A man feels an energy about him when embarked on a just cause . . . that which enables a man to kindle in the common blaze of liberty, and impels him in a time of danger . . . to be foremost.
––Henry Redhead YorkeFootnote 1Henry Redhead Yorke, a Creole of mixed race from a gentry, plantation-owning family in Antigua, had a somewhat unusual political career in England that raises questions about both the nature and the ideology of 1790s English radicalism. Yorke's politicization and frequent recanting of his political position are examined here in the light of recent studies on exclusion and identity. In particular, Yorke's radical performance as a “citizen of the world” and a gentleman leader on the outside platform together with his adoption of universalist, abolitionist, and constitutionalist ideologies reveal an eclectic identity. Politicization and identity are, then, central themes in this study.
As is well established, the term “radicalism” was not a contemporary term used to describe the English reform movement of the 1790s. Rather, it was not until the 1820s that this term began to be applied to the period.Footnote 2 In the final decade of the eighteenth century, radicals tended to describe themselves as “reformers,” and the government and loyalists denigrated them as “Jacobins.” “Radicalism” has since been liberally applied retrospectively to construct a collective English political movement oppositional to loyalism.Footnote 3 E. P. Thompson and other socialist and Marxist historians sought to recover a radical tradition in the English past. In terms of politicization, this grand narrative identifies a primarily working-class movement with a shared working-class consciousness.Footnote 4 Revisionist interpretations of radicalism have most notably taken the linguistic turn, a cultural turn, and/or have identified a fragmented movement with a diverse ideology.Footnote 5 Yet for the most part, historians retain the “Englishness” of the radical movement. It has been consistently perceived as a movement focused upon a challenge to the Westminster Parliament and organized among Britons predominately in towns and cities within the British Isles.Footnote 6
It is clear, however, that British radicalism was no more an entirely English affair than the French Revolution remained within the boundaries of France.Footnote 7 C. L. R. James, Laurent Dubois, and others show that revolutionary ideology reached far beyond the shores of France and triggered revolution among maroons and slaves in the French colonies.Footnote 8 Indeed, the revolution in Saint-Domingue became a revolt against slavery, and in 1794 Paris declared that slaves in all French colonies were to be citizens of the French Republic. These connected events suggest that ideas about the rights of man could be universal and that radical action spread globally within empires and between races.Footnote 9 Suzanne Desan argues that French revolutionaries gained much from the ideas and participation of foreigners.Footnote 10 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, similarly, highlight the important role of radicals of the “Revolutionary Atlantic.” This multiethnic group of people from below—sailors, soldiers, adventurers, and indentured servants—traveled the Atlantic but also made an important contribution to the debate.Footnote 11 Other men from the Atlantic periphery also engaged with political reform and/or the abolition movement in Britain, such as Oloudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Joseph Gerrald, Robert Wedderburn, and William Davidson. Henry Redhead Yorke represents such a radical from the West Indies, but as a gentleman, he was from “above” rather than below. He was also more embedded in English society than were Linebaugh and Rediker's Atlantic radicals or emancipated slaves.
Moreover, recently the radical movement of the 1790s has been considered in terms of exclusion rather than inclusion. Mark Philp argues that the movement was not defined by a shared ideology or collective identity. Nor was it formulated primarily in terms of class, or class consciousness. Rather, it comprised those who felt dissatisfaction with the established order and challenged the status quo. In theory, it was a movement that incorporated all those who for one reason or another felt excluded from society or politics: a diverse group including the disenfranchized, the poor, religious minorities, or those excluded on the grounds of race, gender, and so on.Footnote 12 Clearly, many turned to radicalism from a sense of exclusion, outsider status, including those from beyond the geographical boundaries of Britain. In terms of politicization, then, it is important to consider radicals as individuals rather than merely as part of a homogenous movement. In the same volume of essays in which Philp's chapter appears, Conal Condren identifies an “alienated radicalism,” that is, “a condition of frustrated exclusion, which may slide into extremity radicalism” in certain circumstances.Footnote 13 I claim here that such alienated radicals could be found in particular in Paris in 1792, adopting the status of citizens of the world, and in Britain as gentleman leaders on the outside platform.Footnote 14 Yorke was one such radical not only fulfilling both these roles and expounding extreme revolutionary views but also manifesting a certain alienation that reflected his excluded status and complex identity.Footnote 15
As an immigrant from a British colony, Yorke would legally have been “British.” Nevertheless, the current historiography of identities in the eighteenth century tends to highlight the growing concept of an English national identity and the “otherness” of people from the colonies and those of a different race and color.Footnote 16 The disruption of the American and French Revolutions, expansion of the empire, and growth of the abolition movement in Britain all contributed to this shift in the way Britons saw themselves and others, particularly colonized peoples, as concepts of national identity hardened in the late eighteenth century. There is little direct evidence as to Yorke's own view of his identity. No diaries, memoirs, or personal correspondence have been unearthed, although in 1802 he revisited France and in 1804 published his Letters from France, a travelogue that provides some insight into earlier activities and his character and views, albeit with hindsight.Footnote 17 As is commonly the case for people on the fringes of society, the evidence is incomplete, but fragments can be inferred from the uncertainties and absences and gaps may be filled by other less personal sources.Footnote 18
A number of historians briefly refer to Yorke within general discussions of 1790s radicalism and identify him as a revolutionary radical within the English radical movement who later recanted his views. His origins and ethnicity, however, have not been fully explored, and this article provides new evidence as to his background.Footnote 19 Yorke embodies an appropriate subject here because he was a British radical gentleman, but from the colonial periphery, whose politicization can be linked to exclusion in terms of race rather than class or wealth. In terms of the geography of politics, I argue that Yorke and others extended the traditional concept of the “citizen of the world” both ideologically and spatially beyond European boundaries. In terms of his ideological position, Yorke shifted from Whig to radical to loyalist Tory and from a pro-slavery stance to one pro-abolition. I suggest that this frequent recanting reflects his excluded status and a desire both to evade the pervading national identity and to belong in the place he made his home. The politicization and identity of such citizens of the world sheds light on the conundrum of the nature of British radicalism itself and the apparent conflict between universalist and constitutionalist ideologies. Yorke functions here as a vehicle for exploring these themes anew and to consider radicalism within broader geographical and conceptual frameworks. We will consider Yorke's background and personal history. Then we will turn our attention to themes of contemporary attitudes to race and identity; and finally, we will examine Yorke's politicization and propensity for recanting his political position.
