In the Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson is fully alive to the contradictions involved in popular patriotism.
He notes that while in the 1780s and 1790s a reactionary Church and King mob would often attack radicals after Waterloo in 1815 and up to and beyond 1848 the same mob became a radical crowd, ready to protect the most radical candidates on election hustings.
He noted in his chapter on the Free-born Englishman:
The Gordon Rioters of 1780 and the ‘Church and King’ rioters in Birmingham in 1791 had this in common: they felt themselves, in some obscure way, to be defending the ‘Constitution’ against alien elements who threatened their ‘birthright’. They had been taught for so long that the settlement of 1688, embodied in the Constitution of King, Lords and Commons was the guarantee of British independence and liberties, that the reflex had been set up- Constitution equals Liberty- upon which the unscrupulous might play. And yet it likely that the very rioters who destroyed Dr Priestley’s precious library and laboratory were proud to regard themselves as ‘Free-born Englishmen’. Patriotism, nationalism, even bigotry and repression, were all clothed in the rhetoric of liberty. Even Old Corruption extolled British liberties, not national honour, or power, but freedom was the coinage of patrician, demagogue and radical alike. In the name of freedom Burke denounced and Paine championed the French Revolution’.
The contradictory currents in popular thinking and aligning them with progressive rather than reactionary attitudes has, as radicals on the hustings knew, real benefits. It is also not without real problems.
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