London Corresponding Society

From the beginning, the LCS was viewed with suspicion by the British government, and was infiltrated by spies on the government payroll. In addition to domestic subversion, the state authorities feared collaboration with French agents, against whose entry and circulation within the country they had introduced the Aliens Act of 1793.[7] Partly in response to the surveillance, but also in deference to democratic principle, the society adopted a decentralised structure. The LCS organised in "divisions"[8] each comprising neighborhood "tithings" of not more than ten members. Each division met twice a week to conduct business and discuss historical and political texts.[9] In contrast to some of Whig-establishment reform clubs, the organization as a whole provided a sense of present action, allowing all subscribers to participate in open debate, and to elect members to leadership positions such as tithing-man, divisional secretary, sub-delegate, or delegate.[8]

By 1793 sister societies had emerged in Ireland, Scotland, and the English provinces: in Manchester, Norwich, Sheffield, and Stockport.[10]

By May 1792 the LCS comprised nine separate divisions, each with a minimum of thirty members. The height of its popularity in late 1975 it may have had between 3,500 and 5000 member orgnised in 79 divisions[11][12] In contrast to the SCI with its annual 4 guinea subscription, in levying just a penny a week the LCS opened its proceedings to workers of almost every condition. Those, however, with craft skills that gave them sufficient independence to protect them from the political disapproval of employers or of customers–shoemakers, weavers, watch and instrument makers and the like–took the leading role.[13]

While the LCS remained primarily a forum for "a politically conscious and articulate artisan population",[12] men of a more prominent social and professional standing did join, drawn in many cases from existing debating societies.[14] They brought with them important political connections and skills. Barristers such as Felix Vaughan and attorneys like Joseph Gerrald were especially useful given near continuous entanglement of members in court proceedings. But the Society's egalitarian constitution accorded them no definitive preference. Hardy in particular was wary of placing them in positions of authority lest ordinary members be discouraged from "exerting themselves in their own cause".[12]

The Society had an early celebrity recruit, the ex-slave, free West-Indian black and abolitionist, Olaudah Equiano. In 1791-92, Equiano was touring the British Isles with his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African. Drawing on abolitionist networks he brokered connections for the LCS, including what may have been Society's first contacts with the United Irishmen.[15] In Belfast, where his appearance helped defeat plans to commission vessels in the port for the Middle Passage, Equiano was hosted by the leading United Irishman, publisher of their Painite newspaper the Northern Star, Samuel Neilson.[16]

Paine subscribed to the Society; as did the radical poet William Blake; Joseph Ritson the noted antiquarian and founder of modern vegetarianism; and Basil William Douglas, Lord Daer, who held concurrent membership of the Society for Constitutional Information and the Scottish Association of the Friends of the People.

Despite such notaries, the Government were assured by their most trusted informer, "'Citizen' Groves", that the real body of the club was made of "the very lowest order of society".[17] They took little persuading that within the LCS English Jacobins were leading on the equivalent to the sans-culottes of the revolutionary Paris sections. Some of the working class membership did take the republican doctrines of Paine to their extreme, posing the claims of an absolute political democracy against those of monarchy and aristocracy.[18]

At the end of November 1792 the LCS published an "Address of the London Corresponding Society to the other Societies of Great Britain, united for obtaining a Reform in Parliament" expressing confidence in the prospects for obtaining a reformed, democratic franchise through "moral force."[21] [22] A national "Convention " was called for Edinburgh in December.

The LCS delegates' host in the Scottish capital, and perhaps the most "left-wing" delegate present, Thomas Muir of the Society of the Friends of the People, himself said nothing that was not strictly constitutional. An address which he presented from the United Irishmen was made acceptable to the Convention only by redacting any suggestion of "Treason or Misprison of Treason against the Union [of Scotland] with England".[23] Beginning with the title "Convention", and including an oath to "live free or die", the "imitation of French forms" did cause the authorities some alarm. Minor prosecutions were instituted.[5]

By the time LCS delegates attended their second reform convention in Edinburgh in October 1793, the political climate had changed dramatically. From February 1, 1793 the Crown was at war with the new French Republic so that any association with Paris or defence of its policies, foreign or domestic, was regarded as treasonable. In May 1793 the House of Commons refused by 282 votes to 41 even to consider petitions asking for reform.[5]

At a time when reformers were beginning to mobilise a broad swath of opinion in Britain in favour of a reformed Parliament and a strictly constitutional monarchy, they were being forced, by their early embrace of the French revolution, to defend policies in France they did not advocate at home: the execution of the king and of regime opponents, the confiscation of the property of the Church and nobility. Against the institution of the Terror, the French Republic paid no head to the entreaties in Paris of Thomas Muir or, from his place in the French National Convention, of Thomas Paine.

