Rebel Britannia

7th October 1794:

Attempting to neutralise dissidents by accusing them of serious crimes is a trick governments never get tired of.

Older readers will remember (though they may wonder if they dreamed such a bizarre episode) the time that Peter Hain was tried at the Old Bailey for robbing a bank. Now a respectable Labour peer, but then a radical Young Liberal and leading anti-apartheid campaigner, Hain was framed in 1976 by agents working for the South African government with the approval of the British secret police. He was only acquitted on a majority verdict. Even during a period of strange political trials, that one was sufficiently farcical to stand out.

At least the crime Hain was falsely accused of actually occurred. Unlike The Pop-Gun Plot ...

"It is with a degree of emotion which it is impossible for us to describe," one newspaper reported in September 1794, "and which True Britons alone can feel, that we communicate to the public the existence of a plot for the assassination of our most gracious and excellent King."

The monarch in question was George III, who was neither gracious nor excellent, nor was he, as the same report claimed, "beloved and amiable." Rather, he was widely hated, as was his tyrannical government, by working people throughout his kingdom.

The Pop-Gun Plot supposedly involved using the latest innovation in armaments - an air rifle - to fire a poisoned dart into the king, possibly while he attended the theatre. His death would signal a general uprising by revolutionaries who would overthrow the government and establish that most un-British of spectres, a democracy.

The alleged conspirators were members of the London Corresponding Society, a group campaigning for the reform of parliament, which was the first pro-democracy organisation to be made up almost entirely from the lower orders, primarily labourers and artisans. Inspired by the French and American revolutions, it was seen by the state as the greatest threat to the continuation of upper-class rule. For that reason, it was heavily infiltrated by government spies and agent provocateurs - or "spycops," as we call them these days.

Between the 4th and 7th of October 1794, three prominent LCS activists were arrested on the orders of the Privy Council for their part in planning to take a pop at "Farmer George." They were a watch-case maker, a bookseller and a warehouseman. The suspension of habeas corpus meant that the suspects had no rights at all: they could be held indefinitely without trial. Imprisoned in the most dangerous and primitive conditions, their health suffered terribly.

Outraged and alarmed at their treatment, the physician and geologist James Parkinson - who was also a member of the LCS, often writing for it under the pen-name Old Hubert - began frequent prison visits and was eventually able to get the sickest of the men released on bail. Parkinson himself was summoned before the Privy Council and the prime minister to be interrogated about his part in the plot. They got nothing out of him (it's unlikely he had anything to tell them) and he was released without charge. Perhaps significantly, he never wrote another radical pamphlet and devoted himself thereafter to his scientific works.

At last, in May 1796, the three men (and another who had been arrested since) went on trial charged that, having "been moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil," they had acted as "false traitors" against "our Lord the King."

The charge was high treason, a tactical error on the part of the prosecutors since it required a high level of proof. The only halfway decent evidence the crown had was the testimony of another activist who had been arrested with the original three, but never jailed. By the time the trial started, that man was missing presumed dead, and the case collapsed. The men were released.

It's generally thought now that the imaginary plot arose originally as part of a power struggle within the LCS, with one faction hoping to destroy another by exploiting the presence of spycops to get their rivals arrested. Readers will find this unbelievable: what? Left-wingers fighting each other, instead of the government? Such a thing could never happen, surely.

It's said that the acquitted bookseller changed the name of his shop to The Pop-Gun - cheeky if true - but the most remarkable post-Plot life was that of the radical medic, James Parkinson. In 1817, he published An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, the first paper to describe a condition which, sixty years later, was renamed in his honour as Parkinson's Disease.

*

Sources:

A revolution of feeling by Rachel Hewitt (Granta, 2017)

www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/released-court-files-take-hain-2276085

Mistaken identity by Peter Hain (Quartet Books, 1976)

https://blog.geolsoc.org.uk/2014/12/15/door-15-james-parkinson-and-the-popgun-plot/

www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(14)70008-0/fulltext