came down from
Whitehall; and not until the sum of fourteen guineas had gone to the
informant for his patriotic exertions did the authorities discover that
they had been hoaxed.[304]

The Edinburgh Convention, consisting of delegates of forty-five Reform
Societies, seems to have pursued dully decorous methods until 6th
November, when citizens Hamilton Rowan and Simon Butler came to
represent Ireland; Joseph Gerrald and Maurice Margarot were the
delegates from the London Corresponding Society; and Sinclair and York
from the Society for Constitutional Information which met at the Crown
and Anchor. A Convention of English Societies assembled at London about
the same time, and deputed the four delegates to join the Edinburgh body
and form a British Convention.[305] Accordingly, on 19th November, it
took the title, "British Convention of Delegates of the People,
associated to obtain Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments." The
statement of Margarot, that the London police sought to prevent his
journey to Edinburgh, should have been a warning to members to measure
their words well. Unfortunately, Margarot, a vain hot-headed fellow, at
once began to boast of the importance of the Radical Societies; though
fluctuating in number, they were numerous in London; there were thirty
of them in Norwich; and in the Sheffield district their members numbered
50,000. "If," he added, "we could get a Convention of England and
Scotland called, we might represent six or seven hundred thousand males,
which is a majority of all the adults of the Kingdom; and the Ministry
would not dare to refuse our rights."[306] Butler then declared that
Belfast was in a state of veiled rebellion; Gerrald, the ablest and best
educated of the delegates, also scoffed at the old party system, and
said, "party is ever a bird of prey, and the people their banquet." On
19th November a delegate from Sheffield, M. C. Brown, moved that the
next British Convention should meet near the borders of England and
Scotland. Thereupon Gerrald proposed that York should be chosen, despite
its ecclesiastical surroundings; for (said he), "as the Saviour of the
world was often found in the company of sinners, let us go there for the
same gracious purpose, to convert to repentance."[307]

All this was but the prelude to more serious work. On 26th-28th November
the Convention declared it to be the duty of citizens to resist any law,
similar to that lately passed in Dublin, for pre