A History of Britain, Volume 3 (7 page)

As the prophets of international peace and understanding sang hymns to the coming universal communion of humanity, Burke thundered back, in effect: Nature! I’ll tell you about
Nature
. You imagine it’s all the same, daisychains and hands across the seas and songs of fraternity. But what
you’re
talking about is the brotherhood of intellectuals who sip
from
the same little cups of chocolate, chatter away the same clichés and dream the same puerile dreams. But
nature
, my friends, is lived, not thought. Nature is familiarity, a feeling for place. Nature is a patriot.

The ‘people’ whom the demagogues so freely apostrophized had been revealed in France to be ignorant, credulous and bloodthirsty. Democracy was mobocracy. ‘The occupation of a hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot’, Burke insisted, ‘be a matter of honor to any person. … Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they … are permitted to rule.’ But they didn’t know what they were doing. The unforgivable responsibility for giving them the illusion of their own importance and power lay with those who should have known better: class traitors, gentlemen or clergymen who toyed with democracy like a pastime and were rich enough to evade its lethal consequences, who fantasized about exchanging their allotted role in the political order for mere ‘citizenship’. In England it was the dukes and earls – Richmond, Grafton, Shelburne and, regrettably, his old friend Charles James Fox – who, by lending their voice to the destruction of their own nobility, were recklessly cutting the golden chain that tied one generation to the next, the past to the future. They imagined they could, like Lafayette, ride the tiger of the mobs to power and glory. But they would be the first to be devoured.

Burke’s
Reflections
was, by the standards of the day, a commercial success as well as a polemical
tour de force
, selling 17,000 in the first three months (at a time when a generous print run for a novel would be about 1500 copies). It was seen by some of the radical Whigs as an act of apostasy from someone who had the reputation (not quite accurate) of having been a friend to the Americans. (Burke had, in fact, sought Anglo-American reconciliation, but once the conflict began was a British loyalist.) But what distressed Price (who died in 1791, his voice hopelessly drowned out by the thunder of Burke’s rhetoric) was its parochialism: the insistence that the British political inheritance
was
unique; that at their birth Britons had received not ‘natural rights’ but a distinctly native inheritance, quite irreconcilable with universally applicable liberties. Nature, Burke seemed to be saying, could never be cosmopolitan.

In the humiliation of Marie Antoinette fleeing ‘almost naked … to seek refuge at the feet of [the] king’ Burke had seen and lamented the death of chivalry in France. Reverse chivalry – when a woman might spring to the defence of a violently abused man – would never have occurred to him. Such an occurrence he would certainly have characterized as ‘unnatural’. But that is precisely what did happen. Barely a month after the appearance of Burke’s
Reflections
, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had
met
Price when she opened a school in Newington Green, a stone’s throw from his chapel, published her counter-attack,
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790). She had obviously been stung to see Price the subject of Burke’s withering scorn. He had been her first real mentor when she had returned to London from Yorkshire, a self-taught bluestocking nobody, and had encouraged and befriended her as he had many other women writers, such as the children’s author (also a radical) Anna Letitia Barbauld.

Mary had needed all the help she could get, for she had led a gypsy life, constantly fretting about her siblings and never earning quite enough money from her reviews and essays. Her father, the son of a Spitalfields silk weaver, had tried a bit of this and a bit of that – farming in Essex, provincial swagger in Yorkshire – and had failed at each venture. Mary had perforce been mother hen to her sisters, even when one of them walked out on her husband for reasons unexplained but easily guessed. She had, of course, soaked herself in the tepid pool of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sentimental education and had got all warm and sticky with dreams of emotional purity and immortal friendship. But one of Rousseau’s truisms about nature – the nature of the sexes – struck her as monstrous. It was the philosopher’s assumption, set out in his novel,
Emile
, that girls had to be raised for one supreme purpose – to be a comfort and helpmate to their spouse and the mother (a nursing mother, naturally) to his children. Providence had ordained the sexes to be so unbridgeably different that any women who got it into their heads to be like, to act like, men were by definition biological and moral monsters, robbing their families of the quality that made an abode a home,
tendresse
.

Mary had seen her own mother’s sad attempts to lavish such tenderness on her prodigal, drunken husband, and she thought it over-rated. Partly inspired by the example of the growing number of women who seemed to live from their pen, she wrote a little treatise on the education of daughters, arguing, in spite of
Emile
, that girls had the potential to be every bit as educated as boys. And she sent it to the man who seemed to be the hub of all the free spirits and radical writers in London, perhaps in England: Joseph Johnson.

