Overview
This letter is a valuable historical resource because it offers an intimate account of the aftermath of the notorious Birmingham riots of 1791 in which the homes and businesses of dissenters, liberals and democrats thought to be sympathetic to the French Revolution were attacked by a ‘Church and King’ mob with tacit encouragement from the local magistrates. Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), a scientific and political exemplar for Beddoes, lost his house and laboratory. Beddoes’s eyewitness in the letter is Priestley’s friend, the chemist and industrialist James Keir (1735-1820), whose acquaintance Beddoes had made in 1791. Keir’s house and works had also been in danger during the riots and in 1792 he attended the hearing of the case that Priestley and others had brought to gain compensation for the damages they had suffered. That hearing, as Keir shows, became another venue for Priestley to be discredited because of his political views. Beddoes was himself a democrat who remained hopeful that the French Revolution would institute a society of liberty and equality; Keir’s report helped to confirm him in his opposition to the British government — an opposition that led, in 1792, to the Home Office seeking information about him as a person whose writings and speeches were spreading sedition. At this point, he was closer than he knew to being arrested and tried for treason — as, in 1794, were men he admired (John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) and John Thelwall (1764-1834)).

Beddoes’s correspondent was Davies Giddy (later Gilbert) (1767-1839). As an Oxford undergraduate, Giddy attended Beddoes’s lectures. Beddoes’s favoured student, he gradually became his closest friend. Together, Giddy and Beddoes took a geological tour of Cornwall and Devon in 1791; thereafter, much of their friendship was conducted by correspondence, the main themes of which were their shared pro-revolutionary politics and latterly the work of Erasmus Darwin and Beddoes’s proposals for a Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. In his native Cornwall, Giddy went into politics and administration: he was made High Sheriff of Cornwall from 1792 — a post in which he found his democratic ideals compromised because he was responsible for putting down protests by the miners and farmworkers whose poor wages left them unable to afford bread (‘food riots’). In 1799, Giddy encouraged the young Humphry Davy’s scientific interests and recommended that Beddoes should employ him. Giddy also corresponded with Anna, Beddoes’s unhappy wife, and found in 1803 that she had become romantically attached to him and was proposing an affair (she had previously formed a similar attachment to Davy). However, in 1808, after Beddoes’s death, he married, rather than Anna, Mary Ann Gilbert. He acted as a guardian of Beddoes’s children and in this capacity continued to advise Anna. By then, he was an MP. Although he did not pursue a career in science, Giddy provided calculations for Richard Trevithick’s steam engines and Thomas Telford’s bridges. He became President of the Royal Society after Davy stepped down in 1827.

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Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 3 April [1792]¹

This is a letter I have this day received from my friend Keir, whom curiosity carried to Warwick assizes. He is a very accurate impartial observer, unless you sh^d suppose his station at the revolution dinner might bias his judgment.² For a reformer he is very temperate — one of your half way politicians — I applyied to him when we talk upon politics the character which the late Pretender’s³ Secretary⁴ told me at Paris the philosophers there used to apply to David Hume — one of the best of living creatures, but quite oppressed by the prejudices of education⁵ — His account I fancy will excite your indignation more than your surprize. The newspapers will inform you of the treatment Priestly received at Warwick.⁶ I have just got possession of a curious anecdote respecting the apprehensions of our governors & the measures they are taking to continue the people in their prejudices. I shall most assuredly make it as public as I possibly can & add to it all the authenticity I shall be permitted. It was betrayed by the simplicity of a person of whom they intended to make a tool. I imagine if his name was introduced, some very serious consequences to him w^d follow. I cannot therefore bring forward such proof as w^d satisfy a jury, though such proof exists —

I hope Thomson⁷ received my letter — it is hardly worth while to add that I hope his wife may be the better for any thing it contains. I hope to hear soon of the shipping of the iron ore, & my property in Cornish profits, which I am much afraid has given you a great deal of trouble —

My comp^ts to all your family. You have lately sent us incessant cold, wet & blustering winds. I wish you w^d build a wall along the coast & exclude them. Yours faithfully.

T. Beddoes

3 April

[Keir’s letter to Beddoes:]

