It is a commonplace statement that one’s view of the past shapes one’s understanding of the present. This being the case, it is surprising how little attention historians have paid to the uses of history in the British debate on the French Revolution. In the summer of 1789, many (but not all) Englishmen had applauded the news of the revolution in France. By February 1793, when France declared war, few Britons aside from a small group of urban radicals still supported the French Revolution. The transformation of British attitudes towards revolutionary France between 1789 and 1793 played a crucial role in preparing Britain to successfully prosecute a long and costly war. Historians have long recognized the importance of this period; many aspects of the pamphlet war of the early 1790s have been studied. Unfortunately, this flood of works on the pamphlet war has not included a detailed study of the role of historical argumentation in the debate. The use of history by the pamphleteers is treated casually, if at all, by most historians.

Any discussion of the role of ideology in transforming British attitudes to the Revolution is open to the criticism that there are more obvious explanations for the change in British attitudes, especially, the increasingly radical and violent nature of the French Revolution. Recognizing that external events played a leading role in shaping the political debate within Britain does not preclude consideration of the way differing conceptions of history influenced responses to the Revolution. Most pamphleteers discussed British and French history and much of the debate on the French Revolution centered on whether institutional vestiges of the Middle Ages should be retained. For most pamphlet writers discussing the French Revolution, historical argumentation was not a supplementary line of rhetoric but rather an integral part of their system of political thought; a given view of history influenced a whole range of other subjects, ranging from human nature to political epistemology. To examine the pamphlet war of the early 1790s is to study the way history influences views of the present.

When British pamphleteers advanced historical arguments in articulating their views of the French Revolution, they were not working in a vacuum. The eighteenth century had seen a strengthening historical consciousness in England. It is worthwhile sketching the main historiographic and aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century in order to contextualize the use of history in the English debate on the French Revolution. Three important themes in eighteenth century historical thought were historicism, classicism, and medievalism.

The eighteenth century was arguably more historically-minded than the seventeenth. The term "the Enlightenment" covers a broad period of and obscures substantial intellectual diversity. While some tendencies in Enlightenment thought encouraged the study of history, others inhibited it. The dominance of Cartesian rationalism, with its reliance on deductive reason grounded in absolute certainties discouraged the empirical and inductive style of thought upon which historical writing is based. The conjectural history tradition exemplified by the Lockean theory of the social contract shifted attention away from recorded political history to speculative philosophy. Over the course of the eighteenth century there was a general movement away from a deductive, rationalist style of thought to one more hospitable to historical writing. The later part of the eighteenth century saw the development of historicism and the (partial) rejection of the universalistic assumptions of the earlier Enlightenment. Historicism may be defined as the belief that all human activities are conditioned by their historical context. The representation of historical figures in art provides evidence of the growth of historicism over the centuries. Artists of the eighteenth century no longer depicted biblical figures as wearing contemporary clothing, a sign of an increasing appreciation of cultural evolution. Over time, this appreciation of cultural differences was extended from material culture to more profound matters, such as manners, psychology, and political theory. In emphasizing the differences between the people of different periods, historicism also accentuated contemporary national and ethnic differences; in some ways, historicism prepared the way for the growth of modern nationalism and moral relativism. The development of historicism also involved a shift in ideas about human nature, away from the notion of human nature as fixed towards the view that it was malleable and culturally determined. Historicism reinforced the notion that all phenomena in a society or era were interdependent; the increased awareness that manners and political systems varied in different countries and periods encouraged people to see manners and other aspects of everyday life in a society as related to that society’s political system. Pamphleteers in the 1790s would manipulate this widespread idea in presenting their views of the French Revolution. Perhaps the view that all social phenomena were interconnected injected an additional degree of passion into the debate; many people on both sides of the debate believed that the French Revolution had changed the very texture of everyday life in France, not just the country’s political institutions.

Classicism was important in eighteenth-century political thought and aesthetics. Latin and Greek lay at the core of the curriculum in both the public schools and the universities. The intensive study of Greek and Roman authors did much more than train the mind; in many ways, it was a vehicle for instruction in political values. In the early eighteenth century, a debate arose over the relative accomplishments of ancient and modern people. Had people in modern times surpassed the Greeks and Romans culturally and technologically or had the ancient world been the pinnacle of human achievement ? In 1690, Sir William Temple asserted that modern accomplishments in every field were inferior to those of the ancients in his Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning. Literature, astronomy, the decorative arts and architecture had all degenerated from ancient times, according to Temple. This pessimistic view of history was challenged by William Wotton, who argued that tremendous progress had occurred since the time of the Greeks and the Romans. However, this progress had been uneven. Wotton divided knowledge into science and technology on the one hand and the arts on the other; while the moderns may have made great progress in technological and scientific matters, they had not surpassed the ancients in fields such as poetry. The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns (and the eventual victory of the latter) helped to popularize the notion of history as a progressive process; most of the pamphleteers in the French-Revolution debate would draw on this idea in some way.

