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friend of Priestley, at Easy-hill, which they set fire to, and maddened themselves with the wines in the cellar, valued at three hundred pounds. Whilst drinking, the burning roof fell in, and killed several of them. Ryland had been a man active for the best interests of the town, but this had no weight with the drunken mob; it was enough that he was a dissenter, and must suffer to the cry of "Church and king!" Bordesley Hall, the house of another dissenter, Mr. John Taylor, was the next assailed. There a gentleman cried out that he would give the mob a hundred guineas to go away and do no harm; but they shouted "No bribery! Lo bribery!" and fell to work. It was soon in full blaze, with the outbuildings and a number of hayricks, after the house had been plundered. They then marched away, broke open the town prison, and liberated the prisoners. About three o'clock in the afternoon they appeared, drunk and raging, before the paper warehouse of William Hutton, the historian of the place, of Derby, and the author of several antiquarian treatises. Hutton was a man who had raised himself from the deepest poverty, for his father was a poor stocking-weaver of Derby. He had found Birmingham without a paper warehouse; had opened one, and, by that shrewdness and carefulness in business, which are so conspicuous in his Autobiography, and afford a most valuable study for young men, had acquired a competence. He was not only an honour to the town by his upright character, and great reputation as a self-taught author, but he had been an active benefactor to it. He had been the first to establish a circulating library in the town; was always an advocate and co-operator in works and institutions of improvement, and was the most active and able commissioner of the court of requests. It was William Ilutton's constant aim to reconcile the parties that came before him, and, without any salary for his trouble, he had often the satisfaction of sending away litigious parties reconciled, and that at free cost. But all this did not screen him; it was enough that he was a dissenter, and an advocate of toleration and of liberal principles. Besides, as he observes in his Life, "the fatal rock upon which I split was, I never could find a way to let both parties win!" Accordingly, a gentleman, whom Hutton well knew, said to the mob, "If you will pull down Hutton's house, I will give you two guineas to drink, for it was owing to him that I lost a cause in court."

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nine gallons. The special constables dispersed the mob for a time; but going away, to endeavour to save Ryland's house, they left Hutton's unguarded, and the mob broke into Hutton's warehouse, and ransacked it, and then into his house, to which it was attached, gutted it, throwing the furniture into the street, and demolishing a very good library. Hutton himself had retired to his suburban villa at Bennett's Hill, where he was not long safe, but his son remained on the spot, and did all he could to buy off the mob, and save the property, but in vain.

From his house at Bennett's Hill, William Hutton saw Bordesley Hall, the mansion of Mr Taylor, in full flames; and, about four o'clock of the morning, now the 16th, arrived the mob at Bennett's Hill. The attempts to burn down his house in the town had been prevented by the tradesmen, who feared for their own adjoining ones, and who beat off the rabble; but at the villa they were more successful. They broke up the furniture, piled it into heaps, and thus set fire to and burnt down this pleasant mansion, with its coach-house and stables. Whilst these were burning, the mob employed themselves in laying waste his gardens and shrubberies, cutting down his trees, which the old man had carried to the spot on his back, and planted with his own hands, and trampling on the ornamental grounds which he had laid out with love. Amongst the devastators were throngs of women, swearing that they would not do their work by halves, and they left the place a desert. They then adjourned to another country-house belonging to Mr. John Taylor, Moseley Hall, inhabited by lady Carhampton, the mother of the duchess of Cumberland, a lady very old and blind. To show that their vengeance was intended for the dissenter, John Taylor, and not for the titled lady, they allowed her to have her furniture removed; and then they burnt down the house, as they had done Bordesley Hall and the villa at Bennett's Hill. They attacked two other houses at Moseley Wake Green, and pillaged them, burnt the house of Mr. William Russell, a rich dissenter at Showel Green, and plundered and damaged the houses of Mr. George Humphries, of Mr. Coates, another unitarian minister, of the presbyterian minister on Balsarr Heath, of a Baptist minister, &c.

