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 firstt o 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. Copies were sent to the king, to Pitt, to numerous other members of Parliament, to bishops, judges, and foreign ambassadors.15 These publications made Brothers famous, and large numbers of people, even among the polite classes, came to believe in his prophecies and in his mission. He was taken up by the M.P. for Lymington, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, the distinguished scholar of Hindu legal and religious writings, who in January 1795 published a pamphlet which attempted to justify by the internal evidence of the scriptures the truths which Brothers had by revelation.16 The two parts of A Revealed Knowledge are very different. The first is mainly concerned to establish Brothers's divine authority by recounting how God had informed him of his prophetic calling, and how on two occasions - in 1791 and 1793 - God had intended to destroy London, which he had identified to Brothers as the 'Spiritual Babylon' whose destruction is prophesied in the eighteenth chapter of Revelations.17 On both these occasions, Brothers had successfully interceded with God, and the city had been spared. But God would not delay his recorded judgment on London a third time, merely at Brothers's request; he had done so, his nephew explained, 'from HIS GREAT MERCY and regard for Me, that I may be esteemed in this Country'.18 If the city was to survive the next outbreak of God's anger, its inhabitants would have to acknowledge Brothers's divine mission, turn from their corrupt ways, and withdraw from the war with France. In the light of what followed the publication of the final edition of A Revealed Knowledge, the most significant passage in this first part describes Brothers's first intercession with God on behalf of London; for God was not eager to be persuaded to spare the city, and Brothers was at first forced to accept a compromise whereby a few persons only, nominated by him, would be saved. These included a few more or less unknown friends and supporters, and a miscellaneous selection of politicians, most of them Imagining the King's Death 5 leading members of the Opposition - Fox, Grey, Sheridan, and others. But Brothers had also managed to persuade God to spare Pitt himself, and, most importantly of all, the king and the royal family.19 Thus, for those who believed in Brothers's divine calling, he had first prophesied the death of King George III, and had then been instrumental in ensuring his safety. To disbelievers, he had, at least in a weak sense, 'imagined' the death of the king, and by publishing his prophecy he might also have opened the possibility, as we shall see, that he had 'imagined' in the legal sense of 'intending' it. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 The imminent death, or the imminent dethronement, of George III, became the most urgent and most repeated prophecy of the second part of A Revealed Knowledge, the first edition of which was published late in 1794, and which was announced by its subtitle as referring particularly to 'the present time, the present war, and the prophecy now fulfilling'. Brothers now offered an interpretation of the Book of Daniel; and in particular of Daniel's vision, in the seventh chapter, of the four beasts which had traditionally been interpreted as referring to the four great empires of the world or to their monarchs, the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, the Persia of Cyrus, the empire of Alexander, and Rome under its various pagan and Catholic rulers.20 To Brothers, however, these beasts had been revealed as four monarchs of the contemporary Europe allied in their war against the French Republic. This is the first beast described by Daniel, with Brothers's interpretation:

The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man; and man's heart was given to it. The lion means George the Third; the present king of England; plucking the wings of the lion, means taking away the power of the king; made stand on the feet as a man, with a man's heart, means his reduction to the condition of other men, and possessing similar thoughts.21

This apparently republican prophecy was the better of two alternative fates Brothers predicted for the king. If he acknowledged that the revolutionary French armies were God's ministers on earth and withdrew from the war; if he acknowledged Brothers as a true prophet and made over his power to the Nephew of God, he would keep his life. If he persisted in fightingth e war and in ignoring Brothers's claims, he would certainly be destroyed. Brothers was evidently incredulous that the king, in spite of repeated warnings, could be 'so regardless of his own life, and the preservation of his family, as to involve them with himself in certain misery and death, by a longer continuance of this war'. He reminds the king that he was alive now only because Brothers had earlier interceded on his behalf.22 He makes every possible appeal to the king to persuade him to save his own life. He points out that he had correctly prophesied the assassination of the King of Sweden in 1792 and the execution 6 History Workshop Journal of Louis XVI the following year.23 He recounts his visions of the king's death, and of assaults on his life. He appeals to the king's well-known domestic sensibilities, by recounting a vision of the Queen's distress at his death. He speaks with understanding of the reluctance with which the king would surrender his authority, but predicts that it will be outweighed by the satisfaction he will feel when he has done so.24 Finally, in February 1795, in the last edition of A Revealed Knowledge that God permitted him to publish, Brothers abandoned his attempts at persuasion. He delivered to the king the direct orders of God, which it would Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 be death to disobey:

The Lord God commands me to say to you, George the Third, king of England, that immediately on my being revealed, in London, to the Hebrews as their Prince, and to all nations as their Governor, your crown must be delivered up to me, that all your power and authority may instantly cease ... it is for your contempt to me that your country is ordered to be invaded, and your power to be destroyed.25

Once again, to those unpersuaded of his divine authority, Brothers had, in one sense or another, 'imagined' the king's death, and then taken every available step to save his life. But whichever choice George made - whether he persisted in his defiance of God and lost his life, or submitted to God's mild yoke and lost his throne - it would mean the end of the Hanoverian monarchy.

Three months before Brothers was arrested, the orator and poet John Thelwall was acquitted at the Old Bailey of High Treason. His acquittal followed that of Hardy and of the linguist John Horne Tooke of the Society for Constitutional Information. These men, along with several others who never came to trial, had been charged with the treason of compassing and imagining the king's death: they had been planning to hold a convention in support of universal suffrage and annual parliaments, which, the pros- ecution alleged, was intended either directly to usurp the sovereign power of the king in parliament, or, more likely, to overawe the sovereign power into accepting its demands for parliamentary reform. The prosecution case was not based on the claim that the defendants had any direct design upon the life of the king; the plan to hold a convention was constructed as the species of treason known as imagining the king's death by the argument that the likely or possible consequences of any attempt to mobilize popular support in an attempt to persuade the king to change his measures of government were, either that he might in fact be killed in a struggle to maintain his authority, or that he might be deposed (which might lead to his death) or that some restraint might be placed upon him which might, by one means or Imagining the King's Death 7 another, lead to his deposition and so to his possible death. Thus the defendants were imagining, in the sense of intending the death of the king, by the argument that they should have foreseen that among the possible, if unintended, consequences of their plan was that the king might die. The acquittals in these trials were a crisis in the attempts of Pitt's administration to control what it rightly saw as a new and unprecedented political phenomenon, the emergence of an organized popular radicalism. Before the trials, government ministers, the newspapers and pamphlet- writers funded by or sympathetic to the Government, had never doubted the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 guilt of the defendants; indeed, had openly prejudged the outcome of the trials. In the months following the acquittals, all kinds of explanations were advanced for the failure of the prosecutions. The most persuasive of these, in government circles, was that the law of treason itself was to blame: it had been framed, and had been extended by judicial interpretation, in times when High Treason was primarily an aristocratic crime; but with the advent of the corresponding movement, new, democratic and popular forms of treason had emerged which the present law took no account of. A new law of treason was evidently required, but the Government could not be seen to be introducing one simply out of frustration at the outcome of the recent trials. It was widely believed that during most of 1795 the Government was waiting for a pretext to change or reinforce the law, which did not come until late October, when a missile of some sort struck the king's coach as he was on his way to open the new session of Parliament. In the early months of 1795, therefore, the Government appeared at a loss as to how to control the popular radical movement. It was unwilling to risk using the law of treason against those implicated in the 'Pop-Gun Plot', an alleged conspiracy to assassinate the king which had almost certainly been concocted by a government spy; it was unusually reticent in invoking the law of libel against publications in which its conduct of both the treason trials and the war with France was being ever more extravagantly ridiculed. In this context an anonymous pamphlet appeared, A Word of Admonition to the Right Hon. William Pitt, which insisted that Brothers's prophecies, especially as re-presented by Halhed, posed the greatest threat to civiliz- ation and good order ever faced by Britain, and suggested that the prophet should be arrested on a charge of high treason. Brothers, the pamphlet insisted, was the front man of an invisible revolutionary cabal, a 'villain, the hireling of worse villains',26 who had concocted an elaborate plot to subvert the Government, depose the king, and establish a republic. With the exception of Halhed, the author had no means of identifying these Jacobin conspirators, but of their existence, and of the nature of their plot, he had no doubt. At first they had attempted to subvert the Government by preaching the doctrines of atheism, but meeting too much resistance from popular religious belief, they had now changed tack and attempted to undermine the social fabric by prophecy. '"GOD", they had announced, "has determined that your Government, King, &c. shall be overturned!"', a prophecy which, 8 History Workshop Journal

in a superstitious age, would fulfil itself, by finding believers willing to effect its fulfilment.27 The main point of this opportunistic pamphlet is evidently to discomfort the ministry; its author is a supporter of the Opposition, anxious to exploit the Government's recent loss of face and apparent loss of direction, and throughout its argument consistency is repeatedly sacrificed in the search for political advantage. The author attaches the plot he claims to have detected to the English Jacobins, at the same time as he regards the recently acquitted

leaders of the allegedly Jacobin societies as the victims of government Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 paranoia. He blames the inadequacies of Pitt's elaborate spy-system for the fact that there is apparently no evidence of such a plot, at the same time as the very existence of that system is deplored. The prophecies of Brothers, he insists, have been concocted by atheists, but the facility with which they have come to be so widely believed is blamed on Pitt himself, who had urged the British people into the war with the 'bugbear' of French atheism and Jacobinism, and so frightened them into the arms of superstition.28 Brothers comes to seem little more than a pretext for these attacks:29 the more extravagantly the danger is described, the more the Government's failure to act against him is represented as an instance of the 'imbecillity and supineness' of Pitt's administration, and the 'feebleness' of his talent for government.30 There is only one man, the pamphlet insists, able to provide the remedy for this epidemic of superstition: Pitt must stand down, and make way for Fox. There is no evidence in publications by supporters of the Administration of a similar anxiety, real or assumed, about the political tendency of Brothers's prophecies. No pro-ministerial pamphlets about him were published prior to the drawing up of the warrant for his arrest on March 2.31 The more or less independent Oracle had published an article on that day which branded Brothers as a 'fanatic Jacobin', and had repeated the warning first voiced in A Word of Admonition on the dangers of 'supineness'. But the only notices of Brothers in the ministerial newspapers prior to his arrest on March 4 treat his prophecies as 'absurd and ridiculous', and the prophet himself as 'a poor, stupid visionary' or as an ineffectual radical crank.32 There is some evidence that in February 1795 the Administration did consider prosecuting Halhed, and then backed down for fear of looking foolish.33 It seems probable then that the Administration was at first unwilling to act against Brothers himself, and that it may finally have been provoked into arresting him by a pamphlet which had pushed Brothers forward as a sacrificial victim in an attempt to exploit the Government's confusion as to how to deal with the radical societies.24 As soon as Brothers was arrested, however, ministerial publications decided that Brothers was, after all, a serious threat. The Times praised the Administration for apprehending a man who 'was become the tool of a faction, employed to seduce the people, and to spread fears and alarms', and the True Briton warned that there was, after all, ''"method'" in Brothers's Imagining the King's Death 9 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021

