Britain and the French Revolution, 1792

Wickham returned to an England enveloped by an unhealthy and strained atmosphere of insecurity and uneasiness, the result of the increasingly appalling news from France. The complacent, disdainful but generally favourable attitude to the revolutionary events across the Channel in 1789 had been slowly evaporating from the early months of 1792, when the first stirrings of popular radicalism in Britain and the impact of the second part of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, published in February and almost immediately officially declared a seditious libel, raised fears of the contagiousness of revolutionary ideas. The vivid warnings and forebodings expressed in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which initially many had regarded as exaggerated and melodramatic – in July 1791 Pitt's close friend George Rose was still ridiculing ‘the Phantoms of Mr. Burke’ – took on a new resonance.

By the spring of 1792 the spectre of revolutionary French ideas rolling across the frontiers began to realign parliamentary allegiances, especially within the opposition Whig party, where the loyalties of Wickham's friends lay. Among the leaders there were long-standing disagreements over such issues as parliamentary reform, the slave trade and the repeal of the religious Test Acts. Burke had already split from the charismatic Charles James Fox; Portland was stolidly resisting the necessity to follow suit. The Whig party's position at this time might be compared with a tug-of-war event. At one end of the rope were the young and ardent appeasers, led by Charles Grey, pulling the party towards a policy of parliamentary reform in the hope of diluting the impact of French revolutionary ideas on Britain. Sharing their sympathy with the French were Fox and his personal followers, although they were less receptive to political reform and were reluctant to pursue a domestic policy that threatened to produce an alliance between the party and the popular radical societies out of doors. From the other end, tugging the rope – and hopefully Portland – towards an aggressive anti-revolution policy were Burke and his mainly aristocratic acolytes (soon to become the ‘Third Party’), especially William Windham, who described Grey's 30 April notice in the House of Commons to foreshadow a motion for parliamentary reform ‘as nothing but the first big drops of that storm, which having already deluged France, is driving fast to this country’.