1793] TRIALS FOR SEDITIOUS WRITINGS Trials for seditious writings, 1179 which declared guilty of high treason, firstly, all those who supplied any arms or military or naval stores to the enemy; secondly, all those who purchased lands in France, for the use of assignats rendered the sale of land the chief support of French finance, and the purchase of land was therefore regarded as indirectly strengthening the hands of the enemy; thirdly, it prohibited all intercourse with France without special license under the Great Seal; and fourthly, the insurance of French vessels by English merchants. The two first of these offences were to fall directly under the old law of Edward III., and to deprive those who were guilty of them of the advantages secured to them by the ameliorations of the law which had since been made, such as the right to employ counsel, and to be furnished with the list of the jury, the necessity of two witnesses to secure conviction, and the lapse of a certain period between the indictment and the trial. But it was chiefly in the prosecution for seditious meetings and seditious writings that the character of the Government showed itself. The best known of these in the year 1793 was that of Muir. This young man, a member of the Society of the Friends of the People, was indicted for spreading the works of Thomas Paine. He defended himself with great ability upon the ground that he had only aimed at the reform of Parliament. His speech was greeted with loud applause, but the Lord JusticeClerk summed up most strongly against him, and asserted the strange doctrine that the Government was made up of the landed interest. "As for the rabble," said he, "who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation on them?" He sentenced Muir to fourteen years' transportation. The severity of the judges and the frequent trials that the Government ordered had not the effect of checking the popular feeling. Delegates from various parts of Scotland, in concert with the Friends of the People and other societies, assembled at Edinburgh. The leading spirits were Maurice Margarot and Joseph Gerald, agents from London. These delegates assumed the name of a convention, spoke of the first year of the British Republic, and otherwise mimicked their French brethren. In December the law came upon them, and three of them, with Margarot and Gerald, were transported for fourteen years. Pitt resists the Up till this time the people as a whole had been heartily with Pitt; but the course of the year had tended to change their feelings, the war had been by no means the light growing desire undertaking expected, and it began to be seen that its continuation meant fearful expenses, heavy taxes, and a system of for peace, government but little in accordance with the general character of English administration. Some even of Pitt's old friends began to whisper of peace, but his will was not one to yield to opposition. In Parliament he was still supreme, and in this first beginning of difficulties he exhibited the greatness of his energy and his resources. He branded with fierce words, which reminded his hearers of his great father, all who dared to think of peace; he openly avowed that the idea was impossible till some total change took place in the French Government, thus putting his actions on their true basis. Backed by his commercial friends, he found means to continue the subsidies to Prussia and Austria, he purchased the adhesion of several of the smaller German states, induced the Spaniards to continue a war which was wholly against their own interests, and obliged the lesser Italian states to join the coalition; he even allowed Russia to perpetrate the second partition of Poland as a price of her neutrality. With such efforts as these he contrived to carry on his war; it was not unreasonably that he became the ogre of the French, the one object of their insatiable hatred. and continues for seditious At home he would not abate one jot of his policy. Again the prosecutions went forward. So little had the late action the prosecutions of Government been successful that discontent and the writings. intrigues of the societies were becoming even more envenomed. The English had taken a leaf out of the Scotch book; two of the great societies-the Constitutional Society and the Corresponding Society-determined that they too would have a convention. It seems to have been a far more real and dangerous thing than the Scotch convention. The workmen were stirred up, meetings were held in all the great towns attended by delegates from London, revolutionary songs were composed and circulated, and a considerable number of weapons constructed and secreted. It was the intention of the Convention to overawe Parliament somewhat in the same way as the Jacobin Club overawed the French Assembly. The Government determined to act as strongly as possible against it, and instead of accusing the leaders of seditious practices merely, they thought it advisable to treat their conduct as a great and capital crime, and to bring them to trial for high treason. The leaders arrested were Hardy, Secretary of the Corresponding Society, Adams, Secretary of the Constitutional Society, Horne Tooke, the well-known opponent of Junius, the Rev. Jeremiah Joyce, author of the "Scientific Dialogues," and tutor to Lord Stanhope's sons, Theltical lecturer of some importance, and three others. A 1794] TRIALS FOR HIGH TREASON 1181 secret committee of the House, having examined their books and papers, reported that there were ample proofs of a traitorous conspiracy for overawing Parliament. Upon this report the Government advanced a step further, and in spite of the eager opposition of the minority, carried through the House the suspension of the Habeas Corpus. Trials for high treason followed both in England and Scotland. In Scotland the prosecution was successful, but the English trials did not go off so smoothly. Hardy was tried first on the 28th of October. Sir John Scott (afterwards Lord Eldon) conducted the prosecution; but although the evidence, if true, tended to show that language of a most seditious character had been used, and weapons and plans of insurrection made, yet the skill and eloquence of Erskine, who laid his chief stress on the grave constitutional danger of any enlargement of the Treason Act, procured an acquittal. The Government was not satisfied, Horne Tooke was also tried. He defended himself with his usual effrontery and humour, and again an acquittal was obtained. Still the Crown persisted, and Thelwall the lecturer was tried; again the accused was acquitted. The excitement about the trials was intense, the speeches of the rival barristers were listened to with extreme interest, and the acquittals were hailed with the wildest enthusiasm. It was plain that a considerable change had taken place