732 Chapter XXX
ment of character from which his public reputation never recovered. To take an-
other example, in 1797 about fourteen hundred Frenchmen landed on the coast of
Wales under the command of an American adventurer in the French service, Wil-
liam Tate, a “democrat” from South Carolina. The invasion was a fiasco; the Welsh
did not rise in the insurrection to which they were invited; the enemy was soon
disarmed and captured by volunteer companies that rushed to the scene. It was the
events that followed that were significant—more treason trials, false evidence, and
local persecution, not of the coal workers and rural laborers of whom no one was
afraid, but of the Dissenters and Methodists who were detested by upholders of
the establishment, and of farmers and tradesmen who, especially in Wales, re-
mained obstinately outside the Church of England.^43
Meanwhile the country was flooded with reading matter. John Bowles, of the
Association against Republicans and Levellers, published early in 1793 his Real
Grounds for the Present War with France. It went through several editions, and it
introduced into historiography, since many historians continued to repeat it, the
idea that the French Convention, in offering aid “to all peoples wishing to recover
their Liberty” on November 19, 1792, had actually intended to subvert and revolu-
tionize all governments, including the British. John Reeves, of the same Associa-
tion, wrote his Thoughts on the English Government Addressed to the Quiet Good Sense
of the People of England. It found the French Jacobins to be much like the old
English Puritans, and propounded the theory that the French Revolution and the
Protestant Reformation were the twin sources of the evils of modern times. Wil-
liam Playfair, in 1795, published his History of Jacobinism, Its Crimes, Cruelties, and
Perfidies, in which he neglected to mention that he had once been involved in Paris
in the French Revolution himself. At Edinburgh, where Playfair’s brother was an
eminent scientist at the university, there was a good deal of apprehension, since the
faculty was alarmed by the radical sentiments and democratic preaching of Presby-
terians outside the official Church. John Robison of Edinburgh University, as al-
ready mentioned several times, gave warning to the public in his Proofs of a Con-
spiracy against All Governments and Religions. Edmund Burke, when it seemed that
Pitt might sign a treaty with the French Directory, wrote his uncompromising
Letters on a Regicide Peace. George Canning edited the Anti- Jacobin Review. Wr it-
ings of French emigrés were translated; indeed the English edition of Barruel an-
tedated the French. Mallet du Pan’s pamphlets were also translated; in 1799 he set
up in England, with a government subsidy, and published his British Mercury to
attack the French Revolution. An obscure tract by the Italian Barzoni came out in
English, the Romans in Greece. It held that the French in Italy were nothing but
plunderers. Someone found and translated a shocking work by the German Count
von Soden, who had left the Prussian civil service because he disapproved of the
Prussian policy of neutrality. It was a tale of French atrocities in Franconia. The
republican soldiers (called Huns) were said to frequent “Jew taverns”; they seized
43 F. Knight, The Strange Case of Thomas Walker: Ten Years in the Life of a Manchester Radical (Lon-
don, 1957); Commander E. H. Stuart Jones, R.N., The Last Invasion of Britain (Cardiff, 1950); A.
Davies, “La Révolution française et le Pays des Galles,” in Annales historiques de la Révolution française
No. 140 (1955), 202–12.