Beginning around 1740, there was a renewed preoccupation with the Middle Ages which was reflected in literature, architecture, and historical writing. While interest in the ancient world persisted, classicism was increasingly rivaled by medievalism. Horace Walpole’s fantastic creation at Strawberry Hill was only the best example of the mid-eighteenth century Gothic Revival in architecture. Gothic ruins and intact buildings acquired a historical and philosophical significance in light of the development of historical writing. Lord Kames posed the question of whether a ruin should be built in a Grecian or a Gothic form. Kames argued that a Gothic ruin was preferable, since "it exhibits the triumph of time over strength; a melancholy but not unpleasant thought: a Grecian ruin suggests rather the triumph of barbarity over taste, a gloomy and discouraging thought." An element of historical relativism can be discerned in the defence of medievalist architecture. The rules of architectural proportion developed in the ancient world were no longer seen as universally applicable; in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Richard Hurd wrote that "when an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian rules, he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture had its own rules, by which when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian." Gothic Revival architecture was closely tied to new movements in literature. Horace Walpole, the builder of Strawberry Hill was a leader in this trend as well. His 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, was important in establishing a number of enduring motifs in English literature. In this work, Walpole aimed to evoke feelings of terror or awe in the reader through the use of a medieval setting, supernatural elements, and dark moods. It also reinforced the notion of progress by stressing how different the Middle Ages are from modern, rational times. The Castle of Otranto is set in a medieval Italian fortress. In the preface to the novel, Walpole pretends that his book is merely a translation of an Italian work printed in the 1520s; he suggests that the author was a priest who, motivated by a fear of Reformation ideas, sought to "confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions… such a work as the following would enslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been written from the day of Luther to the present hour." The implication is that Walpole can safely print the work in eighteenth-century England because the English are now intellectually immune from such superstition. Elsewhere in the preface, Walpole stresses how different the reactions of English readers to the novel will be compared to even modern French or Italian readers. The overall effect of The Castle of Otranto is to educate the English reader as to how different his own enlightened time and country are from the superstition, crudeness, and barbarism of the Middle Ages. The English reader would have found little in common between the polite aristocrat of his own era and the brutish and tyrannical Manfred, prince of Otranto.

There was an explicitly political side to the Gothic Revival in architecture and literature. In 1770, Bishop Thomas Percy published Northern Antiquities, a translation of a work by Mallett. In Northern Antiquities, the link between political liberty and Gothic culture was strongly argued; Europe was distinguished from the tyranny of Asia by the influence of Gothic institutions. This idea was by no means new to England. In 1741, a prominent Whig, Lord Cobham, erected at Stowe the Gothic "Temple of Liberty" which bore the inscription, "I thank God that I am not a Roman." Statues of Saxon deities ringed the building, reinforcing the link between England’s Germanic heritage and its liberty. The political use of the idea of the Middle Ages was not a new phenomenon, as precedents can be found as early as the Elizabethan era. The seventeenth century witnessed an intense debate on the origins of Parliament that had been fueled by constitutional conflict between the Stuart monarchs and Parliament. The doctrine of immemorialism, which extended Parliament into the most distant past, had been abandoned by the seventeenth century in the face of increasing historical sophistication. Defenders of parliamentary privileges argued that the modern Parliament descended from the Saxon Witanegemot. According to this viewpoint, the Norman Conquest had merely changed the name of Parliament, not its essential function; William the Conquer and his successors had been forced to recognize the rights of the people to send representatives to Parliament. Advocates of the royal prerogative responded with their own version of events. Robert Brady fairly conclusively demonstrated that Parliament’s origins lay in the post-Conquest period and that the first Parliaments were the creations of the monarchs, not the expression of the will of the populace. The political corollary of the view that Parliament was the monarch’s gift to the people was that the House of Commons’ claims to power were presumptuous. While the relative constitutional stability of most of the eighteenth century deprived the debate on the origins of Parliament of much of its passion, it nevertheless continued. Bollingbroke, Blackstone, and Hume all considered modern British political institutions within their historical context and thought in terms of the transition from feudalism to modernity.

In terms of historical writing, the late eighteenth century is chiefly remembered for Gibbon’s history of the decline and fall of Rome. While recognizing the importance of Gibbon, it is important to avoid overlooking the proliferation of historical writing specifically about the British Isles. First appearing in stages between 1754 and 1762, Hume’s History of England was reprinted well into the nineteenth century. One of the central themes of Hume’s history was Britain’s progress from the barbarism of the dark ages to the commercial sophistication of the present. This process had changed virtually every aspect of both political and everyday life, from the status of women to the nature of Parliament. The scope of Hume’s History was totalistic, embracing what would now be called political history as well as economic, cultural, social and gender history. For Hume, commerce was intimately related to this progressive movement. The declension of feudalism was largely attributable to love of luxury; great feudal lords had dismissed many retainers in order to afford manufactured goods, a process which eventually produced the modern English gentleman and commercial society. At the same time, money rents replaced feudal military service and villeinage as the basis of land tenure. In ascribing a central role to commerce, Hume was in good company. Montesquieu had developed a similar argument, and Hume was not the only Scottish Enlightenment thinker to extrapolate from Montesquieu’s ideas; Lord Kames, Gilbert Stuart, Adam Fergusson, William Robertson, John Millar and Adam Smith all shared Hume’s preoccupation with the culturally-transformative impact of commercial development. In The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britian, David Spadafora challenges the prevailing view (which seeks to understand eighteenth-century British political thought in light of the civic humanist tradition) by arguing that the idea of progress was the central theme in eighteenth-century British thought. At the end of the century, participants in the debate on the French Revolution came intellectually equipped with a conception of European history grounded in the idea of interconnected and simultaneous progress in many fields.

The roots of the debate on the French Revolution can be traced to a sermon delivered on 4 November 1789 at the Dissenting meeting-house in London’s Old-Jewry. The speaker was Richard Price, actuary, economist, dissenting minister, pamphleteer, and political activist who had risen to prominence during the struggle with the American colonies and who had most recently campaigned for the lifting of the legal disabilities faced by Protestant Dissenters. The fifth of November had a dual significance, as it was the anniversary of both the discovery of the Gun-Powder Plot and the Glorious Revolution. In the sermon, which was entitled "A Discourse on the Love of Our Country", Price argued that the British monarch was almost the only "lawful" monarch in the world, since alone of the world’s Kings he owed his position to the choice of the people. In 1688, the English people, through the Convention Parliament, had decided that the House of Stuart had forfeited its right to the throne through misconduct. On this basis, Price argued that the Glorious Revolution had permanently established the right of the people to "cashier their Governors for misconduct" and that the King should consider himself to be the servant rather than the Sovereign of the people. Price juxtaposed progress and retrogression: while the rational Dissenters were working to expand civil liberties on a rational basis, there was retrogression elsewhere in society, represented by the conversion of many of the lower orders to Methodism, which Price presented as a form of religious "barbarism." Nevertheless, Price was heartened to see the unfolding events in France, where millions were struggling to establish liberty and despotism had been overthrown. Events in France should inspire the English campaign to complete the work of the Glorious Revolution by establishing full religious liberty and effecting a reform of Parliament.