in the feelings of the people; the strings of repression had been drawn too tight; the line between class and class was becoming more sharply marked. Portland and his friends join July 1794. the ministry. The same fact is rendered obvious by the completion in this year of the consolidation of the new Tory party. Ever since the middle of 1792 the Duke of Portland and his friends had voted with Government, but they now openly joined it, and were admitted to some of the best places. The Duke of Portland became Secretary for the Home Department, Earl Fitzwilliam Lord President, and Mr. Wyndham Secretary at War. The one point which connected the new recruits with the ministry was the determination all felt to carry on the war. Pitt was therefore hampered in two directions. When Parliament was opened on the 13th of December 1794, there appeared to be a growing feeling in favour of peace, and Pitt found himself opposed to many Desire for of his old friends, the country gentlemen; but his union peace. with the Duke of Portland and his party rendered a change of policy at present impossible. He was in the hands of the war party; afraid of losing their support, and buoyed up by an idle belief in the financial exhaustion of France, he determined still to carry on t war vigorously. As he was quite paramount in Parliament1 in spite of an increased minority, he had no difficulty in getting leave to raise a loan of eighteen millions, and to guarantee another large loan to purchase the co-operation of Austria. He nevertheless slightly changed his tone, and confessed that he should be satisfied with a peace that gave him security, and allowed later in the session that there was a possibility of treating with the present Government of France. The Prince of Wales' marriage. April 8, 1795. Amongst other minor difficulties which he had to meet was the constant embarrassment of the Prince of Wales. Seven years before he had purchased the payment of his debts by a lie concerning his wife; he was now again £700,000 in debt; the only terms on which he could hope to get relieved were that he should marry legally, and the King had chosen for him a Princess of Brunswick whom he had never seen. Lord Malmesbury arranged the negotiation, but unwisely suppressed, what he saw clearly himself, the absolute unfitness of the lady for the position she was to occupy. He found her frivolous, slovenly, and quite deficient in tact. It was impossible but that she should be distasteful to any English gentleman. Very shortly after the birth of her child a formal separation took place, and a scandalous dispute arose, which afterwards turned into a great party conflict. For the present however, the Prince received the price of his unfortunate bargain. The royal message demanding the assistance of Parliament was couched in humble language, and asked only for some arrangement by which the debts should be ultimately paid; but even thus it excited a perfect storm in the House. None even of the Prince's old friends rose to defend him, and Pitt himself, though no friend of the Prince, intreated that the matter might not be examined by a Parliamentary Committee, for fear of the damaging effect of such an inquiry on the principle of an hereditary monarchy. It was finally arranged that the Prince's income should be raised from £72,000 to 1 To show how paramount he was in Parliament, and how powerless the Opposition, it is only necessary to read the list of the Acts which passed Parliament that year. Motion in the House of Peers by Lord Stanhope for non-interference in the internal affairs of France-unanimously rejected. Motion of a like tendency in the House of Commons-negatived. Motion in the House of Peers for facilitating the opening of negotiation with France-negatived. Motion for a vigorous prosecution of the war-carried. Sundry motions for preparing the way for peace with France-negatived. Motion in the House of Commons for inquiring into the state of the nation--negatived. Another to the same intent in the House of Peers-negatived. Motion in the House Commons tending to a general pacification by Mr. Wilberforce-negatived. Motion ilar tendency in the House of Lords-negatived. 1795] sufferings OF THE POOR 1183 £125,000 a year, that the revenues of the Duchy of Cornwall should be set apart, which in twenty-seven years would extinguish the debt, and that £25,000 a year more should be devoted to pay the interest. To these enactments was added an extraordinary one, rendering the Prince's servants liable for any contract they should enter into on his behalf, and limiting legal remedy against the Prince to the term of three months. Sufferings of the 1795. Such demands upon the public purse seemed very badly timed, when the working classes were suffering very heavily from depression of trade, from famine produced by two lower classes. bad harvests, and from a constantly increasing burden of taxation. Discontent was in fact increasing widely, great political meetings were held in London and elsewhere to expose the abuses of monarchy and aristocracy. Riots and seditious writings were constantly on the increase, and the Government thought the state of affairs so critical that they determined upon an autumn session. Three days before Parliament met a monster meeting was held under the auspices of the Corresponding Society in Copenhagen Fields. The excitement thus produced found vent in an assault upon the King as he went to open Parliament, one of the win- Assault on dows of his state coach was broken by a stone or the King. bullet; on his return his coach was again surrounded by an angry mob, with shouts of "Bread, bread! peace, peace!" and he only escaped with difficulty by driving rapidly in his private carriage from St. James's to Buckingham Palace. The King, who throughout showed great courage, showed himself in the evening at Covent Garden theatre, where he was on the whole well received. This act of violence produced two coercive Bills, one to suppress seditious meetings, the other to extend the law of treason. Every public meeting was to be advertised by a paper signed by resident householders, and all meetings were liable to be dispersed according to the Riot Act if any two justices thought them dangerous; while by the second law, writing, preaching, and speaking, were created overt acts, thus rendering the offender guilty of treason, and writing or speaking against the established Government was made a highly punishable crime. These Bills were commonly known as the Sedition and Treason Bills. They were not passed without strong opposition, and the use of language on the part of Fox so vehement as to excite still further the anger of the Tories. This party was now enjoying its selfish triumph to the utmost. It became necessary again to augment the taxes, and Pitt hit upon the expedient of levying duties |