scurr, 263-4).

The Terror changes direction
The first phase of the Terror was spontaneous, unco-ordinated and difficult to control. This is seen, for example, in the Convention’s surrender to the demand for price controls that was, in effect ‘a pact with street violence’ (Scurr, 265). The second phase was a government response to the anarchy of mass deaths and the de-christianization. The de-christianization was marked by some dramatic events. The aged archbishop of Paris renounced his Catholicism at the bar of the Convention. Soon afterwards a Convention decree closed all the churches in Paris – a measure that was widely imitated in France. On 10 November (20 Brumaire) in a ceremony organized by the virulent journalist René Hébert, a printer’s wife was worshipped in Notre Dame as the goddess of reason. This disgusted Robespierre was fiercely antagonistic to atheism, which he saw as ‘aristocratic’. Now that the Girondins had gone he saw the virulent Hébertist faction as the new counter-revolutionaries.

On 4 December 1793 the Revolutionary Government passed the Law of 14 Frimaire (4 December), a measure of extreme centralization, which vested all power in the Committee of Public Safety (Doyle, 262-4, Scurr, 269). The Law of Frimaire, and power struggles within the Committee of Public Safety, allowed the elimination of the advocates of crowd disorder (the Hébertistes) in March 1794 after they mounted a failed coup. The mass of executions marked the end of the sans-culottes as a political force.

From December Camille Desmoulins (seen here with his wife Lucile and his baby son Horace, Robespierre's godson) had edited a journal called Le Vieux Cordelier, an attack on the Hébertists, and a call for a Committee of Clemency to provide justice for those arrested under the Law of Suspects. After a public quarrel in the Jacobin Club in January 1794, Danton came to fear that Robespierre, who had hitherto sacrificed his enemies, might now sacrifice his friends. On 10 January Camille was expelled from the Jacobins. Robespierre was now increasingly obsessed with cleansing the Republic of corruption.

‘If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, its basis in time of revolution is both virtue and terror – virtue without which terror is disastrous and terror, without which virtue has now power.…Terror is merely justice, prompt, severe, and inflexible. It is therefore an emanation of virtue, and results from the application of democracy to the most pressing needs of the country.’ Quoted Scurr, 274-5.

In April the Dantonists were arrested and imprisoned in the Luxembourg, where they met Tom Paine. They were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal and executed.

Danton’s death marked the inauguration of the Republic of Virtue, which was characterized by a concentration of power at the centre. In May the cult of the Supreme Being was established (as a counter to anti-Christian excesses). Article I of the new constitution stated:

‘The French people recognizes the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.’

On 20 Prairial (8 June, Whit Sunday in the old calendar) Paris celebrated the Festival of the Supreme Being in a ceremony stage-managed by David.

The Law of 22 Prairial (10 June) marks the height of the Terror. It was designed to speed up and expand the work of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Robespierre believed that the cult of the Supreme Being and the Law of Prairial would bring in the republic of virtue. The result of the law was to increase the number of executions. Between March and August 1794 2,639 people were guillotined, over half dying between June and July. Fouquier-Tinville was often summoned in the night to receive his orders of the day. He claimed he was followed everywhere by ghosts. Among those who died were the whole family of a girl who had tried to assassinate Robespierre and an underage maidservant.

Robespierre was brought down by his enemies outside the Committees of Public Safety and General Security. Many deputies were frightened that they would be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, especially those who had been recalled from their provincial missions, notably Joseph Fouché (a militant atheist who had committed atrocities in Nevers and Lyon) and Jean Lambert Tallien (who had terrorized the Vendée and Bordeaux).

Ever more isolated, Robespierre increasingly withdrew from the Convention and devoted his time to the Police Bureau where he spent hours analysing the reports of informers. On the morning of 8 Thermidor (26 July) Robespierre spoke for two hours to the Convention and threatened to name the conspirators against the Revolution. Everyone knew he meant Fouché, Tallien and their associates. Scurr, 311 ff. On the following day (9Thermidor ,27 July), Saint-Just was shouted down in the Convention and Robespierre, his brother Augustin, Saint-Just and three others were arrested. But some of the Parisian sections were growing restive and no prison would detain them. By 1 am on 10 Thermidor all five were in the Hotel de Ville waiting for the insurrection to begin when soldiers from the Convention burst in. Scurr, 321-2. Robespierre shattered his jaw in a botched suicide attempt. They were guillotined the same day under the provisions of the Law of Prairial. Over 100 of his supporters were executed on the following days. He had forced his enemies into the open and he paid the price.

On 1 August the Law of Prairial was repealed. In the following days there was a mass release of prisoners. In November 1795 a new government, the Directory, was set up. (Paine was released.) By this time France was becoming internally peaceful though the war was stepped up.

Waging war

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Unprepared for war
During the long Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Britain was France’s most consistent enemy. It was a war described by Napoleon as the war of the elephant and the whale: France could not defeat Britain at sea, but the British could only defeat the French on land by coalition building – an expensive and frequently unreliable strategy. It took four coalitions to bring about the final defeat of France. (The other three were smashed by Napoleon.)
Britain entered the war from a position of weakness. Pitt had rehabilitated the national finances partly at the expense of military expenditure. In particular, the army was too small – 15,000 men in the British Isles with perhaps twice as many again deployed to India and the West Indies.

Pitt as war leader
This raises the question: Was Pitt a good war-time Prime Minister? Arguably not. Britain entered the war unprepared and undermanned. The strategy was ill thought out and Fox was right to pick out the confusion of war aims. Furthermore, Pitt mistakenly believed that the war would be short and his financial measures rested on this assumption. He underestimated French fighting capability and France’s sense of patriotic identity. However, he has acquired a reputation as a great war-time leader, because Britain was not defeated and because his allies after his death praised him as ‘the pilot who weathered the storm’.

Britain’s attempt to defeat revolutionary France in the 1790s rested on three strategic pillars:
(a) supporting the European allies with cash and troops;
(b) using the navy to pick off French colonies, especially in the Caribbean;
(c) offering practical aid to opponents of the Revolution within France.

Pitt’s strategy therefore was essentially to follow his father’s policy, though he did not anticipate a war as long as the Seven Years’ War. However the war refused to follow this pattern.

The Armed Forces
The danger of a massive French invasion was so great after 1793 and so protracted that the government was compelled to call Britons for the defence of the nation. This was an era which saw an unprecedented mobilisation - such a scale would not be attempted again until the First World War.

The Army
There were three ways in which men could serve in the army.

1. As regular soldiers
2. In the county militias
3. In the volunteer regiments formed to counter the threat of a French invasion.
The part-time and voluntary forces had reached almost half a million men by 1804.

Regular soldiers
Traditionally Britain, like other European nations, had fought its wars with the aid of mercenaries, mainly Germans, and supplemented with artisans and labourers who enlisted voluntarily in the armed forces, and with men seized by press gangs against their will.
Recruitment was chaotic as different recruiting parties competed with each other. Faced with this chaos, the government authorized the formation of 100 independent companies each of 100 men. The cost of recruiting fell to the individual who raised the company, but it guaranteed him a commissioned rank relative to the numbers he raised. If he couldn’t find a regiment to receive him he went on half pay and could draw army pension for life.
When married men joined the army, their families often had to resort to the parish. In Sunderland in September 1793 the overseers of the poor of Sunderland estimated that the poor rate would treble.

When the army had difficulties in recruiting, it resorted to crimps, civilians who forcibly recruited men for the army. The employment of crimps led to great hostility - they were seen as synonymous with kidnappers. In 1794 there were anti-crimp riots in London.
Most of the recruits came from the unemployed - also from apprentices who wished for adventure (though this was forbidden, and several young men came before the quarter-sessions for enlisting while apprenticed). Many enlisted while drunk.

The Militia
At the onset of the war with France the only civil defence force in operation was the militia. This had been remodelled in 1757 when Parliament ordered that every English and Welsh county was to supply a given quota of men between the ages of 18 and 45 and pay them out of the rates. 32,000 men ‘all of them good Protestants’ were to be chosen by ballot and subjected to martial law in time of active service; during peacetime they were to be dispatched for a month’s military training every year under the voluntary leadership of the gentry.

The system was unpopular and inefficient, with the burden of militia service falling overwhelmingly on the illiterate poor. The lords lieutenants, who were in charge of the militia, appointed poorly paid clerks to carry out the organization. Detailed administrative work (for example, assessing which parishes were deficient in quotas) was not carried out.

Magistrates had to swear in the militiamen. They and the mayors and constables had to organize transport and tented camps and allocate billets in local inns. Reimbursement for innkeepers was often insufficient, and innkeepers often petitioned for barracks.
Parliament authorized a weekly allowance for a wife and each lawful child under 10 of a militiaman (if they did not follow the regiment). This came from the rates and was much resented by rate-payers.

There were numerous exceptions - men under 5ft 4inches, peers, army and militia officers (including ex-militia officers who had served for four years), members of the English universities, Anglican and Dissenting clergy, articled clerks, seamen, apprentices, Thames watermen etc. A balloted man could avoid service by paying a £10 fine or by finding a substitute. The newspapers advertised agencies that could find substitutes.

