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The Freiheit Prosecutions, 1881–1882*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Bernard Porter
Bernard Porter
Affiliation:
University of Hull
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Extract

The minor heroes of anarchism have not been much noticed by historians. Johann Most, who was quite a celebrated anarchist in his own time, now lives chiefly in footnotes and in a few passing recollections in the memoirs of more famous contemporaries. His neglect is not altogether surprising. Anarchism must always suffer neglect while it remains (as yet) one of history's minor tributaries, an aberration, a movement with no discernible place in the mainstream of human political development. Anarchists themselves are generally of little intrinsic interest to anyone unless they are notable thinkers, like Kropotkin, or activists, like Malatesta. Johann Most was neither: not a philosopher of any sophistication, nor (so far as is known) a bomb-thrower. He came between the two: an acid-tongued propagandist for the cause of anarchy who advocated the use of violence, by others. As such he is acknowledged to have had a significant influence on the early growth of anarchist movements in Germany, the United States, and in Britain, where he lived from 1878 to 1882. He may however have been more significant for the things that were done to him than for the things he did. Everywhere Most moved he provoked reactions, persecution, imprisonment. It will be argued here that this is where the importance of the English stage of his career lay.

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Articles
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The Historical Journal , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 1980 , pp. 833 - 856
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 There is a biography of Most by Rocker, Rudolf: Johann Most, das Leben eines Rebellen (Berlin, 1924)Google Scholar. This uses Most's own written recollections, which were printed in Freiheit (New York) in the 1900s and in four small volumes of his Memoiren: Erlebtes, Erforschtes und Erdachtes (New York, 1903–1907)Google Scholar: the latter however stopping in 1871. Drahn's, Ernst very brief Johann Most, eine Bio-bibliographie (Berlin, 1925)Google Scholar concentrates on his career before he left Germany in 1878. His American activities after 1882 figure quite largely in books about anarchism in the United States, and in Goldman's, EmmaLiving my life (New York, 1932), vol. 1Google Scholar.

2 The part played by Most in the divisive history of German socialism around the time of Bismarck's Anti-socialist Law is described in Lidtke, Vernon L., The outlawed party: social democracy in Germany 1878–1890 (Princeton, 1966)Google Scholar, passim. His influence in America is discussed in Joll, James, The anarchists (London, 1964), pp. 139–45Google Scholar. Very recently his contribution to the early growth of a native anarchism in Britain has been noted in Quail, John, The slow burning fuse: the lost history of the British anarchists (London, 1978), pp. 11–14Google Scholar.

3 Daily Telegraph, 26 May 1881, p. 6.

4 ‘There flies a new bomb near this time. It falls down at the despot's feet, shatters for him the legs, rips open for him the belly, and causes among the surrounding military and civil cossacks numerous wounds and annihilations…The Emperor…is dragged to his palace, where yet for an hour and a half he is able, amid horrible sufferings, to meditate on his life full of crimes…’: translation in The Times, 26 May 1881, p. 13.

5 Taken from pp. 12–14 of the printed transcript of the trial, of which there are copies in H.O. 144/77/A3385, and in the Harcourt papers (Bodleian Library, Oxford), box 95, fos. 147–86.

6 Ibid. p. 31.

7 Sullivan was only called to the English bar in 1878. His handling of this case, and particularly his cross-examinations, appear to me to have been inept. He was under great mental and physical strain at the time, arising from his parliamentary efforts against the Coercion Bill: see Sullivan, T. D., A. M. Sullivan, a memoir (Dublin, 1885), pp. 145–7Google Scholar. He died soon afterwards, in 1884.

8 Trial transcript, p. 52 (punctuation added). The judge was Lord Chief Justice Coleridge.

9 Most was indicted on two related common law counts, and ten related statute law counts. The common law counts pertained to that special category of libel which embraced the justifying of assassination, and inciting ‘evil disposed persons’ to assassinate. The statute law on which the other indictments rested was 24 & 25 Vict. c. 100 s. 4, which was directed at people who conspired or encouraged other people to murder ‘any Person, whether he be a Subject of Her Majesty or not, and whether he be within the Queen's Dominions or not’.

There was one point of law which Coleridge himself (because Sullivan had not spotted it) reserved to an appeal court. This was the question whether 24 & 25 Vict. c. 100 s. 4 could be interpreted as embracing conspiracies or encouragements to murder which did not specify who exactly was to be murdered, and who was to do the murdering. The appeal court decided that it could: see Law reports, Queen's Bench division, VII (London, 1881), 244–59Google Scholar. If the ruling had gone against the prosecution it would not have affected the verdict, as this rested on the common law charges too; but it would have lightened the sentence.

