714 Chapter XXX
Horsa, in a remote age of Saxon liberty before the Norman Conquest. In a country
so conscious of its own history this phenomenon is of psychological interest; En-
glish Jacobinism was to suffer a similar eclipse or oblivion for a hundred years.
What was remembered was the revolution of 1688, which had been peaceable
enough in England itself. The centennial produced a certain activity on the part of
various Revolution Societies, some of which greeted the beginnings of the French
Revolution with approval, since in England, as in Prussia for different reasons, it was
at first supposed that the French were only seeking to obtain what the English al-
ready enjoyed. It was to members of such a Revolution Society that Richard Price, in
1789, delivered his famous discourse on the love of country, which provoked Ed-
mund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, with its indignant denial that the
English in 1688 had “cashiered a king,” or ever made laws of their own choosing. On
the whole, the disaffection of the 1790’s had little to do with the Revolution Societ-
ies, and it had no conscious relationship to “the filth of the English republic.”
Disaffection in England, though it may have forgotten its past, was national and
indigenous. It was a plant with native roots, which the sudden blaze of light across
the Channel brought luxuriantly into blossom. Something has been said in the
preceding volume of moves for the democratization of Parliament that had begun
in the 1760’s, of the agitations led by John Wilkes, of the proposals of the West-
minster committee in which the six points of Chartism were already foreshad-
owed, of Pitt’s repeated failure to obtain Parliamentary reform, and of the similar
failures to obtain removal of the disabilities upon Protestant Dissenters. Some-
thing has been said also of the formation, before 1789, of a philosophy of conser-
vatism, which held that the British constitution was in no need of change, and
indeed could not be modified without risk of anarchy and collapse—a conserva-
tism which is not at all to be understood as a reaction against the “excesses” of the
French Revolution.^8 In these earlier movements, except for groups in London and
for the Dissenters, the main strength had come from landowners meeting in
county associations. Many of the leaders had been of the upper and Parliamentary
classes. Persons of this kind remained active after 1789, notably those Whigs who
developed in the direction of Charles James Fox. Some of them in 1792 founded a
society called the Friends of the People. They continued for years to oppose the
war, enjoying a freedom of speech, as members of the upper classes, which would
probably have been tolerated in no other country in wartime. They continued also,
though with declining conviction, to talk of a reform of the House of Commons.
As late as 1797, after years of war and domestic turmoil, a reform bill was intro-
duced by Charles Grey; it failed, but the same Grey was to obtain passage of the
First Reform Bill thirty- five years later. As in other countries, so in England, there
were upper- class “Jacobins,” men who sometimes from conviction, sometimes
from eccentricity, and sometimes from factiousness, set themselves in opposition
to the views of the government, and the predilections of the established order. In
general, however, their contacts with popular discontent were desultory at best. The
Whig Friends of the People had no desire to mix with men of lower station, and
the true radicals felt for them neither confidence nor respect.
8 See above, 477–91, 537–39, 565–88, 654–58.