716 Chapter XXX
raise questions of principle concerning the state, public authority and justice, may
all help to explain the incredible conservatism for which English law was to re-
main famous until the days of Dickens.
In Europe it was usual enough to find business men favorable to the main aims
of the Revolution, and in this matter the same was true, to a degree, of England
also. Commercial men were already more integrated into accepted society than in
the other monarchical states of Europe. It has just been observed that 27 bankers
sat in Parliament, in which the interests of trade were far from being unrepre-
sented. The knighting of Richard Arkwright in 1786, and the granting of a baron-
etcy to the elder Robert Peel in 1800, suggest the transition of the factory- builders
into higher social circles. Peel himself, however, at first felt enthusiasm for the
French Revolution, as did various other men of affairs, the more so if they were
outside the established church, or lived in the newer and politically unrepresented
industrial towns. Such men often looked on the aristocracy as arrogant social
drones, unbroken to useful work, who wasted their own money on racing, gam-
bling, and large entertainments, and the people’s money in lucrative but idle jobs
and appointments. Both partners of the famous firm of Watt and Boulton were
strongly of this opinion, and even talked, not very seriously, of emigrating to
America. Their sons, before settling down in the firm’s business, were notorious
“Jacobins.”^11 The fate of Thomas Walker of Manchester will be mentioned later.
The most curious case, in a way, was that of the ironmaster, John Wilkinson, the
man who had first successfully used coal in place of charcoal in the smelting of
iron ore, and had designed and cast the first iron bridge in Britain. A Dissenter
and a friend of Priestley’s, he was irritated at the failure, which became “final” in
1790, to obtain equal rights for non- Anglican Protestants. He was so outraged and
alarmed by the church- and- king mobs that attacked Priestley in 1791 that he pro-
tected his ironworks with howitzers and swivel- guns against similar attentions.
“Manufacture and commerce,” he wrote, “will always flourish most where Church
and King interfere least.” A man of sixty, who had made a large fortune, he bought
£10,000 worth of French Revolutionary public bonds. Late in 1792, only a few
weeks before England and France went to war, needing a scrip with which to meet
his payrolls, he had his cashier endorse French assignats and circulate them as
money. Since his workers were mostly Dissenters full of the ideas of Thomas Paine,
this device, in December 1792, was inflammatory to say the least. Wilkinson
would have agreed with the “clubbists” of Norfolk: “Surely the interests of all the
industrious, from the richest merchant to the poorest mechanic, are in every com-
munity the same: to lessen the numbers of the unproductive, to whose mainte-
nance they contribute.”^12 By the “unproductive,” such men meant the leisure class,
not the unemployed.
11 On the Watts and Boultons of both generations see E. Robinson, “An English Jacobin: James
Watt, Jr.,” in Cambridge Historical Journal, XI (1955), 349–55.
12 W. H. Chaloner, “Dr. Joseph Priestley, John Wilkinson and the French Revolution, 1789–
1802,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., VIII (1958), 21–40; E. Robinson, “New
Light on the Priestley Riots,” in Historical Journal, III (1960), 73–75. The quotation from the Norfolk
society is from H. Butterfield, “Charles James Fox and the Whig Opposition in 1792,” in Cambridge
Historical Journal, IX (1949), 293–330.