I have been at Warwick assizes, but only one of the cases (Mr Ryland’s)⁸ for damages caused by the Riots was then heard. The judge seems to proceed in the same manner as that at Worcester⁹ in giving damages for nothing but what was found clearly to exist at the hour of the riot which in such a case is impossible. So I imagine they have allowed for little but the building, although the furniture was as clearly proved as could be expected. I imagine also that they have taken the lowest valuation of the buildings where the surveyors on the two sides differed, which they did materially. Here on the part of the sufferers were two of the first builders in London, whereas those on the side of the Hundred were men that seemed ignorant of the expence of building not builders, but merely repairors of other people’s buildings & apparently inferior men. The managers for the Hundred (who are the two Birmingham justices, & Brook the no less celebrated attorney in the time of the riots, all of them against whom accusations are lodged with the Secretary of State¹⁰ ) brought down Harding from London at a great expence to declaim vehemently against the Dissenters & Revolutionists, which he did with all his might, & with abundance of false assertions, & in defiance of the controul of the judge, who twice stopped him & desired him to avoid going into a matter foreign to the cause. He persisted however, & said he would go on if the judge should send him to Newgate for it. I think he could not have ventured on this piece of insolence, if he had not thought himself safe in the approbation of the ministry, or perhaps been instructed. He is King’s Counsellor, & Sollicitor to the Queen. The 2^d part of Payne’s Book has alarmed government much, & particularly a scheme which Payne has of establishing a communication among all the Friends of Liberty throughout the kingdom & also of arming themselves, without exposing themselves to any breach of the Law.¹¹ I do not know the particulars nor do I expect good effects from it, at this time. However, I am told that Payne’s last pamphlet makes great progress among the lower orders.¹² There is a well written book, as republican as Payne’s, but less offensive as being less personal, called advice to the priviledged orders, written I am told by a Mr Barlow.¹³ — Harding hinted that he had abundance of more observations in reserve for another occasions, meaning no doubt, Dr Priestley’s trial.¹⁴ — the judge’s behaviour was very becoming. He set aside all Harding’s interpretation of the Law, who (Harding) contended that it was a penal not a remedial law & therefore to be interpreted strictly & not liberally.

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Notes

1. Year established from the endorsement of the letter.

2. James Keir had proposed the toast at the dinner held in Birmingham on 14 July 1791 to mark the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The hotel at which the dinner was being held was attacked by ‘Church and King’ rioters, encouraged by some of the Birmingham magistrates and ministers. The rioters then attacked the houses and businesses of local dissenters and radicals, demolishing the home and laboratory of Keir’s friend Joseph Priestley and burning a further twenty-six dwellings, four dissenting meeting houses and several businesses. Keir had gone to Warwick assizes to attend, in the public gallery, the hearing at which those who had been attacked claimed damages from the Hundred (the local authority).

3. Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), the Stuart claimant to the throne of Great Britain, grandson of King James II.

4. Andrew Lumisden (1720-1801). Lumisden, having been dismissed from the Prince’s service in Rome in 1768, then lived in Paris. Beddoes visited the city in 1787.

5. David Hume (1711-1766) was in Paris from 1763 until 1766, acting as secretary to the British embassy. He socialized with, among others, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717-83), Denis Diderot (1713-84), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).

6. According to the Observer of 1 April, p. 3, ‘Doctor Priestley, upon his appearance at Warwick Assizes on Thursday last, was so violently assaulted by the populace, that he was obliged to take shelter in the court-house. Dirt and stones were thrown at him in large vollies, and his life was in eminent danger’. Priestley had been attending the assizes because the cases of those who, like him, were claiming damages for property destroyed in the riots were being heard. The local authority (the ‘Hundred’) against which the claims were being made employed George Hardinge (1743-1816) as defence lawyer. So as to smear the claimants as dangerous revolutionaries, Hardinge attacked Priestley in court, reading out extracts from his writings. In November, these extracts were published as an appendix to a pamphlet attacking Priestley — A Small Whole-Length of Dr. Priestley: From His Printed Works (London: F. and C. Rivington).

7. The letter has not been traced; the recipient was probably the Revd John Thomas Thomson (1752-1811), curate of Zennor, near Penzance, a botanist and member of the Linnean Society. Thomson had married Giddy’s cousin Elizabeth in 1781; she died on 30 September 1792.

8. John Ryland (1726-1814), owner of a wire-drawing factory, whose home, Baskerville House, had been destroyed by the mob.

9. Some of the Birmingham property destroyed lay in the county of Worcestershire and some in Warwickshire. At the Worcester assizes of March 1792, nine claimants were awarded only £5504 of the £8511 that they claimed.

10. That is, the men managing the defence case were the very people accused by the claimants of having, contrary to their duty, fomented the riots and frustrated efforts to bring the rioters to justice. The magistrates concerned were Dr. Benjamin Spencer, vicar of Aston (1743-1823), Joseph Carles of Handsworth (d. 1801) and John Brooke (1755-1802), undersheriff of Warwickshire. Their conduct before and during the riot was described in a series of affidavits collected from men accused of riot; these, and a petition, were submitted by the victims to the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Henry Dundas (1742-1811). In May, extracts from the affidavits were read out in a House of Commons debate, in an effort to bring about a public inquiry into the riots and the local authorities’ complicity with them. See Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804 (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 285-89.

11. The second part of The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1737-1809) had been published in February. It argued that citizens had a right to overthrow their government if it became tyrannical. It was promoted by the Society for Constitutional Information (a pro-reform organization set up in 1780) and by the London Corresponding Society (a reformist organization established in January 1792, many of whose members were from the labouring or artisanal classes). On 21 May the government issued a warrant for Paine’s arrest.

12. The Rights of Man, part one, published in 1791. Because Paine did not enforce copyright, many cheap editions were printed at prices the labouring classes could afford.

13. Joel Barlow (1754-1812), Advice to the Privileged Orders, in the several states of Europe, resulting from the necessity and propriety of a general revolution in the principle of government, part one (London, 1792).

14. Priestley’s compensation case against the Hundred was heard at Warwick assizes on 5 April. He was awarded £2502 although he had claimed, with supporting evidence, £4122.