REACTIOS TO RADICALISM I
ORWICH 1789 - 1801
Ian Smith
COTETS
INTRODUCTION ………………….…………………………..4
PART 1 – NORWICH AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Norwich on the Eve of the French Revolution ………………… 8
Early Reactions to the French Revolution ……………………... 9
The Ideological Context Established ………………………….. 13
PART 2 – THE LOYALIST RESPONSE
Early Loyalist Perception of the Threat ………………………. 20
Responses to the Jacobin Message …………………………… 24
Loyalist Platforms…………………………………………….. 27
Spreading the Word …………………………………………... 30
Patriotism and War……………………………………………. 34
Response to Distress ………………………………………….. 42
Direct Repression …………………………………………….. 49
The Loyal Volunteers ………………………………………… 56
The Churches …………………………………………………. 63
PART 3 – THE LOYALIST IMPACT IN CONTEXT
The Effectiveness of the Loyalist Appeal …………………….. 69
The Nature of the Radical Challenge………………………….. 72
Conclusion ……………………………………………............. 75
2
ILLUSTRATIOS
The Rt. Hon. William Windham MP by John Hoppner ……….
Decanter used by the Gregorians ………………………………
‘An Address from the Citizens of N----h to the National
Convention’ caricature by James Sayers …………….………..
Sword of Admiral Winthuysen taken by Nelson at the battle
of St Vincent …………………………………………………..
John Patteson by William Beechey ……………………………
Bishop George Horne by James Heath ………………………...
16
29
35
40
59
64
ABBREVIATIOS
ODNB – Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (electronic version)
TNA – The National Archives
NCNG - Norfolk Chronicle or Norwich Gazette
NHC – Norfolk Heritage Centre
NM - Norwich Mercury
NRO - Norfolk Record Office
ACKOWLEDGEMETS
Thanks to:
Clive Wilkins-Jones, Community Librarian, Norfolk Heritage Centre, for
suggesting the topic of this dissertation.
The Harry Watson Bursary for funding it.
Professor Anthony Howe, University of East Anglia, for supervising it.
Professor Mark Knights, Warwick University, for also commenting on the
draft.
The staff of the Norfolk Heritage Centre, the Norfolk Record Office and the
National Archives for help in researching it.
The Norfolk Museums Service for providing images.
3
ITRODUCTIO
‘Most of the social historians who have spanned the period between 1760 and 1820 have
concentrated on class tension, reform campaigns and radical or proto-revolutionary
protest; few have commented on, and scarcely any have explored, the concurrent trend
towards greater national self-consciousness or the public’s considerable acquiescence in
the existing order…What is needed is a more thorough examination of the impact of both
middle class patriotism and the flag-saluting, foreigner-hating, peer-respecting side of
the plebeian mind… For the content, operation and interaction of plebeian, bourgeois
and elite patriotism in Britain in this period to be established with any precision would
require local and grass roots studies willing to examine public loyalism as well as public
dissidence; at present such subjects are extremely rare.’ 1
Radicals and revolutionaries are naturally prone to catch the eye of historians,
particularly when their ideas triumph and become part of the universally accepted
assumptions of political culture in succeeding ages. Even when, in the short term, their
efforts are of no avail, it is tempting to imagine an unbroken chain of thought linking
them with more successful radicals of later generations. But over-concentration on
radicalism can sometimes militate against good history. However unappealing and
reactionary they may seem to contemporary eyes, those who in the past strove to preserve
the existing order are as much a part of the texture of an age as those who sought to bring
it down. It is necessary to pay heed to what they said and what they did.
Some professional historians of the eighteenth-century British world have attempted to
do this. They have, for example, belatedly given recognition to the one in three
Americans who, on the admission of John Adams, opposed the independence of the
Thirteen Colonies.2 But the historiographical situation is more complex over the other
1
Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III, Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation 1760 - 1820’ in
Past and Present no. 102, February 1984 p. 97.
2
R.C. Simmons, The American Colonies from Settlement to Independence (W.W.Norton, New York,
1981) p. 375.
4
revolution which threatened, but which was averted, a decade later, as British radicals
was stirred by the example of the French. Throughout the nineteenth and into the
twentieth centuries, Whig historians had started from the premise that the case for
moderate constitutional reform in the eighteenth century was unanswerable and those
who opposed it were misguided. Even for Tories, Burke’s attitude to reform in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France began to seem increasingly outmoded as Britain
moved towards democracy.3 But neither Whig nor Tory historians focussed on the fullblooded Paineite radicals of the 1790s as serious agents of change. The Whig historian
Macaulay dismissed them as a lunatic fringe ‘..even in number, not formidable… a
faction utterly contemptible, without arms, or funds, or plans, or organisation, or leader.’ 4
While the Tory biographer the Earl of Stanhope took their threat more seriously, he
denied them any serious political significance, belittling their writings that ‘appeared to
have no other view than the incitement to tumult and sedition.’ 5 For mid-Victorian
gentlemen, revolutions were how foreigners conducted themselves. There might indeed
have been economic unrest, but revolutionary protest in Britain was the occupation of a
troublesome minority.6
By the time late twentieth century historiography got to grips with the period, however,
the tables had been turned. In the era of the welfare state and universal suffrage, the
ideas of Paine can be said to have triumphed over those of Burke. The radicals were the
heroes even if their recognition had been delayed and posthumous. The tone was
3
4
5
6
Gregory Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) p. 34.
‘William Pitt’ in The Works of Lord Macaulay (Longmans, Green, 1907) vol. iv, p. 544.
Earl Stanhope, Life of the Right Honourable William Pitt (John Murray, 1861) vol ii, p. 155.
Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia (Manchester University Press, 2000) pp. 1-3.
5
established by E. P. Thompson who set out to rescue lower class radicals from the
‘enormous condescension of posterity’ and who hailed the Rights of Man as the
‘foundation text of the working class movement’.7 Many subsequent studies of the
period focussed on the growth of radical societies, seeking to establish their continuity
with Luddites, Chartists and other radicals of succeeding generations.8
But if studies of radicalism proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s, a good deal of scholarly
attention in the 1980s was focussed on the loyalist response.9 As with the American
Revolution, historians starting with H. T. Dickinson and continuing with Linda Colley
and Robert R. Dozier,10 demonstrated belatedly that loyalists who defended the existing
order had come to be treated with a fair degree of condescension themselves. The number
of loyalists, they contended, far exceeded the membership of radical societies. The
‘unreformed British state’, Colley maintained, ‘rested on the active consent of substantial
numbers of its inhabitants.’11
Even so, at a local level, the mandate spelt out by Colley over quarter of a century ago,
and quoted above, has still not been fully carried out. During this period Norwich is often
bracketed with Sheffield as the most radical city in England. Pitt dubbed it the ‘Jacobin
7
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Gollancz, 1963; Pelican 1968 – 1980) pp.
12, 99.
8
For example: Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of
the French Revolution (Hutchinson, 1979); Roger Wells, Insurrection. The British Experience 1795 – 1803
(Alan Sutton, Gloucester, 1983)
9
David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English State’ in Mark Philp (ed.) The French Revolution in British
Popular Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 146.
10
H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property. Political Ideology in Eighteenth Century Britain (Methuen,
1977); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707 - 1837 (Yale University Press, 1992 – 2005);
Robert R. Dozier. For King, Constitution and Country. The English Loyalists and the French Revolution
(University of Kentucky Press, 1983).
11
Colley, Britons.. p. 310.
6
City’. The objective of this paper is not to challenge this well-deserved reputation. Yet it
would be a mistake to assume that Norwich loyalists were absent or inactive. Among
nationwide surveys, Albert Goodwin’s The Friends of Liberty, which devotes some thirty
pages to Norwich, leaves the impression that the radicals there simply had it all their own
way. Local historian C. B. Jewson, on the other hand, while similarly focussing on the
radicals, does not ignore the local loyalists.12 Nevertheless a more systematic study of the
loyalist response to the radical tide is overdue as a contribution to creating a more
balanced picture of Norwich in the 1790s.
Thus, after setting out the background in Part 1, this dissertation focuses, in Part 2, on the
persistence, even in this unpropitious environment, of loyalist arguments and activities.
Part 3 aims to assess their impact. By drawing comparisons with other parts of the
country, it concludes that the nature of Norwich society and political culture, rather than
the loyalist reaction, explains why the contagion of the upheaval in France, boosted by
radical rhetoric and economic distress at home, failed to ignite a revolutionary
conflagration.
12
C. B. Jewson, Jacobin City: A Portrait of Norwich 1788 – 1802 (Blackie, 1975).
7
PART 1 – ORWICH AD THE FRECH REVOLUTIO
orwich on the Eve of the French Revolution
On 5 November 1788, Norwich woke up to the bells of St Peter Mancroft and to the
boom of guns. Later in the day, in the Market Place, bands played the national anthem
and ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ and at 7 pm a bonfire was lit. The mayor went to a
special service in the Cathedral. Toasts were drunk at the Maid’s Head Hotel to the
‘majesty of the people’, ‘perpetuity to the British constitution’, ‘equal liberty to all
mankind and virtue to defend it’. Everywhere windows were illuminated with
transparencies ‘allusive to the occasion’.13 Away from the city at Holkham Hall, seat of
the Coke family, 900 guests (representing a fifth of all Norfolk freeholders) were invited
to a party that went on till 4 am, with the last guests lingering until 6 am.14 Some four
and a half months later, in March 1789, toasts were again being drunk and windows lit
up. Sadly, however, on this occasion the weather intervened - notably in the case of a
display set up in the Market by a certain Miss Godfrey ‘which the wind greatly affected
the beauty of.’15
Both celebrations, marking respectively the centenary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and
the recovery from madness of George III, and repeated throughout the land, seemed to
epitomize the endurance and popularity of Britain’s political institutions, of an elected
parliament, of a constitutional monarchy and of a flowering of science, literature and the
13
NCNG and NM, 8 November 1788.
Susanna Wade-Martins, Coke of Norfolk 1754 – 1842 (Boydell Press, 2009) p. 78.
15
NCNG and NM, 21 March 1789.
14
8
arts which ‘cannot be equaled in any part of Universal History’.16 But the appearance of
strength and solidity, resting on the Whig settlement of a hundred years before, was
perhaps deceptive. The wind that spoilt Miss Godfrey’s display was already being
mirrored by another storm brewing on the other side of the Channel. Within another four
months the fall of the Bastille marked the onset of an infinitely more violent tempest that
raged over Europe for the next quarter century, shaking the foundations of every nation
whether or not it was eventually overrun by Napoleon’s armies. On the face of it Norwich
was more vulnerable than other English cities to the revolutionary upsurge. Its radical
political culture, honed in campaigns for parliamentary reform, against the war with
America, and latterly against the slave trade, was characterised by a strong dissenting
tradition, divisive electoral politics, an active press, a vibrant intellectual life and a nondeferential, open society based on a network of independently-minded textile workers. 17
Early Reactions to the French Revolution
Right across the intellectual spectrum the initial response in Britain to the news of
revolution in France was overwhelmingly favourable. In overthrowing tyranny and
reforming their constitution, the French appeared at last to be following the example set
by Englishmen in 1688. When the French Assembly, on 22 May 1790, made a solemn
renunciation of foreign conquests it seemed that this apparent convergence of political
systems might bring to an end the intermittent armed conflict that had characterised
16
NCNG, 1 November 1788.
Mark Knights, ‘Politics 1660 – 1835’ in Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (eds.), Norwich Since
1550 (Hambeldon and London, 2004) pp.181, 182; Penelope Corfield, Towns, Trade, Religion and
Radicalism. The Norwich Perspective on English History (Centre of East Anglian Studies, UEA, 1980) p.
27.
17
9
relations between the two countries for the past century. Prime Minister Pitt went so far
as to predict at least fifteen years of peace.18
The Norwich press and enlightened, especially dissenting, opinion fully shared these
sentiments. ‘If the French succeed at their approaching assembly [i.e. the Estates
General] in carrying many points which seem to be the general desire of the people’,
speculated the .orfolk Chronicle, ‘they bid fair to become a nation of freemen.’19 Any
doubts that the conservative propertied classes might have nurtured at this stage were
unceremoniously brushed aside. ‘The apprehensions, entertained by some, of certain bad
consequences to be feared if the French would become a free people, are too ridiculous to
be seriously answered, and as they are the last remains of the vulgar prejudices which
have too long subsisted, it may be supposed they cannot influence any liberal mind’, said
the .orwich Mercury.20
Several leading Norwich opinion-formers crossed the Channel to experience this modern
miracle at first hand. Dr Edward Rigby, a prominent physician and later mayor of the
city, had the good fortune to be in Paris when the Bastille fell. ‘I have been witness’, he
wrote, ‘to the most extraordinary revolution that perhaps ever took place in human
society. A great and wise people struggled for freedom and the rights of humanity; their
courage and perseverance have been rewarded by success and an event which will
contribute to the happiness and prosperity of millions of their posterity, has taken place
18
Michael Duffy, ‘British Diplomacy and the French Wars 1789 – 1815’ in H.T.Dickinson (ed.) Britain
and the French Revolution 1789-1815 (Macmillan, 1989) p. 127.
19
NCNG, 18 April 1789.
20
NM, 11 July 1789.
10
with very little loss of blood.’ ‘We were recognized as Englishmen, he added later, ‘we
were embraced as freemen, “for Frenchmen”, said they, “are now as free well as
yourselves; henceforward no longer enemies, we are brothers and war shall never more
divide us”.’21 Having ‘kissed the land of liberty’ on his disembarkation at Calais,
William Taylor junior, literary scholar and member of the Norwich Unitarian community,
attended some of the historic early sessions of the National Assembly in May and June
1790. While questioning whether the conduct of the delegates always measured up to
their lofty motives, he nonetheless came back an unqualified admirer of ‘the wisdom,
talent and taste’ displayed in every decree emanating from them.22 Near unanimity of
political opinion at this stage is illustrated by the early impressions recorded by William
Windham, one of the Norwich MPs who later became the leading anti-Jacobin in town.