YORKE'S BACKGROUND
Historians have unearthed little information about Yorke's background, and there are some inaccuracies in existing interpretations.Footnote 20 Yorke's father, Samuel Redhead, was of English origin but born and resident for much of his life in Antigua. He acted as an attorney (or agent) for the landowning Codrington family and managed their sugar plantations on Antigua as well as managing Barbuda, a small island about twenty-five miles north of Antigua that they leased from the Crown. Redhead also owned sugar plantations on Antigua. He was a wealthy man and head of one of the sixty-five leading gentry families on the island.Footnote 21 He had five legitimate children. Yorke was the younger of two recognized, illegitimate sons and one daughter. Yorke was born on Barbuda in 1772.Footnote 22 Until now Yorke's racial makeup has been unclear, but research undertaken for this article reveals that his mother, Sarah Bullock, was a slave. In 1771 Redhead was attempting to purchase the freedom of Sarah Bullock and her son by Redhead, from Sir William Codrington. Redhead wrote in a letter of 30 July 1771 to Sir William Codrington, “I wrote you the 10th of last month by Cap. Lusby and by that opportunity I forwarded a Deed . . . for the conveyance of a mustee child of mine the son of a mulatto in Barbuda, named Sarah Bullock, which I hope you will be so kind as execute. I have a further favour to request of you . . . of the same nature. . . . I have now sent . . . another Deed for the conveyance of the above mentioned Sarah Bullock the mother of the child the last Deed was sent for.” He continued to suggest a price for Sarah Bullock of “ninety pounds which sum I am willing to account to you for, I have left a blank in the Deed for the sum which I leave to yourself to fill up.”Footnote 23 This son was probably Yorke's older brother, Joseph Redhead. In his will, Samuel Redhead described Joseph and Henry as “my natural or reputed sons by Sarah Bullock . . . who resides with me.”Footnote 24
Redhead never married Sarah Bullock, but it appears the two lived together until his death. Yorke was, then, of mixed race and a Creole. A mezzotint of Yorke produced by James Ward dated 1796 displays him wearing a powdered wig and with features and a dark skin tone that suggest a contemporary representation of a Creole of mixed race.Footnote 25 It is notable that Yorke did not allude directly to his racial origins in any of his writings.Footnote 26 In the one comment unearthed from Yorke on the subject, he claimed he was from Barbuda but came to England in 1778 to begin his education at a school in Cambridge.Footnote 27 This reflects the custom for those who identified themselves as English gentry in the West Indies of sending their children “home” to be educated.Footnote 28 He then obtained an LLB at Cambridge University and was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1790, but he clearly delayed his legal career for radicalism.Footnote 29 Yorke's father, having spent most of his life in Antigua, retired to England and died in London in 1785, leaving the bulk of his estate to his legitimate eldest son, George. Redhead left Yorke £500 and property in St. John's Antigua.Footnote 30 Yorke maintained a life of independence in England and assumed the rank of gentleman. Thus, it seems Yorke started his life following the conventional path of the English colonial gentry.
One unresolved mystery is Yorke's change of name. On coming of age in 1792, Yorke rejected his family name of Redhead and adopted the name Yorke.Footnote 31 There is no evidence of his reason for doing so, but it does suggest a desire to change his identity and distance himself from his father. It appears that the name change was never legally completed, which is probably how he came to be known as Redhead Yorke.
Little is known of Yorke's political life before 1792, but the evidence suggests allegiance to the Whigs, and he later declared himself a member of the Whig Club.Footnote 32 One uncorroborated contemporary report suggests he was a protégé of Edmund Burke and “an ardent aristocrat” at the beginning of the French Revolution.Footnote 33 Yorke first engaged with the English radical movement in 1792 when he joined the Derby Society for Political Information. In the same year, he was sent by that society as a delegate to the French National Convention in Paris. He joined the group of British enthusiasts for the French Revolution who gathered in Paris in 1792, known as the “British Club.”Footnote 34 The evidence suggests that Yorke attended the convention and sittings of the Constituent Assembly, where he heard figures such as Danton, Marat, and Brissot. He also attended the trial of “Louis Capet.” Yorke was allied to the more extreme radical members of the British Club, including Paine, John Frost, John Oswald, and Robert Merry.Footnote 35 Paine was by this time an elected member of the National Convention while Oswald was in the Paris Jacobin Club and the citizen army. The club celebrated the spread of the Revolution and promoted its principles.Footnote 36 Yorke's traveling companion from Derby, Dr. William Brooks Johnson, lodged with Paine in the Faubourg St.-Denis, and it appears that Yorke also did so for a fortnight before returning to Britain. Nevertheless, in early 1793, Yorke and Johnson stood out from the majority of the British Club and voted against their proposal to promote a French invasion of Britain. Yorke then seceded from the club and was condemned by fellow members. He was denounced as an English spy to the French authorities, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.Footnote 37 There is no evidence to suggest that he was a British spy in Paris.
Yorke fled back to England where he became well known as an itinerant speaker, associated with a number of popular societies around the country. He wrote three radical pamphlets, published in England.Footnote 38 He was linked to the Society for Constitutional Information, the Manchester Constitutional Society, and the London Corresponding Society, but he was most closely associated with the large Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, one of the most plebeian radical societies of the time. When in Sheffield, Yorke lodged with the radical proprietor of the Sheffield Register, Joseph Gales. After giving an inflammatory speech at an outdoor meeting at Castle Hill in Sheffield in April 1794, before an audience of up to twelve thousand, Yorke was arrested, charged with high treason, and imprisoned to await trial. Yorke was identified as a Jacobin and an extreme radical by the government in his indictment for treason.Footnote 39 He was also repeatedly implicated in charges of arming for insurrection during the Treason Trials of other radicals during 1794.Footnote 40 At his own trial, evidence was given by government spies who had linked him to training in use of weapons by Sheffield radicals. The Second Report of the Committee of Secrecy to the House of Commons declared that Yorke had urged the people of Sheffield to take arms and manufacture pikes, as used in France, to march on London, and that pikes were then made at Sheffield under his orders and sold for 10d apiece.Footnote 41 This was, however, never proved at his trial. Nevertheless, Yorke was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to two years imprisonment in Dorchester jail.
In 1798, Yorke recanted his radicalism and married his prison warden's daughter. He wrote much in the political press, ranting against France and Napoleon Bonaparte, and has been dubbed a “xenophobic ultra-loyalist” for such writings.Footnote 42 There is evidence that he was paid by the government for loyalist writings.Footnote 43 Yorke was finally called to the bar at Inner Temple in November 1811 but died in 1813.Footnote 44 The Gentleman's Magazine mistakenly carried two notices of his death: one in 1793, gallantly on the battlefield fighting for the French revolutionaries, and the other in 1813, at the age of forty-one, as a respected man of letters. The second date of death is correct, but this mistake is rather apposite, for it inadvertently reflects the two dominant aspects of Yorke's identity and also his changeability.
