A Utopian Tory Revolutionary at Cambridge: The Political Ideas and Schemes of James Bernard, 1834–1839

Abstract

Agricultural distress following the Napoleonic wars evoked various responses from those classes whose interests were most immediately bound up with the land. Such factors as decreasing market prices and hence wages, a falling standard of living, and rising indebtedness incited, on the one hand, the disciples of Captain Swing to attempt to restore to the agricutural labourer his dispossessed inheritance, or at least to register protest at its loss. For the landowners and farmers, on the other hand, constitutional means of redress were clearly more acceptable, and between 1815 and 1845 there were several attempts to develop a protectionist organization of farmers’ associations, led, particularly in the early years, by George Webb Hall, and in the latter often associated with Lord Chandos.