Mrs. Schimmelpenninck has, in her autobiography, given a vivid picture of the interest excited in the circle of friends amongst whom she moved, by the thrilling events then occurring in France, and which extended even to the comparatively passionless philosophers of the Lunar Society. At one of the meetings held at her father’s house in the summer of 1788 “Mr. Boulton,” she says, “presented to the company his son, just returned from a long sojourn at Paris. I well remember my astonishment at his full dress in the highest adornment of Parisian fashion; but I noticed, as a remarkable thing, that the company (which consisted of some of the first men in Europe) all with one accord gathered round him, and asked innumerable questions, the drift of which I did not fully understand. It was wonderful to me to see Dr. Priestley, Dr. Withering, Mr. Watt, Mr. Boulton himself, and Mr. Keir, manifest the most intense interest, each according to his prevailing characteristics, as they almost hung upon his words; and it was impossible to mistake the indications of deep anxiety, hope, fear, curiosity, ardent zeal, or thoughtful gravity, which alternately marked their countenances, as well as those of my own parents. My ears caught the words ‘Marie Antoinette,’ ‘The Cardinal de Rohan,’ ‘diamond necklace,’ ‘famine,’ ‘discontent among the people,’ ‘sullen silence instead of shouts of “Vive le Roi!”’ All present seemed to give a fearful attention. Why, I did not then well know, and, in a day or two, these things were almost forgotten by me; but the rest of the party heard, no doubt, in this young man’s narrative, the distant, though as yet faint rising of the storm which, a year later, was to burst upon France and, in its course, to desolate Europe.”[336] A few short months passed, and the reign of brotherhood began. “One evening, towards the end of July,” continues Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, “we saw at a distance a vehicle (usually employed to carry servants to town or church) returning at more than its usual speed. After some minutes the door of the drawing-room opened, and in burst Harry Priestley, a youth of sixteen or seventeen, waving his hat, and crying out, ‘Hurrah! Liberty, Reason, brotherly love for ever! Down with kingcraft and priestcraft. The majesty of the people for ever! France is free, the Bastille is taken!’”[337] “I have seen,” she adds, “the reception of the victory of Waterloo and of the carrying of the Reform Bill; but I never saw joy comparable in its intensity and universality to that occasioned by the early promise of the French Revolution.”
The impressionable mind of Dr. Priestley was moved in an extraordinary degree by the pregnant events which followed each other in quick succession at Paris; and he entered with zeal into the advocacy of the doctrines of liberty, equality, and fraternity, so vehemently promulgated by the French “friends of man.” His chemical pursuits were for a time forgotten, and he wrote and preached like one possessed, of human brotherhood, and of the downfall of tyranny and priestcraft. He hailed with delight the successive acts of the National Assembly abolishing monarchy, nobility, church, corporations, and other long established institutions. He had already been long and hotly engaged in polemical discussions with the local clergy on disputed points of faith; and now he addressed a larger audience in a work which he published in answer to Mr. Burke’s famous attack on the ‘French Revolution.’ Burke, in consequence, attacked him in the House of Commons; while the French Revolutionists on the other hand hailed him as a brother, and admitted him to the rights of French citizenship.[338]
BURNING OF DR. PRIESTLEY’S HOUSE AT FAIRHILL.[339]
These proceedings concentrated on Dr. Priestley an amount of local exasperation that shortly after burst forth in open outrage. On the 14th of July, 1791, a public dinner was held at the principal hotel to celebrate the second anniversary of the French Revolution. About eighty gentlemen were present, but Priestley was not of the number. A mob collected outside, and after shouting “Church and King,” they proceeded to demolish the inn windows. The magistrates shut their eyes to the riotous proceedings, if they did not actually connive at them. A cry was raised, “To the New Meeting-house,” the chapel in which Priestley ministered; and thither the mob surged. The door was at once burst open, and the place set on fire. They next gutted the old Meeting-house, and made a bonfire of the pews and bibles in the burying-ground. It was growing dusk, but the fury of the mob had not abated. They made at once for Dr. Priestley’s house at Fairhill, about a mile and a half distant. The Doctor and his family had escaped about half an hour before their arrival; and the house was at their mercy. They broke in at once, emptied the cellars, smashed the furniture, tore up the books in the library, destroyed the philosophical and chemical apparatus in the laboratory, and ended by setting fire to the house. The roads for miles round were afterwards found strewed with shreds of the valuable manuscripts in which were recorded the results of twenty years labour and study,—a loss which Priestley continued bitterly to lament until the close of his life.