10 When Kropotkin, visited England in this same year he found that, ‘for one who held advanced socialist opinions, there was no atmosphere to breathe in’: Memoirs of a revolutionist (new edn, New York, 1971), p. 440Google Scholar. Even amongst his own socialist kind, of course, Most was not universally approved of. Marx and Engels, for example (whose Kapital he had abridged for them in the past), regarded his ‘empty shrieking’ as devoid of any true revolutionary content: see Engels to J. P. Becker, 1 April 1880, in Marx, K. and Engels, F., Correspondence 1846–1895 (London, 1934), p. 380Google Scholar.

Every British newspaper deplored the tsar's assassination: although a few hinted that it might have been his own political faults that had driven his assailants to such desperate measures, and one or two, refusing to join in what ‘Gracchus’ in Reynolds's Newspaper (27 March 1881, p. 3) called ‘the stereotyped parrot-cry’ raised everywhere against its expediency, believed it might even do good.

Though there was little sympathy in England for Most's politics, there may have been more for his situation: ‘it must in fairness’, pointed out the Daily News (26 May 1881, p. 5), ‘be remembered that he has had much to endure’; which was enough to lead any man away, said the Englishman (9 July, p. 193), ‘to employ unwise and dangerous language’. The jury shared this sympathy, recommending him to mercy – ‘he being a foreigner, and, perhaps, smarting under some wrong, real or imaginary’ (trial transcript, p. 53); a recommendation which the queen regarded as ‘most absurd’ (to Ponsonby, 25 May: Royal Archives [R.A.] H44/54), and which the judge appears to have taken little notice of.

11 Opposed to the prosecution were the Liberal Daily News, Pall Mall Gazette, Weekly Dispatch, and Weekly Times; the Radical Echo, Englishman, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, Radical, and Reynolds's Newspaper; the Conservative Globe; and the independent Times.

12 The Globe (26 May 1881, p. 1) pointed out that laws did not have to be enforced: ‘It is not always in the public interest to punish crime’; and cf. Pall Mall Gazette, 31 March 1881, p. 1.

13 The Times, 1 April 1881, p. 10; which went on to claim that, however much the German socialists liked to ‘vapour about tyrannicide’, if it ever came to it there was ‘every reason to suppose that they would altogether shrink from murderous action of any kind’.

14 Illustrated Police News, 16 April 1881, p. 2. The front page of this issue has a dramatic engraving of Most's arrest.

15 All the British newspapers contained lengthy translations of the article of 19 March, as part of their trial reports; and at a later trial a newsvendor gave evidence that his own sales of the Freiheit had doubled after Most's arrest (trial of Friedrich Schwelm, 30 June 1882: transcript in the Public Record Office, D.P.P. 4/14, pp. 983–4). An English-language edition of the Freiheit was published for a while during the proceedings, ‘for the express purpose’, said the weekly Radical (23 April 1881, p. 5) ‘of diffusing socialistic knowledge among the people‘.

16 Echo, 1 April 1881, p. 1; and cf. Punch, 9 April 1881, p. 167: ‘Making the Most of It.’

17 ‘…this charge is not meant for me alone, but is an attack against the liberty of the Press in England’: Most's statement after committal on 7 April 1881, from the transcript of the committal proceedings in D.P.P. 4/14, p. 91.

18 Apart from more radical newspapers, the Liberal Pall Mall Gazette also saw the prosecution as a threat to press liberty, to which, it claimed, there should be no limit at all: 26 May 1881, p. 1. Contrast the Conservative weekly England (4 June, p. 9): ‘The Press is free only to do what is right.’

19 Manchester Guardian, 27 May 1881, p. 5.

20 The Times, 1 April 1881, p. 10.

21 See my The refugee question in mid-Victorian politics (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 6Google Scholar.

22 As well as the press, it was in the minds of government ministers too: see for example Granville to Ampthill (private; copy), 13 April 1881: Granville Papers, Public Record Office, P.R.O. 30/29/206; Harcourt to the queen, 28 May 1881: R.A. H44/55.

23 Daily Telegraph, 1 April 1881, p. 5.

24 Newspapers which believed the prosecution might fail included the Daily News (1 April 1881, p. 5), the Echo (1 April, p. 1), the Englishman (9 April, p. 394), Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper (3 April, p. 6), the Pall Mall Gazette (5 April, p. 2), the Radical (30 April, p. 4), Reynolds's Newspaper (10 April, p. 5) and The Times (1 April, p. 10).

25 Papers which had opposed the prosecution but nevertheless welcomed the verdict included the Globe (26 May 1881, p. 1), Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper (3 July, p. 6), and The Times (26 May, p. 11).

