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In the Theater of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2013

Kevin Gilmartin
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Extract

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 3: New Directions in Political History , July 2002 , pp. 291 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2002

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References

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29 See Marshall, David, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Corrigan, Philip and Sayer, Derek, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985), p. 104Google Scholar.

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47 See Dickinson, , “Popular Loyalism in Britain,” pp. 516–18Google Scholar, and “Popular Conservatism and Militant Loyalism,” pp. 120–22; and Dozier, , For King, Constitution, and Country, pp. 55–60, 76–77Google Scholar.

48 Duffy, Michael, “William Pitt and the Origins of the Loyalist Association Movement of 1792,” Historical Journal 39 (1996): 947–48, 952–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My account in this and the following paragraph is indebted to Duffy's analysis. The tendency of the loyalist association movement to reflect the dynamics of radicalism has often been noticed. See, e.g., Mitchell, , “The Association Movement,” p. 58Google Scholar; Dickinson, , “Popular Loyalism in Britain,” p. 526Google Scholar; Black, , The Association, pp. 267–70Google Scholar. For government suspicion of clubs and associations, see Sack, , From Jacobite to Conservative, pp. 102–5Google Scholar.

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51 Association Papers, pt. 1, Proceedings of the Association, no. 1, pp. 7–8.

52 Ibid., p. 5.

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54 Association Papers, pt. 1, Proceedings of the Association, no. 1, p. 7.

55 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

56 Eagleton, Terry, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-structuralism (London, 1984), p. 36Google Scholar. For an account of the notion of a counterpublic sphere in relation to the resurgent radicalism of the 1810s and 1820s, see Gilmartin, Kevin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–10Google Scholar.

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59 Association Papers, pt. 1, Proceedings of the Association, no. 1, p. 8.

60 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

61 Ibid., preface, p. iii.

62 See Mitchell, , “The Association Movement,” pp. 74–77Google Scholar. For the development of the volunteer movement, which shares a number of key features with loyalist association, see Cookson, , “The English Volunteer Movement,” pp. 867–91Google Scholar; Western, J.R.“The Volunteer Movement as an Anti-revolutionary Force, 1793–1801” English Historical Review 71 (1956): 603–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Association Papers, pt. 1, Proceedings of the Association, no. 1, p. 6.

64 Ibid., pt. 1, no. 1, pp. 1, 3–5.

65 Ibid., pt. 1, no. 2, pp. 12–16, no. 4, pp. 10–15, no. 8, pp. 13–16, no. 9, pp. 65 1–8.

66 This title page is reproduced in Political Writings of the 1790s, ed. Claeys, Gregory, 8 vols. (London, 1995), 7:213Google Scholar; for details about its publication, see 7:215.

67 Philp, , “Vulgar Conservatism,” p. 57Google Scholar; see also Mitchell, , “The Association Movement,” p. 70Google Scholar, for evidence of how the intimidation of booksellers and publicans allowed the association movement to achieve “many notable successes without ever having recourse to prosecution.” For an account of the 1790s that shifts attention away from prosecution, see Emsley , Clive“Repression, ‘Terror’ and the Rule of Law in England during the Decade of the French Revolution,” English Historical Review 100 (1985): 801–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Association Papers, pt. 1, no. 1, p. 1.

69 See Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Berger, Thomas (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 27, 60Google Scholar.

70 Association Papers, pt. 1, no. 7, pp. 2–4.

71 Smith, Olivia, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 71, 76–77Google Scholar.

72 Philp, , “Vulgar Conservatism,” pp. 62–63Google Scholar.

73 Ibid., p. 63. I take up the case of More and the Cheap Repository Tracts more fully in “‘Study to Be Quiet’: Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain,” ELH, forthcoming.

74 Association Papers, pt, 2, no. 3, pp. 8–12.

75 See The Englishman's Political Catechism and The English Freeholder's Catechism, in Association Papers, pt. 2, no. 3, pp. 13–15, no. 10, pp. 1–8. The former tract was adapted from Bolingbroke's, LordThe Freeholder's Political Catechism (London, 1733)Google Scholar. Gary Kelly has made the point about a reversion from dialogue to catechism with respect to More's Cheap Repository Tracts, in “Revolution, Reaction, and the Expropriation of Popular Culture: Hannah More's Cheap Repository,” Man and Nature/L'Homme et La Nature 6 (1987): 152Google Scholar. For a suggestive treatment of the authority of a catechistic method within late eighteenth-century educational practices, see Richardson, Alan, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 64–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 For Burke's use of the almanac in order to expose the new and more volatile conditions of revolutionary era publicity, see my “Burke, Popular Opinion, and the Problem of a Counter-Revolutionary Public Sphere,” in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Whale, John (Manchester, 2000), pp. 107–8Google Scholar.

77 Association Papers, pt. 2, no. 12, pp. 12–13, 16, 20.

78 [Jones, William,] One Penny-Worth More, or, A Second Letter from Thomas Bull to His Brother John (London, [1792])Google Scholar, unpaginated broadsheet tract.

79 For a careful study of this tradition, see Philips, David, “Good Men to Associate and Bad Men to Conspire: Associations for the Prosecution of Felons in England, 1760–1860,” in Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850, ed. Hay, Douglas and Snyder, Francis (Oxford, 1989), pp. 113–70Google Scholar.

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81 Some of these pamphlets have been collected in The Friends to the Liberty of the Press: Eight Tracts, 1792–1793, ed. Parks, Stephen (New York and London, 1974)Google Scholar.

82 Liu, Alan, “Wordsworth and Subversion, 1793–1804: Trying Cultural Criticism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (1989): 68–69Google Scholar.

83 The Resolutions of the First Meeting of the Friends to the Liberty of the Press (London, 1793), p. 4.

84 Association Papers, pt. 1, no. 4, p. 2. Bowles had immediate reasons for aligning private initiative with government policy in this way, since like many association pamphleteers he held an official position in the government and was also secretly paid for his work. See Mitchell, , “The Association Movement,” p. 59Google Scholar.

85 Association Papers, pt. 1, no. 4, p. 4.

86 Ibid., pp. 4, 8.