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1820 en Grande-Bretagne et dans le monde: radicalisme, conspiration et révolution

1820: A Year of Conspiracies

Gordon Pentland
p. 165-187

Abstracts

Malcolm Chase’s magisterial 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom provided a powerful and richly contextualised account of the complex interactions of high and popular politics in a year of crisis. This article explores the ways in which conspiracy had been a key component of the politics of both governors and governed over the preceding decade and examines its rhetorical and tactical uses by radicals and by ministers. It ends by suggesting that 1820 may have been the high-water mark of conspiracy in British politics–another way in which the crucial period between the Peterloo massacre and the Queen Caroline crisis was an important turning point.

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Author's notes

I would like to thank the organisers of and participants in the journée d’études ‘1820: Perspectives on a Year of Crisis in the British and Irish Isles’ in March 2021 at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and the symposium ‘Conspiracy and Politics in Nineteenth-century Europe’ in November 2016 at the University of Cambridge for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Full text

  • 1 Chase, Malcolm, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester Universi (...)

1Malcolm Chase’s powerful and richly contextualised account of the crisis year of 1820 is brimming with conspiracies.1 Political actors at all levels were quick to see plots hatched by their adversaries. Ministers feared domestic and at times international conspiracies to overturn the state, especially in 1816-17 and 1819-20. Under particular circumstances, radicals did associate to upend the government and at the same time highlighted the government’s use of spies to entrap the unwary as part of a wider ministerial conspiracy against liberty. As 1820 ended, the controversy around Queen Caroline brought into sharp focus the notion of ministerial conspiracy. This article is an effort to collect together these different events and experiences to see whether the lens of conspiracy can bring anything useful to Chase’s account of this important year.

  • 2 Roberts, J. M., The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), 314.
  • 3 Roberts, Mythology, 214.

2Conspiracy is not a theme that has received a great deal of attention within the historiography of modern British politics. Great Britain is all but absent from J. M. Roberts’ classic account of a particular set of conspiracy theories. These revolved around masonic or semi-masonic secret societies that aimed at the overthrow of the European political and social order and were especially prominent in the period under review: “Within ten years of 1815 they reached and fell from the peak of their strength, influence, and diffusion.”2 For Roberts, this exceptionalism was explained by the peculiar nature of its freemasonry, the relative openness of its political culture, and “the comparative sanity of the English educated classes.”3 The same range of factors did not, however, act as an effective prophylactic against a rather more diffuse sense that conspiracies could be held to explain political life.

  • 4 Calhoun, Craig, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the (...)

3This article will examine that sense of conspiracy between 1812 and 1820, roughly the first third of the period that marked, for Roberts, the high point of the sort of politics he analysed for continental Europe. This is perhaps rarely taken as a period in itself, though it was used by Craig Calhoun in an influential account to mark “the ascendancy of English populism,” a political term closely associated with conspiracy.4 The period under review began with the assassination of a prime minister in the context of Luddite protests and a pervasive sense of instability in 1812. It ran through E.P. Thompson’s “heroic age” of popular radicalism, incorporating key episodes such as the Pentrich rising and, of course, the Peterloo massacre in 1819. And it ended with a cluster of events–the Cato Street Conspiracy, an abortive general rising and the tumultuous politics surrounding the return to England of Queen Caroline.

4The article makes the argument that this period–and 1820 in particular–constitutes the high-water mark of conspiracy within nineteenth-century British politics. At the risk of stating the obvious, this was in some senses simply a continuation of that obsession with conspiracy born in the French revolutionary decade, though for the most part without the threat of French invasion which had shaped earlier crises. Nonetheless, after 1812, whether we examine the writings and speeches of government ministers, local authorities and concerned citizens, or loyalist and radical journalists and activists, a generalised and pervasive sense of concern that combinations varying in size from small groups of individuals to the entire nation (and sometimes beyond), aimed at subverting the law, the constitution and religion is hard to avoid. One admittedly quite rough-and-ready way of substantiating this is to look at the relative frequency with which the word ‘conspiracy’ was deployed within one important political context, the houses of parliament (see figure 1). Like a lot of digital humanities tools, the Hansard Corpus serves partially to confirm a hypothesis, that the nineteenth-century high points in the use of the term were 1818 and especially 1820, with a significant drop thereafter. The subsequent high point, in the 1880s, focused overwhelmingly on discussion of Ireland and the titles of specific pieces of legislation.5

Figure 1: Relative Frequency of “conspiracy” in Hansard.

Figure 1: Relative Frequency of “conspiracy” in Hansard.
  • 6 Philp, Mark, “The Fragmented Ideology of Reform” and “Disconcerting Ideas: Explaining Popular Radic (...)

5To examine the wider use of conspiracy within British political culture across these years, the article looks at both governors and governed and then presents a focused discussion on the ‘year of conspiracies’ in 1820. One of the great advances in exploring the contested politics of the 1790s and beyond has lain in efforts to look at all actors within a single political culture and explore how they interacted. Most importantly, adopting this approach reveals the way in which radicalism or loyalism can be best understood: not as fully-formed and coherent ideologies, but as Mark Philp persuasively styles them, developing political practices seeking “a logic of confrontation.”6 This is all the more important for the theme under discussion here, because the conspiracy politics of one group were shaped and conditioned by the claims, actions and choices of the other.

Governors and Conspiracies

  • 7 Wells, Roger, Insurrection: The British Experience (Gloucester: Sutton, 1983).