County quotas were rarely met, and now attempts were made to adjust them to the changing balance of population. In 1796 the proportion of eligible men serving in the militia in the heavily agricultural counties of Dorset, Bedfordshire and Montgomeryshire was more than 1 in 10. But the more industrialised counties, which had experienced rapid population growth, only 1 in 30 for Yorkshire or 1 in 25 for Lancashire, were eligible.

The government responded with the Supplementary Militia Act (1796) which demanded a further 60,000 militiamen from England and another 4,400 from Wales, taking care to ensure that the quotas were more equal. In 1797 the militia was extended to Scotland for the first time.

These two acts brought up the total strength of the militia to c. 100,000. From this time onwards the militia became an accepted part of British life.

Volunteers
In addition, ‘gentlemen’ were encouraged to found their own private volunteer corps of infantry or cavalry, but no state subsidies were given to these early volunteers. The government wanted respectable men with a stake in the country - the leaders to be gentry and professions, the men to be tradesmen and farmers. Very often these forces were more remarkable for their elaborate uniforms than their efficiency. Although some historians have argued that the volunteer movement shows that the radicals had little support, the only labouring men who showed enthusiasm to volunteer were those living in the coastal counties, who felt they had most to lose from a French invasion. It was only when there was a nation-wide fear of invasion that the poor identified in a significant way with the fate of the nation.

Those who did volunteer did so from a variety of motives. Unemployment was a powerful factor. In addition, those who volunteered were usually exempt from the militia ballot, and militia training was much tougher than volunteer training. Part-time volunteer service offered companionship in the company of friends; it also offered tradesmen and shopkeepers the opportunity to tout for custom. In the Bristol volunteers, one sixth of the 848 men who joined it earned their everyday livings in the food and drinks trade, and a further 80 were shoemakers and haberdashers.

The Navy
The role of the Royal Navy was crucial. Because the British maintained their maritime supremacy, they were able to ferry troops to the theatres of war. Most importantly, they maintained (and increased) their global commercial empire, and with it the financial resources to build up coalitions.

The Navy the largest item in the national budget – the National Debt had been created to keep it running. In 1793 it had 54 battleships in commission and another 39 ready. It was directed by the Board of Admiralty, which was composed of civilian and naval members, headed by the First Lord and was responsible for the overall allocation of resources, the movements of fleets and ships, commissions and promotions.

Before individuals could be given command of ships they had to be judged competent to do so. Unlike the Army, promotion in the Navy depended on merit. Before Nelson could be made second lieutenant in 1777 he was examined by three assembled captains – though one of them was his uncle!

The Press Gang
The government entered the war with a depleted navy of 15,000 men. At first it hoped it would be able to man the navy with volunteers. On 1 December 1792 a royal proclamation offered bounties to volunteers: £3 to an able seaman, £2 to an ordinary seaman between the ages of 25 and 50 and £1 to a landsman between 20 and 35. Several men accepted (perhaps reasoning that if they did not volunteer, the press gang would accept them anyway) but many were reluctant to volunteer - said they had not yet received payment from the American War. In anticipation of this reluctance, regulating offices were established in the major ports and press warrants prepared ready for issue. The warrants were issued in February 1793 and gangs combed the ports looking for seamen.

Contrary to popular belief the actions of the press gangs were limited by law. There were many exemptions: all persons under 18 years of age and over 55; seamen with less than two years sea-going experience; apprentices with less than three years’ experience. In the case of inward bound vessels, the press gangs were required by law to leave sufficient men on board to ensure the merchant vessel safe navigation to her anchorage and a safe berthing. Masters, chief mates, boatswains and carpenters were exempt. Generally in the early stages of the war, only seamen were likely to be impressed - reluctant landsmen were a liability. Seamen were easy to spot - they dressed and walked distinctively. Impressment therefore created problems for merchant shipping. After Parliament passed an act (April 1793) allowing British merchant ships to have ¾ of the crew foreign nationals, no merchant ships were safe at sea. Merchant seamen dreaded the moment they arrived back on land when they could be pressed.
There were two kinds of gangs on shore.

(a) those run by land-based recruiting officers from recruiting houses
(b) those sent ashore from warships for a quick raid to boost numbers.

Men seized by the press-gang were offered the option of volunteering so they could take up the bounty.

Regulating officers were called Yellow Admirals, meaning admirals without flagships of their own. Some of these were corrupt and disreputable, but not all of them. Captain Peter Rothe (Tyne and Wear) released 22 of the 60 men seized, acknowledging that they were ships’ carpenters or apprentices and therefore exempt. The regulating officer had to live in the district, and it was in his own interests to establish a rapport with the inhabitants. It was very different with the gangs sent from men of war. In October 1792 a frigate captain ignored the advice of the regulating officer and landed a press gang in Liverpool. During the fracas, one of the midshipmen killed the master of a merchant ship. The population destroyed two recruiting houses, and the local authorities made no move against them.

In 1796 a quota system was introduced, which enlisted into the fleet reluctant young men not from seafaring backgrounds, such as urban artisans. This is undoubtedly one of the factors behind the 1797 mutinies. But in spite of problems, Pitt’s government managed to increase the naval personnel to 133,000 by 1801.

The First Coalition
By March 1793 there was a de facto alliance against France that came to be known as the First Coalition, comprising Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, Spain, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, many German and northern Italian states, and Holland. But this coalition was undermined by the fact that the allies were fighting the war from different motives. The French army put up strong resistance to the Duke of York and his German allies in the Low Countries. Austria and Prussia proved less than reliable allies because they had ambitions in Europe (such as the partition of Poland) which Britain did not share.

Pitt’s coalitions were essentially fragile. He was faced with the question of how to deploy the available British forces, plus the 22,000 men hired from Hanover and Hesse. But he was never able to deliver a knock-out blow against France.

In late February the French invaded Holland. British troops under the command of the duke of York were sent to Flanders but the campaign proved a failure. In August the British began a campaign to capture Dunkirk, but when the duke’s army was defeated at Hondschoote in early September it became apparent that the siege must be raised. The army was too thinly spread as it was also fighting in the Caribbean. Of the 89,000 troops sent to the Caribbean, about 70% were lost mainly to yellow fever. But the ‘West Indian’ strategy can be defended on the grounds that, as an essentially trading nation, Britain could not ignore the opportunities for conquering West Indian islands. Notable permanent gains included the sugar island of Demerara (captured from the Dutch in 1796) and Trinidad (seized from Spain in 1797).

The Levée en Masse
The war was not going all France’s way in 1793. They suffered reverses in the Low Countries and their brilliant general Dumouriez defected to the Austrians. In June a coup brought about the fall of the comparatively moderate Girondin deputies in the Convention and the rise of Robespierre and the Jacobins.

The most immediate result of the British activity was the levée en masse of 23 August. Castlereagh:

‘We contend against an opponent whose strength we have no means of measuring. It is the first time that all the population and all the wealth of a great kingdom has been concentrated in the field. What may be the result is beyond my perception.’ Lord Sheffield: ‘All we have done is to make all France soldiers.’

The Jacobin coup intensified French royalist anger. In August 1793 they opened the port of Toulon to Lord Hood’s fleet. This, in theory, meant that the Allies had a base from which an allied offensive might be mounted. But it also meant that troops intended for the West Indies had to be diverted to a third front – the Mediterranean. In December 1793 Toulon fell to Bonaparte – a serious setback for the British war effort.

Toulon represented the least successful aspect of Pitt’s strategy – his attempts to help French royalists. Toulon proved a failure, so did the Quiberon expedition of June 1795, which led to a mass shooting of French royalists, including Urbain d’Hercé, the Bishop of Dol.

The First Coalition was such an inchoate construction that it is not surprising that it crumbled before the determination of Carnot’s levée en masse. By 1795 only Austria was left in the field, and she was about to experience crushing defeats at the hands of General Bonaparte.

Supply
In the early years of the war, the mortality rate was appalling. Men were sent to Flanders or the West Indies with no training, little equipment and inadequate clothing. In 1794-5 the only troops in Flanders to have great-coats were those whose regiments had received them from public donations. There was no clothing department at the War Office and the clothing of a regiment was the responsibility of the colonel, who was expected to make a profit out of it. He received an annual sum of money for clothing his regiment, and negotiated, either personally or through his agent, with a wool merchant. The sum he received was based on the regiment’s full complement, whether or not it was up to strength. The lack of shoes led to crippling diseases in the West Indies.

An armed people?
Linda Colley suggests that the evidence suggests that in the early years of the war the British people was as afraid of its own people as of the enemy, with the authorities anxious to set up a respectable and propertied home guard to restrain domestic disorder. But in the winter of 1797 as fears of a French invasion grew, the government, d esperate and without European allies, moved to enlist plebeian support.

In 1798 the Defence of the Realm Act demanded from each county details of the number of able-bodied men in each parish and what service he was prepared to offer the state. A further survey was done in 1803. A better known outcome of this frantic search for numbers was Britain’s first census, ordered by Parliament in 1800. The state was for the first time since Domesday Book attempting to compile precise information on its people.

