By Terry Liddle
Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections On The Threat Of Revolution In Britain, 1789-1848 Edward Royle. Manchester University Press, 2000. Hardbound: £45. Paperback: £16.99. ISBN 0-7190-4802-8 (Hb.); 0-7190-4803-6 (Pb.).
MANY readers will be familiar with the first rate historical work of Edward Royle. The present work maintains his high level of excellence. It examines the men, movements and ideas which brought Britain to the very brink of revolution in the turbulent years between the French Revolution and the revolutions which swept Europe, toppling thrones and governments, in the middle of the nineteenth century; this was the period of transition from feudalism to capitalist democracy.
Royle begins with the period 1792-1820, a time when Britain was almost constantly at war with revolutionary France. He first looks at the impact of the French Revolution in Britain. Examining the ideas of such radical organisations as the London Corresponding Society, he points out that while the aim of such bodies was parliamentary reform they readily identified themselves with the French Revolution, an event which had turned the world upside down. They were also so identified by the government, a government which became almost paranoid in its fear of revolutionary plots.
The government reacted in typical fashion with repression. A Royal Proclamation was issued against “seditious” writings and proceedings were started against Paine, who wisely fled.
In Ireland in 1798 the government’s nightmares came true with the uprising of the United Irishmen. Although this is often depicted as a bloody Catholic peasant insurgency the influence of Paine on the thinking of its leaders such as Wolfe Tone cannot be overestimated. Royle then turns to such events as the Cato Street conspiracy and the outbreak of machine breaking by displaced artisans known as Luddism.
In his next chapter, Royle places under his historians microscope the crisis surrounding the Reform Bill of 1831 which was moved in an often hostile parliament by the Whig leader, Earl Grey. When the Lords rejected the Bill, rioting broke out in the course of which Nottingham castle was burned down.
More importantly, both the middle class, as yet largely unrepresented, and the working class, the child of the industrial revolution, began to organise politically. In London a specifically working class body, the National Union of the Working Class, was formed. As Royle writes, it was led by radicals schooled in the literature of Paine.
While the Reform Act enfranchised the middle class, the workers remained without the vote. This circumstance led to the formation of Chartism. In 1836 former members of the NUWC and other radicals set up the London Working Men’s Association to promote democratic reform by peaceful means. The more militant had other ideas and they set up the East London Democratic Association which readily acknowledged its intellectual debt to Paine. Amongst them was George Harney whose Red Republican would publish the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.
There is not space here to recount the history of Chartism, the reader can find many informative works on the subject such as those of Reg Groves and Dorothy Thompson. Suffice to say that despite strikes, riots and attempted uprisings on the one hand and the presentation of massive petitions to parliament on the other, Chartism both as a revolutionary and a reformist movement was a heroic failure. Its success was in providing an example of working class political self organisation independent of the middle classes who would become the mainstay of the Liberal Party.
In his final chapter, Royle attempts to answer the question why there was no revolution? He looks at the nature of the popular movements arguing that their leaders knew both their own limits and those of their followers. He further argues that the revolutionaries were always in the minority, a minority easily contained by an extensive government network of spies and informers.
Royle may well be right, but one cannot help feeling a large measure of empathy with such as the hand loom weavers who met near Manchester to read the Chartist press and who saw as the solution to their problems, political and economic, the dethronement of the queen and her replacement by an elected president of a Republic.
Royle then examines a number of other factors which prevented revolution. He looks at the problem of geography, the differences between London and the provincial manufac- turing towns. He states that one reason why Chartism failed was because its strength was not in the capital.
He looks, too, at the strength of loyalism epitomised by the church and king mobs which burned Paine in effigy and shows how loyalists with their references to Magna Carter and the ancient liberties of the freeborn English used the language and ideas of the radicals against them to great effect.
Royle, too, shows the strength of the state, the establishment of the railways enabling troops to be easily moved around the country, and the weakness of the revolutionaries. Not only were their ranks riddled with informers but their main weapon, the pike, had become effectively obsolete in the 17th century. Royle looks as well at the role of religion with its promise of reward in heaven for suffering in this life and rudimentary social welfare which at the very least took the edge off the desperation which drives people to violent revolution.
He concludes with a long quotation from an editorial published by Harney in the Morning Star in November 1849. In England, as in Europe, concedes Harney, attempts at revolution have failed. Yet he remains optimistic, showing that even though the people may win only very limited changes very slowly their strength grows and one day they will win.
One may disagree with Royle’s analysis and conclusions but this book surely deserves a place in the library of every thinking radical.