6From 1812, many of those with responsibility at national and local level for the preservation of the king’s peace and the maintenance of stability, repeatedly traced the outline of a particular conspiracy, even if the personnel and location of it shifted over the years. Though fears of Jacobin conspiracies had been clear since the first half of the 1790s, and there had been acute concern around the prospect of an Irish rising, French intervention in the form of invasion had been key to both.7 Absence of real and credible invasion threats after 1805, coupled with a reconstituted radical movement and other forms of protest birthed conspiracies with different shape and content.

  • 8 Semmel, Stuart, Napoleon and the British (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004), 126.
  • 9 Pentland, Gordon, “‘Now the great man in the parliament house is dead, we shall have a big loaf!’: (...)

7Assassination was a key ingredient of their fears. Some of the explanation here, of course, lay with the assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, in the lobby of the House of Commons in May 1812. Certainly the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century provided numerous opportunities for Britons to discuss the ethics and nature of political murder, to the extent that “assassination figured prominently in the public imagination of early nineteenth-century Britain.”8 This discussion had largely focused on the figure of Napoleon–whether, for example, the kidnap and murder of the Duc d’Enghien made him an assassin and whether he could legitimately be the target of state-sponsored assassination himself–but Perceval’s murder provided an alarming domestic focus for such discussions. The immediate reaction of ministers and law officers was to ascertain whether John Bellingham had acted alone or was part of some wider conspiracy. Having satisfied themselves on this point by searching others for arms, both Houses moved very promptly on the following day to confirm that the murder had apparently been an “insulated act” unconnected with any wider conspiracy and to deliver a unanimous condemnation of the assassination. This was represented as a crime against both British and universal human values. George Canning, a former (and future) Foreign Secretary, was the first of many to condemn assassination as fundamentally un-English, as “foreign to the character and abhorrent to the feelings of Englishmen.”9

8In spite of the widely publicised message that Perceval’s murder was the act of a lone “deranged” individual and essentially non-political, these efforts failed to foreclose on wider notions of conspiracy. Governors in the localities could not help knitting together celebrations at Perceval’s death with a suspicion that Bellingham had not acted alone. Ralph Fletcher, a prominent and virulently anti-radical magistrate, could report:

  • 10 National Archives, London [hereafter TNA], Home Office Disturbances, HO 40/1, fols. 115-16, Ralph F (...)

The Loyalists here cannot accede to what is stated in the Public Prints–viz that Bellingham had no political motive for committing the foul deed. We here, from the general language of the disaffected and from some secret Information, of a Revolution […] expected to have taken place early in May, cannot refrain from entertaining an opinion that Bellingham’s motives were revolutionary.10

  • 11 For examples see TNA, Domestic Correspondence, HO 42/123, fol. 174, Anonymous to Prince Regent, 17 (...)
  • 12 The Prince Regent was returning from opening parliament when, according to Sidmouth in the House of (...)
  • 13 “A Letter to Henry Hunt, Esq … On the London Plots,” Political Register, 14 December 1816.

9Assassination threats remained common over the following years. George IV and the Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, were natural targets of these sorts of communication and they pepper the Home Office papers and other archives.11 If Perceval’s was the one clearly successful political assassination of the period in Britain, other apparent attempts kept the issue alive, as did widely-circulated news of European assassinations at key moments (the Duc de Berry’s murder in Paris in February 1820 in particular). The alleged “shots” fired at the Prince Regent’s coach in January 1817 seemed to put some flesh on the skeleton plot contained in threatening letters and demonstrated how ideas of conspiracy fed from one another.12 For the authorities, it provided some evidence that the contents of the king’s mailbox were not mere froth–real plots against his life existed, or could certainly be said to exist. The event was a reprise of a similar incident involving George III in 1795 and provided a neat pretext for a return to the atmosphere of the 1790s. The suspension of habeas corpus, the prohibition of seditious meetings and the establishment of committees of secrecy followed shortly afterwards. For radicals on the other hand, it was an opportunity for polemic, satire and ridicule. The conspiracy existed only in the overheated imaginations of government ministers, who had been, according to Cobbett, “absolutely pining and dying for a Plot!”13

  • 14 Devon Record Office [hereafter DRO], Sidmouth Papers, 152M/C1812/OH4-5, Major Seale to Lord Sidmout (...)

10Assassination was, however, the tip of the iceberg, most often seen, as it was by Fletcher, as one version of an exemplary or spectacular act intended to activate a wider conspiracy. Fear of this bigger threat was fully formed in 1812. Major Seale, for example, in command of troops around Sheffield, sent a portfolio to the Home Secretary with his analysis of the Luddite movement. It boasted (he wrote) a network of salaried delegates from Glasgow to London; members swore an oath similar to the one used by the United Irishmen in the 1790s; and conspirators could identify one another by means of an elaborate series of hand gestures and signs. The end game here was a “general rising”, this one to be achieved by staging disturbances in the north of England as a means of drawing troops away from London, before launching a full-scale rising in the metropolis.14 The details and location of this supposed plot changed over time, but its key structural features remained intact until 1820. More-or-less the same grand plan was feared in 1816-17 and from the winter of 1819.

  • 15 DRO, Sidmouth Papers, 152M/C1817/OH39, Duke of Northumberland to Lord Sidmouth, 21 March 1817.
  • 16 Southall, Humphrey, “Agitate! Agitate! Organize! Political Travellers and the Construction of a Nat (...)

