Charles Bradlaugh

In 1877 Bradlaugh and Annie Besant reprinted Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy, a birth-control pamphlet, specifically to force a prosecution and test the law. They were tried, convicted, and had the conviction quashed on a technicality on appeal. The publicity did what suppression usually does: sales of the pamphlet went from a few hundred a year into the hundreds of thousands, and the case is generally treated as a turning point in the public discussion of contraception in Britain. Besant lost custody of her daughter as a direct result.

The connection worth noticing is what happened to his co-defendant. Annie Besant, his closest political ally, secularist lecturer, co-editor of the National Reformer, reviewed The Secret Doctrine in 1889, met Helena Blavatsky, converted to Theosophy, and went on to lead the Theosophical Society from 1907 until her death in 1933. She and Bradlaugh parted ways over it.

The atlas keeps organised atheism and modern occultism in separate rooms, and the same woman was a leading figure in both within a decade. That is a useful corrective to any account of the period which treats Victorian unbelief and Victorian esotericism as opposite camps; they drew on the same constituency of people who had left the churches and were looking for what came next.

The constitutional crisis Bradlaugh created ran for six years and was resolved, characteristically, by his own stubbornness. Elected member of parliament for Northampton in 1880, he asked to affirm rather than swear the religious oath; the House refused, and when he then offered to take the oath as a matter of form, it refused that too, on the argument that an atheist's oath could not bind. What followed became a parliamentary war of attrition. Bradlaugh was excluded and unseated, and Northampton returned him again at by-election after by-election, in 1881, 1882 and 1884, and again at the general election of 1885. He was briefly held in the Clock Tower of the palace itself in 1880, once strode to the table and administered the oath to himself, and fought and lost test cases whose costs nearly broke him. Public meetings across the country took up the cause, which had become, as he insisted, not about atheism but about the right of electors to choose their member.

In 1886 a new Speaker, Arthur Peel, declined to intervene, and Bradlaugh simply took the oath and his seat. He spent his remaining years as an effective and respected radical member, and his Oaths Act of 1888 secured for members and witnesses alike the right of affirmation he had been denied. In 1891, as he lay dying, the House of Commons expunged from its records the resolution that had excluded him, an apology Parliament pays to almost no one.