Already in 1789 he had been willing to give the Revolution the benefit of the doubt by
voting in the House of Commons against the ministerial proposal to prohibit export of
grain to France.’23 Visiting the French Assembly in September 1791, he witnessed Louis
XVI’s acceptance of the new constitution. While he came away hoping that the English
would retain something of the good manners so noticeably absent in the Assembly’s
unnecessary humiliation of the King, he hoped, nevertheless, that ‘we lose nothing of the
solid advantages and privileges that the new system can promise.’24
But it was not long before a new divisive theme crept in. Could it be that revolutionary
France was not following the lead but showing the way? As, in late 1789 and 1790, the
21
Lady Eastlake (ed.), Dr Rigby’s Letters from France in 1789 (Longmans Green, 1880) pps 28, 62, 63.
J. W. Robberds, A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the late William Taylor of Norwich (London,
1843) p. 67.
23
NCNG, 8 August 1789.
24
J. M. Thompson (ed.), English Eyewitnesses of the French Revolution (Blackwell, Oxford, 1938) p.143.
22
11
French Assembly got to work dismantling the ancien regime, Norwich citizens could
read about its reforms in the press and later buy in the Market Place for 6d a weekly
account of its proceedings.25 It could hardly have gone unnoticed that the Assembly was
rectifying abuses similar to those that still disfigured British political culture. The
Chronicle reported that ‘they [the Assembly] have abolished the game laws that still
disgrace England. They have abolished tythes that grind the industrious yeomanry and
oppress agriculture.’ Unmerited pensions and placemen in the legislature and ‘other
rights of superiority which are still in this kingdom the subject of incessant hardship and
litigation….’ had likewise been swept away. No doubt with an eye to the current
campaign for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the Chronicle noted that the
Assembly had declared every citizen ‘whatever may be his persuasion [to be] eligible to
every office of state and to every honour in the gift of the crown.’26 Reflecting on their
first hand experience, the early Norwich visitors to France reached similar conclusions.
Referring to a visit to the Assembly ‘a well-known literary figure late of this city,’ wrote
to his uncle, the leading radical Dr Price: ‘Our House of Commons dwindled into nothing
by the comparison which now forced itself upon my mind. I saw nothing of the filth of
the Treasury – of the servile minions of beggardly and corrupt nobles…all seemed to
unite in disclaiming every authority but that of reason.’27 The double-edged impact of
events in France was illustrated by a toast proposed at the Maid’s Head at a meeting held
to celebrate the second anniversary of the Bastille: ‘May every nation be as free as
England and England as free as any other nation.’28
25
NCNG, 23 July 1791.
NCNG, 5 September 1789.
27
NCNG, 12 September 1789.
28
NCNG, 16 July, 1791.
26
12
But while the measures promulgated by the French Assembly provided ammunition for
those who wished to pursue reform at home, the anarchy let loose by the revolutionaries,
and their apparent tendency to replace an old tyranny with a new one, simultaneously
gave growing cause for concern. Even as the Bastille fell, the francophile Edward Rigby,
had been ‘shocked and disgusted’ at the sight of two bloody heads raised on pikes and
decided to ‘retire immediately from the streets’.29 Of the same event the Chronicle
reported: ‘No personal safety – no protection of property – and the lives of the first men
of state in such momentary danger, so as to oblige them to flee their country and seek
asylum in this Land of Liberty.’30 Its forebodings were reinforced by subsequent events:
‘The French, having in part obtained their liberty, know not what use to make of it’;
‘…national troops more despotic than the king’s used to be…’; ‘..oppression .. similar to
what the English felt under the usurping tyranny of Oliver Cromwell..’ 31 As the
Jacobins in France gained the upper hand with the declaration of war on Austria, the
September massacres and the overthrow of the monarchy, erstwhile admirers of the
revolution were faced with a difficult choice.
The Ideological Context Established
Even before these bloody events, Burke in his Reflections had set the parameters for the
ideological fracture that followed and provided the source book for anti-Jacobins.
Furiously attacking both the theory and practice of the ‘despotic democracy’ across the
Channel, he argued that the best societies were matured over time, based on a partnership
29
30
31
Eastlake, Dr. Rigby’s Letters, pp. 63, 64.
NCNG, 25 July 1789.
NCNG, 3 October and 21 November 1789; 16 January 1790.
13
between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born; equality and abstract rights were
chimeras. On its publication in November 1790 Reflections quickly entered the Norwich
public sphere. It was soon being quoted in newspaper correspondence columns, its
notoriety even serving as a basis for advertising copy - ‘Except Mr Burke’s celebrated
work, no publication has ever had such an astonishing sale as .ature’s Assistant to the
Restoration of Health...’32 So outlandish did its strictures seem at this stage that admirers
of the French Revolution claimed to welcome them. At the Maid’s Head dinner
mentioned above the guests sarcastically raised their glasses to a toast of ‘Thanks to Mr
Burke for calling forth the abilities of the advocates of the French Revolution..’33
But just as events in France began to bear out Burke’s worst predictions, his Norwich
supporters found their most prominent spokesman in William Windham. An MP for the
city since 1784 with strong reformist credentials on issues such as the American colonies
and the slave trade, he had ‘on the first publication of Mr Burke’s pamphlet .. condemned
the principles and ridiculed the performance with as much freedom as the laws of long
friendship could admit’34 and had supported Charles James Fox in his split with Burke in
May 1791. Against the background of the events of 1792, however, he began to talk in
Burkean terms against ‘speculative and experimental systems of government’ and
reluctantly turned against Fox over the Militia Act ‘to vote with those whose measures he
reprobated and against many whose political sentiments were in unison with his own’.35
The following year he led twenty-five Whigs into a third party in support of the
32
NCNG, 13 August 1791.
NCNG, 16 July 1791.
34
Lord Holland, ‘Memorials of the Whig Party’ vol i, p 16, quoted in R.G. Thorne, History of Parliament.
The Commons 1790 – 1820 (Secker and Warburg, 1986) vol v, p. 609.
35
NCNG, 7 July and 22 December 1792.
33
14
government over the war, eventually becoming Secretary at War in Pitt’s coalition in July
1794. Within the government he emerged as the most uncompromising advocate of
repression of Jacobins at home, support for French émigrés overseas and the pursuit of
regime change in their homeland.
At the level of city politics the Burkean opposition to French ideas was spearheaded by
the conservative, exclusively Anglican, section of the merchant/manufacturing elite. As
the ‘Orange and Purple’ party it enjoyed a majority in Court of Mayoralty throughout the
period,36 and derived some intellectual substance from figures such as John Brunton,
manager of Theatre Royal from 1788, who produced vehemently anti-revolutionary
material.37 In Marquis Townshend, Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk, it had an important
patron at county level.
Ranged against those like Windham who was by now unconditionally ‘loyal’ to the
existing order and willing to contemplate only Burkean organic development, were those
‘radicals’ or ‘reformers’ who for most of the preceding century had supported varying
degrees of more artificial constitutional reform, ranging from redistribution of seats from
‘rotten boroughs’ to household suffrage. Although they lacked a Norwich personality
with a national profile to match that of Windham, they derived ample inspiration from
Fox who emerged as the national leader of the opposition Whigs
36
B. D. Hayes, Politics in Norfolk 1750 – 1832 (unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1957)
pp. 68-69.
37
C. R. Sexton, Norwich Gentlemen and the French Revolution: the Cabinet and the Enfield Circle 1794 1795 (Unpublished MA Dissertation, University of Reading, 2008) p. 24.
15
William Windham M.P. by John Hoppner. .orfolk Museums Service.
16
following the realignment of the Whig Party. Thanks to extensive press reporting of
parliamentary debates, Fox’s campaigns for reform were fully aired within the Norwich
public sphere. Norwich reformers reciprocated by transmitting congratulatory addresses
to him and celebrating his birthday.38 Like the conservatives, their most prominent
members belonged to the merchant/manufacturing class although, unlike the
conservatives, they were, with one or two exceptions, predominantly dissenters. Their
stronghold was in Norwich’s influential intellectual elite centred on the Unitarian chapel
and the Quaker meeting house. They were bankrolled by the Gurneys, one of the
wealthiest dissenting families in England, who had made their fortunes in wool but who
were by now investing increasingly in banking. Standing in the colours of the ‘Blue and
White’ party, reformers controlled the Norwich Common Council elected annually by the
resident freemen. At county level T. W. Coke, one of the two Norfolk MPs, was a close
associate of Fox who continued to visit him at Holkham Hall after his withdrawal from
political life.39
In the response to Burke’s Reflections, however, the more moderate Foxite Whigs were
clearly outflanked at the extreme end of the political spectrum. In Paine’s Rights of Man
the talk was less of securing the rights of Englishmen through a return to the principles of
the 1688 constitution, and more of the unrestricted, universal rights of the sort currently
being proclaimed in Paris. Part One, with its uncompromising rejection of monarchy and
the hereditary principle, was published in March 1791 and went on sale in Norwich
almost immediately. In the same month, Paine, already being described in the Norwich
38
39
NCNG, 8 June 1793 and 26 January 1799.
NCNG, 21 January 1797.
17
press as the author ‘whose works have so much engaged the attention of the world’ was
reported to be visiting nearby Thetford, his native town. Panegyrical tributes (‘Odes to
Mr Paine’), reproductions of his portrait and complete editions of his collected works
advertised in the press further boosted his fame in Norwich in subsequent months.40
Fame, or rather notoriety, was redoubled when Part Two advocating revolutionary
economic and social reform, was declared a seditious libel in December 1792. A proposal
was made to have it removed from the public subscription library, but a correspondent
wrote to the Chronicle threatening that, if removal were agreed, ‘a prosecution will be
immediately commenced against the Society, by a large body of subscribers, for illegally
voting away their property’.41 Thanks partly to Paine’s accessible style, the Rights of
Man was found to have a potential reach far beyond and below the literate, intellectual
public sphere.
In the meantime the term ‘Jacobin’ had entered the public sphere. But who exactly were
the Norwich Jacobins? The label was indiscriminately attached to many, some strongly
influenced by Paine, some whose agenda was centred on Fox and the Friends of the
People. But few of those held up as examples of Norwich Jacobinism were willing to go
all the way with Paine or Robespierre. Mark Wilks, the Baptist preacher who hailed
Christ as a revolutionist and collected funds for the defendants in the 1794 state treason
trials, professed an ‘..indissoluble attachment to the NATION, LAW and the KING’42;
and Richard Dinmore who set out to clarify the principles of the English Jacobins ‘with
40
NCNG, 10 March, 23 July and 24 September 1791.
NCNG, 19 January 1793.
42
Mark Wilks, ‘Two Sermons on the Origin and Stability of the French Revolution’, delivered on July 14,
1791 and ‘Two Collection Sermons’ on 19 April, 1795, both at St Paul’s Chapel, Norwich, in Sarah Wilks,
Memoirs of Reverend Mark Wilks (London 1821) pp. vii, lxiii.
41
18
strictures on the political conduct of Charles James Fox..’ denounced that ‘..fell monster
Robespierre..’43 Even Paine himself sat with the Girondins in the French Assembly, voted
against the execution of the king, was denounced in the Convention as a traitor to the
republic and paid for his excessive moderation with a year in the Luxembourg prison.
Perhaps the best way to understand Jacobinism is not as a precise ideological label but as
a political smear, deployed, in the same way as ‘red’ or ‘fascist’ in twentieth century
political discourse, to highlight (or misrepresent) the extremism of one’s opponents.
Some, like Dinmore, or the previously unknown speaker at a Foxite meeting in May 1797
who ‘gloried in the celebrity which Norwich had obtained and was proud of being the
citizen of the Jacobin City…’44 accepted Jacobinism perversely as a badge of honour
bestowed on them by their opponents.
43
Richard Dinmore, An Exposition of the Principles of the English Jacobins (Norwich Patriotic Society, 3rd
edition 1797)
44
NCNG, 20 May 1797.
19
PART 2 – THE LOYALIST RESPOSE
Early Loyalist Perception of the Threat
The first public note of alarm at the Jacobin threat in Norwich was sounded by the newly
elected mayor John Harvey in his Guild Day speech on 19 June 1792: ‘As Chief
Magistrate I think it behoves me to guard my friends and fellow citizens against the
villanous insinuations of wicked and designing men who are industriously employed to
sow sedition, and disseminate discontent, and who are endeavouring by every means in
their power to degrade the laws and weaken the government of this kingdom…’ The
distribution of seditious handbills and meetings held to issue subversive resolutions, he
continued, had ‘..made it doubtful if the civil power alone were sufficient for the
protection of the peaceful citizen…’ ‘For my part’, the mayor concluded, ‘I shall deem it
indispensable to my duty to be ever watchful to defeat and prevent those measures which
serve to taint the public mind with ill-informed prejudices and to lessen that attachment
every honest man feels for his country and his King.’45
The mayor’s speech did not come out of the blue. It was, in part, undoubtedly prompted
by a Royal Proclamation issued less than a month earlier, which, in similar language, had
also drawn attention to the nationwide circulation of ‘divers wicked and seditious
Writings … tending to excite Tumult and Disorder …’, and which had then gone on to
command magistrates to enquire about those responsible, suppress any riots and transmit
information to the central government.46 As was no doubt intended, the Proclamation
prompted loyal addresses from cities, towns and counties. 386 of them had responded by
45
46
NCNG, 23 June 1792.
TNA, PRO 61/20.
