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

Plot and the Glorious Revolution – as a critical day in British politics. On that same day in 1791 a huge crowd in Belfast – both Protestant and Catholic – cheered the dawn of liberty, especially for Ireland, while another crowd in Birmingham was trashing the precious library and laboratory of Joseph Priestley in the name of Church and King. The ‘spark’ had indeed caught for ‘Gunpowder Joe’, but it had lit a fire under the wrong people. By the spring of 1794 Priestley had emigrated to America, settling in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where he founded a cooperative community that at last corresponded, somewhat, to his social idealism.
    Britain, on the other hand, seemed further off than ever from being converted into an Elysium of peace and freedom. Any ‘Friend of the People’ hoping to work some sort of miraculous constitutional change from within would have been sadly disenchanted when, on 6 May 1793, Charles Grey’s measure of parliamentary reform (more equal representation and more frequent elections) was defeated by 282 votes to 41. That was about the size of the Fox-ite ‘New Whig’ remnant in parliament. So when, in May, a royal proclamation was issued outlawing seditious assemblies, the government expected and got Whig support; Fox voted against but the Duke of Portland, and of course Burke, were in favour. However, since the parliamentary road seemed, for the moment, to be a dead end, Paine’s more revolutionary politics became more, not less, appealing. In January 1792, the shoemaker Thomas Hardy established the London Corresponding Society (the ‘mother of mischief’ according to Burke), with John Thelwall as its major theorist and spokesman; it was an overtly democratic Paine-ite organization pressing for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. To the government, fretting about national as well as social disintegration, it suddenly seemed sinister that Hardy was a Scot – all the more so when, in December, Edinburgh was the chosen meeting place for a ‘Convention’ of Scottish ‘Friends of the People’. Since the bloody change from a monarchy to a republic in France had produced a ‘Convention’ the very term (despite a quite different tradition of usage in Britain) seemed to presage a similar upheaval. The Edinburgh Convention numbered 160 delegates from 80 sister societies in no fewer than 35 towns. Government spies reported that there were Irishmen at the Edinburgh Convention – and for that matter Scots in Belfast and Dublin. When one of the conveners, the lawyer Thomas Muir, spoke of liberating ‘enslaved England’, the jump from Jacobite to Jacobin suddenly did not seem so fantastic. Part of the savagery of the government’s counter-attack – arresting its leaders, trying them for sedition and sentencing them to 14 years’ Australian transportation – was undoubtedly due to the fear that the Anglo-Scottish union was about to be subverted or that an attempt to replace parliament with a ‘British Convention’ might begin in some sort of northern democratic heartland stretching from Nottingham to Dundee.
    Agents also noticed that the corresponding societies were packed with rowdy, violently verbose types: a new generation of uppity weavers, godly nailmakers, republican tailors and, most ominously for those who felt the hairs rise on the nape of their neck when they read of the revolutionary horrors in Paris, Sheffield cutlers. Raids occasionally produced the odd cache of pikes or axes, which only fed the hysteria. In the Commons Burke poured on the paranoia, comparing something that he called the Revolutional and the Unitarian Societies to insects that might grow into huge spiders building webs to catch and devour all who stood in their way. Less phantasmagorically, William Pitt warned that if the opinions of Tom Paine were allowed to spread unchecked among the common people ‘we should have bloody revolution’.
    With the connivance of the government, pre-emptive action