The evidence suggests that even at the height of patriotic excitement about a possible French invasion in 1803 some Britons were averse to fighting for their country. Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire seemed to show an unwillingness to volunteer. On the other hand in the south and south-west, over 50% of all men aged between 17 and 55 volunteered to take up arms in 1803. Patriotism seems to have been reinforced by self-interest - whether men were convinced a French invasion was genuinely imminent.

It has been suggested that whereas the old historiography associated economic change with social and political disruption, urban artisans, more easily reached by propaganda and recruiting parties, were in practice more ‘patriotic’ than rural labourers. The government took a political risk in creating a nation under arms, though it had no choice.

‘A nation where formal political power was concentrated in the hands of the propertied few, and where perhaps only one adult male in 50 had the vote, had no alternative but to look to the mass of its inhabitants to win its wars and preserve its independence.’ Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (1992), 318.

The Prelude

2007-11-22T17:11:00.000Z

Click here to access the website of Radio 4's 'In our Time' when you can listen again to the discussion of Wordsworth's The Prelude (or better still download it).

The death of Marat

2007-11-22T17:09:00.001Z

Here is David's famous depiction of the dead Marat as a republican martyr.

Britain and France: the coming of war

2007-11-22T16:54:00.000Z

By the turn of the year 1792-3 Britain was on the verge of the greatest and most costly war she had yet fought. But awareness of war came upon her almost unawares. On 17 February 1792 in his ninth budget speech Pitt had announced tax cuts and reduced military expenditure. True to British traditions in foreign policy, no action was taken as first Prussia and then Austria declared war on revolutionary France during 1792. Even the September Massacres, the declaration of a French republic and the execution of the king were not regarded as pretexts for war in themselves. In October the French were looking for an alliance with Britain even though formal diplomatic relations had been disrupted by the overthrow of the monarchy. In early November the Foreign Secretary, Grenville, was still insisting that Britain would be able to remain neutral.

However, Pitt was greatly exercised by the Austrian defeat at Jemappes in November 1792, as this opened up all her Belgian territories to French occupation. British alarm grew when the French opened the Scheldt and offered ‘fraternity and assistance’ to all peoples seeking to break the yoke of monarchy and tyranny. On 16 November the French issued a decree asserting their right to pursue Austrian troops wherever they fled; this seemed a potential threat to the territorial integrity of Holland. On 19 November they promulgated a fresh decree offering fraternity and assistance to all nations which wished to recover their freedom. On 27 November they announced the permanent annexation of Savoy.

At the same time Pitt was pre-occupied (or professed to be) with the fear of home-grown subversion. This fear certainly frightened the more conservative Whigs. At the end of November extra troops were brought into London and defences at the Tower and the Bank of England were strengthened. On 1 December a new Royal Proclamation was issued, and a few days later Parliament was recalled. In the same month the navy mobilized and militias were called out in ten counties. Grenville informed the French ambassador Chauvelin: Britain

will never see with indifference that France shall make herself directly or indirectly sovereign of the Low Countries or the general arbitress of the rights and liberties of Europe.

But on 15 December a further French decree stated that the occupied territories would be incorporated into France and that any country hostile to the principles of republican government would be regarded as an enemy. At the end of December Britain communicated a rejection of this message.

On 8 January the Aliens Act gave the Home Secretary the power to expel undesirable aliens. Fox’s view that it was unnecessary was easily voted down. The export of grain to France was halted - and here the government may have been influenced by popular demonstrations that might have reflected a combination of anti-French feeling and anxieties about food shortages. On 2 February the Bristol Journal reported:

Several towns in Cornwall were last night visited by large bodies of miners from the different works, in search of concealed corn, which they insist upon is intended for exportation to France. At Wadebridge they found about 25,000 bushels in store, which they obliged the owners to sell at reduced prices. At Looe upwards of 6,000 bushels of grain were kept by them from being shipped - but we did not hear of their committing any outrage.

The Times’s opinion was:

Never was there a war more popular than the approaching one against France appears to be.

Most believed that the war would be short - it was against ‘vagabonds, freebooters and Levellers’. It was against a country in turmoil - it was therefore believed that France would not be able to defend herself.

Though it was not the cause of the war, the execution of Louis XVI aroused great outrage in Britain. Pitt declared it

the foulest and most atrocious deed.

Even Fox called it a deed that

stained the noblest cause that ever was in the hands of Men.

On 1 Feb the Convention declared war, probably pre-empting a similar action by Britain.

But Pitt’s war policy differed from Burke’s. Burke had become a ferocious hawk, obsessive in his search for evidence of subversion and sedition at home, but Pitt did not fight the war as an ideological crusade to extirpate Jacobinism. As war loomed, he called upon France to renounce ‘all ideas of aggrandizement’ and to ‘confine herself within her own territories’. Beyond that the war aims were unclear. Did they include the capture of French colonies? If so, was this to be the type of colonial war fought by Pitt the Elder? Because the government envisaged a short war, they did not come to grips with this question - for which they were severely criticised by Fox.

On the other hand the opposition was in increasing disarray. In the closing months of 1792 Burke and his ally William Windham began urging their colleagues to support the government against the threat of French Jacobinism. In January 1793 Pitt made the Whig Lord Loughborough Lord Chancellor. In February group of Whigs under the leadership of Windham declared their separation from Fox and constituted themselves a ‘Third Party’. The Whigs were splitting. Fox urged immediate peace negotiations but Portland (the nominal leader of the party) believed that revolutionary France had to be defeated.

Louis XVI: trial and execution.

2007-11-21T14:13:00.001Z

Here is the Convention's indictment of Louis XVI and an eyewitness report on his execution. This account is especially valuable as it comes from the Catholic priest who accompanied him to his execution.

Here is Thomas Paine's courageous speech opposing the king's execution.

Here are the reports in the Times on the king's execution. As you can see the execution aroused great outrage in Britain.

After Louis' death there were numerous sentimental representations of the king being forced to part from his family for his trial. This fitted in well with the domestic ideology of the day. Whereas French royalists depicted the king as a Catholic martyr, English Protestants represented him as the model family man. The people in the paintings are the king himself, Marie Antoinette, his daughter, Marie Thérèse (Madame Royale), and the little dauphin (Louis XVII). Next is a depiction of the harrowing event when the dauphin was parted from his mother in July 1793. Below that is a portrait of Madame Elisabeth in happier times. As always, you should click to enlarge.

The discovery of oxygen

2007-11-15T17:30:00.000Z

Click here to get to the website of Melvyn Bragg's 'In our Time' programme where you will be able to listen again or (even better!) podcast the discussion.

Update: Here is Melvyn on Priestley from his newsletter:

The great discovery for me, and for some people Ive talked to since, was Priestley, who, as Jenny Uglow pointed out, brought together his religion, his politics, his science and his chemistry into one single system which today seems quite wonderful but as remote as a hidden planet.

British loyalism and the French Revolution

2007-11-15T17:23:00.000Z

The mobilisation of loyalism
In spite of Paine’s powerful rhetoric and the growth of the reforming societies, there is no evidence that the radicals represented majority opinion, and during 1792 events in France seemed to reinforce the arguments of the anti-reformers. Increasingly, events seemed to prove Burke right. In May Edward Gibbon wrote from Switzerland wrote of the monarchy and nobility in France: they are crumbled into dust;

they are vanished from the earth. If this tremendous warning has no effect on the men of property in England, if it does not open every eye and raise every arm, you will deserve your fate.

By this time France was at war with Austria and Prussia, and the Tuileries had been invaded by the revolutionary Parisian citizens, the sans-culottes, putting the royal family at ever graver risk. The sans-culottes were caricatured by artists such as Gillray as bloodthirsty monsters.

To counter the provincial reforming societies, ‘Church and King’ clubs sprang up. But even before part 2 of Rights of Man the Birmingham riots of July 1791 (see previous post) had shown the beginnings of a loyalist reaction loyalist reaction had begun. Following the publication of part 2 of Rights of Man early in 1792 Paine-burning ceremonies took place up and down the country.

In May 1792 the king’s Proclamation (drawn up by Pitt in consultation with – significantly - the duke of Portland, the nominal leader of the Whigs) banned seditious writings. As a result, criminal prosecutions were launched against Paine, his printer and various booksellers. Whatever slight chance there was of an acquittal was removed by a letter addressed by Paine from Paris to the Attorney-General expressing contempt for the decision of the court and asking:

‘Is it possible that you or I can believe that the capacity of such a man as Mr Guelf or any of his profligate sons is necessary for the government of a nation?’

The jury found Paine guilty of seditious libel.

Meanwhile public assemblies of local notables held across the country to consider the Proclamation forwarded to London nearly 400 addresses of support for government and constitution.

Britain’s official policy to France was one of neutrality, even in the face of the deposition of the monarchy (10 August), the entry of allied troops into France (19 August) and the September massacres (2-6). But on 20 September the French defeated the Prussians at Valmy and the Duke of Brunswick retreated. On 6 November the French defeated the Austrians at Jemappes and advanced into the Spanish Netherlands. Fox was enthusiastic: he ‘

could not recall a public event, not excepting Saratoga and Yorktown, which had given him so much pleasure.