Thus an utter wreck was made of the philosopher’s dwelling at Fairhill. The damage done was estimated at upwards of 4000l., of which the victim recovered little more than one-half from the county. The next day, and the next, and the next, the mob continued to run riot, burning and destroying. On the second day, about noon, they marched to Easyhill and attacked and demolished the mansion of Mr. Ryland, one of the most munificent benefactors of the town. Bordesley Hall, the mansion of Mr. Taylor, the banker, was next sacked and fired. The shop of the estimable William Hutton, the well-known bookseller and author, was next broken open and stripped of everything that could be carried away; and from his shop in the town they proceeded to his dwelling-house at Bennett’s Hill in the country, and burnt it to the ground.[340] On the third day, six other houses were sacked and destroyed; three of them were blazing at the same time. On the fourth day, which was a Sunday, the rioters dispersed in bands over the neighbourhood, levying contributions in money and drink; one body of them burning on their way the Dissenting chapel-house and minister’s dwelling-house at Kingswood, seven miles off. Other Dissenters, of various persuasions, farmers, shopkeepers, and others, had their houses broken into and robbed in open day. It was not until the Sunday evening that three troops of the Fifteenth Light Dragoons entered Birmingham amidst the acclamations of the inhabitants, who welcomed them as deliverers. At the instant of their arrival, the mob had broken into Dr. Withering’s house at Edgbaston Hall, and were rioting in his wine-cellars, but when they heard that “the soldiers” had come at last, they slunk away in various directions.
The members of the Lunar Society, or “the Lunatics,” as they were popularly called, were especially marked for attack during the riots. A common cry among the mob was “No philosophers—Church and King for ever!” and some persons, to escape their fury, even painted “No philosophers” on the fronts of their houses! There could be no doubt as to the meaning of this handwriting on the wall. Priestley’s house had been sacked, and Withering’s plundered. Boulton and Watt were not without apprehensions that an attack would be made upon them, as the head and front of the “Philosophers” of Birmingham. They accordingly prepared for the worst; called their workmen together, pointed out to them the criminality of the rioters’ proceedings, and placed arms in their hands on their promising to do their utmost to defend the premises if attacked. In the mean time everything portable was packed up and ready to be removed at a moment’s notice. Thus four days of terror passed, but the mob came not; Watt attributing the safety of Soho to the fact that most of the Dissenters lived in another direction.[341]
Many of the rioters were subsequently apprehended, and several of them were hanged; but the damage inflicted on those whose houses had been sacked was irreparable, and could not be compensated. As for Dr. Priestley, he shook the dust of Birmingham from his feet, and fled to London; from thence emigrating to America, where he died in 1804.
While such was the blind fury of the populace of Birmingham, the principles of the French Revolution found adherents in all parts of England. Clubs were formed in London and the principal provincial towns, and a brisk correspondence was carried on between them and the Revolutionary leaders of France. Among those invested with the rights of French citizenship were Dr. Priestley, Mr. Wilberforce, Thomas Tooke, and Mr. (afterwards Sir) James Mackintosh. Thomas Paine and Dr. Priestley were chosen members of the National Convention; and though the former took his seat for Calais, the latter declined, on the ground of his inability to speak the language sufficiently. Among those carried away by the political epidemic of the time, were young James Watt and his friend Mr. Cooper of Manchester. In 1792 they were deputed, by the “Constitutional Society” of that town, to proceed to Paris and present an address of congratulation to the Jacobin Club, then known as the “Société des Amis de la Constitution.”[342] While at Paris, young Watt seems to have taken an active part in the fiery agitation of the time. He was on intimate terms with the Jacobin leaders. Southey says that he was even the means of preventing a duel between Danton and Robespierre, to the former of whom he acted as second.[343] Robespierre afterwards took occasion to denounce both Cooper and Watt as secret emissaries of Pitt, on which young Watt sprang into the tribune, pushing Robespierre aside, and defended himself in a strain of vehement eloquence, which completely carried the assembly with him. From that moment, however, he felt his life to be unsafe, and he fled from Paris without a passport, never resting until he had passed the frontier and found refuge in Italy.
The public part he had taken in French Revolutionary politics could not fail to direct attention to him on this side of the channel. His appearance at a public procession, in which he carried the British colours, to celebrate the delivery of some soldiers released from the galleys, was vehemently denounced by Mr. Burke in the House of Commons. The notoriety which he had thus achieved, gave his father great anxiety; and after young James’s return to England in 1794, he was under considerable apprehensions for his safety. Several members of the London political Societies had been apprehended and lodged in the Tower, and Watt feared lest his son might in some way be compromised by his correspondence with those societies. Boulton, then in London, informed him of the severe measures of the Government, and of the intended suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act; to which Watt replied,—