In January 1790, this sermon appeared in print. Edmund Burke soon read the pamphlet and was incensed. While Burke’s initial response to the French Revolution was cautiously non-committal, Burke had become hostile to it even before the royal family had been forcibly brought to Paris in October 1789. In addition to opposing Price’s praise of the French, Burke was in profound disagreement with his analysis of the Glorious Revolution. In February 1790, he announced his intention of writing a pamphlet containing his thoughts on the French Revolution. This publication appeared exactly one year after Price had delivered his sermon and was entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event in a letter intended to have been sent to a gentleman of Paris. In the Reflections, Burke denounced Price and his views as unrepresentative of the English nation as a whole. Price’s history also came under attack. While Price saw the Glorious Revolution as a major discontinuity in English history and the beginning of the right of the English people to choose their own governors, Burke argued that the Revolution had done little to change the nature of the English constitution. Moreover, rather than establishing the right of the people to choose their governors, the Revolution had actually confirmed the hereditary principle, albeit modifying the order of succession by requiring that the monarch be a Protestant. The convention Parliament had committed both the Englishmen of its time and their descendents to uphold the constitution and the order of succession. This commitment was permanently binding, according to Burke.

Burke argued that the Revolution was an attack on the established foundations of European civilization, Christianity and Aristocracy. In defending the traditional order, Burke used notions of progress. For Burke, monarchy, aristocracy, and the presence of an Established Church in each European country had been the basis of, rather than an impediment to material and cultural improvement since the Middle Ages. Polished manners were inseparably tied to the chivalric or aristocratic order from which they had emerged, according to Burke. While Hume and Adam Smith had argued that commerce had gradually transformed the feudal order into modern society, Burke turned this logic on its head. He argued that the development of the orders of chivalry and a more polite code of conduct within the medieval aristocracy had laid the basis for the subsequent growth of commerce, learning and the other characteristics of modernity. Burke made it clear that he valued the enormous material and intellectual advances that had occurred since the Middle Ages ("the accessions of science and literature") but asserted that this progress had a "Gothic and monkish" foundation. He suggested that the advocates of radical change were unwittingly destroying the things they valued most;

If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more that they are always

willing to own to ancient manners, so do other interests which we

value full as mush as they are worth. Even commerce and trade and

manufacture, the gods of our economical politicians are themselves

but effects… they certainly grew under the same shade in which

learning flourished. They too may decay with their natural protecting

principles.

According to Burke, the French attack on monarchy, aristocracy, and Church property was undermining the foundations of European civilization. Burke felt that the high status of women in modern times was the outgrowth of chivalry was therefore threatened by attacks on aristocracy. The seizure of the Queen of France by the Parisian mob demonstrated the social and sexual anarchy that the downfall of aristocracy could lead to. Burke lamented that "the age of chivalry is gone –that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever." While progress in low mechanical concerns might be applauded, Burke did not think that changes in the English people’s most fundamental moral values was necessary or even desirable. In making this distinction, Burke followed one that had been made by William Wotton in the earlier quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. Burke asserted the timelessness of morality when he wrote

Aside from politicizing manners, another contribution made by Burke to the debate related to the question of political epistemology. In other words, were tradition and custom a better source of political values than abstract reason ? Both sides in the French Revolution debate in England utilized arguments based on revealed religion when useful, but the crux of debate was between different secular theories of political epistemology. The most strident English supporters of the French Revolution (such as Paine) upheld reason as the ultimate source of political values and endorsed a deductive approach; first determine the rights of man, then check to see if existing political arrangements in a given society protect these rights. If not, the existing system ought to be changed to bring it in line with the dictates of reason. Naturally, this view engendered a very dismissive attitude to the claims of tradition and prescription.

Burke argued against deductive and rationalist approaches, which he castigated as the "politics of geometry." Instead, one ought to revere and work within the institutions that one’s ancestors had evolved on the basis of precedent (there is an obvious parallel here with the common law tradition). Burke felt that it would have been better if the French had sought to re-establish their ancestral constitution (as represented by the Estates-General) instead of developing a constitution from scratch. In Burke’s view, there was no one model of government appropriate for all societies; each country must have a government appropriate for the character of its inhabitants. England’s constitution was excellent because it had evolved gradually. Contrary to the claim made by Price that the English constitution had been radically changed at the Revolution, the Glorious Revolution had modified only a few aspects of it. Burke referred repeatedly to the only period when England had departed from its tradition of gradualistic changed; the Interregnum, when radical sectaries had seized control. He compared Price to the Rev. Hugh Peters, a radical Puritan divine who had led the capture King Charles I into London in 1648. The implication was that the French Revolution and its English admirers had more in common with Cromwell’s regicidal Protectorate than the Glorious Revolution. Republican mania was a contagion whose entry into England should be checked by all possible means.

Because Burke had announced his attention to write on the French Revolution, the Reflections had been eagerly anticipated by friend and foe alike. Selling quickly, the book became the subject of an intense public debate. Several authors sought to rush responses into print. One of the first was Mary Wollstonecraft, who published A Vindication of the Rights of Man in November 1790. Wollstonecraft went to great lengths to show that tradition (in her words, the "bigotted veneration for antiquity") is a faulty guide to present-day political action. Wollstonecraft sought to "force men of the eighteenth century to acknowledge that our canonized forefathers were unable, or afraid, to revert to reason." Wollstonecraft uses an architectural analogy in defending the decision by the National Assembly to create a radically new constitution rather than seek a restoration of the Gothic one: "Why was it a duty to repair an ancient castle, built in barbarous ages, of Gothic materials… when a simple structure might be raised…?" Reason and natural rights rather than "the rust of antiquity" ought to guide political action.

