tune of church and king! They were armed | with bludgeons and carried terror wherever they appeared, for there was no military force in the town, and the stupid magistrates knew not what to do. About the hour of noon a body of men, women, and children mixed, and about 1000 strong, attacked the house of Mr. John Ryland at Easy Hill. "Every room," says Hutton, "was entered with eagerness; but the wine-cellar, in which were wines to the amount of £300, with ferocity. Here they regaled till the roof fell in with the flames, and six or seven of them lost their lives." Mr. Ryland had not been at the anniversary dinner; but he was a dissenter, and a friend of Priestley, and probably the odour of his well-filled wine-cellar contributed as much as anything else to bring upon him the visitation of these drunken royalists. In fact, the love of drink and the maddening effects of liquor were at the bottom of nearly all this mischief, from first to last. But even in the madness of intoxication this rude rabblement, furnished by some of the worst districts in the country, gave proof that they were of English breed; for though they had for many hours the whole town and neighbourhood at their mercy, and talked about knocking on the head the enemies to church and state, they shed not a drop of blood, nor ever appear to have really thought of shedding any. A French mob, in the like circumstances, would not have got so drunken, but they would have butchered at least some of the victims of their fury. The tumult, after raging four days, was suppressed without bloodshed by the arrival of five troops of light dragoons. birthright of all Englishmen. He occupied, at least in the eyes of his own party, the enviable and honourable position of a martyr; and, besides numerous other testimonials, condolences, and most flattering compliments, he received from his French brethren of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, who called him their "most illustrious associate," a letter brimful of compliments and generous sympathy. This letter was written by no less a man than Condorcet, who was at this time secretary to the academy, and who was soon after one of the leading republicans in the national convention. In a very short time Priestley published the letter to the world, together with addresses from the committee of dissenters at Birmingham, from the members of the new meeting-house, from the young people belonging to his congregation at Birmingham, from the congregation of Mill Hill, Leeds, where he had once officiated, and from the Protestant dissenters in Great Yarmouth, from the Philosophical Society at Derby, &c., &c. Condorcet, as might have been expected, expressed himself very strongly. "You are not the first friend of liberty," wrote this scientific secretary, "against whom tyrants have armed the very people whom they have deprived of their rights. . . . At this present moment a league is formed throughout Europe against the general liberty of mankind; but for some time past another league has existed, occupied with propagating and with defending this liberty, without any other arms than those furnished by reason; and these will finally triumph! It is in the necessary order of things that error should be momentary and truth eternal. Men of genius, supported by their virtuous disciples, when placed in the balance against the vulgar mob of corrupt intriguers—the instru ments or the accomplices of tyrants-must at length prevail against them. The glorious day of universal liberty will shine upon our descendants, but we shall at least enjoy the aurora." [We shall presently see the sort of aurora it was that Condorcet enjoyed.] This letter from a zealot of the revolution, with the other matter which Priestley printed so rapidly, was not likely to allay the storm which had been raised. He seized every opportunity of contrasting the bigotry and misery of England, and the enlight These Birmingham riots were sad and disgraceful enough, but it requires great ignorance or a stupendous impudence to assert, as is done by one of Priestley's disciples in politics and in religion, that they were "far worse, indeed, than any disorders which had as yet occurred in the progress of the French revolution." The liberality of the doctor's friends and admirers more than made up for his pecuniary losses: his brotherin-law gave him an annuity of £200 a year, and made over to him the sum of £10,000; but as the money was invested in the French funds, it may be doubted, notwithstanding the deep sympathy which Frenchmen professed for him, whether he ever got much of it. He also re-ened toleration and happiness of France. In the covered by law compensation for damages to the amount of £3098. Nor was Priestley without other consolations. He published pamphlet after pamphlet to exhibit his wrongs and to attribute them all to the infernal malice and preconcerted designs of a bigoted, intolerant clergy, and a set of selfish slaves, who were ready to barter for gold or distinctions, or the smiles of a court, the Belsham. preface to the first of his appeals he said :-"How different are the spectacles that are now exhibited in France and in England! Here bigotry has been fostered, and has acquired new strength. There it is almost extinct. Here the friends of 2 In the second of his appeals to the public, which was publishe early in the following year (1792), he pretty directly ac cused Burke of being one of the promoters or originators of the persecution he had endured, the Establishment are burning the meeting-houses agreed in any one verdict; and if they had taken of the dissenters, with