I

In May 1794 John Thelwall was arrested on suspicion of high treason, imprisoned until December and put on trial at the Old Bailey. The chief crime alleged against him was that, together with other members of the London Corresponding Society and Society for Constitutional Information who were also arrested, he had participated in the meetings of a committee aiming to organize a convention intended to achieve a reform in parliament – by universal manhood suffrage, annual parliaments, and (so the prosecution claimed, on the flimsiest of evidence) the abolition of the House of Lords. According to the law officers of the crown, who conducted the prosecution, the committee was to have claimed to be a convention of delegates of the whole people, and far more representative therefore than the corruptly elected House of Commons. On the basis of this claim it would either have announced that it had superseded parliament, or, by its strength of numbers, would have sought to ‘overawe’ parliament into agreeing to a reform.

The leaders of the reform societies themselves gave a different and altogether more plausible account of what they were trying to do. Under interrogation they could be vague about it, no doubt aware that to specify the convention as having any particular aim would lay themselves open to a charge of some sort. Thus Thomas Hardy, secretary of the LCS, told the Privy Council that the aim of the convention was ‘to inform the Nation of the necessity of a Parliamentary Reform, and then the business will do itself; though I do not exactly know how’. In other examinations by the council, and in various publications of the society, its members explained that they planned to call a convention of delegates not of the whole nation, but of reform societies from around Britain, in order to confer on the possibility of summoning a further convention which could truly claim to represent the people at large and not just the societies themselves.