This gravely disturbed the duke of Portland, the nominal leader of the Whigs, though he still refused to criticize Fox openly. The law reformer Samuel Romilly (1757-1818) was more representative of the new attitude to the French:

One might as well think of establishing a republic of tigers in some forest of Africa as of maintaining a free government among such monsters.

In December 1792 Burke once more clashed with Fox in the Commons, this time taking a dagger out of a brown paper bag and hurling it to the floor:

‘It is my object to keep French infection from this country; their principles from out minds, and their daggers from our hearts’.

The caricaturists portrayed the sans-culottes as bloodthirsty cannibals and the newspapers printed translations of the inflammatory Ça Ira. Anxieties over the European situation coincided with a poor harvest, rising grain prices, industrial disputes and bread riots in north-east England.

In November the National Convention in Paris endorsed a Fraternal Edict promising French military aid to export the revolutionary principles of the rights of man to oppressed peoples throughout Europe.

On 20 November a barrister, John Reeves, founded the 'Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers' at the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand. Government-funded advertisements in the press invited responses from loyalists. The response was gratifying for Reeves. It included popular loyalist pamphlets such as the John Bull pamphlets - the first attempt by conservatives to appeal to the common people. In doing so, they were bringing them for the first time into the political debate – with incalculable consequences.

The Trial of Tom Paine
In December Paine was tried in his absence for promoting seditious libel. He had left Dover in September, witnessed by hostile townspeople. The government was determined he should not return.

The prosecutor at Paine’s trial was the future Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, the defender was Thomas Erskine, a brilliant legal mind and an eloquent orator. He defended Paine on the grounds of liberty of the press, a natural right, given by God that cannot be infringed by any earthly power. But the jury was unconvinced and convicted without hearing the prosecution evidence. However, Erskine was feted by a crowd shouting ‘Paine and the Liberty of the Press’, though there were also counter-shouts of ‘Damn Tom Paine’.

Paine had been rapturously received in Paris. He had already been made an honorary French citizen (along with Priestley and Wilberforce) and in the Convention elections he was elected for Calais, one of 750 and one of the few who was an artisan rather than a professional. In spite of this his French was rudimentary.

The victory of loyalism?
In 1791 Burke was regarded as a fanatic. By 1793 his views were common property. The execution of the king and the offensives of the French army discredited both the Revolution and the British movement for reform. In January 1793 Rivington published Hannah More’s Village Politics, which took Burke’s arguments to a popular audience. As a tactic this seems to have worked and the newspapers were full of reports of popular loyalist demonstrations. See for example, this report from the Bristol Journal of 2 March 1793:

On Tuesday the Colliers of Kingswood brought the effigy of the Traitor, Tom Paine, to a cart in this city, through the principal parts of which they went in procession, a great number being on horse-back, preceded by the Sunday School Children of St George’s Gloucestershire, carrying flags with various inscriptions, attended by trumpets and other musical instruments, which occasionally played God Save the King! in which the populace most heartily joined. - On one side of Paine a person habited like a Clergyman stood, appearing to admonish the traitor, and on the other a figure representing the Devil, who with his left hand seemed to have fast hold on him by the shoulder, and under his right arm carried a Fox, that was represented to be in the act of devouring an innocent Robin. - Though the concourse of people assembled on the occasion was immense, yet we do not hear of any disorderly conduct having taken place, but the cavalcade having proceeded peaceably thro’ the city returned to St George’s, where Paine’s effigy was executed amidst the execrations of an incredible number of spectators, who afterwards returned to their homes, highly gratified with having given this unequivocal testimony to their King and Country.

The motives behind these demonstrations are mixed - certainly they had the support of the magistrates. But the violence of the Revolution made it difficult for radicals. In Sheffield, however, it was Burke rather than Paine who was burned in effigy (Sheffield Register, 18 January 1793).

Mary Wollstonecraft

2007-11-07T17:33:00.000Z

In both Britain and France the Revolution sparked a debate about women’s rights. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman made an impassioned plea for rational education. In her Rights of Men she had attacked Burke, in the Vindication she took issue with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In spite of its title, her book was more a conduct book than a political treatise. It did not focus on later feminist concerns such as the vote. She argued that women were human before they were feminine and that the soul was unsexed. She showed a distaste for marriage and for sex and (possibly?) a contempt for the preoccupations of most women. Women should think of themselves as rational mothers and good citizens rather than good wives. Society could not progress if half its members were kept backward. At present women had the vices of any oppressed group such as slaves.

The influence of Richard Price can be seen in her views on the perfectibility of human society, the equality of individuals and the natural right of each to determine his or her own destiny. In doing so she linked feminism to the general struggle for political and social reform, arguing that the abstract rights of men and the tyranny of husband, kind, primogeniture, and hereditary privilege must all cease in the name of reason.

The main thrust of her argument was on education. The Vindication was dedicated to Talleyrand, the architect of the French National Assembly’s policy of a system of free education for women. She insisted that boys and girls should be educated together, and that both should have physical exercise. Like her conservative opponent, Hannah More, she deplored the excesses of sensibility, believing that it led to amoral self-indulgence.

Following a crisis in her personal life, when she fell in love with the Swiss artist, Henry Fuseli (a married man) Wollstonecraft left for Paris in December 1792 - a dangerous time!

The spread of radicalism

2007-11-07T17:32:00.000Z

Reforming movements
The winter of 1791/2 witnessed a new development in extra-parliamentary politics with the foundation of a series of radical reform clubs organised by working men. The membership of these clubs consisted mainly of artisans, journeymen, mechanics, small shopkeepers and tradesmen. The subscription rate was low - a penny a week.

One of the first was the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, established late in 1791. Within a few months it was claiming more than two thousand members. For the first time many of the demands were explicitly economic. One of its first secretaries described the aim of the society as

‘to show the poor the reason, the ground of all their complaints; when a man works hard for thirteen or fourteen hours of the day, the week through, and is not able to maintain his family’.

Into the writings of the period came a note of class antagonism:

‘While the rich enjoy almost all the benefits, the poor undergo all the labour.’

The London Corresponding Society
The Sheffield Society’s arrangement into divisions was copied by the most famous of the working-men’s associations was founded by Thomas Hardy (1752-1832) a master shoemaker and devout Dissenter. In October 1791 he met with a few friends at the Bell Inn off the Strand. On 25 January the London Corresponding Society was founded. The admission test was an affirmative reply to three questions of which the most important was:

‘Are you persuaded ... that every adult person, in possession of his reason and not incapacitated by crimes, should have a vote for a Member of Parliament?’

The membership fee was one shilling, followed by a penny a week. Within a fortnight 25 members were enrolled, and the sum in the Treasurer’s hand was 4/1d. By late 1792 it was claiming over 800 members, each committed to manhood suffrage and parliamentary reform ‘by all justifiable means’. Members were organised into 29 cells spread across London. These local divisions also functioned as adult education classes, with regular ‘readings, conversations and discussions’. Their seriousness and stamina differentiated them sharply from the riotous Wilkites of the 1760s.

In January 1792 the Sheffield Constitutional Society distributed copies of part 1 of Rights of Man at 6d each. Paine gave up his profits to finance a cheap edition.

At the same time radical newspapers circulated: the weekly Sheffield Register and the Manchester Herald as well as pamphlets by men such as Daniel Eaton and the bookseller Thomas Spence (1750-1814).

The reforming movements were overwhelmingly urban and flourished in towns with a large proportion of skilled men such as Sheffield cutlers and Norwich weavers. They were not a working class movement in the sense in which the term later came to be used. They were composed of independent artisans, journeymen, small traders - very similar to the Parisian sans-culottes. ‘Skilled men could read and they were encouraged by events in France to think’. They had considerable revolutionary potential. The authorities were particularly alarmed that the membership of the London Corresponding Society doubled in the month following the French victory at Valmy in September 1792.

In response to plebeian radicalism, a group of Foxites formed their own association, the Society of Friends of the People in April 1792. Its leaders included Charles Grey (a future prime minister), Sheridan, Thomas Erskine and Samuel Whitbread (the younger). Fox, for tactical reasons, did not join. The subscription was two and a half guineas and the policy adopted was deliberately moderate - more equal representation and more frequent elections. They repudiated any connection with Paine.

On 30 April Grey gave notice in the House that he intended to move for reform. Pitt replied that he and his associates were connected with people who wanted revolution rather than reform. Burke applied the word ‘Jacobin’ to the reformers.

These reforming societies were not an English phenomenon alone. For the first time Scotland was widely involved in political reform. In July 1792 the Lord Provost of Glasgow presided over a meeting in which representations in favour of equal representation, frequent elections, and universal suffrage were adopted. Edinburgh founded its own branch of the Society of Friends of the people - the leader a young advocate called Thomas Muir.

In Ireland the Revolution had its greatest impact among the Ulster Presbyterians.

The French royal family

2007-11-04T09:42:00.000Z

Here is a family tree of the French royal family down to the present day. Click to enlarge. You will see the absence of women because of France's Salic Law. Not only were forbidden from inheriting the French throne but a man could not claim it through a woman. If this had been applied in England it would have barred the succession not only of queens regnant but also of Henry II, Henry VII, James I and George I and Edward VII, who all claimed the throne through their mothers!