26 Weekly Times, 3 April 1881, p. 4; and cf. Reynolds's Newspaper, 3 April 1881, p. 5: ‘An autocratic Government is an incentive to sedition, to rebellion, to conspiracy, to plot, and to murder. It is only in countries where no free expression of public opinion is found that attempts are made to murder the head of the State…’. This opinion was shaken a little later in the year by the shooting of President Garfield.

27 Daily News, 1 April 1881, p. 5.

28 Porter, Refugee question, ch. 7.

29 Daily News, 30 March 1881, p. 5.

30 Cutting from the Observer of 10 April, in Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/124.

31 Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 260, cols. 346–7 (31 March 1881).

32 Reynolds's Newspaper, 10 April 1881, p. 5, and 29 May 1881, pp. 4–5.

33 Englishman, 9 July 1881, p. 183; and cf. the Radical, 2 April 1881, p. 6.

34 For example Daily News, 31 March 1881, p. 5, and Standard, 26 May 1881, p. 5.

35 Daily News, 1 April 1881, p. 5. Cowenhad asked ‘Whetherthe prosecution…had been undertaken…at the request or suggestion of any foreign government’; to which Harcourt's reply was ‘that, as soon as this article came to my knowledge, without any instigation from any foreign Government, I immediately directed it to be laid before the Officers of the Crown’:Hansard 3rd series, vol. 260, col. 347.

36 For example the Radical, 2 April 1881, p. 6.

37 See the Echo, 26 May 1881, p. 2; Weekly Dispatch, 3 July 1881, p. 8. If this was Harcourt's aim, it was successful for a time: the Queen's secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, wrote to him on 13 June 1881 that ‘The Queen observed that you were the only Minister of the present Government that had any determination’: Harcourt papers, box1, fo. 130.

38 Palmer, Roundell, Memorials, part II, Personal and political 1865–1895 (London, 1898), p. 64Google Scholar.

39 In 1870 the government of the day had been all set to prosecute the Turkish émigré paper Hurriyete for an article advocating the assassination of the sultan and his ministers, when the publisher, Tia Bey, jumped bail and absconded abroad. See H.O. 45/9472/A38025.

40 ‘It is singular that this line of argument should be adopted by journals like the Pall Mall Gazettewho were themselves the first to call attention to this odious publication’; Harcourt to the queen, 9 April 1881: R.A. H44/20.

41 England, 4 June 1881, p. 9. Conversely, of course, much of the opposition from the conservative press may have been merely partisan.

42 See for example the Radical, 2 April 1881, p. 6, 16 April, p. 6, 23 April, p. 5 and 30 April, p. 3. The editor of the Radical was F. W. Souter.

43 Evening Standard, 11 April 1881, p. 4; Daily News, 11 April 1881, p. 3.

44 The Radical, however, reported resolutions passed against the prosecution by the executive committee of the National Liberal League (2 April 1881, p. 6), and by the Civil Service Debating Society(14 May, p. 5).

45 Ibid. 2 April 1881, p. 4; and Reynolds' Newspaper, 3 July 1881, p. 5.

46 Harcourt to the queen, 28 May 1881: R.A. H44/55.

47 On 11 April, for example, Ponsonby wrote to Granville that a hint the latter had made to the queen, that she might point out to her royal correspondents abroad the difficulties which would be caused by overt foreign demands on Britain, was ‘scarcely understood yet by H.M.’: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/38.

48 I can find no trace of the opinion which was received on this case from the law officers on 25 or 26 March. It may be one of the many documents which are missing, marked ‘destroyed’, in the Home Office file on the affair (see below, n. 112). It is referred to, however, in Gladstone's cabinet report to the queen of 26 March 1881 (R.A. A53/24: Harvester press microfilm edn, reel 5), from which the phrase about ‘risks and uncertainties’ is taken; and in a letter from Harcourt to Ponsonby of the same date (R.A. H43/99), which explains that the law officers ‘are always somewhat timid’ because of their personal responsibility for the success of such prosecutions.

49 Sir Charles Dilke's diary for 26 March reported that Bright was the only member of the cabinet to oppose the prosecution: to the disgust of Dilke himself, who had expected more ministers, and in particular his friend Chamberlain, to stand out against such a ‘foolish’ proceeding: Dilke papers, British Museum, Add. MS 43924, fo. 45.