20
September.47 Norwich and Norfolk, among the first wave, were not alone in
encountering internal opposition. While the city’s Court of Mayoralty readily approved
an address, opposition in the Common Council prevented it being submitted in the name
of the Corporation as a whole. At the equivalent Norfolk county meeting a supporter of
the newly formed Whig Friends of the People opposed it ‘in no very orderly manner’ and
county MP Coke deemed it unnecessary.48 Later in the year the anniversary of the
Glorious Revolution and the proclamations of 1 December calling out the militia and
convening an emergency session of parliament provided a cue for further, more specific,
identification of the subversive threat. At the King’s Head on 6 December a ‘very
numerous’ meeting chaired by the mayor toasted the proposition ‘May Pain be expelled
from every British bosom,’ while, at a general city meeting at the Maid’s Head a week
later, the mayor referred specifically to ‘efforts to delude and ensnare the lower class of
people’ and to the perils of a ‘levelling system where every ruffian’s hand may be put
into his neighbour’s purse.’49
Despite the clear government prompting, the alarm expressed by the mayor and his
fellow Norwich loyalists at this time was also clearly based on specific local
developments. The Norwich Revolution Society, founded by wealthy manufacturers such
as William Barnard and the Taylors, ostensibly looked back to 1688 but on Bastille Day
in 1791 it had turned its attention to the French Revolution as well. Although it firmly
eschewed riot and disorder, its self-imposed mission to educate the masses by reading the
Rights of Man aloud to ‘very attentive’ audiences of the lowest description’ quickly gave
47
48
49
Dozier, For King.. p 1.
NM, 23 June 1792; NCNG, 30 June and 7 July 1792.
NCNG, 8 and 15 December 1792.
21
Norwich radicalism a more plebian and threatening aspect with important national and
international ramifications. Norwich radicals established contact with the newly-founded
London Corresponding Society and joined them in an address to the French National
Convention on 27 September 1792 declaring an ‘inviolable Friendship’ with ‘our Fellow
Citizens of the World.’50 In the following year loyalists could hear the authentically
Jacobin voices of Paineite radicalism loud and clear in a number of handbills posted up in
St Peter Mancroft parish: ‘…Let us all join and rebel .. down with the Present
Government! Off with King George’s head. REPUBLIC in Great Britain.’ ‘..overthrow
the Damn’d infernal Constitution… Be sure not to let the Corruptible House of Commons
ever meet again to vote away the Liberties of the People..’ ‘..Lord Buckingham who died
the other day had Thirty Thousand Pounds yearly for setting his arse in the House of
Lords and doing nothing. Think of this ye who work hard, and have hardly a crust to put
in your mouths…’51
Not only were meetings, handbills and resolutions at stake. Thanks partly to news of
events such as the storming of the Tuileries by the sans culottes, the September
massacres and the slaughter of the Swiss Guard, supplemented by the first-hand accounts
of French refugees,52 a clear link was being forged, in the loyalist mindset, between
Jacobinism and bloody, unrestrained mob violence. The diarist, Parson Woodforde,
picked up the sense of alarm at the King’s Head, the Tory meeting place: ‘..Revolution
Clubs in Town and Country much talked of, and riots daily expected to take place on that
50
TNA, HO 42/22 folio 413; Mary Thales (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding
Society 1792 – 1799 (Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 21; for a general account of the activities of the
Revolution Society at this time see Hayes pp. 236 – 241.
51
TNA, HO 42/27 folios 182 and 187; NCNG, 2 November 1793.
52
NCNG, 15 September 1792.
22
account..’ ‘..Much talking about Mobs rising in many parts of the Kingdom, especially in
Norfolk and Norwich…’53 His concern may have been deepened by riots in late October
and early November among seamen in four East coast ports, including nearby Great
Yarmouth and King’s Lynn. Even though Fox later claimed in the House of Commons
that the disturbances ‘had no relation whatever to any political question either in France
or England’, loyalists in Great Yarmouth, the worst affected port, had noted, before the
disturbances, that clubs and associations there, as in Norwich, had been circulating
‘libelous Publications’ and had held ‘seditious Discources…tending to disturb the Public
Peace’. An informant had passed on similar reports to the Pitt government, which
subsequently recommended the mayor for a knighthood for his suppression of a
‘formidable riot’ without military intervention.54
Even though, in the event, no serious disorder was reported at this time in Norwich itself,
a further cause of concern for loyalists was that the elite to which they belonged was
clearly not united in the face of the Jacobin challenge. Not only did many, like Coke,
play down the threat; others, thanks to their role in the inception of the Revolution
Society, could even be construed as being part of it. Not surprisingly the political
temperature rose, the split in Norwich politics widened and, for many loyalists, hatred of
Jacobinism later hardened into an obsession. In October 1793 Windham wrote to his
confidante Mrs Crewe: ‘My hostility to Jacobinism and all its works and all its
supporters, weak or wicked, is more steady and strong than ever….my determination is
open steady war against the whole Jacobin faction and junction for that purpose with
53
54
Peter Jameson (ed.), The Diary of James Woodforde (Parson Woodforde Society, 2003) vol. 13 p. 195.
Dozier, For King.. pp. 44,47; NCNG, 3 November, 15 and 22 December 1792.
23
whomsoever it may be necessary to join..’ ; and in July 1794 Roger Kerrison, a
prominent local loyalist, wrote to his patron Lord Townshend: ‘The Jacobins of this City
were very violent indeed, a disappointed savage people…’ 55
Responses to the Jacobin Message
In response to what they perceived as a new and unprecedented threat, Norwich loyalists,
in common with their counterparts throughout the country, rallied round well-worn
themes. The monarchy itself, whose popularity had recently revived,56 was the ultimate
symbol of loyalty and a potent weapon against radicals, not many of whom dared
publicly to align themselves with Paine’s republicanism however much they supported
other aspects of his message. Events such as the King’s birthdays, his recovery from
illness (see above), his survival of attacks against his person in October 1795 and
February 1796, provided convenient occasions for addresses and celebrations that
uniquely among loyalist manifestations were immune from radical disruption or direct
counterattack.57 Royal visitors were fully exploited. When the Prince of Wales came in
April 1797 his programme was clearly designed to appeal to all classes of citizens and
thereby possibly to take the wind out of the sails of the radicals who were simultaneously
gathering support for a petition calling for the dismissal of the King’s ministers. As well
as ‘polite’ venues like the theatre, the library and the Chapelfield Assemby Rooms, he
called at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital and the county gaol, where he unsuccessfully
55
Mrs Henry Baring (ed.), The Diary of the Right Hon. William Windham 1784 to 1810 (Longmans
Green, 1886) pp. 291, 299; NRO, BL/T/8/ 5/1, letter from Kerrison to Townshend, 13 July 1794.
56
See Colley, ‘The Apotheosis…’.
57
The loyal address following the attack on the King in October 1795 was, however, sent from the Court
of Mayoralty, not the Assembly, as not enough Common Council members attended to form a quorum
(NM, 14 November 1795).
24
made a plea for a convict awaiting the gallows. He also visited Patteson’s Brewery and
Knights’ Shawl Warehouse where he placed an order. The Chronicle may not have been
entirely exaggerating when it commented that ‘the partiality and the attention which his
Royal Highness has shown to the manufactory of this City, must endear him to every
rank of its inhabitants.’58
Along with the monarchy itself, the excellence of the British constitution, inherited from
the Revolution of 1688, with its unique balance between monarch, Lords and Commons,
was a cornerstone of the loyalist message, hammered home in numerous declarations,
publications and addresses. In a pamphlet, published in the city in early 1794, to celebrate
its ‘ peculiar excellencies’ it was likened to a ship ‘..torn by the fury of the winds, often
assailed by tumultuous waves, often in the very vortex of destruction; but [which] now,
with timbers refitted and sails full flowing, rides triumphant over the billows of the
ocean.’59 Yet, unlike the monarchy, the constitution did not provide such an uncontested
loyalist theme. At the same time as they lauded the constitution’s virtues, loyalists had to
find some way to answer radical attacks on corruption, excessive crown influence,
restricted franchise, unequal constituencies, infrequent elections and other deformities.
To counter these arguments some loyalists conceded that there was scope for flexibility
and moderate reform. In the aftermath of the defeat of Grey’s motion for parliamentary
reform in December 1792 and of a successful reform petition signed by 3,731 Norwich
citizens in May 1793, a correspondent of the Mercury, for example, counterattacked by
claiming that ‘These men loudly clamour for a reform in the representation. A temperate
58
59
Jewson, Jacobin City.. p 78; NCNG 8 and 22 April 1797
NM, 18 January 1794.
25
and moderate reform, few would object to; but they demand a universal right of suffrage,
or, in other words, the establishment of Mob-Government and Club-Law.’60 Many
loyalists, however, ruled out even moderate reform in current conditions. As early as
March 1790 Windham had observed that no one would begin repairing a house in the
hurricane season.61 Later, as the threat of domestic unrest increased, loyalists had also to
muster arguments to counter radical clamour against the government’s temporary
derogation from the constitutional rights of trial by jury and freedom of speech.
Emergency measures, they asserted, were designed to defend the constitution, not to
overturn it. Robert Harvey junior, a lone loyalist voice at a meeting denouncing the
Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings Acts in November 1795, stoutly blamed
‘factious men and seditious resolutions’ for rendering coercion indispensable for the
preservation of internal tranquility and constitutional government.’ A loyalist counteraddress confided in the wisdom of parliament to adopt ‘wise and temperate restraints’
while loyalist-inspired letters to the Chronicle insisted that the object of the measures was
to preserve, not to destroy the constitution.62
For loyalists, mayhem in France was predictably the opposite side of the coin from
constitutionally secured rights in Britain. Press reports from Paris needed little further
elaboration to make the point. ‘The complete Guillotine with “French Liberty” inscribed
thereon’, set up in the Market Place during the by-election of July 1794 just as the Terror
in Paris was at its height, was evidently intended by Windham’s supporters to remind
60
61
62
NCNG, 11 May 1793; NM, 25 May 1793.
ODNB, entry for William Windham.
NCNG, 21 and 28 November and 5 December 1795.
26
electors of the dire consequences of Jacobin rule.63 What did need to be driven home,
however, was the identification of British radicals with French revolutionaries. Hence the
widespread attribution of the term ‘Jacobin’, already noted, even to those who claimed to
abominate Robespierre and all his works. The theme played so well that it was being
deployed long after the tyrant himself had fallen to the guillotine. Predictably Tom Paine
was equally demonized as his British counterpart and guilt by association was used to tar
all English ‘Jacobins’ with the same Paineite brush. A loyalist transparency displayed on
the National Thanksgiving Day in November 1798 had an effigy of Paine and over him a
window ‘with the Westminster Orator peeping in [and saying] “May I come in, ‘tis old
friend Charley [i.e.Charles James Fox]”.’64
Loyalist Platforms
To get their message across and to rally support across the country loyalists clearly
needed suitable platforms. At national level such a platform was provided by the
Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and
Levellers, launched by John Reeves in November 1792. For a time the APLPRL became
the biggest political organization in the country with up to 2,000 branches including one
in Great Yarmouth, founded, albeit with some dissension, on 10 December.65 The
absence of a specific APLPRL body in Norwich has led some historians to conclude that
the city was uniquely resistant to the Reeveites.66 But unlike in other Whig-inclined
cities like Nottingham where the mayor refused to convene a meeting to endorse a loyal
63
NCNG, 19 July 1794.
NCNG, 1 December 1798.
65
H. T. Dickinson, ‘Popular Conservatism and Militant Loyalism 1789 – 1815’ in H. T. Dickinson (ed.)
Britain and the French Revolution pp. 114, 115; NCNG, 15 December 1792.
66
Clive Emsley, Britain and the French Revolution (Longmans, 2000) p. 42.
64
27
address,67 Norwich loyalists at least had a secure municipal base from which to proclaim
their anti-Jacobin message. Although they lacked a majority in the Common Council, the
Court of Mayoralty and the office of Mayor itself, provided them with a suitable platform
from which to launch subscriptions and loyal addresses and to undertake other activities,
such as warnings to licence holders not to host Jacobin meetings, which, elsewhere in the
country, were typical of those being organized by Reeveite organizations.
The lack of a formal APLPRL branch was also compensated by the existence of several
unofficial loyalist associations in the city. The Gregorians, a Tory club founded in 1734,
contributed to the first wave of anti-Jacobin reaction in December 1792 by distributing
1,000 copies of a declaration, pledging to unite ‘..with Heart and Hand .. to support to
the utmost of our Power, the Legislature of this realm …and .. collectively and
individually assist the Magistrates in preserving Peace and good Order, by which means
only, true Liberty and Security of Property can be insured..’ In May 1797 it initiated
Prince William as a member. 68 Other loyalist clubs emerged when existing political
clubs split in response to the impact of the French Revolution. The Corporation Club
divided in 1792. A radical group that appears to have merged with the Revolution
Society, continued to meet at the Bell Hotel, while members supporting the government
crossed the road to meet at the Castle Inn. According to its minute book the Castle Club
67
Dozier, For King.. p. 21.
Rex Stedman, Vox Populi. The Norfolk Newspaper Press 1760 – 1900 (Unpublished thesis submitted
for Fellowship of the Library Association, 1971) p. 36; NCNG, 15 December 1792 and 6 May 1797.
68
28
height, was evidently set up by Windham’s supporters in the Market Place for the
Decanter used by the Gregorians c.1750 - 1800. .orwich Castle Museum and Art
Gallery.
29
became a rallying point for ‘the good and loyal citizens who had occasion to make a
stand against .. the dupes of chimerical and delusive doctrines of liberty, equality and
reform.’ It also made it its duty to assist in promoting to high office in the city
corporation men of good sense, education, public and private virtues and loyalty to their
king.69 The Friendly Corporation also split but only the Tory group survived and it
appears to have acted in close association with the Castle Corporation Club. At its
anniversary dinner on 10 January 1793, members drank to the punning toast: ‘May the
Castle Corporation ever be on the watch to silence the alarm Bell of Sedition.’70 When
war broke out both the Castle Corporation and Friendly Clubs were active alongside the
Gregorians in collecting for comforts for the army in Flanders.71
Spreading the Word
But ringing declarations on the glories of the English constitution issued by gatherings of
like-minded elite citizens in the Court of Mayoralty or the loyalist clubs were unlikely by
themselves to do much to confront the perceived Jacobin threat. Unlike the Gregorians
and members of the Castle and Friendly Clubs, who focussed on dining together in
private, others, under the label of constitutional associations, went out onto the streets to
proclaim their loyalty. The ceremonial street theatre, which they laid on in celebration of
civic events, royal anniversaries and, above all, military victories, was one of the most
effective loyalist weapons. Thus in Assize Week in 1794 ‘near 2,000 persons’ attended a
procession of ‘Constitutional Societies .. with drums, fifes, colours and a variety of
emblematic banners’ to attend a ‘ Military Divertisement interspersed with Recitative,
69
70
71
Jewson, Jacobin City.. pp. 38, 49.