11The outlines of these conspiracies, real and imagined, indicate certain key concerns among governors. Perhaps foremost was an unease about movement and itinerancy and the ability of dispersed groups and individuals to make connections with one another and communicate over distances. During the 1790s similar concerns had revolved around the idea of corresponding societies knitting themselves into a larger movement. Vastly and rapidly improved roads and cheap and efficient mail services represented further opportunities for radicals. This was most obvious in the dramatically increased volume and circulation of the radical press, perhaps the number one target of loyalist correspondence. The press had an organisational function itself, but this was augmented by the ability of leaders and activists to move more freely around the country. Such concerns were inflated from 1812, with recession and economic instability and then large numbers of returning servicemen increasing the sense of movement across the country. It provoked considerable unease and the appearance of “strangers” in any community was likely to exercise jumpy magistrates and Lords Lieutenant. The nervous correspondence from the Duke of Northumberland in 1817, for example, is fairly typical: “Several strange figures have been lately wandering about, who, when closely questioned, confess unwillingly they come from Lancashire and Yorkshire, and seem too much like delegates from certain Clubs.”15 More challenging still was apparently purposeful movement. Major Cartwright’s tours in 1812, 1813 and 1815, for example, were pioneering efforts using the explosion of new turnpike roads to draw together a “national movement.”16 He was closely watched throughout his travels.

  • 17 Perhaps the most explicit was TNA, PRO 30/29/6/11 fol. 1615, “One of the Fifty–Brutus” to Granville (...)
  • 18 Binfield, Kevin, ed., Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, (...)
  • 19 DRO, Sidmouth Papers, 152M/C1817/OH39, Duke of Northumberland to Lord Sidmouth, 21 March 1817.

12While there was credible evidence of real conspiracies, at the same time it was a radical strategy to play on the jumpiness of elites and to inflate their own numbers and the magnitude of the threat they represented by suggesting a connectedness that did not exist in reality. Just as the practice of groups of radicals loudly clapping to imitate musket reports was designed to mislead and unsettle, other activities might gesture towards conspiracies purely as a means of challenging the nerves of political elites. Threatening letters provide some evidence of this. For example, despite all of our evidence pointing to the assassin of Perceval as an unconnected individual, a number of letters both immediately following the event and for a couple of years afterwards, linked the writers, sometimes very explicitly, to Bellingham’s example.17 At the same time, Luddism was, as we know, a diverse collection of political actions and its character was regionally quite specific. The widespread adoption of the eponym “Ned Ludd” and its variants, suggested a coordinated strength that in reality did not exist.18 Similarly, chalked slogans–such as those that appalled the elderly Duke of Northumberland in 1817 “Now’s your time” and “Be ready”–were far more likely to be efforts to provoke and unnerve elites as they were to be genuine insurrectionary communications.19

  • 20 Saville, John, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University P (...)
  • 21 DRO, Sidmouth Papers, 152M/C1816/OH79, W. Smyth to Lord Sidmouth, 29 January 1816.

13We should not, however, overstate the degree of unease among governors, who can too easily be caricatured as paranoid alarmists. Many had lived through the atmosphere of the French Revolution and, through experiences such as the Irish rising in 1798 and the Luddite disturbances, had developed some tried and tested means of monitoring and managing apparent conspiracies. The Home Office’s small staff was the clearing house for communications from Lords Lieutenant, military officers in “disturbed districts” as well as magistrates and police forces. The personnel of the Home Office, as John Saville showed, was remarkably stable across the first half of the nineteenth century and this may well have affected how it responded to reports of conspiracies. As Robert Poole’s recent account of Peterloo demonstrates, they were certainly, on the whole, calmer and cannier than local authorities.20 While the expanded mail network from the 1780s provided opportunities for radical communication and organisation, it also provided opportunities for the state to monitor radical activity, ranging from issuing warrants for named individuals’ mail to blanket circulars instructing postmasters to forward any information they received relative to sedition. Ministers by no means believed all of it. Many letters to the authorities claiming to have information on plausible conspiracies were either ignored or sometimes dismissed and marked as “deranged.”21

  • 22 TNA, Home Office Correspondence (Scotland), HO 102/26, fols. 709-13, Alexander Maconochie to Lord S (...)

14Nonetheless, it did, at other times, seem appropriate to amplify the threat of radical conspiracies, even where the danger they represented was in reality limited. To attribute popular discontent to the conspiracies of a few deluded malcontents was an effective form of delegitimising popular protest and of justifying authoritarian measures. At times, there was considerable distance between the calm and measured way in which real plots were discussed in private correspondence and the melodramatic way in which they were presented to the public. There was, for example, a conspiracy on foot in and around Glasgow in the winter of 1816-17. It was riddled with informers reporting to both the Lord Advocate and police authorities in Glasgow and Edinburgh, who were confident that informers and their sources “had very much exaggerated the extent of the preparations” and that “no systematic plan for creating tumult has been formed.” None of this prevented the Lord Advocate from using what evidence he did have to telling effect in his maiden speech in February 1817, which defended the government’s suspension of habeas corpus. He painted a lurid picture of “the secret conspiracy in Glasgow,” which was in communication with societies in England, and then dramatically read out the oath by which it was bound together.22

Figure 2: Relative Frequency of “spies” in Hansard.

Figure 2: Relative Frequency of “spies” in Hansard.
  • 23 Fremantle, A. F., “The Truth about Oliver the Spy,” English Historical Review 47 (1932): 601-16; Mc (...)
  • 24 Using the Hansard Corpus, part of the SAMUELS project, https://www.english-corpora.org/hansard/ [ac (...)
  • 25 TNA, Home Office Correspondence (Scotland), HO 102/33, fols. 168-9, William Rae to Lord Sidmouth, 1 (...)