During these disgraceful days, the church-and-king party took no measures to prevent the destruction of the property of dissenters. Noblemen, gentlemen, and magistrates rode in from the country, on pretence of doing their Hutton had been on friendly terms with all parties, and duty, but they did little but sit and drink their wine, and the preachers of both church and chapel were often to be enjoy the mischief. They could have called out the militia found at his house. So far was he from sympathising with at once, and the mob would have been scattered like leaves Priestley's controversial zeal, that he says, in his Autobio- before the wind; but they preferred to report the outbreak graphy, that the ardent desire of making proselytes had been to the secretary-at-war, and, after the time thus lost, three the bane of the world; and that, if Dr. Priestley chose to troops of the 15th light dragoons, lying at Nottingham, furnish the world with candles, it certainly conferred a lustre were ordered to march thither, which, though they 1ode on him, but there was no necessity to oblige every man to thither, fifty-nine miles in one day, to the great damage of carry one; that it was the privilege of an Englishman to their horses, did not arrive till the evening of Sunday, the walk in darkness, if he chose. Yet the mob broke into his 17th, this frightful state of things having lasted five days. warehouse, and demanded money; he gave them all he had, The magistrates, meantime, had contented themselves with but they insisted on more, and began to carry off his goods issuing very gentle proclamations, in the blandest terms, and break his windows. He then borrowed more money telling the rioters, whom they styled "friends and brother from his neighbours; but, when the mob had that, they churchmen," that they had done enough; that these demanded drink, dragged him away to a public-house, and "gentlemen of the church-and-king party, the real true ran up a score, in his name, of three hundred and twenty- | blue," would, by any further violent proceedings, more

offend their king and country than serve the cause of him and the church. They mildly assured them that the losses already sustained would not have to be ultimately borne by the individuals victimised, but by the county at large; that the damages would at least amount to one hundred thousand pounds, which "the rest of the friends of the church would have to pay." The whole of their language tacitly admitted that these drunken demons had really been doing acceptable work for the king and country. No riot act was read, and even the services of two recruiting parties in the town, which were offered, and would soon have protected property, were rejected.

On the Sunday, many of the rioters had drunken themselves into sheer stupidity. Mr. Hutton now venturing to return from Tamworth, to which town he had fled, found the high road and fields scattered with them, like the dead of an army. Others, however, were still in full activity, and, in their inebriated fury, were mistaking the houses of good churchmen for those of dissenters. They were in the act of breaking into the house of Dr. Withering, at some distance from the town, when the light dragoons arrived. Other parties were ranging about at greater distances; they burnt down the dissenting chapel and the minister's house at Wharstock; at King's Wood, they burnt the meeting-house, and so far had they now lost their nicety of distinction, that they there burnt the church parsonage too. In the parish of King's Norton, a manor belonging to the king they professed to be serving, they destroyed nine houses. Other parties were reported to be up in the country, especially towards Hagley and Hales-Owen. The colliers of Wednesbury were out, and were pouring in to Birmingham to join in the plunder. But the arrival of the light dragoons showed what might have been done at first, if the magistrates had been so minded. The mob did not stay even to look at the soldiers; at their very name they vanished, and Birmingham, on Monday morning, was as quiet as a tomb. Government itself took a most indifferent leisure in the matter. It did not issue a proclamation from the secretary of state's office till the 29th, when it offered one hundred pounds for the discovery and apprehension of one of the chief ringleaders!

At the ensuing assizes in August, those rioters who had been apprehended were tried; some for participating in the outrages near Birmingham, at Worcester, where, however, only one was committed. Of those tried at Warwick, on the 25th of that month, four received sentence of death. Of these five rioters condemned, only three actually suffered; two received his majesty's pardon. The sufferers by this riot thought the penalty much too trivial. Hutton tells us that the solicitor of the treasury, who was sent down to conduct the trial, very civilly showed him the list of the jury men summoned, and told him he and his friend might select any twelve men from it that they chose; but, on looking it over, he found them all church-and-king tories to a man, and returned the paper, saying, "They are all of a sort; you may take what you please."

Such, indeed, was the state of public feeling in and around Birmingham, that the sufferers in the riots were regard d as men seeking the lives of innocent men, who had only shown their loyalty to church and king. They were

declared to be no better than selfish murderers. Whilst they attended at the assizes, their lives scarcely seemed safe. They were publicly abused in the streets, or wherever they appeared, menaced and cursed. In the very assize-hali there were persons who, on seeing Priestley, cried, "Damn him! there is the cause of all the mischief!" He was followed in the streets, especially by an attorney, who cursed him furiously, and wished he had been burned with his house and books. The favourite toast of the church-andking party was, "May every revolutionary dinner be followed by a hot supper!" and sermons were preached of the most rampant kind, in which all the old passive obedience and non-resistance principles were revived, as if the days of the Stuarts and Sacheverel were come back.