James Gillray, 'The Prophet of the Hebrews, -the Prince of Peace -conducting the Jews to the Promis'd Land', published 5 March 1795. As well as leading the Jews to a gibbet, in the belief that it is Jerusalem, Brothers carried a bundle of opposition politicians along with him, including Fox, Shedan and Stanhope. By permission of the British Library. apparent madness, 'if mad he should finally be deemed'.35Thereafter, it was almost exclusively pro-Government and orthodox Anglican pamphlets which represented Brothers as a danger to the state, and for a few weeks loyalist alarmism fed upon the belief that he was the front-man of an elaborate conspiracy all the more insidious because no clear evidence could be found of its existence.% The affair enabled loyalist opinion to reiterate the version of the conspiracy theory which had appeared so often during the debates on the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act in May of the previous year, and which had been laid aside when the plot to summon a convention was finally determined to be a 'modem', 'democratic' variety of treason. The fact that Brothers had somehow found the money to print and give away so many copies of A Revealed Knowledge suggested that he had some affluent supporters, who were regarded by those who chose to believe that he was the puppet of some invisible 'folks behind the curtain' not as patrons but as conspirators. Though Brothers himself named a Captain Hanchett as his main financial backer,37 the loyalist press seemed to prefer the notion that Halhed was the chief puppet-master, and that the conspiracywas an old-style 'aristocratic' treason, which was seeking to mobilize the energies of popular radicalism to further 10 History Workshop Journal the ambitions of some more prominent enemies of the state. It was hinted, as it had been of the Pop-Gun Plot, that the conspiracy might even be traced back - presumably via Halhed's friendship with Sheridan - to the Oppo- sition itself.38 The day after the arrest, James Gillray published a caricature, very probably commissioned by the Government, which attempted to turn the tables on the Opposition by associating them with Brothers, whom it de- picts as a French agent, carrying Fox, Sheridan, and Stanhope to a gibbet, in the belief that it is the gate of Jerusalem. When the Morning Chronicle raised the question of how the publication of A Revealed Knowledge had Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 been funded, the St. James's Chronicle replied: 'The Seditious Chronicle re- marks that it is inexplicable how Brothers,. . . should have distributed pam- phlets which cost upwards of 2501 [£250]. - We think it admits a very easy explanation, by all who know of the diligence of Faction'.39 But among the pamphlets published after Brothers's arrest the division of opinion about whether or not Brothers was part of a revolutionary conspiracy did not entirely run along party lines. The author of the satirical dialogue The Age of Prophecy, published in late March but apparently written, at least in part, prior to the arrest, writes with contempt of Pitt's alarmism and his conduct of the war, and though he is equally hostile to popular radicalism, he clearly regards the treason trials as instances of legal oppression: Halhed, one of his characters remarks, could 'interpret the signification of prophecy, inspiration and revelation, with as much facility and strict adherence to truth as the Attorney General construes law, justice and constructive treason'. Like A World of Admonition, the pamphlet urges that Brothers is part of a complicated and invisible plot, and that, unless he is stopped, 'a total revolution' will ensue, 'moral, political, and religious'; and, again like A Word of Admonition, it seeks to taunt as well as to persuade the Administration into arresting the prophet; by doing so, it argues, ministers would have an opportunity to show that they had recovered from 'the stupor proceeding from the knockdown blow they received at the conclusion of some late trials'.™ The pamphlet is probably to be read as evidence that the attempts of the loyalist press to link Brothers, through Halhed, to the Opposition, were taken seriously enough by opposition opinion for it to seem worth denying the link, and as insisting, once again, that the Brothers affair was an instance of government pusillanimity and ineptitude.

3

The sense that the Government may have been provoked and hurried into arresting Brothers may be confirmed by the confusion surrounding the charge on which he was arrested. In the days and weeks before the arrest, ministers were offered conflicting advice on how best to deal with Brothers. A Word of Admonition had suggested there might be no obvious law under which he could be apprehended; but in claiming that he and his alleged conspirators were plotting 'an act too horrible to name', which could be Imagining the King's Death 11 accomplished by a 'single stroke', it clearly challenged the Government to proceed against Brothers by invoking, once again, the change of imagining the king's death.41 On the other hand, the orthodox and pro-ministerial pamphlet Sound Argument dictated by Common Sense, a refutation of Brothers purporting to be written by the late Bishop of Norwich, George Home, also represented Brothers as the front man of a conspiracy, but its author, Walley Chamberlain Oulton, did not believe that his crimes amounted to more than promoting sedition. He advised the Government to arrest Brothers by invoking a statute of Queen Elizabeth forbidding the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 wicked publishing of fantastical prophecies with intent to cause disturb- ances.42 When Brothers was arrested, these different recommendations were matched by the different reports of the arrest that appeared in the opposition and the ministerial newspapers. According to the Morning Post, Brothers had been detained on a charge of high treason, and according to the Morning Chronicle, he was arrested on the slightly less serious charge of 'Treasonable Practices', the formula used when the suspicion of the Home Secretary was less than what he regarded as fully substantiated.43 But according to the True Briton, the Times, and the St. James's Chronicle - and also the radical Courier - the warrant for Brothers's arrest charged him merely with fantastical prophesying.44 The ministerial newspapers were in a much better position to know what was written on the warrant; and if I am right that elements in the Opposition had been attempting to lure the Government into invoking the law of treason against Brothers, the reports in the opposition newspapers might perhaps be regarded as deliberate disinformation, suggesting that Government had finally taken the bait. The Morning Post certainly treated the arrest as an occasion to ridicule the Government, arguing at once that Brothers should have been arrested long ago, and that the Ministers and the Privy Council were allowing themselves to be diverted by the affair from much more important business.45 But in fact it seems certain that the opposition papers were right, and that Brothers, as he himself at various times asserted, was indeed arrested on a warrant for treasonable practices.46 At the time of his arrest, the king's messengers took possession of all the papers that were found in his house, and they could have done this - legally, at any rate - only if the warrant was for high treason, suspicion of treason, or treasonable practices.47 Nor is it at all probable that Brothers would have been interrogated by a meeting of the Privy Council attended by Pitt and virtually all his senior ministers for such a relatively minor offence as false prophecy, the penalty for which was no more than a fineo f £100 and a year's imprisonment. The Privy Council acted as the examining and committing magistrates in cases of suspected offences against the state,48 and every other criminal examination it conducted throughout 1794 and 1795 was of those suspected of high treason or of possible witnesses to that crime. • Halhed, who claimed to have questioned the king's messenger who 12 History Workshop Journal served the warrant, informed parliament that Brothers was detained under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, 'on suspicion of treasonable prac- tices',49 and this is confirmed by Alexander Gordon, the author of the excellent article on Brothers in the Dictionary of National Biography, who appears to have found the warrant for Brothers's arrest (which so far I have not), and who reports that it was drawn up on March 2, and that it charged him with 'treasonable practices'. That this was indeed the real reason for his arrest may also be suggested by Gillray's cartoon, which represents Brothers as carrying off his opposition accomplices to death by hanging: of all the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 crimes of which Brothers might have been suspected, only treason carried the penalty of death. The likeliest explanation of these contradictory reports may be that Brothers was indeed arrested on a warrant for treasonable practices, issued with a view to discovering whether there was anything in his papers which would support such a charge; but that, finding nothing in them, the Government decided to let it be known that it was proceeding on the lesser suspicion of fantastical prophesying, with a view to taking out a commission of lunacy against him.50 In that way it could damp down the expectation that the arrest would lead to the revelation of another grand conspiracy, and so might hope to escape the inevitable derision when no such conspiracy emerged. That some such change of mind occurred between the arrest and the examination may be supported by the form taken by Brothers's examination: as we shall see, the questions were mainly designed to establish whether Brothers had any connection with known subversives; but the questioning was conducted by Loughborough, the Lord Chancellor, among whose responsibilities was the cognizance of lunatics.

