Courts, and political trials in particular, are deceptive frameworks that have often been difficult for historians to decipher. The problem stems from the fact that virtually all legal proceedings are characterized by the coexistence of major restrictions and extraordinary freedom. On the one hand, courts are places with a clear preference for authorized spokespeople (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s concept), in which language (in the words of James Epstein) “is routinely narrowed or compromised.” On the other hand, courts also constitute social sites in which ceremonial rules provide litigating parties with the freedom to speak unhindered by constraints of time and that, at least in 1790s England, frequently functioned as what Michael Davis describes as a “de facto parliament where radicals could question and confront authority.”Footnote 1 Another expression of this duality in courts is the fact that the accused are always in structurally inferior positions by virtue of their classification as “defendants,” while there is symmetry—at least in theory—between the opportunities enjoyed by both the prosecution and the defense to persuade judges and jury of the justness of their claims.Footnote 2
Moreover, in England in the 1790s, both the court and the prosecution were more limited than the defense in their ability to maneuver. The court’s need to emphasize its commitment to the rule of law and to the preservation of the traditional freedoms entitled to every Englishman often limited its realm of action and provided the defense with the legitimacy to present its case freely and at length. As E. P. Thompson argues, to be effective in the eyes of the public to which it applies, law must appear just and fair. Maintaining this appearance requires great effort and comes at a price. As expressed succinctly by Henry Addington, speaker of the House of Commons, following the acquittal of Thomas Hardy: “It is of more consequence to maintain the credit of a mild and unprejudiced administration of justice than ever to convict a Jacobin.”Footnote 3
That being the case, the need to maintain an unbiased appearance during times of crisis such as the 1790s could transform law into an arena in which the ruling regime, as a “prisoner of the rhetoric of law” (in the words of Clive Emsley), had more to lose than it had to gain.Footnote 4 In 1790s Britain, defendants who knew how to make effective use of the verbal, cultural, and symbolic capital at their disposal could potentially turn the tables on the establishment by destabilizing its offensive stance and putting it on the defensive. The establishment, and the court as its agent, endeavored, in their turn, to portray the accused as dangerous figures who were attempting to undermine state security. It was therefore important for defendants to acquire legitimacy from different, extra-establishment sources, such as the crowd that accompanied them to and from the trial, the spectators at the trial itself, the independent press, and, of course, members of the jury, who were also undoubtedly influenced by the abovementioned sources, as the loyalists bitterly argued after the acquittals in the treason trials of 1794.Footnote 5 The ability of defendants to acquire legitimacy from these sources depended not only on the type of arguments they chose to adopt but also on the form in which they articulated them before the court, the historical references they made, and the balance between offensive and defensive sentiments they conveyed in their statements.
On the one hand, defendants wished to maintain conditions that provided them with discursive legitimacy in order to ensure that their words be taken seriously and to maintain their ability to influence the jury and the spectators (as well as readers of the trial protocol after the fact). This, they believed, would improve their chances of acquittal. On the other hand, defendants interested not only in being acquitted but also in glorifying their radical ideology at the expense of the ideology of the state were obligated to transform the symbolic power of the judge, and the state he represented, from obvious to problematic, from shrouded to visible, and from within the consensus to disputed. Such defendants aspired to undermine the status quo by revealing “the fictitious restoration of the doxa,” as Pierre Bourdieu puts it. Doing so required them to use harsh and sometimes violent language that frequently threatened their legitimacy in the eyes of the very people they were addressing.Footnote 6 This essential built-in duality is why, of the numerous arenas of battle between loyalists and reformers in 1790s Britain, I regard political trials as a particularly revealing institution.
We can assume that virtually all the defendants in the political trials that took place in Britain in the tumultuous 1790s were forced to deal with the dilemma created by their position. Should they play down their radical character to please the establishment and retain a realistic chance of achieving acquittal? Or, primarily because the outcome of trials so often seemed to be predetermined, should they adopt the reverse strategy and present themselves as untarnished heroes who could simply not be prevented from articulating their views? As we have seen, this dilemma was to a large extent intrinsic to the judicial situation. Although many defendants made a decisive choice between the two options, others remained ambivalent during their trials.
English radical activist Henry Redhead Yorke (1772–1813) is an excellent example of such an ambivalent defendant. Yorke—whose dramatic, temperamental, and somewhat enigmatic life story has “the full attraction of a novel of adventures,”Footnote 7 as one historian put it—was tried on charges of conspiracy in 1795. Through an exploration of this trial, which was arguably the key moment of Yorke’s political career, this article examines the range of strategies available to defendants in the political trials of radicals in Britain during the tumultuous 1790s and the possible consequences of their choices in this context. It depicts the English courtroom of the 1790s as a site in which political power relations of the period were embedded, but that at the same time was also administered according to its own specific set of rules. As such, and as we have already seen, it provided radical defendants with unique opportunities, as well as high risks.
Based on a close reading of the protocol of Yorke’s trial in general and his defense statement in particular, I maintain that the trial illustrates the profound instability that characterized the political and legal atmosphere in Britain during the 1790s, both in terms of the interaction between radicals and the establishment and their relative positions, and in terms of the radicals’ own identity and ideology. The inherent volatility of the public arena in Britain in the 1790s led to varied if not contradictory outcomes and to a combination of hard-to-predict gains and losses for the historical agents involved. We can therefore posit that while the synthetic and eclectic nature of Yorke’s arguments endowed his early writings with important political leverage, its impact in the context of the political trials of the mid-1790s was quite damaging. More specifically, Yorke’s unwillingness and/or inability to adhere to one specific mode of defense during his trial, in conjunction with his tendency to employ incompatible discursive and rhetorical elements, helps us to better understand not only why he was convicted but also why he failed to emerge as a radical hero. Before delving into the details of the trial, however, I would like to explain why I focus specifically on Yorke’s case instead of on the better-known cases of the period, such as the dramatic acquittals of Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall in November 1794, or the harsh convictions of the five “Scottish martyrs” earlier the same year.
