ight--afterwards the revered, but rather tiresome, patriarch of
the Radicals--was called the 'father.' Horne Tooke (as he was now
named), by these and other exhibitions of boundless pugnacity, became a
leader among the middle-class Whigs, who found their main support among
London citizens, such as Beckford, Troutbeck and Oliver; supported them
in his later days; and after the American war, preferred Pitt, as an
advocate of parliamentary reform, to Fox, the favourite of the
aristocratic Whigs. He denounced the Fox coalition ministry, and in
later years opposed Fox at Westminster. The 'Society for Constitutional
Information' was still extant in the revolutionary period, and Tooke, a
bluff, jovial companion, who had by this time got rid of his clerical
character, often took the chair at the taverns where they met to talk
sound politics over their port. The revolution infused new spirit into
politics. In March 1791[128] Tooke's society passed a vote of thanks to
Paine for the first part of his _Rights of Man_. Next year Thomas Hardy,
a radical shoemaker, started a 'Corresponding Society.' Others sprang up
throughout the country, especially in the manufacturing towns.[129]
These societies took Paine for their oracle, and circulated his writings
as their manifesto. They communicated occasionally with Horne Tooke's
society, which more or less sympathised with them. The Whigs of the
upper sphere started the 'Friends of the People' in April 1792, in order
to direct the discontent into safer channels. Grey, Sheridan and Erskine
were members; Fox sympathised but declined to join; Mackintosh was
secretary; and Sir Philip Francis drew up the opening address, citing
the authority of Pitt and Blackstone, and declaring that the society
wished 'not to change but to restore.'[130] It remonstrated cautiously
with the other societies, and only excited their distrust. Grey, as its
representative, made a motion for parliamentary reform which was
rejected (May 1793) by two hundred and eighty-two to forty-one. Later
motions in May 1797 and April 1800 showed that, for the present,
parliamentary reform was out of the question. Meanwhile the English
Jacobins got up a 'convention' which met at Edinburgh at the end of
1793. The very name was alarming: the leaders were tried and
transported; the cruelty of the sentences and the severity of the
judges, especially Braxfield, shocked such men as Parr and Jeffrey, and
unsuccessful appeals for mercy were m