A Historical Backgrounder, Part 3 to the Life & Works of
William Wordsworth
In England, the reaction to the goings on in France, at first, were mixed; but the majority, especially when the abuses of the French Revolution were recognized, were ready to support the French Royalists.
The English historian, John Richard Green:
"The cautious good sense of the bulk of Englishmen, their love of order and law, their distaste for violent changes and for abstract theories, as well as their reverence for the past, were rousing throughout the country a dislike of the revolutionary changes which were hurrying on across the channel; and both the political sense and the political prejudice of the nation were being fired by the warnings of Edmund Burke. ... [Burke hated] a revolution founded on scorn of the past, and threatening with ruin the whole social fabric which the past had reared; the ordered structure of classes and ranks crumbling before a doctrine of social equality; a state rudely demolished and reconstituted; a church and a nobility swept away in a night."16There were, of course, people in England, while regretting the blood and destruction of the French Revolution, nonetheless supported the principles for which it stood. These principles were best summed up in Rousseau's expression: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains!" And, the Rousseauish cry: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Most all of the young intelligentsia of the age (for that matter of any age) were for change; after all, was not the existing state, unfair; where is the justice in the existing system; things need be set right. These notions were meat and drink to all of the young poets of the age, including William Wordsworth.
In England, in 1793, a political book, like no other, before or since, was to come off the presses. It was Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, or, more simply, Political Justice by William Godwin. It burst upon the scene as a major piece of sedition.17 It was an attack on aristocracy, property, religion, and even the sacrament of marriage. In 1793, the trials of the "Reform-martyrs," one of whom was Thomas Muir (1765-99) were to unfold. The lot of them were convicted and transported to Botany Bay. In 1794, there was to be the "Trial of the 12 Reformers": Thomas Holcroft, Horne Tooke, Thomas Hardy, John Thelwall and others were brought to trial on the charge of high treason, and, acquitted amid much excitement. These trials were part of the larger government effort to prosecute editors, nonconformists and radicals who were arguing for Parliamentary reform. England, however, was at war; and reform, indeed, even the liberties of the people18 were to take second place to the grand effort of making England victorious. And, victorious she was to be, due mainly to her superiority upon the oceans of the world.
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