By the time Burke’s Reflections provided a new subject for her ire, Catherine Macaulay had already had a long career of historical and radical political writing. Her Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France in a letter to the Right Hon. Earl of Stanhope was published late in 1790. While Price used the precedent of the Glorious Revolution in making demands for further change, Macaulay wanted to make a clean break with the past, freeing mankind to create a future that would be utterly unlike its shameful history. Macaulay mocked Burke’s traditionalism and veneration of institutions whose origins lay in the Middle Ages. "The leaders of the French Revolution, and their followers see none of the those striking beauties in the old laws and rules of the Gothic institutions of Europe which Mr. Burke does… they do not have any of the spirit of antiquarians." For Macaulay, the age of chivalry was one of ferocity, barbarism, slavery, and ignorance; modern people ought to sever their ties with such an era and its institutions. In contrast to Richard Price, Macaulay disparaged even so recent an event as England’s Glorious Revolution; in her view, it was now totally superseded in brilliance by the French and American Revolutions. She did, however, defend Price’s assertion that the King owes his crown to the right of the people to choose their governors. But in her view, the establishment of this principle was very modest accomplishment in light of the far greater advances made by the French and Americans. Macaulay lamented the fact that the contractarian view of the state had not become more firmly entrenched in the 1690s, attributing the incomplete nature of the Glorious Revolution to nation’s having "swallowed deeply of the poison of church policy; passive obedience, by their means, had so entirely suplanted the abstract notion of the rights of men…Mr. Hume justly supposes that if the Revolution had happened one hundred years after it did, it would have been materially different in all circumstances." Macaulay attacked Burke for claiming that the Convention Parliament wanted "to bind their posterity to all succeeding generations" and argues that such a commitment would have been illegitimate in any case. She warned Englishmen against boasting about their traditional rights and ancient constitution on two grounds. Firstly, the Magna Charta and other restrictions on royal authority were merely limitations of a tyranny that dates from the national humiliation of the Norman Conquest. More importantly, denoting liberties such as freedom from arbitrary arrest "the rights of Englishmen" undermines the claim of other men to freedom. While Macaulay mocked Burke’s reliance on the past as a guide, the Earl of Stanhope, to whom her tract was addressed, had argued from historical precedent in his own response to the Burke, which had been published earlier in 1790. Challenging Burke’s criticism of the National Assembly’s confiscation of Church property, Stanhope used a precedent from English history: "the French have abolished monasteries, which we did long ago."

A strong element of post-millenialism pervaded Macaulay’s work. She thought that it was possible for people to construct a perfect society that would anticipate the Kingdom of Heaven instead of waiting for God to create the perfect order after Armageddon. Macaulay asked, "has Mr. Burke never heard of any other millenium but that fanciful one which is supposed to exist in the Kingdom of the saints?" She proclaimed that the French Revolution was ushering in a new era "when righteousness shall prevail over the whole earth." For Macaulay, the French Revolution, like the birth of Christ, was a "singular" event marking a new period in human history; Macaulay compares the joy Parisians felt at the Revolution with the inspirational feelings experience by those who had gazed on the infant Christ.

Macaulay’s extravagent enthusiasm for the Revolution contrasts with the quiet optimism and intellectual sobriety of James Mackintosh. In many ways, Mackintosh bridged two intellectual worlds: the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. In April 1791, he published Vincidciae Gallicae: A Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers. The Latin in the title suggests the work’s intended audience; the tone is cerebral and there are many sophisticated literary allusions. Mackintosh prefaced his discussion of the French Revolution with a short comparative history of the French and British constitutions. According to Mackintosh, the political systems of both nations originated in the common "Gothic institutions of Europe," but after a point their constitutional histories had diverged radically. In England, the power of the feudal aristocracy had dwindled at the same time as the growth of commerce was creating a powerful new class in society able to check royal authority. In France, the independence of the nobility eroded well before the growth of commerce "had elevated any other class of citizens into importance." As a result, the powers of the formerly independent aristocracy had devolved to the monarch. In England, the remnants of the Gothic constitution, the Lords and the Established Church, "had imbibed the principle of freedom," so it was not necessary to destroy them. In fact, they served a useful and progressive function in British society. In contrast, the long exposure of the French nobility to absolutism had corrupted it and had infused it with a love of tyranny, a spirit completely opposite to that of the English nobility. According to Mackintosh, "it is absurd to regard the Orders as remnants of that free constitution which France, in common with the other Gothic nations of Europe, once enjoyed. Nothing remained of these ancient Orders but the name." The Orders that had once checked royal authority had now "dwindled into dependents" of the monarch and needed to be destroyed. Addressing Burke’s argument that the French should have sought to restore their ancient constitution, Mackintosh posed the question as to whether the French should have "reformed or destroyed their government." Mackintosh asserted that the French were right to construct a new government; gradual reform of existing institutions would have been impossible given the corrupted nature of the surviving Gothic institutions: "these institutions would have destroyed Liberty, before Liberty had corrected their spirit."