If Pitt and his ministers had been hurried into choosing Brothers as a possible candidate for a new attempt to use the law of treason against the popular radical movement, they had made an unlikely choice. It is beyond question, of course, that millenarian beliefs of one kind or another were held by many in that movement, and there seems little doubt that Brothers's version of millenarianism had a large following, at least in London, by the time he was arrested.51 Brothers's texts are certainly full of statements; and not only on the subject of the war with France, which seem to align him with contemporary radical opinion, especially contemporary dissenting radical opinion. Thus A Revealed Knowledge prophesied the complete destruction by an earthquake of the House of Commons, which Brothers identified both as Armageddon and (because it had nearly 666 members) as the Beast of the Apocalypse; 'the Parliament House', he warned, was 'the recorded prophe- cied burying-place of all its members'.52 Brothers also condemns royal and aristocratic titles, which belonged properly only to God; the titles, office and conduct of bishops, the practice of oath-taking, as well as the condition of the poor and of prisons and British participation in the slave-trade, Imagining the King's Death 13 humanitarian issues which engaged not only radical and dissenting opinion but a wide spectrum of public concern.53 The second part of A Revealed Knowledge even contains a letter to Pitt, written during the trial of Hardy, informing him that all those charged with treason were innocent.54 On the other hand, the prophecies are certainly not, as various contemporary writers pointed out, the writings of a believer in the essentials of the radical reform programme, nor, despite their threats or warnings to the king, of a republican.55 Insofar as the theocracy they imagine is given a definably political form, it is that of an absolute monarchy, with Parliament Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 destroyed and Brothers as king: as one satirical pamphlet explained, 'Mr. BROTHERS . . . has . . . been unjustly reproached with Democratic principles; for, if he destroys all the Kings of the Earth, we shall still enjoy the felicity of a Monarchical Government under his pious reign'.56 In Brothers's account of the future, the British Empire and the patronage system would still be firmly in place: Halhed's promised reward for believing in Brothers's mission was to be the choice of becoming Governor-General of India, or (if he prefers to stay in Britain) President of the Board of Control, posts which Brothers also offered at various times to Loughborough and Pitt.57 Brothers himself explicitly denied having any interest in political discussion, or any radical connections.58 William Sharp, formerly of the now virtually defunct Society for Constitutional Information, believed in his mission, and in May 1795 he published an engraved portrait of the prophet, but by this time Sharp had withdrawn from political activism following his interrogations by the Privy Council. Though Brothers had individual adherents who were members of the London Corresponding Society, the only part of the reform movement in London in early 1795 which had the organization and numbers to press for large-scale political reconstruction, there is no evidence that prior to his arrest he had any association with the most active and influential members of the Society. If he had had such an association, the Government would certainly have known of it, for the Society had been deeply and widely infiltrated by spies throughout 1794, and in January 1795 its President was himself a government spy.59 Equally certainly the Government did not even suspect such a connection at the time of his arrest, which was never raised during Brothers's examination by the Privy Council.60 Apart from the pamphlets put out by Brothers's own publisher, most publications in 1795 which refer to Brothers and which emanate from radical London booksellers treat him as a lunatic or an impostor. The Courier, a newspaper close to the London Corresponding Society, described Brothers on the day after his arrest as 'certainly ... a false prophet'. The broadsheet pasquinade, A Contrast on Mr. Brothers and Mr. Pitt, probably published during the summer of 1795, opposes the two men by representing the prophet as deluded, harmless, but rightly incarcerated; the Prime Minister as distracted, dangerous, and fit only to be hanged.61 Most of the other 14 History Workshop Journal pamphlets originating with radical publishers other than Riebau himself are atheist or agnostic attacks not only on the prophet but on the doctrines of Christianity as well, and are part of the explicit move towards atheism of many London radicals following the publication of The Age of Reason.''2 The nearest thing to an endorsement of Brothers among these radical pamph- leteers came from the eccentric radical empiric Martin van Butchell, who regularly took whole columns of the Morning Post to advertise himself and his practice - he specialized in curing anal fistulae and impotence. Butchell collected some of these advertisements in a pamphlet published in June Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 1795, with a brief and genial address to Brothers and Halhed.63 Those who wrote pamphlets in support of Brothers, though they shared his attitude to the war and the divine mission of the French, were not generally as outspoken as he was on the political implications of his prophecies or theirs, nor were their writings at all as susceptible as his of being understood as radical, republican, or 'Jacobin'.64 Of the few pamphlets published by supporters of Brothers prior to his arrest, none is as explicit in its threats to the king and Government as Brothers's own writings. Halhed was particularly reticent on the subject of the fate which awaited George III, explicitly refusing to enlarge on Brothers's interpretation of the first of Daniel's four beasts, though he went into elaborate detail to confirm the interpretations of the other three.65 For obvious reasons, the numerous testimonies to Brothers's mission published after his arrest are, with one exception, careful not to repeat his most outspoken prophecies.66 For the most part, however, though Brothers's supporters were often eloquent in their denunciations of the war and of corruption in church and state, their writings suggest, as J. F. C. Harrison points out, that the prophet's appeal was primarily 'to sectarians and "seekers" of various kinds', whose faith in the coming of the millennium was too strong for them to have any need to nourish an intention to assist God in hastening the downfall of the king and Government in the manner feared by the most alarmist commentators.67

The minutes of Brothers's examination, which I have managed to find,68 show that, when brought face to face with the Nephew of God, the Privy Council was entirely at a loss: unable to extract any information from him about his possibly treasonable associations, and equally unable to supply any of its own to ambush him with - the fishing expedition among his private papers had clearly revealed nothing. As the Morning Chronicle reported of the examination, the Council 'could not exasperate, intimidate, nor disconcert him. He preserved that gentleness of deportment which is peculiar to him under the most biting harshness of rebuke, and he was never once deceived by the lures which were spread to throw him off his guard'.69 The belief that Brothers was involved in a revolutionary conspiracy depended largely on the question of where he had found the money to print Imagining the King's Death 15 his books and to distribute so many of them gratis. Asked about this, Brothers replied simply that God had provided it through the medium of a Captain Hanchett and others among the better-off of his proselytes, and the Privy Council did not press him further on the matter. In an attempt to establish the extent of Brothers's knowledge of known subversives past and present, the Council asked him whether he had known the late Lord George Gordon, who had converted to Judaism, and whom they might reasonably have expected Brothers to have encountered while both were in Newgate.

The prophet replied that he had neither known Gordon nor respected him, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 for he himself 'was a Man of Peace, and the other was not'. Brothers had reprinted some of the millennarian prophecies of the puritan minister Christopher Love,70 executed for high treason in 1651, and the Council asked him if his knowledge of Love was 'from History'? Brothers replied that it was 'from Revelation'. Asked if he knew, or knew of any prophecies by, Major Cartwright, Brothers replied that he did not: 'Many Prophecies,' he said, 'are sent to me, and I put many of them into the fire'. Asked about his final prophecy concerning God's command to the king to renounce the throne in favour of Brothers, he replied that it was entirely out of a consideration of 'the Troubles which would come on the King's Family that he wrote the Letter to the King, in order that he might consider and so conduct himself that when he (Brothers) was revealed he might take him by the Hand'. The Privy Council concluded by agreeing that the prophet was probably insane and should be examined by two mad-doctors. On March 27 a jury was impanelled at the King's Arms in Palace Yard on a commission De Lunatico inquirendo to decide on Brothers's state of mind. Advised by Dr Samuel Foart Simmons of St Luke's Hospital and Dr Thomas Monro, the keeper of the Bethlehem Hospital, it pronounced him to be a lunatic, and to have been so since September 1791, the period when he first began prophesying.71 The verdict, if it is correctly reported, is an intriguing one, for the legal distinction between idiocy and lunacy depended on the notion that while idiots were 'absolute madmen', permanently insane, lunatics were only periodically insane - usually, as the term suggests, between the new moon and the full.72 Idiots were therefore not chargeable for any offences committed while they were of unsound mind - as Blackstone emphasized, 'no, not even for treason itself73 - though they had no im- munity from prosecution for offences committed during the 'lucid inter- vals' they were thought to enjoy. Since Brothers showed no sign of enjoying intervals in which he did not prophesy, or did not believe in his own prophesies, the verdict seems to suggest that Brothers was a very strange lunatic indeed, who had enjoyed no periods of lucidity since he first emerged as a prophet. The verdict is probably best understood as an attempt to adapt the terms in which insanity was defined by the law to those in which it was being described by contemporary psychiatrists. It was frequently noticed by those 16 History Workshop Journal who had met Brothers, but who were not convinced by his claims to be a prophet, that on all other topics apart from those relating to his prophecies he conversed with perfect rationality. In terms of contemporary theories of insanity, the pattern of behaviour generally ascribed to Brothers was more easily recognizable as the 'partial insanity' of melancholia than the periodic insanity of lunacy as defined in law. William Falconer, for example, described melancholia as being distinguished by 'an attachment of the mind to one object, concerning which the reason is defective, whilst in general, it is perfect in what respects other subjects'.74 Alexander Crichton probably Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 had Brothers in mind when he wrote in 1798 that a person suffering from melancholia

conducts himself like a man of sense, in every respect but in one particular circumstance; but in that, his thoughts and actions are in such opposition to those of other men, that he appears to them to be evidently deranged ... as when a person believes he is endowed with a prophetic spirit; that he is the intimate companion of kings and princes; that he ascends up to heaven, or descends to hell, . . .75

The decision to describe Brothers as an unusually long-term lunatic ensured that he could not stand trial, but could be detained during the Lord Chancellor's pleasure. This was no doubt a thoroughly convenient outcome for the Administration, which, whether or not it was now satisfied that Brothers was not a member of a treasonable conspiracy, may well have thought it safer as well as politically expedient to keep him in custody than to release him. In the past nine years the king had been attacked twice, by Margaret Nicholson and John Frith, both of whom were judged to be insane; and the Nephew of God may well have seemed too reminiscent of Frith in particular (who believed he was St. Paul) for the Administration to feel comfortable at the thought of liberating a now certified lunatic who had repeatedly predicted the king's death.711 Unsurprisingly, the verdict of the jury was strongly contested by Halhed and Brothers, both of whom argued that it had been arrived at improperly, 'surreptitiously', and on political rather than medical grounds.77 But in spite of their protests the verdict was widely accepted as correct, except of course by his more tenacious adherents, and after the beginning of June, the time when Brothers had promised to perform the miracle which would reveal him as a true prophet, he more or less disappeared from the newspapers, and pamphlets on the Brothers affair began to be reviewed either as tiresomely belated or, if they were satirical, as unnecessary attacks on one who should now be an object of pity rather than of fear or ridicule.78 Brothers remained in Simmons's custody at Fisher House, Islington, for eleven years, continuing to write, and continually postponing the date of his revelation. He seems to have expected to be released in 1802, following Pitt's resignation, which he ascribed to God's 'influence' with the king;™ but in the Imagining the King's Death 17 event he had to wait for his release until Pitt was dead. Thereupon Thomas Erskine, the leading counsel for the defence in the 1794 treason trials and now Lord Chancellor, instigated and presided over a second inquiry which led to Brothers's release.80 Erskine would not however set aside the verdict of lunacy, as 'there were scruples to be overcome in the King's mind'.81 Brothers died in 1824. Once Brothers had been officially declared to have been a lunatic since 1791, there was no possibility either of bringing a criminal charge against him, or of producing him as a witness in a criminal trial. The Privy Council Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 did not examine him again, but nor would it release him from the custody of the king's messenger, at whose house in Crown Street, Soho he continued to be detained, with all the privations reserved for state prisoners suspected of high treason, until early in May 1795 he was transferred to Fisher House.82 The most plausible reason for his continued detention as a state prisoner was that investigations were being made into Brothers's associates; but if this was the case, no one else was examined, and the Administration seemed once again to have unearthed an imaginary treason, of the kind Halhed later described as a 'conspiracy without conspirators'.83 In the period between his being certified as a lunatic, and his removal to Fisher House, Brothers appeared, as the Analytical Review put it, under two totally distinct and mutually exclusive characters; as a lunatic 'pretender to prophetic power', and as 'a culprit, charged by his country with treasonable designs'.84 In two speeches to Parliament Halhed drew attention to what he later called 'this heterogeneous amalgama of treason and lunacy'.85 On March 31, four days after the inquiry into Brothers's state of mind, Halhed proposed 'That the Books of Richard Brothers, intitled "A Revealed Knowledge, &c." be laid upon the table', a motion which, if it were passed, would have enabled Halhed to discuss the books in detail in the House at a later date. The motion was not seconded.86 On April 21, with Brothers still a prisoner in Crown Street, Halhed attempted to force the Government to produce the information which had prompted Brothers's arrest, the warrant on which he was taken up, the record of his examination, and the minutes of the inquiry which had determined that he was a lunatic. He pointed out that the Government's confusion was such that it was no longer possible to discover which department of state was responsible for Brothers, who 'is, as a suspected traitor, in the power of the secretary of state [i.e. the Home Secretary] - as a lunatic he is immediately under the Lord Chancellor'. It was therefore impossible for Halhed to know where to address his represen- tations on Brothers's behalf; he would, he argues, be 'bandied about as a shuttlecock' between the Duke of Portland and Lord Loughborough:

If I apply to chancery, I must expect to be told he is a state prisoner, under warrant from government for treasonable practices. If I refer to the secretary of state's office, I shall have the same answer as given to another friend of his, 'that he is not properly under that department, but as a 18 History Workshop Journal

lunatic is to be sent to some hospital, where, perhaps, by leave of the governor, I may be permitted to see him'.

