The 'sinking down' of Jacobinism and the rise of the counter-revolutionary man of letters

Abstract

The murder of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval by John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons on the evening of 11 May 1812 shocked loyal subjects and reinforced a sense of crisis that followed directly upon the economic disruptions of the Napoleonic wars and months of newspaper reporting about Luddite riots and industrial protest in Nottingham, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. For some, there was reassurance in the discovery that the assassination was the result of a personal grievance, unconnected with any wider radical conspiracy. However, both Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge remained convinced that this violent event represented disturbing new evidence of the fragility of established government and the reckless energy of a new generation of radical leadership and organization. Of course, neither writer had to be urged on at this late date to hostility to radical reform: the years after the resumption of war with France in May 1803 provided them with ample occasion to reconsider the hazards of republican ambition and the virtues of British constitutional government. Yet the distressed conditions of 1812, and the particular circumstances under which reports of the assassination circulated back and forth through both their public and private lives, ensured that the alarming spirit of political resistance that seemed to erupt in violence in the lobby of the House of Commons would be cast in the distinctive form of conspiratorial popular resentment, which both men refused to recognize from their own past radical experience.

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