I The Trial as a Turning Point in Yorke’s Life
From one perspective, the personal story of Henry Redhead Yorke is extremely idiosyncratic. Yorke was most likely born in the Caribbean Islands and may have been of mixed “black” and “white” origin, although references to his ancestry appear only in political writings directed against him during the 1790s and 1800s.Footnote 8 In the course of just one decade, between 1792 and the first years of the nineteenth century, he went from being a young radical Englishman and an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution to a sober “ultraloyalist” and what historian Emma Vincent MacLeod has termed a “crusader,” or a supporter of all-out war against France as long as the French government continued operating in accordance with its democratic-revolutionary ethos.Footnote 9 As a result of this dramatic transformation and Yorke’s overall excessive behavior, the relatively few historians who have studied him have tended to regard him as an anomaly. E. P. Thompson, for example, describes Yorke as “a very young, eloquent and unstable gentleman from Derby,” while James J. Sack labels him “peculiar” and “eccentric.”Footnote 10
But from a different perspective, it appears that Yorke was not as great an anomaly as he might seem at the outset. Melvin Lasky, who regarded Yorke as an exceptional pioneer in future revolutionary thought, describes him as a part of “a generation of English ideologists for whom ideology was exclusively the politics of experience—erratic, instructive and avoidable.”Footnote 11 As Mark Philp has argued, the ideological positions of reformers and loyalists in the 1790s were not predetermined but rather changed frequently “in response to the arguments and events of the decade.”Footnote 12 For this reason, not only did individuals from both camps frequently change positions during the debate on the French Revolution in England, but some also moved from one camp to the other. While it is true that Yorke offers an extreme example of the “fragmentary character of the ideological terrain,” it is precisely because of its extreme nature that his case sheds light on some of the deep, hidden processes under way during the period.Footnote 13
Until at least late-1795, when he first began to incorporate sentiments of regret about his past into his writings, Yorke was associated with the most radical wing of the reform movement. His early essays, which he wrote when he was in his early twenties, combined harsh criticism leveled directly at Britain with more general and amorphous criticism of “Europe,” “absolutism,” and “tyranny.” According to Yorke, a just and worthy society in England could only be achieved through the abolition of slavery and, most important, overall parliamentary reform aimed at facilitating “a universal, free and annual representation of the people.” Like almost all other members of the reform movement, Yorke believed that parliamentary change that served to decentralize the power of government and prevent privileged circles from accumulating excessive political power would gradually solve all other major problems, including widespread poverty and other social inequalities.Footnote 14
In his earliest writings, Yorke praised the French Revolution, which transformed the French populace into a “brave and heroic” people and bitterly attacked England’s war against “our brethren the Franks.” In his 1793 essay These Are the Times that Try Men’s Souls, which he dedicated to John Frost, a self-declared Republican who had been convicted of seditious libel, Yorke described the war as “a war of twenty-eight millions of human beings, contending for everything that is dear to man, against a few kings vainly attempting to subjugate them.”Footnote 15 This was one of many examples of Yorke’s decisive, harsh, and aggressive use of political language, which tended to incorporate unequivocal dichotomies. Like many other texts of the period—written by loyalists and reformers alikeFootnote 16—Yorke’s early texts were constructed on a foundation of constant opposition between “good” and “bad” values. In opposition to values such as precedent, mysticism, privilege, oppression, violence, and plunder, Yorke consistently posed the values of nature, virtue, truth, knowledge, general will, and equality. In Thoughts on Civil Government, his 1794 essay, which turned out to be his most impressive and significant essay as a radical, Yorke integrated a new message: a fierce attack on established religion in England and the world over. In this spirit, he charged the Church of colluding with the state against humanity. The clergy, Yorke argued, had disseminated and was continuing to disseminate superstitions and perpetuate a fundamental lack of knowledge in an effort to keep believers poor, frightened, and ignorant. Yorke maintained that “the Supreme Being” existed but that, contrary to the image created by the Church, he was an entity who endowed man with intelligence, a sense of justice, and the trait of perfectibility, and who regarded privilege as an abomination.Footnote 17
Yorke’s position on the political map was also reflected in his personal and institutional connections. Daniel Eaton, his regular publisher, was himself known as an aggressive radical and was tried a number of times for the publication of seditious literature in the course of 1793 and 1794.Footnote 18 Moreover, the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, which was established in late-1791 and of which Yorke became a prominent leader in 1793, appears to have been the largest radical organization in existence outside of London. Whereas its program was fundamentally similar to that of other radical societies throughout England—demanding reform of the corrupt system of representation, relief from high taxes, and an end to the war against France—the Sheffield Society had a uniquely militant approach that stemmed from Sheffield’s “particularly independent plebeian culture,” and that found expression in the “democratic” gestures adopted by its members, such as refraining from using the titles “Mr.” and “Esquire.”
This militant mood was expressed in the radical newspaper the Sheffield Register. It was also reflected at political events organized by the Sheffield Society, such as a celebration of the victory of the French republican army at Valmy in September 1792 that included roasting an entire bull and distributing the meat to imprisoned debtors and the poor, and a mass rally in April 1793 during which 10,000 people signed a petition in support of universal suffrage. However, soon after Yorke joined the organization, the oppressive loyalist mood that became dominant during the war against the French, and the government’s increasing pressure on the radical opposition, created a deepening crisis among its members. Some fled to the United States, while others lost their jobs.Footnote 19 This situation, however, did not dissuade Yorke from working vigorously to incite the masses. Indeed, he continued working in this direction until June 1794, when he was arrested with other leaders of the movement during the major wave of arrests of radicals across England that began the previous month. The arrests were based on the real or engineered fear within the government that the radicals were trying to topple the regime. This fear was sparked by informants’ reports regarding efforts by radical organizations to organize a convention in London and to arm themselves.Footnote 20 Yorke himself was charged with treason and with planning an armed insurrection. He was interrogated at length by the Privy Council, whose members reported the seizure of letters in which York stated that he was going to France to build an army that would return to fight the British army.Footnote 21 Gradually, two more specific charges were leveled against him: involvement in creating a cache of bayonets out of a desire to overthrow the government and an effort to advance this cause with his speech at the 7 April 1794 mass rally at Castle Hill, Sheffield, which was attended by between 10,000 and 12,000 supporters of reform.