'All I require,' said Halhed, 'is to discover . . . whether this Mr. Brothers be a traitor or a lunatic. He may possibly be either: but it is morally certain he cannot be both.' In an effort to bring the issue to a crisis, he announced that, as a convinced believer in Brothers's prophecies, he himself was 'a conscious, willing accomplice in all the guilt contained in them': if Brothers was a suspected traitor, so was Halhed himself, and he too should be Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 arrested.87 Once again, his motion failed for lack of a seconder.

A pamphlet published three days after Brothers's arrest reminded its readers that an act had been passed in the reign of Henry VIII which made it High Treason to predict the king's death, with the result that, in Henry's last illness, the physicians were too terrified to acknowledge the seriousness of his condition; the act was repealed in the reign of Queen Mary.88 Of the various species of High Treason which remained on the statute book, there was only one which the Privy Council could have hoped to attach to Brothers - that of compassing and imagining the death of the king - and to turn this story into an argument, I need now partly to summarize, partly to amplify, some remarks I have made elsewhere about this species of High Treason, and about the problems caused at the end of the eighteenth century by the words 'imagine', 'imagining', 'imagination' in the context of discussions of this crime .89 This species of High Treason, I should explain, differed from all other crimes in that the crime lay entirely in the intention, irrespective of whether an attempt had actually been made to carry it into effect. To prove a charge of compassing and imagining, it was necessary to show that the intention to kill the king had been manifested in one or more open acts, but these acts did not themselves constitute the crime, and they could be alleged only as evidence of the original traitorous intention: thus in the trials of the Regicides, the man who cut off the head of Charles I was charged only with having 'imagined' the king's death, and the actual act of decapitation was treated as evidence only of the prior intention to decapitate. This formula phrase - 'compassing and imagining' - which had been translated into English from law French, was by the eighteenth century thoroughly archaic, so that, as one contemporary advocate remarked, the retention of these words in the statute defining High Treason meant that the fate of every person charged with this treason depended 'upon the critical construction of two obsolete French words'.9" Of the two terms, 'imagining' was the more problematic; for by the 1790s the keyword 'imagination' was a skeleton key which turned the locks of many discourses, and though the legal meaning of 'imagine', 'imagining', 'imagination' was in theory clear enough, in the course of legal discussion it was continually subject to Imagining the King's Death 19 contamination, sometimes involuntary, sometimes deliberate, from the meaning 'to represent' or 'to picture in the mind1, as well as from a range of other uses of the words in various discourses, notably aesthetics and literary criticism, epistemology, and treatises on insanity, discourses in which the imagination and its functions were very differently valued. By the eighteenth century 'imagine' and its cognate terms retained their purposive sense of 'intend' or 'design' only in one other context, the King James Bible, where according to James Hastings, for example, the word 91 always means 'to design, to plot, to intend to perform evil against'. But Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 long before the 1790s that biblical meaning was thoroughly insecure, and was itself subject to contamination: thus eighteenth-century commentators are in frequent silent disagreement, with each other and themselves, as to whether the 'vain' and 'evil' imaginations repeatedly rebuked in the Old Testament are wicked and futile plots against the Almighty, inclinations to idolatry, or simply ill-natured thoughts or involuntary fancies.92 Indeed, the uses of 'imagine' and 'imagination' in the Authorized Version, which might have been expected to lend the legal use of the word a degree of stability, probably contributed to its destabilization, by supplying lawyers with such ready-made oratorical phrases as 'wicked imaginations' and 'evil imagin- ations', whose meaning in the Bible was insecurely understood. As a result, the denunciations of the Crown Lawyers prosecuting in the 1794 treason trials frequently read as if they are accusing the defendants not of intending the king's death, but merely of imagining it in the weak sense, of picturing it in the mind. An especially virulent source of contamination arose from contemporary theories of insanity, which was usually explained either as the effect of a 'wild', or 'disordered' imagination, or as a failure of the judgement to discipline the associations of ideas made by the imaginative faculty seen as of its very nature wild and disorderly. In and after the trials of 1794 the contamination from this source became openly embarrassing to the Crown Lawyers; for in those trials, as we have seen, the charge that to summon a convention amounted to 'imagining' the king's death or deposition de- pended on the most elaborate associations of ideas: the extrapolation by the Crown Lawyers of a long series of the possible consequences of possible consequences, and the obsessively over-ingenious construction (or so the defence claimed) of a treasonable plot, of which no direct proof could be shown, from an unprecedented accumulation of only loosely related evidence. This 'immense collection of miscellaneous matter', declared the Morning Chronicle, was thrown 'into confusion and anarchy' by Sir John Scott, the Attorney General; 'he toiled, and sweated for four long hours, trying his talent at the art of creation; but his disobedient materials refused to realize the creature of his imagination'.93 During his defence of Home Tooke, Thomas Erskine suggested to the Solicitor General, though in polite and coded terms, that it was he, not the defendant, who had 'imagined' the king's death, though in the weak sense, 20 History Workshop Journal of course, of picturing it in the mind, and that the charge was the product of his own disordered imagination.94 After the acquittals the suggestion was made quite openly, by Thelwall, by Thomas Holcroft - who had been indicted but not charged - by Coleridge, and by a host of other radical and Opposition writers.95 Clearly someone, in some sense, had imagined the king's death; the verdict established that the defendants had not done so; it must, therefore, have been the Administration itself, which was now so deluded as to believe its own alarmist propaganda about the perils of republican subversion. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 In Halhed's first speech to the House of Commons, delivered after Brothers had been judged insane but while he was still in custody under the apparent suspicion of treason, he insisted that there could be no possible evidence external to Brothers's writings to justify a suspicion of treason. The suspicion must derive from the writings themselves, so by what reading of A Revealed Knowledge could Brothers have come to be suspected of treason? To the best of Halhed's knowledge, the occasion of this suspicion was the publication, in the final edition of A Revealed Knowledge, of God's command to the king, that he should surrender his crown to Brothers, which I quoted earlier. He pointed out, however, that the king was required to do this only after the prophet had publicly revealed himself by an elaborate miracle which, by those who regarded him as a lunatic or an impostor, must be regarded as a 'palpable impossibility'.

If, for instance, I were to assert, that on some future day, I should ascend to the top of St. Paul's, and from thence fly over London, and in sight of all its inhabitants, to Westminster Abbey, after which the king must seat me on his throne, and kiss my great toe, most people, I allow, would think me mad; but I should certainly not dream of being apprehended for treason.%

Brothers's demand to the king had been made on similar terms; he had undertaken first to turn his walking-stick, Moses-like, into a serpent and then back into a walking-stick; only if and when he had done this would the king be obliged to resign his throne.97 'Had the condition been reversed', Halhed acknowledged, 'the plea of treason might not have been so ill-founded'; and a sufficient number of ignorant and ill-intentioned proselytes might have been found to force George to abdicate in favour of the Prince of the Hebrews. As it was, however, if Brothers really could do this miracle, he would evidently be no traitor but a true prophet, and the miracle could certainly not be prevented by the futile expedient of locking him up. If he could not do it, there was no obligation on the king to abdicate and no likelihood that Brothers's now disabused proselytes would rise and force his abdication; and in that case, equally evidently, Brothers could not be a traitor and must be considered insane.98 In both his speeches, Halhed returned repeatedly to the same point: that Imagining the King's Death 21 the question of whether Brothers had indeed 'imagined' the king's death had become inextricably involved and confused with the question of the health of Brothers's imagination. The knowledge he claimed to have of the divine purpose came to him in dreams and visions, and just as his supporters believed that the imagination was the conduit through which God revealed the future to him," so those who believed him to be insane supposed that his visions were the product of an imagination which was seriously diseased. To Halhed, of course, it was out of the question that Brothers was insane. His imagination, variously described by his detractors as 'warm', 'heated', Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 'troubled', 'wild', 'disordered', and 'distempered',100 was to Halhed entirely 'correct'; where others saw 'the wandering of a deranged intellect', he saw 'that versatility of thought and sentiment, which ... is deemed one of the first essentials of genius,'101 and he regarded the idea either that Brothers was insane, or that he had imagined (in legal sense) the death of the king, as equally out of the question. In the matter of Brothers's detention, however, it was not Halhed's opinion but the Administration's that was at issue; and he insisted that since the Administration was convinced that it was not even within the verge of possibility that Brothers could perform his miracle, it followed that Brothers was being made to suffer as a suspected traitor merely for the mental delusion of 'imagining' an impossible eventuality in which the king would be constrained to resign his crown. In short, Halhed is arguing again that some kind of slippage has occurred between two categories, traitor and lunatic, which in law were mutually exclusive; a slippage facilitated, I am suggesting, by the slipperiness of the term 'imagine' and its cognates, by the impossibility of preventing its specialized meaning within the discourse of law from interacting with its meanings in half-a-dozen circumambient discourses, in particular the discourse of psychiatry. It is as if to imagine the king's death had become an indeterminable sign of both insanity and violent republicanism; or as if, once again, the Government had so terrified its own imagination with fears of republican subversion, that the 'wild imagination' of the lunatic had become indistinguishable from the 'wild imagination' of the traitor. Like Brothers, the word had become a shuttlecock in a game played without rules between two departments of state; and the prophet, so Halhed's speech implies, had been deprived of his freedom by the free play of the signifier.

