This was true enough, but the fear was largely the work of the government itself, which was spending some £5,000 a year in subsidies to newspapers and helped start the Sun and the True Briton, which fanned fears of French subversion. Its use of spies also contributed to spreading mistrust and fear: the notion of revolutionary France sending out agents to subvert enemy states before attacking them was gaining ground. An under-secretary at the Home Office, Evan Nepean, had already put together a system of surveillance of foreign undesirables who might be planning an insurrection.20
Seemingly alarmed at this possibility, Pitt introduced a Bill to deal with the threat. In the event, the Aliens Act of January 1793 was to prove anything but a defensive measure, and the Aliens Office to which it gave rise was soon paying more attention to infiltrating the London Corresponding Society than to foreigners living in London. Under the Whitechapel magistrate William Wickham, appointed ‘Superintendent of Aliens’ in 1794, it would go on to mount a number of attempts to overthrow the French government.21
Whether or not Pitt and his colleagues believed in the threat of revolution and French subversion, there can be no doubt it did provide them with a golden opportunity to split the opposition, by forcing the less radical to support him out of a fear of appearing to harbour revolutionary intentions. The Foxite Whigs who stuck to their guns were not only isolated, but made to look unpatriotic. It was also a heaven-sent opportunity to increase the powers of the government.
In December 1792 the Scots Association of Friends of the People held a Convention in Edinburgh. The delegates kept their speeches moderate and made frequent declarations of loyalty to the crown, but the very word ‘Convention’ was tainted by association with its French model, and the Home Office’s informer in their midst reported a number of seditious off-the-record utterances. Several of the more radical delegates were arrested in January 1793.22
The execution of Louis XVI on 21 January profoundly shocked Pitt and most of British public opinion, and provided the excuse for the expulsion of the French diplomatic representative in London. France’s subsequent declaration of war on Britain and the Dutch Republic on 1 February meant that enthusiasts of the Revolution and any kind of reform could now be represented as traitors. In Nottingham, encouraged by the mayor, crowds reinforced by navvies digging the Trent Canal attacked the houses of those thought to harbour revolutionary sympathies, on the pretext that they might be hoarding arms. Dissenters, be they Catholics or Quakers, were suspect, and despite repeated declarations of loyalty by John Wesley himself, Methodists were the object of particular suspicion and antagonism, as ignorance of what they actually stood for raised fears that they might be Levellers in disguise.23
The trial of the Edinburgh radicals was slow to get under way, and it was not until August 1793 that they were sentenced. The Vice-President of the Association of Friends of the People, Thomas Muir, was sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation, and the others to shorter terms. The trial had been a travesty, and provoked numerous protest meetings. A new Convention met in Edinburgh in October, bringing together delegates of reform societies from across the whole kingdom. On the basis of reports that some members were talking of drilling and arming, and that quantities of arms were being manufactured in Sheffield, the government closed it down and arrested a number of the delegates, provoking yet more protests.
Since there were few restrictions to membership of the London Corresponding Society and the other associations, it was easy for government informers to be admitted as members, and all the pro-reform societies in the capital and the major cities had been infiltrated, with some informers holding high office. The founder of the Corresponding Society, Thomas Hardy, believed that secrecy was both counter-productive and might lead to their undoing. ‘We conceive that the permanency of a reform must be founded on the acquiescence of the public, who, after maturely deliberating on everything proposed, shall have found the plan the most useful and the best that could possibly have been laid down,’ he wrote. Generally, the reformists displayed a concern for due process and were profoundly offended by the government’s bending of rules and shocked by its use of spies.24
Hardy’s colleague John Thelwall could be more radical in his speeches, and drafted a resolution for one meeting in Chalk Farm to the effect that the compact between rulers and subjects was automatically dissolved if the laws securing the liberties of those subjects were violated. But he was opposed to violence. ‘True reason ought to be the only weapon of the friends of liberty,’ he declared. ‘The pen is the only artillery, and the ink the only ammunition, that the London Corresponding Society must ever use.’ Candidates for membership were in some cases obliged to make a declaration disavowing conspiracy and violence, and when some of the societies began to make more radical declarations, many members tendered their resignations, complaining that they had ‘deviated from the Pursuit of their original proposed object, viz. to obtain Parliamentary Reform’.25
Even if a significant number of radicals had intended to bring about a revolution, it is difficult to see where they would have found the means. There was much misery both in the countryside and in the manufacturing towns. Events in France had given encouragement to the nascent working men’s associations, and there was an increase in strikes, particularly around 1792. But these were almost entirely about wages and conditions, and restricted to a particular trade. They were conducted with a degree of ponderous legality, their aims set out in formally drafted petitions. Although the press occasionally pictured the strikes as being motivated by ‘Jacobinical’ ideas, the only one in 1792 with what might be construed as a political edge to it was that by Liverpool ships’ carpenters who threatened violence if the slave trade were abolished, as it would reduce demand for their work. The government on the other hand had over 2,500 troops at its disposal in London alone, and plenty more, as well as militia, stationed around the country.26
Yet reports kept reaching the Home Office from magistrates and its own agents that preparations were being made for insurrection. Magistrates were unreliable, as some reported every minor incident while others failed to inform the home secretary of actual riots. Some of the Home Office’s agents were capable and responsible, but they were outnumbered by opportunistic informers who were paid according to the importance and bulk of the intelligence they supplied, a recipe for exaggeration and invention, and sometimes provocation. Mostly they came up with no more than baseless gossip. Typically, Edward Gosling, a government spy who was a member of the London Corresponding Society, reported that John Baxter, a Shoreditch silversmith and chairman of the London Corresponding Society, had told him where he could obtain a gun and declared that a revolution could be effected in a few hours and blood would have to be spilt, particularly that of Pitt, Dundas and, unaccountably, Fox. Another report alleged that a Sheffield journeyman printer by the name of Davison bade a cutler make him ‘about a hundred’ pike-heads which were stored at the house of the secretary of the local Constitutional Society. One source revealed the existence of the ‘Lambeth Loyal Association’, an eighty-strong military force, but the only evidence further investigation yielded was that of a potential recruit, Frederick Polydore Nodder, ‘botanic painter to His Majesty’, who came to join them and found three men performing military drill with ‘an old rusty musket and a broomstick or two’.27
Dundas and his colleagues were on the whole critical of the reports they received, and took them with a pinch of salt. It seems unlikely that Pitt and his cabinet could really have believed that a revolution could