During this tempestuous speech, which lasted for more than an hour, Yorke called for the abolition of the slave trade, the institution of universal suffrage, and the release of the five radicals—Muir, Skirving, Palmer, Margarot, and Gerrald—who, during the preceding months, had been sentenced in Edinburgh to long periods of exile in Australia. Under his direction, it was decided to submit two separate petitions to the king regarding the abolition of slavery and the release of the radicals. However, with regard to the issue of parliamentary reform, the meeting judged that there was no reason to submit a petition to parliament since parliament had “disdainfully” rejected a previous petition and there was furthermore no reason to ask “a corrupt agent to remove itself.”Footnote 22
This appears to have been Yorke’s high point as a radical leader, for at the conclusion of the rally he was carried in a carriage by the crowd through the streets of Sheffield, and one week later he was praised at an assembly of the London Corresponding Society (LCS).Footnote 23 The rally speech, however, also signified the beginning of Yorke’s decline. Even within the reform movement itself, some regarded this moment as crossing a red line. For example, on 19 April, Cambridge Intelligencer editor Benjamin Flower wrote that Yorke would “make a much more suitable President for the Jacobin Club, or the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, than for a respectable society of English reformers.”Footnote 24 If this was the impression of a liberal like Flower, it is not difficult to imagine why government officials ascribed to Yorke a major role in what it believed to be a conspiracy of the radical organizations to topple the regime. In the course of June, magistrates were called on in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sunderland, Shields, Hull, Carlisle, and of course Sheffield, to look for him, in an effort to prevent him from leaving the country. Yorke, who was moving from one hiding place to another at the time, was eventually apprehended under unclear circumstances. According to one version, his capture was the result of his haughtiness and his success with women, which were themes that emerged on a regular basis during his trial, as well as that of Hardy.Footnote 25
Despite his considerable personal charisma and impressive oratory and writing skills, Yorke as a thinker was neither consistent nor original. Rather, he tended to use his extensive knowledge of authors on the subjects of politics, philosophy, and history—which, considering his young age, was extremely developed—in order to make wise and effective use of a variety of sources. Even if we limit our examination to the period during which Yorke was active in the radical camp, the ideology appearing in Yorke’s early writings combined arguments, keywords, and modes of thinking from a variety of traditions: classic republicanism as well as bourgeois liberalism; revolutionary discourse as well as reformist discourse; reliance on both natural law and historical myths; civic humanism as employed by Algernon Sidney and the meritocracy and individualism of John Locke; pluralistic tolerance toward different beliefs as employed by Voltaire and Kant, as well as uncompromising Rousseauist language directed against ideological rivals; and, finally, a tendency toward pragmatism, as well as the use of purely abstract theories.Footnote 26 Yorke’s theoretical stew, however, was not an idiosyncratic phenomenon; such mélanges can be found in the writings of other reform movement members in the 1790s, albeit not always to the same extent. Like many other radicals, Yorke was an opportunist who made alternating use of a variety of political vocabularies to achieve his changing goals.Footnote 27
In this way, as strange and exceptional as he may have been, Yorke was in constant dialogue with the political culture of his era and the logic on which it was based. His actions were imbued with meaning by the specific social reality and its many contexts and constraints to which he responded and simultaneously attempted to transform. In the lengthy defense statement he delivered during his trial in 1795, which is the focus of the latter part of this article, Yorke was compelled to justify and explain his choices and to respond to the charges against him. His statement therefore elucidates not only his own ideas but many different aspects of the society in which he lived. While Yorke was in no way a representative figure, the social and legal strategies he employed during his political and journalistic career and during his trial both reflected and helped shape (and perhaps also to limit) the spectrum of personal and political possibilities during the years in question. In this way, he can be regarded as someone who functioned as “exceptional normal,” in the words of Italian historian Edoardo Grendi.Footnote 28 Precisely because of its great distinctiveness, Yorke’s case teaches us a great deal about both the collective and the “center” of English society in the 1790s.Footnote 29
The trial in which Yorke was convicted marked a major turning point in his own political development.Footnote 30 The beginning of this transformation was reflected in his introduction to the protocol of his trial, which he composed toward the end of 1795. At this early stage, he already declared that he had learned “that moderation is the best policy.”Footnote 31 Yorke’s process of being “born again” accelerated while he was in prison, as reflected in his book The Means of Saving Our Country, which was published in 1797 while he was still incarcerated.Footnote 32 Upon his release from prison in 1798, he published A Letter to the Reformers, a book in which he disavowed his old political positions and attempted to persuade his former colleagues to follow suit.Footnote 33
Yorke’s move from blunt radicalism to ultraloyalism by the first years of the new century was clearly linked to the overall loyalist political mood that was prevalent in Britain beginning in 1792, with the French Revolution’s turn toward massive violence and the subsequent outbreak of war between France and England. This atmosphere continually tried the spirit of radicals, many of whom—including Yorke—eventually surrendered to the general public pressure, the fear of bearing the brunt of “Pitt’s Terror,” and the desire to start over as legitimate patriots in a time of war.Footnote 34 Nonetheless, it is evident that Yorke’s extreme transformation stemmed not only from the prevailing atmosphere but also from his actual judicial conviction and imprisonment, as he himself noted in his writings.Footnote 35
In the sections that follow, I will suggest that Yorke’s conviction was not necessarily predetermined but rather was greatly influenced by the manner in which he handled his trial. As in other trials of the period, the prosecution’s success stemmed not only from the way it handled the case but, to an equal extent, from the strategy adopted by the defendant as well.
II The Evolution of Yorke’s Indictment
If the dubious testimony of police informant Henry Alexander in the renowned trial of Thomas Hardy is to be believed, Yorke’s trial was originally planned to take place immediately following the conclusion of the treason trials, which began in London in late October 1794.Footnote 36 It appears that the government hoped that convictions in the London trials would encourage convictions in the trials taking place in other parts of England, like that of Yorke, and, more specifically, that the trials would reveal additional concrete evidence to be used against Yorke. Yorke, who had been in custody under suspicions of high treason since June 1794, was a major topic of discussion during the Hardy trial (and subsequently, but to a lesser extent, during the trial of John Horne Tooke). During this trial, the prosecution attempted to prove that Yorke was a revolutionary extremist who had planned a violent rebellion and that, as a private individual and the head of the Sheffield Constitutional Society, he maintained extensive contacts with the LCS, of which Hardy was the secretary and dominant leader.Footnote 37
As we know, the London treason trials were a complete failure for the Crown. Hardy, Horne Tooke. and Thelwall were acquitted one after another in November 1794. By clarifying that membership in the LCS and the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) did not constitute sufficient grounds for conviction under the serious charge of high treason, these acquittals forced the Crown to withdraw its indictments of the remaining London defendants. Yorke’s case was also no great success for the Crown; although two witnesses for the prosecution (Alexander and former Sheffield Society secretary William Broomhead, who became a state’s witness) depicted Yorke as an extremist with violent intentions, the Crown’s theory of a planned bayonet attack that Yorke was supposed to lead sustained a mortal blow.Footnote 38
As a result, it was decided to postpone Yorke’s trial. It was also subsequently decided (apparently in May 1795) to reduce the charges against him (and against two of his colleagues, Joseph Gales and Richard Davison, who managed to evade arrest by escaping to the United States)Footnote 39 from high treason to “a conspiracy to traduce and vilify the Commons House of Parliament, to excite disaffection towards the king and his government in the minds of his subjects, to excite riots and tumults and commotions in the realm.”Footnote 40 This action was taken based on the belief, which was subsequently justified, that it would increase the chances of achieving a conviction in the trial.Footnote 41