In one sense at least, Halhed was very possibly right, for the main danger the Government saw in Brothers may well have been that he would make it easier for republicans to 'imagine' the death or deposition of the king, in the sense that A Revealed Knowledge made available new imaginative resources by which a republican future could be imagined. The ambiguity of the popular reform movement in the mid-1790s on the question of whether or not it was also an anti-monarchical movement is well known, and it is 22 History Workshop Journal probably the result of a number of factors. Among those who may have regarded themselves as convinced (if necessarily crypto-) republicans, there was a wariness of alienating the more moderate supporters of parliamentary reform, as well of course as the fact that the Government was especially disposed to prosecute as seditious libels writings which in any way represented or hinted at the king's death. But perhaps equally important may have been that, even for the most active and thorough-going reformers, it was difficult to shift the psychological barrier which stood in the way of imagining the extinction of the quasi-mystical authority of the crown and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 aristocracy, in the aura or shadow of which they had passed their whole lives. It was easier, so to speak, to go round it, and this is probably one reason why almost all attempts to imagine the king's death or deposition in the early and mid-1790s are expressed in the form of jokes, squibs, and pasquinades. Brothers's writings prior to his arrest are an exception to this general caution or hesitation; as we have seen, his supporters observed a prudent silence or ambiguity when it came to imagining the king's death or deposition. So indeed, after his arrest, did Brothers himself: there is no direct mention in his first major publication issued from Fisher House of the impending death of George III, whom indeed he has now discovered to be among those 'descended from the Hebrews'.102 But for those who felt able to laugh at Brothers's pretensions or find the material for laughter in them, his prophecies and the controversy that surrounded them opened up a new resource for joking about the king and his future. The Book of Bobs, an anonymous and double-edged satire on both King Brothers and King George, makes use of the prophetic mode of the Old Testament in order to imagine the king's death as the final stage of God's retribution for his oppression of the poor and his persecution of the radicals. The first stage of George's punishment will be a return of the madness which had afflicted him in 1788-9. He will pray to God to restore his health and the obedience of his subjects, and when his prayers are unanswered, he will fly to 'Dear-side'' - it was at Cheapside that Brothers had promised to reveal himself by performing the miracle with his rod103 - and

. . . there shall he behold a man standing in the midst thereof with a rod in his right hand whose name is SATAN sir-named LUCIFER, and he shall haste to him and say, unto him save me Oh! thou true prophet.104

True then to the suspicion entertained of Brothers by many popular radicals, the prophet will appear not as the Nephew of God but as the Devil himself; and invited to take sides between the starving and rebellious people and the king whose death he had so often imagined, he 'shall . . . lift up the rod which is in his right hand to smite the people therewith'. It is no miracle performed by Brothers himself, but the miraculous intervention of God, which turns the rod into a serpent and the prophet himself into the unwilling or unwitting agent of God's vengeance.1"5 Imagining the King's Death 23

The Book of Bobs appropriates Brothers's prophecy of the death of George to serve a radicalism to which it represents Brothers himself as hostile. A pamphlet by Henry Spencer, which appeared at about the time of Brothers's arrest, appropriated Brothers's apparent disrespect for George as a vehicle for opposition contempt for the king. Spencer, a professed admirer of Home Tooke as well as of Fox and Sheridan, is full of a patrician disdain for the vulgarity of Brothers's language and the enthusiasm of popular religious sects, 'the Muckletentians, Methodists, Anabaptists, and

many other sects, whose predecessors heaped so many blessings upon the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 People of England in the time of OLIVER CROMWELL'.106 The pamphlet is written, however, from two different standpoints. At times it offers itself as a direct attack on Brothers and popular prophecy in general; at others it purports to be written by a convert, and in this second mode, it pretends to vindicate Brothers's identification of the lion with eagle's wings with George III but only in order to develop an elaborate satire on the king: his small-mindedness, his unprepossessing appearance, his extravagance, his unconvincing attempts to assert his authority, his lack of success in the war against France, and his failure to elicit the respect either of his subjects or his enemies.107 More than anything else it was this identification of the lion with eagle's wings as George and of Babylon with London that made his prophecies available as a figurativeresourc e for popular republican satire, for it gave a new point to an old anti-monarchical joke. It was repeatedly reaffirmed by those who wrote to refute Brothers that Babylon was Rome and the winged lion was Nebuchadnezzar, 'who', as one writer put it, 'was looked upon as a lion, till the concepts of his army were stopped, or, as the prophet expresses it, his wings were plucked'.108 The words' "(it was) made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to it", are supposed to refer to the humiliation and conversion of Nebuchadnezzar, who after elevating himself as more than mortal, had his wings plucked, and was reduced even below humanity'.109 To such writers, the truth seemed simple enough: 'the first beast', as one of them put it, 'is.Nebuchadnezzar, and consequently not George III'.110 But these attempts to refute Brothers's interpretation were all too happily seized upon as confirming it; if the beast was indeed Nebuchadnezzar, then Nebuchadnezzar was a type of George, for both had suffered bouts of insanity, and had temporarily lost their thrones. The identification of George and Nebuchadnezzar seems to have first been made in a radical pasquinade which originated in Yorkshire in 1794.in In the following year this was reprinted in London by Citizen Richard Lee, a radical poet and bookseller, and its publication there was followed by a number of radical publications which represented George as the king of Babylon: in 1795, in London radical circles, George was Nebuchadnezzar, a fact which throws an intriguing light on Blake's famous colour print of the Nebuchadnezzar of the same year. Eventually, in September or October, Lee published another handbill, 'King Killing', in which, though more 24 History Workshop Journal ambiguously, George appeared once again as Nebuchadnezzar. In the aftermath of the attack on the king's coach in October and the alleged attempt on his life, this handbill was discussed on several occasions in Parliament, and after a year in which the Government had hitherto attempted no prosecutions for seditious libel in London, it decided that Lee should be arrested.112 Along with 'King Killing', one of the other four of Lee's publications selected for prosecution represented George as the king of Babylon. This was a selection from Charles Pigott's Political Dictionary which described Nebuchadnezzar as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021

an hirsute king, [who], like other brute beasts, ate grass and potatoes - whence the name of potentate. . . . It is thought by physiologists, that it would greatly conduce to the welfare of his People, if the king of Georgia was turned out to grass before the meeting of every session of Parliament."3

After the attack on the king as he was on his way to open the new session of Parliament, this passage must have seemed especially - indeed prophetically -seditious.114

From the end of 1792, when the Government had first raised the alarm to warn of the dangers of popular radicalism, Opposition and radical writers alike had repeatedly argued that these dangers had been 'imagined' by the Administration for the purpose of terrifying the imaginations of the people. The decision to act against the political societies by charging them with 'imagining the king's death' meant that, during and after the trials of 1794, this claim developed a new point and persuasiveness. It was insisted, over and over again, that any evil imagining that had been done had been done by the Government, by its lawyers, and by the judges it had appointed. When in the pre-trial proceedings the Lord Chief Justice argued that it was not difficult to 'imagine' how the plan for a Convention could amount to 'imagining' the king's death, Godwin retorted that the defendants were apparently to be tried for an entirely 'imaginary' crime."5 In the parlia- mentary debates that followed the trials, Fox insisted that the conspiracy had had no existence except in the 'imagination' of the Government;"6 and there are dozens of remarks to the same effect. The word was even used to suggest that the Government itself was guilty of a crime unknown to the law but still more grave than imagining the king's death - High Treason against the majesty of the people, by imagining the extinction of their political rights. The word 'imagination' had become a symbolic trophy which the defendants, their counsel and supporters repeatedly attempted to wrest from the prosecution and the Government and to use against them, for it Imagining the King's Death 25 offered them the power to discredit the state of mind and the motives of their opponents, and to bend and blunt the most dangerous weapon in the armoury of Government, the statute against 'imagining' the king's death, by which it had believed popular radicalism could be destroyed. In this 'battle', to quote Raymond Williams's phrase again, 'about the fixed character of the sign', and under pressure from the host of meanings of the word 'imagin- ation' in other contexts and discourses - the gate protecting the legal meaning of the word gave way, and the Administration - or so at least

Halhed implies - lost control of its own use of the word, along with the power Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 to control its use by others. That the Government was sensitive to the problems caused by the word became clear in November 1795, when in a determined and more successful attempt to control the power of the popular radical movement, it published the Treasonable Practices Bill, designed to supplement the old statute of treasons by defining the new, 'democratic' varieties of High Treason that the old law had not anticipated. This bill, which became law the following month, attempted to fix the meanings of 'compass' and 'imagine' by adding as a gloss the words 'invent', 'design', and 'intend'. The word 'imagine', however, still survived in the old statute, and was retained in the new, which led Bentham in the following year to comment that its continuing presence in the legal definition of treason meant that everyone, and certainly everyone in court - 'judges, jury, counsel, audience, all who contribute to, or are present at, the trial of a traitor . . . will be traitors'.117