Merci, Martine.

Paine attacks Burke

2007-11-01T17:35:00.000Z

Burke's Reflections sold about 19,000 copies in its first year, with about another 30,000 over the next five years. It also sold well in France. The Whigs were divided in their response. Fox kept quiet about his disapproval but Sheridan was extremely vocal and the Pittite press gloated over Whig divisions. It inspired over 50 replies. The first was Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759-97) Vindication of the Rights of Men. It appeared anonymously in December 1790 and was republished almost immediately.

'Your tears are reserved ... for the declamation of the theatre or for the downfall of queens whose rank alters the nature of folly and throws a graceful veil over vices that degrade humanity; whilst the distresses of many industrious mothers, whose helpmates have been torn from them, and the hungry cry of helpless babes, were vulgar sorrows that could not move your commiseration though they might extort an alms.'

Among other refutations of Burke one of the most notable was James Mackintosh’s (1765-1832) Vindiciae Gallicae, which came out in early 1791. This set out a moderate Whiggism, based on the 1688 settlement.

But a more radical view was set out by Catharine Macaulay in her Observations on the Reflections of Burke (1790) which saw the French Revolution as a ‘sudden spread of an enlightened spirit’ inspired by a benevolent providence.

Rights of Man, part 1
In 1787 the former excise officer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) returned to England from America, where his Common Sense (1776) had inspired the revolutionary course, his immediate reason being to promote his design for an iron bridge. He and Burke knew each other and got on well because of their common support for the Americans. But when Burke published his Reflections, they became ideological enemies.

In March 1791 he published the first part of Rights of Man, dedicated to George Washington. 50,000 copies were sold in 1791 alone, breaking every publishing record. It was also welcomed by some moderate reformers. The Society for Constitutional Information recommended his book to the nation and one enthusiast wrote to taunt Burke on his opponent's ‘magnificent answer’. Certainly Paine captured the interest of the labouring classes in a way none of his predecessors had managed - much to the dismay of some middle-class reformers.

Burke breaks with the Whigs
Whig divisions over the French Revolution came as a relief to Pitt, who faced difficulties over British policy towards Russia. (In the so-called’ Ochakov incident’ Pitt mobilized the fleet to go to war against Russia in an abortive attempt to force her to surrender a Black Sea Port which she had seized from Turkey.) On 15 April 1791 the House debated Russia. Fox spoke in favour of the French Revolution; the Speaker did not allow Burke to reply. On 6 May Parliament was debating Quebec. However, when Burke, his subject was the French Revolution and he publicly broke with Fox. In the summer Fox paid a fraternal visit to France and Burke published a defence of his views in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

The Birmingham riots
Events in Britain took an ugly turn in July 1791 when a revolutionary dinner held in Birmingham. This sparked off a riot in which Dissenting meeting houses were destroyed while the authorities looked on. Priestley had not been present at the dinner but he and his wife fled from their home. The mob torched Priestley's house, destroying his valuable laboratory and all of the family's belongings. Other homes of Dissenters were burned in the three-day riot. Priestley spent several days hiding with friends until he was able to travel safely to London.

By the summer of 1791 French politics had become more tense. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy had opened up divisions in France, causing the flight of many Catholic priests, a number of them to England. (By the end of 1792 there were to be over 10,000 émigrés in London alone.)

The failed flight to Varennes (20 June) had left the royal family virtual prisoners in the Tuileries. In August the king of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria threatened to punish France if the royal family were harmed.

Rights of Man, part 2
The publication of the much more radical part 2 in February 1792 heightened the concerns of those who had had misgivings about part 1. Paine’s work seemed a vindication of those who had argued that parliamentary reform would be the prelude to social revolution. He argued that a democratic government would reduce taxes on the poor but also levy a special property tax on the rich. He advocated child allowances of £4 p.a. for every child of a poor family until it reached the age of 14; old age pensions of £6 p.a. for those over 60; maternity allowances of £1 for each child born to a poor family; a marriage grant of £1 to each poor couple.

Nothing could stop the circulation of Rights of Man. More than 100,000 copies were sold by 1793, in spite of the determination of the government to prevent the sales.
In 1802 Paine estimated the sale of both parts at 4-5000,000 and in 1809 at 1½ million, including foreign translations.

Britain and the French Revolution: the initial response

2007-11-01T17:23:00.000Z

Pitt in 1789
The French Revolution was not initially an issue in British politics. In 1789 Pitt was relieved that he had survived the Regency Crisis and felt strong enough to strengthen his government by bringing in two supporters, both of them future Prime Ministers. In June Lord Sydney was replaced as Home Secretary by Pitt’s cousin William Wyndham Grenville (who was created Lord Grenville in the following year; in 1791 he became Foreign Secretary). Grenville was replaced as Speaker by Henry Addington, the son of the Pitt family doctor.

Internationally Britain was playing a role in resolving international crises. For example in July 1790 British diplomats mediated between Austria and Prussia and produced an agreement whereby both powers ended their wars with Turkey and the constitutional rights of the Netherlands were guaranteed. This was in keeping with Pitt’s overall foreign policy which was ‘to prevent (if it can be done without too great effort or risk) any material change in the relative situation of other powers – particularly naval powers – and to diminish the temptation to wars of ambition’. He did not foresee in 1789 that this policy would lead to war with France.

The British Reforming Movement
Although many argued complacently that the British had a perfect constitution that needed no change, support for parliamentary reform had existed since the 1760s and had revived during the American War. At the end of 1779 the Revd Christopher Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association had sparked a mass of petitions for parliamentary reform, notably in abolishing pocket boroughs and creating more county seats. This remarkable and sustained mobilisation of respectable opinion had the support of Pitt.

But for all its innovatory force, the Yorkshire Association was a cautious and respectable body. In March 1780 a more radical movement sprang up in London, the Westminster Committee Association, influenced by the Unitarian, John Jebb. It produced a series of sweeping recommendations: annual parliaments: single-member and equal constituencies: universal male suffrage: the secret ballot; payment of MPs; the exclusion of placemen from the Commons.

These views were also supported and circulated by a new association, the Society for Promoting Constitutional Information, founded in April on the initiative of the veteran radical, Major John Cartwright. Such proposals were too radical for the Parliamentary Whigs and stood no chance of success.

The Test and Corporation Acts
In the mid 1780s the reforming movement died down and Pitt’s modest attempt at parliamentary reform failed. But from 1787 a campaign to give full civil rights to Dissenters by repealing the Test and Corporation Acts got underway. It was spearheaded by the Rational Dissenters like the ministers, Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, together with well-to-do manufacturers, merchants, professional men, in both London and the provinces. It was opposed by Pitt, but supported by Fox. It was defeated 176/98. The king was amazed that so many could be found to support ‘so ill-advised a proposition’.

On 8 May 1789 the motion was brought forward again. Fox argued: ‘No human government had a right to enquire into private opinions, to presume that it knew them, or to act on that presumption’. The motion was again rejected 124/104. There was a further defeat in 1790. The result of this campaign was an Anglican backlash which led to polarisation between Church and Dissent.

The Centenary Celebrations
Many of the characteristics of 1790s politics were already in place before the French Revolution: the parliamentary dual between Pitt and Fox, provincial movements for parliamentary reform, the grievances of the Dissenters. The events of 1788 added a further ingredient when the centenary of the Glorious Revolution was celebrated with bonfires and revolution dinners, and balls, and its ambiguous legacy was debated. The Bristol Journal for 1 November reported: ‘

Tuesday next the 4th of November being the [centenary of the Glorious Revolution] our fellow citizens of every rank and denomination appear zealous to commemorate this happy and important event by every testimony of joy which can demonstrate their thankfulness for so signal a deliverance ...’

The tone of the celebrations was largely self-congratulatory, but in towns such as Birmingham, Derby, Newcastle, Norwich and Sheffield, Whigs and Dissenters made common cause, toasting ‘Equal liberty to all mankind’ and the end of slavery. The radical Revolution Society toasted:

‘May the dawn of liberty on the continent be soon succeeded by the bright sunshine of personal and mental freedom.’

The Initial Impact of the Revolution
In June 1789 a bankrupt France faced the crisis of a severe harvest failure and Necker asked Britain to send over emergency consignments of flour. He had reasons to hope that this request would be granted as the two men had met in 1783 when Pitt made his one visit to France. Necker had been so impressed with him that he had offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage. However Pitt refused on the advice of the Board of Trade, who pointed out that Britain too was short of wheat and was scouring the Continent for supplies. This led to great resentment in France and the beginning of the persistent belief that ‘Pitt’s gold’ was undermining the Revolution. However the government’s attitude to the Revolution was one of public and private neutrality.

The news of the fall of the Bastille reached Britain in the week after the event. Even before this, the newspapers were referring to ‘the French Revolution’. In spite of the violence (the heads of the governor and the chief magistrate of Paris were stuck on pikes and paraded through the streets), most commentators complacently assumed that the French Revolution was a re-run of the Revolution of 1688. Members of the reforming societies sent a message to the French.