15Such knowledge of real conspiracies as did exist was largely gleaned from the use of spies and informers. The most notorious were John Castle (an informer around the Spa Fields events), George Edwards (who kept the government posted on the Cato Street Conspiracy) and above all W. J. Richards or “Oliver the Spy” (who had nudged the Pentrich rebels to action). The sensational exposure of the last of these in the Leeds Mercury in the summer of 1817 had profound consequences.23 Another relative frequency chart (see figure 2) demonstrates what historians already knew, that is how significant the alleged activities of spies were to parliamentary and to public debate in these years.24 The revelation of the identity of spies in the press did much to shape politics. From the government’s perspective, the media exposure threatened prosecutions that relied on informers of dubious social backgrounds. Informers might be used to gain intelligence, they might well play the part of agents-provocateurs, but the exposure and prosecution of men involved in plots could not rely on the testimony of spies alone, which was now pretty roundly suspected. For example, the Lord Advocate congratulated himself on securing numerous capital convictions at treason trials in 1820 with “not a single person offered as a witness who was either a spy, a socius criminis, or liable to the most remote suspicion.”25

  • 26 Parliamentary Debates, 1st series, vol. 36: 1016-23. For examples of the many prints deploying gree (...)

16The impact on radicals was similarly double-edged. In one sense the spectacular revelations of spying were a great public relations coup. They were taken as proof that governors imagined, invented, or magnified conspiracies. The “green bag” of tainted evidence became a widely recognised emblem for the secret conspiracies of governors and would figure prominently in the visual language of radicalism thereafter.26 At the same time, however, the publicity around the activities of spies doubtless contributed to an atmosphere which ensured that at points radicals acted more conspiratorially–employing secretive or coded communications to avoid entrapment–whether there were spies in their midst or not.

Radicals and Conspiracies

  • 27 See, for example Wade, John, The Black Book; or, Corruption Unmasked (London: 1820).

17Radicals, of course, had their own conspiracy theories of politics, in which this idea of government using agents-provocateurs to entrap the unwary featured prominently. More broadly, classics of radical literature were about “unmasking” or “unveiling” the true levers of power.27 The idea that the hidden and illegitimate manoeuvres of powerholders shaped the world ran from international politics and the “holy alliance”, through Westminster boroughmongers, activist groups such as the Vice Society and the Constitutional Association, down to the local level.

  • 28 Hazlitt, William, “The Character of Mr Cobbett,” The Fight and Other Writings, Tom Paulin ed. (Lond (...)
  • 29 Dyck, Ian, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), (...)

18Perhaps nowhere was such a worldview articulated more clearly or more trenchantly than in the work of William Cobbett, the most widely circulated journalist of the era who Hazlitt could call “a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.”28 Considerable efforts have been made to pin down and pigeonhole the politics of a man who published over twenty million words across his career. One point of absolute consistency in his work was a conspiratorial outlook, from which much of his journalism derived its punch. This was one of the key reasons that led Bill Rubenstein to argue that Cobbett is best understood as a “populist” in the vein of the 1890s US “People’s Party”, with its claims to represent the people as a whole against a range of ethnic, political, and economic special interest groups. In his early years as a loyalist, Cobbett railed against an international Jacobin conspiracy or sought to unveil the plots of the United Irishmen. During his subsequent career as the government’s most powerful critic, he highlighted and personalised a wealth of other conspiracies sustained by specific groups and often by named individuals. Boroughmongers, financiers and debt holders, evangelicals, Jews and quakers, Scotch feelosophers’ and political economists were among the targets of his prolific output across these years.29

19It was in exactly this period, through the medium of his cheap twopenny Political Register, that Cobbett drew together all of these interlocking conspiracies into their most persuasive form: “the THING.” This formulation appeared first in the spring of 1818, less than a year after Cobbett’s self-imposed exile to America (which in itself Cobbett could present as part of an ongoing government conspiracy against him as an individual):

  • 30 “On the absolute sway of the Great Seat Owners over King, Ministers and People,” Political Register(...)

Such is the government of England; such is the thing, which has been able to bribe one half of Europe, to oppress the other half; such is the famous “Bulwark of religion and social order,” which has surrounded itself with a permanent standing army of more than a hundred thousand men, and very wisely, for without such an army it could not exist a month.30

  • 31 Epstein, James, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (N (...)

20If a language of conspiracy pervaded the radical press and platform, conspiratorial actions are slightly more challenging to explain. Radicals had a range of resources available to them and, on the whole, demonstrated an overwhelming reliance on strategies that could be presented as “constitutionalist.” Given the flexibility of historical and contemporary understandings of the English constitution, that left them a good deal of space in which to operate and experiment. The constitutional right of petitioning, for example, could become something altogether more threatening if mass coordinated petitions could be presented in person at Westminster, and Robert Poole navigates these constitutional grey areas to great effect in his recent account of the run-up to Peterloo.31

21Political movements, of course, take shape around the forces that oppose them and there was a clear drift to conspiratorial and extra-legal ways of doing politics at certain points across this period. As radicals explored more effective ways of pushing the boundaries of existing rights–for example, by circulating printed petitions to generate mass or by circumventing stamp taxes by redefining the newspaper–ministers made efforts to define and harden the legitimate boundaries of these activities. Printed petitions were rejected as “unconstitutional” or “illegitimate.” In particular, the Six Acts at the end of 1819 were presented as “declaratory” by ministers. They were an effort to define and therefore police the boundaries of constitutional rights whose precise extent had been unclear, but which could no longer remain vague in the face of an insurgent and innovative radical movement. As this constitutional space for creative protest became more and more strictly defined, it made the move to more conspiratorial modes of politics all the more pronounced.