After Muir returned to Scotland, he was charged with treason. Although the evidence presented in court amounted to little more than a reiteration of his political opinions, in August 1793 a jury of landlords upheld the charge and Muir was sentenced to 14 years transportation. Convicted of sedition, the same fate befell the secretary of a second Edinburgh convention in October, 1793, William Skirving, and two LCS delegates attending, Joseph Gerrald and LCS chairman Maurice Margarot.[24] Margarot (a wine merchant who had lived the first year of the revolution in France) alone survived to return to England in 1810.  

Frontispiece for LeMaitre's 1795 book

The weight of repression had substantially reduced popular societies in the provinces. In London, Hardy and Margarot's successor as chairman, John Baxter, undaunted, had drawn up addresses to "the friends of peace and parliamentary reform" and to "His Majesty" calling for an end to the war against France.[25] Prime Minister, William Pitt, responded by having the papers of the London societies seized and examined by a secret committee of the House of Commons.[26]

In May 1794, hard on the Committee's "Report on Radical and Reform Societies",[27] charges of treason were laid against Hardy, the poet, public lecturer and journalist John Thelwall, and sometime parliamentary candidate John Horne Tooke. Their trials in November misfired. The juries in London were not as ready as those in Edinburgh to accept the mere expression of political opinion as evidence of plots against King and Parliament. When the evidence running to four printed volumes failed to impress in the case of Hardy, the courts were unable to take seriously the charges against his associates: Horne Tooke jeered at the Attorney-General and clowned in the dock, and the Lord Chief Justice slept through the prosecution's summary against Thelwall.[5]

The process did deliver Hardy a blow: during his trial his wife was attacked in their home by a loyalist "Church and King mob" and subsequently died in childbirth.[28] On his release, Hardy did return to his position in the Society.

During the course of these trials a further three members of LCS, Paul Thomas LeMaitre, John Smith, and George Higgins, were arrested as accomplices in the so-called "Popgun Plot", an alleged conspiracy to assassinate King George III by means of a poison dart fired from an airgun.[29] In May 1796, their cases similarly collapsed.[30]

The reformers were not allowed to celebrate their victory. The LCS bookseller John Smith provocatively renamed his shop The Pop Gun, and sold a pamphlet that explained that the government required three instuments: 1) soldiers ("by profession slaughters", 2) clergymen (who "hallow with the sanction of Divinity state robbery"), and 3) lawyers (who "thrive on misery" and are the "tyrants of property"). He was given two years hard labour on bread and water for seditious libel.[19]

The government's considered response to their humiliation in the courts was to introduce the so-called "Gagging Acts": the 1795 Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act). These made writing and speaking as much treason as overt acts, made inciting hatred of the Government a "high misdemeanour", and required licences for public meetings, lectures and reading rooms.[31] These restrictions, with the encouragement given to magistrates to use public order powers to close taverns and bookshops regarded as centres of radical activity, wound down the Society extensive publishing programme--some eighty separate pamphlets and broadsides and two periodicals down[2]--and, in general, "hamstrung" its propaganda activity.[5]

In advance of the treason trials, habeas Corpus had been suspended and six members of the Society detained, including the bookseller and advocate of common ownership of the land, Thomas Spence. Invoking the presence of "a traitorous and detestable conspiracy ... formed for subverting the existing laws and constitution, and for introducing the system of anarchy and confusion which has so fatally prevailed in France", in May 1794 Parliament had allowed the Privy Council to direct detentions "any law or statute to the contrary notwithstanding"[32]

LCS speakers address the crowds at Copenhagen Fields, 1795

Weariness with the war combined with failed harvests triggered renewed protest: in summer of 1795 crowds shouting "No war, no Pit, cheap bread" attacked the prime ministers residence in Downing Street and surrounded the King in procession to the Opening of Parliament.[5] The Society was growing again: from 17 divisions in March to 79 in October. General Meetings were attended by tens of thousands.[33]