Historical precedents played a role in Mackintosh’s defence of the French Revolution; the Glorious, Dutch, and American Revolution all produced durable and positive results through violent means. Mackintosh buttressed the idea that it is desirable for statesmen to re-engineer a system of government by using a mechanical analogy of the state. In his view, the French Revolutionaries had no more abandoned the collected wisdom of experience than an inventor who develops a mechanical improvement; "an artist who frames his machine in exact imitation of his predecessors, is in the first sense said to be guided by experience. In this sense, all improvements of human life have been derivations from experience." Geometry, according to Mackintosh, "has nearly the same relation to mechanics that abstract reasoning has to politics." Carrying the analogy further, he asked the reader to "suppose that by a certain alteration in the structure of a machine, its effect would be increased four-fold, would an instructed mechanic hesitate about the change?" In an age of enormous progress in many fields, should the art of constructing governments "be alone stationary amid the progress of every other –liberal and vulgar- to perfection." Mackintosh contrasted governments that are the product of design or "art" with those which are the fruits of historical accident; with the exception of the United States, all existing governments are of the latter kind. Through the intelligent reconstruction of governments, a portion of the human suffering in the world can be eliminated. Mackintosh argued against Burke’s reverence for the past by showing what traditionalism in technology would be like. Twisting Burke’s terminology, Mackintosh stated that the "first visionary innovator" in the mechanical arts was "the savage who built a cabin or covered himself with a rug." The French Revolutionaries, far from applying new-fangled theories, were implementing ideas that "the philosophers of Europe had for a century discussed." To further illustrate his point, Mackintosh described a pre-technological society where science is known at theoretical level but where it is not applied to practical problems. In political terms, this was the state of France before the Revolution.

To mock Burke’s arguments, Mackintosh made many medieval allusions that would have been familiar to someone who had been exposed to the genre of novels represented by The Castle of Otranto. The Reflections are called the "holy banner of his philanthropic crusade" against the "discourteous knights of Paris and the spells of the sable wizards of democracy." Mackintosh did defend Burke against the charge of inconsistency that others, pointing to his support of the cause of the American colonists, had levelled. In his view, Burke was consistent in his "abhorence for abstract politics, a predilection for aristocracy, and a dread of innovation."

Thomas Paine was one pamphleteer who accused Burke of inconsistency. In the preface of the first part of The Rights of Man, Paine stated that "from the part Mr. Burke played in the American Revolution, it was natural that I should consider him a friend of mankind." Paine hinted that Burke had changed his opinions due to an offer of a secret government pension. A strong personal animosity towards Burke is evident in The Rights of the Man, and this antipathy was carried into Paine’s historical analysis.

Paine grounded his defence of the French Revolution in history. His account of the origins of government is occasionally confusing, because in addition to discussing how the English government arose through conquest, Paine described how governments ought to have been formed (i.e., through compact) in terms that suggest they actually had been formed that way. Whereas Burke advised prescription and tradition as guides to political action, Paine had a dismissive attitude towards historical precedent, at least as it used by Burke. "The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity." Pointing to the sheer diversity of the intermediate stages of human history between the origin of man and the present, Paine maintained that any argument based on precedents drawn from one era could easily be refuted by a contradictory precedent drawn from a different period. In his words, "if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting one another." To escape this intellectual deadlock, it is necessary to go beyond recorded history, and to examine "the origin of man" and his rights. Paine reasoned that since "the genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam," one should "trace the rights of man to the creation of man." Discussing early men living in the state of nature was hardly new; it had long been a feature of the conjectural-history tradition associated with John Locke. Following Locke, Paine held that entering into civil society did not cause a man to forfeit his natural rights, since government was instituted to protect these rights; "man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, but to have those rights better secured." In natural society, the artificial distinctions of civilized life were unknown; "through all the vocabulary of Adam, there is no such an animal as a duke or a count." Paine contended that common ancestry of man in the Mosaic account of creation supported his conception of natural rights. While earliest history was a time of equality and liberty, subsequent periods have witnessed the continuous violation of the rights of man. Paine repeatedly refers to the origins of the English constitution in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. While several other radical writers invoked pre-Conquest institutions such as the Anglo-Saxon Witan, Paine, like Wollstonecraft, followed the seventeenth-century Tory historian Robert Brady in ascribing the origins of Parliament to the Norman Conquest. Paine argued the need for radical change; a Parliament whose origins lie in the Middle Ages can not protect natural rights. England’s traditional constitution counts for little in Paine’s analysis.

Paine’s rationalist and universalist approach was criticized by George Chalmers. Chalmers’ biography of Paine appeared under the pseudonym Francis Oldys and went through a number of editions in the early 1790s. For Chalmers, the "grand question" in politics was whether universalistic notions of the "rights of man" or "the rules of the particular society of Great Britain" should govern British life. A prescriptive and historical "mode of reasoning has no weight with Mr. Pain…. Pain as a reasoner, argues here, and through the greater part of his pamphlet, against facts." Chalmers attributed Paine’s falling out of favour with many in the United States to his mode of reasoning. Sensible Americans such as General Washington have realized that "government is a good to be cherished" and the radical ideas expressed in the pamphlet Common Sense had been repudiated by the American constitution of 1787, according to Chalmers.

An anonymous pamphleteer echoed Chalmers’ critique of ahistorical theorizing about the rights of man in Thoughts on the New and Old Principles of Political Obedience. The writer observed that in the republics of the ancient world, tradition and ancestors were honoured. He asserts that the new French republic is built upon false principles because it turns its back on history. In striving for equality, the French had severed their connection to the past. In contrast, the ancients "placed the statues of distinguished characters in the homes of their descendants… the French are much mistaken if they think the principles of equality will form anything which resembles the ancient republican character." The author of this pamphlet argued that thinking in terms of an original social contract has serious limitations because civil society did not, in fact, originate in a Lockean compact. In attempting to convert the Kingdom of France into a republic, the French Revolutionaries had detached republicanism from its proper historical context; the author reasons that since republican forms of government evolved in small city-states, they are unsuited to large nations, which are properly monarchies. Republicanism was not wrong in and of itself; in some social contexts a republic might be the right form of government. . Burke had adopted a similarly relativistic position in the Reflections, when he wrote that it was "the circumstances which render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind."