Dilke– at this time foreign under-secretary – was himself involved in a minor affaire arising out of the Freiheit case, when on 7 April 1881 he and Thomas Brassey were both accused in the House of Commons by Lord Randolph Churchill – who had it from a journalist called Maltman Barry who had once been an acquaintance of Marx but was now suspected of being a police spy – of having once in the past given a subscription to support the Freiheit (Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 260, cols. 874–7, IO32–3). Dilke's denial of the charge was generally accepted, to the detriment of Churchill, whose ungentlemanly behaviour was widely deplored; but Brassey appears to have made some kind of admission of the truth of the allegation to Barry (see Brassey to Dilke, 18 June 1881: Dilke papers, Add. MS 43911, fo. 248); and Maltman Barry himself continued hounding Dilke, in order to elicit a similar confession from him (see for example Barry to Dilke, 13 June 1881: Dilke papers, Add. MS 43911, fos. 256–7). Karl Marx believed Dilke was lying (see Marx to his daughter Jenny, 11 April 1881, in Marx, and Engels, , Correspondence, pp. 3907ndash;1)Google Scholar; and Dilke later acknowledged that it was possible that he had once given money to Barry for the relief of some socialists (see Jenkins, Roy, Sir Charles Dilke (London, 1958), p. 134n)Google Scholar. Dilke's old republican sympathies will have made him peculiarly vulnerable to charges like this. I have found no evidence of any deeper involvement with the Freiheit or with German social democracy in Dilke's papers: which however are notoriously censored, phrases and whole paragraphs having been cut from letters and diaries with scissors. The excisions are generally assumedto have related to his extra-marital amatory affairs – but some of them are in letters to his wife.

50 Harcourt to Ponsonby, 26 March 1881: R.A. H43/99; Harcourt to the queen, 9 April 1881: R.A. H44/20; and cf. Harcourt in the House of Commons, 31 March 1881, quoted above, n. 35. It is possible that Harcourt did anticipate the respresentations made to him – just.There were references to the Freiheit article in English newspapers on Sunday 20 March, and possibly earlier, for Sunday papers oftenappeared in London the previous evening (see for example Reynolds' Newspaper, 20 March, p. 8). The first royal letter about it (referred to below) probably did not come to Harcourt's notice before the Monday; and Miinster's note (below) was officially communicated to the Home Office on the Wednesday (Granville to Home Office, 23 March 1881: Public Record Office, F.O. 64/999). If Harcourt noticed the article on the Saturday or the Sunday, therefore, there was time for him to have communicatedwiththe law officers before he was prompted. Of that communication however there is no surviving record: so we have to take Harcourt's word for it.

51 The queento Ponsonby, undated; and Ponsonby to Gladstone, 20 March 1881: R.A. H43/69–70. How the queen came to know of it so quickly is uncertain.

52 Münster to Granville, 21 March 1881: F.O. 64/995; and see Granville to Home Office, 23 March: F.O. 64/999.

53 Ampthill (Berlin) to Granville, no. 150, 22 March 1881: F.O. 64/980. This dispatch was received at the Foreign Office on the 28th.

54 Harcourt to the queen, 9 April 1881: R.A. H44/20.

55 See Annual Register 1878, ‘History’, pp. 292 and 294; ‘Chronicle’, pp. 44 and 52.

56 See Cole, G. D. H., A history of socialist thought, vol. II, Marxism and anarchism 1850–1890 (London, 1954)Google Scholar, ch. 12.

57 See Porter, , Refugee question, p. 215Google Scholar.

58 Höhn, R., Die Vaterlandslosen Gesellen: Der Sozialismus im Licht der Geheimberichte der preussischen Polizei 1878–1914 (Cologne, 1964), Band 1, p. 49Google Scholar et passim.

59 Elliot (Vienna) to Granville no. 185, 6 April 1881: F.O. 7/1014.

60 Above, n. 35.

61 Trial transcript, p. 41.

62 For example Granville to Ampthill (Berlin), no. 180, 13 April 1881: F.O. 64/977.

63 Tenterden to A. K. Stephenson (copy), 29 March 1881: F.O. 64/999.

64 See ibid.; and Stephenson to Tenterden, 1 April 1881: F.O. 64/1000. At Most's trial Sullivan remarked on the absence – ‘for some reason best known to themselves’ – of any witnesses from the Foreign Office, who were customary in trials of this nature to prove that Britain and the country attacked in the libel were at peace: trial transcript, pp. 36–7.

It is possible that, for much the same reason, certain libel charges originally preferred against Most were dropped before the trial proper, so as to avoid its being used as a platform for the further vilification of foreign monarchs: which might have been admitted as a proper defence against ordinary libel, and which Most himself threatened after his committal: D.P.P. 4/14, p. 92.

65 See memo, by Granville, 4 April 1881, asking cabinet colleagues what they did with these confidential prints when they had finished with them, and those colleagues' replies: in Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/143.

66 This comment, by the Saturday Review (28 May 1881, p. 688), was typical: ‘We are strong enough in the possession of our liberties to feel secure against any serious menace from socialism in England.’ ‘In depth’ features on the German socialists in the Daily News, 21 March, p. 6, and the World, 6 April, pp. 4–5, found ‘nothing appallingly fierce’ in them.

