Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
to the French Assembly. After they had retired, a crowd gathered and went through the town destroying Unitarian meeting houses and the homes of Dissenters. The crowd then set off for Priestley’s house, Fair Hill, which it sacked, destroying in the process one of the most important laboratories and collections of scientific instruments and specimens in Europe. In the morning the crowd forced open the city’s gaols and rampaged for a further two days under the slogan of ‘Church and King’, meting out rough justice to Dissenters and suspected reformers with the tacit approval if not the active encouragement of the city’s magistrates. This pattern was replicated in similar riots elsewhere. While the role of conservative magistrates was evident in some cases, the frenzy of the mobs was partly fuelled, as it was in similar explosions on the Continent, by undefined fears that the Revolution in Paris and its effects somehow threatened the traditional certainties of life.12
These disturbances alarmed Pitt and his cabinet, and in March 1792 he installed seven additional stipendiary magistrates in London, along with a complement of constables. He nevertheless persisted in his confidence that neither France nor the reformist agitation at home constituted a threat. In his budget speech of 17 February 1792 he prophesied that the country could expect at least fifteen years of peace. The outbreak of war in April 1792 between France and Austria, and the French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands, did not alter this view.13
A Corresponding Society for the encouragement of discussion on the constitution was founded in January 1792 by Thomas Hardy, a London shoemaker, and it soon put out branches in Manchester, Sheffield, Norwich, Birmingham, Derby, Stockport and Leicester. In April, a group of noblemen founded an Association of Friends of the People, and societies of various kinds up and down the country discussed reform, published pamphlets and formulated appeals to Parliament. By the middle of 1792 the Norwich Revolution Society had scores of branches in surrounding towns and villages. In April, the prominent Whig Charles Grey launched a campaign for parliamentary reform in the House of Commons, which was vigorously supported by the various societies.
But the Whigs themselves were split, with Burke thundering his warnings against ‘the new and grievous malady’ sweeping Europe. He felt ‘great dread and apprehension from the contagious nature of these abominable principles, and vile manners, which threaten the worst and most degrading barbarism to every adjacent Country’. He was convinced that ‘no Monarchy limited or unlimited, nor any of the old Republics, can possibly be safe as long as this strange, nameless, wild, enthusiastic thing is established in the Center [sic] of Europe’. He equated the desire for change of any sort with revolutionary purpose, warning that the Dissenters were ‘preparing to renew 14 of July’ and that if they had their way Christianity would be ‘extirpated’. He bracketed anyone who did not hold the same views as himself as a ‘terrorist’, and accused English journalists of being in the pay of the Paris Jacobin Club. He contrasted sentimental notions of good old England with lurid references to the disgusting ‘French Pestilence’.14
Many were beginning to think like him. On 10 August the Paris mob attacked the Tuileries Palace, massacring the Swiss Guards in a wanton display of savagery, and Louis XVI was imprisoned along with his family. In the first week of September the Paris prisons in which priests and nobles were being held were stormed, and thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered. Many of those who had welcomed the Revolution began to recant. ‘How could we ever be so deceived in the character of the French nation as to think them capable of liberty?’ wrote Sir Samuel Romilly, who had previously believed the Revolution to be ‘the most glorious event, and the happiest for mankind, that has ever taken place since human affairs have been recorded’. Their horror turned to alarm in October, when news of the French victory over the invading army of the Duke of Brunswick at Valmy reached England.15
Public opinion polarised. Many welcomed the victory, holding public demonstrations in celebration. The London Corresponding Society and other reformist bodies sent congratulations and messages of support to the French Convention. But they were increasingly branded as ‘Jacobins’ and ostracised. Landowners threatened tenants with eviction if they held radical views, employers sacked workers, tradesmen and shopkeepers who belonged to reform societies were boycotted by their customers, and in some parts of the country house-to-house enquiries were conducted to check the loyalty of individuals. Landlords of public houses refused to rent their premises to reform societies for their meetings. The Cambridge University Court expelled one of its dons for having published a pamphlet approving of the French Revolution. A Regius Chair of Chemistry was deferred because the only candidate was a supporter of reform. In London, booksellers, authors and even ministers of religion whose sermons were considered seditious were sent to the pillory or to gaol. Flurries of pamphlets appeared denouncing ‘French liberty’. Booksellers who sold radical literature saw their shops torched, and effigies of Paine, often clutching a copy of Rights of Man, were burned – almost as many of him as of Guy Fawkes on the night of 5 November 1792.16
Periodicals sprang up to combat the reformist tendency, first the British Critic, and later the Anti-Jacobin and the Anti-Jacobin Review. George Canning, founder of the Anti-Jacobin, commissioned the cartoonist James Gillray to produce images suggesting connections between the London Corresponding Society and the French revolutionaries. Other cartoonists joined in, taking considerable liberties with the truth and giving loose rein to their fancy, representing reformist Whigs such as Charles James Fox manning a guillotine or lynching members of the cabinet.
As conservatives closed ranks, even abolitionists were denounced: the slave rebellion which had erupted in the French colony of Saint-Domingue appeared an evil omen. Although the only property to have been destroyed so far in England was that of reformists and Dissenters, it was conservatives who on 20 November formed an Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers, which rapidly grew into the largest political organisation in the country.
In the general panic, the Home Office and the Treasury Solicitor’s Office had begun employing spies to infiltrate reform societies and lurk in public places to report anything suspicious and gauge the mood of the public. In the second half of 1792 these began to send in reports of seditious talk, of expressions of discontent with the government and outbursts against the king, and even of people arming. One informer stated that bands of Frenchmen armed with daggers were disembarking at various ports and marching on London, and that ‘within two months there would be a great riot and there would be no king and it would be worse than in France’. A French royalist émigré, Dubois de Longchamp, warned the government that there were large numbers of Frenchmen in London, some of them soldiers, planning an insurrection. One of their alleged contacts, a Piccadilly hatter by the name of Charco, was arrested and found to possess three daggers and some firearms. An Italian was said to be suborning soldiers in their barracks, and a ‘dangerous’ man by the name of Cervantes was keeping suspicious contacts, along with an Irishman who was ‘the most dangerous of any’. The insurrection was allegedly to break out on 1 December.17
Pitt found ‘nothing to agree with’ in any of Burke’s writings, and was dismissive of the threat of popular revolt. ‘Tho there has lately been a disposition to a great deal of Alarm,’ he wrote to home secretary Henry Dundas in mid-November, ‘I believe the Bulk of the People here, and certainly the higher and middling classes, are still sensible of their Happiness and eager to preserve it.’ But he could not afford to be complacent. With the French occupation of the Austrian Netherlands, which would have been perceived, Revolution or no Revolution, as a direct strategic threat to British interests, the situation at home assumed a new significance. As a result, in the second half of November 1792 Pitt drew up plans for mobilisation, and on 1 December embodied the militia in several counties. This was accompanied by a Royal Proclamation stating that extreme measures were necessary in the face of the imminent threat of revolution.18
Pitt was attacked in the House of Commons, with Charles James Fox pouring scorn on his fears and the playwright and Whig