The Unlikely Upshot of Parkinson's Pop-Gun Plot

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n                             You may find this difficult tonimagine but there was once an unpopular Tory government! In the early 1790s,nsome radicals were opposed to the policies of Prime Minister William Pitt thenYounger, and Pitt and his Tories sought to silence dissent by changing the lawn– just imagine a Tory government trying to do that these days. An Act of 1351nhad defined seven offences as high treason – including “imagining the King’sndeath” – crimes that were punishable by hanging, drawing and quartering. 

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nPitt’snadministration passed two new acts, The Treasonable and Seditious PracticesnAct and The Seditious Meetings Act, (known as ‘The Two Acts’) whichnredefined the crime of treason to include, amongst other things, bringing thenCrown, the Constitution or the Government into contempt. One group opposed tonThe Two Acts was the London Corresponding Society for Reform of ParliamentarynRepresentation (LCS), which was in favour of social reforms, includingnextending the franchise to include more working people. The LCS published pamphletsncriticizing the government, an act seen by some as treasonable. One writer ofnthese pamphlets, which included such titles as ‘Revolutions withoutnBloodshed’, was Doctor James Parkinson, who published under the pseudonymnof ‘Old Hubert’. In October 1794, Parkinson was sworn under oath before Pittnand the Privy Council to explain his involvement in a plot to murder the King,nGeorge III. 

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nThis plot, called the Pop-Gun Plot, was, apparently, dreamed up bynradicals who sought to assassinate the monarch and overthrow his government bynshooting him in the neck with a poisoned dart, fired from an air gun. I sayn‘apparently’ as it seems likely that it was, in fact, a rumour circulated bynthe government itself in order to garner popular support for more restrictivenlegislation. Dr Parkinson and four others – John Smith, George Higgins, PaulnThomas Le Maitre and Thomas Upton – all members of the LCS, were suspected ofninvolvement in the Pop-Gun Plot and although the last four mentioned spent timenin gaol, there was insufficient evidence to convict them and they were releasednwithout charge. 

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nPitt’s Tories seemed to have had a thing about the threat posednto the King by air guns, as one was supposedly fired at George III as he wentnto open Parliament on October 29^th 1795, breaking the window of hisncarriage. It was almost certainly broken by either a pebble or marble thrown atnthe carriage, but someone, somewhere, decided an air gun was involved. As thenKing travelled back to the Palace later in the day, his coach was againnattacked by a mob, described as ‘all of the worst and lowest sort,’ who shoutednanti-war slogans and insults at the King, including “No Pitt, No War,nBread, Bread, Peace, Peace!” There were five arrests made,nalthough no trials followed, and there were rumours that the crowd had beennincited by government agents provocateur – again, could you imagine suchnthings happening today?

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nMaybe the threat of seven yearsntransportation (the penalty for sedition) scared Dr Parkinson, as he reined innhis political tendencies and devoted more time to his other passions – medicinenand palæontology.  In line with hisnpolitical affiliations, he wrote The Villager’s Friend and Physician (1804), anwork intended for a popular market that promoted preventative medicine and thatnsold for a shilling. 

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nParkinson was a surgeon rather than a physician, and wrotensome important works describing physical conditions, including a paper on goutn(1805), appendicitis and the effects of perforation as a cause of death (1812)nand an essay on the shaking palsy (1817) – this condition was renamed by thenFrench neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot as Parkinson’s Syndrome some 60 yearsnlater, and it from this that Parkinson’s name is most popularly known today.

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nIn time, Parkinson spent more ofnhis time on the emerging field of geology. and on palæontology in particular.nFrustrated by the lack of descriptive literature on the subject, Parkinsonnembarked on writing a three-volume introduction to the study of British fossilsnOrganic Remains of a Former World (published in 1804, 1808 and 1811), a worknhighly praised by Gideon Mantell who used the illustrative plates in works ofnhis own. Parkinson was among the thirteen original founders of the GeologicalnSociety of London, which had its first meeting on November 13^th 1807nand received its Royal Charter in 1825. It is hard to overemphasise thenpopularity of geology amongst gentlemen scholars in the early nineteenthncentury – at one time membership of the Geological Society threatened tonoutstrip that of the Royal Society, and fossil hunting became a verynrespectable pastime for men and women alike.

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