RACE AND IDENTITY
In order to better understand Yorke's politicization, it is necessary to place it within the context of ideas about race and identity in eighteenth-century Britain. How Yorke was received in late eighteenth-century English society as a gentleman but also the illegitimate son of a West Indian plantation owner of mixed race requires some exploration. We can assume he kept his illegitimacy under wraps, because it is certainly not mentioned in any of his writings. The existence of racism in eighteenth-century society is much debated among historians, complicated by the fact that the concept was not one familiar to contemporaries. There was no legal category of citizenship in Britain at the time, and a number of historians argue from what has been called the “big tent position.” That is, the category of “Briton” was sufficiently undefined to allow a loose inclusiveness around the margins, enabling black people to live reasonably comfortably within British society. Others argue that eighteenth-century society was acutely aware of racial difference and that what would now be termed racism was common.Footnote 45 This suggests that on the ground attitudes to those of a different race and color were inconsistent and circumstantial.
On the face of it, the evidence suggests that Yorke viewed his identity through external factors such as political allegiance and social position, as was common at the time.Footnote 46 However, as the burgeoning historiography on identity reveals, such a view was becoming increasingly difficult to sustain as society's reaction to issues of ethnicity and nationality toughened during the later eighteenth century.Footnote 47 A system of British imperial dominance was put in place, and a sense of nationhood was constructed on the basis of difference.Footnote 48 National belonging was “kept within strict territorial, cultural, and increasingly, racial boundaries.”Footnote 49 Being English reflected a domestic national identity and British more loosely an imperial one, the former taking priority over the latter. Indeed, race and class formed important “axes of European social hierarchy” that extended to the colonies. To be “English,” one had to be white, Christian, and “free from all taint of the Negro race.”Footnote 50 But to be West Indian meant being both “colonizer and colonized … included and excluded,” being “one kind of inside/outside” to Britain.Footnote 51 As Dana Rabin argues, West Indians' “hybrid class status” created difficulties in “demarcating the colonial from the metropolitan and resulted in the racialization of whiteness.”Footnote 52 Indeed, not only black slaves but also white West Indian planters were at the center of discourses on the abolition of slavery. They were incorporated into an all-embracing “slave society,” and such society, including the West Indian planters, was disowned and displaced to the colonial periphery.Footnote 53
Nevertheless, members of the West Indian planter class had always considered themselves as loyal subjects of the empire.Footnote 54 They associated themselves primarily with the metropole and viewed their residence in the West Indies as temporary. Many, probably including Samuel Redhead's father, traveled to the West Indies initially as adventurers aiming to make money and then return home. Many wealthier English plantation owners functioned as absentee landowners often sending out young sons or hiring managers, like Redhead, to manage their plantations. Most viewed the West Indies as an inhospitable place that they longed to exchange for the tranquility of England.Footnote 55 Edward Codrington wrote home from Antigua in 1775 that he hated the heat of the West Indies, and “I as much long for the time of my return, as a Schoolboy does for the Holidays.”Footnote 56 Many retired to England, as did Samuel Redhead when Yorke was still a boy.
Yorke was educated in the English Enlightenment tradition and presumably in metropolitan manners and mores. Indeed, embedding Yorke in English society and culture from the age of six was clearly intended to render him “English.” But the literature suggests that this was increasingly difficult to achieve. Edward Long exposed the practice of planters sending their illegitimate mixed-race children to schools in England and hoping that their antecedence could be buried under a veneer of Englishness. They assumed that “the bronze of their complexion” would be “ignorantly ascribed to the fervor of the sun in the torrid zone.”Footnote 57 Long-standing beliefs that skin color was entirely the result of climate no longer held weight in Britain, although such a link was frequently suggested in contemporary writings throughout the eighteenth century.
Moreover, Planters returning to England with an entourage of slaves and mulattos found that they were derided as “Nabobs” and treated with contempt.Footnote 58 The source of their wealth was frowned upon particularly by the growing abolition movement.Footnote 59 West Indian planters were also frequently mocked for their social pretensions in the press, novels, and plays. Fears about racial intermingling were also expressed.Footnote 60 Long and others also identified Creoles as having their own “national character,” incorporating extravagance, promiscuity, idleness, and lethargy.Footnote 61 Their behavior in business and society did not match the high moral standards expected of a gentry class and was tainted by their inappropriate associations with the slaves on their plantations. The reckless, decadent, and extravagant behavior of Creole landowners resulted in their failure to secure and improve their patrimony, and hence family fortunes dwindled.Footnote 62 Samuel Redhead allegedly engaged in much sexual association with enslaved women particularly on Barbuda, and contemporary letters suggest that Yorke and his brother were far from his only illegitimate children.Footnote 63 The family patrimony was also dwindling after Samuel Redhead's retirement and the estate fell into heavy debt.Footnote 64 Thus Yorke's family background appears to fit the contemporary derisory profile of West Indian planters to an uncanny degree. David Lambert has noted that such attacks left West Indian planters on the defensive and feeling “themselves to be an increasingly beleaguered group.”Footnote 65 It is unlikely that Yorke escaped such feelings.
On the basis of this evidence, it seems that Yorke would have been perceived in England as British in the imperial sense rather than as English in the national and racial sense. His roots were on the fringes of national belonging at a time when the English were resistant to incorporating their colonial members in the nation. For Yorke, class, race, and nationality would have reflected conflicting aspects to his identity. His gentry status was tainted by illegitimacy, mixed race, and a denigrated Creole planter background. He was identified as a gentleman by contemporaries as well as in his indictment for treason and the report of his trial.Footnote 66 Yet the evidence suggests that he was not seen entirely as an English gentleman, for he was also identified variously as a mulatto, a Creole, a quadroon, or a half-caste. Clearly, then, he was seen as racially “different.” James Montgomery, a journeyman printer in Joseph Gales's newspaper office in Sheffield, remembered Yorke in his Memoirs: “He called himself Yorke, but always said he was the son of a plantation agent, . . . of the name of Redhead at Barbuda. . . . He was, if not a mulatto, a quadroon.”Footnote 67 Reports of his trial in the press described Yorke as, for example, a “Creolian by birth, a man of some property in the West Indies,” and a “Mulatto.”Footnote 68 Uncertainty about Yorke's name, his ethnicity, and his place of abode were all expressed at his trial. In Howell's State Trials, Yorke's trial is titled “Trial of Henry Redhead, alias Henry Yorke,” the “alias” suggesting uncertainty as to who he was.Footnote 69 Evidence given also suggested a shadowy figure, floating from one radical society to another, but never quite belonging anywhere. In the original indictment he is a “gentleman” late of Manchester, and in the report of his trial he is “late of Sheffield.” No permanent address was given for Yorke, and he seemed to be perennially of no fixed abode. Yorke did not himself link his politicization to issues of identity, yet his behavior and writings can be associated with a complex identity and particularly with a sense of exclusion and outsider status.