However, neither the prosecution nor the defense could have understood the full significance of the change in charges against Yorke, as the charge of “conspiracy” had hardly been used during the political trials in England during the 1790s. Rather, most indictments fell under one of two categories: sedition, for which the longest prison sentence during the years 1793–1801 was three years,Footnote 42 and high treason, which, in the case of conviction, was punishable by quartering and death. Due to the substantive legal distinction between treason and the other offenses, which were classified as misdemeanors, the accusations against Yorke were closer to sedition than to treason. However, due to the lack of precedents, it was undoubtedly difficult to guess what his sentence would be. The one trial that had been conducted in England under charges of conspiracy during the period preceding Yorke’s trial was that of Thomas Walker of the Manchester Constitutional Society. The trial was held in Lancaster Assizes in April 1794 under the charge of “a conspiracy to overthrow the constitution and government, and to aid and assist the French … in case they should invade this kingdom,” and the indictment was also directed at some of Walker’s associates, including Yorke himself (although there is no indication that he was arrested). The trial did not, however, provide much information, because the “conspiracy” in question was much more serious than that subsequently attributed to Yorke, and, more significantly, because it ended in acquittal due to the perjury of the prosecution’s main witness.Footnote 43
Although the state’s counsels did not completely forgo the chances of incriminating Yorke for the planned bayonet attack, they decided to place the emphasis on the statements he made at the Sheffield reform rally in Castle Hill in April 1794. In particular, the prosecution highlighted three excerpts from Yorke’s speech, which it regarded as indicating intention to incite listeners against the king, the government, and the parliament. The first two excerpts were very serious in content but were nonetheless extremely abstract and general in nature. In one, Yorke held that he was convinced that his countrymen would not be satisfied with “a melioration” alone but rather would demand “the annihilation of corruption and abuses” and would do so “in an imperious tone which will take no denial.” The second excerpt had to do with the way in which the “suffering nations” must prepare “their combustible ingredients … so as to produce with effect that grand political explosion which, at the same time that it buries despotism … may raise up the people to the dignity and sublime grandeur of freedom.” The third excerpt, by contrast, was much more moderate overall, but its last lines included the explicit, concrete statement that the prosecution so badly needed in order to convince the jury that Yorke was in fact working to undermine the foundation of the current order: “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 44
However, the prosecution’s major difficulty had less to do with its efforts to convince the jury of the criminal nature of Yorke’s statements and more to do with the need to prove that the words were in fact spoken by Yorke. This was because the text of the speech from which the excerpts were taken appeared in a publication that had been published by the Sheffield Society and that had been sold at an inexpensive price during the weeks following the rally.Footnote 45 For its part, the defense did not take the trouble to deny the seriousness of the three excerpts during the trial. Instead, it argued that the printed version of the speech was very different from the speech that Yorke actually delivered at the rally, and that the three excerpts in question had not been part of the speech itself. As a result, and in light of the fact that the prosecution’s thesis regarding the bayonet attack was not convincing, the manner in which Yorke was perceived by the members of the jury, and the degree to which they could believe that the defendant might have said the things attributed to him, carried a great deal of weight.
III Two Defense Models
As was not uncommon among defendants in the 1790s, Yorke sat in custody for more than one year, due, among other reasons, to the suspension of Habeas Corpus in May 1794.Footnote 46 This left him with ample time to deliberate over his trial strategy. The fact that his trial was preceded by many other political trials in both Scotland and England enabled him to consider the effectiveness of the different lines of defense employed by other defendants. It is plausible to assume that, like them, Yorke drew on well-known state trials from the recent and more distant past for practical ideas and for inspiration.Footnote 47
Historian James Epstein argues that the British radicals of the period under discussion adopted one of two legal defense models.Footnote 48 The first model involved retaining an experienced counsel who was responsible for deciding on a line of defense. This counsel usually decided that it was preferable for the accused to be heard as little as possible during the trial. Hardy’s trial was paradigmatic in this way. The main argument in this line of defense was usually that the accused had worked for reform but had always respected law and order and that if, from time to time, he had expressed himself in a manner that appeared extreme, he did so unintentionally and not as the result of malicious intent.
According to the second model, in contrast, the defendant played a central and active role in his own trial, in some cases as a witness and in other cases as his own counsel. Although usually assisted by other attorneys, it was the accused himself who defined and led the main line of defense. This arrangement enabled defendants to transform proceedings into trials that were political and ideological in nature and to highlight the principles in which they believed. It was extremely tempting for radical activists to adopt such an approach, as fiery speeches delivered inside courtrooms were often published and sold for a symbolic price, popularized, and glorified, transforming the defendant into a tortured saint in the service of the reform movement.Footnote 49 Indeed, in some such cases, it is clear that this is how the accused wanted to be remembered. The pragmatic line of defense of an experienced counsel, who tended to display an exaggerated degree of respect for the judge and the prosecuting counsels, could only hinder the achievement of such a goal.Footnote 50
In contrast to the ambitious daring of the second model, the first model was defensive and apologetic. However, from the perspective of the outcome of the trials, the first model was undoubtedly much more effective. True, rulings in some cases were apparently based on particular circumstances more than on the line of defense adopted. For example, it is doubtful whether the five defendants tried in Edinburgh in 1793–94 and sentenced to long periods of deportation to Botany Bay had a realistic chance of being acquitted from the outset, in light of the clear bias of the judges and the strict nature of Scottish law in the matter. It is clear, on the other hand, that it was Thomas Erskine’s phenomenal skill in examining witnesses rather than any general defense model that played the critical role in the acquittal of Hardy, Thelwall, and Horne Tooke (who, contrary to the other two, took part in his own defense, but who, like them, refrained from making statements during the trial itself). Even Erskine, successful and committed to the abovementioned apologetic model as he was, finished a significant number of cases in failure, the best known of which was the November 1792 decision that convicted Thomas Paine in absentia for seditious libel.Footnote 51 Nonetheless, most jury members—not to mention judges—probably found it easier to accept an argument that held that the defendant had overall good intentions and just went a bit too far, than an argument that held that the regime was functioning in a tyrannical and arbitrary manner and that it—and not the defendant—should actually be on trial.
Which model did Yorke adopt? The answer to this question can be divided into two parts: one relating to his legal representation and the other relating to his strategy of defense. In terms of representation, Yorke clearly adopted the second model, choosing to play a major and active role in his own defense and to make only partial use of the assistance of an unknown counsel named John Hotham. While Hotham examined most of the witnesses, Yorke himself delivered his lengthy, weighty defense statement after the prosecution examined its witnesses.
Yorke’s actions as they related to defense strategy reflected greater ambivalence. If at the beginning of his long statement it appeared that Yorke had adopted an apologetic tone in order to create an impression of a gentler, less extreme character, the remainder of his statement was very different in content and tone and, to a certain extent, served to undermine his initial direction. Ultimately, this inconsistency appears to have been to Yorke’s detriment in both realms; not only was he convicted, but he also failed to emerge as a champion of the radical camp.
