Out of the ferments which spread from France to the intellectuals and ordinary citizens of England, there sprang the first independent political working-class movement in history. Its founder was Thomas Hardy (1752–1832), a Scottish shoemaker of strong character, thoughtful and well read. In 1773 he had left his Scottish home in Stirlingshire for London, where he opened a small workshop in Piccadilly. In 1792, when he was forty years old, he called a meeting in a public house with eight of his friends and fellow artisans. He suggested to them that they establish a society to agitate for parliamentary representation. It was to be called the London Corresponding Society. Since national political organizations were prohibited, local societies would co-ordinate their activities through correspondence, in the form of letters, circulars and delegate conferences. The membership fee was fixed at one penny, and all present immediately contributed. The society, therefore, started life with a capital of 9d. Hardy remained its secretary until his arrest in 1794.[1]
Hardy's idea evoked an unexpectedly strong response among educated workers, artisans and small shopkeepers. English branches were established in Sheffield, Coventry, Leeds, Nottingham and Norwich; Scottish ones in Glasgow and Dundee. Soon after, branches appeared in the great industrial centres of Lancashire and Yorkshire. By the end of 1792 the societies had 20,000 members; in 1795 they had 80,000. In October 1795 an open-air demonstration attracted 150,000 people. Justifying the suspension of Habeas Corpus in May 1795, Pitt, the Prime Minister, told Parliament that 'the London Corresponding Society has reached the height of audacity. It is a Jacobin body, and aims at destroying the rich.'
It was indeed Jacobin, and like the Jacobins of France it hoped to replace oligarchy with a democratic form of society. The Corresponding Society did not aim at a social upheaval directed against property. Socialism was no part of its programme. It fought for political equality and universal parliamentary suffrage. It wanted to end government by a rich minority and transfer political power to the poor. It stood simply for democracy. But Pitt knew only too well that if democracy meant power in the hands of the poor, it would not be long before they used that power to threaten the property and privileges of the rich.
The prevailing system of oligarchy did not only deny power to the mass of working people. The bulk of the middle class was equally excluded, and it supported the cause of parliamentary reform principally to transfer power to itself. Consequently the Corresponding Society found itself linked with the liberal-minded section of the middle class in a common struggle for democracy.
But above all, its members identified themselves with the French Revolution. Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man was printed by the Corresponding Society and distributed free, in great numbers, to working people. After the first victory of the French revolutionary armies in September 1792, the society sent a message of congratulation to the Assembly. It spoke of the hopes of working people, the fulfilment of which was to be expected from the victory of the French Revolution.
You are already free [it said], and we now prepare ourselves for the victory of freedom in our country.…Whilst you enjoy the enviable honour of being the pioneers of freedom, we, in our own minds, think of the blessings which are imminent for mankind. If you, as is our dearest wish, are finally victorious, there will then be a Triple Alliance, not of the Crowns but of the people. Americans, Frenchmen and citizens of Great Britain will then bring freedom to the people of Europe and peace to the whole world.
The Assembly replied with a spirited message of thanks. In Britain, members of the societies, after the fashion of the French Revolution, took to calling each other 'citizen' instead of 'Mr' and referred to their conferences as 'conventions'. And many societies also corresponded directly with the revolutionary clubs in France.
The government was dismayed. AS early as May 1792 a royal proclamation warned the country against such 'revolutionary writings' as Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man. In December, the government reported to Parliament that British subjects were working together with foreigners to destroy the constitution and overthrow the government. Vigorous counter-measures were threatened.
Three months later, war broke out between Britain and France, a war which Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons, demanded should become a crusade against the ideas of the French Revolution. The war should have as its aim 'the complete destruction of the frenzied hordes' who were 'responsible for these ideas'. The government intensified the persecution of the Corresponding Society, which Burke described as the 'mother of all evil'. The authorities began to infiltrate the working-class movement with spies and agents provocateurs in an attempt to bring its leaders to heel.
The first victim was in Scotland. There the society was known as the Friends of the People. At a meeting of weavers, Thomas Muir, a young and talented pioneer of the movement, had demanded the right of the workers to be represented in Parliament. He was charged with preparing for high treason and sentenced to fourteen years' banishment in the penal settlement of Botany Bay. He managed to escape on a pirate ship which some American sympathizers had sent to rescue him. He was received with honour in France, but soon died from exhaustion, the effect of his imprisonment.
The entire movement now decided to call a convention in Edinburgh, with representatives of all the branches in Britain, to protest against the savage sentence. At an open-air meeting in a working-class district of London, attended by 30,000 men and women, M. Margarot and J. Gerrald were elected delegates of the London Corresponding Society.
The convention met at the end of November. The government ordered it to dissolve. When it refused to do so it was dispersed by armed force. A number of delegates were arrested, including Margarot and Gerrald. After being found guilty of 'conspiring to overthrow the constitution', all the accused were sentenced to fourteen years in Botany Bay. Only one of them survived the fever and hardship. In both England and Scotland, and for a good many years, the workers kept alive their memory as honoured martyrs. In 1843 a monument was erected to them in Edinburgh.
