Treason and Imagination: The Anxiety of Legitimacy in the Subject of the 1760s

Abstract

Imagining the king’s death: figurative treason, fantasies of regicide (1793–1796) (2000), John Barrell examines in detail the paranoid reaction to political dissent that the French Revolution provoked among supporters of George III. Through close attention to the treason trials of that period he demonstrates that the suspicions of the monarchy extended deep into the imaginative life of the king’s subjects and, in treason cases, led to intense scrutiny of the private thoughts and fantasies of defendants. In doing so, Barrell draws attention to the increasingly pejorative connotations that attached to the term ‘imagination’ in the English law courts of the1790s. He shows that by the middle of the decade the fears of the ruling class were so intense that the mere act of ‘imagining’ the death of the king was treated with the same severity as more concrete and genuinely threatening acts of treason. Yet, anxiety over purely imaginative acts of ‘treason’ in England did not begin with the revolution of 1789: rather, as I seek to show, such fears have a notable literary history. As E.P. Thompson has argued, ‘Too often events in England in the 1790s are seen only as a reflected glow from the storming of the Bastille’, but ‘the elements precipitated by the French example-the Dissenting and libertarian traditions-reach far back into English history’. According to Thompson, the effect of these schools of thought, particularly in the period after 1780, was to produce ‘a new notion of democracy, which cast aside ancient inhibitions and trusted to self-activating and selforganizing processes among the common people’ (24). In line with Thompson’s view, in this article I reach further ‘back’ than some commentators in finding the emergence of a self-grounding, proto-democratic subject in key canonical texts of the 1760s. This ‘selfactivating’ subject, to use Thompson’s term, finds it increasingly difficult to disguise its suspicion of monarchy and the extent to which this central, hereditary power constrains its personal liberty and freedom of expression. Yet, the corollary of the concern with independence and autonomy that it demonstrates is an anxious questioning of its own desires and, in particular, a disturbing suspicion that its wish for greater liberty is inherently treasonous and illegitimate. It would seem that, at this pivotal moment in modern history, the conceptual apparatus was lacking to conceive of a democratic subject without attributing to it the absolute rights and power of monarchy and, hence, verging on treason, by ‘imagining’ the death of the existing king. The average citizen therefore experienced considerable inner turmoil in making the transition between what Thompson calls ‘an anti-absolutist’, ‘with few affirmative rights’ (87), to ‘the free-born citizen challenging King and Ministers and claiming Benjamin Bird