POLITICIZATION
In terms of politicization, the first cause with which Yorke became engaged was slavery. His first known pamphlet, published in 1792 before his conversion to radicalism, was written in support of the slave trade.Footnote 70 The addressee of this pamphlet, Bache Heathcote, was a member of the Derbyshire gentry.Footnote 71 In this pamphlet, Yorke dismissed the petitions for the abolition of the trade, claiming that “under our present circumstances, the immediate abolition would cause the ruin of our colonies.” The West Indians were “firm patriots,” and the abolitionists who had crossed the Atlantic to the West Indies were “base and bold usurpers of the public authority” who intended “to corrupt the innocence of our plantations, to call the Negro from agriculture and peace, to uproar and rebellion.”Footnote 72
Yorke provided conventional contemporary arguments for retaining the slave trade commonly promoted by planters. He described a colonial identity and suggested familiarity with the West Indies and plantation life. He declared that he had “often observed” the slaves before the house of the planter, revelling “to the sound of the Banja and the Pipe.”Footnote 73 He commented that in the “Torrid Zone” slaves were ravaged by contagious diseases that were accelerated by the climate and their own waywardness. This meant that slaves did not pass on healthy dispositions to their children. Indeed, “they are of so extremely warm a constitution in those countries, that when a woman takes into her head to gratify her passion, she will not hesitate with a man whose body is full of running sores.” Diseases were then passed on to the children, who were born “emasculated, pitiful objects.” He continued, “I have known of an estate, 250 slaves out of 300 under the care of the doctor and incapable of performing any work.”Footnote 74 Here and elsewhere in the slavery pamphlet, Yorke registered “the Negro” in terms of “difference” and himself as the colonizer, as British and superior, representative of white civilization.Footnote 75 Reflecting Long's comments on the danger to British colonizers of black female promiscuity, Yorke singled out black women as recklessly and rapaciously sexually active and here conflated race and gender as “other.”Footnote 76 Thus, it seems that Yorke was engaged in what Wilson terms a “performance of Englishness,” attempting to distance himself from “indigenous savagery.”Footnote 77
Yet in 1792 Yorke recanted his former views in terms of both politics and slavery. Yorke claimed that it was in Paris he fell “madly in love with Ideal Liberty.”Footnote 78 Winifred Gales wrote that in “Paris during the sitting of the Jacobin Club,” Yorke was “carried away by the specious program of that infamous body . . . flung aside his conservative principles, becoming a sudden proselyte and flaming stickler for the rights of man.”Footnote 79 Here he came across French abolitionists’ views of slavery. The Société des Amis des Noirs, founded by Brissot, had from the calling of the Estates General in 1789 seen the French Revolution as an opportunity to further the abolitionist cause and the call for universal rights.Footnote 80 French revolutionaries were much exercised by the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue, and by the time Yorke reached France, the National Assembly had already declared that equality of political rights should be enjoyed by the “hommes de couleur” and the “nègres libres” as well as the white colons.Footnote 81 Paine has been linked to the Brissotins and was instrumental in placing a paragraph written by Yorke's friend Brookes Johnson in Brissot's Patriote Francais. Footnote 82
It is likely, then, that Yorke's presence in Paris further developed views that came to reflect French and Brissotin ideas on abolition. Yorke's first radical pamphlet, Reason Urged against Precedent, published in London in 1793 (but a pamphlet it seems he wrote in part in France), appears to be the refutation of his Letter to Bache Heathcote.Footnote 83 Here he expressed his new radical conviction and performed a complete volte-face in his views on slavery. He lamented, “I have injured the wretched Negro, by formerly denying him his rights.” He claimed that he now thought “we should be richer and happier without any Colonies” and that it was not just the slave trade that should be abolished but “SLAVERY itself.” He hoped that emancipation would persuade rehabilitated slaves to return to Africa and arouse their fellow Africans “to a sense of their rights” and then “to co-operate with Europeans in breaking their chains over the heads of their tyrants, and to participate in the approaching happy system of equal and universal liberty.”Footnote 84 Thus, by incorporating slaves into calls for universal freedom, Yorke extended radicalism beyond European national geographical boundaries to incorporate the colonial periphery. But at the same time, he appears to have been evading or denying his own colonial identity. There is no mention of his ethnicity or antecedence in this pamphlet, and also absent is the familiarity with slavery expressed in the pro-slavery pamphlet.
Moreover, in Paris, Yorke took on a new identity as a “citizen of the world.” Such citizens of the world, or Cosmopolities, reflected the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism that had centered on Paris throughout the century. A radical form of cosmopolitanism developed in Paris and attracted foreigners who flocked there in the 1790s, such as members of the British Club. The intellectual focus and aims of such Cosmopolities were not on the national scale but embraced mankind as a whole, and they shared ideas and hopes for a new future, promoting universal rights and freedom for all mankind.Footnote 85 In 1792, the National Convention was dubbed “a congress of the whole world,” and on 26 August, the Legislative Assembly awarded French citizenship to eighteen such citizens of the world, including Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley, as a gesture of the Revolution's cosmopolitan goals. Such men were invited to “defend the cause of the human race against tyrants and their slaves.” At the same time, the assembly decreed the nation's cosmopolitan “renunciation of all conquest and its desire to fraternize with all peoples,” proclaiming that the National Convention would set “the destiny of France, and perhaps that of the whole human race.” Thus, the French revolutionaries appropriated and politicized cosmopolitanism in the development of a universalist ideology and the ideal of a regenerative republic. Such universalism was built not only on rights ideology but also by encompassing “foreign peoples and projects” into the new republic.Footnote 86
Presented with such a direct appeal to foreigners to join the revolutionary project, it is unsurprising that Yorke became a citizen of the world. Moreover, as Dror Wahrman argues, by adopting such a persona, citizens of the world could successfully evade the increasingly entrenched individual national identity of their home country. They abandoned national belonging for a universal humanity.Footnote 87 Such men adopted French universalist ideas, championing a “world of revolutions” and universal human rights that they claimed could not be contained within political frontiers. This was a clear “international act” that defied the long-established European system of dynastic monarchical “geopolitics” within which national identities were being forged. Footnote 88 Furthermore, as Sophia Rosenfield notes, as a citizen of the world, it was possible to find a role on the political stage but to speak from no place or position as “a citizen of nowhere in particular.” This “fungible individuality” enabled such cosmopolitans to avoid the general focus on social position, family name, and increasingly national identity, and to imagine a sort of “global citizenship.” Indeed, she argues, “one can situate oneself cosmopolitically in multiple ways simply by manipulating that basic identifier that is one's name.”Footnote 89 Perhaps Yorke's attempt to change his name was a way of resituating himself, and by joining the citizens of the world in Paris, Yorke could evade his outsider status, both personally and geographically. The same can perhaps be said of others excluded from national identity such as Thomas Paine outlawed in Britain; Joel Barlow an American; Irish nationalists the Sheares brothers; and John Oswald, a much-traveled Scot who arrived in Paris via India and Turkey and fought in the French revolutionary army.Footnote 90 As Desan suggests, such men represented revolution already “on the march,” and Yorke brought his new identity and ideology with him on his return to England in 1793.Footnote 91