The damages awarded to the sufferers were, in most cases, far below their real amount. Hutton was a heavy loser; Priestley received three thousand and ninety-eight pounds, but he complained that this was two thousand pounds short of the extent of his loss. But this deficiency was made up by the contributions of many sympathising friends. His brother-in-law settled on him an annuity of two hundred pounds a-year, and made over to him ten thousand pounds invested in the French funds-a very doubtful security, notwithstanding the doctor's admiration of French principles. Priestley became, through this persecution, the central object of two violently-opposed parties. On one hand, he was regarded as a martyr by those of his own religious and political views. Addresses poured in upon him filled with terms of the warmest condolence and admiration. There were addresses from the committee of deputies at Birmingham; from the members of his own congregation at the new meeting-house; from the young people belonging to it; from the congregation of Mill Hill, Leeds, where he had once officiated, and from many other places. But those which gratified him most were from the Philosophical Society, at Derby, of which Dr. Darwin was president, and from the Academy of Sciences, in Paris, the address of which was written by Condorcet. In this he was termed their "most illustrious associate," and he was treated as a great and dauntless opposer of the tyranny of kings and aristocrats. The address of the Academy of Sciences was speedily followed by similar ones from almost all parts of France; from the jacobins of Nantes, of Lyons, of Marmande, on the Garonne, of Clermont, in Auvergne, of Toulouse, and from the great mother-club of the Rue St. Honoré, in Paris. When the national convention met, one of its first acts was to name him a citizen of the French republic. The revolutionary societies in London and the provincial towns were equally enthusiastic in hailing the great martyr of Birmingham in most eulogistic addresses.

These, on the other hand, inflamed all the more the hatred of the rampant church-and-king party; and the most bitter philippics were fulminated against him. Even the methodists, who were always very loyal, and always professed themselves part of the church, took up the cry against him. He was accused of having said that he would never rest till he had pulled down Jesus Christ, as his admirers in France had done. It was natural that the Birmingham patriot should feel complimented by the vas. importance into which he was raised, but it is difficult to

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imagine, at this time of day, how far even persecution could have blinded him to the real character of the French revolution. We find him writing, "How different are the spectacles that are now exhibited in France and in England! Here bigotry has been potent, and has acquired new strength. There it is almost extinct. Here the friends of the establishment are burning the meeting-houses of the dissenters with all the rage of crusaders; while in Paris one of the churches has been obtained by the protestants. It was opened by one of their ministers to a crowded audience, among whom were many catholics, all in tears of joy for the happy change. The preacher's text was, 'The night is far spent; the day is at hand.' Here we must rather preach from Isaiah lx. 2: 'Behold, darkness shall cover the land, gross darkness the people.'”

and

The ignorance and bigotry of the English populace, and the gross bigotry of the church-and-king party in this country, were disgraceful enough, but they stopped short of blood. The intolerance of the French mob had already made many sanguinary exhibitions, and was on the eve of making many more. The French legislators, though they could melt into momentary fits of weeping sentiment, held their king with an iron grasp, that was far from an example of generous liberality; and everything portended a night of terrors, instead of a joyful morning - portended this in symptoms so unequivocal that they did not require the prescience of a Burke to perceive them.

Priestley quitted Birmingham and its bigotry, and became the successor of his deceased friend, Dr. Price, at Hackney: there he did not find it much better. His opinions were not acceptable to the learned and scientific in London, especially to the members of the Royal Society, who shunned him. He determined, therefore, to quit England, and take up his residence in America, where he expected more sympathy. In this, however, he was deceived. He found very little religious sentiment in the States; and few, especially, were inclined to his ultra-unitarian notions. His enthusiasm for France and French democracy were as little responded to. The Americans had won their independence, and the democratic ardour had subsided. France had shed its blood and spent its money for their enfranchisement, when France had really no money to spare; but all this seemed already forgotten, and Priestley was regarded as a spy in the interest of France. "The change," he wrote, in a letter dated September, 1798, "that has taken place is, indeed, hardly credible, as I have done nothing to provoke resentment; but being a citizen of France, and a friend to that revolution, is sufficient. I asked one of the more moderate party whether he thought if Dr. Price, the great friend of their own revolution, was alive, he now would be allowed to come into this country. He said, he believed he would not." Priestley's latter years were thus darkened: he lost his wife in 1796, as well as his youngest son; his own health soon after failed, and he died in 1804; expressing, on his death-bed, his satisfaction in the consciousness of having led a useful life, his confidence in a future state and a happy immortality. An éloge was read by Cuvier before the National Institute, on the news of his death reaching Paris. Whilst these things had been passing in England, the revolution in France had made great strides. The assembly