  • 32 “To Henry Hunt, Esq. Letter III,” Political Register, 11 April 1818.

22Observers like Cobbett were well aware that changes in the legal context helped to explain these shifts: “When the people, in answer to their humble petitions, were menaced with the dungeon and the gallows; then they, of course, ceased to have any hope from a peaceful and supplicating line of conduct.”32 Even without the impact of specific legislation restricting mass meetings, the manner in which politics had developed presented radicals with two options. Either they could maintain the commitment to mass action but behave more conspiratorially, whether their aims were the violent overthrow of the government or not, privileging secrecy and a healthy distrust of strangers, developing elaborate code words and secretive means of association. Or they could eschew all public contestation as instigated by spies, as Henry Hunt did in decrying the plan for simultaneous mass meetings in November 1819 as the plot of agents-provocateurs. Neither offered an especially promising way forwards.

A Year of Conspiracies

  • 33 Bew, John, Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (London: Quercus, 2011), 474.
  • 34 Gardner, John, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (...)
  • 35 Wilkinson, George Theodore, An Authentic History of the Cato-Street Conspiracy (London, 1820), vii; (...)

23All of this came to a head in the aftermath of Peterloo in this year of 1820. As the unintended outcome of their concerns about and their attempts to police conspiracies, both actual and imagined, ministers succeeded in making real conspiracies both more likely and less effective. With these conditions in place, they prompted an abortive performance of the pan-British conspiracy that had haunted them since 1812. We certainly should not overstate the omnipotence and confidence of those in authority. There were genuine concerns and there was a good deal of breathless and panicky correspondence across the winter of 1819-20. Castlereagh’s habit of taking dinner with two loaded pistols was not simple bravado.33 Looking across the Home Office papers and government correspondence, however, the events of 1820 do come across as a kind of controlled or at least a partially controlled explosion. The government knew, of course, about the Cato Street Conspiracy from start to finish and scholars have reached for theatrical metaphors in analysing the plot, John Gardner describing the conspirators as “a few half-starved men who were unwitting actors in a snuff drama.”34 The role of the informer George Edwards in driving the plot along; the insertion by him or by the permanent under-secretary in the Home Office of the false advertisement for a cabinet dinner at Lord Harrowby’s; the ambush and arrest of the conspirators in the loft at Cato Street and the trial and vilification of “a set of lawless wretches” was triumphant public proof that fears nursed from 1812 onwards had not been imaginary.35

  • 36 Pentland, Gordon, Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland, 1815-1820 (London: Pickering (...)
  • 37 Donnelly, F. K., “The General Rising of 1820: A Study of Social Conflict in the Industrial Revoluti (...)
  • 38 The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, H. J. C. Grierson ed. (London: Constable, 12 volumes, 1932-7), vol (...)

24The spectacular act of assassination, according to the script, was only supposed to be the event that triggered a wider conspiracy. Ministers had been waiting for the long-anticipated “general rising” from the winter of 1819 and there was a concerted effort to divine any links between London ultra-radical plots and the networks of Union Societies that had been arming and drilling nocturnally in the north of England and Scotland. Reports abounded that the Cato Street plot towards the end of February and (less plausibly) the assassination of the Duc de Berry (which had taken place at the hands of the saddler, Pierre Louvel, at the Paris Opera earlier in the same month) were to have sparked this wider insurrection and Sidmouth connected all of the dots: “It is certain that the Committees of the Disaffected in Leeds, Manchester, Carlisle and Glasgow expected to hear of a Blow having been struck in London last week.”36 When it came, abortively, a little over a month later, military forces were well deployed to meet its few flashpoints.37 From those in authority, there was almost a sense of relief, as though a boil had been lanced or, from Walter Scott, “the bubble seems to have burst and with a slighter explosion than could have been expected.”38

25For radicals, it was a telling demonstration of the limits of conspiracy. Militant radicalism was clearly well developed within individual communities. Entire towns and villages were deeply invested in the idea of a decisive confrontation or a rising. Pikes and evidence of active preparation that were abandoned were paraded around for months afterwards as evidence that the conspirators had been in earnest. From England and Scotland, there were reports of large groups turning out for what they thought was an insurrection, before vanishing. Looking through the various reports, misinformation and rumours hobbled the conspiracy. The Scots thought the English would rise first. The English were waiting for the Scots. Everyone was waiting for the stopping of the mail coaches, the national signal that was frequently reported as the practical indication that a rising had begun. Its unimpeded arrival ensured that the main towns and cities saw few turn out in arms. Smaller towns and villages around the major cities turned out only to find that Glasgow and Leeds were not in flames.

  • 39 Stevenson, John, A True Narrative of the Radical Rising in Strathaven, in Vindication of the Partie (...)
  • 40 TNA, Home Office Disturbances, HO 40/12, fol. 282, General Byng to Lord Sidmouth, 22 April 1820.

26As this indicates, the great challenge for radical activists was communication and coordination between these communities. That was difficult in fair conditions and nearly impossible in a context in which spies and agents-provocateurs were believed to be omnipresent. Paranoia within the radical movement is palpable within the Home Office and trial records. Radicals in the town of Strathaven to the south of Glasgow reported a man relaying that Glasgow was in flames and thousands were marching on the city from the north and the south.39 In Yorkshire, it was rumoured that “a well-dressed man” had acted as commander of those who had turned out at Grange Moor.40 Paranoia coupled with miscommunication hobbled the radical movement and contributed, perhaps decisively, to the inability to act effectively.