all the rage of crusaders; while in Paris one of the churches has been procured by the Protestants." To keep up and increase the irritation of these blisters, fresh addresses and condolences poured in from France upon Priestley, who published a proud list of them all, while he or his friends published many of the peppery documents at full length. A few days after Condorcet's letter, the Jacobins of Lyons wrote him an address, and this was followed, in rapid succession, by other addresses from the Jacobins of Nantes, from the Jacobins of Marmande on the Garonne, from the Jacobins of Clermont, in Auvergne, from the Jacobins of Toulouse, and from the Société-Mère-the great genetrix and nursing-mother of them all-in the Rue St. Honoré, at Paris. As a climax, the national convention, almost as soon as it met, nominated Priestley a citizen of the French republic. The public mind was in a most excited state when the trials of some of the Birmingham rioters who had been apprehended came on. As the circuit was at hand, the prisoners had not long to wait. Of five of them who were tried at the assizes for Worcestershire, on the 22d of August, for offences committed near Birmingham, only one was convicted. But of those tried at the Warwick assizes on the 25th, four received sentence of death. Those who had suffered in their property, and all those who sympathized so deeply with Priestley, maintained that there ought to have been a good many more convictions; that the trial was unfair, or at least that the jury was all chosen from among the high-church party. But if they had taken some of the sturdy partizans of the other side, we really believe-so inflamed were both parties that they would have fought in the jury-box, and would never have them all from that opposite party, who, great philanthropists as they were, had no notion of secondary punishments, but, in their vengeance, a most decided taste for gibbets and halters, there would have been such a black list of convictions as had not been seen in Warwick for many a day. But, besides the advantage of the one-sidedness of the jury, the rioters had in their favour nearly the whole strength of public opinion in those parts, and many witnesses who, believing that the original motive of their conduct was a good and loyal one, were probably not over-scrupulous as to what they swore, in order to screen them and get them off. It could also be proved, upon better evidence, that several of these rioters had previously been inoffensive, well-conducted men, and that they had only been excited by their own inward belief that Priestley and his friends were sworn enemies to the king and church. Besides all this, there was the favourable confusion of great numbers, the contradictory evidence of the illiterate witnesses for the prosecution, and the common flaws in indictments, when drawn up, as these had been, in a hurry, and upon loose testimony. And, after all, it is a difficult and odious and agonizing task to select out of so great a number a few men for examples. Previously to, and even during the trial, when a reaction of sympathy might have been expected, the sufferers from the riots and their witnesses were publicly abused and threatened in the streets of Birmingham and Warwick, where-as in many other places-the favourite toast of the church-and-king party was-"May every revolutionary dinner be followed by a hot supper!" Although, including the man convicted at Worcester, five rioters were sentenced to death. only three were hanged, the other two receiving his majesty's free pardon. CHAPTER XXVIII.-CIVIL AND MILITARY HISTORY.-A.D. 1791. GEORGE III. Progress of the French revolution-The serment civique-The attacks on the church threaten to produce a civil war-Covenant of the Jacobins for the suppression of their enemies-Establishment of the Société Fraternelle --Violence of the Jacobins against the priests-Decree issued by the national assembly against the clergyThey are compelled to emigrate-Contests between the church and the popular infidelity-Marat and his ferocious journalism-Riot at Vincennes-It is quelled by La Fayette-Treatment of the royalists who repaired to the Tuileries-La Fayette again interposes-His account of the proceeding--Marat's counter-statement-The event called the "Day of Poignards"-Cause of the title-Character of Mirabeau-His indecisive attempts to restore the monarchy-His last illness and death-His unfitness to arrest the career of revolution -The king denounced for harbouring priests in the Tuileries-He resolves to keep Easter at St. Cloud—A riot at his departure-He is compelled by the mob to remain in the Tuileries-Contradictory accounts of the event-Louis XVI. complains to the national assembly of the insult—Unsatisfactory answer of the president -La Fayette persuaded to resume the command of the national guard-Attacks against him by the Cordeliers and Marat-Proposal of Prudhomme for the abolition of royalty-Changes in the names of the streets of Paris-Growing influence of the Cordeliers-The Jacobins establish their Journal des Débats-The king and his family resolve on flight-His hopes of a restoration by a coalition of European sovereigns-The King of Sweden sends Count Fersen to aid the escape of Louis-The Emperor of Austria's preparations to reinstate the fugitives-Escape of Louis XVI. and his family-The proclamation he leaves behind him at his departure -His list of the injuries he had endured-Proceedings in the Parisian clubs at the king's flight-La Fayette denounced in the Jacobin club as a traitor to the people-The king arrested at Varennes and brought back to Paris-His rough