Certainly, Yorke's writings published in London reveal his adoption of the French universalist ideology and similarities to Paine's writings. In Reason Urged, he declared that he was taking up “the great cause of public Freedom,” found himself “interested in the happiness of my fellow creatures,” and had visited Paris to pay “personal homage to the enlightened and regenerated REPUBLIC.”Footnote 92 Yorke promoted reason, justice, fraternity, and equality, calling for “universal emancipation” of the oppressed and “the universal happiness of the world.” He called on his “brethren, to pay tribute . . . to those gallant and undaunted citizens of France” who “contended not for France alone, but the whole human race.” Yorke declared, “[T]hroughout every nation of the earth, let the oppressed awaken from their drunken sleep, let the African, the Asiatic, the European, burst asunder their chains and raise a pious war against tyranny.” In tune with French universalism, Yorke termed European monarchs “tyrants” and “despots,” and declared “WAR has ever been the wretched policy of courts, to uphold their government” and “[d]uring all ages” dynastic power politics have destroyed the world. He concluded, “[T]he woeful chronicle of human miseries is filled up with the narrative of the quarrels of Kings, Priests, Nobles, and prostitutes.”Footnote 93
Historians identify something of a cosmopolitan ideology in England, as well as in France, during the years 1790–92, but on a smaller scale. Linebaugh and Rediker note that the interactions among such individuals as Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Hardy, and William Blake, and the dissemination of works such as Volney's Ruins in translation to the London Corresponding Society, resulted in the spread of “egalitarian, multi-ethnic conceptions of humanity.”Footnote 94 The London Corresponding Society and other radical societies had promoted an antislavery agenda. Calls for religious toleration, parliamentary reform, and abolition could sometimes be found in one radical pamphlet. James Walvin and Richard Huzzey argue for a considerable interaction between the abolition movement and English radicalism particularly in terms of ideology.Footnote 95 However, it seems that the cosmopolitan ideology that linked political radicalism with abolition of slavery in Britain had largely disappeared by 1793, and societies no longer incorporated those outside Britain in their calls for reform.Footnote 96 Certainly, on Yorke's return, English radicalism was increasingly embracing an Anglo-focused constitutionalism that functioned within the English constitutional structure and the law.Footnote 97 Reform of the British government and enfranchisement for people in Britain became the dominant stated aims. Indeed, “universal suffrage” invariably meant male suffrage to vote for representatives in the Westminster Parliament; those in the colonies, along with women, were implicitly excluded. Thus, at a time when the French were accepting the slaves in all their colonies as French citizens, most English radicals were closing the door on such possibilities. It seems, then, that a form of recanting had already begun in England that rendered it not an entirely appropriate political home for a citizen of the world such as Yorke.
Nevertheless, Yorke in his writings continued to invoke a cosmopolitan or universalist ideology while at the same time promoting constitutional reform in Britain. This resulted in some discordance, and it is not always entirely clear what he meant. In his second and third radical pamphlets published in 1793 and 1794, Yorke included non-English peoples in his universalist rhetoric.Footnote 98 In These are the Times that Try Men's Souls!, for example, he declared: “Man is everywhere the same . . . the vast majority of the people are excluded from their lawful rights,” but they should be encouraged to “DEMAND THEIR RIGHTS; and to assert triumphantly the empire of Peace and Happiness.”Footnote 99 And Thoughts on Civil Government commenced with “despotism is in agony. . . . Hear ye not, the tocsin of Freedom ringing through the world” and the “millions of living beings preparing to take terrible vengeance on their Oppressors.”Footnote 100 In these pamphlets, Yorke ranted against despots and tyrants, aristocracy and kings, corporations and factions, corruption in and inadequacy of the established institutions not only in England (government, the judiciary, and the Church) but also more loosely in Europe.Footnote 101 In one example, he declared that “UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE” is the “Right of the People,” but here he traced such rights back to the English King Alfred.Footnote 102 Yorke also had a tendency to digress at length into theoretical and constitutionalist discussions of law and history. In his third reform pamphlet, among the extensive universalist rhetoric, he promoted in Britain a system of national education, religious toleration, sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage, meritocracy in government, fairer representation, and annual parliaments. Ultimately, though, Yorke declared that it was up to
the governors to choose whether the aged and monstrous colossal pile of feudality, shall be peacefully taken to pieces by the skilful hand of the reforming workman, or tumbled into a heap of ruins by the wild and naked fury of the people. They will have to decide, whether the sun of despotism shall go down into the calm waters of oblivion, or set in blood and horror.Footnote 103
The only available printed version of one of Yorke's speeches is an edited version of a speech given at Castle Hill, Sheffield.Footnote 104 In this speech, of more than an hour, he allegedly spent some time discussing the constitution and the need for parliamentary reform. Yorke went on to warn that if reform could not remedy the nation's ills due to the corruption and failure of government, then history “teaches the suffering Nations of the present day, in what manner to prepare their combustible ingredients and . . . in what manner to enkindle them, so as to produce with effect that grand political explosion” that “buries despotism.” He then went on to state that in Britain there must first be a “revolution of sentiment. . . . [T]he People must grow wise, in order that the people may rule,” and when this is achieved, “then the commanding voice of the whole people shall recommend the Five Hundred and Fifty-eight Gentlemen in St. Stephen's Chapel, to go about their business.”Footnote 105 At Yorke's trial, such provocative sections of the speech were read to the court by the prosecution and, despite his call for a “revolution of sentiment,” were taken to mean that radicals intended to abolish the House of Commons, by force if necessary.
A petition to be presented to the king, calling for “total and unqualified emancipation of the Negro slaves,” was also read out by Yorke at the Castle Hill meeting. Here he declared: “JUSTICE is eternal, unconfined by time, person, circumstances or place” and called for the abolition of “Negro slavery in the West Indies, in the fullest manner, and without any qualification.” Abolition would extend “the Brotherhood of the Human Race” and establish “on their purest principles, the Claims of Justice and the Rights of Man.”Footnote 106 Here, clearly, political rights were to be extended to slaves, and Yorke was putting forward a more radical agenda than most of his contemporaries at that time.Footnote 107 Yorke also condemned those “unfeeling barbarians, who, unblushingly, call themselves Slave Dealers, West Indian Merchants and Planters” who wished “to prevent the Abolition of the Slave Trade.”Footnote 108 Again, Yorke appears here to have been denying or rejecting his own background.