67 Police records surviving from this period are very selective, and so are not a reliable guide; there is nothing however in Harcourt's or in Gladstone's papers to suggest that it ever occurred to anyone in authority that Most might be a threat to Britain. Similarly, there is no evidence of any government concern about an anarchist conference which was held in London in the summer of the same year.

68 As well as the Mansion House bomb on 16 March, there was an explosion at the Salford infantry barracks on 14 January; a rumoured plot to blow up Windsor castle on 10 February; a fire in Victoria docks on 15 February; an attempt on the militia barracks at Chester on 5 May; an explosion in a police barracks in Liverpool on 16 May; an attempt on Liverpool town hall on 10 June; and a secret consignment of ‘infernal machines’ discovered in Liverpool docks in July: all believed to be of Fenian origin. (Annual Register 1881, passim.)

68 The Times, 18 March 1881, p. 8. On 1 April, the Daily News published a letter from Marx and Engels (p. 6), dismissing an inference which could have been drawn from one widely quoted passage from the Freiheit, that there was a connexion between the German socialists and the Mansion House bomb. The next summer one paper, the Standard (1 July 1882, p. 5), did maintain that ‘the existing agencies for the commission of organised outrage in Ireland have close relations with the Revolutionary Societies of the Continent’, but this was still a very unusual claim to make. This was in spite of the fact that Most's barrister was an Irish nationalist, and another acted later as a spokesman for him in the Commons (below, n. 126), which might have been expected to raise some suspicions – and may indeed possibly indicate some kind of more intimate connexion between the two movements.

70 See Lewis Harcourt's diary for 4 and 15 April: Harcourt papers, doc. 348, pp. 31–2, 41; Daily Chronicle, 1 April 1881, p. 4; Annual Register 1881, ‘Chronicle’, p. 2.

71 Lewis Harcourt's diary for 23 and 25 March: Harcourt papers, doc. 348, pp. 17, 20.

72 Harcourt to Granville, 3 July 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/130 (original emphasis).

73 See Harcourt to Granville, 10 May 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/130.

74 Granville to Gladstone, ?3 June 1881, in Ramm, A. (ed.), The political correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville 1876–1886 (Oxford, 1962), 1, 277–8Google Scholar.

75 Granville to Sir E. Thornton, 24 June 1881: in Part. Papers, 1882, LXXX, 55–6.

76 Thornton to Granville, 27 June 1881: in ibid. pp. 56–7. Blaine's reply was identical to the reply the British government had always given to similar requests made to them in the past: that their devotion to the principle of free speech precluded any preventive action.

77 Harcourt to Granville, 18 June and 3 July 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/130.

78 Dufferin (St Petersburg) to Granville, no. 116, 24 March 1881: F.O. 65/1111.

79 A copy of the circular, dated 22 April, is in F.O. 27/2525; and an ‘aide-memoire’ giving details of the plan, printed in French and dated July, is in the Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/130.

80 Vivian (Berne) to Granville, no. 44, 28 March 1881: copy in F.O. 181/644.

81 In March 1880 the Russian government had asked Britain whether there was a theoretical possibility that Leo Hartmann, who had been responsible for an earlier attempt on the tsar's life, could be extradited; to which Salisbury had replied that there was not, because of the lack of an extradition treaty between the two countries. This stimulated Russia's interest in securing one. See Dufferin to Salisbury no. 136, 16 March 1880: F.O. 65/1079; Salisbury to Dufferin no. 126, 31 March 1880: F.O. 65/1076; and Granville to the queen (draft), 13 April 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O.. 30/29/38.

82 Granville to Wyndham (St Petersburg), no. 222, 21 May 1881: F.O. 65/1109; Wyndham to Granville nos. 276 and 289, 6 and 8 June 1881: F.O. 65/1111.

83 Cabinet memorandum by Granville, 29 April 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/143.

84 There was at this time some uncertainty over whether ‘political crimes’, which were exempted from all Britain's extradition treaties, included political assassination. The queen, for example, was greatly perturbed by the suggestion, which came to her via Prince Woronzow from one of the female conspirators in the St Petersburg plot, that if she had managed to escape to England she would, for this reason, have been safe (Ponsonby to Granville, 9 April 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/38). The lord chancellor gave it as his opinion that political assassination probably was an extraditable offence (Selborne to Granville, 10 April: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/141); but if it had ever been tested in the courts there could have been no certainty of this. The Extradition Act of 1870, which all extradition treaties rested on, had purposely avoiding acting upon a select committee's recommendation to specify political murder as coming within the act, or trying to define a ‘political offence’ at all: see 33 & 34 Vict. c. 52 s. 3; Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 202, col. 302 (16 07 1870)Google Scholar; and Parl. Papers, 1867–8, VII, 136–7. Political assassination remained, of course, an offence indictable in Britain.