The Corresponding Society refused to be intimidated. On 20 January, only a few weeks after the verdict, they issued a manifesto protesting against the imprisonment of their delegates and also against the war. They called on all workers and citizens throughout the country to support them in their fight for freedom. 'We must now choose,' the manifesto declared, 'between freedom and slavery.…Shall we wait until barracks are built in every village and the Hessians and Hanoverians are on our backs?' The manifesto made it clear that if foreign troops were brought into the country, Habeas Corpus repealed, martial law enforced or the right of assembly destroyed, a convention would be called in London. This was a thinly disguised threat of revolution. At the same time, a large number of meetings were quickly called in London and the provinces against the war—the 'conspiracy of kings against freedom'.
Pitt now decided to attack the leaders of the working-class organizations. In the early hours of 12 May 1794 Thomas Hardy and eleven other leading members of the society were arrested, taken to the Tower and charged with high treason. They were accused of having 'maliciously and treacherously, alone and together with others, waged war against the King'—a crime which, in the gruesome conditions of English law at the time, carried the most cruel death sentence.
Four days later, Pitt, on the authority of the king, asked the Commons to suspend Habeas Corpus until 1802, so that political suspects could be kept in custody without trial. The country, he declared, in justifying the emergency legislation, was in the grip of a dangerous conspiracy, whose aim it was to overthrow the constitution and replace it with the Rights of Man. Government, law, property and religion, so dear to the English people, were in danger of being swept away as in France. Pitt accused the London Corresponding Society of being the most dangerous element in the conspiracy.
Parliament endorsed Pitt's move, and Habeas Corpus was suspended. The working-class leaders were brought before the Assizes on 20 October 1794. The proceedings lasted for five days, but they did not go according to the government's wishes. The public prosecutor failed to prove that the accused had sworn to wage 'war against the King' by force of arms. But he claimed to have proof that ideas of the kind propagated by the Corresponding Society had led in France to the overthrow of the monarchy and the execution of the king. As the society had quite openly proclaimed its sympathy with the French Revolution and with Paine's The Rights of Man, he argued, it had declared by implication its intention to overthrow the monarchy in England, on the model of France.
The proceedings were followed with intense emotion. London had been radical since the days of Cromwell, and a London jury was not to be intimidated. The court-room was crowded every single day, and in towns and villages people gathered in the streets waiting for the stage-coach to bring news of the trial. On 5 November, the day of the verdict, a dense crowd filled the roads round the court-house from early morning. When it was announced that the accused had been acquitted, the crowd broke into cries of joy and did not disperse until Thomas Hardy had been carried home in triumph.
The government had not yet broken the back of the working-class movement. The poverty resulting from the war had led to hunger riots. When George III drove to the House of Lords for the opening of parliament in October 1795, the royal procession was greeted with hisses and wild shouts of 'Down with the war! Down with Pitt!' On the king's return to St James's Palace, soldiers of his bodyguard who were escorting the procession were pelted with stones and mud.
In 1797 the disturbances reached a climax. Leaders of the United Irishmen had planned an invasion of Ireland with the help of the French government. A small detachment of French troops had actually landed.
There was violent resistance to the new militia law in the eastern counties of Scotland. Still more serious was the naval mutiny, provoked by the harsh conditions of life on board, which broke out at Spithead and spread as far as Duncan's squadron in Yarmouth. The mutineers blocked the mouth of the Thames and appealed to the people for support. The uprising was finally crushed.
In effect, nearly all traces of freedom in Britain had been wiped out. Soon after the public demonstrations against the king, a new and stronger law against high treason was passed, together with another law forbidding meetings not authorized by the authorities. No further meetings, in fact, took place. In 1798 the government ordered the arrest of the entire executive committee of the London Corresponding Society, and held them in prison for three years without trial. A law passed in 1799 prohibited debating societies and forbade political societies to make contact with each other, either verbally or in writing. Finally, in 1800 and 1801, the workers were denied the right of trade-union organization. The law remained in force until 1825.
The first political working-class association in history was destroyed by force. The industrial proletariat was still in process of developing into a modern, self-confident working class. It was not yet mature enough, either morally or intellectually, to defy the supreme power of the state or bring off a successful revolution. Moreover, the peasants had been effectively crushed for some time by a series of Enclosure Acts. And the liberal-minded middle class, who had greeted the French Revolution with such joy and sympathized with the Corresponding Society, were by no means revolutionary. Their aims were limited to political reform. Also, among the intellectuals, many of the earliest friends of democracy, such as Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth, were disillusioned with the French Revolution when, at home, internecine struggles became continually more grim, while, abroad, what had begun as a war of liberation against despotism, degenerated into a war of conquest. Such men became terrified of the Revolution. Francis Place, a faithful friend of Hardy who later continued his work, testified of the repressive laws that 'infamous as these laws were, they were popular measures'.[2] As the main conditions for revolution were absent, the fate of the first attempt at a working-class political society was sealed.
Its story forms, nevertheless, an important chapter in the history of both the English Labour movement and the International, because it was infused with the conviction that the fate of the working people of all countries was linked together in a common destiny. In this way, it established the tradition of international solidarity in the English Labour movement.
1. The best account of the history of the London Corresponding Society in German can be found in Max Beer, Geschichte des Sozialismus in England, ch. 4 (see p. 71, n.1, for details of the English edition). A detailed description in English can be found in Anthony Brown, The French Revolution in English HIstory (London, 1918).
2. Graham Wallas, The Life of Francis Place, 1771–1854 (London, 1937), pp. 14–15.