Not all defenders of the existing order did so with reference to historical precedent. At least two conservative pamphleteers advanced essentially ahistorical and a priori defences of the existing order. In his Principles of Government deduced from reason supported by English experience and Opposed to French Errors, Rev. Robert Nares’ (1753-1829) took an approach that was essentially rationalistic rather than historical; he first deduced what a political system should be like, then judged existing systems by this standard. History and precedent played a very secondary role in Nares’ system of thought. He prefaced his comments by remarking that literate Englishmen must be "fatigued by the dispute between the English and the French politicians" and apologized for producing yet another pamphlet on the subject. Nares affirmed that any viable political system must balance "the doctrines of Religion and the claims of freedom." According to Nares, the French had swung in the space a few years from one extreme form of government to another while Britain kept to a happy medium. Nares spoke in the abstract in discussing parliamentary representation. For instance, he stated that in a national legislature, the "principal divisions of a kingdom and principal towns should properly be represented." Similarly, in outlining the proper balance of powers within the constitution, Nares wrote as if he were sketching how to establish a constitution from scratch. In the chapter entitled "On the Creation of an Aristocratic Order," Nares argued that since the monarchical and democratic element of the constitution would tend to come into conflict, it would be necessary to create an intermediate order, the aristocracy, to check the excesses of the other two components of the constitution. While Nares expressed his ideas in universal terms, outlining how governments in general ought to be structured, Burke had defended the British constitution as the product of a long historical evolution. Nevertheless, the practical import of Nares’ ideas (to defend the existing social order) was the same, since, through a happy coincidence, the British constitution corresponded closely to Nares’ ideal one.

Similarly, James Edward Hamilton defended the British constitution on the grounds that it corresponded with the political system that reason would dictate if one were creating a constitution ex novo. His Reflections on the Revolution in France by the Right Honourable Edmund Burke considered, also, observations on Mr. Paine’s Pamphlet Intitled The Rights of Man with Cursory Remarks on the Prospect of a Russian War and the Canada Bill now Pending appeared in 1791. Hamilton compared the arguments of Burke and Paine and concluded that Burke was generally correct. However, there are points where Hamilton disagreed with Burke. Hamilton upheld Aristotle’s Treatise on Politics as the ultimate source of political wisdom. Where Burke’s ideas corresponded with those of Aristotle, Hamilton agreed with Burke. But when Burke and Aristotle differed, Hamilton would declare that Burke had made a mistake. According to Hamilton, his aim in writing was to call "the attention of our governors and reformers to Aristotle." "Mankind was more beholden" to Aristotle than any other person that "ever breathed," according to Hamilton. Hamilton saw both Burke and the "Democratists" have entirely "praise-worthy" motives; with good-will and a willingness to defer to Aristotle’s ideas, their disagreements could be overcome. According to Aristotle, dependent individuals such as employees and all traders should be excluded from government; Hamilton proposed disenfranchising all men in this class. Hamilton followed Aristotle in asserting that the best form of government is mixed-government, or "Politea." While he had no doubts as to the "integrity and patriotism" of the French National Assembly, its members had made a grievous error when they had deviated from Aristotle by failing to follow the British model. "They had an outline before them so obvious that they are scarcely to be excused from deviating from it." France was in danger of sliding into anarchy, according to Hamilton, and he outlined a number of possible solutions. Hamilton seriously suggested that the French National Assembly should offer Edmund Burke the job of drafting a new constitution for France. If Burke refused this offer, then France should become part of the British Empire so Parliament could write a new constitution for it in the same manner as it would legislate a constitution for a colony. Whatever his gifts as a student of Aristotle, one suspects that James Edward Hamilton knew little about the passions of Revolutionary France.

Burke’s comments on the Revolution’s influence on manners and the treatment of women were the target of Helen Maria Williams’ Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790 to a Friend in England Containing Various Anecdotes Relating to the French Revolution, which appeared in late 1790. Williams argued that polite manners were independent of an aristocratic political order; French politeness had survived the old government because it was not dependent on it. "The most determined Democrats of the nation, whatever other privileges they may choose to exercize, will always suffer the privilege of being rude to lie dormant." Williams suggested that Burke had misrepresented the amount of violence that had attended the Revolution; the prevailing English view that "every street is blackened with a gallows, and every highway deluged with blood" did not correspond with her experience in France. Her defence of the Revolution related primarily to its effects on the family and manners; far from having destroyed civility and domestic happiness, the Revolution had increased them. "I was told before I left England that I should find that French liberty had destroyed French urbanity," wrote Williams, but this was not the case. She illustrated the beneficial effects of the Revolution through the story of the romance between a ci-devant baron’s son, referred to only as M. du F----, and a women of bourgeois origins, a love that had been frustrated under the old regime. According to Williams, pre-Revolutionary France, despite its reputation for refined manners, was actually characterized by a nearly medieval crudeness within the aristocracy. The father of the M. du F----, Baron du F----, is depicted as a repulsive figure, a man who is both deceitful and a barbarous tyrant over his family. There are obvious parallels between this character and Manfred, the cruel father in Walpole’s The Prince of Otranto. When his son fell in love with a women of a bourgeois family, the anger of the Baron du F----- forces the young couple into exile; they travel first to the (Protestant) republic of Geneva, then to Holland, and finally to England. M. du F---- is eventually lured back to France by his father. Once inside his father’s castle, "the mask of civility" is dropped and he is seized by servants. Under the authority of a lettre de cachet, the son is imprisoned in a monastery, where he is cruelly tormented by monks. M. du F---- steadfastly refuses to renounce his marriage. The cruel Baron is unmollified by the fact that his son’s bride was of distant noble ancestry, since "some links were wanting in this chain of honourable parentage. The claim of nobility could not be traced to the entire satisfaction of the Baron." Williams draws an explicit parallel between "domestic tyranny" and France’s old political system. As an authoritarian father, the Baron was

formed by nature for the support of the antient government of

France. He maintained his aristocratic rights with unrelenting

Severity, ruled his feudal tenures with a rod of iron, and

considered the lower orders as a set of beings whose existence

was tolerated merely for the use of the nobility.

