The great storm which swept over southern England on the night of 15–16 October 1987 prompts a reflection on parallels between natural and political events, which have a certain bearing on the present theme. Everywhere that wind of hurricane force wrought destruction among the trees in the southern English countryside. Yet there were some which survived. They withstood the gale because of some inner toughness, strength of root, integrity of fibre, health of timber, absence of areas of rot and weakness – rot and weakness which, in less fortunate specimens, manifested themselves in wind-torn branches broken clean off the stem, or the whole tree wrenched from its roots and thrown to the ground. Without too much straining of metaphor, we may think in these terms of France and Britain in the early 1790s. The weaknesses, the internal divisions, the bottled-up discontents of French society led from 1789 onwards to revolutionary disruption. Britain on the other hand, though not without some areas of dissonance, nevertheless had the tensile strength to remain largely impervious to the storm of revolution. The purpose of this chapter is to outline in summary terms what seem to have been the salient elements of that power of resistance.

Late eighteenth-century British society comprised an enormous range of groups of differing social and economic status, from the common labourer at the bottom of the pile, whose wage might be no more than six to eight shillings a week, insufficient to support a family, to the wealthiest of the landed aristocracy with incomes of £30,000 to £40,000 a year.