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 generated so enticing a narrative as secrecy.

Secret Designs

They for the most part avoided keeping papers for fear of discovery, and theyused cyphers or mysterious words in the few writings that passed between them.

—An Account of the Present English Conspiracy Taken From the Report ofthe Secret Committee

The rhetoric of secrecy that fueled Pitt's proposal harnessed a broad contemporaryinterest in surveillance and privacy, a preoccupation that emergedacross several literary genres. The atmosphere of Eliza Fenwick's novelSecresy; or, the Ruin of the Rock (1795) is cued, for example, by an epigraphfrom Twelfth Night: "Disguise! I see thou art a Wickedness, / Wherein thepregnant Enemy does much." Writers slipped the word onto title pages:A Secret History was the subtitle of Ann Yearsley's 1795 historical novel TheRoyal Captives, playwright Thomas Morton deployed hidden documents andoverheard dialogue in Secrets Worth Knowing (1798), and enterprising printersexhumed religious pamphlets from the seventeenth century that dwelton secrecy, such as Rev. John Corbet's Self-Employment, in Secret, whichJ. Ferraby reprinted in 1795. The politics of this gothic lexicon come intosharp focus in James Boaden's play, The Secret Tribunal, which premiered atCovent Garden on 3 June 1795. In the central action, heroine Ida faces theWirtemberg "Tribunal," to whom the fate of anyone, we are told, may beconsigned. Because the play's depiction of state repression clearly echoes thefraught atmosphere of the 1794 treason trials, an indemnifying prologue wasretrofitted to remind audiences that the scene of tyranny is fifteenth-centuryGermany, no matter how familiar things may seem. "Britain! rejoice!—Theenvied pow'r is Thine," playgoers are assured,

To punish malice, and to thwart design.Open as day our Courts judicial move,And RICH or POOR their equal influence prove;REJOICE! Your UPRIGHT JURIES make you free,Bulwarks of FAME, of LIFE and LIBERTY.

This is either utopian ideal or heavy sarcasm in Pitt's Britain, and the linesstrain under the political burden they are asked to support. Even as thenotion of "thwart[ing] design" evokes announcements of foiled republicanplots, the praise of "UPRIGHT JURIES" cheers the system that helpedsecure acquittals in the 1794 trials. But the boast that "Open as day ourCourts judicial move" cannot help but accuse present-day Britain. Withthe suspension of habeas corpus on 23 May 1794, prominent reform leaderswere imprisoned without trial, and the terror of juridical obliquity amplifiedthe suffering. "We are no longer Freemen," warns Coleridge in Concionesad Populum, using a reiterated first person plural to indicate a shared crisis:

It is an insult to tell us that we cannot suffer Death at the pleasure of aMinister, as is the case under arbitrary Governments—Suffer death! we canbe torn from the bleeding breast of domestic affection—we can be throwninto foul and damp dungeons—we can hear of the death of a dearly lovedWife, heartbroken by our Imprisonment—till overpowered by disease andwounded sensibilities we sink into the Grave.

Coleridge's scenario of violence, extreme pathos, and the violation of sentimentaldomesticity is no less dramatic than Boaden's Secret Tribunal.Whether in fifteenth-century Germany or Coleridge's Britain, the governmentmay invade homes, destroy families, and end lives at the "pleasure of aMinister"—for Coleridge and many others, Britain's legal system was hardlyas "Open as day."

Coleridge's gothic idiom sounds the fear felt across the country as surveillanceand prosecution became synonymous with the ministry. Private correspondencewas routinely perlustrated, and in some cases the governmentwent much further. In May 1794, agents raided the homes of several reformleaders, confiscating their papers and books. Along with his entire library,Thelwall lost several works still in draft. "Every manuscript was seized," hewould later report, "upon whatever subject—Poems, Novels, Dramas, Literaryand Philosophical Dissertations, all the unpublished labours of tenyears' application." This surveillance of public and private discourse waspervasive and unrelenting. "Every coffee-house is filled with party hirelingsand venal associators," Thelwall warned, while

anonymous letters are sufficient to blast the peace and destroy the personalsecurity of the best and worthiest members of the community.... [E]venyour own house and your own table furnish no longer a sanctuary and analtar where it is safe to offer the free incense of friendly communication[and] the very domestic who eats your bread stands open-mouthed, perhaps,behind your chair to catch and to betray the idle conversation of your unguardedmoments;—when every skreen conceals some myrmidon of oppression,lurking, like a beast of prey.

