Though he referred to himself in his autobiography as a “violent Tory of the old school,” in Fors Clavigera he had called himself a “Communist of the old school”—indeed a “dark-red Communist, reddest of the red.” Tories like himself had to champion the cause of the working class, he explained, because the clergy were lackeys of the wealthy. “Have they so betrayed their Master’s charge and mind in their preaching to the rich,” he asked in another letter, “so smoothed their words, and so sold their authority, that … there is no man in England … who will have mercy on the poor?”