Hayes, Politics in Norwich.. f/n p 78; NM, 12 January 1793.
NM and NCNG, 16 and 23 November 1793.
30
Song and Pantomime.. called BRITISH LOYALTY OR THE LAND WE LIVE IN’ at
Keymer’s Pavilion.72 On 19 May 1795, 3,000 turned out for a procession organized by
the United Constitutional Associations to mark the King’s birthday. The Chronicle noted
a very great number of flags and devices ‘expressive of liberty and loyalty’ and, in
particular, at the head of the procession, ‘a beautiful boy….standing on horseback,
representing the genius of Britain, supported by a soldier and a sailor.’73 Two months
later the associations turned out again ‘with music playing and colours flying’ for a
scheduled visit by the Duke of York. But the spectators who lined the Newmarket Road
for several miles were disappointed when it emerged that the Duke had been detained in
London by ‘state affairs of the utmost importance.’74 Later the Loyal Volunteers largely
took over the ceremonial role performed by the constitutional associations, but with even
greater élan and visibility.
But when it came to the task of engaging with specific issues, the tables were turned and
the loyalists faced a far greater challenge. ‘Common Hall’ public meetings, convened at
the request of prominent citizens to draw up an address or petition, were exploited by
radicals to great effect. As a mere declaration by the Court of Mayoralty represented a
much narrower political base, the loyalists were often forced onto the back foot. On one
occasion the case put by the radicals to a Common Hall was so popular that loyalists had
no option but to go along with it. A petition for peace, moved at a meeting of 1,000
people in St Andrew’s Hall on 27 January 1795 was signed by the loyalist mayor and
almost all the other magistrates, even though, unlike an earlier petition from a special
72
73
74
NM, 19 July 1794.
NCNG 23 May 1795.
NCNG, 25 July 1795.
31
assembly of the corporation, it failed to accompany its plea with an expression of
veneration for ‘our excellent constitution’.75 On other occasions loyalists called meetings
to oppose radical initiatives and to put forward counter-addresses of their own. But
significantly the press was generally silent on the numbers who attended and the numbers
of signatures collected.76 In response radicals would object that any address or petition in
response to theirs was ‘contrary to [the] accustomed manner of ascertaining the opinion
of the people.’77
Loyalists had more success with subscriptions that gave people the opportunity to
demonstrate their commitment by donating money rather than simply signing a
document. Some subscriptions, such as those for the relief of distress caused by food
shortages and for the establishment of the Loyal Volunteers, were clearly aimed at the
rich and powerful. But in other cases contributions claimed to have made by lower social
groups gave an added boost to the loyalist message. Even ‘the poor, distressed as they are
for want of work’ were said to have ‘contributed their mite’ to a subscription for the relief
of French clergy fleeing Jacobin persecution in 1792 and 1793.78 In early 1798 the
government-sponsored nationwide appeal for voluntary subscriptions to government
funds at a time of threatened French invasion was similarly a propaganda, as much as a
fiscal exercise, but on a larger scale. The Norwich loyalists launched their response by
calling a Common Hall, thus for once preempting the radicals who had so successfully
exploited this procedure on previous occasions. Mayor Crowe stood down as chairman of
75
76
77
78
NCNG, 31 January 1795; NM, 7 February 1795.
For example NCNG, 21 and 28 November 1795.
NCNG, 29 April and 20 May 1797.
NCNG, 27 April 1793.
32
the meeting when it was obvious that ‘his sentiments did not coincide with those of the
present assembly’ and the subscription was unanimously approved.79 The Norwich
contributions, which included many from groups such as domestic servants as well as the
rich, eventually totaled over £8,000. But radicals later had their revenge by voting down
in the Common Council a proposal to contribute from municipal funds.80
Loyalists also attempted to make their point with the distribution of printed material. By
1793 advertisements for the True Briton and the Constitutional Magazine and other
works containing ‘Honest Advice to the Working People’, were appearing in the local
press and a loyalist reader of the Chronicle was moved to express his satisfaction at being
able to read ‘so many counter-revolutionary works replete with good sense and just
remarks.’81 Most of this material was produced centrally in London and sold at local
booksellers, although individual loyalists also took a direct hand in its distribution.
Windham, for example, arranged for a complete set of the Anti-Jacobin to be dispatched
to the mayor asking him for ‘hints as to the best mode of circulating them in your
Clubs.’82 It is of course difficult to assess the impact of such material on any but the
converted. And as with all loyalist activities, the radicals were ready to retaliate. Peter
Pindar, a local pamphleteer who supported the Rights of Man, also hit back at Paine’s
detractors with a lampoon on Hannah More, the celebrated loyalist writer.83 Norwich
loyalists were also hampered by the lack of a mouthpiece on the lines of the London Sun
79
Crowe was the only Whig mayor elected in this period. See Jewson, Jacobin City.. pp. 82, 83 – ‘For
reasons of their own’ neither of the two senior aldermen in 1797 wished for the mayoralty and in the end
Crowe, although a Whig, was elected by a solid Tory vote.’
80
NCNG, 24 February and 3 and 10 March 1798.
81
NCNG, 23 November 1793.
82
NRO, COL/2/111, folio 11.
83
NHC, L821 PIN Peter Pindar, ‘Odes to Mr Paine’; NCNG, 30 November 1799.
33
and other similar newspapers in provincial cities. The Mercury, despite its Whiggish
origins, did take a perceptibly more loyalist line in the course of the period under
consideration, but perhaps with an eye to retaining a wide readership in politically
divisive times, the Chronicle made a virtue of abjuring party allegiance. In its report on
the election of May 1796 it even went to the lengths of printing two versions of the event
– from a loyalist and radical perspective.84
Apart from this more serious printed material, cartoons, caricatures, lampoons and
doggerel verses provided a more direct and immediate channel for the loyalist appeal to
public opinion. The local loyalists could count on the support of James Sayers, the
Yarmouth-born caricaturist, who took up residence in Norwich in the 1790s.85 In 1795
he published a print lampooning the support given by the Norwich Revolution Society to
the joint address of English Jacobins to the French National Convention.86 Fox
commented that his caricatures ‘had done him more mischief than all the debates in
Parliament or the works of the press.’87
Patriotism and War
But by far the most potent weapon in the loyalist armoury was patriotism, especially after
Britain became involved in the war against revolutionary France. Norwich, despite its
Jacobin complexion, was still susceptible to the appeal of king and country and loyalists
were able to tap into a rich seam of anti-Galicanism. ‘The trait which formerly marked
84
85
86
87
NCNG, 28 May 1796.
ODNB, entry for James Sayers.
NHC, Colman Collection L320.0207.
Quoted in Tamara L. Hunt, Defining John Bull (Ashgate, 2003) p.19.
34
‘An Address from the Citizens of N-----h to the National Convention. Caricature by
James Sayers. .orfolk Heritage Centre.
35
the French character under a Monarchy’, commented the Mercury, ‘is still strongly
visible in a Republic; for notwithstanding their repeated defeats they still preserve their
former propensity to bombast.’ 88 J. E. Cookson has gone so far as to argue that at this
stage, or certainly later when French invasion seemed imminent, loyalism was
superseded by ‘national defence patriotism’.89 But for Norwich loyalists, at least,
defence of the realm and loyalty to king and constitution were two aspects of a common
response to a common enemy. When war broke out, the military threat simply
compounded the existing ideological one. As Windham declared later in a speech
opposing the Peace of Amiens, ‘the authors of the French Revolution…wished for a
double empire; an empire of opinion and an empire of political power; and they used the
one of these as a means of effecting the other.’90
Early victories, turning back the French incursions into the Low Countries, were
jubilantly proclaimed. ‘The Jacobins cannot conceal their chagrin at the success of the
Allied armies..’, proclaimed the Mercury.91 When news of the French surrender to the
Duke of York at Valenciennes reached the city on 1 August 1793, bells were rung and
guns discharged almost incessantly for nearly two days with ‘all ranks of people’ joining
in the celebrations. Several ‘principal gentlemen’ purchased a bullock weighing nearly 60
tons, which was roasted on Ber Street and distributed among the populace with penny
loaves and beer. The local Jacobins were said to be ‘excessively crestfallen’.92 Similar
celebrations greeted news of victory at Cateau the following April and Lord Howe’s
88
89
90
91
92
NM, 7 September 1793.
J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation 1793 – 1815 (Clarendon Press, 1997) p. 214.
Thomas Amyot (ed.), William Windham. Speeches in Parliament (Longman, Hurst, 1812) vol.1, p. 21.
NM, 29 June 1793.
NCNG and NM, 3 and 10 August 1793.
36
naval victory at Ushant in June. A person at the Cateau celebration who had, in the
market place, ‘made use of ‘several illiberal expressions particularly against the Duke of
York and his army’, was forced to run the gauntlet and was ducked in St Stephen’s
pond.93 No doubt hoping to convert short term jubilation into longer term commitment
Norwich loyalists launched subscriptions to provide flannel waistcoats for soldiers in
Flanders, support for their dependants, bounties for the recruitment of seamen and a
welcome home banquet for returning soldiers, some of whom were treated at Coe’s
Garden to 570 dishes of roasted, boiled and baked meats, 600 3d loaves and 14 barrels of
porter.94
The problem for the loyalists, however, was that while they could make the most of
triumphant victories, they also had to cope with discouraging defeats, the desertion of
allies and the crushing financial and economic consequences of a prolonged military
struggle. Despite isolated successes the 1794 campaign in Flanders went badly thanks to
the disarray of the Austrian and Prussian allies. The elevation of Windham to the cabinet
as Secretary at War in July 1794 and his subsequent re-election as Norwich MP on a
platform pledging his efforts, in Burkean terms, to serve in his new office ‘not only the
cause of this country, but of all the civilized world’95 rubbed salt into the wounds of the
radicals. In a violent counterblast they attacked the ‘the partizans of Mr Windham [who]
have contributed to the continuance of an absurd and fruitless war.’96 By the beginning
of 1795 the Duke of York was in full retreat, the allies in disarray and the French
93
NCNG, 3 May and 14 June 1794.
NCNG, 16 November 1793, 19 July 1794 and 30 May and 6 June 1795.
95
NCNG, 12 July 1794.
96
NHC, Norwich Election Pamphlets 1781-1838, ‘An Address to the Electors of Norwich being a
Vindication of the Principles and Conduct of Mr Windham’s Opponents at the late Election 12th July 1794.’
94
37
marching on Holland. With peace rivalling political reform as their principal slogan, the
profile of the radicals began to rise again after an earlier lull. The only argument that the
loyalists could muster at this stage was that ‘disunion and disaffection’ would give
encouragement ‘to our enemies to prescribe harsh terms of negociation, and desperately
to persevere in the contest.’97 But perseverance in the contest was the last thing on the
minds of ‘a few ill-informed and misguided persons’ who a year later forced the
postponement of a meeting called to implement the Supplementary Militia Act in
Norfolk.98
Paradoxically it was not until the years after 1797 when anti-French coalitions were
falling apart on the continent and invasion seemed imminent that Norwich loyalists found
their patriotic voice again. Just as Norwich citizens learnt of Bonaparte inspecting
invasion preparations, the Supplementary Militia being called out and mustered in the
city, and read in the Chronicle that ‘to defend our country against the common enemy is
now the only measure left to us …’, the news came of Jervis’ naval victory at Cape St
Vincent.99 The resonance in Norwich was made all the greater by the leading role played
by Nelson, as one of Jervis’ captains, whose status as the local war hero in his capacity as
‘the son of the Rev. Mr Nelson, of Burnham in this county’ dated back to his gallantry as
captain of the Agamemnon in the Mediterranean in 1795.100 Now, at St Vincent, his
bravery ‘beyond all praise’ gave a welcome boost to local loyalists at a time of ‘general
gloom’. Following the usual victory celebrations, Nelson was made in absentia an
97
98
99
100
NCNG, 21 November 1795.
NM, 19 November 1796.
NCNG, 3 and 25 February and 11 March 1797.
NCNG, NM, 10 October 1795.
38
honorary freeman of the city and he presented to the Corporation the sword of RearAdmiral Winthuysen, which he had taken at the battle.101 Duncan’s victory over the
Dutch fleet just across the North Sea at Camperdown in October gave loyalists another
trophy to display in the shape of the defeated Dutch admiral’s bowsprit. On this occasion,
the proximity of the battle brought home to many the full horror of war. But although a
‘spectacle more shocking to humanity was never exhibited than the landing of the
wounded..’ the loyalist associations were not discouraged. They laid on a feast for the
‘brave tars’ at Keymer’s Pavilion, charged Norwich citizens 6d a head to witness it and
launched a subscription for the wounded.102 It was not, however, until 1 October in the
following year, when news reached Norwich of Nelson’s historic victory at the Nile that
loyalists were able to reap the full benefit of patriotic fervour. For two days bell-ringing
and gunfire was heard throughout the city in celebration of what the mayor claimed to be
‘a Victory perhaps unparalleled in the history of the world’. At a ball at the Assembly
House arranged by the brother of one of Nelson’s captains the ladies decorated their
dresses with ribbons inscribed ‘Nelson, Berry, Victory’. Norwich’s participation in the
subsequent national day of thanksgiving brought the loyal constitutional societies out in
force and, according to the Chronicle, was attended ‘with more festivity, harmony, and
heartfelt glee than we can remember to have seen on any occasion whatever.’103
Although their opposition to Pitt’s government and its war policy remained as firm as
ever, there is some evidence that the Foxites found it difficult to stand out against the
101
102
103
NCNG, 11 March, 1 April and 18 November 1798.
NCNG, 21 October and 4 and 11 November 1798.
NCNG, 6 and 13 October, 17 November and 1 December 1798.
39
Sword of Admiral Winthuysen taken by Nelson at the battle of St Vincent. .orwich
Castle Museum and Art Gallery.
