to supersede the House of Commons by a national convention,
and Pitt proposed and carried a bill suspending the
Habeas Corpus Act. This was followed by further reports of
the committees of both Houses, presenting evidence of the secret
manufacture of arms and of other proceedings calculated to
endanger the public peace. A series of state prosecutions
followed. The trials of Robert Watt and David Downie for
high treason (August and September 1794) actually revealed
a treasonable plot on the part of a few obscure individuals at
Edinburgh, who were found in the possession of no less than
fifty-seven pikes of home manufacture, wherewith to overthrow
the British government. The execution of Watt gave to this
trial a note of tragedy which was absent from that of certain
members of the Corresponding Society, accused of conspiring
to murder the king by means of a poisoned arrow shot from
an air-gun. The ridicule that greeted the revelation of the
“Pop-gun Plot” marked the beginning of a reaction that found
a more serious expression in the trials of Thomas Hardy, John
Horne Tooke and John Thelwall (October and November 1794).
The prisoners were accused of high treason, their chief offence
consisting in their attempt to assemble a general convention
of the people, ostensibly for the purpose of obtaining parliamentary
reform, but really—as the prosecution urged—for subverting
the constitution. This latter charge, though proved to
the satisfaction of the committees of both Houses of Parliament,
broke down under the cross-examination of the government
witnesses by the counsel for the defence, and could indeed only
have been substantiated by a dangerous stretching of the
doctrine of constructive treason. Happily the jury refused to
convict, and its verdict saved the nation from the disgrace
of meting out the extreme penalty of high treason to an attempt
to hold a public meeting for the redress of grievances.
The common sense of a British jury had preserved, in spite of parliament and ministry, that free right of meeting which was to be one of the strongest instruments of future reform. The government, however, saw little reason in the events of the following months for reversing their coercive policy. The year 1795 was one of great suffering and great popular unrest; for the effect of the war upon industry was now beginning to be felt, and the distress had been aggravated by two bad harvests. The sudden determination of those in power, who had hitherto advocated reform, to stereotype the existing system, closed the avenues of hope to those who had expected an improvement of their lot from constitutional changes, and the disaffected temper of the populace that resulted was taken advantage of by the London Corresponding Society, emboldened by its triumph in the courts, to organize open and really dangerous demonstrations, such as the vast mass meeting at Copenhagen House on the 26th of October. On the 29th of October the king, on his way to open parliament, was attacked by an angry mob shouting, “Give us bread,” “No Pitt,” “No war,” “No famine,”; and the glass panels of his state coach were smashed to pieces.
The result of these demonstrations was the introduction in the House of Lords, on the 4th of November, of the Treasonable Practices Bill, the main principle of which was that it modified the law of treason by dispensing with the necessity for the proof of an overt act in order to secure conviction; and in the House of Commons, on the 10th, of the Seditious Meetings Bill, which seriously limited the right of public meeting, making all meetings of over fifty persons, as well as all political debates and lectures, subject to the previous consent and active supervision of the magistrates. In spite of the strenuous resistance of the opposition, led by Fox, and of numerous meetings of protest held outside the walls of parliament, both bills passed into law by enormous majorities. The inevitable result followed. The London Corresponding Society and other political clubs, deprived of the right of public meeting, became secret societies pledged to the overthrow of the existing system by any means. United Englishmen and United Scotsmen plotted with United Irishmen for a French invasion, and sedition was fomented in the army and the navy. Their baneful activities were exposed in the inquiries that followed the Irish rebellion of 1798, and the result was the Corresponding Societies Bill, introduced by Pitt on the 19th of April 1799, which completed the series of repressive measures and practically suspended the popular constitution of England. The right of public meeting, of free speech, of the free press had alike ceased for the time to exist.
The justification of the government in all this was the life and
death struggle in which Great Britain was engaged with the
power of republican France in Europe. Yet Pitt’s
conduct of the war, so far as the continent was concerned,
had hitherto led to nothing but failure after
The Revolu-
tionary War.
failure. In 1794, in spite of the presence of an English
army under the duke of York, the Austrian Netherlands had
been finally conquered and annexed to the French republic;
in 1795 the Dutch republic was affiliated to that of France, and
the peace of Basel between Prussia and the French republic left
Austria to continue the war alone with the aid of British subsidies.
On the sea Great Britain had been more successful,
Howe’s victory of the 1st of June 1794 being the first of the long
series of defeats inflicted on the French navy, while in 1795 a
beginning was made of the vast expansion of the British Empire
by the capture of Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope from the
Dutch (see French Revolutionary Wars). The war, however,
had become so expensive, and its results were evidently so small,
that there was a growing feeling in England in favour of peace,
especially as the Reign of Terror had come to an end in 1794,
and a regular government, the Directory, had been appointed
in 1795. At last Pitt was forced to yield to the popular clamour,
and in 1796 Lord Malmesbury was sent to France to treat for
peace. The negotiation, however, was at once broken off by his
demand that France should abandon the Netherlands.
The French government, assured now of the assistance of
Spain and Holland, and freed of the danger from La Vendée,
now determined to attempt the invasion of Ireland.
On the 16th of December a fleet of 17 battle-ships,
13 frigates and 15 smaller vessels set sail from Brest,
Hoche’s expedition
to Ireland.
carrying an expeditionary force of some 13,000 men
under General Hoche. The British fleet, under Lord Bridport,
was wintering at Spithead; and before it could put to sea the
French had slipped past. Before it reached the coast of Ireland,
however, the French fleet had already suffered serious losses,
owing partly to the attacks of British frigate detachments,
partly to the bad seamanship of the French crews and the
rottenness of the ships. Only a part of the fleet succeeded in
reaching Bantry Bay on the 20th of December, and of these a
large number were scattered by a storm on the 23rd. Hoche
himself, with the French admiral, had been driven far to the
westward in an effort to avoid capture; the attempt of Grouchy,
in his absence, to land a force was defeated by the weather,
and by the end of the month the whole expedition was in full
retreat for Brest. A French diversion on the coast of Pembroke
was even less successful; a force of 1500 men, under Colonel
Tate, an American adventurer, landed in Cardigan Bay on the
22nd of February 1797, but was at once surrounded by the local
militia and surrendered without a blow.
A more serious attempt was now made to renew the enterprise by means of a junction of the French, Spanish and Dutch fleets. The victory of Jervis over the Spanish fleet at St Vincent on the 14th of February postponed the imminence of the danger; but this again became acute Mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. owing to the general disaffection in the fleet, which in April and May found vent in the serious mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. The mutiny at Spithead, which was due solely to the intolerable conditions under which the seamen served at the time, was ended on the 17th of May by concessions: an increase of pay, the removal of officers who had abused their power of discipline, and the promise of a general free pardon. More serious was the outbreak at the Nore. The disaffection had spread practically to the whole of Admiral Duncan’s fleet, and by the beginning of June the mutineers were blockading the Thames with no less than 26 vessels. The demands of the seamen were more extensive than at Spithead; their resistance was better organized; and they were suspected, though without