IV Yorke’s Defense Statement
Yorke’s trial, which was typical in that it took place over the course of one long day in July 1795 (the treason trials of 1794 were exceptional in that they deviated from this procedure),Footnote 52 proceeded in the following order: prosecution’s presentation of the indictment; testimony of the prosecution witnesses; defense statement; testimony of the defense witnesses; “reply” of the prosecution; and the judge’s “summing up.” This order provided the Crown’s counsels with an advantage from the outset, particularly when we keep in mind that the judges (in this case, Judge Sir Giles Rooke) tended to be biased in their favor, and that their leading comments and directions had a certain degree of influence over the jury.Footnote 53 This meant that the defense statement, which was delivered more or less in the middle of the trial, was the defense’s primary opportunity to persuade the jury members of the justice of their case.
This observation, of course, is valid only if we believe that the jury attributed significance to the defense statement or even bothered to listen to it carefully. Unfortunately, in the case of Yorke, as in many others, we do not have access to material testifying to jury members’ actual attitude toward the defense statement or toward the trial as a whole. We are therefore left with the content of Yorke’s discourse, the judge’s and prosecution’s reactions to it, and the jury’s final verdict. Furthermore, the credibility of the trial protocol itself must also be regarded as questionable, as it was shorthanded by LCS member William Ramsay, who was certainly not a neutral stenographer.Footnote 54 However, the distinction between discourse and the reception of discourse, as essential as it might be on a theoretical level, is not as dichotomous as it may appear at first glance, particularly when considered in the context of the English political trials of the 1790s. Even if the jurors were not interested in Yorke’s speech per se, they were surely aware of the fact they were being closely examined (by the trial audience, newspaper readers, reformers, etc.) and were expected to take defense arguments into consideration. This was one manifestation of the government’s need to maintain the image of a fair and legal institution and the long English tradition of a just and fearless jury mentioned earlier. It is also reasonable to conclude that Yorke believed that his speech had the potential to make a difference; had he not believed so, he would not have tried so eagerly to defend himself and to adopt apologetic language in its opening section. Thus, even if neither Yorke nor the jurors took his defense statement at face value, it still most likely influenced the jury’s deliberations regarding sentencing. Finally, although Ramsay’s protocol must have contained some errors, the tradition of trial “prints” that began in the seventeenth century and combined private initiatives with official judicial control ensured its relative accuracy and fairness. This tradition developed as a system of checks and balances of sorts, based on mutual reliance and long-term relationships between the imprimatur-granting judge, the stenographer, and the publisher. The need of all three to maintain their professional reputation as pursuers of the truth, as well as the explosive political atmosphere, which paradoxically “created a standoff or stalemate that can be described … as a culture of fact,” guaranteed to a great extent the relative precision of Ramsay’s protocol. This assessment is also implied by the protocol’s inclusion in the prestigious volumes of State Trials.Footnote 55
Yorke’s two-hour statementFootnote 56 began with a series of apologetic declarations: he never attacked the parliament, “the strongest palladium of our liberties,” as an institution, rather only the manner in which it was functioning at the time; his trip to Sheffield was meant to promote not riots but rather “that which is universally acknowledged to be indispensably necessary to the safety of the state … a Parliamentary Reform”; those who were convicted in Scotland and deported acted in good faith, and even if they had been mistaken they should have nonetheless been pardoned.Footnote 57 This defensive rhetoric differed markedly from the aggressive rhetoric he had employed in the past. It was even more conspicuous in two other declarations that appeared in the beginning of his statement, which undoubtedly amused all who had read Yorke’s angry writings or listened to his belligerent speeches from the period 1793–94. First, Yorke argued that in each of his speeches he had emphasized that the English constitution was “the noblest that ever was recorded on the annals of human kind,” and he continued by claiming that in most of them, “I took essential pains in controverting the doctrines of Thomas Paine, who denied the existence of our constitution.”Footnote 58 Yet, not only had Yorke never before made statements against Paine, but the title of one of his early writings, These Are the Times that Try Men’s Souls! had actually referenced the opening sentence of the first paper in Thomas Paine’s publication American Crisis.Footnote 59 Although in contrast to Paine and like most of his comrades in the struggle, Yorke chose not to disengage completely from “accepted constitutional language” even in his most radical years, Paine was clearly one of his main sources of inspiration.Footnote 60 Here, however, Yorke was employing a tactic of reconciliation and therefore had to distance himself from Paine, who at the time in England was regarded by most people, and certainly by the establishment, as a dangerous revolutionary and a threat to the integrity of society.Footnote 61 For this reason, Yorke repeatedly told the jurors that the Crown was trying to convince them that he was a revolutionary like Paine, when actually he was only “a reformer.”Footnote 62 The credibility of Yorke’s words were bolstered by the “historical” line of argument he advanced: as he continued, he explained that he intended to prove that general annual elections “were partly not only the spirit but [also] the practice of the British constitution” in the past, and that his protests were aimed only against violations against the kingdom’s original constitution.Footnote 63 At this point, it appeared that despite his decision to deliver his own defense statement (and not to leave this task to an experienced counsel), Yorke chose to adopt a line of defense characteristic of Erskine, based primarily on the argument that his sole aim had been to achieve reform through peaceful means.