40
patriotic loyalist tide. Mayor Crowe, despite his Whiggish politics, helped to celebrate the
Camperdown victory by financing a feu de joie and a distribution of beer out of his own
pocket, while in January 1799, still in the afterglow of the Nile, a gathering at the Angel
Inn to celebrate Fox’s birthday toasted ‘The Tars of Old England’ as well as the more
controversial ‘Sovereignty of the People.’104 No opposition was recorded from radicals
in the Common Council later in the same year to the proposals for a subscription to erect
an obelisk to commemorate the naval victories and to grant the honorary freedom to
naval hero Sir Edward Berry (despite rejection at the same session of freedom for the
recently-elected city Tory MP Sir John Frere).105 Perhaps sensing a weak spot in the
radical defences, loyalists did what they could to perpetuate a link in the public mind
between the external military threat and Jacobin-inspired subversion. Thus Sheriff
Tawell’s illuminations at the Nile celebrations depicted, alongside a Nelson theme,
images of Robespierre (long since guillotined) and Paine (imprisoned in 1793/94 on
Robespierre’s orders).106 The by-election defeat of a Foxite, standing on anti-war
platform, in May 1799 showed that the patriotic message still had potency.107 Later in the
year no anti-war feeling surfaced when 3,700 troops were temporarily billeted in
Norwich on their return from Holland. Thanks to the local innkeepers they received
‘every attention and accommodation which their situation demanded – It would be
impossible to enumerate the many acts of hospitality and kindness troops experienced
from individuals on their arrival..’.108
104
NCNG, 4 November, 1797 and 26 November 1799.
Commemoration of Nelson did however become a subject of controversy later on during the mayoralty
of Edward Rigby.
106
NCNG, 1 December 1798.
107
NCNG, 1 June 1799.
108
NCNG, 2 November 1799.
105
41
Response to Distress
Loyalists and radicals alike were aware that the appeal of revolutionary ideas was
sharpened by economic distress. Despite early attempts to diversify into leather and
brewing, Norwich was still uniquely dependant on the textile industry, which for
centuries had ‘shaped its social structure and dominated its entire life.’ From the mideighteenth century the industry had in turn become uniquely dependant on export markets
and thus particularly vulnerable to disruption caused by war.109 Even in the early stages
of the wars with revolutionary France, while the national economy was relatively
buoyant, Norwich merchants anxiously scanned the horizon for threats to their important
Spanish and Russian markets. But from February 1793, when Britain became involved in
the war and further markets closed, unemployment and economic distress quickly came
to the forefront of civic politics.
Loyalists were faced with an impossible dilemma, supporting the war on ideological
grounds, yet casting round desperately for some way of ameliorating its economic
impact. Already on 12 March 1793 Robert Harvey junior, a leading textile manufacturer
and former mayor, was writing to the Home Office to say that ‘the consequences of this
just and inevitable war visit this poor city severely, and suspend the operations of the
Dutch, German and Italian trade and the only lingering employment in the manufactory is
the completion of a few Russian orders and the last China cambletts which I hope will
find encouragement in the East India Charter.’110 A year later the East India trade also
109
110
Hayes, Politics in Norwich… pp. 55, 58.
TNA, HO 42/25, folio 107.
42
came under threat, a development that prompted Harvey to take a deputation of Norwich
manufacturers to Downing Street.111
In their public pronouncements loyalists could hardly deny the crisis in the textile trade,
but they attempted to argue that factors other than the current war with France came into
play. Even before he joined Pitt’s ministry as Secretary for War, Windham was claiming
in Parliament on 17 June 1793 that ‘with respect to Norwich, the temporary distress there
occurred before its commencement, from the market for her manufactures being shut on
the banks of the Rhine.’ Nevertheless, as both he and Pitt argued in the same debate, the
war ‘ought to be prosecuted to guard against other dangers.’112 In the following year a
decree by the Empress of Russia prohibiting the import of striped woollens and worsteds
again brought Norwich manufacturers together to make representations to the
government and enabled Henry Hobart, Windham’s fellow Norwich MP, to claim that it
was the ‘arbitrary edict’ of the Empress, rather than the war itself, which had disrupted
trade and thrown over 10,000 out of work.113
But, in the end, the attempt to shift responsibility for the distress in Norwich away from
the war with France was doomed to fail. Radicals such as Bartlett Gurney enthusiastically
associated themselves with Fox’s national campaign against the war emphasizing in
particular their ‘local situation as inhabitants of a commercial place in ourselves and our
neighbours, and more especially in those amongst us of the lower orders of society’ and
deploring, ‘the most serious consequences already produced by it, in the obstruction of
111
NCNG, 30 March 1794.
NCNG, 22 June 1793.
113
NCNG, 15 February and 12 April 1794.
112
43
trade and the suppression of labour…’114 The link between war and the crisis in the
woollen industry was further driven home in the by-election of July 1794 when
Windham’s opponents set up in the Market Place a loom hung with black cloth and
empty shuttles and drew attention to the unrelievedly bleak picture of ‘numberless objects
of distress, with which our streets are crowded, .. those creatures of silent and quiet
sufferance, concerning whom our war-minister is so little disturbed..’115 They also
continued to exploit his alleged remark ‘Perish Commerce if it be obtained at the expense
of our Constitution’, said to have been posted up in the workroom of every weaver in
Norwich. 116 Although the remark was denied it was still accepted, in loyalist circles, that
what the loyalist Corporation of Yarmouth called ‘a cause where the honour of the crown
and the safety of the people’117 was at stake, and that it justified all the unemployment
and distress which the war was causing.
As the conflict dragged on, there was little loyalists could do to convince people that
anything but peace could relieve the crisis. Opposition to the war brought together not
only all shades of radical and reformist opinion, but also those with no ideological agenda
– in the words of a speaker at a Common Hall in May 1797 ‘those who wished merely for
peace and those who thought that the prosperity of the country could be restored by no
other means than a radical reform.’118. Attempts to boost the home market by campaigns
to persuade ‘the ladies of this city to wear nothing but Norwich manufactures …as an
114
NCNG, 8 June 1793.
NHC, ‘An Address to the Electors of Norwich …’
116
NCNG and NM, 19 July 1794; NCNG, 10 January 1795.
117
NCNG, 2 March 1793.
118
NCNG, 20 May 1797.
115
44
effectual method of relieving the present distress of the poor’119 seem to have had some
success. They may even have had a minor impact on public opinion. But they can hardly
have contributed much to the replacement of lost foreign markets. The naval victories of
1797 and 1798 may have provided a massive but temporary boost to loyalist feeling, but
distress was clearly outweighing triumphalism. When, on 3 October 1801, the news
reached Norwich that peace preliminaries had been signed, the overwhelming and
spontaneous relief clearly outdid the celebrations of earlier military victories. ‘The news
spread like wildfire throughout the city.. greatest exhultation in every description of
people…large bonfires in the Market Place..ringing of bells, [and] firing of guns..
continued for three successive days..’ In the general illumination which followed on 21
October transparencies concentrated on the theme of peace and returning prosperity with
Nelson and the glory of war all but forgotten.120 Only Windham stood out against the
peace terms and the associated jollity, and was rewarded for his pains by defeat in the
ensuing election.
If war-related unemployment was not enough, distress was compounded by the poor
harvests and consequent food shortages which punctuated the decade both nationally and
locally. As pressure on the Poor Rate became barely tolerable, the Norwich elite looked
to traditional charitable activities to provide relief for poor families suffering from the
high price of corn and the impact of freezing temperatures in a series of exceptionally
cold winters. Special subscriptions for the poor were launched in the winters of 1792/93
and 1794/95 and cash distributions were supplemented by both collective and individual
119
120
NCNG, 2 November 1793.
NCNG, 10 and 24 October 1801.
45
assistance in kind through the distribution of soup, food, coal and cast-off clothing. The
first subscription of the period – to supply the ‘industrious poor of this city and its
hamlets with provisions and coals at a reduced price during the winter in consideration of
their distress’ - was launched, significantly, at the same meeting called by the mayor to
‘consider some proper mode of publicity testifying their attachment to the constitution’ in
December 1792. Underlining the link between philanthropy and loyalty the mayor’s
chaplain, Rev Gee Smyth, ‘trusted that Benevolence would always be the handmaid of
British loyalty.’121 But if loyalists hoped that charity would eliminate distress and
remove the sting of radicalism they were doomed to disappointment. The subscription of
December 1792 was eventually wound up in April of the following year by when £2,594
11s 9d had been raised122 – a respectable sum, but a mere quarter of the sum raised by
loyalists for the Loyal Volunteers in 1794/95. A further subscription launched in
December 1794 for the relief of those afflicted by ‘the general want of employment and
the high price of the necessities’ ran into difficulties. Although £1,691 10s. was
eventually collected, suggestions of charity fatigue and political controversy on
loyalist/radical lines surfaced at meetings of the organising committee in January. One
participant objected that, since distress was caused by the war, ‘subscriptions for
temporary relief would in the end be more prejudicial than useful to the objects of them.’
Another, while denying that the war was the cause of the distress, deplored the fact that
‘so many respectable inhabitants of this city have withdrawn their assistance in a time
when every individual must surely be struck with the uncommon number of most piteous
121
122
NCNG, 15 December 1792.
NCNG, 27 April 1793.
46
objects with which our streets are filled.’123 In the severe winter of 1798/99 when snow
drifts of up to 20 feet deep disrupted transport, the emphasis seems to have shifted from
general subscriptions to street by street distribution of soup, bread and coal organized at
parish level and by the non-political Society of United Friars. Soup kitchens continued to
be the main focus of relief during continued food crises in 1800 and 1801 giving one
correspondent of the Chronicle occasion to remark patronizingly on ‘the joyful
countenances of the poor, as they return home with their jugs plentifully laden’ and to
congratulate subscribers ‘on the agreeable sensations they must individually feel at being
the happy means of continuing to afford sustenance at this time of pressure…’124
But loyalists did not always have reason to experience ‘agreeable sensations’ over the
reaction of the poor and needy to their plight. Following the harsh winter of 1794/95,
high grain prices persisted into the spring and led to food riots. The Norwich food riots in
spring 1795 and again in spring 1796 were part of a nationwide phenomenon which
generally conformed to the character of food rioting earlier in the century, and most
notably, as far as Norwich was concerned, in 1766. Although one Paineite tract
emerged,125 there is little direct evidence in Norwich that the riots themselves had a
Jacobin edge. The rioting in April 1796 was directed in the first instance against a Mr
Bloom, a miller, who was chased from Trowse to the Sword Room of the Guildhall,
rescued by a detachment of the Inniskillings and who subsequently rode off in a shower
of stones, sticks and potatoes. A few days later bakeries in various parts of the city were
123
NCNG, 27 December 1794, 10 January and 23 February 1795; NM, 17 January 1795.
NCNG, 25 April 1801.
125
TNA, TS 25/3/81; Jewson, Jacobin City.. p. 65.
124
47
being surrounded by mutinous young men, women and boys.126 As food prices again
rose alarmingly in 1800, bread riots were reported from London, Cambridge, Ipswich and
nearby Dereham. On this occasion the Norwich poor were praised for their forbearance
by a judge at the City Assizes, but only days after he spoke the magistrates were called on
to disperse a great concourse of discontented people at the New Mills, and the Court of
Mayoralty issued a proclamation lamenting the ruinous consequences of riotous
proceedings and expressing its determination to suppress ‘every attempt to impede the
regular Business of the Markets.’127
Although bakers and millers were convenient targets for riots, the needy also looked to
the municipal authorities to relieve scarcity and bring prices down if necessary by
regulation of the market. Part of the early response was little more than cosmetic. The
city magistrates naturally followed the lead of the Privy Council in undertaking to
consume only wholewheat bread and the Court of Mayoralty urgently petitioned the city
MPs on 21 October 1795 to address the problems caused by ‘dearness and scarcity of all
kinds of Provisions.. [which]..cannot but excite alarming apprehensions for.. the
labouring poor of every description..’128 For a long time loyalists held out against
measures which might have tended to interfere with the free market. A correspondent of
the Chronicle in May 1793 was defending the mayor’s reluctance to insist that the price
of flour should necessarily be reduced in accordance with the price of corn. 129 More
positively, however, the city authorities finally promoted the establishment of a Flour
126
NCNG, 23 and 30 April 1796.
NCNG, 9 August, and 6, 20 and 27 September 1800.
128
NCNG, 1 August and 24 October 1795.
129
NCNG, 4 May 1793.
127
48
Company in early 1801 with the objective of alleviating scarcity through ‘works within
our walls which should at all times be able to supply Flour of genuine Quality, at a fair
price’. The project was reckoned to need capital of £12,500 and to involve the
employment of the latest technology in the form of a steam engine to ‘secure the plan
from customary dependence upon wind and water.’ Although independent traders
opposed the plan as ‘unjust interference in commerce’, it was accepted to be of public
benefit even though its impact was not evident in the period under consideration.130
Ultimately, however, loyalists were forced to admit that they were helpless in the face of
scarcity and high prices in as far as they were caused by harvest failures and unusually
bad weather. In the last instance, they contended, the needy had to look to God alone to
relieve their suffering. But in the meantime William Windham was resigned to accept, in
his election address of May 1796, that, as a member of the Government, his popularity
was affected by the high price of corn because it was assumed that he held ‘the Keys of
Plenty and Scarcity’ in his hands, which all too evidently he did not.131
Direct repression
From patriotic parades to famine relief, in declarations and in ballads, loyalists thus
deployed a wide range of measures in their efforts to turn the hearts and minds of the
people away from seditious doctrines. But direct physical force could never be ruled out
in case things got out of hand. The central government was certainly taking no chances in
the Jacobin City. Early in 1792 plans were being drawn up for the construction of new
130
131
NM, 7 March 1801.
NCNG, 28 May 1796.