NOTES

My thanks are due to Rachel Bowlby, Greg Claeys and Harriet Guest, who read a longer, chapter-length version of this essay, and commented most helpfully upon it. 1. A Political Dictionary for the Guinea-less Pigs, J. Burks, Citizen Lee and others, [1795], p. 2. 2. William Fox, On Jacobinism, M. Gurney, 1794, pp. 1-2. 3. Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary: explaining the True Meaning of Words. Illustrated and exemplified in the Lives, Morals, Character and Conduct of the . . . most illustrious Personages, D. I. Eaton, 1795. 4. Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review, Verso, 1979, p. 177. 5. Writing in Society, Verso, 1983, p. 208. 6. For a fuller account of the struggles of the 1790s as involving a struggle for ownership of the English language itself, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791-1819, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984. 7. The Political Register of the Times, or Political Museum, B. Crosby, 1795, 4, 28 February-11 March, p. 42. , 8. A Word of Admonition to the Right Hon. William Pitt, in an Epistle to that Gentleman, occasioned by the Prophecies of Brothers, Fellows, &c., Cullen and Co., 1795, p. 17: the remark refers to a summary of Brothers's prophecies by his leading supporter, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, M.P., Testimony of the Authenticity of the Prophecies of Richard Brothers, H. D. Symonds, 1795. 9. The main pamphlets on the Brothers affair are discussed or mentioned below. The main periodicals, the Analytical Review, the British Critic, the Critical Review, the English Review, the Gentleman's Magazine, and the Monthly Review, all reviewed gatherings by or about Brothers at various times in 1795; the Political Register of the Times covered the 26 History Workshop Journal controversy at length in a number of issues. Satires of indeterminate political complexion appeared in the Oracle, 25 June 1795 ("The First Epistle of Prophet Brothers') and 30 June 1795 ('A Vision'). Susan Eyre wrote a number of letters to the Oracle (see in particular 2 April 1795) exposing Brothers as a false prophet. 10. True Briton, 23 April 1795; 7 May 1795; the pantomime was performed at the Royal Circus, St. George's Fields. 11. Mary Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society 1792-1799, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1983, p. 307n. 12. For extended comparisons of Brothers and Blake, see Morton D. Paley, 'William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman clothed with the Sun', in Paley and Michael Phillips (eds), William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Clarendon Press, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 Oxford, 1973, pp. 260-93, and Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blakeandthe Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s, Oxford UP; Oxford, 1992, ch. 1.1 have not seen it as within the scope of this essay to offer a detailed discussion of the nature of Brothers's millenarianism, which has been very well discussed by Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England, the Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1975, ch.8; by J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780-1850, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, ch.4 (and see his essay 'Thomas Paine and Millenarian Radicalism', in Ian Dyck (ed.), Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine, Christopher Helm, 1987, pp. 73-85); and by James K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1982, ch. 7. 13. Minute of Brothers's examination before the Privy Council, 5 March 1795: PRO PC 1 28 A60. Brothers's fullest account of the diaspora is in Wrote in Confinement. An Exposition of the Trinity. With a farther Elucidation of the Twelfth Chapter of Daniel: One Letter to the King: and two to Mr. Pitt, G. Riebau, [1796], pp. 27-33. 14. See for example Halhed, Two Letters to the Right Honourable Lord Loughborough, Lord High Chancellor of England, on the present Confinement of Richard Brothers, in a private Mad-House, G. Riebau, 1795, title-page. 15. A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times. Particularly of the Present Time, and the Present War, and the Prophecy now fulfilling. . . . Book the Second, G. Riebau, 1794 (sic on title page; in fact 1795), p. 101. 16. See above, n.8. 17. Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, G. Riebau, 1794, 1, p.45. 18. A Revealed Knowledge 1, p. 50. 19. A Revealed Knowledge 1, pp. 39-50. 20. The fourth beast was taken by some to be the Syria of the Seleucidae: see Matthew Henry's commentary (An Exposition of the Old and New Testament, James Nisbet, 1864) to Daniel 7. 21. A Revealed Knowledge!, p. 12. I quote Daniel directly from the Authorized Version, which differs slightly from Brothers's own, for as he explains, he had been commanded by God to make a few alterations in the wording of some of the prophecies (1, p. 39). 22. A Revealed Knowledge 2, pp. 60, 30. 63. 23. Brothers listed his successful prophecies, including those concerning the death of the kings of Sweden and France, in the index to his prophecies, and an account of those already fulfilled, published in A Letter of Richard Brothers, (Prince of the Hebrews) to Philip Stephens, Esq.,G. Riebau, 1795. 24. A Revealed Knowledge 2, pp. 115-20, 30. 117. 25. A Revealed Knowledge 2, pp. 157-8; according to Halhed, this part of the book was first published on February 20 1795; see his speech in the House of Commons, 31 March 1795, in PH 31: col. 1416. For a possible source of this vision of the humiliation of the king, see 'The Vision of Dabritius' in Brothers, Extracts from the Prophecy given to C. Love, no publication details [1795], p. 3. 26. A Word of Admonition, p. 9. 27. A Word of Admonition, p. 13. 28. A Word of Admonition, p. 8-9. 29. 'We cannot lose sight of the aim of the writer . . . who affects a serious alarm at the progress of the doctrines of the impostor,. . . for the purposes of bringing in Mr. Fox to save the state . . .', Gentleman's Magazine, March 1795, p. 228. Imagining the King's Death 27

30. A Word of Admonition, p. 5. 31. A mild satire of Brothers, 'Malachi Moses', The Prophecies of the Times: A Satire, J. Bell, 1795, appeared on 2 March (see the advertisements in the True Briton, 26 February and 2 March 1795). 32. True Briton, 20 February; Times, 4 March 1795. 33. Morning Post, 17 February 1792; the story may or may not be true; it was normal practice in the mid 1790s for newspapers of all shades of opinion to invent stories about their political opponents for the sake of ridicule or satire. 34. A brief item in the Morning Post on Christmas Day 1794 reads: 'The Prophet who has been engaged some time past in circulating his Prophecies in the neighbourhood of Mary-le-bone, has been taken into custody, and has undergone an examination before the Privy Council'. The item could possibly refer either to William Bryan or to John Wright (see below Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 n. 65), who in March 1795 at least were living together in Dorset Street Marylebone (PC 1 28 A60); but more likely it refers to Brothers, by far the most famous prophet at the time, who was certainly more active in 'circulating his Prophecies', and who lived only 200 yards from the church of St Marylebone. No arrest and examination of any prophet are reported by other newspapers, however, and no such event was referred to at the time of Brothers's arrest in March 1795; nor can I find a record of any examination of any prophet among the records of Privy Council examinations of the period. 35. The Times, 5 March; True Briton, 7 March 1795. 36. Even the 'Sybil of Store-street', the famous society fortune-teller Eliza Williams, produced an ultra-loyalist pamphlet, dedicated to the Queen, in which she accused Brothers and his supposed conspirators of a treasonable plot. (The Prophecies of Brothers Confuted, Debrett and Parsons, 1795; see pp. 2-3, 55, 44; for Williams as 'the Sybil of Store-street', see Critical Review 15, October 1795, p. 218). One of the fullest elaborations of the conspiracy theory appeared in the March number of the English Review, which interpreted the emergence of Brothers as the latest stage in a plot 'to propagate the belief of a revolution speedily to take place over Europe, and, by repeated impulses on the public mind, not only to strike a deep impression of such belief, but to produce a union of counsels for effectuating that projected revolution'. The actors in this conspiracy had been obliged to use prophecy as the means of achieving their aims when the more direct method, of political agitation, had been stopped by the arrests of May 1794 and the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act. Unlike, therefore, A Word of Admonition, this article insisted on a continuity between the activities of the radical societies in 1793-4 and those of Brothers and his presumed coadjutors. 'The trial of the prisoners for high treason', it argued,

is the true era of pretences to the spirit of prophecy in England . . . The clubs for constitutional information, &c. being then suppressed by authority, recourse was had to a less suspicious, but more effectual measure, that of engaging a set of men, fluctuating in principle, soured with disappointments, and without the means of subsistence, to alarm the majority of the people . . . (English Review 25, March 1795, pp. 192,197-8).

For other suggestions that Brothers is part of a revolutionary plot, see A Crumb of Comfort for the People, B. Crosby and others; Further Testimonies of the Authenticity of the Prophecies of Mr. Richard Brothers, the author; Strictures on the Prophecies of Richard Brothers . . . by a Country Curate, the author, Oxford; and 'George Home' [= Walley Chamberlain Oulton], Sound Argument dictated by Common Sense, the author, Oxford, all 1795. Christopher Frederick Triebner (Cursory and Introductory Thought on Richard Brothers' Prophecies [1795]) believed that he was the agent of a plot masterminded by Jesuits and Illuminati. Apart from those discussed or mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, other attacks on Brothers include 'Moses Gomez Pereira', The Jew's Appeal on the Divine Mission of Richard Brothers, Bell and Crosby, 1795, and A Letter to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Esq. M.P. from an Old Woman, Nicol, 1795, probably written by Elizabeth Boydell, the wife of John Boydell, owner of the Shakespeare Gallery and a former Lord Mayor of London: see British Critic 5, April 1795, p. 438. 37. See the examination of Brothers before the Privy Council (reference above, n. 13). 38. See for example English Review 25, March 1795, p. 198. 39. Morning Chronicle, 7 March; St. James's Chronicle, 5-7 March 1795. 40. The Age of Prophecy! or, Further Testimony to the Mission of Richard Brothers. By a Convert, Parsons, Jordan and Crosby, 1795, pp. 12-14, 28; the pamphlet was published on 28 History Workshop Journal

