I. THE BLACK LAMP
‘BEHOLD the head of a traitor!’ In February 1803 the executioner held up before the London crowd the head of Edward Marcus Despard. He and his six fellow victims had been found guilty of high treason (encompassing the death of the King) and all died with fortitude. Despard declared that he was innocent of the charge, but died because he was ‘a friend to the poor and the oppressed’. The crowd was angry and compassionate. The London press feared that if the victims had been drawn through the streets and executed at Tyburn or Kennington Common, instead of at Southwark, riots and an attempt at rescue might have ensued. Among those who witnessed the execution was a young apprentice named Jeremiah Brandreth. Fourteen years later his own head was held aloft before the crowd in front of Derby Castle: ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’
Between Despard and Brandreth there stretches the illegal tradition. It is a tradition which will never be rescued from its obscurity. But we may approach it from three directions: first, from considering some surviving evidence as to the ‘underground’ between 1800 and 1802; second, from some criticism of the historical sources; and, third, from some examination of the quasi-legal trade union tradition. Unless we make this preparation, we shall be unable to understand the Luddite. movement, and the post-war years of the Pentridge Rising, Oliver the Spy, and the Cato Street Conspiracy.
We have seen the origin of the illegal tradition in the shadowy societies of ‘United Englishmen’ at the end of the 1790s.1 In 1800 and 1801 a rash of rioting broke out throughout England. Most of these were food riots, provoked by scarcity and soaring prices during Napoleon’s continental blockade. But there are suggestions, also, of some sketchy organization. Several riots and consumer’s ‘strikes’ were advertised in advance by handbills, on a scale which argues organization by committees with access to the printing-press. From London, in September 1800:
FELLOW COUNTRYMEN
How long will ye quietly and cowardly suffer yourselves to be imposed upon, and half-starved by a set of mercenary slaves and Government hirelings? Can you still suffer them to proceed in their extensive monopolies, while your children are crying for bread? No! let them exist not a day longer. We are the sovereignty, rise then from your lethargy. Be at the Corn Market on Monday.
For six days there were tumults at the Corn Market. In November handbills called upon ‘Tradesmen, Artizans, Journeymen, Labourers, &c., to meet on Kennington Common’ – a meeting prevented only by a show of military strength. In Portsmouth the dockyard ‘artificers’ resolved to ‘abstain from making any use of any butter, cream, milk, and potatoes’ until prices should come down. In Nottingham army officers were stoned out of a theatre when they tried to make the audience sing ‘God Save the King’. In Nottingham, also, where the Liberty Tree was still planted with annual ceremony at the turn of the century, the authorities intercepted a letter which described a successful food riot, with enthusiasm for ‘the conduct of the people on tuesday who Stood the fire from the Yeomanry with such an Undaunted Courage that astonished the Gentlemen…’ But the writer added a significant comment. The crowd was no longer divided between ‘Jacobin’ and ‘Church and King’ factions: ‘What scarred the Gentlemen the most was to see the Union of parties their being no… painites nor no such song as God save the King to be heard.’ Here was an important shift in popular attitudes, in the sub-political responses of ‘the mob’.1
Meanwhile, alarming reports were coming into the Home Office. The worst trouble-centres appeared to be Nottingham, industrial Lancashire (where the United Irishmen and Englishmen were reputed to remain active), and the West Riding. We may piece together what is known of the latter region. The organization spread outward from Jacobin Sheffield. In September 1800, an inflammatory handbill was found nailed openly in a workshop: ‘K — G — and the Farmer are busy crambing the empty stomachs of the poor with Bayonets.’ In December the Sheffield magistrates found it necessary to issue a proclamation against the ‘numerously attended’ meetings which were being held in the fields at night. Various reports were sent to Earl Fitzwilliam, the Lord-Lieutenant of the county. At one such meeting, advertised to consider the best means of reducing the price of provisions, a spy heard talk of pikes and arms; when the spy was recognized, he was driven off. People were being enrolled in secret societies, and taking solemn oaths of confederacy: ‘there is a system of organization going on – secret committees – and a preparation of hostile weapons’. Frequent meetings were taking place near Sheffield –
at 10 o’clock in the Evening – an orator in a Mask harangues the people – reads letters from distant societies by the light of a candle & immediately burns them.