reception at his return-Effects of anguish upon the queen-The Marquis de Bouillé's threatening letter to the national assembly. R of acting with the Church of France, as that prince had done in his last days by the Anglican church. But Louis had none of the boldness of Charles I.; and even on this point, where his feelings and principles were perhaps stronger than upon any other, he was incapable of any steadiness of purpose. He was not born to be a voluntary martyr. Day after day the majority of the assembly were thrown into transports of rage by the reception of protests against the civil constitution of the clergy, and by the positive refusal of some prelates, curés, and other priests to take the serment civique. This hardihood was attributed to the obstinacy of the king. To extort compliance through terror, the Paris patriots made an émeute, and a terrible uproar, under the windows of the apartment of the poor weak prisoner of the Tuileries, who then gave his assent. EVERTING once more to the lead- | the history of our Charles I., he may have thought ing subject, we turn to the startling events in France-or to the aurora of French liberty. It was soon seen that the courage of the majority of the clergy had not been over-rated by Maury, and that the forcible exacting of the serment civique would lead to a civil war, at least in a part of France. Before matters had come to this extremity with the clergy, Louis XVI., as a really scrupulous Catholic, had written to Rome for the opinion and advice of Pius VI. The pope's opinion was opposed to the plans and determinations of the assembly, and therefore the liberal Archbishop of Vienne, minister for ecclesiastical affairs, and the equally liberal Archbishop of Bordeaux, keeper of the seals, into whose hands it fell, had kept it for a long time from the knowledge of the king. But neither the strong opinion of the pontiff of the Catholic world, nor the sentiments of the French hierarchy, among whom were many individuals that he revered, could be permanently kept from the knowledge of Louis; and his own firm conviction gave him courage to withhold for some time the royal assent to the civil constitution of the clergy, and to the forced serment civique, which was a part of it. At one time he is even said to have declared that he would rather die than be a party to the destruction of the established church; and, as he studied very attentively On the 24th of January, the Jacobins of Paris had bound themselves by an oath to defend with their fortunes and their blood every citizen who should have the courage to devote himself to the denunciation of traitors to the country, by which they understood all men that entertained different opinions from their own. The decree to this effect for the Jacobins made decrees like the assembly-was unanimously adopted, as was also the resolution that copies of it should be sent to the affiliated societies in all parts of France, in order that they might bind themselves read the reports of the debates, and the decrees themselves, or he has intentionally falsified their meaning and import. Thiers starts with the principle that he will not be excited in narrating what took place, and that he will be angry with no man or men, or parties; and he so far adheres to the latter part of his principle as not to lose his temper at any atrocity or rascality whatsoever, provided only it be committed by or for the revolution. He hands his Jacobin scoundrels across the stage one after the other with all the politesse of a courtier or master of the ceremonies of the old régime; and he dismisses nearly every one of them with the assurance that he has done his best according to the light of his own reason and conscience, and that, if he have in some respects done amiss, his evil doings have, in the end, and the great result, been productive of good. In these matters he is an optimist, a very Pangloss, for in revolutionism all is for the best. But when a priest is strug gling for his church, a noble for his order, a king for his crown, Thiers' suavity is by no means so perfect; and here his affected moderation, his under-toned, half-whispered malice and spite, his inuendoes and cavils are, by several degrees, more revolting than the openly blurted, loudthundering malice of others.2 by the same oath-an oath which would have and unfair in commission:-either he has not suited the original assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain. The president, on the night when all this was decreed in the Rue St. Honoré, was Victor Broglie, ex-count, and father of the late Duke de Broglie; and one of the secretaries was Alexandre Beauharnais, ex- viscount, the first husband of Napoleon Bonaparte's first wife, Josephine, Empress of the French.' The im mediate effect produced by the infernal vow and covenant was a red-hot persecution against all unsworn priests. Mirabeau had proclaimed in the assembly that those priests who would not take the oath, and that gave up their livings, places, and appointments, were not to be treated or considered as culpable; but the Jacobins and the unbelieving mobs, and the dastardly majority of the assembly itself, determined to consider them as suspect. [This terrible word was already in use, and equivalent to a sentence of proscription; but the champions of the rights of man and the zealots of liberty and equality went on improving, until soupçonné d'étre suspect-suspected of being suspected-had the same force, and was a common term.] At this time also another democratic club started into existence, in aid of the Jacobins, to which it was to serve as a sort