A History of Britain, Volume 3 by Simon Schama

was taken. The militia was called out in 10 counties, but they looked the other way when the target of the mob was the radicals. Presses were smashed; literature deemed ‘seditious’ taken and burned. Cartoonists like the genius James Gillray were hired to show, as graphically as possible, what would happen should a revolution happen in Britain. John Reeves, a sometime chief justice of Newfoundland now returned to Britain, was so disturbed by the brazenness of the clubs that in November 1792 he founded his own Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Levellers and Republicans ‘to support the Laws, to suppress seditious Publications and to defend our Persons and Property’. As well as arming loyalists, the Association promoted the publication of tracts specifically to disabuse credulous working men of the views of Paine. Once war with the French had broken out in February 1793 a whole new seam of neurosis about the consequences of a French republican invasion could be richly mined. One of the tracts featured a patriotic master taking the time and effort to explain to his gullible apprentice just how wicked and dangerous Paine’s opinions were. ‘Right Master,’ replies his journeyman, overcome with gratitude. ‘I thank you for explaining all this and instead of going to the Liberty Club I will begin my work for I should not like to see the Frenchmen lie with my wife or take the bread out of my children’s mouths.’ The evangelical Hannah More, whose reputation had been built on improving literature for children, now took it on herself to supply timely patriotic definitions for all ages. Her
Village Politics
(1793) has ‘Jack Anvil’ explain to ‘Tom Hod’ that a democrat was ‘one who likes to be governed by a thousand tyrants and yet can’t bear a king’. The
Rights of Man
prescribed ‘battle, murder and sudden death’ and a ‘new patriot’ was ‘someone who loves every country better than their own and France best of all’.
    If, despite all the intimidation and danger, you were a committed ‘Friend of the People’ in the stormy years of 1792–3 what were your options? If you were prudent, and mistrustful of the excesses of Paine-ite revolutionary enthusiasm, you might make Thomas Bewick’s choice and decide to button your lip, hunker down and hope that at some time, preferably in the not too distant future, British common sense, public decency and justice
would
prevail. In the meantime he would content himself with reading the local radical newspaper,
The Oeconomist
(distributed in London by, of course, Joseph Johnson); or relish the ferociously satirical attacks on Pitt in, say, his old friend Thomas Spence’s
Pigs’ Meat, or Lessons from the Swinish Multitude
(1793–5); get on with his birds and beasts, and smuggle, for those who wanted to look carefully between the illustrations, images of brutality, misery, daring and death. Or, from the relative safety of a Hepplewhite chair in your club, you might cheer on the dwindling band of ‘New Whigs’ in parliament – Fox, Sheridan, Charles Grey and Shelburne – who persisted in opposition to measures infringing the freedom of press or suspending habeas corpus and who refused to recant their benevolent views about the French Revolution. Or, if you were very brave, very angry or very drunk on revolutionary optimism you might take the plunge and join one of those artisans’ clubs where you could drink rounds to the health of Paine, the imminent realization of a British republic and the death of despots. Given the ubiquitousness of government spies, you would be putting yourself in jeopardy, even for unguarded toasts. When John Thelwall, now the prime orator of the London Corresponding Society, swiped the froth off a head of beer and remarked (according to a spy), ‘This is the way I would serve up kings,’ the joke would come back to haunt him in the Old Bailey.
    There was another option, of course: leaving Britain altogether.