Transactions of the Royal Historical Society [antikvár]

TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH RADICALISM BEFORE WILKES By Linda Colley, M.A., Ph.D. read I february 1980 ADDRESSING a Society consecrated to the advance of historical studies is bound to be an awesome experience: it is a particularly sobering one for me because the central argument of this paper would have been famihar to British historians writing in the early nineteenth century. In his Constitutional History of England, published in 1827, Hallam asserted, seemingly without fear of contradiction, that 'it must be evident to every person who is at all conversant with the publications of George IPs reign, with the poems, the novels, the essays, and almost all the hterature of the time, that what are called the popular or liberal doctrines of government were decidedly prevalent. The supporters themselves of the Walpole and Pelham administrations made complaints, both in parliament and in pamphlets, of the democratical spirit, the insubordination to authority, the tendency to republican sentiments, which they alleged to have gained ground among the people. It is easy enough to document Hallam's reference to contemporary complaints. When the Commons discussed the publication of debates in 1738, one of the major arguments against this concession was that the extra-parliamentary nation was already dangerously poHticized: 'The People of Great Britain are governed by a power that never was heard of as a supreme authority in any age or country before It is the government of the press.' However much dissident M.P.s might criticize the growth of the executive, Viscount Perceval warned five years later, 'the popular interest' and 'the Repubhcan Spirit' had been 'for many Years invisibly increasing in a far greater Proportion'.^ More recent accounts of the eighteenth century would compel us to ' H. Hallam, The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VH to the Death of George H (4 vols., London, 1827), II, p. 653. ''?ohn Perceval], Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts (2nd edn., London, 1743), p- 134; printed in G. Midgley, The Life of Orator Henley (Oxford, 1973), p. 216.