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Book Reviews
To his friends he was affectionately admired in later life as the “Wizard of Wimbledon”; to his political enemies he was loathed and feared as a subversive, a rabble-rouser, a threat to the status quo in Britain which was progressively strained by the American and French revolutions during the late eighteenth century. John Horne Tooke was the gentleman radical that the title of this book describes him as, but the positive credence he received as a gentleman was negatively balanced by the contempt he endured as a radical reformer. It was a bitter-sweet reality which characterised the greater part of Horne Tooke’s career, but it was not the only contrast of this man’s amazing life. Indeed, Horne Tooke lived a life filled with contradictions and ironies. As a young boy he was a regular play friend of the future King George III; in 1794 he was tried for high treason and suspected of encompassing or imagining the king’s death. Still later he was a supporter of the Despard conspirators who were found guilty of plotting the assassination of George III. As a young man Horne Tooke was ordained a priest, but in his final days he proclaimed no belief in an afterlife and refused visits by the clergy to his death bed. While his early adulthood was occupied with religious duties, Horne Tooke’s continuing ambition from a young age was to become a lawyer, yet his only taste of legal practice came at his own trials. Even more ironic is the fact that Horne Tooke devoted most of his life to the burgeoning campaign for parliamentary reform, but his one and only opportunity to sit in parliament came as the representative for the rotten borough of Old Sarum. In the end, Horne Tooke had lived a long and distinguished life of seventy-five years, yet he suffered for many years from the infirmities which gradually made him a prisoner in his own body and which saw him die a less than dignified death.
Horne Tooke’s career is nothing short of fascinating and would be apt for cinematic adaptation. His life intersected with many of the major figures of British literary and political history, and he is perhaps best remembered as the only person tried in Britain as a supporter of the colonists during the American Revolution and for his victimisation as part of the so-called “reign of terror” that led to the infamous treason trials in 1794. However, unlike some other leading radical contemporaries whose lives are equally intriguing and important, Horne Tooke’s biography has been captured several times over in works like Alexander Stephens’
Memoirs of John Horne Tooke (1813), J.A. Graham’s work of the same name published in New York in 1828, and I.M. Yarborough’s John Horne Tooke (1926). In many respects Stephens’
Memoirs, with the author’s personal knowledge of Horne Tooke and access to contemporary reminiscences, remains the most definitive biography. Yet for many students and scholars it is inaccessible on account of its age and fragility. This modern account of Horne Tooke’s life by Christina and David Bewley, which borrows noticeably from the structure of Stephens’ work, makes accessible once more the wonders of the “Wizard of Wimbledon”. In being categorical rather than polemical it is fair to say that the biographies of Horne Tooke so far produced owe a real debt to Stephens and Gentleman Radical reveals little if anything new and it lacks many of the anecdotal references of its earlier model.
Christina Bewley, who also wrote a biography of the radical Scottish Martyr, Thomas Muir, began Gentleman Radical but died before its completion and the book was finished by her husband, David Bewley, who is not a historian and worked as a researcher for the Medical Research Council. Christina’s death, I suspect, is the cause of some minor criticisms with the volume, including the fact that the narrative is in part disjointed and reads like a second author has tried grappling with a topic that is not completely familiar. While there is some merit in reproducing a modern biography of Horne Tooke, the book could have made a more distinct contribution to the historiography of the period by taking a thematic and interpretative approach to Horne Tooke’s career. The one chapter, dealing with the Diversions of Purley, which goes some way towards analysing Horne Tooke’s career and influence seems the least convincing and in many respects out of place. Having said this, however, the straightforward narrative approach can be seen as much as a weakness as it can be seen a strength of the book. Gentleman Radical is an enjoyable read. For those readers with only a limited knowledge of the period the life of John Horne Tooke will be spellbinding and thought-provoking. For scholars this book is grist to the mill and hopefully a stimulus to pursue some of the many important and informative biographies of Horne Tooke’s radical contemporaries that remain to be explored.
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