The moderate reformist approach adopted by Yorke was reinforced by three additional types of arguments employed throughout his statement: the rhetoric of “enlightenment,” his proposal of a particular interpretation of the French Revolution, and the rhetoric of “patriotism.” The central components of the first type of argument were harsh criticism of the religious persecution and “barbarian ignorance”Footnote 64 of the Middle Ages and an emphasis on the importance of the invention of printing, which, he argued, enabled the gradual emergence of free debate. Some of his claims appear to have been taken directly out of prominent manifestos promulgated by Enlightenment circles: “without knowledge there can be no liberty”; people should be encouraged to find the truth “by the exercise of their own faculties”; and whoever prevents them from doing so is “an enemy to the best interests of mankind!”Footnote 65 The similarity of these arguments to those appearing in Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment?”—whether intentional or not—is particularly striking. As Kant, like many other Enlightenment philosophers on various occasions, maintained that revolution could never bring about “a true reform in ways of thinking,” this resemblance, to the extent that it was identified by its listeners, may very well have served Yorke’s efforts to portray himself as a moderate supporter of reform. True, Kant, who was a philosopher of high standing throughout continental Europe and Britain in 1795, supported the French Revolution in its early phases. However, his later call for perpetual peace prevented any possibility of associating him with the subsequent Jacobin Terror, which now came to be increasingly understood in English collective imagery as analogical to the very idea of revolution itself.Footnote 66
This attempt to be identified with a cautious, enlightened spirit acquired further validity when Yorke turned to his analysis of the French Revolution. Here, Yorke did not praise the revolutionaries en bloc as he had in past writings but rather divided the revolution into three chronological periods that were completely different from one another: the period of a promising beginning, the destruction of all that had been achieved as a result of Robespierre’s unbridled despotism, and the present Thermidorian state of affairs, which aroused cautious optimism due to the “moderation” of the legislators whose aim was the defense of liberty and property.Footnote 67 This interpretation of the Revolution was consistent with the mood of some of the liberal elite of Britain (and of Europe in general) at the time, as well as with the anti-Montagnard Thermidorian discourse that portrayed terror as a shameful perversion of the correct development of the Revolution, and Robespierre and his colleagues (and them alone) as “sanguinary monsters.”Footnote 68
Another way that Yorke attempted to establish legitimacy among members of the jury for his radical activities was to portray them as activities undertaken for the sake of the state and state security. Not only did the struggle for parliamentary reform during this difficult hour not threaten the national effort, argued Yorke, but it was actually critical for the future existence of the nation. For this reason, Yorke held that it was the persecution of supporters of reform that constituted a serious national threat, and that his trial was in fact “a question of first national importance.”Footnote 69 As in his earlier writings, here too the struggle between the establishment and the radical opposition to appropriate “true” patriotism for itself reverberated in the background.Footnote 70
V The Unfortunate Victim and the Political Martyr
In this way, the opening of Yorke’s defense statement created the impression that he had decided on a defense strategy based on rhetoric portraying him as a moderate, enlightened, and responsible man—in other words, the apologetic model that Erskine had employed so skillfully one year earlier. As we read on, however, it becomes clear that this impression is mistaken and that as the statement continued, Yorke made increasing use of other types of arguments that obscured what appears to have been his original line of defense, resulting in a statement that was eclectic and inconsistent. First, he employed the language of “victimization” similar to the language used in some of his earlier writings but completely different from the semi-apologetic language of the beginning of his statement. In contrast to the beginning of the statement, he now played on human emotions and made no effort directly to address the charges of the prosecution. As far as he was concerned, the major issue now was the suffering he had experienced, especially while he was in prison. “How dreadful a deed it is to sacrifice unprotected innocence,” exclaimed Yorke at one point, later adding, in a melodramatic tone: “Could even guilt attach itself to me my sufferings have been greater than my offence.” In this way, it is safe to assume that members of the jury questioned his sincerity when he told them with great emotion: “I am not asking you for mercy—I demand only justice.”Footnote 71
However, toward the end of his statement, as he made effective use of the “charisma” of the victim and pled for the mercy of the jurors cloaked as a battered and unfortunate figure,Footnote 72 Yorke assumed an image that was similar in its suffering but quite contrary in its meaning: the image of a martyr. In this persona, Yorke presented himself as someone who would never agree to abandon his mission, who was completely at peace with the bitter fate stemming from this choice, and who regarded the outcome as a sign of the justness of his path. In this way, Yorke told the jury, if they convicted him for his struggle for the liberty of man, not only would he view it as a great honor but it would certainly not cause him to deviate from his principles. He concluded his statement with the following words: “if I must yet be doomed to languish out the most precious moments of my life in a prison, fatal as it must be to my interest, blasting every where my hopes, and sinking me down completely into ruin, my mind shall be equal to the task—it shall bear with calmness and serenity the worst of ills, in support of a cause whose basis is truth, and whose object is the liberty of my country.”Footnote 73 These were not words spoken without thought but rather the deliberate adoption of a rhetorical model based on what Marcus Wood has called “the tradition of protestant martyrdom.” This trope was consciously deployed by defendants in religious and political trials, at least from the period of the Civil War onward, and during the 1790s was evident in trials such as that of Scottish radical Thomas Fyshe Palmer.Footnote 74
Contrary to the unfortunate victim’s asking for the mercy of society, the martyr challenges society, preaching to the people the truth they do not want to hear, just like the outcast prophet. As a political (or secular) martyr,Footnote 75 Yorke’s message to the jury was unequivocal: even if you decide to convict me, justice will still be on my side. Moreover, he also argued that more than being in his interest it was in their own interest to acquit him, as “if I fall for having avowed the wholesome notions of our forefathers, and for having held up their institutions for imitation, you yourselves may be the next victim.”Footnote 76 At this point, Yorke appeared to be speaking as if he were still standing on the podium at Castle Hill, ignoring the very different “spatial economy” dictated by each location.Footnote 77 This threatening and subversive language was already visible slightly earlier in his statement, when he characterized those who were responsible for placing him on trial as conspirators “who have formed a league … against the best friends of the constitution,” and even more so when he told the jurors to use their ruling to “teach those who have nothing but power on their side to be silent when reason speaks, and not to attempt to drown the voice of the people amid the din of corruption.”Footnote 78
If at the beginning of his statement Yorke attempted to gain the support of the jurors without challenging the existing order, he now attempted to line the jurors up with him on one side of the barricade, with the establishment on the other side. York thus transformed himself from an apologetic defendant into an uncompromising accuser and put the holders of power on the defendant’s bench in his place. In this way, he abandoned the apologetic model and looked toward the romantic, glorified model. He may have believed that at this point he possessed the symbolic power necessary to make this dramatic change and to maintain his chances of achieving an acquittal. On the basis of the decision of the jurors at the end of the trial, however, he appears to have been mistaken.
VI Historical Rights and Natural Rights
It can be assumed that Yorke’s chances of achieving acquittal were also reduced by his unwillingness to limit himself to “historical” arguments when attempting to establish the legitimacy of his opinions, as well as his decision to weave in arguments taken from the discourse of natural rights. Indeed, there is no doubt that in contrast to his earlier writings and speeches, which frequently drew on natural rights as a basis for the legitimacy of taking action for the sake of change, here he chose to emphasize the “primitive purity” of the English constitution. To this end, like many other radical defendants in the trials that preceded him, Yorke quoted a large number of respected authorities from the past and present, including Lord Chatham and Edmund Burke, and showed that their ideas regarding parliament were consistent with his own.Footnote 79 In this light, he promoted the conclusion that he was being tried for views that in the past were considered completely legitimate.