March 24; for the date of publication, see True Briton, 7\ and 24 March 1795. Mee reads this as a pamphlet in support of Brothers, indeed as 'explicit' in its 'revolutionary ardour' (Mee, p. 29); his interpretation must depend on taking the views expressed by the alleged author, a'convert', and by the 'old woman' who also participates in the dialogue, as expressing those of the author. As I read the pamphlet, however, the views of these speakers are repeatedly satirized or rebuked, and (even allowing for the equivocal nature of the dialogue form) I see the author's voice in that of the third disputant, a sceptical old gentleman. My interpretation was that of the contemporary reviewers: see AnalyticalReview2\, May 1795, p. 490. and Monthly Review 16, April 1795, p. 467. Both treat it as the author's opinion that Brothers was the front-man of a political conspiracy: see the old gentleman's remarks on pp. 39-40 of the pamphlet. On March 28 1795 True Briton recommended The Age of Prophecy! as 'the best antidote' against Brothers's influence. There are good reasons why it should have chosen to recommend the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 pamphlet, even though it was by an Opposition writer, for it clearly believes that Brothers intends to create 'distrust, disorder, and anarchy' (p. 39). It is out of the question that the True Briton would have recommended the pamphlet had anyone believed that it was 'explicit in its revolutionary ardour'. 41. A Word of Admonition, p. 16. 42. 'Home' (= Oulton), Sound Argument vii, p. 52. This pamphlet was published on March 3 1795: see the True Briton of that date. 43.Morning Post, 5 March; Morning Chronicle, 5 March 1795; on March 6 the Morning Post reprinted the Morning Chronicle account word for word, as if accepting that Brothers had in fact been arrested on the slightly less serious charge. The Morning Chronicle version was also reprinted at the end of the month by the Lady's Magazine, March 1795, p. 150. More than two months after the arrest the Analytical Review 21 May 1795, p. 490, still regarded Brothers as having been arrested on suspicion of treason. 44. The Times,7 March;St. James's Chronicle, 3—5 March; Courier, 5 March; True Briton, 6 March 1795. 45. Morning Post, 5 and 7 March 1795. 46. Brothers, Wrote in Confinement, pp. 50, 54; Copy of a Letter from Mr. Brothers, who will be revealed to the Hebrews, as their King and Restorer to Dr. Samuel Foart Simmons, M.D., A. Seale, Islington, 1802, p. 1. 47. Oracle, 5 March 1795; The Times, same date. 48. Alan Wharam, 'Treason', New Law Journal, 31 August 1978, p. 851 and n. 1. 49. Parliamentary History 31: col. 1414. 50. The report in The Times, 5 March of Brothers's arrest was already suggesting that this would be the likely outcome of his examination by the Privy Council. 51. These issues are well discussed by Harrison and Mee, see above n. 12. 52. A Revealed Knowledge 2, pp. 35, 41-3, 153. 53. For titles; see A Revealed Knowledge 2, pp.149, 153; for bishops, 1, p. 63; 2, pp. 136-7; for oath-taking, see for example 2, pp. 82-8, 136; for prisons, see 2, pp. 75-6; the identification of London as Babylon depended in part on the fact that Britain (like Babylon) engaged in the slave-trade. For the condition of the poor, see for example the chap-book Brothers's Prophecy of all the Remarkable and Wonderful Events which will come to pass in the Present Year: Fore-telling . . . The Downfall of the Pope; a Revolution in Spain, Portugal, and Germany; the Death of Certain Great Persons in this and other Countries, etc., 'Printed and sold in London', ] 1795], pp. 4—5. Dissenting opinion, both rationalist and enthusiast, was no doubt for the most part hostile to Brothers: see for example [Thomas Williams], The Age of Credulity: A Letter to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Esq. M.P. in Answer to his Testimony in Favour of Richard Brothers . . . by the Author of "The Age of Infidelity" - and other Tracts (1795), Thomas Ustick: Philadelphia, 1796, and William Huntington. The Lying Prophet Examined, and his False Predictions Discovered; being a Dissection of the Prophecies of Richard Brothers, the author, 1795. 54. The prophecy appears in A Revealed Knowledge 2. pp. 144. 149, and is claimed to have been fulfilled in Brothers, A Letter . . . to Philip Stephens, p. 22, The Contents of the three Books of Revealed Knowledge wrote by Richard Brothers, no publication details [London 1796?], and ' '"Quench not the Spirit - Despise not Prophcsyings - Prove all Things - Hold fast to that which is good"'. prospectus for A Revealed Knowledge and Wrote in Confinement, [London (G. Riebau?) 1796?]; 'G. Home' (= Oulton), Occasional Remarks: addressed to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed M.P. in Answer to his late Pamphlet, the author, Oxford, [1795]. p. 24. The loyalist 'Country Curate' in his Strictures on the Prophecies of Richard Brothers, Imagining the King's Death 29

p. 18, suggested that Brothers had based his prediction on the opinion of Lord Thurlow 'who declared in the House of Lords, "that there was much of sedition, but that it did not amount to treason"'. 55. See in particular The Age of Prophecy!, p. 46; Henry Spencer, A Vindication of the Prophecies of Mr. Brothers, and the Scripture Expositions of Mr. Halhed, CuWen and Co., 1795, p. 24. 56. Spencer, A Vindication, p. 24. 57. A Revealed Knowledge, 2, p. 158; Brothers offered the posts to the Lord Chancellor during his interrogation and in Wrote in Confinement, p. 55, to Pitt. 58. A Revealed Knowledge, 2, p. 36. 59. SeeThale,p.242. 60. John Binns, who became a member of the LCS late in 1794 and who visited Brothers a Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 few times after his arrest in 1795, never became a disciple. He regarded the prophet as 'laboring under an hallucination of mind', but as 'incapable of harboring a wish to impose himself upon the world for anything but what he really thought he was'. Binns first encountered Brothers in June 1795 and visited him a few times thereafter 'at Pentonville' -presumably at Fisher House, Islington, where Brothers had been received the previous month; see Recollections of the Life of John Binns, the author, and Parry and M'millan, Philadelphia, 1854, pp. 47-51. 61. The anonymous A Poetical and Complimentary Epistle to Richard Brothers the Prophet, Vernor and Co., 1795, appears to be lost; but that it was an attack on Brothers, by a radical republican, seems clear enough from the political complexion of the same author's The Times;or, the Age of Ruin. A Poem. By the Author of " A Poetical and Complimentary Epistle to R. Brothers the Prophet, and N. B. Halhed, Esq;", Vernor and Hood, [1795], an overtly republican poem in which both Brothers arid Halhed are described as 'maniacs' (p. 32). 62. See for example An Enquiry into the Pretensions and Look Before You Leap, or the Fate of the Jews a Warning to the People of other Nations, in the Case of Richard Brothers, the Prophet. By one who readeth and revereth the Scriptures, H. D. Symonds, [1795], both published in March, shortly after Brothers's arrest; Doubts of Infidels, submitted for Elucidation by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed and the Bench of Bishops, Daniel Isaac Eaton, 1795, published in August. The Enquiry consists mainly of a reprint of Hume's essay on miracles with an appropriate introduction pointed at Brothers and Halhed; Doubts of Infidels is a reprint, with a similarly pointed 'Epistle Dedicatory1, of William Nicholson's pamphlet firstpublishe d in 1782. Look before you Leap can arguably be read as a defence of Brothers, but all the leading reviews which noticed it regarded it as elaborately ironic: thus the Analytical Review (21, p. 321, March 1795) admired it, but was unsure whether it was ironical at the expense of Brothers, or a satire treating all pretensions to prophecy as effects of enthusiasm - a view which the Analytical Review regards as erroneous. The Monthly Review (pp. 349-50, March 1795) was similarly puzzled, but found the copious biblical quotation in the pamphlet typical 'of the most noted infidel writers; who only meant in ridicule what they often, to save appearances, pretended to revere'. The Critical Review (13, p. 466, April 1795) treats it straightforwardly as having 'a sly laugh at the doctrines of revelation'. 63. Martin van Butchell, Causes of Crim. Con. Also Barrenness - and the King's Evil: Advice - New - Guinea; come from Ten till One: for I go to None. The Anatomist & Sympathizer, who never poisons, - nor sheds humane Blood: Balm is in Mount-street. Martin Van Butchell, his Address to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Esquire, Member of Parliament; on Richard Brothers, Riebau and Wright, 1795. 64. Mee has argued that there was a strongly democratic tendency in Brothers's writings, to be looked for primarily in the liberty he allowed to prophesying: Mee bases this claim mainly on Brothers's pronouncement, in Wrote in Confinement, written in the months after his arrest, that he did not seek to monopolize the power of prophecy, and on Riebau's willingness to publish, especially after the arrest, testimonies in support of Brothers's mission from writers who themselves claimed to be prophets (Mee, p. 34 and n.; Wrote in Confinement, p. 5; Mee quotes from a later edition of this text, to the effect that 'every honest man is a prophet'). It is not clear to me that Brothers himself, before his arrest, took quite the same view; as we shall see, he certainly denied it when the Privy Council questioned him on this issue. 65. Halhed, The Whole of the Testimonies, p. 15. Of Brothers's fellow-prophets, John Wright warned merely of 'the death of several sovereigns', and William Bryan, though more fiery, was not much more outspoken. John Wright, A Revealed Knowledge of Some Things that will speedily be fulfilled in the World, communicated to a Number of Christians, brought together at Avignon, by the Power of the Spirit of God, from all Nations: now published by his Divine 30 History Workshop Journal

Command for the good of all Men, no bookseller credited, 1794, p. 26; William Bryan, A Testimony of the Spirit of Truth, concerning Richard Brothers . . . with some Account of the Lord's gracious Dealing with his Servant William Bryan, one of the Brothers of the Avignon Society, J. Wright, 1795, pp. 11-12. 66. The exception is George Coggan, a Hull merchant, who was already known to the Government, for throughout 1794 he had been warning the Government and the royal family that the consequences of opposing the French, whom God had employed 'to accomplish great things', would be fatal to them (G. Coggan, A Testimony of Richard Brothers, in an Epistolary Address to the People of England on the impending Judgments of God, Riebau and others, 1795, iv). Riebau'sindexto/1 Revealed Knowledge, which appeared probably in late May 1795, refers to the fate of George and Charlotte simply as the death of 'a King and Queen', though he shows Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 no such reticence in listing the pastor future deaths of the rulers of Germany, France, Prussia, Russia, Spain and Sweden (A Letter. . . to Philip Stephens, pp. 9-10). When Sarah Flaxmer, a believer in Brothers's mission and herself a prophet, recounted her own vision of the king's death, it turned out to have been vouchsafed to her in the most circumspect of forms, as a gathering of the Royal family at which only the king was absent, and 'the Queen and the Princesses seemed all in the greatest distress' (Satan Revealed; or the Dragon Overcome, the author, [1795], p. 5). Flaxmer believed that Brothers was a true prophet temporarily under satanic influence. 67. Harrison, pp. 67-8; pamphlets testifying a belief in Brothers's mission published after his arrest include (in addition to those noted elsewhere in this chapter) God's Awful Warnings to Giddy, Careless, Sinful World; Prophetical Passages, concerning Present Times; George Turner, A Testimony to the Prophetical Mission of Richard Brothers; William Wetherell, An Additional Testimony in Favour of Richard Brothers, allG. Riebau, 1795; J. Crease, Prophecies Fulfilling: Or, the Dawn of a Perfect Day; William Sales, Truth or not Truth; or A Discourse on Prophets . . . by a Well-Wisher towards the Souls of All; Thomas Taylor, An Additional Testimony given to vindicate the Truth of the Prophecies of Richard Brothers; Samuel Whitchurch, Another Witness! or Further Testimony in Favor of Richard Brothers, all Riebau and John Wright, 1795; Henry Francis Offley, Richard Brothers, neither a Madman nor an Impostor, Riebau, Wright, H. D. Symonds and others, 1795. 68. See above, n. 13. 69. Morning Chronicle, 1 March 1795. 70. For Brothers's interest in Love, see Extracts from the Prophecy. 71. True Briton, 25 March 1795. 72. Hale, Hisloria Placitorum Coronae. The History of the Pleas of the Crown . . . Now first published, ed. Sollom Emlyn, 2 vols, F. Gyles and others, 1736, 1, p. 31. 73. Blackstone 4 Comm. 24. 74. William Falconer, A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon the Disorders of the Body, 2nd edn, C. Dilly, 1791, p. 115; see also William Pargeter, Observations on Maniacal Disorders, the author, Reading, 1792, p. 6. 75. Alexander Crichton, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, 2 vols, Cadell and Davies, 1798, 1, p. 381. 76. For a discussion of the legal and psychiatric issues raised by the case of Margaret Nicholson, see Ida Macalpinc and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business, Allen Lane, 1969, pp. 310-3; for Frith, see T. B. Howell and Thomas Jones Howell (eds),/4 Complete Collection of State Trials, 30 vols, Longman and others, 1816-22, p. 22: cols 307-18 and 1254-6. The cases of Nicholson and Brothers were connected by The Times, 3 April 1795, which published a letter purporting to be from Nicholson to Halhed and dated 'April [fools'] day 1795', which satirized Halhed's first speech to Parliament (see below, p. 17). 77. See for example Brothers, Wrote in Confinement, p. 50. See also the pamphlet by Mrs Green, who had been Brothers's landlady when he had lived in Dartmouth Street, Westminster, and who had eventually come to believe in his mission. Green claimed that though she knew Brothers as well as anyone, she was prevented from giving evidence at the inquiry into his sanity (A Letter to the Publisher of Brothers's Prophecies, ... in which she bears Testimony to the Sanity of Mr. Brothers. And relates Several Visions, which she has had in Confirmation of his Mission, G. Riebau, 1795, pp. 3-4). The pamphlet, published a week or so after the inquiry, is an expansion of her 'Account of Richard Brothers, the Prophet', dated March 19 and inserted in the Political Register of the Times, 4, pp. 259-61. 78. For the date of Brothers's revelation, see A Revealed Knowledge!, p. 129. Occasional squibs at Brothers's expense continued to appear in the press for a few months more: see for Imagining the King's Death 31 example'The First Epistle of Prophet Brothers, toN. B. Halhed, Esq.', in the Oracle, 25 June 1795; 'A Vision', Oracle, 30 June; the (probably genuine) poem ascribed to Peter Pindar - 'Ode to Mr. Richard Brothers, the Prophet' - in the True Briton, 1 January 1796. 79. Brothers, Copy of a Letter, p. 2. 80. See Paley pp. 265-7. There is some evidence that a few years after Brothers's arrest Erskine became interested in Brothers's prophecies, however briefly: see James Knowles (ed.), The Lifeand Writings of Henry Fuseli, Esq., M.A., R.A., Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1836,1, p. 203. 81. John Finleyson, The Last Trumpet and the Flying Angel, 1849, quoted in Paley, p. 267. 82. For the implications of the restrictions placed on Brothers for his ability to prepare his

