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By John Barrel1 ARTICLES AND ESSAYS m-am" Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 Richard Brothers: engraved poWby WrmPm Sharp, published in 1795. The caption reads: 'Fully believing this to be the Man whom God has appointed, I engrave his likeness'. Imagining the king's death: the arrest of Richard Brothers by John Barrel1 This is an expanded version of a lecture given at Cambridge, March 3 1993, to inaugurate the annual Judith E. Wilson Raymond Williams Memorial Lectures. 'The prostitution of Language,' wrote the anonymous author of a 'political dictionary' published in 1795, 'has lately, been so glaring, and notorious, that . it requires a nice discrimination, to distinguish . the true intent, and signification, of many Phrases, now in general use'.' The author is complaining about the language of loyalist writers hostile to the movement for parliamentary reform, and particularly to the popular branches of that movement. These writers, he argues, are deliberately distorting the vocabulary of radical reformers in order to represent them as revolution- aries. A similar point had been made the previous year by the brilliant radical pamphleteer William Fox; the meaning of many of the words employed in political debate, Fox argued, is left deliberately ambiguous; indeed, many such words are 'invented to deceive' by governments and their supporters, and 'have been peculiarly resorted to in that state of this country, in which those who govern have found themselves necessitated, in some degree, to resort to artifice to obtain or maintain dominion, no longer History Workshop Journal Issue37 0 History Workshop Jouml1994 2 History Workshop Journal deeming it expedient to rely totally on force'. It is essential, he insists, to define such words with the greatest accuracy, for their use as a means of political control depends entirely on the vagueness of their meaning; if left undefined, they 'deluge the world with blood; they not only light up the fire of controversy, but produce real conflagrations: instead of amusing the speculative and idle, they agitate the mass of people, and spread horror, confusion, and desolation through the earth.'2 There are numerous other radical texts of the mid-1790s which similarly suggest that the conflict between loyalism and radicalism in the period was Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 regarded, by radicals at least, as a conflict, among other things, about the meanings of words. Some of these texts are concerned to reappropriate the words in the vocabulary of radicalism which, they claim, have been deliberately distorted by supporters of the government; others, most famously Charles Pigott's Political Dictionary, posthumously published in 1795, are mainly attempts to expose the 'true' meanings of the vocabulary of loyalism.3 Taken together, these texts seem to confirm, for the 1790s at least, the relationship between political conflict and historical semantics proposed by Raymond Williams in much of his writing about language: his suggestion, for example, that shifts in the meanings of words may 'indicate periods of confusion and contradiction of outcome';4 his argument, in particular, that the meanings of words are a site of political conflict, and that 'battles about the fixed character of the sign' should be approached as themselves signs and aspects of political battles.5 The 1790s saw a new kind of political crisis in British politics, when the Government was fighting a war on two fronts, against a republican enemy abroad and a highly organized popular radical movement at home. Tt was not coincidental - so Williams would certainly have argued-that this crisis should have taken the form, among others, of a struggle for ownership of the 'political dictionary'.6 For the most part the semantic battles in the 1790s were fought over the meanings of such large political terms as 'aristocrat', 'democrat', 'consti- tution', 'equality', 'jacobin', 'liberty'. This essay, however, is an attempt to sketch a bitter conflict over the meaning of a no less ambiguous, but apparently much less politically controversial term. It is about a moment in the complex history of the complex word 'imagination', a moment in late 1794 and 1795 when the Government of William Pitt was attempting to control the new phenomenon of a nationwide and highly organized popular radical movement. Its chief weapon in this struggle was the law which defined High Treason as, among other things, 'compassing and imagining the king's death'. I want to discuss that moment by telling a new version of the story of Richard Brothers, who was briefly - in the few months on either side of his arrest in 1795 - one of the most famous, most admired, most feared, most written-about men in Britain. He inspired, whether in his admirers or detractors, the most hyperbolic descriptions: he was, according to one contemporary, 'the most extraordinary man this century has produced';7 his Imagining the King's Death 3 writings, according to another, amounted to 'the most serious appeal to the public mind that has ever appeared'.8 On March 4 1795 Brothers was arrested on a warrant signed by the Home Secretary, and was interrogated by the Privy Council. His arrest was followed by the publication of dozens of pamphlets and other writings declaring a belief in his mission and in his sanity, or denouncing him as a false prophet inspired by Satan, or repudiating his interpretations of the scriptures, or satirizing the affair from various political positions from extreme loyalism to radical atheism.9 In April and May there was even a pantomime performed in London, The Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 Prophecy: or the Mountains in Labour, which was almost certainly based on the Brothers affair.10 In the period after his arrest, Brothers found himself in the thoroughly anomalous position of being an officially certified lunatic, and a prisoner suspected of high treason, a crime which, as a lunatic, he could not have committed; and one key to this anomaly, I shall be suggesting, is to be looked for in the interaction of the various different meanings of the words 'imagine' and 'imagination'. Richard Brothers was born in Newfoundland in 1757; he served, apparently with credit, in the British Navy, and had reached the rank of lieutenant when, in 1783, he was placed on the half-pay list. In 1790 he developed religious scruples about oath-taking, and it became impossible for him to continue drawing his half-pay, which could be paid only on condition that he made a sworn statement about his financial circumstances. He fell into debt, which led to his being sent first to a workhouse and then to Newgate, from where he was released in 1792. For the next two years or so he lived at 57 Paddington Street, in what was then the far north-west corner of London, where he issued a series of warnings that the events in the war with France were signs of the fulfilment of the prophecies in the Apocalypse and in the Book of Daniel. The 1790s, he believed, were the last days. Brothers was far from being alone in this belief: among dissenters in particular, there was a widespread if far from general conviction (held, for example, by Thomas Hardy,11 the first Secretary of the London Corre- sponding Society) that the French were the appointed agents of God to put an end to the reign of the Pope, the AntiChrist. In one vital respect, however, Brothers, like his contemporary William Blake with whom he has sometimes been compared, differed from most of those, Richard Price and Joseph Priestley for example, who interpreted the scriptures in these terms, and who arrived at this conviction by the study and comparison of the scriptures with current political events. For Brothers believed that the true meaning of the prophecies was revealed to him in dreams and visions which came directly from God; he believed, indeed, that he was the Prince of the Hebrews and the Nephew of God, descended from James the brother of Jesus - and he was convinced that he had been entrusted with a prophetic and spiritual mission, not simply to warn of the certain consequences of the enemies of France, if they persisted in their war with the chosen agents of God, but to lead the Jews home to Jerusalem and to rebuild it.12 There were, 4 History Workshop Journal he explained, far more Jews in England than people believed; for in addition to the small number of 'visible' Jews who still professed the Jewish religion, there was also a host of 'invisible' Jews, Christians, who were, unknown to themselves, direct descendants of 'the primitive Christians who came from Judea and went abroad preaching the Gospel'.13 Among the large number of the 'invisible' Jews Brothers counted the Prime Minister, William Pitt, his brother the Earl of Chatham, and Charles Grey. Brothers published his prophecies in the two parts of his most famous book, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times . wrote under Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 the Direction of the Lord God, and published by his Sacred Command. The first part appeared in four gradually expanding editions between January and September 1794; the second appeared in the same piecemeal way until its final version in late February 1795. Both were published in large print runs by George Riebau, who described himself as 'bookseller to the Prince of the Hebrews',14 was apparently a believer in Brothers's mission, and was a member of the radical London Corresponding Society.
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