Free A History of Britain, Volume 3 by Simon Schama Page A

insignificance. Part II, with its even more radical ‘welfare state’ agenda (which divided the reformers), redistributing national income through progressive taxation to fund government obligations towards children, the aged, the infirm and the poor, did even better, selling, according to Paine, between 400,000 and 500,000 copies in the first 10 years. Even allowing for an element of exaggeration the figures make nonsense of the claims of some modern historians that radical opinions at this time were confined to a small and unrepresentative minority. At a meeting of the suddenly revived Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information, a vote of thanks was passed to Paine in the sung form of a new version of the national anthem:
    God Save the Rights of Man
    Let Despots If they Can
    Them overthrow …
    By the summer of 1791, with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette caught at Varennes while trying to flee France, brought back in disgrace to Paris and held prisoner in their own Palace of the Tuileries, two sets of self-designated British patriots were at each other’s throats. In May, in the House of Commons, the erstwhile friends and allies Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox had had a bitter and irreparable falling-out. Goaded by Pitt, Fox remained defiant that the new French constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were ‘the most stupendous edifice of liberty’ that the world had ever seen. And in private he accused Burke of being no more than Pitt’s hired mouth, an accomplice to the dirty war of tarring him with the brush of being a republican. In the Commons on 6 May, a speech by Burke was a signal from Fox’s ardent young band of radicals, whom Burke called ‘the little dogs’, to howl and hiss. Burke publicly aired his anger that ‘a personal attack had been made upon him from a quarter he never could have expected, after a friendship and intimacy of more than 22 years’. Rehearsing other disputes that had divided them, but had neither compromised their closeness nor split the Whigs, Burke was about to say that this particular argument over the French Revolution was fatal to both. Fox interjected: ‘There is no loss of friendship.’ ‘I regret to say there is,’ responded Burke. ‘I have done my duty though I have lost my friend.’ Fox rose, became tearfully incoherent, but finally spoke unrepentantly of the disappearance of ‘horrid despotism’ in France. Burke responded again that he hoped no one would trade away the British constitution for a ‘wild and visionary system’.
    This courtly if emotional exchange disguised the polarization taking place, fast and furiously, in the provincial towns of England and even more ominously in Scotland. Certainly, London was also a storm-centre of both radical and loyalist politics. But the ‘new Britain’ – Manchester, Sheffield, Belfast, Birmingham and Glasgow, as well as older towns transformed by commerce and industry such as Derby, Nottingham and Bewick’s Newcastle – was experiencing a real baptism of fire. It was in those places that meeting house ‘rational religion’, debating clubs, the printing and publishing trades and radical newspapers were all tied together. In Sheffield the bookshop owner John Gales, also the editor of the
Sheffield Register
, was the prime mover of the city’s Constitutional Society, which rapidly acquired over 2000 members. The question of just how radical these organizations were to be often put a strain on their solidarity. Some wanted to follow the more ‘Friends of the People’, Fox-ite, constitutional line of pressing for parliamentary reform, perhaps even manhood suffrage as a ‘birthright of freeborn Britons’; others quickly became intoxicated with millenarian visions of the coming just society as outlined in the gospel according to Tom Paine.
    Amazingly, 14 July – the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille – replaced 4–5 November – the anniversary of both the Gunpowder