Johnson, a short, neatly wigged, Liverpudlian bachelor, held court above his business at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard, for centuries the favourite haunt of London’s book publishers. To radical London he was the Johnson who really mattered – not just publisher of the
Analytical Review
(between 1788 and 1799) but patron and good uncle to his ‘ragged regiment’ of disciples. He was someone who could find a review to assign, a job to fill (for Mary he found a position as governess in Ireland, but with mixed results), a short-term loan or even (again, for Mary) a roof. She ate with
him
several times a week and was a regular at Johnson’s famous Sunday dinners where the honest ‘patriot’ fare (a lot of boiled cod and peas) was spiced by interesting company: visionary artists like William Blake and Henry Fuseli; veteran stalwarts of the Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information like the Reverend John Horne Tooke and Major John Cartwright; celebrity democrats like the black-eyed, red-faced Tom Paine; and, invariably, a group of articulate, unblushing, intelligent women like Barbauld and the actress Sarah Siddons. Accounts of Mary’s appearances at Johnson’s dinners describe an ungainly, strong-minded, immensely animated woman, her long curly hair powdered when it wasn’t crowned with a beaver hat in the style of Benjamin Franklin or Rousseau. Self-consciously careless with her dress, she was a tremendous interrupter. The social philosopher William Godwin, who came to listen to Paine, found himself irritated by Mary talking incessantly over him.

The mix of stormy passion and tenacious argument, heart and head working like a right and left punch, which was already Mary Wollstonecraft’s trademark, would have made her especially indignant at Burke’s savage onslaught on the great and good Dr Price. But it was much more extraordinary that she should make the move from indignation to publication. Although her
Vindication of the Rights of Men
has been overshadowed by the more famous
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792), published two years later, as well as by Paine’s blockbuster
Rights of Man
(1791–2), Mary’s intervention was not just the earliest counter-attack on Burke but one of the cleverest. Instead of doing what would have been expected (not least by Burke) of a woman and writing in a primly sanctimonious manner, Mary used Burke’s own weapon of venomous irony to attack his credentials as the guardian of traditional institutions. If he were so deeply exercised about the sanctity of hereditary kingship, she wondered out loud, was it not rather peculiar that when King George had gone mad Mr Burke had been in such indecent haste to replace him (with the Prince Regent, Burke’s patron’s patron)? ‘You were so eager to taste the sweets of power, that you could not wait till time had determined, whether a dreadful delirium would settle into a confirmed madness; but, prying into the secrets of Omnipotence, you thundered out that God had
hurled him from his throne
…’ Was not that the very same dissolution of the bonds of loyalty that Burke had found so shocking in the French? The goal was to make Burke look not just wrong-headed but ridiculous, mocking his pet obsessions; his comical gallantry towards Marie Antoinette (‘not an animal of the highest order’); his infatuation with the escutcheoned past; the myopia (more fun with Burke’s famous eye-glasses, even though Mary used them
herself)
in not seeing that the ‘perfect Liberty’ was only perfect for those who had the property to enjoy it. More seriously, if the sanctity of the ‘ancient constitution’ were never to be tampered with, were we not then doomed to ‘remain forever in frozen inactivity because a thaw that nourishes the soil spreads a temporary inundation?’

Mary was the sniper; Tom Paine the heavy artillery. In the early days of the French Revolution Paine had assumed that Burke, as an old ‘friend of Liberty’, would be sympathetic, and had actually sent him a cordial letter from Paris. The
Reflections
disabused him. Gripped by anger and urgency, in just three months Paine produced 40,000 words of Part I of
Rights of Man
(1791), his demolition job on the ‘bleak house of despotism’. Much of it had been said before, by John Milton, Algernon Sidney and, indeed, by Paine himself: the rights of men, including their natural equality as well as individual liberty, are God-given at birth and, since they precede all forms of government, cannot be surrendered to those governments. On the contrary, governments were instituted to protect those rights, and are obeyed on the condition of such protection. But Paine added an extra note of sardonic ridicule at the mere idea of hereditary governments – aristocracies as well as monarchies. To entertain such a notion, much less defer to it, was no less absurd than believing in, say, inherited lines of mathematicians.