  • 41 Rogers, Nicholas, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), ch. (...)
  • 42 The Queen’s answer to the address of the loyal inhabitants of Paisley (Paisley: 1820).

27While these abortive risings exposed the limitations on conspiracy as a strategy, its use as an effective rhetorical weapon was rather confirmed by the cause célèbre of 1820, the return of Queen Caroline to recover her rights and her “trial” via a bill of pains and penalties in the House of Lords. One marked feature of the responses to Caroline was the characterisation of the opponents of the Queen as conspirators. In such a way, radicals made common cause with other political groups in an ostentatiously loyal and patriotic episode. They did so, too, using similar symbols, redeploying the liberty caps, for example, that had been prominent in 1819. Perhaps the symbol most commonly used to malign the King’s ministers in 1820 were the green bags in which documents were conveyed to and from parliament. These appeared in speeches and prints, they were burned in effigy in pro-Caroline demonstrations and they stood proxy for ministerial designs against the Queen’s claims and for the secret preparation of tainted evidence. In this guise, though, they were a continuation of radical critiques that had ministers actively conspiring to entrap and execute radicals from 1817.41 Indeed, responses to addresses to the Queen, many of them written by Cobbett, explicitly recycled these charges of a government conspiracy: “Violence there has been; but that has not originated with the People. It has been instigated by the enemies of the People. Secret agents and insidious emissaries have been busy in creating disloyalty, where it did not exist, and in producing treason where it would not otherwise be found.”42

  • 43 Wahrman, Dror, “Public Opinion, Violence and the Limits of Constitutional Politics,” Re-reading the (...)

28Dror Wahrman has suggested that the controversy and movement around Queen Caroline functioned as a kind of salve for the body politic, a “triumphant rehabilitation” of the political process. It did so partly by allowing radicals to airbrush their own recent conspiracies and reaffirm the reality of ministerial conspiracies. These had been levelled against radicals, then against the Queen and had now been decisively rejected by “public opinion.”43

Conclusion

29That is not, of course, to suggest any abrupt end to links between conspiracy and politics in nineteenth-century Britain after 1820. The value of conspiracy as a charge levelled against government was clear again during the reform agitation after 1830, which reprised ideas around an insidious cabal of boroughmongers and more specific plots such as Wellington and English ultras being in cahoots with Polignac and their French counterparts, or the Queen and other members of the royal household seeking to overawe William IV. It was an important part of Chartist rhetoric as well. For their part elites could point to the political unions after 1830 as little more than home-grown carbonari intent on overthrowing the government, while trade union investment in the idea of a general strike and the physical force dimension to Chartism ensured further actual conspiracies.

30It is hard to escape the idea, though, that after 1820 the weather changed. It is difficult to identify another period after this point when conspiracy was quite so central to the outlook of such a wide range of political actors. That is said with one very important caveat: that the same is almost certainly not true of politics in Ireland and in the wider British Empire. The short period which this article has examined has been seen as a transitional one within a number of historiographies of Great Britain (political, literary, and cultural). It is clear that three broad sets of changes may have acted as solvents of the kind of politics that peaked in 1820.

  • 44 Cookson, John E., Lord Liverpool’s Administration: The Crucial Years, 1815-1822 (Edinburgh: Scottis (...)
  • 45 Hilton, Boyd, “The Gallows and Mr Peel,” History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, T (...)

31First, within ‘high politics’ the years after 1820 saw the reconstruction of Liverpool’s government and the emergence of “liberal Toryism.”44 This involved a changed tone in government and, for example, important shifts in how political crime was defined and prosecuted. Robert Peel (Home Secretary from 1822) is often taken as emblematic of this change. As Boyd Hilton noted, his emphasis on “visibility and predictability” involved a rejection of the sorts of discretionary measures which had underpinned the conspiracy politics of the preceding decade: “God forbid that he should mean to countenance a system of espionage.”45 There was no very high turnover of Home Secretaries in subsequent decades, but there was even less turnover in the other personnel at the Home Office and doubtless this continuity helps to explain the longevity of the changed tone in central government.

  • 46 Chase, 1820, 204-6.

32Secondly, at the local level Malcolm Chase identified what he called a “quiet constitutional revolution” in the years around 1820, especially in England, where mechanisms like the reform of vestries saw a rapid take-off in the range of citizens involved in local government. This sits at the centre of his thesis of how stability was recalibrated in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars.46 By that reading the confidence of the British state in facing down and policing Chartist activity by 1848 was underpinned by processes that began not only with the Reform Acts of 1832, but in the immediate context of the period examined here. These same changes squeezed the spaces where conspiracies and fears of conspiracy could most fruitfully grow.

  • 47 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), ch. 16; McCalman (...)
  • 48 See, for example, Baines, Edward, History of the Reign of George III (Leeds: 4 volumes, 1820-23); M (...)
  • 49 Saunders, Robert, “Chartism from Above: British Elites and the Interpretation of Chartism,” Histori (...)
  • 50 Stedman Jones, Gareth, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832-1982 (Camb (...)