evidence for the lunacy inquiry, see Halhed, Two Letters, p. 4. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 83. Parliamentary History 32, col. 289. Note that Coggan claims in a letter to Grenville, dated March 25 1795 (before Brothers was pronounced a lunatic) and printed in his Testimony, pp. 51-2, that the Administration had attempted to imprison him for his warnings to the king and Government. 84. Analytical Review 21, May 1795, p. 490. 85. Halhed, Two Letters, p. 8. 86. Parliamentary History 31, col. 1421. 87. Parliamentary History 31, cols 1424,1427. 88. The Manual of Liberty: or Testimonies in Behalf of the Rights of Mankind, H. D. Symonds, 1795, p. 165 (quoting Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, pt 2, bk 12, ch. 10). For the date of publication of A Manual, see Morning Post, 7 March 1795. 89. See my essay 'Imaginary Treason, Imaginary Law: the State Trials of 1794', in The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge, Macmillan, 1992, pp. 121-44. 90. Quoted by Robert Cullen, defence counsel for David Downie, tried for High Treason at Edinburgh in 1794, in State Trials, 24, col. 123. 91. James Hastings, A Dictionary of the Bible (1899), T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1904,2, p. 453. 92. It is difficult to exemplify this disagreement briefly, because the examples are so many and so various. But note for example Matthew Henry's comment on Hosea 7.15 ("Though I have bound and strenthened their arms, yet do they imagine mischief against me'): "The designing of mischief is doing it, in God's account. Compassing and imagining the death of the king is treason by our law. Those that imagine an evil thing, though it prove a vain thing. . . will be reckoned with for the imagination.' However, William Lowth (A Commentary upon the Larger and Lesser Prophets: being a Continuation of Bishop Patrick, 4th edn, D. Midwinter and others, p. 173) comments on the same verse thus: 'Tho' I have bound up their Wounds, and given them new Strength and Vigour, yet they are continually devising some new idolatrous Invention, whereby they may dishonour me'; where the slippage between imagine = devise, and imagine = produce a representation, is very apparent. On the other hand, Henry comments on Deut. 31.21 ('I know their imagination which they go about. . .' - to 'go about' an imagination is to perform such act, overt or otherwise, in furtherance of a wicked intention), thus: 'God knew very well that there were in their hearts such gross conceits of the deity, and such inclinations to idolatry, that they would be tinder to the sparks of that temptation', where 'imagination' appears to be a [mis-]shaping spirit. See also Henry's remarks on Zechariah 7.10 ('. . . let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart'): 'Do not project it; do not wish it; nay, do not so much as please yourself with the fancy of it', which seems an attempt to try for size almost every possible meaning of 'imagine'; Lowth, by contrast, emphasizes the 'legal' meaning of the verse: 'Do not employ your Thought in devising Mischief against others, in order to put it into Execution, when Opportunity serves'. 93. Morning Chronicle, 27 November 1794. 94. State Trials25, col. 266. 95. Thelwall, The Native and Constitutional Rights of Britons, theauthor, 1795, pp. 84,91; Holcroft, A Narrative of Facts Relating to a Prosecution for High Treason, H. D. Symonds, 1795, pp. 91-2; Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, eds Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, p. 61. 96. Parliamentary History 31, col. 1417. 97. Brothers's walking-stick had originally been the means by which God first informed him of his divine mission; the story is told in Wrote in Confinement, pp. 34-5. 98. Parliamentary History 31, cols 1417-18. 99. See for example A Revealed Knowledge 1, Preface, and 2, p. iv, and also Brothers, 32 History Workshop Journal

Wonderful Prophecies. Being a Dissertation on the Existence, Nature, and Extent of the Prophetic Powers in the Human Mind, 5th edn, 'for the booksellers', 1795. This pamphlet is certainly not by Brothers, whom it refers to in the third person, but by a disciple of his. It consists of a dissertation on prophecy written in a style more polite than Brothers's own, and extracts from his prophecies. Prophecy, it argues, is 'an impulse entirely external . . . involuntary, unsought'; but when the prophecies are transmitted through dreams, and manifested in images, as Brothers's were, they present themselves to the 'imagination' (pp. 9-10). 100. [Thomas Williams], The Age of Credulity, p. 36; An Enquiry into the Pretensions of Richard Brothers, p. 12; The Times, 5 March 1795; London Recorder, 22 March 1795; 'Home'

(= Oulton), Sound Argument, p. 51; Gentleman's Magazine, March 1795, p. 229; Political Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/37/1/1/899982 by guest on 01 October 2021 Register of the Times 4, 21-31 March, p. 195; Joseph Moser, Anecdotes of Richard Brothers, in the Years 1791 and 1792, with some Thoughts upon Credulity, J. Owen, 1795, p. 29. 101. Parliamentary History 31, col. 1426. 102. Wrote in Confinement, p. 40. 103. See the Oracle, 2 March 1795. 104. The Book of Bobs. Being a Serious Caution to the Pensioned Tribe of Albo, R. Bedford, [1795], p. 29. 105. The Book of Bobs, p. 8. 106. Spencer,/! Vindication, pp. 32-3. 107. Spencer, A Vindication, pp. 7-8. Spencer's pamphlet was reviewed approvingly by the Analytical Review 21, p. 320, March 1795, which treated it however entirely as an antidote to the infection spread by Brothers and Halhed. The Monthly Review 16, p. 348, March 1795, more sensitive to the double-edged nature of the satire, was less impressed: 'Thersites trying to laught at Tiresias: - but he can make nothing of it'. 108. 'Home' [= Oulton], Sound Argument, p. 32. 109. [Thomas Williams], The Age of Credulity, p. 13. 110. English Review 25, p. 195, March 1795; the fullest refutation of Brothers's identifi- cation of this beast with George III is by David Levi, Letters to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, M. P., Joseph Johnson and others, 1795, pp. 10-18. 111. 'For the Benefit of the Tythe and Tax Club' [York, 1794], a satire on the fast ordained in February 1794 to enlist God on the side of Britain in the war with France. This satire was complained of by Samuel Buck in a letter from Leeds to John Scott, 19 February 1794. The Treasury Solicitor, Joseph White responded with an indictment against a man called Brownrigge, who had published by distributing it in York. But Brownrigge absconded, and on the advice of White the same indictment was used against Charles Handley, who also 'published' it in Leeds. See PRO TS 11 591 1936; for Handley's trial, see the Oracle, 5 April 1794. For further evidence of resistance in Yorkshire to the 1794 fast, see Liberty and Property infallibly secured by War and Taxes against Republicans and Levellers, [Knaresborough, 1794], which complains that the efforts of all the allied Generals having been vain, we are now resting our hopes on 'General Fast'. 112. Before he could be brought to trial, Lee escaped from custody disguised as a woman, and made his way to Philadelphia, where he died probably in 1797. See The Times, 19 December 1795, and the True Briton, 23 January 1796; Memoir of Thomas Hardy (1832), in David Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790-1885, Europa, 1977, p. 61. 113. The Rights of Nobles, Citizen Lee, [1795], p. 6, quoting Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary, p. 83 (see n. 3 above). 114. Brothers had his own explanation of that attack. By the authority of the Lord Chancellor, he claimed, a tailor and shoemaker had been prohibited from measuring him for a coat and a pair of shoes. When Brothers complained about this, he was "grossly insulted', and it was at that 'very hour and instant' that 'the King was attacked for his life going to the Parliament' (Wrote in Confinement, p. 42). 115. State Trials 24. col. 206; Godwin, Cursory Strictures on the Charge delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury, D. I. Eaton, 1794, p. 21. 116. Parliamentary History 31, col. 1124. 117. The Works of Jeremv Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols, William Tait. Edinburgh, 1843, 10, pp. 320-2.