It made out that the self-important declarations of congratulation and solidarity addressed by the various reform societies, and particularly the London Corresponding Society, to French revolutionary clubs were evidence that the English radicals were under the influence, if not the control, of the French Convention. From papers seized, it was clear that there was a certain amount of correspondence between the various societies, both among themselves and with similar bodies in France and Ireland. While the actual correspondence had not been found (as it was scrupulously burned by the recipients), Pitt and his ministers assumed that its purpose must have been to coordinate action, from which they extrapolated that ‘a detestable conspiracy against our happy constitution’ was being hatched. The government’s informers were warning that violence ‘will be used very soon’, and in April 1794 a report compiled by Wickham convinced Pitt that what he called ‘a new era in the history of insurrection’ had dawned, and that he had enough evidence to act. In order to ensure greater support in Parliament he made an alliance with a segment of the Whig Party led by the Duke of Portland, who became home secretary.28
At 6.30 on the morning of 12 May 1794 a group of King’s Messengers and Bow Street Runners entered the house in Piccadilly of Thomas Hardy, founder of the London Corresponding Society. Without allowing him or his wife to dress in private, they ransacked the lodgings and carted away everything they could lay their hands on in the way of papers, as well as a large number of legally published books. Hardy himself was conducted to the Tower of London. The society’s secretary, Daniel Adams, was also hauled out of bed and arrested, and his home similarly searched.
The documents found were passed by the Home Office and the Treasury Solicitor’s Office, along with reports they had received from their informers, to a Committee of Secrecy specially convened by the House of Commons to assess the level of threat. After studying the material, this reached the conclusion that the London Corresponding Society and the Constitutional Information Society were dedicated to the subversion of the British constitution.29
In a second, more detailed report, the committee sought to justify this conclusion. It insisted that the Edinburgh Convention had been modelled on the French, and that since the model had brought about the fall of the monarchy, confiscated Church property and judicially murdered the king and thousands of others, that must also have been the intention of its Scottish emulators. The committee picked out of the Convention’s recorded proceedings words such as ‘struggle’ as proof of violent intent. The phrase ‘it would appear that’ recurs with numbing frequency throughout the report, and much of the evidence consists of ‘certain persons’ having overheard statements or had sight of documents of a seditious nature, attributed to people who were members of one of the societies, or had attended their meetings, or knew people who had. The report quotes as evidence a letter from Dundas to Pitt reporting that ‘Paisley is in particular alluded to as being in a state of great readiness [for revolution]; and there has been positive information received through other channels, that within these three weeks persons of that description have assembled themselves to a very considerable number in the night-time, for the purpose of practising the use of arms.’ No corroboration of this assertion is provided in the report, and there is none to be found among the papers delivered to the committee.30
‘From what has been stated it appears, that the design of arming, as far as it has yet proceeded, has been conducted with great secrecy and caution, and, at the same time, with a remarkable degree of uniformity and concert in parts of the kingdom remote from each other,’ the report asserted. ‘The weapons principally provided seem to have been peculiarly calculated for the purposes of sudden violence, and to have been chosen in conformity to the example of what has recently passed in France. The actual progress made in the execution of the design, during the short period of a few weeks, sufficiently shows what might have been expected, if the societies had proceeded, without interruption, in increasing the number of their members, and the fund for providing arms.’ No arms were actually listed, and nowhere in the papers seized was there any mention of them, but such details were not allowed to stand in the way of the committee’s convictions. ‘It also appears to your Committee,’ its report pronounced, ‘that subscriptions had been opened for the purpose of providing musquets.’ Needless to say, neither muskets nor money were found.31
The committee covered itself against accusations of failing to provide evidence for its assertions with the excuse of confidentiality. ‘Your Committee have, for obvious reasons, omitted to annex to their Report the evidence of particular witnesses, by whom the facts above stated are supported; and, for the same reasons, they have studiously forborne to mention the names of persons and places in all cases in which they could be omitted,’ it concluded.32
Faced with this ‘traitorous conspiracy’ to overthrow the government and introduce French anarchy, Pitt proposed the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, which was done on 17 May. Although he as good as admitted that the government was overreacting, he justified this by the argument that it was better to err on the side of caution and by the need to appease opinion throughout the country, which was now in a state of near-panic. Further arrests were made, and John Thelwall, his fellow radical John Horne Tooke and others were committed to Newgate or joined Hardy in the Tower. In a celebration of the Glorious First of June naval victory against the French, a mob attacked Hardy’s house and ill-treated his pregnant wife, who later died in childbirth.33
In the space of less than two years, Pitt’s government had radically changed its position, and by the summer of 1794 it was at war with subversion at home and with France abroad. At home, it sought to root out the supposed conspiracy and decapitate its leadership. Abroad, it hoped, by landing troops in France, to assist royalist rebels in overthrowing the French government. It justified both policies with the alleged threat of revolution, and almost any evidence was used to support this. Riots against the press gangs were represented as being politically motivated; reports from spies that military drilling was taking place on the outskirts of London and that the prisoners in the Tower were in communication with accomplices outside were made much of. In Edinburgh, while searching the house of a bankrupt, officers of the law found weapons apparently made to the order of a secret committee of the radical ‘Ways and Means’ society. Further investigation revealed that this had drawn up a plan of insurrection, supposedly at the instigation of the London Corresponding Society. The trial of the two ringleaders opened with eighteen pike-heads and four battle-axes laid out as the evidence for the prosecution. One of the accused, Robert Watt, turned out to have been the government’s principal informer in Scotland, and it remains unclear whether he had turned radical or had had the weapons made in order to fabricate evidence for the government, as he was hanged on 16 October.34
In September, the Home Office was informed by a Thomas Upton of a plot to kill the king by firing a poisoned dart at him from a brass tube disguised as a walking stick while he was in his box at the theatre. Two members of the London Corresponding Society were hauled in for questioning. One of them was James Parkinson, a surgeon of Hoxton Square who had published a pamphlet entitled Revolutions without Bloodshed, and who would later identify a form of ‘shaking palsy’ as a disease which would in time bear his name. The questioning yielded no evidence, and it subsequently transpired that Upton had invented the whole story. A long-standing member of the London Corresponding Society, he had been asked to resign when it was discovered that he had defrauded its funds, and sought to avenge himself.