having passed the decree that the clergy should take an oath, serment civique, binding them to obey the civil constitution in all things, proceeded on the 2nd of January of this year to enforce it. A violent discussion took place. The bishops, and vast numbers of the curés, refused to take the oath. The bishops contended that the assembly, in abolishing the old provinces and re-adjusting the country in departments, had no right to interfere with the ancient boundaries of the bishoprics. The bishop of Clermont proposed a clause being introduced into the oath expressly exempting the clergy from swearing to obey the civil power in spiritual matters; but, though the assembly declared that it was not interfering with spirituals, it would not consent to this, and passed an order that the bishops and clergy should take the oath pure and simple. Four bishops only took the oath, of whom were Lomenie de Brienne, archbishop of Sens, and Talleyrand; all the rest, one hundred and thirty-two in number, refused, as well as about eighty thousand curés, and other ecclesiastics, professors in colleges, teachers in schools, and other functionaries. The abbé Georgel asserts that not above one in ten of the priests would abandon what he believed to be his conscientious duty to the church, and take the serment civique. Amongst the abbes who took the oath were Gregoire, who became bishop of Blois; Lindet, who became bishop of Evreuse; Gouttes, one of the fiercest democrats in the assembly, who soon succeeded Talleyrand as bishop of Autun; and Lamourette, who, though he had written "Meditations of the Soul with its God," was not supposed to be very strict in his religious notions. The bishops being elected, it was necessary that they should be consecrated, but here arose a difficulty. It had always been considered necessary that bishops should be consecrated by a metropolitan or archbishop; and of these, only one, Brienne, had taken the oath; and this man, who had scraped together, during his premiership, an enormous fortune by the most unscrupulous means, but was not by any means satiated with wealth or dignity, demanded that, in reward for this service, he should be made primate of the new-modelled church. The assembly, which did not contemplate any such dignity, refused, and decreed that the services of a metropolitan were not at all necessary, but that any bishop who had taken the oath might consecrate the newly elected ones; for every district elected under this arrangement its own bishop and curés. Talleyrand was selected to perform this function, and, as he had no fancy for making a laborious journey into every quarter of France for this purpose, he ordered them all to attend in Paris; and there, having a tricoloured sash over his canonicals, and the bishops elect the same, he consecrated them, and sent them down to their new dioceses to ordain the curés who had sworn. The whole matter was carried through in good earnest. The bishops were installed in their cathedrals and their palaces, and the curés in their parishes, by detachments of national guards. Once installed, they issued pastoral letters, and, in their sermons, praised the national assembly, and represented its proceedings as inspired by God.

But it is not to be supposed that the ejected prelates and curés submitted to all this without resistance. They were all in motion to agitate the people, and raise a party amongst them to maintain them in their livings, or to

A.D. 1791.]

ESCAPE OF THE KING'S AUNTS.

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restore them when ejected. They hawked about pamphlets the guards at defiance, and insulted and abused those who from house to house; they entreated, conjured, threatened. | persisted in going there. This was probably the church To some they represented the clergy triumphant, the which Dr. Priestley averred that the dissenters had obtained, assembly dissolved, the prevaricating ecclesiastics stripped citing it as a brilliant example of French toleration. of their benefices, and confined in their houses of correction; the faithful ones covered with glory and loaded with wreaths. The pope was about to launch his anathemas at a sacrilegious assembly, and at the apostate priests. The people, deprived of the sacraments, would rise; the foreign powers would enter France; and that structure of iniquity and villany would crumble to pieces. And, indeed, the pope soon issued his anathema against the innovation.