Yorke stopped short of directly promoting in his writings a republic or revolution in Britain. But he frequently came close.Footnote 109 Ultimately, the juxtaposition of universalism with constitutionalism is not easy to reconcile. In common with other radicals, his writings consisted primarily of an attack on present systems of government, but they were thin on detailed proposals as to what should replace them. Perhaps Yorke's actions could be identified with something of Epstein and Karr's “Jacobin performance,” that is, “inflecting British tradition with democratic possibilities previewed in France,” while at the same time retaining an underlying constitutionalism. Yet the evidence suggests that Yorke went further than this. His writings were dominated by universalist rhetoric and ideology, with English constitutionalism playing a smaller part. They suggest that Yorke was not merely “playing,” or reflecting a current “mood or temper,” in the manner of such Jacobin performers, or not entirely anyway.Footnote 110 Nor, as John Barrell suggests, did Yorke just dress “peaceable principles in fighting words.”Footnote 111 It is clear that Yorke reflected something of Mee's “revolutionary enthusiasm,” promoting “the possibility of the world being utterly different from its present state,” being made anew in line with universalist ideology.Footnote 112 In this Yorke's writings echo Paine's Rights of Man. However, Yorke did not focus as strongly as Paine on practical reforms aimed at improving the lot of English working people.Footnote 113 Nor, it seems, did he wish to abolish the concepts and boundaries of states altogether in favor of a global brotherhood of the sort Marx was later to envisage. As a citizen of the world, but from a different background than Paine, Yorke had a slightly different agenda that looked to remedy a social as well as political exclusion for him, and those like him, excluded more widely, in terms of ethnicity as well as politics. In this he displayed a genuine universalist ideological commitment but one that was personal to his particular circumstances.
Fundamentally, though, he believed strongly in civil society, in the rule of law, and in some form of social hierarchy, where he could be “foremost,” and hence constitutionalism was theoretically comfortable for him. In a typical declaration, in his last pamphlet, Yorke roared, “As a CITIZEN, I glory to see the insolent and rapacious dominion of Kings about to be supplanted by the mild rule of Laws. . . . That mass of Disfranchised Human Beings . . . about to be protected by Equal Laws. . . . They charge us with the desire of overthrowing Government . . . whereas, we wish to purge Government of its anarchy, in order that Society may become desirable.”Footnote 114 Here he recommended reform of the constitution rather than getting rid of it altogether. There is some suggestion in his writings that Yorke shared the view of many Englishmen that while revolution might be necessary in Europe, it was not in England. This was because England had already experienced revolutions in the seventeenth century and had a constitution that could be traced back to King Alfred and the Magna Carta; hence, constitutional reform would be sufficient.Footnote 115 This uncertainty revealed in his writings suggests parallel and conflicting desires behind Yorke's politics: one desire for a new egalitarian world and another to belong within English politics and society.
Yorke, then, remained a citizen of the world, in part at least, once back in Britain, and an exploration of his actions there also contributes to a better understanding of his politicization. On his return, having narrowly escaped arrest in France, Yorke expressed unhappiness at his treatment both by the French authorities and by loyalists in England. Yorke complained that he had been “so hardly dealt with” and suffered “hatred and invective” from those who saw his conversion to radicalism “in glaring colours of madness . . . as an act of flagrant apostacy and treason,” and counter to “notions of honourable conduct.” He lamented, “[T]hough I can find neither friendship nor security in any place, I am resolved in despight of Prosecutions, Threats and Bastiles not to flatter my country.”Footnote 116 Implicit here is a sense of isolation, of not belonging within the English political world.
It is not surprising that Yorke then took to the outdoor platform, once again evading conventional politics and issues relating to his own national identity. He became well known as an itinerant speaker associated with radical popular societies around the country. He reportedly arrived in Manchester in 1793 with the “apparatus of a kind of apostolic mission.”Footnote 117 Yorke was also much feted by fellow radicals for his fiery and passionate speeches. Joseph Gales declared him “one of the finest orators in the kingdom.”Footnote 118 William Broomhead, a secretary of the Sheffield Society, confirmed that members of the society considered Yorke “a man of considerable abilities, and as an orator, paid great respect to him.” Indeed, although he was not a settled inhabitant of the town, many attended meetings “principally on the account of Mr. Yorke being in Sheffield.” Clearly, Yorke made an instant impact at popular meetings and Sheffield was an important venue for him. The report of his trial suggests that he arrived at the Castle Hill meeting once the audience was assembled, “and when it was known he was there, there was a great noise from the people calling for Mr. Yorke in the chair and the crowd made an opening for him and he was pressed forward.” After his speech, supporters allegedly took the horses from his carriage and dragged it bearing Yorke through the streets of Sheffield.Footnote 119 Thus, Yorke's performance suggests a celebrity status of leader-hero that was awarded to such political figures in popular culture at the time.Footnote 120 Certainly, Yorke's performance at Castle Hill in 1794 was his crowning moment as a radical.
Here Yorke embodies some similarities with Henry Hunt and Fergus O'Connor that Belchem and Epstein identify as gentleman leaders of the outdoor platform. Such leaders lived on the edge, outside party politics, and tended to reflect the charismatic romantic hero. They were detached from their social background, at home on the outdoor reform platform, but leading a peripatetic existence, outside any local community and devoid of permanent attachments.Footnote 121 Moreover, in common with other such outdoor speakers, Yorke made a claim on public space, using it to exploit the popular enthusiasm and to generate a sense of excitement and imminent confrontation.Footnote 122 Yorke's aristocratic flamboyance would have stood out among the plebeian audience at outdoor meetings.
Yorke was described by contemporaries as something of a romantic hero, young, handsome, and somewhat “exotic.” Winifred Gales said that Yorke would fascinate all who met him “by his charming manners, wit, and unusual attainments . . . while his discussion of the all-absorbing national question . . . rendered him a powerful auxiliary in the Reform movement.” Indeed, “few men could withstand his eloquent boldness of assertion, flattering prognostication; and . . . powerful appeals.”Footnote 123 Montgomery, said of Yorke, that he was
a fiery orator, and . . . his style was altogether French. His figure, when he appeared at the Castle Hill meeting, was good, and his dress striking, if not in the best taste—with Hessian boots and a stock of republican plainness; he wore a silk coat and waistcoat of court fashion; his hair at the same time defying the curt French character by its luxuriant curl—a tendency derived from the sunnier side of his ancestral tree.