The Revolution and the release of M. du F--- coincides with the riding death of his father. M. du F---- succeedes to his father’s property, but not to his father’s noble title, which was abolished. Reunited with his bride, he enjoys domestic comfort and familial affections undistorted by a feudal social structure. Moreover, there is the suggestion that M. du F---- is now a Protestant. In her defence of the French Revolution, Williams skillfully combined romantic sentiment, disdain for the Middle Ages, and anti-Catholicism. To counter Burke’s assertion that the Revolution had degraded French women, Williams painted a happy picture of the condition of women after the Revolution. She also attacked Burke’s suggestion that the French should have renewed the traditional constitutional order represented by the Estates-General. Williams praised the French for constructing a new constitution on "the simple principle of amity" rather than repairing "the feudal wheels and springs by which their ancestors directed its movements." She argued that excessive veneration for the past is wrong; had it always prevailed, "we might even have been worshipping the idols of paganism at this moment." According to Williams, the National Assembly did not want to export revolution, but England should nevertheless imitate the French example, since "Europe is hastening towards a period of Enlightenment." In an obvious historical allusion, Williams compared the old constitution of France to the primitive ships used by ancients to carry plundering warriors from country to country. In contrast, the new constitution of France was like a "modern ship of discovery" in that it was created by reasonable men for rational purposes.

Another critique of Burke was provided by James Green in An Historical Essay on Different Governments, the second edition of which appeared in 1793. Green, a marine lieutenant, outlined a position between those writers who has "openly declared their republican principles" and those who "have propagated doctrines, not only derogatory to the Rights of Man, but totally repugnant to the Constitution." His stand is best characterized as one of qualified support for the French Revolution. By 1792, it was difficult to support the Revolution unconditionally, given its increasingly radical nature. By February 1793, shortly after the execution of its former monarch, France was at war with Britain. It is hard to determine whether Green’s moderate position was dictated by revulsion at Revolutionary excesses, long-standing philosophical conviction, or the need to avoid jeopardizing his commission. Green quoted the famous statement by Polybuis that the "best form of Government… is composed of a due mixture of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy." He submitted that mixed government was the original system of the Saxons before the "Norman Yoke" had been fastened on the English. Subsequent generations of Englishmen had continued the struggle for liberty against monarchs. Green conceded that the constitutions of the ancient republics contributed to their military success. However, the customs of the Germanic tribes that eventually grew into the Gothic constitutions of Europe were better protectors of the liberty of the subject. Green urged that Britain return to the political principles of the Saxons by instituting annual Parliaments and representation commensurate with population. A reform of Parliaments would undermine republicanism, because enemies of the constitution "would no longer have topics of invective."

As did the better-known Major John Cartwright (1740-1824), James Green grounded his demands for political change in the Saxon past. Green supported the French Revolution while distancing himself from its more radical English supporters, while Cartwright’s position on the French Revolution is harder to gauge. Cartwright was a prolific writers whose career of political activism extended from the seventeen-seventies, when he defended the American colonists, to the eighteen-twenties, when he was still demanding Parliamentary reform. Given his life-long literary output, it is strange that Cartwright did not produce a pamphlet on the subject of the French Revolution. We know from Cartwright’s surviving correspondence that he expressed approval for the Revolution in 1789 and revulsion at the King’s execution in 1793, but the French Revolution does not seem to have figured prominently in his thinking during this period, except as a strictly military threat. Cartwright’s twentieth-century biographer, John W. Osborne, attributes his disinterest in events across the Channel to a combination of a dislike of the French nation and his overriding preoccupation with English history. The English reform movement in the 1790s embraced a broad spectrum of thought and while radicals like Paine had a dismissive attitude towards the past, it is interesting to observe how more moderate figures such as James Green and John Cartwright had a very different mindset.

As concern that Revolutionary sentiment might spread to England’s lower classes grew, a number of individuals identified the need to counteract republican works (especially Paine’s well-selling The Rights of Man) with popular tracts written for the common people. Hannah More was the most famous of these writers. She had had an early association with Burke in Bristol, but had disagreed with him on the issue of colonial taxation. The French Revolution helped to repair the relationship by providing an area of agreement. Village Politics was a short tract More wrote for the labouring people of England with the aim of inuring them against Revolutionary arguments. Her writings in the 1790s have been called "Burke for beginners" and there are many elements More and Burke have in common. While Burke and More expressed mutual admiration, there are differences in emphasis between their works. Village Politics stressed practical and religious as well as historical reasons for opposing republicanism.

Village Politics took the form of a discussion between Jack Anvil, a village blacksmith, and Tom Hood, a mason, who is reading Paine’s The Rights of Man. Aside from a habit of drinking too much in the village pub, Tom is an essentially decent man. However, he has been befuddled by Paine’s arguments. Another village figure, Tim Standish, is mentioned; Standish is an exciseman and a disseminator of seditious ideas. Paine had formerly been an exciseman and Standish may be viewed as a local version of Paine. In the course of their talk, Tom raises many Painite ideas, which Jack promptly answers. Jack stresses the many practical benefits of living under the British constitution, pointing out that there are no poor-laws or charity hospitals in France. Jack asks Tom to visualize what an equal distribution of property would entail; following a re-distribution of the landed wealth in the kingdom, everyone would be so busy growing food on their small plot of land to permit anybody to practice medicine or a specialized trade. In other words, the division of labour that stems from inequality has resulted in a division of knowledge beneficial to all. More modified Adam Smith’s conception of the division of labour to combat demands for the enfranchisement of the uneducated tradesman. Jack freely admits that he knows as little about public affairs as Sir John, the local landowner, knows about making horseshoes. Let everyone deal only with matters with he is competent. Tom complains of high taxes, but Jack refers to the need to pay down the national debt and points to a recent decrease in the tax levied on candles. Radicalism is presented as an impediment to the faster reduction of taxes; Jack states that the gentleman in charge of the nation’s finances (obviously Pitt) would have been able to have lightened the tax burden even more if domestic and foreign radicalism had not disturbed the peace. Jack points out that the English working man enjoys the equal protection of the law; he refers to the case of a lord executed for killing his servant.