From the hearth and beyond, no one is safe from surveillance. This panopticalwarning is not hyperbole: Thelwall cites the example, among manyothers, of the satirist Charles Pigott, who was imprisoned, with fatal consequences,for a coffee house utterance. Appalled by the fate of those suchas Pigott, and alert to infiltration by government agents, the correspondingsocieties felt besieged by what Thelwall referred to as the ministry's "system ofSpies and Informers." "System" is an apt term here, for the modern conceptof a centrally coordinated network of salaried spies was coming into shape inthe mid-1790s, following an important change in governmental structure. In1794, the War Office took over foreign intelligence work, allowing the HomeOffice to concentrate on domestic security. And espionage paid well: whenthe pursuit of treasonous or seditious activity was at issue, the Secret Servicefund was an open coffer, so that from the 1780s to the mid-1790s its expendituressoared seven hundred percent. Amidst a failing economy, famine, andwar, domestic spying was a boom industry in 1790s Britain.

As an indication of the modernity of this system, the phrase "His Majesty'sSecret Service" makes its first appearance in 1799 (the earliest mentionof the organization that would develop into the MI5). By this time, WilliamWickham could hail domestic espionage as a point of national pride:

It would be sufficient for Your Grace to take Mr. Pitt for one half hour onlyinto the Office and shew him the different Official Books, Secret as well asPublic.... A mind like his could not fail to see that without bustle, noise, oranything else that can attract Public Attention, Government possesses herethe most powerful means of Observation and Information, as far as theirObjects go, that ever was placed in the Hands of a Free Government,—thatin observing Foreigners resident here, much curious information respectingthe ill intentioned of Our Countrymen and Concerning Foreigners residentabroad, has been, and must continue to be indirectly obtained.

Wickham not only puts this information on display for the prime minister,but also implies that the system is validated by Pitt's own surveillance: he isthe über-surveyor whose authority justifies the entire structure. Wickhamhad good cause for claiming that Pitt would commend the Alien Office'swork, for secrecy's appeal to the prime minister was public knowledge. Pittwas accused of "establishing a system of espionage, arming the mind of eachman against his neighbor," and of using "his agents" to torment those who"raise their voices against his measures." The first minister's surveillanceeven rattled a few Tories, such as Lord Garlies (John Stewart), who felt theneed to write to Pitt on 1 January i795 to apologize for attending a politicalmeeting at a pub, explaining that he had understood that such gatheringswere frequented by both loyalists and reformers. Garlies's apology is sheepishlytendered, for he realizes that Pitt occupies "the Fountain of Information"and would by now know of his night out. Pitt was notorious forsurveilling not only public houses but also private exchanges. In a letter toGrenville, Burgess writes about a set of letters that were once in his possession:"Mr Pitt desired me to give them to him. I accordingly did so, & helocked them up in one of his own Boxes: since which time I have not seenthem." This image of Pitt controlling discourse through a mechanism oflocks would come to focus the public response to the Gagging Acts.

"A Lock'd Jaw for John Bull": Reading the 1795 Gagging Acts

Are you willing to grant to that government, whose measures have avowedlybrought you to the brink of famine, the power of telling you when you may meet?When you shall shun each other? When you may speak, when you must be silent?

—Circular Letter to all the Patriotic Societies in Great Britain

It was one of the ministry's canny strokes to position the Gagging Acts asan invitation to public patriotism. Faced with swelling agitation for reformat mid-decade, Pitt offered an alternate mode of political participation:his parliamentary speeches of late 1795 encouraged the public to join theministry in discovering the "secret plots" of the LCS and the Society forConstitutional Information (SCI), and even of their own neighbors. Addingenticement to encouragement, Pitt presented the Gagging Acts in parliamentgift-wrapped in a language of secrecy and disclosure. He began bylinking the LCS to the 29 October attack on the king's carriage. Claimingthe group's immense outdoor meeting at Copenhagen Fields on 26 Octoberas the provenance of the riot three days later, Pitt declared that "meansmust be found to repress the spirit which gave birth to so daring an outrage."This figure of a generative spirit materializing in violence was puregothic, imaging a sinister plot that meant to "undermine and subvert theconstitution" (PH, vol. 32, col. 363). Legislative action was urgently needed,argued Pitt, to stop revolutionaries from abusing the right to peaceful assembly,even more so because "the peculiar construction of the correspondingsocieties," in which "divisions and sub-divisions" were quietly spreadingthroughout the nation, provided "not only the means of secret communication,but also of prompt execution of their designs" (PH, vol. 32, col. 361).For Pitt, this declaration of the societies' creeping reticulation trumped anycall for evidence. "Need I prove the necessity of such a precaution," he challenged,"at a moment when there exist societies hostile to the authority andexistence of parliament? Those societies, meeting under the specious pretextof parliamentary reform, and the right of petitioning, have employed a languagewhich sufficiently shows how far these were their real objects" (PH,vol. 32, col. 524).