Britain 715
On the Continent the professional classes, including the clergy, furnished many
sympathizers with the French Revolution and sponsors of change in their own
countries. The same was much less true in England. A church whose bishops were
administrators sitting in Parliament, whose parsons hobnobbed with squires, whose
ranks were recruited from yeoman and gentry families, and which in any case had
lost touch with the newer forms of the laboring population, was in no mood to be
critical of the social order. “Individuals have nothing to do with the laws but to obey
them,” said the Bishop of Rochester in the House of Lords.^9 Dissenting and Uni-
tarian clergy were more susceptible to republicanism. In Scotland, where a system
of patronage to church livings, on the English model, had been introduced into the
established Presbyterian Church after the Union, and where, partly in protest
against this system, various other Presbyterians had broken away, the established
clergy were generally satisfied, feeling close to the government and the landowners,
but the “seceders,” “New Lights,” etc., were rightly suspected of political radicalism.
Methodist clergy in England tried to be officially neutral on political questions. The
effects of Methodism, however, were by no means conservative. Men taught to read
in Methodist Sunday Schools, or to speak up in Wesleyan meetings, often figured
as leaders in radical clubs.^10 Home missions, Bible reading, and itinerant preaching,
in both England and Scotland, offered a kind of competing program to that of the
French Revolution as a force calling the established order into question.
On the Continent, eastward from France itself, university professors and stu-
dents were prominent among partisans of the new ideas. At the two English uni-
versities, assimilated to the aristocracy since the Restoration, and at a low point in
their intellectual history, the same was not so. Even in Scotland, where the univer-
sities were more alive, but attached to the Presbyterian establishment, a “Jacobin”
professor was a rarity. In Europe, professional government employees, sometimes
trained in the universities in subjects corresponding to modern economics and
political science, might favor reforms or even collaborate with the French. The
same was not true in England, which had no professional class of this kind. In
Europe, and also in America, the new groups usually included a contingent of doc-
tors. We hear little of doctors in the English radical clubs. In Europe, the lawyers
were everywhere divided, but few types were more common than the radical law-
yer. In England the radical lawyer was less in evidence. Causes for these differences
can only be suggested, in the absence of more detailed investigation; they might
range from the class structure of the professions in England to the empirical habits
of the English mind. As for the lawyers, their division into a hierarchy of barris-
ters, solicitors, and attorneys, the fact that legal counsel was associated with large
property rather than small, the location of legal study, and the formation of lawyers
in the Inns of Court, with nothing like the atmosphere of a Continental university,
the steeping of the youthful mind in the mysterious lore described by Blackstone,
the disregard of Roman law as taught on the Continent, which was more likely to
9 Parliamentary History, X X XII, 267.
10 See the report on an unpublished dissertation by R. F. Wearmouth, “Methodism and the
Working Classes of England, 1800–1850,” in the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research of the
University of London, No. 41 (1936), p. 121. The same point is made for Manchester by L. S. Marshall,
op.cit., 122. For Scotland see Meikle, op.cit., 34–40, 194–213.