e to the authorities.
Walker's services to the cause of Reform had, as we have seen, been
conspicuous alike in energy and moderation, and his enemies in the
Church and King Club made great exertions in order to procure a
conviction. The archives of the Home Office throw a sinister light on
their methods. A magistrate of Manchester, the Rev. John Griffith,
informed the Home Secretary that Booth, a man who was imprisoned in June
1793 for seditious practices, made a declaration against Thomas Walker
and McCullum, members of the local Constitutional Society. According to
Booth, McCullum had said: "Petitioning Parliament be d----d. You may as
well petition the devil to reform himself. The only way is for each
Society to send a number of delegates to a certain place, and there
declare themselves the Representatives of the People and support
themselves as such." Thomas Walker had also said that each member must
have a musket, for they would soon want them.[315] But it transpired in
the trial of Walker, McCullum, and others that Griffith had let Booth
see that he wanted to incriminate Walker. He not only offered Booth his
pardon for such evidence, but left him alone with Dunn, a malicious
perjurer, the falsity of whose charges against Walker was convincingly
demonstrated.[316] The case proves how far an unscrupulous magistrate
could succeed in getting charges trumped up against an innocent man who
opposed him in politics. Doubtless in other cases personal spite, or the
desire of a reward, led to the offer of false charges; and the student
who peruses the Home Office archives needs to remember the Greek
caution, +memnesth' apistein+, as much as if he were perusing French
Memoirs.

It is therefore with much doubt that one reads the declaration of a
Sheffield magistrate, in May 1794, that there was in that town "a most
horrid conspiracy against State and Church under the pretence of
Reform." A vast number of pikes and spears had been made and "cats" to
throw in the road to lame the horses. 2nd July was fixed for the
storming of the barracks and town. "It is a mercy the plot is
discovered. I am to be all night in the search." More detailed is the
deposition of a magistrate of Sheffield, James Wilkinson, that a
democrat named Widdison had made several pikes and sold twelve to Gales,
a well-known Jacobinical printer. Further, that a witness, William
Green, swore that a man named Jackson had employed him and others to
make spear-head