The LSC called a "monster meeting" for November 12 at Copenhagen Fields, Islington. Veteran reformers Joseph Priestley and  Charles James Fox, joined Hardy's successor as LCS secretary John Ashley (another shoemaker); chairman John Binns (a plumber’s labourer), John Gale Jones (surgeon), and John Thelwall in addressing crowds estimated at upwards of 100,000. For the Society, Binns and Ashley declared that should British nation, in the face of "the continuation of the present detestable War; the horrors of an approaching Famine; and above all, the increased Corruption, and Inquisitorial measures" of the Government, "demand strong and decisive measures", the London corresponding Society would be "the powerful organ" ushering in "joyful tidings of peace ... universal suffrage and annual parliaments".[34]

But the rally in LCS membership and activity was brief. The problem was not alone Pitt's "reign of terror".

As "the immediate leader of popular opinion" there had been no rival to Paine. But following the purge and mass execution of the Girondins in June 1793, in France Paine found himself a prisoner of the revolution he had defended. In prison, and prior to an obscure American exile, he had produced his second great work, published in 1796 and 1797. Without "regard to the dictates of prudence, The Age of Reason submitted the Christian bible and churches to the same type of deconstructive logical analysis to The Rights of Man had submitted monarchy and aristocracy. Only "the broadest-minded Unitarian could tolerate it, and the dissenters [the Non-Conformists] who till then had been consistent if timid recruits to the reform movement, were henceforth as horrified as the bishops themselves".[5] Already in 1795 disgruntled Methodists had withdrawn from the LCS to form the Friends of Religious and Civil Liberty.[12]

The government's closure of peaceful avenues for reform agitation, and the prospect of French assistance, encouraged a radical rump to consider the threat implicit in the Copenhagen Fields address: physical force. In this, they were supported by the United Irishmen.[35] In the summer of 1797, following the Spithead and Nore mutinies, in which the government had been quick to see the hand of radical societies, the Irish priest James Coigly arrived from Manchester. In Manchester Goigly and a cotton spinner from Belfast, James Dixon, had helped convert the town's Corresponding Society into the republican, United Englishmen. Bound by a test that promised to "Remove the diadem and take off the crown ... [and to] exalt him that is low and abuse him that is high".[36] the United men went on to organise in Stockport, Bolton, Warrington and Birmingham.[37]

Presenting himself as an emissary of the United Irish executive in Dublin, Coigly met with leading members of the LCS, among them the Irishmen Edward Despard, the brothers Benjamin and John Binns, and the Society's chairman Alexander Galloway (in protest against the violent turn in rhetoric, his predecessor Francis Place had resigned). Meetings were held at Furnival’s Inn, Holborn, where United delegates from London, Scotland and the regions were reported to have committed themselves "to overthrow the present Government, and to join the French as soon as they made a landing in England"[37] (in December 1796 only weather had prevented a major French landing in Ireland).

In March 1798 Coigly was arrested just as he was to embark on a return mission to Paris. Found on his person an address to the French Directory from the "United Britons". While its suggestion of a mass movement primed for insurrection had been scarcely credible, it was sufficient proof of the intent to invite and encourage a French invasion. Coigly was hanged in June.[37]

At the time of Coigly arrest, LCS was split on the question of the war, but with the majority on the Central Committee in favour backing the government against what they increasingly allowed was a tyrannical enemy. The French Directory had betrayed the revolution and the entire business coordinating with the Directory and the United Irish was a "destructive diversion". There was even a proposal to report the United Britons to the magistrates. But 19 April 1798, just as the Central Committee was meeting in a pub in Drury Lane to discuss which patriotic militia they might join, they were raided by the police. Sixteen were arrested, and several more in parallel raids on corresponding societies in Birmingham and Manchester. The LCS were never to attempt to meet again.[38]

The next day, 20 April, Pitt renewed the suspension of habeas corpus absolving the Government of the need to present evidence of complicity in Coigly's mission. A final "Parliamentary Act of 1799 "for the more effectual suppression of societies established for seditious and treasonable Purposes; and for better preventing treasonable and seditious practices", referenced and banned the LCS by name.[39]

Despard, who had protested a betrayal of the United Britons as "dishonourable", was charged, convicted and executed for treasonable association with their remnants--the so-called Despard Plot--in 1803.