85 The British government's objections are detailed in Granville to Ampthill, no. 174, 11 April 1881: F.O. 64/977; and in Granville to Wyndham, no. 188, 10 May: F.O. 65/1108.

86 See Granville to Gladstone, telegram, 11 April 1881: Gladstone papers, British Museum, Add. MS 44173 fo. 38; Granville to Ampthill (Berlin), no. 174, 11 April 1881: F.O. 64/977; Granville to the queen, draft, 13 April 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/38; and Granville to Gladstone, 14 April 1881, printed in Ramm, , Political correspondence, I, 257Google Scholar: ‘it looks as if B[ismarck] wished to create a sore between us & the Russians’.

87 Dilke visited Paris ‘incognito’ on 9 April, and learnt from Gambetta there that France intended to decline the ‘asylum conference’ invitation (Dilke's diary for 9 April: Dilke papers, Add. MS 43924, fo. 46; Dilke to Granville, 9 April: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/121). She kept her word, and helped mollify Russia at the same time by offering her an extradition treaty instead (Lyons to Granville nos. 377 and 378, 25 April 1881: F.O. 27/2492). This – and the Freiheit prosecution – did the trick: ‘As regards the Nihilist Conference’, wrote Ampthill to Granville privately on 7 May, ‘you have successfully nipped it in the bud. France and Italy will hold with us, and Bismarck will advize [sic] Russia to make the most of the French offer to negotiate new extradition Treaties. I doubt his caring for a Conference “à trois” as matters now stand’ (Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/177). When Britain's refusal was eventually communicated to the Russian government on the 10th (above, n. 85), the latter reacted by suggesting an Anglo-Russian extradition treaty instead (Granville to Wyndham no. 222, 21 May 1881: F.O. 65/1109); which was at least negotiable, if unlikely at that time. (One was signed in 1887.)

88 Harcourt to the queen, 9 April 1881: R.A. H44/20.

89 See Wyndham, to Granville, no. 174, ‘confidential’, 27 04 1881Google Scholar: ‘I assured him [Giers] that Her Majesty's Government would do all in their power in accordance with the laws to prevent the commission of such crimes, and I instanced to him as proof of their earnest desire to do so, the proceedings which had been instituted against the “Freiheit” newspaper’: F.O. 65/1111.

90 Harcourt to the queen, 28 May 1881: R.A. H44/55.

91 For example Elliot (Vienna) to Granville no. 185, 6 April 1881: F.O. 7/1014.

92 Ponsonby to Harcourt, copy, 30 May 1881: R.A. H44/57.

93 The Times, 26 May 1881, p. 11. The case may even have extended the 1861 law, to cover ‘public manifestoes’ which were clearly not in the minds of those who had contrived that law – who were thinking of secret and specific incitements to murder: see the Morning Post, 26 May 1881, p. 4. This was one of the points raised in the appeal: see Law Reports, Queen's Bench Division, VII, 249–50.

94 The ‘Mazzini letter-opening affair’ of 1844, when a home secretary had been much criticized for opening Mazzini's letters and communicating information found in them to the Austrian government, was supposed to deter British governments from this kind of activity thereafter: see Smith, F. B., ‘British post office espionage, 1844, in Historical Studies, XIV, no. 54 (Melbourne, 1970)Google Scholar.

95 Harcourt to Granville, 1 April 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/130.

96 Harcourt to the queen, 9 April 1881: ‘Sir William after consultation with Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville directed Mr. Vincent to invite the representatives of the Courts of Berlin Vienna & St. Petersburgh to inspect these papers in order that they might take such measures as they th[ou]ght fit to defeat these criminal plots and it is hoped that the information may enable measures of security to be taken. Sir William need hardly state to Your Majesty that he has imposed upon all persons who have been intrusted with this information injunctions to observe the most careful secrecy as any indication on the subject might have the most injurious consequences’: R.A. H44/20. Granville wrote to the three ambassadors asking to whom this information should be shown (see Granville to Harcourt, 3 April: Harcourt papers, box 84, fo. 73 – which is followed by replies from two of the ambassadors: fos. 75 and 77). A letter from Vincent to Harcourt of 3 May (Harcourt papers, box 100, fo. 30) tends to confirm that the initiative for this act came from the Home Office, and not from the police.