49
barracks in the city and Nepean, under-secretary of the Home Office, ordered four troops
of dragoons to be stationed at Norwich (together with three at Sheffield, Nottingham,
Birmingham and Coventry and a whole regiment at Manchester).132 Later in the same
year Norfolk was one of eleven counties where two-thirds of the militia were called
out.133
Throughout the period the military presence in Norwich was highly visible and
particularly so in years such as 1800 when a French invasion seemed imminent. Although
they were never called upon to fire a shot in anger in Norwich, some soldiers attempted
to contribute to the loyalist cause in their off-duty moments and some of them may
conceivably have had a deterrent effect on local radicals. In May 1797, at a time of naval
mutinies and of radical attempts to undermine the loyalty of the armed forces generally,
non-commissioned officers and privates of the Inniskillings, indignant that a ‘handbill of
most pernicious tendency’ had been thrown into the horse-barracks yard, ‘entered into a
subscription for the detection of the publisher’ which raised £100. A few days later the
Oxford Militia, congratulated by the mayor on their attachment to King and Country,
voluntarily declared that they would give up three days’ pay as a reward for anyone
apprehending those responsible for distributing similar handbills found in their barracks
in the city.134 But on other occasions the soldiers, apparently enraged by the activities of
Norwich radicals, took anti-Jacobin measures into their own hands in ways less
acceptable to the city magistrates. Also in May 1797 soldiers passing the Shakespeare Inn
where the radical John Thelwall was about to give a lecture were offered handbills and
132
Dozier, For King..p 23.
Jennifer Mori, ‘Responses to Revolution: The November Crisis of 1792’ in Historical Research 69
(1996) p. 298.
134
NCNG, 27 May and 3 June 1797.
133
50
abused by some local people. They proceeded to ransack the inn and damage a
neighbouring house apparently in an unsuccessful attempt to find Thelwall, who escaped
to London. With even less provocation, officers of the 85th Foot, newly posted from
Ireland, started a riot in the Theatre Royal in March 1800 when the management failed to
play the National Anthem after the first play of a double bill. They were subsequently
fined at the Quarter Sessions.135 Other violent incidents involving soldiers had no
apparent political motive and can only have served to alienate Norwich citizens. When a
colonel from the 9th Foot was committed to the city gaol in January 1800 for assault, 400
soldiers followed in an abortive attempt to rescue him.136 Later in the same year the
Common Council congratulated the outgoing mayor for bringing to justice ‘violent
spirits, who instead of being the preservers, had proved to be the violators of public
peace.’137
Despite promptings from London, local magistrates appear to have taken remarkably
little direct legal action against seditious activities in Norwich. Cases coming before the
courts remained overwhelmingly the familiar, run-of-the-mill crimes against property and
people without apparent political motives. Following a government directive to local
magistrates in November 1792 ordering them to investigate the distribution of radical
publications with a view registering presentments at the approaching quarter sessions,
Charles Harvey, steward of Norwich, delivered a charge to the grand jury drawing
attention to the offences of publishing and circulating seditious and inflammatory libels
with a view to overturning the constitution. Every freeman had a right to free speech, he
135
Michael and Carole Blackwell, Norwich Theatre Royal. The First 250 Years (Connaught Books, 2007)
p. 49.
136
NCNG, 18 January 1800.
137
NCNG, 21 June 1800.
51
conceded, ‘but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the
consequences of his own temerity.’ At the Quarter Sessions of 18 January, 1793 it was
resolved to have the charge printed and distributed to the inhabitants of the city, but,
judging from the cases recorded in the Minute Books, no one at this time was actually
summoned for seditious behaviour.138 A similar lack of response greeted Home
Secretary Lord Portland’s circular of 21 July 1797, reminding magistrates of the
requirement under the Seditious Meetings Act to disperse meetings if no notice was
given. Apparently overlooking Thelwall’s attempted lecture the previous May, John
Crowe, the Whig mayor, tersely replied: ‘We know of no such meetings.’139
Drunkenness was, in accordance common eighteenth-century practice, seen as a
mitigating factor for the few who were brought to trial for sedition. In an isolated instance
in the wider county of Norfolk a master butcher from Happisburg was acquitted in
October 1797 on a charge, brought by three soldiers, of uttering seditious expressions
against his most gracious Majesty. Several neighbours had confirmed his loyalty to the
king and constitution and the words, the jury concluded, ‘were, if spoken, the effects of
intoxication.’140
Lack of local action cannot necessarily be put down to the negligence or unwillingness of
local magistrates, who, in cases deemed to be more serious, looked to the Home Office
for guidance and help. But, in the days before a professional police force or anything
more than a rudimentary intelligence organisation,141 success was elusive. The response
138
Jewson, Jacobin City..p. 32; NRO, NCR case 20a MF 617/3 - Quarter Sessions Minute Books.1786 –
1794. However a Henry Wade is listed among those in the Castle in August 1794, having been fined five
pounds for traitorous and seditious behaviour (NM, 16 August 1794).
139
NRO, NCR case 16a/37 - Mayor’s Court Books 1796 – 1802,
140
NCNG, 11 October 1794.
141
See Clive Emsley, ‘The Home Office and its Sources of Information and Investigation 1791 – 1801’ in
The English Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 372 (July 1979) pp. 532 – 561.
52
to the spate of seditious and treasonable bill posting in St Peter Mancroft parish in
September 1793 is a case in point. Thomas Shelton, an agent dispatched to Norwich on
the orders of Pitt and Dundas, the Home Secretary, reported back that he was astonished
to find that the overnight watch in the parish was mounted only by two men between the
hours of twelve and four and that the town was badly lit. He examined the dispositions
taken by Alderman Robert Harvey and Mayor John Buckle from those who had found the
offending material, showed the handbills to the local Post Master who had no recollection
of the handwriting and concluded that no suspicion could be fixed on any particular
person. He reported back inconclusively to his superiors that there were ‘a few violent
people in the Town some of whom it is probable are the authors of these seditious and
treasonable papers, but this is only conjecture and arises from their Character and the
Principles they are said to hold.’142 Neither the additional private watch of six men from
dusk to dawn, which he then instituted, nor an advertisement published in the Norwich
papers reproducing (and thus giving gratuitous publicity to) one of the posters in question
and offering a £200 reward for information,143 produced any recorded result.
Mayor Buckle had a little more success the following year in a case where the culprits
seem to have made little attempt to cover their tracks. At issue was a meeting of 200 men
at a public house, announced three days in advance by a handbill (and well before the
Treasonable and Seditious Meetings Act), and the posting of another handbill containing
the substance of a speech in the House of Lords on the Suspension of Habeas Corpus.
Isaac Saint, the publican, whose name had appeared in November 1792 as secretary of a
142
143
TNA, HO 42/27 folio 191.
NCNG, 2 November 1793.
53
hitherto unreported Society for Political Information,144 was sent to London for further
questioning, but returned to Norwich unscathed after seven months, to a welcome from
‘the huzzas of several of his friends and acquaintances.’145 The bill-posters were detained
in Norwich for two weeks until guidance was received from London and then, ‘after
expressing their contrition in proper language’, set at liberty – finding sureties for their
good behaviour for twelve months.’146
To supplement these efforts by the city magistrates William Windham also tried to help
the Home Office to bring the law to bear against seditious activities. Following the Isaac
Saint affair he passed the name of a possible informer to the Home Office which invited
him to provide information on the ‘political society in Norwich’ and in particular to
transmit papers and pamphlets issued since Saint’s arrest.147 But another attempt by
Windham to collect information came seriously to grief when he wrote to a friend in
Norwich ‘desiring him to be most vigilant in watching the movements and expressions of
Mr Wilks [Rev Mark Wilks, the radical Baptist preacher], and if, at any time, he uttered
anything which might be made to appear in the least degree treasonable, to make him
acquainted with it.’ Somehow the letter fell into the hands of Wilks who had it printed
and distributed so that ‘in a few hours the perfidy of Mr Wyndham was publicly known
in every part of the city.’148
144
TNA, TS 11 3510(2) – letter to the London Corresponding Society of 11 November 1792.
NCNG, 27 December 1794.
146
NCNG, 14 June 1794.
147
TNA, HO 42/34/1 folio 1.
148
Sarah Wilks, Memoirs.. p. 79.
145
54
It seems highly unlikely that these ineffectual legal measures were enough to restrain
Norwich radicals from expressing opinions or undertaking activities which might
contravene the law. But developments on a national level such as the arrests of radicals
and subsequent state trials in 1794 and the introduction in late 1795 of the ‘Two Acts’
against treasonable and seditious practices and against seditious meetings and assemblies
may have deterred some. The expected impact of the ‘Two Acts’ was certainly played up
at the Common Hall called by radicals on 17 November when the chairman of the
meeting, Sigismund Trafford, forecast that they would open up ‘a wide field to
ministerial vengeance’ and confer ‘upon every village magistrate a privilege of summary
arrest.’149 Such hyperbole may well have been in the mind of the Rev. Enfield, the
radical Unitarian preacher, when he wrote to his daughter in January 1796 declining ‘..to
say anything just now on the subject of politics.. ‘tis at present very well to have an
excuse for saying nothing on a subject on which one knows not whether it be safe to open
one’s lips or to take up one’s pen..’150 But in the event, even on a national level, only the
Seditious Meetings Act was ever used, and that rarely.151 Although the ‘Two Acts’,
according to some accounts, had left the London leadership of the LCS cowed and
incapable of rallying the provincial societies, 152 Norwich radicals still showed signs of
life. It was in 1797 that the Norwich Patriotic Society, under whose banner the radicals
had regrouped in April 1795,153 published Dinmore’s Exposition of the Principles of the
English Jacobins and issued its address to the people of Norwich without any recorded
149
NCNG, 21 November 1795.
NRO, ACC 2000/73 quoted in C. R. Sexton, Norwich Gentlemen.. pps. 28/9.
151
Clive Emsley, ‘Repression, ‘Terror’ and the Rule of Law during the Decade of the French Revolution’
in The English Historical Review, vol. 100, no 397 (October 1985) p 813.
152
Wells, Insurrection.. p. 46.
153
Hayes, Politics in Norwich..p. 244 - 246.
150
55
interference from the law. Historians who have attributed the decline and disappearance
of the Society between 1797 and 1799 to ‘Pitt’s policy of repression’ have not been able
to point to any specific instances of arrests or legal prosecution at this time.154 Other
political and social factors examined in part 3 of this dissertation may have played a
greater role.
The Loyal Volunteers
A further repressive weapon in the armoury of the government was the loyal volunteer
movement. Designed to counter the double threat of domestic sedition and French
invasion, it also provided the best opportunity for loyalists in Norwich, as elsewhere in
England, to back up their words with deeds. The movement started in 1794, at a time of
military setbacks and fears of invasion, with a series of meetings to inaugurate
subscriptions to meet the expenses of the volunteers units not covered by the government.
Most were held at county level, called by the Lord Lieutenant and attended by leading
landowners, but others were convened at city level either by the mayor or by groups of
individuals, either independently or based on an existing loyalist organisation.155
Norfolk’s first meeting, chaired by its Lord Lieutenant, Lord Townshend, was held in
London on 31 March, 1794, well away from the Jacobin City. Coke and other Foxites
argued that no subscription should be launched before a meeting had been held in the
county itself, but the respectable sum of £1,700 was nonetheless pledged there and
then.156 In spite of a letter from Roger Kerrison, treasurer of the subscription fund,
warning Townshend that ‘it is probable that those who are hostile to this business will be
154
For example, Hayes, Politics in Norwich.. p. 248.
Dozier, For King.. p. 148.
156
NCNG, 5 April 1794.
155
56
very active’,157 the High Sherriff decided to press ahead with a meeting shortly after at
the Shire Hall in Norwich. A crowd greater ‘than we ever remember to have seen on such
an occasion’ turned up at the meeting including ‘a few ignorant people’ who interrupted
Windham’s speech, while from a more genteel perspective Coke followed the Foxite lead
by questioning the legality of the subscription.158 But such opposition was not unusual in
county meetings held up and down the country at about this time;159 and it did not
prevent a successful resolution to form cavalry units ready to be called out of the county
in case of imminent invasion or in adjacent counties ‘for the suppression of riots and
tumults,’ and volunteer companies in particular towns near the coast for local defence.
The proposal quickly received the approval of the Home Office.160
The first quantifiable measurement of the reception of the initiative was the subscription
for ‘Internal Defence and Security’ which lasted until February 1795 and collected nearly
£12,000. But no conclusions can be drawn from it about the popularity of the loyalist
cause in Norwich, still less among a representative section of the population. The
subscription was a Norfolk, not only a Norwich, initiative. Over 15% of the contributors
listed in the press were clergy and many of the larger contributions came from the
nobility. As the subscription passed £10,000 it was decided to extend its remit to cover
the expenses of the use of horses by serjeants, corporals and privates and for clothing if
required.161 But at this stage not all was going well. Despite fears of invasion following
the success of French arms in the Low Countries, Norfolk volunteers were expressing a
157
NRO, BL/T/8/5/1 - letter of 3 April 1794.
NM, 19 April 1794.
159
Dozier, For King.. p 150/151.
160
NM, 19 April 1794; NRO, BL/T/8/5/1 – letter to Townshend from Dundas, 24 April 1794.
161
NCNG, 25 September 1794.
158
57
reluctance to go far beyond their homes, a reluctance which Townshend compared
unfavourably with the willingness of neighbouring inland counties to come to the defence
of the Norfolk and Suffolk coast. Returning to the charge again in August when ‘a
descent on our coasts’ seemed imminent, a committee meeting which he chaired deplored
the fact that, although several units had been formed, there were some parts of the county
in which no steps had been taken.162
As the prospect of an immediate invasion receded the loyal volunteer movement faded
into the background. But from 1797 it entered a new and more vigorous phase across the
nation when Britain was left fighting alone without allies, Napoleon’s army was
encamped along the French coastline and the threat of home grown subversion had also
been enhanced by the naval mutinies and further reported subversion in the armed forces.
