in England. It was believed that no less than
three hundred signed warrants lay ready for issue on the day that Hardy
and his friends were convicted. But the stroke was too daring, the
threat too impudent. When the trial began, the prosecution lightened
its own task by dropping the charge against Holcroft and three of his
comrades. But for nine days the charge was pressed against Thomas Hardy,
and when he was acquitted a further six days was spent in the effort to
convict Horne Tooke, and four in a last vain attempt to succeed against
Thelwall.

The popular victory checked the excesses of the reaction. As Holcroft
wrote: "The whole power of Government was directed against Thomas Hardy:
in his fate seemed involved the fate of the nation, and the verdict of
Not Guilty appeared to burst its bonds, and to have released it from
inconceivable miseries and ages of impending slavery." The reaction,
indeed, was restrained; but so also was the movement of reform. The
subsequent history of its leaders is one of unheroic failure, and of an
unpopularity which was harder to endure than danger. Windham referred to
the twelve in debate as "acquitted felons," and Holcroft was constrained
first to produce his plays under a borrowed name, and then to seek a
refuge in voluntary exile on the continent. The passions roused by the
Terror arrested the progress of the revolutionary movement in England.
The alarms and glories of the struggle with Napoleon buried it in
oblivion.

It is this complex experience which lies behind Godwin's political
writings. The French Revolution produced its simple effects in Burke and
Tom Paine--revolt and disgust in the one, enthusiasm and hope in the
other. In Godwin the reaction is more complicated. He retained to the
last his ardent faith in progress, and the perfectibility of mankind. No
events could shake that, but it was the work of experience to reinforce
all the native individualism of his confident and self-reliant temper,
to harden into an extreme dogma that general belief in _laissez faire_
which was the common property of most of the English progressives of his
day, and to beget in him not merely a doubt in the efficacy of violent
revolutions, but a dislike of all concerted political effort and the
whole collective work of political associations. He had felt the lash of
repression, saved one friend from the hangman, and seen others depart
for Botany Bay: he remained to the end, the uncompromising foe