97 Harcourt to Granville, 5 April 1881: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/130.

98 On 5 May Harcourt received a ‘pro memoria’ from the Austrian ambassador, to the effect that the arrests had not derived from the information given to the Austrian authorities from Most's papers, but from ‘independent sources long antecedently [sic] to Most's arrest’ (Harcourt to Granville, draft, 5 May 1881: Harcourt papers, box 84, fo. 89). Vincent was told by the secretary to the Austrian embassy that these sources were ‘a well-known private detective agency in London’ (21 April 1881: Harcourt papers, box 100, fos. 32–3); which appears to conflict with information given to the British ambassador in Vienna by the Austrian police chief, that the information came from Salzburg (Elliot to Granville no. 239, 6 May 1881: F.O. 7/1015). On the basis of the Austrian ‘pro memoria’ Harcourt was able to reply to Cowen, who asked in the House of Commons on 5 May whether there was any truth in press reports of a connexion between the arrests and Most's papers, that they were not connected with it ‘or owing to any information derived from the English Government or the English police’ (Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 260, col. 1840). Some people – for example The Times) – took this as implying that no such information had been given, which of course it did not. Sir Charles Dilke's diary notes that on 10 May he ‘Dined with Howard Vincent the detective: it is clear from his talk to me that Harcourt lied when he said that the Vienna police had not got the information, on which they went in arresting the Socialists, from ours. He told me that the Vienna police had been struck with amazement “at the list of 4,000 names, & at finding that Vienna was mapped-out into sections”’ (Dilke papers, Add. MS 43924, fos. 51–2). Dilke, however, may have been under the same misapprehension that The Times was under; or the Austrian alibi may have been contrived.

99 Trial transcript, pp. 19–20 (evidence of P.C. Henry Ward).

100 Harcourt to A. O. Liddell, 26 March 1881: H.O. 144/77/A3385, item 8a. Harcourt was informed of the meeting by the queen's secretary, who had read of it in the Daily Telegraph. There is a lengthy report of the meeting (at which some English socialists were present) in Reynolds's Newspaper, 27 March, p. 6.

101 Harcourt to Liddell, 26 March 1881: H.O. 144/77/A3385, item 8a.

102 Two notes from Harcourt to Granville of 28 June and 21 July confirm that the ‘Communists and their meetings’ are being ‘carefully watched’: Granville papers, P.R.O. 30/29/130.

103 Vincent to Harcourt, ?October 1882: Harcourt papers, box 100, fo. 186.

104 Issue of 12 August 1882: copy in H.O. 144/77/A3385, item 47. (The same file contains some of Hagen's and von Turnow's reports; others are in the Harcourt papers, box 100.) Hagen was said by Freiheit to be a criminal who had fled from Germany to London, where he had been ‘sentenced to long imprisonment for a vulgar crime’, but then released in order to become a police spy; Turnow was described as ‘a Prussian Junker without money’, who also had had to leave Germany on account of his ‘swindling’ activities – which activities he still carried on while in the British police force. I have not been able to confirm any of this from police archives. Hagen had been in the police for 23 years: see D.P.P. 4/14, p. 85.

When questioned about it in court by defence lawyers anxious to prejudice juries against him by casting him as a police spy, Hagen always denied that he had any special duties among the refugees: see for example the Most trial transcript, p. 23; and D.P.P. 4/14, pp. 937–8, which reports his testimony in May 1882, that ‘Since Most's case the Police so far as I know have had nothing to do with the “Freiheit”’, and that ‘I have no special instructions to look after Social Democrats nor “Freiheit”’. On the latter occasion his statements were certainly false, and indicate perhaps how sensitive this issue was supposed to be.

105 Reynolds's Newspaper, 3 July 1881, p. 2.

106 Rocker, , Most, pp. 129–30Google Scholar.

107 According to Rocker's account, he made ink out of a mixture of cleaning lime and gruel, bartered bread with other prisoners for toilet paper to write on, manufactured a pen out of a needle bound with thread, lay full length on his cell floor in order to hear the warder coming, and bribed prison employees to smuggle the finished articles out: ibid. p. 123.

108 ‘In politics there is no such thing as murder, but only a removal of obstacles. This is the standpoint the Irish have now reached, and good it is for them they have done so’: quoted in The Times, 18 May 1882, p. 11.

109 Vincent to Harcourt, 28 March 1882, notes the increasing vehemence of the Freiheit; and a police report of 8 May 1882 anticipates that ‘in next week's “Freiheit”, special mention will be made’ of the Irish murders: Harcourt papers, box 100, fos. 63, 65–8. The Freiheit in question appeared on 13 May.

