CHAPTER 1

Plots Discovered

Coleridge, Godwin, and the 1795 Gagging Acts

Be padlocks plac'd on ev'ry BRITON's tongue.

—Peter Pindar, The Convention Bill (1795)

Mr. Pitt is determined that there shall be no discontent. At least heis determined, that discontent shall not declare itself, and that noclamours shall be heard. He shuts up every avenue, of open consulting,of political publications, and of private conversation.

—Godwin, Considerations on Lord Grenville's and Mr. Pitt's Bills (1795)

Truth should be spoken at all times, but more especially at thosetimes when to speak Truth is dangerous.

—Coleridge, Conciones ad Populum (1795)

In late 1795 speaking truth became especially dangerous. Over four centuriesearlier a treason law had been established—25 Edward III (1351)—to protectthe monarchy from armed attacks, particularly attempts at usurpation. Thisbroad law remained in effect until 1795, when the Pitt ministry launched alegislative strike on printed and spoken discourse. The government claimedgood reason for rewriting the treason law. On 29 October 1795, a riotousmob greeted the king on his way to parliament and in the commotion awindow in his carriage was shattered. The loyalist press was quick to reportthe event as an attempted assassination and to demand a legislative reaction.A pamphlet titled A Warning Voice to the People of England broadcastthat "the nation," in response to the tumult, has "called upon the powers ofgovernment to relieve the public mind, to exert the due authority of law."A week later, the Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Assemblies billsappeared in answer to this orchestrated outcry, redefining "treason" froman act of war to an act of culture. The country took notice. The revolutionin the relationship between law and culture that the legislation threatenedtriggered a singular moment, what E. P. Thompson has called "the last, andgreatest, period of popular agitation."

The six weeks between the introduction of the Gagging Acts and theirroyal assent (6 November–18 December) saw a flood of essays, poems, satiricalprints, speeches, petitions, and newspaper reports. Contributions to thedebate included Samuel Taylor Coleridge's impassioned The Plot Discovered;or, An Address to the People Against Ministerial Treason, John Thelwall's urgentlectures, William Godwin's deftly calculated Considerations on Lord Grenville'sand Mr. Pitt's Bills, the satirical verses of Peter Pindar (John Wolcot), and thestrikingly radical cartoons of James Gillray and others. Uniting this panorama,the legislation's galvanizing jolt recalls the effect, a half decade earlier,that Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France had on radicalvoices. Burke, however, regarded British radicals as no more than "half adozen grasshoppers" who issued an "importunate chink," and if they made"the field ring," it was not enough to call down legislation to silence them.The 1795 Gagging Acts were another matter. The statute targeted those whotraded in language.

The Gagging Acts underwrote by threat of death the broader program ofsurveillance and prosecution that the Pitt ministry pursued across the 1790s,and the immense response to the new laws indicates that they were viewed asthe most chilling of the ministry's juridical strikes. This chapter examines thestrategies that writers used to engage the Gagging Acts and the tropology thatemerged as they began to figure a culture of enforced silence. At the heartof what follows are two remarkable documents of oppositional engagement,Godwin's Considerations and Coleridge's The Plot Discovered. In order to warnthe country about the Gagging Acts, Coleridge left his place of retirement inSomerset to return to political activism in Bristol. By 1795 he had already readwidely in Locke, Berkeley, Thomas Reid, Lord Monboddo, and John HorneTooke with interest in the natural language debate, but the government'seffort to legislate the boundaries of discursive possibility turned Coleridge'sfocus to the constitutive relationship between language and community, aturn that had a lasting influence on his work. Coleridge's writings of late1795 begin to establish the coordinates for his later theologically inflected sociolinguistictheory, as the young writer and lecturer addressed the profoundthreat of the Gagging Acts. Godwin, still smarting from ministerial animosityto Political Justice (1793) and especially Cursory Strictures (1794), found thecalculated ambiguity of the new legislation particularly alarming: "There isno case to which this bill may not be stretched," he warns in Considerations,"there is no offence, present or future, definite or indefinite, real or fictitious,that it may not be made to include" (137). Godwin's Considerations countersthis elasticity with a slippery rhetoric of resistance, drawing on strategies thatevoke his novel of the previous year, Caleb Williams.

Coleridge and Godwin shared a sense that the threat was most blatantin the government's plan to monitor all discourse, public and private. Theywarned of the isolation and social degeneration that would result—Coleridgeforesaw a vibrant nation hushed into "deathlike silence" (PD, 289). Giventhis funereal forecast, it is no surprise that challenges to the acts recruitedgothic rhetoric: "[T]he cadaverous tranquility of despotism," shudderedColeridge, will smother the country, and "the black moveless pestilential vapourof slavery will be inhaled at every pore" (289). More remarkable, however,is that the Gagging Acts also introduced Britons to William Pitt's gothicperiod. If by 1797 the Canning circle at the Anti-Jacobin (with Pitt's support)was reveling in satire, in 1795 Pitt preferred the tropes and tricks of the populargothic, particularly the narrative dynamics of secrecy and revelation. Inhis presentation of the Gagging Acts, Pitt was writing a gothic tale in juridicaldrag, and no trope...