At this stage also the movement impinged for the first time on the life of Norwich with
the formation of the Norwich Light Horse Volunteers, commanded by Robert Harvey, the
Norwich Loyal Military Association, commanded by John Patteson, followed by separate
volunteer units at parish level. In the case of a French invasion, the NLHV expressed a
willingness to serve wherever they may be required, the NLMA confined their offer to
the Eastern Military Region while the parish units limited their offer of service to the city
itself seeing their task primarily as the suppression of domestic tumults in case regular
military units had to be withdrawn to fight the French invader.163 For some,
162
163
NM, 31 May and 27 September 1794.
NRO, B/L/T/8/5/2/13 - responses to Dundas’ circular of 23 November 1797.
58
John Patteson in the uniform of the Norwich Loyal Military Association by William
Beechey. .orfolk Museums Service.
59
advancing age and ‘the necessary Superintendance of our respective Avocations’
provided a convenient excuse for not agreeing to go beyond the city boundaries.164 As it
turned out, however, the contribution of the Norwich volunteers to the loyalist cause was
more psychological than military. Although, on one occasion, in September 1800, the
NLHV assembled out of uniform and offered their services in tackling a threatened food
riot,165 neither they nor their fellow Norwich volunteers were ever called upon to fire a
shot in anger either as a military or as a counter-insurgency force. Exploiting a growing
nationwide taste for military pomp as a manifestation of patriotism,166 they developed,
nevertheless, into a highly visible and audible manifestation of Norwich loyalism. From
their first public appearance – at a function on 8 April 1797 to greet HRH Prince William
at the Theatre Royal – no royal event, no national commemoration and no civic ceremony
in the city, up to and including the peace celebrations in 1801 and 1802, was complete
without the NLHV and the LMA, sometimes supplemented by the parish units, lining up
on parade, clattering through the narrow streets with drums beating and fifes playing,
and, where appropriate, firing a feu de joie. Colourful uniforms were regarded as an
indispensible element in the overall effect.167 Thus, not long after its establishment in
1794, the Committee for Internal Defence got into the discussion of uniforms for the
original Yeomanry Cavalry.168 The Norfolk Rangers, parading in Fakenham in August,
still won ‘high recommendations from the ladies’ even though not all their becoming
green and buff uniforms were ready in time.169 Putting show before practicality the
164
NRO, B/L/T/3/8/5/31 - King Street Volunteers’ letter of 8 May 1798.
NCNG, 6 September 1800.
166
Clive Emsley, ‘The Social Impact of the French Wars’ in Dickinson (ed.) Britain and the French
Revolution p. 219.
167
Colley, Britons.. pps. 288, 289.
168
NCNG, 5 July 1794.
169
NM, 23 August 1794.
165
60
NLHV paraded from 1797 in white breeches together with helmets and military boots, a
black stock and a rosette. Their undress uniform of dark blue coat with black velvet cuffs
and collar was proudly worn by their colonel Robert Harvey when he went to London in
June to present a loyal address to the King.170 Anthems and doggerel verse with a
loyalist message of unity in the face of the common foe, contributed to the impact of their
activities. ‘Verses to the People of England’, composed in celebration of the founding of
the NLHV and the NLMA, began:
‘Britons, rouse to deeds of death!
Waste not zeal in idle breath,
Nor lose the harvest of your swords
In a civil-war of words…’171
But despite the rousing songs and colourful uniforms, not everything went well with the
Norwich volunteers as recruitment got under way from 1797 onwards. In response to
Dundas’ decree of April 1798 ordering Lord Lieutenants to vet recruits with a view to
keeping unsuitable elements out of the volunteer units and preventing arms from falling
into the wrong hands, Townshend insisted on close scrutiny of resolutions proposing the
formation of new units particularly those coming forward from individual parishes. After
consulting ‘respectable’ persons he refused to endorse proposals from St George’s
Colegate, St Michael’s Coslany and St John’s Maddermarket. The resolution from St
Andrew’s was only accepted after an enquiry that rejected insinuations from someone
who had misrepresented to government ‘the Characters and Proceedings of the
170
171
NCNG, 11 March and 10 June 1797.
NCNG, 25 February 1797.
61
parishoners’ and had led Townshend initially to brand their proposed ensign as a ‘very
improper person.’172 Some recruits evidently joined up hoping to take advantage of the
exemption from militia service offered to volunteers, but quite soon afterwards dropped
out again. A St Lawrence parish corps was established but later found not to be viable,
whereupon its captain left to join the NLHV as a private. St Saviours lost 14 recruits by
September 1798.173 On 16 September 1798 Thomas Murray of the St Andrews corps
wrote to Townshend enclosing a printed declaration by the corps’ officers addressed to
those who had absented themselves from meetings without assigning a satisfactory
reason and asked for permission to disband if numbers fell below 60. The absentees, it
appeared, had maintained that ‘there no longer exists a necessity for forming
Associations of this nature [when] the danger which threatened us is at an end.’ The
officers retorted by declaring: ‘Of this, we beg leave to observe, we cannot be adequate
judges..’ 174
More serious was the impact on the volunteers of the acute food shortages of 1799 and
1800. In September 1800 Patteson wrote to Townshend reporting that rank and file
volunteers of the LMA, unwilling to leave their business on market day, had failed to
appear when called out and ‘gave very improper answers to the Serjeants who went to
summons them..’175 In the following month he wrote again to say that, following a court
of enquiry, he had dismissed thirteen men at once, that a further enquiry was scheduled
172
TNA, HO 50/341 – Townshend’s letters of 16 and 25 May 1798; HO 50/44 – enclosure to Townshend’s
letter of 18 September 1798.
173
NRO, B/L/T/8/5/3/20 and 21 – returns from Capt Ewen of 10 September 1798 and from Capt Hammond
Fisk of 26 September 1798.
174
TNA, HO 50/44 – Murray’s letter of 16 September 1798 enclosed with Townshend’s letter of 18
September.
175
NRO, B/L/T/8/5/5/11 – letter from Patteson to Townshend of 27 September 1800.
62
into the case of about twelve others and that, taking into account others under censure or
who seldom, if ever, attended, he expected to lose about 50 men all told. Attempting to
put forward an explanation, he continued: ‘The idea is so prevalent amongst the
description of men who form the volunteer corps, that they are supporting the present
high prices of Corn & other necessaries & as they say are fighting for a small loaf, that I
think much care and vigilance is necessary on the part of Government – I have done all
that is in my power & hope I have cleared away all the suspicious men, but your Lordship
knows how difficult it is for industrious men to submit & see their families submit to the
pressure of the present times & still come forward to fullfill duties, which I suspect many
of them never expected would have existed…’176 Townshend passed Patteson’s letter on
to Portland with the observation that the incident in the LMA was the only instance of
dissatisfaction he had to report and that, thanks to the vigilance of the yeomanry,
volunteer corps and magistrates, the county was perfectly quiet at this critical period.177
Such incidents were indeed far from peculiar to Norwich and indeed much less serious
than elsewhere.178
The Churches
Although religion was seldom evoked in the addresses and declarations issued by the
opposing political factions, the spiritual leaders of the established church were,
nonetheless, firmly in the loyalist camp and did their bit in attempting to turn back the
176
TNA, HO 50/341 – letter from Patteson to Townshend of 7 October 1800.
TNA, HO 50/341 – letter from Townshend to Portland of 19 October 1800.
178
Emsley, ‘The Social Impact..’ p. 219; Cookson, Armed Nation.. pp. 228, 238.
177
63
George Horne, Bishop of Norwich, by James Heath. Wikipedia.
64
radical tide in Norwich just as they did in the rest of the country.179 George Horne,
elevated as the Bishop of Norwich in June 1790, and his chaplain William Jones, had
been inveighing against the evils of French Revolution even before the appearance of
Burke’s Reflections. In his charge on his primary visitation on 15 June 1791, delivered in
writing in his absence through sickness, Horne deplored all the ‘many corrupt and strange
opinions [which] are current amongst us.’ Equal rights and equal liberty, he contended,
were contrary to divine law. Liberty of thought could not be prevented, but liberty of
action ‘there cannot be, till the laws of God lose their force and society itself is
dissolved.’180 Responding to a reference in the charge to a ‘learned and eloquent layman
who hath very effectually exposed those wild opinions,’ Burke subsequently wrote to
Horne to congratulate him on his wisdom and piety.181
In a book widely advertised in the Norwich press at about the same time, Horne’s charge
was echoed by Samuel Cooper, a Minister in Great Yarmouth, who also argued against
Lockean natural rights and for the necessity of an ‘uncontrollable absolute power
somewhere existing in the state.’182 Meanwhile political sermons continued, particularly
at the Cathedral. On 19 December 1792 Parson Woodforde heard ‘..a very good
constitutional sermon preached by Dr Grape of Horsted against the Seditious Writings
that have been and now are daily published by the Dissenters, Atheists and ill designing
men..’ He then retired to the King’s Arms for the usual sumptuous dinner where he was
179
See, for example, Cookson, Ibid., p.. 24 and Colley, ‘The Apotheosis..’ p 121
NHC, C.262.3 – ‘Charge intended to have been delivered to the Clergy of Norwich at the Primary
Visitation of George, Lord Bishop of that Diocese.’
181
Robert Hole, ‘English Sermons and Tracts as Media of Debate on the French Revolution’ in Mark Philp
(ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 22.
182
Samuel Cooper DD, The First Principles of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government delineated in letters to
Dr Priestley occasioned by his to Mr Burke (Great Yarmouth, 1791).
180
65
fired up to contribute two guineas to the subscription for the French clergy ‘..lately drove
out of their country by the present Anarchical Government in France..’183
But not all Church of England clergymen were as uncompromisingly conservative as
Horne, Jones and Samuel. In a sermon delivered at the Cathedral on the Fast Day of 19
April 1793, and later published in pamphlet form, the prebendary Rev Robert Potter
accompanied the usual strictures against free-thinkers and atheists with some
acknowledgement of equality of rights and the rule of law: ‘..no law can ever be enacted,
which is not common to, and equally binding upon every member of the community;
neither prince nor peer can arrogate to himself immunity or exemption from the laws,
whose protection is equally extended to the peasant..’184 Charles Manners-Sutton,
successor to Horne as bishop of Norwich, took a similarly more enlightened position,
describing himself in a charge to the clergy in June 1801 as ‘a convinced friend of
toleration, and an enemy of every attempt to bind the consciences of men in matters of
faith..’185
The clergy did not confine their efforts to the pulpit. They signed loyalist declarations
and, in response to some events such as the outrage against the King in October 1795,
issued declarations of their own.186 They contributed generously to loyalist subscriptions,
most notably to the loyal volunteer subscription of 1794/95 and to the nationwide
183
Peter Jameson (ed.), The Diary … vol. 13 p. 182.
NHC, C.252 POT – ‘A Sermon preached before the Right Worshipful the Mayor of Norwich and the
Corporation at the Cathedral on Friday April 19 1793 by the Rev Robert Potter, Prebendary of Norwich.’
185
NCNG, 27 June 1801.
186
NM, 5 December 1795 (but the clergy petition, unlike the equivalent loyalist city petition, failed
specifically to endorse the ‘Two Acts’ introduced in response to the attack on the King).
184
66
voluntary subscription of February 1798. In many cases they organised contributions to
subscriptions both on a parish and city level, although not always without opposition. In
house to house collections for sailors wounded in the battle of Camperdown, for example,
they met with ‘some unpleasant repulses’ even if ‘they were finally rewarded by the
amount of the subscriptions received from the liberally minded of all parties.’187 Taking
an even more active role in national defence at times of acute peril, they joined the
nationwide effort by chairing parish meetings to ascertain the disposition of inhabitants in
the case of invasion, enumerating those willing to associate for the defence of property
and country.188 In the villages surrounding Norwich one parson, in Horsford, is recorded
as going round to persuade farmers to form themselves into corps of cavalry to act as a
baggage train in the case of invasion. Another, in Blofield, appears to have discarded his
surplice for a volunteer uniform by raising a unit of pikemen.189 Such instances may well
have been repeated elsewhere.
It is as well, of course, to be cautious in evaluating the effectiveness of the established
clergy in rallying to the loyalist cause the inhabitants of a city notorious for religious
dissent and indifference, as much as for radical politics. But the observance of national
fast days at times of acute peril is one possible indication that the Church still had some
hold. The fast day of 7 March 1798, for instance, was observed ‘with the greatest
propriety and decorum’ and the ‘congregation in most of the Churches and Roman
Catholic chapels were very numerous’ affording ‘satisfactory proof, that, however
religion and its professors may be ridiculed and despised by some among us, the major
187
NCNG, 4 November 1797.
NCNG, 22 August 1801.
189
NRO, B/L/T/8/5/2 - letter of 21 May 1797 from Rev Mr Burton to Lord Townshend.
188
67
part look for comfort and support in the precepts which Christianity enjoins.’190
Furthermore not all dissenters should necessarily be counted on the opposing side. A
Methodist chapel in Walsingham and even, surprisingly, a Baptist congregation in
Norwich, are reported as having contributed to loyalist subscriptions.191
190
191
NCNG, 10 March 1798.
NM, 14 June 1794; NCNG, 10 March 1798.
68
PART 3 – THE LOYALIST IMPACT I COTEXT
The Effectiveness of the Loyalist Appeal
Norwich loyalists, then, were not inactive in the face of the radical challenge. But their
success was limited partly because, at a popular level, the environment in which they
worked was not as favourable as it was elsewhere in the kingdom. Norwich experienced
no early widespread and spontaneous anti-radical reaction similar to the Church and King
riots in Birmingham and Manchester. Even in Whiggish Nottingham the homes and
businesses of Unitarians were attacked and later, in June 1793, a ‘well-prepared section
of poor people’ indulged in five-day outbreak of violence against supposed opponents of
the war.192 Paine burnings, ‘the most dramatic expression of English loyalism in the
1790s’, swept the country in the winter of 1792/93, 193 and in Norfolk are recorded in
Saxthorpe, Corpusty, Edgefield, Swaffham, East and West Flegg and Lenwade.194 There
may have been more, unreported, instances, but Norwich itself remained immune to such
activities. What popular anti-Jacobin violence there was in Norwich, was promoted later
by outsiders, notably soldiers.