Later in the Memoirs, Montgomery declared:
This eloquent, restless, and attractive individual . . . was personally unknown to Mr. Gales before the winter of 1793, when he presented himself one evening in Sheffield as a patriot; he was about twenty-two years of age, a handsome figure, and so insinuating were his manners, that he contrived not only to domicile himself for a time in the family at Hartshead, but ultimately to obtain the affections of his host's youngest sister, Sarah.Footnote 124
Montgomery provided an intriguing portrait of Yorke as something of an opportunist and a showman, his dress and style suggesting an eclectic identity.Footnote 125 Belchem and Epstein note that “Sunday best” was a way of imposing order on the crowd at outdoor meetings. Such dress helped create an “exotic distance” that separated the gentleman leader from his more lowly audience.Footnote 126 It also helped confirm an outdoor speaker's “reputation as a political adventurer.”Footnote 127 Yet in Montgomery's description, there is something more. He noted Yorke's ethnicity, his fiery delivery, his striking but eclectic dress, and his insinuating manners altogether suggesting something perhaps rather exciting and exotic but also dangerous and predatory. He was perhaps marking out racial difference here and suggesting that Yorke was not entirely in tune with Englishness.
Moreover, a number of historians see the populist style and constitutionalist ideology of such gentleman leaders reflected in later leaders such as Bright and Gladstone and thus as indicative of continuities between popular radicalism, Liberalism, and socialism. Belchem and Epstein agree that constitutionalism was the political position promoted by both Chartists and Liberals. They argue, however, that earlier leaders such as Hunt and O'Connor represented a “more aggressive brand of popular politics.”Footnote 128 In Yorke's case, the concept of the gentleman leader can be traced back to the eighteenth century.Footnote 129 Yet Yorke too disrupted such continuities with a popular politics that was more raw and radical than that of either the earlier or later reform movements. He promoted universalist revolutionary radicalism that incorporated a broader humanity than the working-class and included an antislavery component that Chartist leaders such as Hunt and O'Connor would have denounced.Footnote 130
Moreover, in many ways Yorke was more like John Wilkes than the nineteenth-century leaders. All were mavericks, but both Yorke and Wilkes manipulated the crowd and exploited public space for their own ends as well as for the cause.Footnote 131 They were showmen who wanted to make their mark not only among their radical followers but also in political society more generally. Interestingly, Wilkes was something of an outsider himself. He had come from a plebeian background, and finding his place in the political establishment had proved difficult. Belchem and Epstein suggest that in the case of Hunt and O'Connor, the “exotic distance” separating gentleman and popular audience was mediated by their “singular devotion to working people” and a certain familiarity, the sense of “a father returning home to his children.”Footnote 132 This was not the case for Yorke or, indeed, Wilkes, both of whom fell short of paternal benevolence, representing more the reckless romantic adventurer. Yorke's writings and speeches suggest a citizen of the world loftily preaching the universal rights of all people rather than for a distinct working class of Englishmen with whom he had little connection. He invoked a history and political philosophy that his outdoor audience would not understand, interspersed with passionate rhetoric that they would. Yorke was a demagogue as much as a popular orator. Yorke's role on the outdoor platform did not entirely render him a “displaced gentleman” like Hunt and O'Connor, but it was rather more a tool by which Yorke could evade a questionable gentlemanly status. He was neither an English gentleman nor an Irish aristocrat; he was something altogether more complex, a citizen of the world in more ways than one. As perhaps Montgomery spotted, the “exotic difference” that separated Yorke from the crowd was not only one of class but also one of race.
Thus, the gentleman leader and his performance were not always only informed by the politics he promoted. It was not only where he stood politically as a 1790s revolutionary radical, a Chartist, or a Victorian liberal that denoted his public performance and use and occupation of space but also his identity and sense of self. The legitimate public political sphere was difficult to penetrate for radical leaders and extraparliamentary popular politics, and the outside platform offered what historians class as alternative, counter, competing, or plebian public sphere.Footnote 133 Such a contested site of assembly also provided an alternative route to fame and recognition for those of the displaced and excluded, those alienated radicals who sought it. The outdoor platform provided an agency Yorke might otherwise have been denied to promote his role and ideology as a gentlemanly citizen of the world and also to seek inclusion as one from the Atlantic periphery.Footnote 134 Perhaps, then, we can add a “periphery” public sphere to the list of possibilities.
Yorke's last appearance as a radical gentleman leader was at his trial for seditious conspiracy in 1795.Footnote 135 In the battle that ensued in the courtroom, Yorke placed himself at the center of proceedings, conducting much of the defense himself and giving a robust three-hour speech to the jury. Again he was the showman, courting fame and recognition, but here he did not retain his hero status gained on the outdoor platform. He positioned himself primarily as an Enlightenment-educated English gentleman reformer rather than the Jacobin leader the government portrayed him as. In his speech, Yorke professed considerable knowledge of English government, law, and history, and attempted to legitimize annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and free speech within an established and accepted British constitutional past. He remonstrated that he was “an enemy certainly to anarchy and revolutions” and a staunch and abiding supporter of the English constitution. Indeed, he was a “Reformer” rather than a “Revolutionist.” On slavery he said little, merely highlighting the failure of the House of Commons to consider abolition.Footnote 136 But Yorke concluded with a burst of characteristic rhetoric:
The political hemisphere is extremely portentous. . . . [T]he most ancient thrones are now trembling beneath their possessors. . . . [A] general wreck of the Gothic policy is taking place, and all the old and venerated governments of the world are passing gradually away. . . . The great and mighty change of sentiment which is electrifying Europe, hath not passed over this country. Already the minds of the people of England are veering towards the polar star of truth . . . already they acknowledge the necessity of a reformed representation as the only means of saving us from ruin.Footnote 137
Thus, Yorke's call for a “reformed representation” again required a dramatic “change” that reflected European events and that was sure to frighten a contemporary jury. Amnon Yuval argues that defendants in the treasons trials were faced with a dilemma. Should they present themselves as moderate reformers and thus have a better chance of acquittal or as radical heroes and espouse their inflammatory views to the full? Yorke remained ambivalent here, as his speech illustrates. Consequently, he was convicted but also failed to retain a radical hero status.Footnote 138 Yorke's trial and imprisonment in Britain clearly brought an end to his citizen of the world identity
Yuval identifies Yorke's trial as a “major turning point” in his political development and the cause of his recantation.Footnote 139 Yorke recanted to English loyalism by means of two pamphlets, claiming that it was the threat from France that had provoked him to do so. He asserted his patriotism and his contrition, and refocused his zeal on attacking the French and particularly Napoleon.Footnote 140 Yorke claimed that the present threat by France to invade England had provoked him to write again. He described himself as an enlightened man who would not depart from his “duty as an Englishman.”Footnote 141 He claimed that once he was freed from prison, he would be able to demonstrate a “more active zeal in the support of the glorious fabric of British freedom” and would be “ready and willing to shed my blood in the defence of the King and Constitution of my country.”Footnote 142 Yorke declared that now the people of England should unite in defense of their country. Indeed, an “elevated patriotism” was needed, for the French were “fighting to establish a universal despotism of the worst and most abhorrent species.”Footnote 143
