Constitutions, Concordats and Country Party Ideology: The Realignment of Coleridge’s Political Theory, 1799–1802

Abstract

After the collapse of The Watchman in May 1796, Coleridge’s career as a political writer was in abeyance until early 1798, when he was engaged to write for Daniel Stuart’s Morning Post. At this time, Stuart’s paper was generally anti-ministerial, anti-war and liberal on issues such as freedom of the press and parliamentary reform, and Coleridge’s early prose efforts for the paper sat comfortably enough with the position of its proprietor. These articles (a series of six appeared between 1 January and 8 March 1798) represent, as David Erdman writes, ‘in their intensity and in their irony and in the radicalism of their themes — advocacy of parliamentary reform, opposition to the war with France, opposition to the new war taxes after the collapse of the peace negotiations — a recrudescence of the fervour that was evident in Coleridge’s earlier political utterances … heretofore assumed to have faded away’.¹ Over the course of the next year, however, both Coleridge and the Morning Post became increasingly hostile towards France and towards the forces of reform at home.² In Coleridge’s case, this shift in political sympathies culminated in the development of a more favourable perspective on established churches, at least in the English form, a perspective which was anathema to the radical, anti-establishment non-conformism of the Bristol period.