met with open accusations or covert insinuations, that because he refused to abandon his desire for Parliamentary Reform, because he believed that the ordinary law of the land was sufficient to keep down whatever excesses the advocates of extreme opinions might be disposed to commit, he and his friends were therefore Jacobins in disguise, and the friends of sedition and anarchy. It was idle to protest. Had not the Convention, it was asked, voted the tide of French citizens to his friends, Joseph Priestley and Jeremy Bentham. The terrible events in France, the massacres of the loth of August and the 2nd of September 1792, had unnerved the minds of men. A panic arose, and the friends of order called on their representatives to pass laws recalling the memory of the days of the Stuarts. Priestley left England in despair to go to America; whence he kept up a correspondence with Lord Lansdowne.[1] Benjamin Vaughan shortly after followed his example;[2] Price fortunately for himself had died in the previous year; Bentham in vain addressed an eloquent plea to the Convention in favour of justice and mercy. The storm none the less continued to rage against them with undiminished vigour.
On the 21st December 1792, Lord Lansdowne moved a resolution in favour of sending a Minister to France, in order to represent the feelings of the English Government for the unhappy situation of "Louis XVI.," and to use his best endeavours in exhorting the Convention, not to suffer any danger to arise to his person.[3] Lord Grenville in reply said that he never in his life heard words that conveyed so much
- ↑ The idea of going to America had been entertained by Priestley as far back as 1772. See supra, Vol. I. p. 434.
- ↑ Vaughan got involved in the charges made against William Stone and John Hurford Stone of treasonable conspiracy, and took refuge in France to escape arrest and probable prosecution in 1794. In France he was arrested during the Reign of Terror; and was denounced by Billaud-Varennes as "an agent of Pitt."
- ↑ Lord Acton (Lectures on the French Revolution, 253) states that at this time Lord Lansdowne, with Fox and Sheridan, supported a proposal which had originated with the Spanish Government, to offer a large bribe to Danton, who was said to be ready to accept it, in order to save Louis XVI.; but he does not state his authority. (See on this subject the observations of Mr. J. Holland Rose, Pitt and the Great War, 94 note.)
