Introduction: Enlightenment and Revolution: A British Problematic
Summary
1794 was a difficult year for the Hurdy Gurdy. He was on trial, accused of ninety-three counts of sedition. The principal charge of which was the playing of the tune, ‘Ça Ira’, which the judge pronounced
one of the most flagitious expressions of disloyalty and disaffections – one of the most dangerous attempts to provoke and excite the people to the acts of force and violence, and to overturn the constitution and to promote anarchy and rebellion, I will not scruple to say, the most so that ever I have known.
Given this view – and the testimony of the French Horn to the effect that ‘this instrument has played this tune day after day, through the streets of this metropolis’ – chances of an acquittal were slim. Despite the assertion of the French Horn that the Hurdy Gurdy had sung a variety of seditious songs, such as ‘Go George, I can't endure you’ and ‘The Modes of Court’, the defence refused to answer to the charges, for ‘although there may be a libel without writing, as by words, signs or pictures, Yet there is no law to make mere musical sounds libellous’. However, the prosecutor, the Attorney General, deemed it the necessary task of the jury to
stand forward boldly and honestly, to defend the constitution against Hurdy Gurdy; and by a firm and upright verdict, to check the career of fanatic delusion, set on by diabolic malignity, which if suffered to go one jot further will burst the bounds of all legal and social restraint, and overwhelm the British Empire, the glory of the world, in blood and desolation, and envelope in worse than Egyptian darkness or Egyptian bondage, you and your posterity forever.
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- Information
- Cultures of Radicalism in Britain and Ireland , pp. 1 - 24Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014