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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Ray Hemmings, Liberty or Death. Early Struggles for Parliamentary Democracy (London: Lawrence and Wishart 2000).

RAY HEMMINGS was a senior lecturer in Mathematical Education at Leicester University and in retirement has turned to the writing of history. In this short, readable book, he traces the struggle for parliamentary democracy in England in the late 18th century. He does so by developing two parallel narratives of leading radicals: John Cartwright, the founder of the Society for Constitutional Information, and Thomas Hardy, the founder of the London Constitutional Society.

John Cartwright was the third son of a minor country gentleman from Nottinghamshire who went to sea as a midshipman and saw plenty of service in the Seven Years' War, rising to the rank of lieutenant. After the war he served on the Newfoundland station for four years and mobilized for war against the Spanish during the Falkland Islands crisis of 1770–1771. He then returned home, greatly emaciated by his naval endeavours, and during his convalescence threw himself into the looming crisis in domestic and imperial politics over America. He was a major in the Nottinghamshire militia, a territorial army that was organized both as a counterpoint to a government-dominated standing army and as a defence against a possible invasion by the French after their alliance with America in 1778. Like some other naval officers, he declined to fight against the Americans, whom he regarded as freedom fighters engaged in a just war against an oppressive government. Indeed, he openly advocated a form of American home rule as early as 1774, hoping that this major concession would facilitate an ongoing union between Britain and America. It was the American experience that radicalized Cartwright, leading him to advocate universal manhood suffrage in 1776 and four years later, to found the Society for Constitutional Information, an organization dedicated to broadening the frontiers of political literacy and to disseminating radical tracts at subsidized prices.

Cartwright's narrative is interwoven with that of Thomas Hardy, the Scottish shoemaker who nearly left for America to set up a shoe factory in New York but ventured instead to London where he helped found the London Constitution Society in 1792. Hardy's story is, of course, better known, having been central to the first section of Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Hemmings does not add a lot to an already well-trod story save that he stresses how the writings of Major Cartwright and the Duke of Richmond, who routinely moved the adoption of annual parliaments and universal manhood suffrage in the Lords during the 1780s, were central to Hardy's radicalism. His major contribution is his concise and intelligible account of Hardy's trial for treason in 1794, noting not only the legal intricacies of what treason meant in that era — whether it had to involve an actual conspiracy to kill the king or not — but also the drama of the event and its subsequent significance in radical memory.

Unfortunately for Hemmings, the year of his book also saw the publication of John Barrell's Imagining the King's Death, a brilliant investigation of the treason trials and their meaning. Working from the original statute of 1351 which made it treason to "compass or imagine [intend] the death of our lord the king," Barrell showed how the Crown prosecution, in its desire to suppress the radical movement, stretched the meaning of treason to cover "overt acts" which might lead to the deposing or imprisonment of the king. They invited juries to imagine the sequence of events and circumstances that made such an attack upon the king's authority likely if not inevitable. "Imagining the king's death" thus took on new, sinister, and capacious overtones, with topical analogies to the "imprisonment" (and subsequent execution) of Louis XVI in France and by extension to the debate over political representation that was foregrounded by Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, where reason and representative transparency are counterposed to tradition, law, and the spectacle of majesty. Barrell's elaborate contextualizing of the treason trials and his play on the fluid signification of "imagine" at an acute crisis in British politics make Hemming's account look parched. What it underscores is Hemming's very insular approach to the radical movement, his failure to see how central the American and French revolutions were to the aspirations of British radical endeavour.

Hemming's insular approach means that other opportunities are missed. His account of Cartwright's first democratic statement, Take Your Choice, fails to examine how the militia major reworked the Country Whig tradition in the context of the American Revolution and looked forward to dramatic changes in the British political landscape with an almost millenarian intensity, describing the British polity as a system of corruption heading for a "Niagrian fall." Hemmings spends too much of his time criticizing Cartwright for proposing a property qualification for MPs in a new democratically-elected parliament and not recognizing the novelty of his pamphlet, which, with its demand for equal electoral districts, payment of MPs, a secret ballot, and annual parliaments, anticipated much of the Chartist programme of reform in the next century. Equally important, Hemmings does not seem to understand the dilemma that radicals faced in this age of revolutions and prescient change, that of how to put radical "reformations" into effect. This is why issues of mass petitioning, remonstrances, conventions, or "grand national associations" to use Cartwright's phrase, assumed as much importance as electoral franchises and strategies to get men of integrity into parliament. To focus so exclusively on the potentially inclusive nature of parliament — in Hemming's frame of reference whether working men were eligible or not to vote and be elected — runs the risk of anachronism. The late 18th century was the age of radical enlightenment, high political expectation in the wake of new liberated nations, and also one which had to grapple with a moving frontier of political literacy in which crowds were sometimes politically volatile and credulous. Hemmings' inclination is to adopt a Whiggish perspective, to see the changes and challenges of this era as part of the long road to political democracy. This filters out millenarian expectation, revolution, and radical revolt, and privileges parliamentary probity. It highjacks complex debates about the nature of citizenship, public space and debate, the appropriation and reworking of old political languages or narratives, and the fate of universalist enlightenment assumptions in an age of militant nationalisms.

Also disconcerting is Hemming's tendency to contrast Cartwright and Hardy and their respective institutions in class terms without appreciating the extent to which these men and their fellow travellers were part of the same emancipatory project. Hemmings is hard on Cartwright for agreeing with other landowners to regulate the wages of itinerant workers on their farms. Fair enough. He does not mention that Cartwright also saw the militia as a training ground for mass citizenship and believed that military service — often imposed upon poor people — strengthened their entitlements to full participation within the British polity. Nor does he stress the degree to which Cartwright's Society of Constitutional Information encouraged the formation of democratic clubs across the country in 1792–3, circulated radical literature to them, and assumed the leadership of the radical movement in May 1792, when the fledgling plebeian societies became increasingly vulnerable to government prosecution.

True enough, some leaders of the SCI like John Horne Tooke abandoned the radical wagon when things got hot. But that was certainly not the case of all, least of all Cartwright himself, who soldiered on during the bleak years of radical blight to help pioneer the Hampden clubs in the post-war era. Cartwright may have been a bit of a patrician, but he was a populist patrician all the same who believed that the "poor peasant," specifically the poorest male peasant, was entitled to the same political rights. How those rights might have been exercised in the economic sphere was not something that Cartwright, or any other radical of his era, addressed very systematically, with the possible exception of the agrarian utopian Thomas Spence.

Whether those rights could encompass women or people of colour, an issue that emerged with the confluence of abolitionism with radicalism, were also unresolved issues in this era of dramatic international transformations. Historians have begun to unpack those issues in the wake of feminist and multicultural agendas, but they will not find much to work with in Hemming's study. Although Hemmings briefly alludes to Hardy's friendship with Olaudah Equiano and has two fleeting references to Mary Wollstonecraft, he has no interest in these new perspectives, or in anything remotely connected to the cultural turn. This is a staid, pre-Thompsonian treatment of two radical figures of the late 18th century, nicely written, but dated.


Nicholas Rogers York University

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