Britain 727
signed “to excite the poor to seize the landed property of the kingdom.” William
Windham asked gentlemen of the house to remember that “there was such a thing
as the French Revolution.” There was a French party in Holland, he said, and there
was one in America. “Was there a country in Europe,” he demanded rhetorically,
“safe from the poison of these principles, or which had not felt the effect of this
great democracy?”^31
As the Two Acts went into operation, the membership of the London Cor-
responding Society, and of similar radical clubs throughout the country, began to
decline. Cautious spirits, or respectable young men aspiring to rise in trade, like
Francis Place, ceased to be active. Under the new conditions the management of
club affairs fell to the adventurous and the bold. Where in 1793 the London
Corresponding Society had voted against the use of the word “citizen” as a term
of address by its members, the word was commonly used in the society in 1796,
and by its correspondents in Leeds and other northern towns, who also closed
their letters with “Health and Fraternity”—the salut et fraternité of the revolu-
tionary French.^32 In November 1796 there was enough life in the radical move-
ment for five hundred persons to sit down to an eight- shilling dinner, at the
Crown and Anchor Tavern in London, with the radical Earl of Stanhope, who
praised the “80,000 incorrigible Citizens” despised by Edmund Burke.^33 Under
pressure, the London society became more secret. It established contacts, difficult
to unravel, with the United Irish, who broke into full rebellion in 1798, and with
the nebulous groups called the United English, who were fairly numerous among
the old “clubbists” in the neighborhood of Sheffield and Manchester. Some club-
bists began to drill and arm. In 1797 there were mutinies in the Navy—in the
Channel fleet at Spithead, in the North Sea fleet at Nore, in the South Atlantic
squadron near Cape Town—and indeed the very ship that carried the “Scotch
martyrs” to Australia in 1795 was troubled by a mutiny in which the convicts were
joined by the soldiers who guarded them. The mutineers complained against
abuses of treatment and in the receipt of their pay. No connection with radical
clubs was ever discovered, and historians have agreed in dissociating the out-
breaks from any revolutionary intentions; but the investigating committee of the
House of Commons believed (as seems likely enough) that what might have been
a mere “breach of subordination and discipline” was made far more serious by the
persistent agitation of the political clubs against the form of government and the
governing class.^34 In 1798 there was still enough disaffection for Pitt, expecting
invasion by the French at any moment, to have habeas corpus suspended. Various
organizers and agitators went to prison without trial. In 1799 the London Cor-
responding Society and certain other clubs were proscribed by name, and ceased
to exist. The government had succeeded in crushing the popular radical move-
ment—at least until after Waterloo.
31 Parliamentary History, X X XII, 274–363.
32 British Museum, Add. MSS., 27,814, fol. 126 for August 1, 1793, and Add. MSS. 27,815 for
materials of 1796ff.
33 Add. MSS. 27,817, fol. 44.
34 Report of the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons, Ordered to be Printed 15 March 1799,
p. 18.