Fox: ‘The fall of the Bastille was ‘much the greatest event that has ever happened in the world, and ... much the best’.
Hannah More: ‘What English heart did not exult at the demolition of the Bastile [sic]? What lover of his species did not triumph in the warm hope that one of the finest countries in the world would soon be one of the most free? ... Who ... that had a head to reason and a heart to feel did not glow with the hope that ... a beautiful and finely framed edifice would in time have been constructed?' Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont (1793)
Wordsworth: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven! (The Prelude, vi.)

On 4 October Parisian market women marched on Versailles. Overnight violence broke out and the queen fled for her life down the corridors. On the following day royal family were forced to leave Versailles for the Tuileries Palace in Paris. They never saw Versailles again.

On 5 November 1789 Richard Price delivered a sermon to commemorate the Glorious Revolution. It was published as ‘A Discourse on the Love of our Country’. In emotional language it hailed the fact that the king was forced to move from Versailles to the Tuileries as the dawn of a new age.

It was this that inspired Edmund Burke to write his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which came out in November 1790 and opened up a nation-wide debate on the meaning of events in France.

The French Revolution

2007-10-11T17:31:00.000Z

Here is an excellent website packed with information about the French Revolution. Perhaps you'll feel you don't need to come to the classes (only joking!).

The Enlightenment

2007-10-11T17:21:00.000Z

The beginning of the Enlightenment is difficult to determine. Scholars often talk of a pre-Enlightenment period, dating to Isaac Newton’s natural science, the social and political theories of thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington and the epistemological (theories of knowledge) revolutions of Blaise Pascal and René Descartes. The end is equally difficult to pinpoint. The Enlightenment and its ideals extended beyond 1800 and permeated early nineteenth-century society - as you will see when you come to look at the writings and policies of Robert Owen. This course ends in 1830 but we must not think that this means that the Enlightenment had finished by this date.

There are many debates and controversies about the Enlightenment, but the following features are generally agreed.

A common term applied to the Enlightenment is 'The Enlightenment project'. This implies that the Enlightenment

was coherent, possessing a unifying philosophy
was self-conscious, having a deliberate and proselytizing agenda
depended on the existence of a ‘public sphere’ in which ideas could be debated

Its fundamental belief was that the increase of knowledge will produce happier, more virtuous people. This meant that it opposed and savagely mocked what it saw as bigotry and obscurantism, especially as represented by the Catholic Church. The Church responded by banning the French Encyclopédie in 1759.

Famous names include
Voltaire (1694-1778)
David Hume (1711-76)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)

It is associated with certain characteristics:

1. Rationality, especially as represented with the empirical method associated with Isaac Newton
2. An optimistic belief in progress (though Voltaire's Candide was a critique of facile optimism)
3. Admiration for the classical world (its aesthetics and values) seen in the writings of Gibbon, Winckelmann and the neo-classical architecture of Robert Adam
4. An increasingly secular approach to morality (Hume on suicide)
5. Cosmopolitanism (though in Germany the Enlightenment became associated with German nationalism)
6. Interest in non-Europeans and non-European cultures (the fashion for things Chinese, the cult of the noble savage)
7. A belief in a common, equal humanity (though this was inconsistently expressed)
8. A doctrine of natural rights (seen in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man)
9. Enlightenment rulers, most notably the cultivated despots Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great

Landmarks include

The Encyclopédie (20 volumes, 72,000 articles)
Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (pocket-sized)
Scientific discovery (Priestley, Lavoisier, Davy), the foundation of the Royal Institution
Medical innovation (inoculation, later vaccination)
Educational innovation
Exploration (James Cook, Bougainville, Joseph Banks, Mungo Park).

We say Enlightenment, the Germans say Aufklärung
Although the Enlightenment is most commonly associated with Frenchmen like Voltaire and the other philosophes, and with Hume and the Scottish thinkers who followed him, the most famous description of the Enlightement came from the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who in 1784 wrote a celebrated essay, 'What is Enlightenment?' Here's a sample:

'Enlightenment (Aufklärung) is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! ... "Have the courage to use our own understanding", is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.'

See what I mean, when I said that the Enlightenment was self-conscious?

However, though Kant told his readers to think for themselves, he wanted the Enlightenment to be under the patronage of appropriate rulers. He probably had in mind the King of Prussia, Frederick II ('the Great'). The American Thomas Jefferson used the ideals of the Enlightenment in order to attack George III, but I don't think Kant would have approved.

So -Enlightenment thinkers could be political conservatives or liberals.

Jane Johnson collection

2007-10-05T11:00:00.000Z

I think I mentioned the wonderful Jane Johnson collection at the Lilly Library, Indiana. Jane was a clergyman's wife, who devised a range of wonderful teaching materials for her children. Go and have a look. You will need to follow all the links.

James Ramsay: the unknown abolitionist.

2007-10-05T07:02:00.000Z

There is a good BBC article about James Ramsay here. There is another good article here.

The manor house at Teston was renamed Barham court in 1805 when the eighty year old Sir Charles Middleton became First Lord of the Admiralty and took the title of Lord Barham.

The New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography have made their essay on Evangelicals and abolition available free online.

Is your name here? Mine isn't.

2007-09-30T07:48:00.001Z

This is just a bit of fun. Here is the list of those in line to the British throne.

A moral revolution?

2007-09-25T13:47:00.000Z

The late eighteenth century saw the start of a new moral order, which involved the overturning of the aristocratic ethos of the late 18th century (represented by Fox with his sexual laxity and huge gambling debts) with one of religion, sobriety and social concern. Obviously this is over-simple but it is remarkable how the generation that reached old age in the 1820s looked back on their youth and marvelled at the way standards had changed. The prime movers of this change are usually seen as the Evangelicals but many who did not subscribe to Evangelicalism nevertheless came to accept the new values.

The Clapham Sect
Evangelicalism was a broad movement, encompassing both Anglicans and Dissenters. It has been identified by its four defining characteristic: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. In the late eighteenth century the two most influential groups of Evangelicals were the Methodists, whose numbers were rising dramatically, and the group of Anglicans around William Wilberforce.

In 1784 Wilberforce was returned for Yorkshire. In 1785-6 he experienced an Evangelical conversion and at the end of 1787 he recorded in his diary,

‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.’

Earlier in that year he had been instrumental in setting up the Proclamation Society. In 1789 he made his first great speech on the abolition of the slave trade and encouraged Hannah More to set up her first Sunday school in Cheddar.

In 1792 he set up a ‘chummery’ at Battersea Rise on Clapham Common with his second cousin, the banker Henry Thornton (1760-1815). On the edge of the common Thornton built two smaller houses, one, Broomfield, rented by Edward Eliot, Pitt’s brother- in- law, and the other bought by Charles Grant (1746-1823) who had been a member of the board of trade at Calcutta. The little colony was later joined by

John Shore (Lord Teignmouth) (1751-1834), Warren Hastings’ successor as governor-general of India
the lawyer James Stephen (1758-1832)
the abolitionist, Zachary Macaulay (1768-1838) who in 1796 accepted the governorship of the experimental non-slaving colony of Sierra Leone.

This conglomeration of Evangelicals, comprising bankers, members of Parliament and colonial administrators, all devoted to the abolition of the slave trade and the dissemination of ‘vital religion’, became known as the ‘Saints’; by the middle of the nineteenth century they had acquired the retrospective title of the ‘Clapham sect’. Their group solidarity was remarkable. They went on holiday together, intermarried and stood godparents to each other’s children. In the Rev. John Venn (1758-1813) they had (almost) their own domestic chaplain; he had (of course) been presented to the living of Clapham by Henry Thornton.

The Evangelicals aimed at remoralizing both ends of society – the poor and the genteel.
In 1795 Hannah More began the publication of her Cheap Repository Tracts aimed at a popular readership.

In 1797 Wilberforce published his Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes of this Country contrasted with Real Christianity, which sold 7,500 copies within six months. It benefited from the fact that it coincided with the new moral and political conservatism in the wake of the French Revolution. Burke is said to have read it in the dying months of his life. Wilberforce's message operated on two levels:
it called the great to moral reformation
it also offered the means of strengthening the state against political reformers.

In 1802 Zachary Macaulay, back from Sierra Leone and married to Selina Mills, a former teacher at the More sisters’ school in Bristol, founded the Christian Observer, the house-journal of the Clapham sect.

The group was also influential in Cambridge: Dr Isaac Milner (1750-1820) was dean of Carlisle and president of Queens’ College; Charles Simeon (1759-1836), vicar of Holy Trinity, was a fellow of King’s.

However, the Evangelicals never acquired a commanding position in the Church of England. In 1815 they acquired their first bishop in Henry Ryder (1777-1836): bishop of Gloucester, 1815, bishop of Lichfield 1823. In 1828 John Bird Sumner (1780-1862) became bishop of Chester and in 1848 archbishop of Canterbury. But by this time the Tractarians had mounted their own challenge.

Sunday schools
Sunday schools became an extremely fashionable form of philanthropy. In the summer of 1789 Wilberforce told Hannah More ‘something must be done about Cheddar’. By ‘something’ he clearly meant a Sunday school.

