Scholars working on British politics during the 1790s will know something about Henry Redhead Yorke. They will probably know that he was tried and imprisoned for a seditious speech he delivered at the Sheffield outdoor meeting at Castle Hill in 1794 and that he quickly renounced his Jacobin beliefs; they may have read one of his many pamphlets, perhaps Reason Urged against Precedent (1793) or These Are the Times that Try Men's Souls! (1793). He merits a short entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and a walk-on part in E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963). Authors are understandably apt to claim historical significance for neglected figures that are the subject of their books. In this case, Amanda Goodrich earns full marks for demonstrating just this. Redhead Yorke is indeed a figure worthy of our attention, and his complex position—a creole man of color, an educated gentleman of some wealth, a displaced colonial constantly on the move, a Jacobin turned loyalist, a suspect figure alike for former comrades and the government—reflects many of the central themes of the age. With commendable thoroughness and interpretative insight, Goodrich has produced an excellent study of a figure who at first sight does not seem to fit standard historical narratives.
Three major themes can be singled out: the extension of British radicalism beyond “home” shores, the relationship of displacement and marginality to politics and selfhood, and the phenomenon of recantation. Henry Redhead was born in 1772 in Barbuda, the son of a slave-owning father who acted as an agent for a large plantation in Antigua, and a free woman of color whom his father never married. His status as an illegitimate creole of dual African and European heritage was not particularly remarkable in the West Indies, but in Britain as a colonial subject with a private income and a Cambridge University education, he occupied a position of liminality. He added Yorke to his name, either ignored or concealed his racial-creole identity, and projected himself as an English gentleman. Throughout her study, Goodrich stresses the flexibility and shifting contours of Yorke's identify, moving from cosmopolitanism to an uncertain identification as an Englishman. Although he trained as a barrister, he was called to the bar only near the end of his life. In his early twenties, he moved from Cambridge to Derby, establishing himself among the town's Whig elite. His first public political appearance and first publication were in defense of slavery. Within less than a year, by late 1792, he had repudiated his pro-slavery sentiments and emerged as an abolitionist and “Jacobin” leader, joining the Derby Society for Constitution Information as well as connecting with the London Society for Constitution Information.
It is unclear when Yorke first visited Paris, but he was among those delegated to present the Society for Constitution Information's address to the National Convention in late 1792. Here he mixed with the British expatriate community, including Thomas Paine, and witnessed the revolution first hand. The world seemed to be changing fast, and Yorke changed with it. Like most British supporters of the French republic, his sympathies lay with the Brissotins rather than Robespierre's violent reign of virtue. He rejected appeals to the British constitution: reason was to be freed from precedent. Freed from the past, republicanism also stood free of national allegiance. The dual freedoms from nation and history were difficult to achieve in practice, but Yorke's background was well suited to his claim to be a citizen of the world. As Goodrich shows, as an advocate of the abolition of slavery, Yorke's concept of freedom embraced all oppressed people, and in condemning colonialism, “he imagined a new liberated world beyond empires” (93). Ideologically, Yorke was a confirmed universalist, a displaced cosmopolitan. Goodrich argues that his opposition to “Englishness” related to a “Transatlanticism” (130) shared with fellow revolutionaries such as Paine, Joel Barlow, Joseph Gerrald, Maurice Margarot, Robert Wedderburn, William “Black” Davidson, the Despards, and the Irish nationalist Sheares brothers. Goodrich rightly stresses the networks connecting such “outsiders,” although her proposed concept of a “periphery public sphere” is tentative.
For a brief time, Yorke played a prominent role in British radicalism as a fiery orator connected with plans for a national convention and identified by the government as a leader in arming activities—the convention conceived as an anti-parliament and the collecting of arms, mainly pikes, were crucial to the government's case in the 1794 treason trials. According to Goodrich, between 1793 and his trial in 1795, Yorke was the “most revolutionary radical in Britain” (6–7). The government energetically gathered evidence against Yorke, hunting him down once he went on the lam trying to avoid arrest. Goodrich provides superb chapters on the authorities’ pursuit of Yorke and his trial at York summer assizes. The initial charges of high treason were reduced to seditious conspiracy, for which Yorke was convicted and sentenced to serve two years in Dorchester jail. Yorke felt aggrieved because others charged with high treason were released after the acquittals of 1794. In fact, the acquittals of the London leaders may have saved him from a traitor's fate. It is impossible to say whether a provincial jury would have been more inclined than would London juries to convict on capital charges.
It was in jail that Yorke underwent a second “conversion,” from Jacobinism to loyalism. His rapid changes of political allegiance make it easy to dismiss the sincerity of Yorke's political beliefs. To her credit, Goodrich gives serious attention to the phenomenon of recanting, an issue about which literary scholars of Romanticism have been more concerned than historians. Goodrich details the complexities involved in Yorke's shifting ideology, including a strong dose of pragmatism and self-interest (he had the inducement of £100 paid from secret service funds), linked in turn to his sense of alienation, “a sense of searching for a true self within the confines of an Englishness he could never quite achieve” (222). Following his release from prison, he married the jailer's daughter, who was not without property. Yorke's career as a loyal supporter of Pitt's party as an author and journal editor lasted much longer than his meteoric moment as a revolutionary. At his death in 1813, he had achieved the status of an English gentleman. By the next generation, any lingering taint of racial difference was erased; in 1841, H. G. Redhead Yorke, who had married an heiress, was elected MP for York, the fulfillment of an aspiration that had eluded his father. Goodrich skillfully demonstrates the relevance of York's eccentric career to broader historical understanding, examining connections within the Atlantic world and Europe, tensions between national and cosmopolitan allegiance, and trajectories of political disillusion and “apostasy” and restoring a dual-heritage writer and activist to an appropriate place in history.
