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THE “LEVEE EN MASSE” OF THE PEOPLE OF QUALITYBut the government did not have to do it alone. If the liberty of England was
shown in the latitude, all things considered, so long allowed to the voices of disaf-
fection, it was shown also in the alacrity with which the upper classes, on their own
estates and in towns and villages far from the capital, rushed on their own initia-
tive to uphold their way of life. “The hands of Government must be strengthened
if the country is to be saved,” wrote Lord Grenville, the Foreign Secretary, to his
brother the Marquis of Buckingham during the crisis of November 1792; “but,
above all, the work must not be left to the hands of Government, but every man
must put his shoulder to it, according to his rank and station in life, or it will not
be done.”^35
On the Continent, from Holland to Naples, the conservative elements, when
they faced domestic agitation and foreign threats, showed little but helplessness
and bewilderment, or, indeed, counted on Great Britain for protection. One Ger-
man journalist, dreading Cisalpinization in 1797, could think of nothing to recom-
mend to his readers except to keep calm and trust the authorities. In England
matters were different. Here the government could call for an arming of the people
without serious trepidation. England, with the possible exception of Catalonia,
was the one country that saw a kind of spontaneous mass rising of conservative
character. The aristocracy showed its powers of self- help.
There were four things that England must do, wrote William Eden, Lord Auck-
land, from his post at The Hague, in November, as Dumouriez’ republican hordes
swept over the Low Countries. It must work for a pacification in Europe. It must
prepare its navy. It must put down internal sedition. And it must bring English-
men of all classes to a due sense of “the blessings which they are risking in pursuit
of a bubble.”^36 This should be done, he said, by proclamations to the people, by
speeches in Parliament and discourses in the pulpit. Many other methods were
soon found.
We must do something, said the Marquis of Buckingham, “to reconcile the
lower ranks of people to our Constitution, and to their situation under it.”^37 Here,
implicitly, was a recognition of the deep social alienation expressed by the working
people of Sheffield, when they said that the Constitution was nothing to them
since they were nothing to it. There was not much, however, that the marquis had
to propose, beyond the lightening of certain taxes, the repeal of the law of 1773
requiring laborers to work six days a year on the roads, and an amendment of those
features of the Poor Laws which prevented laboring people, if it seemed that they
might become public charges, from moving about freely from place to place in
search of work. In effect, with one notable exception, nothing was done in the way
of actual concessions to allay popular discontent. In 1793 a few concessions were
made to property- owners among the Catholic Irish, in the hope of preventing
35 Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George III... by the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, 2
vols. (London, 1853), I, 228.
36 Gt. Brit., Hist. MSS. Comm., Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Preserved at Dropmore, 10 vols.
(London, 1892–1927), II, 342.
37 Ibid., 327.