The two aunts of the king, who were aged and pious women, were not only alarmed at the position of things in France, but they were horrified at this desecration of the church, and were anxious to get out of the country, and take up their residence at Rome, near the head of their religion. They knew that the king and the rest of the royal family were actually contemplating a similar flight, and they, therefore, applied to Louis for passports, and proposed to take along with them Madame Elizabeth, the king's sister. Elizabeth, however, was too devoted to the interests of her brother and his family to quit him, and Louis, thinking that his own passports would avail little in protection of the old ladies, applied to Bailly for municipal passports. Bailly refused, and such was the alarm at the idea of the aged princesses quitting France, that Bailly and a deputation hastened to the king, and represented to him the agitation amongst the people of Paris, and the necessity of calming it by forbidding their departure. The city was filled by the most extravagant rumours. The jacobins declared that some of them had lately reconnoitred Versailles, the Trianon, and the Belle-Vue, the residences of the princesses, and that they had found things all in readiness for a general flight. In the stables at Versailles, they said, they found seven hundred horses all saddled and bridled, and prepared for an instant command; royal portmanteaus and imperials packed, and the royal arms erased from the The king's carriages. They declared that they had positive information that the count d'Artois and the emperor Leopold, the king's brother, were on the frontiers, waiting to receive the king, and then march into France with Louis at their head. The jacobin journals sounded a loud alarm. Marat, never backward in publishing the most daring lies, on the 14th of February, in his L'Ami du Peuple, exclaimed, "These aunts of the king are playing the devil to get away. It would be excessively imprudent to let them. In spite of all that has been said by imbecile journalists, these women are not free. We are at war with the enemies of the revolution; we must keep these old nuns as hostages, and triple our guard over the rest of the family. It is of the greatest importance that a circular letter be immediately written to all the municipalities to stop them. Citizens! remember that these king's aunts are going to leave behind them debts to the amount of three millions of livres, and to carry with them twelve millions in gold. They are going to carry off the dauphin, and there will be hoisted up in the Tuileries a little boy, of the same age and appearance, who has been in training these eighteen months, for the express purpose of deceiving the public."

The assembly had decreed that the new bishops should not apply to the pope for his bull of recognition of their new appointments; but it permitted them, on the recommendation of Cannes, to send a formal letter to the holy see, announcing the fact, recognising the papacy as the centre of catholic unity, and demanding its sanction. To prevent the effect of an adverse reply, the assembly interdicted all appeals to Rome without the authorisation of itself, and declared that all bulls, briefs, or rescripts coming from Rome without such authorisation, were null and void. But the expelled clergy had sent a vehement appeal to Rome against their ejection; and the pope, in "a doctrinal answer," had promptly replied that the serment civique was impious; that the whole of the new civil constitution of the clergy was heretical and destructive of the authority of the church; that the new jurisdictions and appointments were utterly out of order, and the consecrations by the bishop of Autun sacrilegious. The ejected bishops printed this doctrinal answer, and circulated it throughout their dioceses. national assembly ordered the suppression of this document, under the severest penalties against all such as dared to circulate it. The interdicted clergy declared that the pope was in the hands of the emperor of Austria, and that these were not his real sentiments; but the doctrinal letter was not without effect. A considerable number of country curés, on reading it, declared that they had been deceived, and retracted the oath they had taken. On a proposition of Mirabeau's, it was decreed that all such priests as took the oath, and then abjured it, should be treated as traitors, and deprived of their curés; and, accordingly, they were seized by the municipalities and thrown into prison. This occasioned a fresh rush of emigration, and the ejected bishops, abbés, and curés were soon scattered all over Europe, many of them came to England, seeking their bread by teaching their language. In La Vendee, in some of the southern departments, and remote districts, where the old church and royalist notions prevailed, the people resisted the new law and the soldiers, and maintained their pastors in their pulpits, where they continued to declaim fiercely against the sworn clergy as heretical intruders, and to maintain the good old cause of monarchy. Even in Paris the ejected clergy obtained the church of the Theatin monks, which order, like all the rest, had been suppressed; and those priests who had not taken the oaths officiated. This excited the jacobin club and the mob, who looked on all unsworn priests as rank rebels; and, though the assembly assented to this use of the Theatin church, and granted a guard of militia to protect the worshippers, they broke in, setting

Roused to fury by these bold invectives, all the patriotesses of Versailles, Sèvres, Meudin, and that neighbourhood, turned out and besieged Belle-Vue, the residence of the royal aunts, night and day. The patriots and patriotesses of Paris were all in agitation too, and every means were adopted for stopping these ladies on their journey, by sending information for their arrest all along their route to Lyons, and from Lyons to the frontiers.

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