No one was admitted to the field without giving a watchword to a ring of sentries.1
By March 1801, the alarm had spread to Leeds and Huddersfield, where the magistrates feared ‘an Insurrection was in contemplation among the lower orders’. There were ‘persons going about endeavouring to persuade the People to take an oath, to support each other in regulating and lowering the Price of all necessaries of Life’. A letter from two Lancashire magistrates alleged that some sort of delegate meeting of ‘agents’ from Yorkshire, Birmingham, Bristol and London had met in January in the neighbourhood of Ashton-under-Lyne. At the same time, Pitt’s Two Acts (passed at the end of 1795) banning seditious meetings, as well as the suspension of Habeas Corpus, expired. Although any form of organized correspondence between individual groups remained illegal, it became technically lawful to call public meetings once more. Within a matter of weeks protest meetings were being called, often by handwritten handbills, in a score of widely separated places. In Yorkshire meetings were called in Sheffield, Wakefield, Dewsbury, Bingley. In Bingley handbills were distributed secretly under doors and in market stalls early in April, calling on people to attend a demonstration of the ‘association of the Friends of Liberty’. The purpose of the meeting was to demonstrate against the exorbitant price of provisions, ‘to expose fraud and every species of Hereditary Government, to lessen the oppression of Taxes, to propose plans for the education of helpless infancy and the comfortable support of the aged and destressed… to exterpate the horrid practice of war’:
Will you suffer yourselves to be thus imposed upon by a Majority of mercenary hirelings, Government pimps – corndealers – placemen – pentioners – paracites etc. and yourselves Starving for Bread? No let them exist not one day longer, we are the Sovereignty… Drag the Constitution from its hidden place – and lay it open to publick inspection – Shake the Earth to its centre…1
‘It appears to be in agitation,’ reported a Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons, ‘suddenly to call numerous meetings in different parts of the country, at the same day and hour, to an extent which, if not prevented, must materially endanger the public peace.’ By the end of April the Seditious Meetings Act was re-enacted, and Habeas Corpus suspended for a further year.
The agitation promptly went underground once more. We may once again try to follow its history in the West Riding. Throughout the summer of 1801 meetings continued, mainly at night; Batley, Ossett, and Saddleworth are added to the list of centres. At Halifax, in July 1801, some kind of delegate committee appears to have met, with representatives from the textile towns and a speaker from Sheffield. There was talk of oath-taking or ‘twisting-in’ to the United Britons or Englishmen, whose main centre of activities may have been across the Pennines in Bolton. All who joined were required to answer in the affirmative three questions: (1) Did they desire a total change of system? (2) Were they willing to risk themselves in a contest to leave their posterity free? (3) ‘Are you willing to do all in your power to create the Spirit of Love, Brotherhood & Affection among the friends of freedom & omit no opportunity of getting all the political information you can…’ A further delegate meeting was reported from Leeds in August; it was adjourned according to a magistrate, upon a resolution that there was ‘no occasion for any further Meetings till the French landed’. A Wakefield magistrate concurred: ‘…a Revolution is their object and the rising of the disaffected depends entirely on the enemy invading the country’.1
Meetings had now become so widespread that they were noticed in the Leeds Mercury, whose Editor, Edward Baines had once been secretary of a ‘Jacobin’ club at Preston, but who was now anxious to disassociate himself entirely from ‘all secret associations for political purposes’. The practice of midnight political meetings, it was editorially noted, had become ‘very frequent’. There were strong reasons to suppose them to be motivated by ‘bad designs’ and some suspicion of a secret correspondence with France. He accused the reformers of shrinking into ‘lurking holes like a lawless banditti’. Baines’ note called forth an uncompromising reply from Benjamin Flower, whose Cambridge Intelligencer was (with Montgomery’s Sheffield Iris) the last of the provincial reformers’ papers to struggle through to the nineteenth century. In November 1800 Flower had issued a general call for public demonstrations for peace: people (he said) ‘perceive and feel that the effect of war and taxes [is] to raise the price of all consumable commodities’. Now Flower accused Baines of being a ‘time-server’, of aiding the ‘Church-and-King’ propagandists, of deliberately smearing the reformers (who had no alternative but to meet in secret) with the libel of ‘French correspondence’, and of bringing comfort to:
that corrupt and profligate system which has desolated a great part of Europe, murdered millions of our fellow creatures, robbed the people of this country of their most valuable rights, and brought the kingdom to the verge of ruin.
