Mark Coleman Wallace PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

element in the government’s reaction to domestic radicalism which was,
according to O’Gorman, its “use of Parliament and parliamentary enactments.” 83
As Britain was quickly becoming a refuge for French exiles seeking to
escape the revolution, the Alien Act of 1793 delayed the entry of all foreigners
into the United Kingdom until they were issued a passport. 84 Two years later,
following the suspension of habeas corpus in 1795, 85 the government passed
the Treasonable and Seditious Meetings Acts, collectively referred to as the
Gagging Acts. As Fry maintains, Dundas made a “particular fuss about the
Treason and Sedition Bills of 1795, introduced to clear up the legal
controversies arising from the recent trials by declaring such offences indeed to
be criminal in Scotland, just in case they were not so already.” 86 The
Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act defined as treason any
compassings, imaginations, inventions, devices, or intentions which
might be published, printed or written and which might endeavour by
force or constraint, to compel him or them to change his or their
measures or counsels, or in order to put any force or constraint upon, or
to intimidate, or overawe, both houses or either house of parliament. 87
Essentially, the Act protected the King, constitution, and government
from defamation. 88 The second of the Two Acts, the Seditious Meetings Act,
“banned meetings of more than fifty people whose object was either to petition
Parliament on or to discuss any alteration of the establishment in church and
83
O’Gorman, “Pitt,” 31-32.
84
Ibid, 29.
85
Ibid. Pitt was more hesitant in his decision to suspend habeas corpus. Duffy writes that
“during the debates on the suspension of habeas corpus in May 1794, he declared that
‘prosecution, in no instance, ought to extend beyond what the real necessity of the case
required,’ Pitt The Younger, 149.
86
Fry, Despotism, 172.
87 O’Gorman, “Pitt,” 32.
88 Wells, Insurrection, 44.
161