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BY DECEMBER 1795 PRIME MINISTER WILLIAM PITT WAS WELL ON THE way to crushing political dissent in Britain. he had tried reformers for treason, passed laws restricting the right of association and suspended habeas corpus, all without an outcry from British people about their loss of freedom. To one radical, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the people's quietude was an uncanny sign of a new malaise coursing through the body politic:
WILLIAM PITT, the great political Animal Magnetist, ... has most foully worked on the diseased fancy of Englishmen . . . thrown the nation into a feverish slumber, and is now bringing it to a crisis which may convulse mortality!'
Coleridge was not alone in seeing Pitt as an animal magnetist, mesmerizing his countrymen into a trance to be followed by the convulsions of war. According to James Tilly Matthews, returning to London in 1796 after imprisonment by the Jacobins, the Prime Minister had been "actuated" by "magnetic spies" sent from revolutionary France.2 Now controlled "like a mere puppet by the expert-magnetists," Pitt was himself a traitor, part of a Jacobin conspiracy to mesmerize the nation towards its destruction.
Puppet or not, Pitt acted decisively when Matthews repeated his allegations from the gallery of the House of Commons. he had Matthews locked up in Bedlam madhouse. On the ministry's reading, it was Matthews, and not the Prime Minister, whose mind had been "possessed"-Matthews had himself been an enthusiast of mesmerism, and had now been hypnotized by the practice he had gone to France to study.
Animal magnetism was inextricably linked in most British minds with France and its revolution. Indeed, many of Pitt's supporters viewed it as part of a revolutionary conspiracy that Britain must fight. The reactionary scientist John Robison, for instance, feared the "almost irresistible" influence of an association dedicated to "rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning the existing governments of Europe." The members of this association were, he diagnosed, "Magicians-Magnetisers-Exorcists, &c."3 According to the alarmist political commentator W. H. Reid, magic medicine threatened London itself: a set of "Infidel mystics," "made up of Alchymists, Astrologers, Calculators, Mystics, Magnetizers, Prophets, and Projectors" had embraced the politics of France and were spreading deism and democracy amongst the "lower orders."4 Mesmerism, he was sure,...