This is my photograph of the 'Hannah More cottage' in Cheddar, the converted cowshed that was her first Sunday school. The first teacher was a Mrs Sarah Baber. The cottage is now a landmark in the village

In 1780 Robert Raikes started his first school for the children of chimney sweeps in Sooty Alley, Gloucester (opposite the city prison) in 1780. He used his position as proprietor and editor of the Gloucester Journal to publicize the work. After his first editorial in 1783, schools spread rapidly. In 1785 an undenominational national organization, the Sunday School Society, was set up to co-ordinate and develop the work. By 1784 there were said to be 1800 pupils in Manchester and Salford, and Leeds the same. Sunday schools were attended by adults as well as children. By the turn of the century more than 2,000 Sunday schools had been founded. 8,000 were in existence by 1821. In 1801 c. 10% of children were enrolled, more than 55% by 1851. Sunday schools taught reading and the more controversial also taught writing. They provided feasts and processions and for their parents they provided adult classes and benefit clubs. They disseminated the 'Victorian' virtues of industry and sobriety.

In 1810 the Quaker Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838) founded what became known as the British and Foreign School Society. It was based on the monitorial system in which from 200 to 1,000 pupils were gathered in one room and seated in rows, usually of ten pupils each. The adult schoolmaster taught the monitors, each of whom relayed the lesson to his own row.

In 1811 the Anglican clergyman, Andrew Bell (1753-1832) became superintendent of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. These two rival societies formed the foundations of what became the state system of elementary education.

The growth of Methodism
After the death of John Wesley an integrated organizational structure developed with each chapel linked to others in the area in a series of 'circuits' (114 by Wesley's death in 1791) which were themselves incorporated into districts. Methodism depended on an itinerant ministry; ministers remained in a particular community only for a limited period and at the direction of the Annual Conference.

Methodism concentrated on fitting the convert into a social as well as religious institution; meetings were held on weekdays. Methodists were organised into 'classes' for the majority of members and ‘bands’ for those ‘pressing on to holiness’. Inevitably such groups set up a spiritual elite that ran against formal church structures.

Methodism flourished in the North Midlands and the north of England, particularly east of the Pennines and in the south west, especially Cornwall. Its most receptive hearers were skilled workers and craftsmen. It appealed particularly to those outside the traditional Anglican hierarchy of squire, tenant farmer and labourer. In the first thirty years of the 19th century almost two-thirds of Methodists were drawn from the ranks of the skilled working classes rather than the poorest in society.

After Wesley's death a number of secessions took place. In 1807 Conference condemned revivalist meetings on the United States model which had been held at the hill known as Mow Cop on the Staffordshire moorlands. Four years later Hugh Bourne (1772-1852) a carpenter and William Clowes (1780-1852), a potter from Burslem, established a Primitive Methodist Connexion, which grew steadily to a membership in excess of 100,000 in 1851. Whereas the Methodist Connexion had banned women's preaching in 1803 the Primitives allowed women to preach. They had particular success among the rural labourers of eastern and northern England.

Elie Halévy (1870-1937) and E. P. Thompson have argued that Methodism was an essentially conservative movement, diverting energies that would otherwise have gone into revolution. Certainly the Wesleyans became increasingly conservative as the threat of radicalism increased. However, Methodism trained many working men in administration and public speaking and gave them a sense of their own worth they would not otherwise have possessed. Methodists became trade unionists, Luddites and Chartists.

In 1811 alarmed at what he saw as the Methodist threat, Viscount Sidmouth the Home Secretary proposed a bill introducing new restrictions on dissenting ministers, aimed principally at itinerants. It was beaten off by frantic lobbying, in which Dissenters united with Evangelical Anglicans such as Wilberforce.

An Age of Societies
The Evangelicals were extremely successful in mobilizing middle-class activism that involved women and even children in an unprecedented fashion. Some of the new societies were non-denominational, others purely Anglican (though always with a strong Evangelical ethos. Here is a list of some of their societies:

1792: the Baptist Missionary Society
1795: the London Missionary Society (the original title was 'the Missionary Society; the title ‘London’ was added in 1818). This was the first time in recent history that Anglicans and Dissenters had joined together in a common enterprise.
1798: the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor
1799: the Religious Tract Society
1799 the Society for Missions to Africa and the East (the Church Missionary Society). Unlike the Religious Tract Society this was purely Anglican and aroused hostility from many high churchmen, who feared that it was setting up a church within a church.
1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society. The result was the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society at a public meeting in London on 7 March 1804. The society was inter-denominational from the start, and even included some non-Evangelicals like Bishop Burgess. Its three secretaries were an Anglican clergyman, a Welsh Baptist, and a German Lutheran; the committee consisted exclusively of laymen, fifteen Anglicans, fifteen Dissenters and six foreigners resident in London. Henry Thornton was treasurer and the Claphamite Lord Teignmouth, former Governor-General of India, its president.

The goal of the Bible Society was the interdenominational dissemination of the Bible ‘without note or comment’ - this was deeply resented by High Churchman and between 1805 and 1822 over 170 pamphlets were written against the Society. Its genius lay in its ability to mobilize the energies of its supporters throughout the country, using women and even children, and playing a vital role in the creation of the energetic evangelical culture which was to be such an important feature of Victorian society. It happened spontaneously, as auxiliary associations began to mushroom throughout the country. The auxiliaries then spawned their own outgrowths in the form of Ladies’ Associations, and by the 1830s, middle-class women had cornered the market in selling cheap bibles to the poor, much to the alarm of conservatives who thought women should concentrate purely on domestic concerns. Some feared that the women would neglect their families and undermine male authority by becoming tub-thumping fanatics or that they would be unable to add up the collections.

1809 the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. This began in 1805 as a weekly series of Saturday night lectures for potential Jewish converts in London. In 1815 the Society became purely Anglican. The stress on the Jews owes much to the millenarian preoccupations during and after the Napoleonic Wars.

Missions
Missionary work was an offshoot of imperial expansion and something which united Evangelicals of all denominations.

In 1793 William Carey (1761-1834) went to Calcutta. In 1801 he began to teach at Fort William College and translated the Bible into a number of Indian languages. In the February edition of the Whig Edinburgh Review, Sydney Smith (1771-1845) sneered at the Indian mission as ‘a nest of consecrated cobblers’.

In 1813 the East India Company’s charter was up for renewal, and the Evangelicals wished to insert a clause in the new charter allowing Christian missionaries to operate in the parts of India controlled by the Company. They faced fierce opposition from the Company which had always forbidden proselytizing for fear that this would exacerbate religious tensions. With tactics learned from the abolitionist movement, Wilberforce brought pressure on his fellow parliamentarians from the country at large.

The petitions were successful in Manchester, Bristol and throughout the provinces. Armed with this impressive support, Wilberforce stood up in the Commons on 22 June and delivered a diatribe on ‘the degraded character of the Hindoo superstition’ that condemned sati and female infanticide. His motion for the insertion of the new clause was carried by 89 votes to 36.

The consequences for India were momentous. The diocese of Calcutta was founded in 1814. The evangelical success in opening up India to Christianity was paralleled a generation later by the secular Utilitarian programme of westernization. In 1834, Thomas Babington Macaulay, son of Zachary the abolitionist, came to India as the new Law Member. In a resolution of the following year he declared

‘that the great objects of the British government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science ... through the medium of the English language’.

This had a profound effect on the Indian educational system.

There can be little doubt of a new ethos by 1830. Lady Louisa Stuart looked back bemusedly to her earlier admiration for Aphra Behn. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) produced his Family Shakespeare. The new generation of compulsive womanizers like Viscount Palmerston were no longer open in their conduct. There was a new ‘hypocrisy’ - the ‘tribute vice pays to virtue’?

Select bibliography

2007-09-17T16:00:00.000Z

Adkins, Lesley, The War for all the Oceans (Abacus, 2007)
Barrell, John, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006)
Bindman, David, The Shadow of the Guillotine (British Museum, 1989)
Blanning, Tim, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (Allen Lane, 2007)
Briggs, A., The Age of Improvement (Longman, 1979)
Brown, F. K., Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge, 1961)
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (many editions)
Cannon, J., Parliamentary Reform (Cambridge, 1973)
Christie, I., Wars and Revolutions (Arnold, 1982)
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, 1992)
Derry, J., The Regency Crisis and the Whigs (Cambridge), 1963)
Doyle, William, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989)
Ehrman, J The Younger Pitt: The Years of Acclaim (Constable 1969)
________The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition (Constable, 1983)
________The Younger Pitt: The Consuming Struggle (Constable, 1996)
Elliott, Marianne, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (Yale, 1989)s
Emsley, Clive, British Society and the French Wars (Macmillan, 1979)
Evans, Eric, The Forging of the Modern State 3rd edn. (Longman, 2001)
________William Pitt the Younger (Routledge, 1999)
Foreman, Amanda, Georgiana duchess of Devonshire (HarperCollins, 1998)
Foster, Roy, Modern Ireland (Penguin, 1989)
Fraser, Marie Antoinette (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2001)
Gilmour, I., Riot, Risings and Revolution (Pimlico, 1992)
Hague, William, William Pitt the Younger (HarperCollins, 2004)
Hochschild, A., Bury the Chains (Macmillan, 2005)
Hibbert, C., George IV (Penguin, 1973)
Hibbert, C., George III (Penguin, 1998)
Hilton, Boyd, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? (Oxford, 2006)
Howse, E., Saints in Politics (George Allen and Unwin, 1952)
Jones, Colin, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (Longman, 1988)
Keane, John, Tom Paine (Bloomsbury, 1995)
Macoby, S., The English Radical Tradition (Adam and Charles Black, 1966)
Matthias, Peter, The First Industrial Nation (Methuen, 1983)
Mitchell, Leslie, Charles James Fox (Penguin, 1992)
Mitchell, L.G., The Whig World, 1760-1837 (Hambledon, 2005)
Mori, Jennifer, William Pitt and the French Revolution (Keele, 1997)
O’Gorman, F., The Long Eighteenth Century (Arnold, 1997)
Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man (many editions)
Perkin, H., Origins of Modern English Society (Routledge, 1969)
Philp, Mark, Paine (Oxford University Press, 1989)
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Pitt the Younger

2007-09-17T14:33:00.000Z

For the story of how William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister at the end of 1783, see here.