33Thirdly, historians of popular politics have long seen the 1820s as a transitional period, witnessing what E.P. Thompson called a “search for alternatives” premised on new approaches and an embrace of respectability.47 Indeed, journalists and activists began quite quickly to memorialise and thus distance the period between 1812 and 1820 as one marked by conspiracy alarms and “spy systems.”48 More widely there were broad changes in the languages used to discuss and analyse political and social life. The thought of men like Robert Owen, world views shaped by political economy and evangelical religion, and the categories that increasingly came to mark political debate from the 1820s–the rising “middle class” or sovereign “public opinion”–left less scope for analyses that attributed great changes and threats to small groups or individuals. In public, for example, politicians, ministers and those in authority were less likely to describe Chartism as a widespread political conspiracy and more likely to dismiss it as an aberrant and self-defeating social pathology.49 Radicals who, before 1820, could plausibly claim that their political exclusion rested on the self-interested machinations of a comparatively small number of individuals, had a numerically much more formidable target after 1832 in the form of a treacherous and self-interested middle class. Chartists, of course, had their conspiracy theory–of “a powerful and malevolent machine of repression, at the behest of capitalists and factory lords, essentially and actively dedicated to the lowering of the wages of the working classes through the removal of all residual protection at their command, whether trade societies, legal redress, poor relief or what survived of the representation of the interests of the working classes in local government”–but it had powerful competitors and became gradually less plausible during the 1840s.50

34Malcolm Chase persuasively presented 1820 as a turning point in a range of areas. This article has suggested that we might add a political culture deeply marked by conspiracy to his case. Conspiracy still had a role in British politics after 1820, but that year represented its nineteenth-century peak.

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Notes

1 Chase, Malcolm, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

2 Roberts, J. M., The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), 314.

3 Roberts, Mythology, 214.

4 Calhoun, Craig, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 4.

5 Using the Hansard Corpus, part of the SAMUELS project, https://www.english-corpora.org/hansard/ [accessed 9 July 2022].

6 Philp, Mark, “The Fragmented Ideology of Reform” and “Disconcerting Ideas: Explaining Popular Radicalism and Popular Loyalism in the 1790s” in his Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 11-39; 71-101.

7 Wells, Roger, Insurrection: The British Experience (Gloucester: Sutton, 1983).

8 Semmel, Stuart, Napoleon and the British (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004), 126.

9 Pentland, Gordon, “‘Now the great man in the parliament house is dead, we shall have a big loaf!’: Reponses to the Assassination of Spencer Perceval,” Journal of British Studies 51, 2 (2012): 340-63.

10 National Archives, London [hereafter TNA], Home Office Disturbances, HO 40/1, fols. 115-16, Ralph Fletcher to Henry Hobhouse, 15 May 1812.

11 For examples see TNA, Domestic Correspondence, HO 42/123, fol. 174, Anonymous to Prince Regent, 17 May 1812; Disturbances Entry Books, HO 41/4, fol. 23, David Scott to Lord Sidmouth, 19 February 1818.

12 The Prince Regent was returning from opening parliament when, according to Sidmouth in the House of Lords, “the glass of the carriage window had been broken by a stone, as some represented it, or by two balls, fired from an air-gun, as others stated it,” Parliamentary Debates, 1st series, vol. 35: 4. For a good account see Poole, Steve, The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 144-50.

13 “A Letter to Henry Hunt, Esq … On the London Plots,” Political Register, 14 December 1816.

14 Devon Record Office [hereafter DRO], Sidmouth Papers, 152M/C1812/OH4-5, Major Seale to Lord Sidmouth, 30 June 1812; Dinwiddy, John, “Luddism and Politics in the Northern Counties,” Social History 4, 1 (1979): 33-63.

15 DRO, Sidmouth Papers, 152M/C1817/OH39, Duke of Northumberland to Lord Sidmouth, 21 March 1817.

16 Southall, Humphrey, “Agitate! Agitate! Organize! Political Travellers and the Construction of a National Politics,” Transactions of the British Institute of Geographers 21 (1996): 177-93; Eckersley, Rachel, “The Drum Major of Sedition: The Political Life and Career of John Cartwright” (PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 1999), 187-220.

17 Perhaps the most explicit was TNA, PRO 30/29/6/11 fol. 1615, “One of the Fifty–Brutus” to Granville Leveson-Gower, 24 May 1812.

18 Binfield, Kevin, ed., Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 1-18.

19 DRO, Sidmouth Papers, 152M/C1817/OH39, Duke of Northumberland to Lord Sidmouth, 21 March 1817.

20 Saville, John, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 15-20; Poole, Robert, Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

21 DRO, Sidmouth Papers, 152M/C1816/OH79, W. Smyth to Lord Sidmouth, 29 January 1816.

22 TNA, Home Office Correspondence (Scotland), HO 102/26, fols. 709-13, Alexander Maconochie to Lord Sidmouth, 22 December 1816; Parliamentary Debates, 1st series, vol. 35: 728-30.

23 Fremantle, A. F., “The Truth about Oliver the Spy,” English Historical Review 47 (1932): 601-16; McKenzie, Kirsten, “Exit Pursued by a Bear: Oliver the Spy and the Imperial Context of British Political History, History Australia 13, 1 (2016): 80-94.

24 Using the Hansard Corpus, part of the SAMUELS project, https://www.english-corpora.org/hansard/ [accessed 9 July 2022].

25 TNA, Home Office Correspondence (Scotland), HO 102/33, fols. 168-9, William Rae to Lord Sidmouth, 15 July 1820.

26 Parliamentary Debates, 1st series, vol. 36: 1016-23. For examples of the many prints deploying green bags to highlight ministerial conspiracies see Cruikshank, George, Conspirators; or, delegates in council, 1 July 1817, British Museum Satires 12887; Marks, J. Lewis, A peep into the green bag or the secret committee of magnifiers, 27 February 1817, British Museum Satires 12868.

