Hardy was the first to be brought to the bar, and after nine days in the course of which the case for the prosecution fell apart for lack of evidence, the jury threw out the charge of treason, arguing that there had been no attempt on the life of the king, and that whatever plots might have been laid were aimed at Pitt’s ministry. Hardy was taken back to his lodgings in a coach drawn by an enthusiastic crowd. After three more of his colleagues had been similarly acquitted, the rest were discharged. It was a terrible loss of face for the government. But it was the state that had suffered most.
While the government battled to protect the country against the revolutionary bacillus supposedly threatening society, it succumbed to a far more serious infection itself. During these first five years of the French Revolution, almost every state in Europe built up intelligence-gathering networks and the surveillance of individuals to unheard-of levels, introduced or expanded the use of informers, spies and even agents provocateurs, encouraged denunciation, made use of dishonest propaganda, branded those it did not like as ‘enemies of the state’, tarred them with the brush of ‘immorality’, and repeatedly tried to use legal processes for political means. Since all of these had been either initiated or elaborated by the government of revolutionary France, it could be said that contagion was far greater at government level than among the ordinary people of whom they were so scared. While the virus of revolutionary upheaval had proved only moderately contagious, those of state control over the individual and the politicisation of the legal process had made serious ravages.
5
The war with France dragged on, with little to show in return for the expenditure in men and money. Most people had forgotten, or never understood, what it was about, and by the summer of 1794 its growing unpopularity was compounded by food shortages which threatened to become acute as an unpromising harvest drew near. In July, as the government deliberated on measures of relief, an angry crowd invaded Downing Street clamouring for cheaper bread.
The suspension of habeas corpus had expired in June, and the London Corresponding Society exploited the situation by holding a meeting at St George’s Fields in London which brought together a crowd estimated variously (and probably with considerable exaggeration) at 50,000 to 100,000. Another meeting, at Copenhagen House Fields outside Islington on 26 October, brought together an even greater crowd than the first, possibly as many as 150,000. This emboldened the discontented, and three days later a mob assailed the king’s coach as he was being driven to the state opening of Parliament.1
The government responded with a speed that suggests it had only been waiting for an excuse to act. On 6 November Lord Grenville introduced a Treasonable and Seditious Practices Bill in the House of Lords. This redefined the law on high treason, introducing the notion of ‘constructive treason’ and thereby extending it to cover the intention of bringing about a situation in which the king’s life might be placed in danger, the direct or indirect intimidation of the monarch, and by extension of his ministry. Seditious practices were broadened to include composing or distributing material, printed or spoken, inciting hatred of the king, the constitution or the government. In the Commons four days later, Pitt introduced the Seditious Meetings Bill, which prohibited more than fifty people assembling without a magistrate’s licence (and reclassified halls in which they took place alongside brothels as ‘disorderly houses’). This ruled out the Corresponding Society’s principal activity and ensured that nobody would allow it to use their premises. The Two Acts, as they became known, effectively closed the only legal means of advocating constitutional reform.
William Wilberforce, who had helped to draft the first of the Bills, insisted that it was no more than ‘a temporary sacrifice, by which the blessing of liberty may be transmitted to our children unimpaired’, but there was nothing temporary about it, and it was widely seen as a shameful abuse and extension of the government’s powers. Meetings in defence of free speech were held all over the kingdom, with the Dukes of Norfolk and Bedford turning out alongside John Thelwall and other working-class radicals. The government did not in fact make much use of these powers, but its actions did outrage large bodies of public opinion and widen the gulf between defenders of the status quo and would-be reformers of every hue, who now began to complain of Pitt’s ‘reign of terror’.2
The government had reason to feel embattled. The war with France, unpopular as it was, was not the principal cause of concern. The foreign secretary Lord Grenville believed that despite their early victories, the French were now ‘a People languid and exhausted’. Pitt too had a low opinion of France’s military potential. But he was alive to the threat of a French invasion prepared by a revolutionary fifth column. He possessed a copy of Barruel’s book, and while it may not have convinced him that there was a worldwide conspiracy at work, as he was himself involved in plots to overthrow the government in France, with the bankers Coutts providing funds through their agents in Paris, he might naturally have assumed that the French were planning something similar for London. And there were two, interconnected, areas in which Britain was vulnerable.3
In April 1797 a mutiny broke out in the fleet at Spithead. The sailors demanded higher wages (these had not been increased since the 1660s), better victuals and the abolition of harsh punishments. The new practice of lining ship’s bottoms with copper, which meant they did not need such frequent careening and extended the time they spent at sea, was another cause of discontent. The government granted most of their demands, but the mutiny then spread to the ships at the Nore, at the mouth of the Thames, whose crews took a more political line, although they too were principally concerned with pay and conditions (and demanded a higher share of prize-money). While they did fire salutes on the king’s birthday, they put pressure on the government by blockading the Thames, leading to a logjam of over a hundred merchantmen. They also threatened to take their ships over to France, which, they suggested, would know how to treat free men fairly. The mutiny then spread to Admiral Duncan’s squadron at Yarmouth, and it was not until June that it was pacified.4
The proclamations and addresses of the sailors abounded in words and phrases they would not have known the meaning of ten years before, suggesting that they were aware of what had been happening in France. But the likelihood of their sailing off to join the French was minimal, given that they had been fighting them with jingoistic enthusiasm for the past four years. In December a great Naval Thanksgiving, with thousands of sailors marching past the king in a frenzy of patriotic feeling, seemed to bear this out. Although investigators sent down to the Nore reported ‘with great confidence that no such connections or correspondence ever did exist’, the government could be forgiven for suspecting that the mutinies had been abetted, if not inspired, by London radicals. A more serious cause for anxiety was the possible connections with their homeland of Irish sailors, who made up well over 10 per cent of the total.5
The underlying political problem in Ireland was the divide between the small landowning Ascendancy, made up principally of originally English Anglicans, and the overwhelming majority of the indigenous population, almost entirely Catholic, which suffered a litany of disabilities and discrimination. This was aggravated by less than sensitive rule from London, which alienated not only the Catholics. Reforms had been introduced in the 1780s, giving more power to the Irish Parliament in Dublin. The outbreak of revolution