But this is not to say that elements in the loyalist message did not get through at a popular
level. Patriotism burst to the surface at times of national triumph; and the welcome given
to visiting members of the royal family cannot have been entirely artificial. Nothing he
had seen or heard in Norwich had apparently prepared Parson Woodforde for the
mobbing of King on way to parliament in October 1795 which he witnessed it at first
192
Malcolm I. Thomis, Politics and Society in Nottingham 1785 – 1835 (Basil Blackwell, 1969). pp. 170,
176.
193
Clive Emsley, ‘The Paine Burnings of 1792-1793’ in Past and Present no. 193, November 2006.
194
NM, 12 and 26 January 1793; Peter Jameson (ed.), The Diary …, vol 13, p. 210.
69
hand with so much shock and horror.195 The extent to which popular loyalism generally
was boosted by the impact of the pomp, ritual and ceremonial associated with the
monarchy, patriotism and military prowess should also not be underestimated. In an era
before the mass media, what happened on the city streets where people mingled and
associated and circulated on foot had a correspondingly higher impact particularly on the
minds of the lower orders of society ostensibly more vulnerable to the Jacobin message.
Hence the importance of street theatre on which the loyalists had a near monopoly – the
parades of the loyal constitutional associations, the illuminations and firecrackers at times
of military triumph and above all, from 1797 onwards, the colourful pomp of the
omnipresent loyal volunteers.
Surviving records illustrate furthermore that, for all its problems, the volunteer movement
was capable of attracting parts of society well outside the established loyalist elite. The
abortive resolution from St John Maddermarket parish, mentioned above, included seven
tailors, six cabinet-makers, three clerks, three cordwainers, two hairdressers as well as
numerous other representatives of the manual, artisan and shop-keeping classes who had
originally been attracted to the radical societies earlier in the decade.196 The St Stephens
parish volunteers, who did get up and running, listed, apparently unasked, the
occupations of their members in reply to a routine circular in 1798. These included three
carpenters, three tailors, three whitesmiths, two shoemakers, two turners and two
cabinetmakers.197 Nevertheless weavers and textile workers, the most radical sections of
Norwich society, are noticeable for their absence and parishes populated by weavers such
195
Ibid. vol. 14 pp. 215-216.
TNA, HO 50/341 – enclosure to letter from Capt Boyce to Townshend of 16 May 1789.
197
NRO, B/L/T/8/5/3/225 – return from Capt Hardy of 28 September 1798.
196
70
as St George’s Colegate and St Michael’s Coslany were, perhaps significantly, among
those whose applications to form volunteer units were rejected.
However in the battle over hard issues like constitutional reform, civil liberties and war
and peace, not many Norwich citizens would have agreed with some modern historians
that the loyalists won the argument198. In the battle of petitions and declarations, they
were always on the defensive. Radicals collected 3,731 signatures for a petition on
parliamentary reform handed over to the House of Commons in May 1793, but rejected
on the grounds that printed petitions were out of order; 5,575 signed a peace petition on
a parchment 99 feet long taken to London in February 1795; 5,284 signed a petition
against the ‘two Acts’ in November 1795 forwarded to Charles James Fox; and an
unknown number signed a petition in May 1797 calling on the King to dismiss his
ministers.199 Even so Norwich loyalists could take some comfort in their performance in a
series of hard fought parliamentary elections. Despite the unpopularity of the war,
loyalists held back the radical/Foxite assault in the 1794 and 1799 by-elections and in the
General Election of 1796. According to one analysis of voting patterns Windham’s reelection in 1796 was due not only to ‘increased support from those bastions of the
establishment.. who had not voted for Windham the Whig in 1790’ but that ‘he was even
able to garner the votes of 26% of the wool trade, the industry hardest hit by the war..’200
Despite the much-noted effect of the non-resident vote, the Norwich result in 1796
demonstrated lower support for Foxites and radicals than other constituencies with a wide
198
Dickinson, Liberty and Property … p. 272.
NCNG, 11 May 1793; 7 February 1795; 28 November 1795; and 20 May 1797.
200
Eugene Richard Gaddis, William Windham and the Conservative Reaction in England 1790 – 1796
(Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1979) p. 523.
199
71
franchise. In Westminster Fox and the radical Horne Tooke (standing independently, but
with a degree of mutual approval) garnered 5,160 and 2,816 votes respectively against
their opponent’s 4,814. In Norwich Windham and Hobart polled 1,622 and 1,159 against
Gurney’s 1,076.201 The final radical/Foxite triumph over Windham in 1802 was
paralleled by radical victories elsewhere, most notably in Middlesex.202
The ature of the Radical Challenge
Yet clearly, neither pomp nor patriotism, nor some limited success in hard-fought
electoral battles, would have been enough if a critical revolutionary mass had existed in
the city. To begin with it seemed possible that such a mass might have emerged. At least
this is what many loyalists thought. But, while its revolutionary ardour cannot be
doubted, the true strength and persistence of the original Jacobin surge is difficult to
gauge and easy to exaggerate. No first hand records survive of the proceedings of the
early Paineite radical clubs spawned by the Revolution Society and some of the secondhand sources are suspect. The spy Alderson, who reported in November 1792 that 40
clubs comprising upwards of 4,000 persons ‘of the lowest description’ had been formed,
was clearly intent on creating alarm in government circles. His report ended by
speculating that ‘people in power’ would ‘find these Clubs not at all less powerful by &
bye than those of the Jacobins in France.’203
201
Thorne, History of Parliament… vol ii pp. 292, 266 and 268.
Thompson, The Making..pp. 492, 493.
203
TNA, HO 42/22 folio 413 – information concerning the societies formed at Norwich received from Mr
Alderson, 17 November 1792; see Gaddis, William Windham.. p. 436, on the reliability of spy reports.
202
72
Later, when war broke the back of its dominant industry, causing intense suffering and
distress, Norwich of all places, might have been expected to succumb to Jacobin
insurrection. Yet for all the anger and frustration that existed at this time, it is important
to recognise how little, if any, was directed against the textile merchant/manufacturers.
Unlike in the newly emerging manufacturing centres, relations between weaver and
merchant in Norwich had developed over centuries in an industry which had alternated
between periods of prosperity and distress, of which the recent crisis was only the last of
several examples. Although assertive and prompt to defend their interests, Norwich
weavers were not confronted with any single major employer or city boss.204 Even in
Sheffield, whose industrial structure was similarly based on small workshops, the
Cutler’s Company, increasingly dominated by larger manufacturers, was cutting across
the interests of ordinary cutlery workers and an undercurrent of industrial disputes was
beginning to develop, giving radicals in the city the local reputation of dangerous
exponents of industrial combination in support of higher wages.205 Yet in Norwich the
clear common interest of both weavers and merchant/manufacturers in countering threats
to the textile industry was a stronger factor than any potential sources of conflict between
them. At the end of his mayoral term in 1793 John Harvey, who introduced shawl
manufacturing to the city, was presented with an address from the Norwich weavers
expressing their happiness that his heart was open to the distresses of the poor and to their
just complaints.206 Even the social geography of the city may have been a factor in
avoiding serious class conflict. In contrast to Sheffield where the elite had moved away
204
Corfield, Towns, Trade… p. 27.
John Stevenson, Artisans and Democrats. Sheffield in the French Revolution 1789 -1797 (Sheffield
History Pamphlets, 1989) pp. 8 and 9; Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty.. p. 159.
206
Jewson, Jacobin City.. p. 32.
205
73
from the city centre, many of Norwich’s wealthy merchants still lived in central parishes
such as St Peter Mancroft and St Stephens; and many employers still lived among their
workmen on Magdalen Street and Colgate.207 Norwich was evidently not in the forefront
of those urban centres where E. P. Thompson’s ‘English working class’ was in the
making at this time.
No new surge of popular protest occurred when Norwich radicals regrouped in April
1795 under the banner of the Patriotic Society. There was no Norwich counterpart to the
large open air meetings which brought 10,000 to Crooke’s Moor in Sheffield in August
1795 or even hundreds of thousands said to have congregated in Copenhagen Fields in
London in November 1795.208 The final insurrectionary phase of the radical movement,
inspired by the Irish uprising, similarly passed Norwich by. No United Englishmen or
United Britons appeared as in some other parts of the country.
Throughout the period the radical challenge came not so much from ideologically
motivated insurrection or class-based social conflict fueled by hunger, but from a more
long-lasting and deep-rooted element in Norwich’s heritage. Norwich became famous as
the Jacobin City above all for its ‘close community of scholarly divines, distinguished
scientists, literary innovators, agricultural improvers and attractive blue-stockings’
unparalleled anywhere else in England, except perhaps in the Birmingham Lunar
207
Penelope J. Corfield, The Social and Economic History of Norwich 1650 – 1850: A Study in Urban
Growth (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1976) p. 565.
208
But see Ian R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Eighteenth-century Britain (Clarendon Press, 1984) p. 50,
who casts doubt on some of the attendance figures.
74
Society.209 Members of this middle class radical coterie were associated with the circle
around The Cabinet , the Tusculanum debating society and the Octagon Chapel. Their
contacts with lower class opinion, even in the early1790s, were said to have been ‘far
closer in theory than in practice’.210 They were undoubtedly what Dinmore had in mind
when he wrote that ‘the persons in Norwich who have espoused what are called
jacobinical principles, are generally men of strong sense and some reading…not a few
have adorned their minds with science; and added to the literary productions of their
country..’211
Conclusion
Most of the evidence, then, points to the conclusion that in Norwich the nature of politics
and society rather than the impact of the loyalist reaction explains why an era of political
turmoil and economic distress did not in the end lead to an insurrectionary outcome.
While Norwich radicals would have been loathe to agree with him, Frere, the Tory
candidate, speaking after his by-election victory in May 1799 was probably right to
conclude that, for the time being at least, that ‘the fervour of the times is somewhat
allayed and that the dangers that had so nearly overwhelmed us have led men to
appreciate the Blessings they now enjoy too justly to put them to the hazard for the sake
of any vaunted advantages held forth as likely to accrue from Reformations and
Revolutions.’212 No one, similarly, could have failed to recognise that, among those
blessings, Burke’s organic constitution, for all its faults and for all the temporary
derogations enacted to defend it from the perceived revolutionary threat, still provided
209
Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty.. pp. 151, 152.
Corfield, The Social and Economic History..p 581.
211
Dinmore, An Exposition.. p. 4.
212
NCNG, 1 June 1799.
210
75
the basis for a degree of freedom and equality before the law absent both in the absolutist
regime being constructed by Napoleon all over Europe and in the earlier revolutionary
attempt to build a new political and social system from scratch.213
If there is a particular Norwich perspective on the avoidance of revolution it is to be
found not in any achievements of the loyalists, but in the city’s open political culture in
which they operated alongside their radical opponents. Norwich shone out from other
urban centres for its tolerance of dissenters, and wide franchise and open society.214
Thanks to a high literacy rate, amounting to three-quarters of the male population in some
central parishes, a high proportion of citizens had the means of participating in its wellinformed public sphere.215 Steering a course ‘betwixt the too great ardour of the Friends
to Reform and the abject Timidity of those who cherish prejudices’,216 the Norwich press
strove to cover opinions both favourable and unfavourable to the government line. Right
from the beginning, events in France, including proceedings of the Assembly and the
speeches of French politicians, were fully and fairly reported and could be discussed and
analysed by all classes in the city’s numerous taverns. Newspaper readers, unlike their
modern counterparts, were able to read, and form their own opinions on, accounts of
parliamentary proceedings and dispatches from overseas undistorted by the spin of
political correspondents, parliamentary sketch writers and the like. Direct source
material embarrassing to the government, such as the transcripts of the trials of Thomas
213
Emsley, ‘The Social Impact…’ p. 227.
See, for example, Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty.. p. 50; a final attempt to exclude dissenters from
the Common Council was made in 1801.
215
Knights in Rawcliffe and Wilson (eds.), Norwich since 1550 p. 178.
216
NCNG, 5 January 1793.
214
76
Hardy and Horne Tooke, taken by Joseph Gurney, could still be purchased at the Norfolk
Arms at a particularly sensitive time.217
True, there were many aberrations - features of late eighteenth century political life that
fall far short of modern standards of justice and freedom. In Norwich the political system
was deformed by the expense of contesting elections and the manipulation of voting
rights through the creation of honorary freemen. Yet concrete examples of the operation
of what Francis Place called ‘Pitt’s Terror’ were, in Norwich, few and far between.
Norwich radicals, like Dinmore and Wilkes, despite their Jacobin rhetoric, cherished their
basic constitutional rights and were conscious of what they stood to lose. At the same
time, while the more destructive and authentically Jacobin element benefited from an
initial surge, it never established the same reputation for mob action and insurrectionary
tactics evident elsewhere in Britain. In the succeeding years, Norwich Castle, unlike
Nottingham Castle was not burnt down by angry mobs. Nor even did Chapelfield, unlike
St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, become a killing field. In the country as a whole, but
nowhere more significantly than in Jacobin Norwich, existing political institutions
survived a revolutionary challenge and a breathing space was created, allowing a more
gradual and less bloody process of reform to gather pace over the succeeding half
century.
217
NCNG, 3 January 1795.
77
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
The National Archives (TNA)
HO 42/ and 50; TS 11/, 25/ and 50/.
Norfolk Heritage Centre (NHC)
Norfolk Chronicle or Norwich Gazette, 1788 – 1802 (NCNG).
Norwich Mercury 1788 – 1802 (NM).
Colman Collection.
Norfolk Record Office (NRO)
Bradfer-Lawrence Collection – Townshend Papers.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (first published 1790).
Tom Paine, Rights of Man (first published 1792).
Thomas Amyot (ed.), William Windham. Speeches in Parliament (Longman, Hurst
1812).
Mrs Henry Baring (ed.), The Diary of the Rt. Hon. William Windham 1784 to 1810
(Longmans Green, 1866).
R Dinmore, Exposition of the Principles of the English Jacobins (Norwich Patriotic
Society, 3rd edition 1797).
Lady Eastlake (ed.), Dr Rigby’s Letters from France in 1789 (Longmans, Green and Co,
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