in France? The
duke might be a sincere lover of political liberty, but he certainly
would not be prepared to approve the confiscation of his estates. The
aristocratic Whigs, dependent for their whole property and for every
privilege which they prized upon ancient tradition and prescription,
could not really be in favour of sweeping away the whole complex social
structure, levelling Windsor Castle as Burke put it in his famous
metaphor, and making a 'Bedford level' of the whole country. The Whigs
had to disavow any approval of the Jacobins; Mackintosh, who had given
his answer to Burke's diatribes, met Burke himself on friendly terms
(9th July 1797), and in 1800 took an opportunity of public recantation.
He only expressed the natural awakening of the genuine Whig to the
aspects of the case which he had hitherto ignored. The effect upon the
middle-class Whigs is, however, more to my purpose. It may be
illustrated by the history of John Horne Tooke[127] (1736-1812), who at
this time represented what may be called the home-bred British
radicalism. He was the son of a London tradesman, who had distinguished
himself by establishing, and afterwards declining to enforce, certain
legal rights against Frederick Prince of Wales. The prince recognised
the tradesman's generosity by making his antagonist purveyor to his
household. A debt of some thousand pounds was thus run up before the
prince's death which was never discharged. Possibly the son's hostility
to the royal family was edged by this circumstance. John Horne, forced
to take orders in order to hold a living, soon showed himself to have
been intended by nature for the law. He took up the cause of Wilkes in
the early part of the reign; defended him energetically in later years;
and in 1769 helped to start the 'Society for supporting the Bill of
Rights.' He then attacked Wilkes, who, as he maintained, misapplied for
his own private use the funds subscribed for public purposes to this
society; and set up a rival 'Constitutional Society.' In 1775, as
spokesman of this body, he denounced the 'king's troops' for 'inhumanly
murdering' their fellow-subjects at Lexington for the sole crime of
'preferring death to slavery.' He was imprisoned for the libel, and thus
became a martyr to the cause. When the country associations were formed
in 1780 to protest against the abuses revealed by the war, Horne became
a member of the 'Society for Constitutional Information,' of which Major
Cartwr