27 See, for example Wade, John, The Black Book; or, Corruption Unmasked (London: 1820).

28 Hazlitt, William, “The Character of Mr Cobbett,” The Fight and Other Writings, Tom Paulin ed. (London: Penguin, 2000), 129.

29 Dyck, Ian, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2-12; Rubinstein, William D., “British Radicalism and the ‘dark side’ of Populism,” Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History: Essays in Social and Economic History, William D. Rubinstein, ed. (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), 339-73; Pentland, Gordon, “William Cobbett’s Scottophobia,” Celts and their Cultures at Home and Abroad, Andes Alqvist, Pamela O’Neill eds. (Sydney: University of Sydney Celtic Studies Foundation, 2013), 251-65.

30 “On the absolute sway of the Great Seat Owners over King, Ministers and People,” Political Register, 28 March 1818; Livesey, Ruth, “Radicalism on the Cross Roads: William Hazlitt and William Cobbett,” William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment: Context and Legacies, James Grande, John Stevenson eds. (London & New York: Routledge, 2015), 77-92. As Livesey demonstrates, “THE THING” began to be capitalised from the subsequent issue in “A Letter To the Freemen of the City of Coventry,” Political Register, 4 April 1818.

31 Epstein, James, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Poole, Peterloo, ch. 5.

32 “To Henry Hunt, Esq. Letter III,” Political Register, 11 April 1818.

33 Bew, John, Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny (London: Quercus, 2011), 474.

34 Gardner, John, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 105. For another example, see Chase, 1820, 76-7.

35 Wilkinson, George Theodore, An Authentic History of the Cato-Street Conspiracy (London, 1820), vii; Chase, 1820, 76-84. Previous accounts have now been superseded by a comprehensive treatment in Gatrell, Vic, Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

36 Pentland, Gordon, Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland, 1815-1820 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 92. For de Berry’s murder see Skuy, David, Assassination, Politics and Miracles: France and the Royalist Reaction of 1820 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).

37 Donnelly, F. K., “The General Rising of 1820: A Study of Social Conflict in the Industrial Revolution” (PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield, 1975); Chase, 1820, ch. 4; Pentland, Spirit of the Union, ch. 4.

38 The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, H. J. C. Grierson ed. (London: Constable, 12 volumes, 1932-7), vol. 6: 175.

39 Stevenson, John, A True Narrative of the Radical Rising in Strathaven, in Vindication of the Parties Concerned (Glasgow: 1835), 4-5.

40 TNA, Home Office Disturbances, HO 40/12, fol. 282, General Byng to Lord Sidmouth, 22 April 1820.

41 Rogers, Nicholas, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), ch. 8; Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest, chs. 8-10; Zealoushead, Zachary, Plots and placemen, or, green bag glory: an historical melodrama in two acts (London: 1817); Oliver, William, Spies and Bloodites!!! The lives and political history of those archfiends Oliver, Reynolds & Co., treason-hatchers, green-bag-makers, blood-hunters, spies, tempters, and informers-general (London?: 1817?); Hunt, Henry, The green bag plot: being a detailed account of transactions which led to the suspension of the Habeas Corpus act (London: 1819).

42 The Queen’s answer to the address of the loyal inhabitants of Paisley (Paisley: 1820).

43 Wahrman, Dror, “Public Opinion, Violence and the Limits of Constitutional Politics,” Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century, James Vernon ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83-122.

44 Cookson, John E., Lord Liverpool’s Administration: The Crucial Years, 1815-1822 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1975); Hay, William, Lord Liverpool: A Political Life (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), ch. 10; Hilton, Boyd, A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 309-28.

45 Hilton, Boyd, “The Gallows and Mr Peel,” History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, Tim Blanning, David Cannadine eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 95.

46 Chase, 1820, 204-6.

47 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), ch. 16; McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Belchem, John, “Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Social History 6, 1 (1981): 1-32.

48 See, for example, Baines, Edward, History of the Reign of George III (Leeds: 4 volumes, 1820-23); Mackenzie, Peter, An exposure of the spy system pursued in Glasgow, during the years 1816-17, 18-19 and 20 containing the exploits of Richmond the spy (Glasgow: 1832).

49 Saunders, Robert, “Chartism from Above: British Elites and the Interpretation of Chartism,” Historical Research 81, 213 (2007): 463-84.

50 Stedman Jones, Gareth, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832-1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 173-4.

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1: Relative Frequency of “conspiracy” in Hansard.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/docannexe/image/10235/img-1.png
File image/png, 84k
Title Figure 2: Relative Frequency of “spies” in Hansard.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/docannexe/image/10235/img-2.png
File image/png, 87k
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References

Bibliographical reference

Gordon Pentland, 1820: A Year of ConspiraciesCaliban, 65-66 | 2021, 165-187.

Electronic reference

Gordon Pentland, 1820: A Year of ConspiraciesCaliban [Online], 65-66 | 2021, Online since 20 October 2021, connection on 28 November 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/10235; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.10235

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About the author

Gordon Pentland

Professor of History, Monash University. He has published widely on the political history of Britain, especially during the ‘age of revolutions’, including a recent collection, co-edited with Michael T. Davis and Emma Macleod, entitled Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions: Britain and the North Atlantic, 1793-1848 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). He is currently working on a new history of the reform crisis of 1830 to 1832.

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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