The quotes read by Yorke were, of course, very selective. In the case of Burke, for example, they were taken from his 1770 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, which addressed the conflict under way in the American colonies.Footnote 80 In this way, Yorke was able to use the worst enemy of 1790s English radicals against himself, so to speak. Some of the other quotes deployed by Yorke, like those taken from the writings of the well-renowned judge and constitutional analyst William Blackstone,Footnote 81 were chosen in a particularly sophisticated manner, as they contained a double “historical” argument: not only were they the words of an authoritative figure from the past, but they also contained criticism of the deviation from the “original” British constitution. Yorke expressed the advantage gained by this tactic in words that no juror could fail to understand: “I cannot then be considered as an innovator, nor can I boast of being the original of such principles; but I follow the immortal Mr. Locke … I follow the late lord Chatham … I follow lord Camden … and, lastly, judge Blackstone.”Footnote 82 Yorke’s turn to constitutional discourse was a wise move, as it constituted the imagined shared space of the British nation, a supernarrative that could be used, subject to its constraints, to wage an effective political struggle. As radical groups such as the Levellers understood well before Yorke,Footnote 83 the symbolic borders of the English constitution provided defense and legitimacy for strong and even subversive expressions that would be unacceptable in any other context. Even the claim of the existence of natural rights, which at that point was firmly associated with Paine and with the French Revolution, could be recognized as long as it was based on an imagined mythological past, that is to say, as long as it was portrayed as part of England’s ancient constitution.
Nonetheless, Yorke understood that the constitutional discursive field also presented considerable problems, which, incidentally, are what caused him to refrain almost completely from entering it during the years of his radical activity that preceded his trial. Even if there is a degree of justice in John Pocock’s claim that it is problematic automatically to link claims of natural rights with radicalism and constitutional claims with conservatism,Footnote 84 this connection was undoubtedly not completely mistaken, certainly in the case of formative images of the people of the era. If Yorke’s aim was not only to be acquitted but also to be remembered in the pages of history as a courageous radical speaker, he could not remain within the safe confines of the ancient English constitution.Footnote 85
Indeed, the farther York progressed into his statement, the more he stressed natural rights as a meaningful basis of legitimacy. If at the beginning of the statement he alluded to them here and there in an almost incidental manner, toward its conclusion he overemphasized their importance. Even though equal representation and short parliaments should be considered as “the basis of our ancient constitution,” he declared, “I would never provoke their adoption from the derivative claim of precedent; for neither the concessions nor the prejudices of ancestors—neither their unruly temper nor their servility, nor the encroachments of ancient kings, can constitute any precedents against the natural rights of mankind.”Footnote 86 This declaration was dramatic relative to the content of the defense statement until that point; it was not simply the introduction of one additional point to the many points that had already been advanced but rather it had the ability completely to transform the foundation on which all the other arguments had been based. Furthermore, this declaration strongly reverberated with the much-criticized arguments made by revolutionary Thomas Paine in Rights of Man, which held that rights trump precedent and that the present generation cannot be bound by previous ones.Footnote 87 If earlier in his statement Yorke tried to distance himself from Paine and to associate himself with Burke, the effect was now completely opposite.
Thus, in at least two ways—in the language he used and the persona he presented—the Yorke who concluded his defense statement was markedly different from the Yorke who had opened it. Of course, these two aspects of his statement were connected by a Gordian knot. In the first part of his statement, Yorke presented himself both as a moderate and responsible person and as a person in distress, requesting the mercy of the jurors. His reliance on acceptable and “legitimate” historical-constitutional arguments in the early sections of his statement contributed to the successful construction of this image, which did not threaten the symbolic power relations between the accused and the state. However, as the statement progressed, Yorke’s self-representation underwent marked symbolic change. The repeated blows he had sustained at the hands of “those who have nothing but power on their side,”Footnote 88 he now claimed, were not coincidental but rather the result of his uncompromising struggle for truth and the liberty of the English people. Despite its many examples throughout the history of the English people, this liberty, he continued, had a foundation that was more ethical and rational than mythological or historical. Regardless, Yorke held that the “authorized cruelty” that had been directed at him was the result of the threat that his efforts for “the resettlement” of a corrupt public affairs and government posed for the privileged, who lived “at the expense of the public, without serving it.”Footnote 89
If during the first part of the statement Yorke appeared to be trying to persuade the jurors to reintegrate him into the existing order, as he got closer to the end it became increasingly clear that he was actually interested in having the jurors join him in challenging the status quo. It is very likely that, in common with other English radicals, Yorke too believed in the independence and courage of the members of the jury, as reflected in the acquittal of the defendants in the treason trials of 1794. However, refraining from conviction when the punishment was cruel execution was one thing,Footnote 90 and endorsing explicitly oppositional messages like those Yorke presented toward the end of his statement was another story entirely. In the context of the hysterical atmosphere prevalent in Britain in the mid-1790s, it was unrealistic to expect jurors to adopt Thomas Paine’s language of natural rights.
The problem was not only content-related but also one of integrity, or lack thereof. Even the jurors, who were not necessarily aware of or interested in the ideological nuances of the language deployed by Yorke, could not miss his tendency toward political and performative fluctuation. In their eyes, Yorke had the appearance of an enlightened reformer one moment and an angry revolutionary the next; a misunderstood apologetic figure one moment and an uncompromising, preaching radical activist the next; a man begging for his life in a touching manner one moment and a man shunning all anticipated punishment and suffering the next. In this way, Yorke did damage to his case twice over: not only by revealing his threatening and revolutionary side but also by displaying an incoherency that caused him to lose one of the most important resources of any defendant standing trial—his credibility.
