726 Chapter XXX
mentary reform might prevent radicalism, and while uninvolved in the popular
clubs generally felt for them a tolerant attitude. Others, led by the Duke of
Portland, and including Burke, William Windham, and Sir Gilbert Elliot, had
urged Pitt to control seditious writings and associations, and even, in November
1792, to go to war against France. What the British ministry needed, said Burke,
was a “basis in the strong permanent Aristocratical interests of the country.”^29 A
third group of Whigs, conservative in home affairs, who could not go along with
Fox, or “with men who call on 40,000 weavers to dictate political measures,” had
nevertheless been afraid, six weeks before the war began, that public opinion
would not support it. The aristocratic Whigs joined Pitt’s government in a coali-
tion in 1794. The Duke of Portland became Home Secretary, Windham Secretary
at War, and Elliot, as explained in Chapter XXIV, Viceroy of Corsica at £ 8,000
a year. It was the coming of these Whigs, as Keith Feiling once said, that made
the Tory party conservative.
The acquittals of 1794 gave encouragement to the London Corresponding So-
ciety, whose minutes show increasing attendance at its general meetings through
- In England as in France the war produced food shortages and rising prices,
so that immediate economic grievances were now added to a general social mal-
aise and a bitter class consciousness as sources of discontent. The society had per-
haps as many as 5,000 members in London in 1795. It served as a nucleus for
mass meetings and public demonstrations, usually orderly, for, as a recent British
writer has put it, plebeian politics had come a long way since the days of Wilkes
and the hooliganism of No Popery mobs. In October 1795 the most enormous
crowd that anyone could remember, estimated at 200,000 persons, swarmed in the
streets to watch the procession for the opening of Parliament. With hoots for the
dukes and earls, and with cries of “Bread! Bread! Peace! Peace!” the populace
pressed closely about the king’s own coach, in which “a small pebble, or marble or
bullet broke one of the windows.”^30 The king was extricated with difficulty amid
the hisses of his subjects.
The government, now reinforced by the Portland Whigs, and with popular agi-
tation after three years showing little sign of abatement, proceeded at once to se-
verer measures. Parliament passed two bills: the Treasonable Practices Act, which
greatly enlarged the definition of treason, and the Seditious Meetings Act, which
made it unlawful for gatherings to assemble to hear “lectures” except in the pres-
ence of some kind of officer of the law. Fox, Erskine, and some seventy others
voted against the two bills in the Commons. They argued that the London Cor-
responding Society had had nothing to do with the assault on the king, that to
deny lawful means of expression would produce more revolutionary sentiment
rather than less, and that the government was concocting imaginary dangers,
which was doubtful, in order to persist in an unpopular war, which was more nearly
true. The sponsors of the two bills were in a great majority. The state trials, they
said, had proved that some people wanted “representative government.” The young
Lord Mornington, not yet off to his conquests in India, complained of books de-
29 Quoted by Butterfield, “Fox and the Whig Opposition,” 319.
30 Annual Register for 1795 , Chronicle, p. 38; Maccoby, Eng. Radicalism, 93–94.