The year 1789 saw the outbreak of the French Revolution, and Thomas Muir like so many Britons of a liberal persuasion had great hopes that in time all of Europe's monarchies would follow the course first established in America and become popular democracies. Clubs and societies were born across the country to promote the cause of political reform, and a broad-based movement was established. In Scotland, Thomas Muir helped to draw up a framework for an umbrella organisation to bring these groups together, and in July 1792 the Scottish Association of the Friends of the People was born. On the 21st November, Muir, having been elected Vice-President of the movement at the Edinburgh monthly meeting, called for a General Convention of the corresponding societies of England and Ireland to be held there in December. This development troubled the British government deeply; the Edinburgh General Convention was seen as a direct threat to the established order in Britain. Government spies were directed to penetrate the proceedings, and only days after the Convention closed Thomas Muir among others was arrested on a charge of sedition.
Muir refused to answer the officiating magistrate's questions and was bailed, and then journeyed to London to report on the plight of the Scottish radicals to their colleagues there. It was at this point that word arrived of the planned execution of Louis XVI, and Muir agreed to journey to Paris as part of a delegation aimed at dissuading the French revolutionaries from their course. Arriving too late to prevent the king's death, Thomas Muir was nevertheless welcomed and toasted by the leading members of the Convention. Word of his whereabouts had obviously reached the Scottish Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas, for Dundas now forwarded the date for Muir's trial by two months, making a timely appearance impossible for him. On his return to Scotland he was arrested at once, and became the principal victim of a series of show trials in Edinburgh that became notorious examples of the political abuse of the judicial process.
Before the Scottish version of Judge Jeffries, the cynical Lord Braxfield, and a carefully chosen jury of fervid anti-reformers (their selection was possible under Scots law), the outcome of the trials were never in doubt. Muir's crime was that he had dared to suggest that there might be ways to improve the British system of government, namely by widening the franchise to include men of less privileged classes than Braxfield's own. Muir's eloquent and thoroughly convincing defence was dismissed, and he was sentenced, with others, to fourteen years deportation to New Holland, virtually a death sentence at that time.
To be continued.
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