The issue of recanting among political activists in the eighteenth century has been little explored by historians. They note that in such circumstances recanting from a radical to a loyalist position, and vice versa, was not uncommon or particularly surprising at a time of flux such as the French Revolution.Footnote 144 Well-known recanters include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Sir James Mackintosh, and William Cobbett. There are clearly both generic reasons for recanting and those specific to Yorke to be considered here. Historians suggest that many expressed enthusiasm for the French Revolution and concomitantly for English radicalism in the early years but lost faith as the Revolution turned to violence and terror, and Britain went to war with France. During Pitt's reign of Terror (1793–94), radicals were hunted down and persecuted as “Jacobins,” and this resulted in many deserting radicalism or operating underground.Footnote 145 F. K. Prochaska and others have noted the heavy-handed tactics of the government and the judiciary in their treatment of radicals.Footnote 146 Increasingly, revolutionary radicalism was limited to an extreme fringe of the reform movement, with more moderate constitutionalism dominating the mainstream.Footnote 147
Yorke crossed political boundaries between loyalist and radical, and back again. He also wrote both for and against slavery, calling for political rights for slaves at a time when most radicals and societies were silent on the issue. Nor could his views be identified as moderate, leaning easily toward either side of a political divide. Taking the last recantation first, it is clear that, as a victim of Pitt's “Terror,” Yorke experienced denunciation and harassment by the authorities firsthand. While those indicted for treason during the Treason Trials were acquitted, Yorke, left until last, had his charge changed from high treason to seditious conspiracy, for which he was convicted. It is clear that the government would have hanged radicals for treason if it could, and Yorke's charge was reduced not from leniency but from the fear that a jury would not convict on a charge of high treason, which was a capital offense. In the Introduction to his own published report of his trial in 1795, Yorke declared that he had “suffered more than any other man, under every species of obloquy, falsehood and calumny; not satisfied with inveighing against my public character, my private one was also to be assailed” and that he had not “gained one single friend from among the multitude who professed themselves friendly to reform, and having experienced more ill-usage from them than those of the opposite description.” He also complained, “[I]t is rather hard that I should now suffer in prison for asserting, . . . that the will of the people was the supreme law, when I saw Earl Fitzwilliam standing as a spectator at my trial, whom I have frequently heard, as President of the Whig Club, of which I am a member, give this toast, ‘The Majesty of the People.’”Footnote 148 Clearly, Yorke fell victim to the sort of invasion of his private life by the public state John Barrell identifies.Footnote 149 He was shaken to the core by this treatment, and was left feeling singled out, isolated, alienated, and deserted by his fellow radicals. Unlike other English gentlemen, Yorke's fragile gentlemanly status had not protected him against ill treatment. He must also have been aware of how narrowly he had escaped an even worse fate that the full force of the state could have imposed. Consequently, once out of jail, his universalist dreams crushed, Yorke reverted to his preferred identity as the conservative English gentleman and loyalist, however precarious that might be. Perhaps marrying his jail-keeper's daughter helped to connect him more closely to Englishness and seek a more conventional life.
CONCLUSION
Returning to the starting point of this article, what conclusions can be reached about the politicization of Henry Redhead Yorke as a citizen of the world? The first question here, that is perhaps as pertinent today as in 1792, is: Why would a young man, apparently embedded in English society and a gentlemanly Whig milieu, turn to radicalism? Yorke claimed that he became a radical because he believed that it was right to join the cause that advocated a new focus on liberty, equality, and universal rights beyond national boundaries; a world without hereditary hierarchies and patrician politics. While there is no reason to disbelieve Yorke's claims, the evidence suggests that such politicization was not the result of political conviction alone but also of complex issues of identity. Adopting a citizen of the world persona enabled Yorke to deny or evade contemporary conditions for national identity while at the same time embracing an ideology that he hoped would bring change to that society and his place within it. The fluidity of the radical movement and the spaces it occupied, including the outdoor platform, gave Yorke agency to assert not only his ideas but also himself. He clearly hoped that radicalism would offer new opportunities for unconditional belonging through its promotion of a universalist ideology and political and social inclusion. It offered potential emancipation, empowerment, and social mobility in a cause that could make up its own rules.Footnote 150
Wilson suggests that a sense of “identity results from the negotiation between where one is placed and where one places oneself within social networks, working through what is possible as well as what is forbidden.”Footnote 151 Clearly, this negotiation was problematic for Yorke, and the evidence suggests that he was subconsciously engaged in a kind of self-fashioning or imagining an identity that denied his difficult origins and excluded status.Footnote 152 Politics here appears to be a means to finding his place in the world. Yorke, then, provides an example of the significance of cultural influences on politicization.
Yorke also presents a useful case study of those who can be identified as alienated radicals and citizens of the world in the 1790s. Yorke extended the geographical boundaries of English radicalism in his own non-Englishness, his “exotic” performance, and his retention of a citizen of the world universalist ideology even at a time when English radicalism was largely retreating into the safety of constitutionalism. Others who reflect similar positions and warrant investigation in this regard include some of the most ardent revolutionary radicals, such as Thomas Paine, John Oswald, Joseph Gerrald, John and Henry Sheares, and Maurice Margarot.Footnote 153 Such men were all “outsiders” politically and/or racially in Britain, and notably, they all had strong connections with British colonies.Footnote 154 They also challenged prevailing ideas about who were subjects or citizens and what forms of cultural and political belonging were possible.Footnote 155 Hence, by becoming involved in English radicalism, they extended the fragmented leadership beyond English boundaries and identities to create something of a “periphery public sphere.” Moreover, the many radicals who emigrated to North America from 1792 to avoid prosecution, including Joseph Priestley, Joseph Gales, Robert Merry, Daniel Isaac Eaton, and Thomas Paine, also extended the margins of radicalism.Footnote 156 Thus, the geographical boundaries of British radicalism extended beyond the metropole and into the periphery of the empire and the Atlantic World.
Finally, this study highlights the importance of being careful about the labels we apply. Yorke has been identified as a revolutionary radical and a Jacobin, but it is not entirely clear what was meant by such terms in the 1790s or since. Yorke slipped between revolutionary rhetoric, universalist ideology, and proposals for constitutional reform, between identities as a West Indian Creole, an English gentleman, and a citizen of the world. This seemed possible in a time of political turmoil as monumental as the French Revolution. But it raises questions about how contemporaries and historians have labeled such political actors as “revolutionaries,” “radicals,” “Jacobins,” and “reformers,” and also how they have identified the radical movement in terms of class and nationality. This reinforces the argument that when considering complex political movements, it is important to consider individuals who make up that movement as well as the collective whole. It shows not only that radicalism was a more amorphous movement than has conventionally been suggested but also that the politicization of individual radicals was predicated to some degree on issues of identity.Footnote 157
