#john barrell

[poniatowskaja]

‘But the most striking illustration I know of how the Gurney defence may have encouraged writers to greater and greater hyperbole in their anti-monarchical and regicidal imaginings is a wonderfully ambiguous poem, appropriately titled Treason!!!, or, Not Treason!!!, by James Kennedy. In May 1794 Kennedy, a gauze and muslin weaver, had fled to London from Edinburgh to escape arrest for his involvement in the treasonable conspiracy of Robert Watt, described in a later chapter. He worked for a period in 1795 as John Thelwall’s secretary, before returning in July or August to Scotland, where he was imprisoned for ten weeks, he tells us, ‘upon a false charge of having “Connected himself with the Disaffected and Conspirators against our Happy Constitution in London”’. He may eventually have emigrated to Canada. He is a thoroughly skilful poet in the manner, sometimes, of Burns; here are two stanzas from the poem: Fates! bless the Monarch who maintains      The duties of his station; With mercy, love, and justice, reigns,      The father of the Nation;             And shudders at the thought of war,             And heals the wounds of civil jar,             And spurns the venal from his Throne,             And makes the injur’d cause his own! Fates! blast the King whom War delights,       Who hugs vile venal creatures, Who deems th’asserters of their rights      Seditious, wicked Traitors ----              His subjects starves to pamper minions,              And persecutes for just opinions!              That King no more deserves a Crown;              Hurl - hurl the sanguine Tyrant down.   The first stanza describes the ideal king in something very close to the language in which George was continually described by loyalist writers; the second, before recommending his death, describes a king who commits every crime that radical writers had alleged against George. He has engaged in an unjust war against the French Republic; has encouraged the corruption of government; has prosecuted as traitors those who wished to return the constitution to its original purity; and has taxed his people to pay the debts of his spendthrift son and the pensions of his acolytes. But to prosecute this poem, the Attorney-General would have had to frame his innuendoes in such a way as would have enabled the defence to question why he found it easier to recognize George in this second stanza than in the first.’    John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796     

[poniatowskaja]

Writing on behalf of the LCS, James Parkinson took particular exception to a squib in The Times, an attempt to imagine the newspaper as it would be in 1800, in the 'First Year of the Republic One and Indivisible'. This, Parkinson complained, was a violation of law and justice which, published in the confidence that it would not be prosecuted, 'describes those men who are awaiting the verdict of their county, as having fully perpetrated those acts of high treason of which they are supposed to be accused, but of which a fundamental principle of our constitution declares them to be held innocent until their guilt is proved.' The New Times of Year One reveals that a national convention has indeed replaced parliament, and that equality of property, or its destruction, for they come to the same thing, has become the main principle of Britain's rulers. Hardy is now President of the Committee for the Sale of the Effects of the Nobility, Thelwall President of the Convention. Horne Tooke is apparently dead, but his name is remembered in Horne Tooke Square, formerly Grosvenor Square, and Horne Tooke Street, formerly St James's Street. His place in the new political elite has been filled with repatriated exiles from France, America, or Botany Bay: Paine, Priestley, Skirving, and so on. Margarot is now Lord Mayor of London. The new republic is in a state of economic ruin, surving only by confiscations and forced loans, and awash with worthless paper money; on the financial markets sterling has no price except against French assignats. Experiments are being conducted on the feasibility of making bread from decayed bones. Civil war wages in the provinces, and a letter from Henry Yorke, General of the Armed Citizens at Sheffield, warns that in the face of a monarchist rebellion in Yorkshire, 'terror must be the order of the day'. The main news item is a report of the latest sitting of the British National Convention to consider reports on the successful plunder and demolition of aristocratic houses. A brief report on the proceedings of the Revolutionary Tribunal notes that thirty-two persons are about to be guillotined. A reassuring press release from Bonney, designed 'to stop the foul breath of slander', announces that in the recent pillaging of the West End and the City, no more than 8,000 citizen perished.

John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796

[poniatowskaja]

'if the People say anything about liberty; - Oh! your eyes, you are a Jacobine!' 'you are a d----d Presbyterian!' - 'you are a King killer!' - 'you want to cut the King's head off, as the Jacobines have done in France! nay! - you are a Republican and a Leveller!' with many such offensive jargons and wicked insinuations, trumpeted forth by the enemies to peace, and friends to ministerial influence!

John Harrison (a Sheffield razor maker) ‘A Letter to the Right Hon. Henry Dundas’, 1794, quoted in John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796

[poniatowskaja]

As Horsley attempted to evoke the effects of the red terror on France, he must have made the walls of Westminster Abbey tremble: a paragraph of fifteen staccato sentences each ending with an exclamation mark was followed by a no less ejaculatory account of the sufferings of the French royal family:

A monarch deliberately murdered! A monarch - whose only crime it was, that he inherited a sceptre, the thirty-second of his illustrious stock, - butchered on a public scaffold, after the mockery of arraignment, trial, sentence! Butchered, without the merciful formalities of the vilest malefactor’s execution! The sad privilege of a last farewell to the surrounding populace refused! Not the pause of a moment allowed for devotion! Honourable internment denied to the corpse! The Royal Widow’s anguish imbittered by the rigour of a close imprisonment! with hope, indeed, at no distance, of release - of such release as hath been given to her Lord!

Who was to blame for this catastophe? ‘O my Country,’ Horsley exclaimed. ‘Read the horror of thy own deed in this recent heightened imitation! Lament and weep, that this black French treason should have found its example, in the crime of thy unnatural sons!’

The sermon, remarked Sheridan, revived ‘all the slavery of passive obedience and non-resistance’, and it provoked a furious reply from an anonymous and apparently dissenting republican, who demanded whether ‘the most violent enemies of the French’ would contend

that the late king was executed, because he was the thirty-second descendant of Hugh Capet? No - I believe no one but the Bishop of St. David’s will make such an assertion. - He was executed for having invaded the peace and security of the kingdom. - He was executed for having abused the confidence reposed in him. - He was executed for having lifted his arm against the people. - He was executed for having sworn to maintain the constitution adopted by his nation, and for having violated his oath. - For these crimes, proved against him, he was executed, and I THINK HE DESERVED HIS DEATH. 

John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796

[j2parman]

Perhaps Hazlitt was right when he said that Turner painted 'pictures of nothing, and very like.'

John Barrell, "The Virtues of Topography," a review of the exhibition, "Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape" at the Royal Academy, London, in the London Review of Books, 3 January 2013, page 18.

[j2parman]

Kristy Wark, chairing a discussion of a Gainsborough exhibition, asserted that his landscapes were 'irrelevant,' that they had nothing to say to the present day. Now that so many students want to learn only about the contemporary, and many universities feel increasingly little obligation to teach them much else, the remark is useful to get them thinking about whether they might learn as much about the culture of the present day by studying what appears to be 'irrelevant' to it, as they can from works which claim to speak directly of the times we live in.

John Barrell, "The Virtues of Topography," a review of the exhibition, "Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape" at London's Royal Academy, London Review of Books, 3 January 2013, page 17. The quote is condensed. The emphasis on "relevance" in higher education, especially in England, is wrongheaded.