More important than what Paine said, however, was the way in which he said it. His own origins as a maker of stays and corsets in Norfolk, where he had grown up on a bare hill known as ‘The Wilderness’ facing the local gallows and had been taken to Quaker meeting houses, meant that Paine was not among those whom Burke wrote off as radical playboys with more money than morals or sense. Before his burst of fame in America, Paine had known what it had meant to be poor, itinerant, almost entirely self-educated. His real schooling had taken place amidst the bawling arguments of pipe-smoking tavern politicians. The rough-house clamour of American politics had added another string to his crude but powerful bow. And closeness to the language of the inns and the streets served him well in the combat with Burke since he understood, with an almost 20th-century shrewdness, that a battle of ideas was also necessarily a battle of language. Burke had deliberately chosen the most high-pitched vocabulary, alternating between Gothic histrionics when describing (at second hand) lurid scenes of mayhem in France and lordly grandiloquence when lecturing the ‘swinish multitude’ on their richly merited exclusion from public affairs. Paine called those set-piece performances ‘very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show’. In calculated contrast, as if to
make
Burke’s worst nightmare – the political education of ordinary people – come true, Paine chose to write with aggressive simplicity: ‘As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand … I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in a language as plain as the alphabet.’ Many polite readers who picked up
Rights of Man
were shocked less by the predictable twitting of the monarchy and the aristocratic establishment than by the coarseness of his language. As if anticipating the crinkling of noses and the fluttering of fans, Paine virtually belched his ideas in their faces.

The swinish multitude ate it up. Joseph Johnson had agreed to publish it in time for George Washington’s birthday on 22 February (the general duly got a copy and thanked Paine). But on the appointed day Johnson, whose shop had already published attacks on Burke, including that of Mary Wollstonecraft, got an uncharacteristic attack of nerves. Paine was forced to shop around for another publisher, and when he found one hired a horse and cart to take the unbound sheets to the new premises. Johnson might well have regretted his panic, for
Rights of Man
sold out briskly and a second printing was needed three days after the first. By May there had been six editions and 50,000 sales of a book that, at three shillings, was not inexpensive. Even with foreign sales (for many copies undoubtedly went to Boston, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin), this made Paine’s work the most colossal best-seller of the 18th century, knocking Burke’s readership into insignificance. Part II, with its even more radical ‘welfare state’ agenda (which divided the reformers), redistributing national income through progressive taxation to fund government obligations towards children, the aged, the infirm and the poor, did even better, selling, according to Paine, between 400,000 and 500,000 copies in the first 10 years. Even allowing for an element of exaggeration the figures make nonsense of the claims of some modern historians that radical opinions at this time were confined to a small and unrepresentative minority. At a meeting of the suddenly revived Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information, a vote of thanks was passed to Paine in the sung form of a new version of the national anthem:

God Save the Rights of Man

Let Despots If they Can

Them overthrow …

By the summer of 1791, with Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette caught at Varennes while trying to flee France, brought back in disgrace to Paris and held prisoner in their own Palace of the Tuileries, two sets of self-designated
British
patriots were at each other’s throats. In May, in the House of Commons, the erstwhile friends and allies Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox had had a bitter and irreparable falling-out. Goaded by Pitt, Fox remained defiant that the new French constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were ‘the most stupendous edifice of liberty’ that the world had ever seen. And in private he accused Burke of being no more than Pitt’s hired mouth, an accomplice to the dirty war of tarring him with the brush of being a republican. In the Commons on 6 May, a speech by Burke was a signal from Fox’s ardent young band of radicals, whom Burke called ‘the little dogs’, to howl and hiss. Burke publicly aired his anger that ‘a personal attack had been made upon him from a quarter he never could have expected, after a friendship and intimacy of more than 22 years’. Rehearsing other disputes that had divided them, but had neither compromised their closeness nor split the Whigs, Burke was about to say that this particular argument over the French Revolution was fatal to both. Fox interjected: ‘There is no loss of friendship.’ ‘I regret to say there is,’ responded Burke. ‘I have done my duty though I have lost my friend.’ Fox rose, became tearfully incoherent, but finally spoke unrepentantly of the disappearance of ‘horrid despotism’ in France. Burke responded again that he hoped no one would trade away the British constitution for a ‘wild and visionary system’.