Britain 711
and overcome by the Establishment, to use a modern term, which then referred
only to the establishment of religion in the Anglican Church. As for the disaf-
fected, they were variously known by their enemies as Jacobins, Levellers, “club-
bists,” or “anarchy men.” They had no name for themselves, but might occasionally
confess to “republican” sentiments. It was not that they proposed to do away with
the monarchy; but they were critical of the kinds of men and institutions by which
the monarchy was surrounded, they thought that church and state were controlled
by aristocrats, and they regarded more equality as desirable.
In Britain and Ireland, as in Eastern Europe, it was counterrevolution that pre-
vailed. The net effect of the revolutionary decade was to demonstrate, or to consoli-
date, the strength of the established order. The very lengths to which the established
order went, however, in dealing with disaffection (or what was called “sedition”)
offer a measure of the magnitude of the discontents. The men who ruled England
were not the sort to be frightened by witches. The British governing class was nei-
ther timid, foolish, intolerant, nor especially ruthless when unprovoked. That En-
glishmen of this class became fearful of unrest at home, intolerant of ideas or orga-
nizations suggesting those of the French Revolution, repressive in Britain, and
deliberately terroristic in Ireland can be taken as evidence of the reality of some-
thing of which, from their own point of view, they had reason to be afraid. In En-
gland as elsewhere there was a contest between democrats and aristocrats.
British Radicalism and Continental Revolution
Situated on an island, commanding the sea, trading with all the world, possessing a
highly developed national unity, rejoicing in its liberty, its constitutional monarchy,
its common law, and its Parliament, England was in truth very different from the
rest of Europe. Of “feudalism” in its many senses nothing remained, or what re-
mained had been transformed into a sort of landowners’ rule; the country was politi-
cally more homogeneous than France before 1789, or the Dutch provinces before
1795, with the landed class providing a central direction through Parliament and
the Crown, while as individuals they retained a good deal of local initiative in the
counties. Landownership was highly concentrated, and in process of becoming
more so; there was no peasantry, as on the Continent, either of small free proprietors
as in Western Europe, or of serfs as in the East; the mass of the rural population
worked as wage laborers for farmers who paid rents to the landowners, or in such
household manufactures as cutlery and weaving. Freed of peasant conservatism,
British agriculture had become innovating and productive, and since the country
was also a commercial and financial center, well launched on the process of industri-
alization, England was the most wealthy region in Europe, or indeed the world. In a
population of nine millions in 1800 there were perhaps ten thousand families that
could be called rich, having £1,500 (or over 30,000 French livres) of annual reve-
nues. Land was still the chief source of wealth. In Patrick Colquhoun’s estimates for
1801, the category of titled persons, “esquires” and “gentlemen and ladies living on
incomes,” with 27,000 families, was almost twice as large as that of “eminent mer-
chants” and “lesser merchants by sea.” In the same estimates there were two million