of seminary or preparatory school. This club of the people, called "Société Fraternelle," held its meetings in the section of Enfans Rouges, or Red Boys, and had for its first president M. Tallien, a leading member of the Jacobins, lately a compositor in a printing-office, but now the editor of a journal, and destined to be, for a time, a sort of dictator in France, and one of the first patrons of young Napoleon Bonaparte. This Société Fraternelle especially undertook to explain, in an easy and familiar manner, to the populace of Paris, the decrees and other proceed ings of the national assembly; and they admitted to their discussions, free of expense, all citizens and citizenesses, with all their children that had attained the age of twelve years. "Such establishments," says an approving journalist, "which cannot be too much encouraged, are the best arms to oppose to the fanaticism of the priests and the insidious practices of pretended devotees." The French historians most in vogue at the present day can see nothing to condemn in these methods of constitutionalizing the church, and very little to regret in the atrocities that ensued in consequence. Thiers, indeed, can find nothing to blame, except "the violence" of Abbé Maury, and that too, "with the ordinary intolerance of these gentlemen," he hints was all feigned, or a noisy pretence to excite the people against the assembly and liberty. His account of the transaction is glaringly unfair-unfair in omission Hist. Parlement. A good many country curés who had conformed and taken the oath soon repented and retracted, declaring they had been misled. These repentants were seized by the municipalities or other branches of the civil power, and thrown into prison. Their martyrdom or their sufferings have probably been exaggerated; but there is little reason to doubt that, wherever the Jacobins were in force, and religious feeling very lowand this was the case in by far the greater part of France-these poor priests were treated with great barbarity. As Mirabeau had proclaimed that every priest that took the oath, and then abjured it, would be highly criminal, the assem bly presently issued its decree against all such retractations, ordering that all such priests should be immediately deprived of their appointments, arrested, and punished as rebels to the law and traitors to the nation. This terrible decree gave a fresh impulse to emigration; shoals of priests crossed the Alps, the Rhine, or the ocean, and there was soon not a country in Europe but had its quota of French bishops, abbés, and curés, all penniless, and all desperate. England had ber full share, or more than her share; and be it re membered to her honour, that in spite of the difference in faith, and the still lingering dread of Popery, she gave a kinder and a more generous 2 See almost any chapter or page of M. Thiers' History of the Revolution. orders, and they engaged priests who had not taken the oath, to officiate for them in a manner satisfactory to their consciences. They claimed that liberty of conscience which had been promised even to Jews and Mahometans, and, as their priests were free from any engagement, and exercised no public functions paid by the state, the laws or decrees of the assembly had no hold on them. The assembly assented to the reasonableness of these propositions, and granted the Theatin Church a guard from the city militia to protect those within in their hours of worship; but the assembly's master, the Paris mob, would not brook this monstrous toleration; they broke into the church in spite of the guard, or-which is just as probable-with the consent and encouragement of the guard; they insulted and threatened with the lanterne the devout old ladies and gentlemen that more regularly attended that place of worship, and they made it as dangerous to go to the Theatins as it had been to go to the Monarchic Club. That club, by the way, in consequence of Barnave's denunciation in the assembly, was forcibly suppressed a month or two later by Mayor Bailly and his municipals, who said that it was a nuisance, and the cause of exciting the people to daily riots. Even so went this Gallic liberty, and thus far and much farther had it gone when Priestley and others were worshipping it in England. reception to these expatriated priests than they One of the oracles of the French people was now the notorious Marat, a diseased wretch, who conducted a journal, in which insurrection and assassination were constantly recommended as the only sure means of establishing freedom and the rights of man. From the beginning of the revolution the people had been excessively prone to suspicion; and now Marat was maddening them into cruelty, by exciting their fears. He was every day telling them, in language more or less plain, that if they did not butcher the aristocrats and the priests, they, and their wives, and their children would be butchered by them. While in this temper the slightest incident was enough to drive the Parisian mob into a fury. Such authority as La Fayette and Mayor Bailly had ever possessed over them, was now completely lost. Marat had pointed out both the general and the mayor as fitting subjects for the On the 28th of February, a day or two after Marat had given some dark hints respecting repairs begun at Vincennes, a report was suddenly spread in the Faubourg St. Antoine that the court--the miserable court who were prisoners themselves—were going to shut up the Duke of Orleans and all his family, together with all the true patriots of the assembly, in the donjou. Forthwith all that faubourg, whose glory it was |