VII Gerrald’s Trial and Yorke’s Sentence
In typical form, and as we have already seen, Yorke referred both explicitly and implicitly to numerous different sources while building his defense statement. Still, it is difficult to escape the impression that Yorke received considerable inspiration from the defense statements of the five “Scottish martyrs,” who were tried in Edinburgh in 1793–94, and particularly from that delivered by Joseph Gerrald, the LCS representative to the “British Convention” who was sentenced in March 1794, three months before Yorke’s arrest, to fourteen years of exile in Botany Bay.Footnote 91 Indication of Yorke’s great respect for Gerrald had already appeared shortly after Gerrald’s trial.Footnote 92
In his own statement, Gerrald made use of virtually all the motifs and argument types that Yorke employed later. First, he stressed his loyalty to Britain’s ancient constitution but gave clear precedence to the “eternal” principles of wisdom, truth, and justice.Footnote 93 Second, he cast an image of himself as a tortured saint by talking about the chronic illness from which he suffered and by invoking a series of mythological figures from the past (topped by Algernon Sidney) who sacrificed themselves for a great cause.Footnote 94 Third, as Yorke did later, Gerrald moved from a tone of justification, emphasizing good intentions and innocence, to a sharp and angry political indictment. Both defendants appear to have hoped gradually to persuade the jurors not only to support their acquittal but also to support their radical views, or at least view them as legitimate. Yorke also may have thought that what had completely failed in the particularly hostile atmosphere that prevailed in the Scottish courtroom could succeed before an English jury. After all, the traditional independence and integrity of English juries were often praised by the radicals in the 1790s (including Yorke himself, in 1793), especially after the acquittals in the London treason trials of 1794.Footnote 95 In addition, one can argue that in view of the major differences between Scottish and English law, Yorke’s risk in employing Gerrald’s rhetoric was apparently smaller than that taken by Gerrald himself, as their eventual sentences clearly illustrate: while Gerrald was sentenced to fourteen years in exile, Yorke was sentenced to only two years in prison, despite the fact that he was found guilty of the serious charge of “conspiracy … to excite riots and tumults and commotions in the realm.”Footnote 96
This, however, is a case of retrospective wisdom that was not necessarily possessed by Yorke at the time, inasmuch as the charge “conspiracy” was hardly used in the political trials in England during the period.Footnote 97 In the end, it appears that Yorke’s relatively lenient sentence was not necessarily a predetermined outcome but rather was the result of concrete factors, the most important of which was Yorke’s decision to retain the services of Thomas Erskine to defend him at his sentencing hearing in November 1795. Erskine reduced the damage suffered by Yorke during his trial by adopting an apologetic and patriotic line of argument somewhat similar to Yorke’s rhetoric at the beginning of his trial. Erskine stressed to Judge Rooke that Yorke was an extremely young and unfortunate man and that, due to his talents and intelligence, he had the potential to contribute a great deal to his country in the future.Footnote 98 The fact that Rooke—at least according to one historian—was “a mild and merciful judge” also most likely helped Yorke to some degree.Footnote 99 Finally, it should be noted that Yorke was convicted for his behavior at the rally and not for the bayonet episode, as reported in the Annual Register.Footnote 100 As a result of these factors, Yorke’s sentence was similar to the sentences given at the Assizes of York in 1793–94 for the offenses of “seditious words” and “seditious libel.”Footnote 101
It is also possible that Yorke’s desire for acquittal was secondary to his desire to be glorified in the way Gerrald had been. It is important to remember that Gerrald’s model included not only his dramatic statement before the court but his behavior surrounding the trial in its entirety. Gerrald had been released from prison in Edinburgh in early 1794 in order to travel to England to arrange his affairs before his trial, and this had provided him with a golden opportunity to escape, as many others had done before him. However, although he suffered from tuberculosis, and despite the pressure his colleagues exerted on him to flee and his own expectation that the Scottish court would sentence him to exile, Gerrald preferred to appear for trial and endow the radical struggle (and himself) with important symbolic capital.Footnote 102 In July 1795, when Yorke was finally put on trial, Gerrald, who was now dying and on his way to Botany Bay, was already a mythological hero of the reform movement. The temptation of attaining even a fraction of the respect and veneration enjoyed by Gerrald might have been too great for Yorke—so great that he was perhaps unable to withstand it, even at the risk of conviction.
VIII Conclusion
The instability of Yorke’s defense statement was the product of his own personal political and intellectual leanings and opinions, but it must also be understood as a product of the legal setting in which he operated. The significant limitations and restrictions imposed on the ruling regime and its representatives throughout the legal proceedings, which stemmed from the need to safeguard a fair appearance and the traditional rights of the accused, enticed Yorke to try to achieve goals that were separated by significant tension, and in some cases total contradiction: the acquisition of discursive authority as a speaker in the courtroom versus the ability simultaneously to level serious criticism at the hegemonic discourse that enabled him to be placed on the defense bench in the first place; the cultivation of empathy among the jurors for past suffering versus an attempt to reshape their worldview; achievement of acquittal versus achievement of the status of hero and tortured saint. Yorke’s desire to achieve these diverse goals was simultaneously shaped and reinforced by the ambivalence that was an integral part of the political trials of 1790s England.
Ultimately, Yorke ended up with the worst of both worlds: not only was he convicted and sentenced to two years in prison but he also failed to emerge as a radical hero. His conviction stemmed not only from the fickleness of his defense statement but also from many other factors that were unrelated to his handling of the case. The final ruling was almost certainly significantly influenced by the oppressive social and political atmosphere prevalent in England in 1795 due to the state of the war, the bias of the judge, and jurors’ tendency to convict the vast majority of radical defendants brought before them during the 1790s.
In contrast, Yorke’s failure to become a radical hero appears to have been more of a result of Yorke’s conduct both during the trial itself and in the years that followed. He certainly appears to have had the potential to become a hero. Much evidence indicates that in his younger years, Yorke aroused enthusiasm to the point of veneration among many of those around him, as well as the staunch opposition of political rivals. For instance, a passage from his first radical essay was included in a collection of biting political morceaux published in 1793, along with well-known texts by Locke, Godwin, and William Paley, while Arthur Young chose to close his successful antirevolutionary essay The Example of France a Warning to Britain with an attack against Yorke.Footnote 103 Joseph Gales, the influential editor and publisher of The Sheffield Register, wrote that at the conclusion of the rally at Castle Hill, he “had the honour to be drawn along with Yorke amidst the thousands.” During the same period, shortly before his arrest, a boy named after Yorke was christened in Sheffield. Even during his time in prison, at least until the emergence of signs of his political conversion, he received many visitors, and apparently also the financial support of the LCS, which he denied having received in retrospect for understandable reasons.Footnote 104 It was Yorke’s trial that in many ways signified the onset of the process through which he bid farewell to the persona of the mythological martyr. The possibility that Yorke might emerge as a formative myth—or at least a radical one—appears to have been thwarted by the unsuccessful combination of the defense strategies he employed during his trial; by the fact that he was only sentenced to two years in prison; by his service in an infantry regiment as a lieutenant colonel soon after his release; by his marriage to the warden’s daughter in 1800; and, of course, by the gradual ideological turn manifest in his writings.Footnote 105
After turning his back on the reform movement, Yorke attempted to earn political capital within the opposing camp in his new role as a “nationalist” convert. His penitence for his sins of the past, his melodramatic declaration of willingness to sacrifice himself in the name of England, his appealing pathos-filled antirevolutionary letters from his 1802 journey to France, and his extremist newspaper columns against Napoleon transformed him into a prominent figure among the loyalists.Footnote 106 But here, too, his success was not complete, and he was always suspected of being two-faced.Footnote 107 Even the obituaries written about him after his death in January 1813 fluctuated between admiration and condemnation. Despite its overall hostility, the Edinburgh Annual Register’s short description did a commendable job summing up Yorke’s life work and explaining why he remained such an enigmatic and not particularly heroic figure in British collective memory: “Henry Redhead Yorke, one of the most violent of all politicians, first on the side of liberty, and afterwards against it.”Footnote 108 In many ways, this description sums up England’s political culture as a whole during the 1790s.