110 See Vincent to Harcourt, 16 and 17 May 1882: Harcourt papers, box 100, fos. 81 and 83.

111 Mertens was charged on broadly the same counts as Most – malicious libel justifying assassination, and encouragement to murder under 24 & 25 Vict. c. 100. Schwelm was charged (5 June) only on the former common law count. There is a handwritten transcript of the trials in D.P.P. 4/14; and full reports in The Times, 18 May 1882, p. 11, 25 May, p. 13, 6 June, p. 4, 1 July, p. 14, 2 August, p. 12, and 6 August, p. 9.

112 The Home Office file on the whole Freiheit affair (H.O. 144/77/A3385) is full of gaps, where numerous items are noted as ‘missing’ or ‘destroyed’. One of the biggest gaps is at the beginning, where items documenting the events leading up to the decision to prosecute Most are ‘missing’; another is between 26 October 1881 and 28 August 1882, where ten items have been ‘destroyed’. When were they destroyed? The Departmental Record Officer at the Home Office, Mr H. G. Pearson, believes (from the handwriting of a list of the destroyed items at the front of the file) that it may have been done between the wars, when efforts were made to weed out of old Home Office files documents which were regarded as ‘ephemeral’ or ‘trivial’. The ‘missing’ items, however, clearly disappeared much earlier, and it is possible that they were purposely ‘mislaid’ at or soon after the time of the prosecutions, because they were felt to be embarrassing.

113 See Ampthill to Granville, no. 421, 22 October 1881: F.O. 64/983.

114 A letter from Vincent to Harcourt dated 28 March 1882 implies that he had been ordered to submit to him any articles which ‘directly incite to murder’: Harcourt papers, box 100, fo. 63.

115 Reynolds's Newspaper, 21 May 1882, p. 5 (‘the old dictum that muddy pools are best left unstirred might always be considered with profit’); Daily News, 1 July 1882, p. 5. The Radical, which might have been expected to object, was too taken up at this time with an (unsuccessful) struggle for its own survival.

116 Vincent to Harcourt, 17 May 1882: Harcourt papers, box 100, fo. 83.

117 Rocker, , Most, p. 130Google Scholar.

118 Legal opinion by A. K. Stephenson, 1 April 1881: H.O. 144/77/A3385, item 9.

119 See a broadsheet headed ‘Parteigenossen’, in the Harcourt papers, box 100, fo. 109; and another broadsheet headed ‘Unsere Lage’, in the British Library: which claimed that the arrest of the compositors had the ‘frank intention of making the further appearance of the Freiheit an impossibility’. I have found no evidence of ‘bribery’: but such evidence, if it ever existed, would be unlikely to survive.

120 Sir R. Anderson to Harcourt, 9 June 1882: Harcourt papers, box 105, fo. 6. This box is mainly to do with Irish secret service work, and Anderson's informant presumably was Irish.

121 ‘Unsere Lage’, loc. cit.

122 Rocker, , Most, p. 135Google Scholar.

123 Ibid. p. 131; and see H.O. 144/77/A3385, items 55 et passim.

124 Police report of 31 August 1881: Harcourt papers, box 100, fo. 170.

125 C. S. Murdoch to Maconochie (the prison governor), 25 October 1882, ordering that Most be released early, in H.O. 144/77/A3385, item 52; and Vincent to Harcourt, 28 March 1882: ‘I should not wonder if we had trouble when Most comes out of prison’: Harcourt papers, box 100, fo. 63.

While Most was in prison, he sent Harcourt three very vigorous (and highly descriptive) petitions of complaint about his conditions there, which Harcourt went to some trouble to alleviate (see H.O. 144/77/A3385, items 22, 22a, 24–6, 28, 34, 36). His main request, however, could not be granted: which was to be treated as a political prisoner, a category not recognized in English prisons (see Rocker, , Most, p. 122)Google Scholar.

126 J. G. Biggar, who questioned the home secretary in the House of Commons about the confiscations on 17 November 1882: Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 274, col. 1634.

127 Rocker, , Most, pp. 134–5Google Scholar.

128 The attorney general pointed out in the Commons on 1 April 1881 that it was open to any party who considered himself wronged to sue the police (Hansard, 3rd series, vol. 260, col. 464); but this was perhaps too much to expect. ‘That the printing proprietor, himself a poor labourer’, commented Freiheit, ‘cannot bring an action against the English government for damages over this business, is well known to Mr Harcourt and his gang of criminals at Scotland Yard’ (issue of 28 August 1882: H.O. 144/77/A3385, item 47).

129 See Keller, Lisa, ‘Public order in Victorian London’, Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation 1976Google Scholar, ch. 4.

130 See Trilling, L., ‘The Princess Casamassima’, in Powers, L. H. (ed.), Henry James's major novels: essays in criticism (East Lansing, 1973), pp. 115–16Google Scholar. James himself was out of England during the period of Most's arrest and trial.

131 Such as, for example, the creation of what later became the ‘Special Branch’.