CHAPTER XXX
BRITAIN: REPUBLICANISM AND
THE ESTABLISHMENTI disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified.
Hereditary distinctions, and privileged orders of every species, I think must neces-
sarily counteract the progress of human improvement; hence it follows that I am
not amongst the admirers of the British Constitution.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1794
Lord Malmesbury and I have made a large circuit on horseback today.... The cot-
tages picturesque; the inhabitants thriving, but preserving a sylvan sort of charac-
ter.... Everything is in the highest possible order, and this country affords a speci-
men of general prosperity and comfort which should make even a Sans- culotte
think twice before tearing off the breeches of the world, and making us sit bare
under the Tree of Liberty, instead of on a good, broad, well clothed, aristocratic
basis, as they do in Hampshire.
—SIR GILBERT ELLIOT,
LATER EARL OF MINTO, 1793
Until late in 1792 the British government expected to remain at peace, but once
engaged in the war with France it became the most persistent adversary of the
New Republican Order. In the British official view, at least after 1797, there could
be no lasting settlement, nor would British interests be secure, except by a liquida-
tion not only of the French Revolution but of the new regimes in Holland and
elsewhere. And it seems true that Britain, which if not fighting for its life was
fighting for the freedom to grow, could never have enjoyed its great Victorian and
Edwardian imperial age without the destruction of the new order of the 1790’s,
and the Napoleonic system which succeeded it. The greatest single champion of