More reinforced practical arguments with religious ones. The abolition of the Sabbath in revolutionary France is both sacrilegious and harmful to the working people. Tom is urged to render onto Caesar his due; Jack points out that the rulers the early Christians were enjoined to obey were horrible kings who "fiddled to the flames of their town and persecuted Chrisitians." Painite notions that bad rulers can and should be overthrown are un-Christian. Jack concedes that the French were Catholics before the Revolutions, but any form of Christianity is better than atheism. In the family, "the woman is below her husband, and the children and below their mother"; it behooves the Christian to uphold the hierarchical social order. Jack urges Tom to "fear God, honour the King."

Upon these religious and practical appeals More added a layer of historical argumentation. Like many pamphleteers in the French Revolution debate, More used an architectural metaphor, comparing the British constitution to an old castle. Jack and Tom have their discussion within sight of Sir John’s castle. Tom recounts how

when Sir John married, my lady, who is a little fantastical and likes

to do every thing like French, begged him to pull down yonder fine

old castle and build it up in her frippery way. No says sir John, what

shall I pull down this noble building raised by the wisdom of my

brave ancestors; which outstood the civil war and only underwent a

little needful repair at the Revolution –a castle which all my neighbours

come to take a pattern by –shall I pull it down, I say, only because there

may be a dark closet, or an awkward passage…

Jack states that "our ancestors took time for what they did. They understood foundation work… now and then they mend a little thing, and they’ll go on mending." As a mason, Tom is bound to be convinced by such arguments and he soon realizes the folly of republicanism, joining with his friend in singing the traditional patriotic song "The Roast Beef of Old England." Tom then suggests that they go to the nearby public-house, the Rose and Crown, where Standish is disseminating his lies, so they can violently stop his sedition. Jack advises against this course of action; the best way to protect the constitution is to mind one’s own business and lead a clean, sober life. Jack also cautions against blaming Dissenters for the spread of sedition, as "a good man is a good man, whether his church has got a steeple to it or not." Loyalist "Church and King" rioters in Birmingham on July 14, 1791 had targeted the property of Dissenters, especially the scientist Joseph Priestley. More argued that this type of direct action is counter-productive and furthers the plans of the enemies of the constitution. Village Politics hinted at a theme that was to be developed by More in later pamphlets, namely, that improved morality is the best way to preserve the constitution. Jack refers to Tom’s traditionally excessive drinking at the Rose and Crown; at the end of Village Politics, Tom and Jack resolve on "no drinking, no riot, no bonfires."

Like More’s Village Politics, anti-republican pamphlets produced for mass distribution in the 1790s tended to emphasize the practical benefits conferred by the British constitution on the common people rather than engage in historical analysis. Typical is The Paisley Weaver’s Letter to His Neighbours and Fellow Tradesmen. In this short tract, the author, who purported to be a weaver of thirty years’ experience, argued that living standards had improved over his life-time "we have been enabled to procure the necessities of life, we can even procure many of its comforts; comforts which my father, a good honest man, never knew." In A Plain and Earnest Address to the Britons, especially Farmers, it is pointed out that in France an "arbitrary and despotic mob" forces farmers to sell their produce at low prices. The author urges Britons to disregard Paine and avoid being "so short-sighted as to believe that in 1792 the man would counsel them to their good who a few years before was labouring at their destruction." As popular loyalist organizations such as the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Levellers and Republicans were formed, some local branches felt moved to have their resolutions and declarations of loyalty printed. These short statements provide clues as to how non-writers interpreted the French Revolution. At a meeting at Culross on 13 December 1792, it was resolved by the attendees that they were "more wealthy, better clothed, and more commodiously lodged than our forefathers." While practical economic arguments dominate this type of pamphlet, some echoed ideas and terminology used in the more "high-brow" pamphlets. For instance, on 7 December, 1792, the merchants of Leith stated in a resolution their support for "this constitution which has been the result of the wisdom and experience of ages." These stray comments suggest that many Englishmen of the "middling orders" found the popularized versions of the historical reasons for opposing republicanism persuasive though not as important as the practical arguments that they reinforced. The proliferation of Gothic literary works in the 1790s also suggests that use of historical argumentation in high political discourse influenced the broader culture. Fred Botting attributes the popularity of Gothic novels to a reading public that sought "terror" in literature because of the presence of real terror across the Channel. Castles were residences where instead of domestic tranquility, one confronted terrifying monsters that emerged from subterranean labryinths, symbolic of the threat of Revolution from below. A more plausible explanation is that it was the historical element in Gothic novels that appealed to people in a period when the medieval roots of many institutions were being examined. Perhaps Gothic novels were popular because they offered an escape from the atheistic, democratic present into a magical and medieval past.

With the commencement of hostilities in February 1793, Britain began a generation of nearly continuous warfare with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. In the relatively short period proceeding war, events had moved rapidly; the French Revolution was a very different event in late 1792 than in 1789. In interpreting the fluid situation in France, Britons were influenced by notions of history that had been evolved by earlier generations. On the British side, a number of different motivations contributed to the deterioration of relations with France in this period. While historians have debated the degree to which ideological hostility rather than more traditional motivations (e.g., strategic and colonial ones) contributed to this process, it is clear that the desire to fight Jacobinism was shared by at least some members of Pitt’s war-time coalition. A conflict of such duration and scope was bound to produce some lasting changes in British culture. In the period after 1815, medievalism in a number of forms (architectural, literary, and political) would flourish. In 1790, Edmund Burke lamented that the age of chivalry was dead. However, the age of Sir Walter Scott was merely beginning.

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