For a biographical account, see here.

The Regency Crisis: or the Madness of George III

2007-09-17T14:15:00.001Z

Pitt in 1788
Pitt felt himself to be in a strong position at the end of the decade. This did not mean that he had always got his own way - he had failed to persuade the Commons to accept his proposals for Irish free trade and (modest) parliamentary reform, and he had been forced to repeal his Shop Tax by riots outside Downing Street, where he had been burned in effigy. These bruising experiences were to make him more cautious in the future.

However his economic policies were bearing fruit: the national debt had been cut though additional taxes on spirits and hair powder and the setting up of a Sinking Fund, and the navy improved after its poor showing in the American War. In 1787 he had ended Britain’s post-war diplomatic isolation by joining a Triple Alliance with Prussia and the Dutch Republic. His political opponents, the Foxites were fewer than 200 in a House of 558, and the king’s favour consolidated his position. Pitt and George III were never close but they knew they needed each other. This left the Foxites impotent in opposition, deeply loathing Pitt. From 1786 they vented their frustration in impeaching Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of India and then prosecuting him. The trial consumed a great deal of their energy, with Burke being especially zealous in the trial (which was to end in 1795 with Hastings’ acquittal). Politically they depended on the Prince of Wales and hoped desperately that the king would die

The Fitzherbert marriage
On 15 December 1785 the prince secretly marred the widowed Catholic Maria Fitzherbert (1756-1837), whom he had met the previous year. This marriage was illegal according to three Acts: the Act of Settlement (1701), the Act of Union (1707), both of which excluded a prince or princess married to a Catholic from succeeding to the throne, and to the Royal Marriage Act of 1772. Though the couple initially kept separate establishments, the marriage was an open secret in London society, where they were constantly seen together. Gillray drew a cartoon of the marriage, with Burke as the clergyman, and Fox giving away the bride. However the king and queen were ignorant of it.

The prince further embarrassed the Opposition by his debts, which were over a quarter of a million pounds. The king refused to relieve him without a promise that he would be less extravagant in the future. It was hinted to the prince that his father would be more amenable if he married and if he abandoned Fox. The Prince refused to do either.

In April 1787 Parliament debated the prince’s debts. One ‘country’ member hinted that a question was involved ‘which went immediately to affect our constitution in Church and State’ - an oblique reference to the Fitzherbert marriage. George wrote to Fox that ‘there never was any ground for those reports ... so malevolently circulated’. (To the end of his life he consistently denied the marriage.) Believing the prince, Fox spoke to a crowded Commons on 30 April, denying the

‘monstrous report of a fact which had not the smallest degree of foundation ... a low malicious falsehood’,

and said that he had ‘His Royal Highness’s direct authority’ for his declaration. (After this Mrs Fitzherbert developed a lasting hostility to Fox.)

On arriving at Brooks’s, Fox met one of his friends who told him he had been present at the marriage. He then realized that he had unintentionally misled the House. For a year he did his best to avoid the prince, but they had to resume their alliance, because they needed each other.

The Regency Crisis
Compared with his son’s the king’s life was a model of rectitude and frugality, and after a difficult start to his reign he was becoming popular. In 1775 John Wesley had attested to his unpopularity:

‘…the bulk of the people in every city, town and village do not much aim at the ministry…but at the King himself. They heartily despise his Majesty and hate him with a perfect hatred’.

But by the end of the war, opinion was shifting in his favour, and an assassination attempt in 1786 only increased his popularity.

On 11 June 1788 the king suffered a ‘spasmodic bilious attack’, and was ill for several days. At Kew on 17 October he had a second attack, coupled with severe abdominal pains and discoloured urine. This was coupled with ‘agitation’, ‘flurry of spirits’, uncontrollable gabbling and mental confusion. All these are symptoms of porphyria.

The Prince of Wales took over the royal household and called in his own doctor, Dr Warren. The king refused to see him. On 12 November from hearsay Warren told Lady Spencer, ‘Rex noster insanit’. The prince was already in communication with the Opposition in the person of Sheridan (Fox was in Italy with his mistress, Mrs Armistead).

The king’s condition fluctuated throughout the whole of November. The king remained at Windsor. Various remedies were tired: blistering, hot baths. On 18-19 November, after only two hours’ sleep, he talked for 19 hours. On 23 November, he uncharacteristically spoke ‘indecencies’.

The Opposition were convinced that a regency would be needed, which would put them in government. Fox hurried back from Italy. Stories were spread about the king’s illness - shaking hands with a tree. On 28 November the Whiggish Morning Post published a list of ministers who would be in the new government. The atmosphere at Brooks’s was buoyant, but fears of Pitt’s dismissal caused a two-point falling stocks.

However in late November the atmosphere began to change. The physician, Dr Anthony Addington, one-time consultant to the Pitt family and the former keeper of a madhouse, encouraged Pitt to think that the king might recover. He recommended a move to Kew - away from the prying spectators at Windsor. When taken there, George was denied permission to see his wife and daughters.

On 5 December Parliament opened. On the same day Dr Francis Willis, the keeper of a private asylum in Lincolnshire, arrived at Kew, armed with a straitjacket and three strong assistants.
Willis’s role shows that madness was now seen as a medical condition and that the patient, whatever his rank, had to submit to the all-knowing, all-powerful doctor – an historical development described in Michel Foucault’s Madness and Reason (1961).

In December - January, Parliament debated a regency. On 10 December one of the epic debates in the Pitt/Fox relationship took place. Pitt moved the appointment of a committee to examine precedents. Fox argued that this was a delaying tactic, as there were no precedents, and asserted that it was necessary to give the prince ‘full powers to act as a sovereign immediately. This betrayal of fundamental Whig principles gave Pitt the opportunity to ‘unwhig’ Fox.

The Whigs were reduced to quarrelling among themselves. Fox and Sheridan were at odds. On 15 December Thurlow, the opportunistic Lord Chancellor, who had been contemplating throwing in his lot with theirs, changed his mind and declared, ‘When I forget my sovereign, may God forget me!’ On 16 December the government motion for a restricted regency was carried 268/204.

However the king was still ill, and the prince was behaving very badly among his companions at Carlton House and Brookes’s, doing nothing to discourage the scurrilous attacks on the queen in the opposition press.

The king was suffering from Dr Willis’s treatment. Willis became quite openly Pittite, while Warren remained the Opposition’s preferred doctor. In the parliamentary debates their rival diagnoses were hurled across the floor of the Commons. Meanwhile, the duchess of Devonshire’s diary recorded Opposition in-fighting. Pitt was refusing the play the one card he knew would utterly discredit the prince - the secret marriage. Because the prince had denied the marriage, exposure would show him to be a liar and discredit the monarchy. Instead, he would rely on his good parliamentary majority.

On 5 February Pitt introduced the first reading of the Regency Bill, which passed the Commons:

The Regent was to have no power to create peers (though in the debates Pitt conceded that he would have this right after three years).
He would only to have a limited right to grant offices, salaries, or pensions.
He would have no jurisdiction over the king’s lands or property.
The care of the king was to be in the hands of the queen

However, George was not beginning to recover - even though on 2 February he chased the Second Keeper of the Robes, Fanny Burney.
On 16 February, the bill was ready to go to the Lords. If they threw it out and if the king recovered, Pitt would have to go.
On 19 February, the Lord Chancellor informed the Lords that the king was convalescing and was inquiring about parliamentary business.
On 24 February Pitt travelled to Kew and found the king lucid - he told Pitt that if the Regency Bill had gone through he would have retired to Hanover.

On St George’s Day a triumphant grand thanksgiving service was held at St Paul’s. The prince chatted throughout the service and the press attacks on the prince showed how much he had lost popularity. The Opposition was now in further disarray, with Burke and Sheridan extremely hostile to each other. And as he approached his 30th birthday, Pitt seemed stronger than ever.

In the summer the king made a triumphant journey to Weymouth. While the royal family were there, the Bastille fell.