720 Chapter XXX
were over a hundred capital offenses in English law many others were hardly guilty
of serious misbehavior. From England and Scotland not many were deported on
political charges—indeed the “Scotch martyrs,” Muir, Palmer, Skirving, Gerrald,
and Margarot, may have been the only ones. Many deported as criminals, however,
were probably “democrats” also. In 1800 there were two thousand Irish political
offenders in New South Wales. Mutinous soldiers and sailors were also sent there.
On the whole, and with exceptions, these off scourings from the “Pitt terror” proved
to be useful citizens in both America and Australia. Vaughan received an honorary
degree from Harvard, and Cooper became president of a college. One of the
founders of the hospital at Sydney was a young medical officer involved in the
mutiny of the Nore. The first Presbyterian service held in Australia was conducted
by Thomas Muir, deported from Scotland in 1793 for sedition.^19
Clubs and Conventions
A popular democratic movement appeared quite suddenly in Britain in the course
of the year 1792. Clubs sprang up all over the country, sometimes called “popular
societies,” as in France, consisting of neighbors who met in taverns to talk about
the meaning of the French Revolution, the war beginning on the Continent, the
policy of the British government, and the vices of the idle rich. Two clubs came
especially into prominence in London. There was the Society for Constitutional
Information, to which Thomas Paine gave £1,000 received as royalty for his Rights
of Man. More important, and more popular, was the London Corresponding Soci-
ety. It was founded by Thomas Hardy, a master shoemaker who owned a shop
employing half- a- dozen skilled craftsmen. By his own account, Hardy, having
been interested in the American Revolution, and having observed the failure of
upper- class efforts to obtain Parliamentary reform a dozen years earlier, deliber-
ately decided to organize a more purely popular movement, to be carried on by
“tradesmen, shopkeepers and mechanics.” The immediate aim was to change the
mode of election to the House of Commons, but the impulse and the ultimate
goal were more broadly social, reflecting the deep resentments of “an industrious
class of men.” As he wrote to a correspondent in Scotland, explaining the origin of
the London society, with the rambling syntax of one unused to writing: he and his
friends had discussed “the low and miserable conditions the people of this nation
were reduced to by the avaricious extortions of that haughty, voluptuous and luxu-
rious class of beings who wanted us to possess no more knowledge than to believe
all things were created for the use of that small group of worthless individuals.”^20
19 For those going to America see the biographical dictionaries; for Australia, E. O’Brien, The
Foundation of Australia, 1786–1800: a Study of English Criminal Practice and Penal Colonisation in the
Eighteenth Century (London, 1937), 282–93, 321, 384; M. Roe, “Maurice Margarot: A Radical in
Two Hemispheres 1792–1815,” in Bulletin of the Inst, of Hist. Res. of Univ. of London, X X XI (1958),
68–79.
20 See the Manuscripts of Francis Place, British Museum, Add. MSS, 27,814 fol. 178. The fairly
sudden appearance of a popular radicalism in 1792 is evident in H. Butterfield, “Fox and the Whig
Opposition,” loc.cit.