ABSTRACT
Maurice Margarot, first president of the LCS and one of its delegates to the British Convention at Edinburgh, became a vexed object of commemoration in the later 1830s as early-Chartist political radicals sought to commemorate him as one of the “Scottish martyrs” transported for sedition in 1794. His disputes with Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Unitarian reformer and fellow martyr, over a putative plot to seize the transport ship, together with his political activity in Australia, which included conspiring with Irish revolutionaries transported in the wake of the 1798 rebellion, complicated remembrance and the stories told. Margarot’s experience also suggests how the very process of empire and exile might shape colonial expression of dissent: the secret journal that he kept during his exile projected the unfinished desires of British Jacobinism onto empire. Noting that Chartist-era memorial practices were in part a reaction to contemporary conservative built-form monuments which sought to use urban space to inculcate loyalism among metropolitan residents, the chapter shows that divisions with radicalism during the 1830s meant that efforts to commemorate the martyrs constructed the radical past in a restrictive way. Radical commemoration emphasized constitutionalist strands of the movement, and marginalized its more utopian, subversive, “Jacobin” strains.