This breach, between the old Painite Radicalism of such men as Flower (who were not afraid to risk prosecution or agitation among the discontented masses), and the cautious ‘constitutional’ Whiggish Radicalism of Baines, was to grow in significance as the nineteenth century advanced.1
There appears to have been a lull, punctuated with public rejoicing when Peace Preliminaries were ratified in October. Then in the winter of 1801–2 there were renewed reports of ‘nightly’ meetings in the West Riding, and of protests against the Malt Tax, the Window Tax, and restrictions upon liberty. Although peace came in March 1802, nocturnal meetings continued, and, despite every effort, the magistrates could not identify any of the leaders. The fullest account of a meeting is in a letter from the Mayor of Leeds to Earl Fitzwilliam in August 1802:
With respect to the nocturnal meetings, they continue, though the place is never known to others till they take place. On Friday evening at or near midnight a meeting was held in a hollow way, or narrow valley about six miles from Leeds and two from Birstall, at some distance from any public road. A man of perfect veracity assures me that he attempted to form one of the party, but found that scouts were stationed on all sides at some distance, the outermost of whom accosted him and aimed at drawing him off in a different direction. On his persevering he found another irregular and moving line of scouts, who asked his business, and upon his continuing to proceed towards the ‘Black Lamp’ of men, a whistling was made, and he heard expressions and tones of voice that quite deterred him from his purpose. That some particular persons whom they called gentlemen were expected and were not then arrived, he could easily recollect from what he overheard on the way….
From another quarter on which I can depend, I learn that the committee forming the ‘Black Lamp,’ and which on Friday night might be composed of about 200 men, consists of those who have discoursed on the subject with nine others, and have sworn them in, each of which again, ad infinitum, becomes a Committee man on the same grounds. ‘Abolition of all taxes, and the full enjoyment of their rights’ are the subjects on which the leaders hold forth, and the cement which holds them together. ‘By Christmas they should be able to carry their points, and on one night the rise was to take place in every quarter.’1
Whatever organization there was had access to the printing-press. In June 1802 a small eight-page ‘Address to United Britons’ was sent to the Home Office by a West Riding magistrate. This claimed to unite ‘in a chain of affection’ all those seeking to overthrow the nation’s oppressors:
The independent LIBERTY of a wise people, they deem TREASON, because they dread that justice may fall on their own guilty heads…2
In the autumn two Sheffield men, William Lee and William Ronkesley, were brought to trial for administering secret oaths. It was alleged that between October 1801 and August 1802 they had been members of a secret association, comprising 1,000 members in Sheffield, which had manufactured pikes and had secret depots of buried arms. The organization was officered by ‘Directors & Conductors’, who drilled the members at night. Its aims were vague, but (the Mayor of Leeds wrote to Fitzwilliam) ‘an Idea has place amongst the poor – that they should pay no Taxes…. Thousands carry about with them a Secret Conviction & Indulge a Hope that Matters are growing Ripe.’3 Lee and Ronkesley were sentenced to seven years transportation.4
In November Despard and his associates were seized in London. There were more reports in December, of the preparation of arms in Sheffield. As late as August 1803 Fitzwilliam was told by an informant that oath-taking and pike-manufacture continued. Secret organization ‘has pervaded the great body of the People in the manufacturing district of this Country’, he wrote to the Secretary of State, despite his habitual scepticism. ‘Vast numbers of the Army & Militia were sworn’, with the same oath as taken in the Despard business. There were special envoys between districts: ‘Little is committed to paper, but whatever is, is destroy’d as soon as communicated.’ ‘The Managers never meet in their own towns: when they have occasion to deliberate they go to a distance from their homes.’1 Thereafter the ‘Black Lamp’ appears to go out.
Similar reports came in, during the same period, from south Lancashire and parts of the Midlands. Clearly there was some underground organization in existence, which sought to turn discontent at the soaring prices and food shortages into a revolutionary channel. There is too much evidence, and from too many independent sources, for it to be possible to uphold the accepted historical fiction that ‘sedition’ had no existence except in the imaginations of Ministers, magistrates and spies. But at this point the sources lead only into obscurity. Did the ‘United Britons’ have any real national existence? Was Colonel Despard connected with it, and with the underground in Lancashire and the West Riding? Were there links with France and with Robert Emmet in Dublin? Did the underground continue after 1802?
The Despard trial revealed little, although a great deal was suggested. Colonel Despard (1751–1803) came of an Irish landowning family, and had a distinguished military record. ‘We went on the Spanish Main together,’ declared Nelson, who was called by the Defence at the trial: ‘We slept many nights together in our clothes upon the ground; we have measured the height of the enemies’ wall together. In all that period… no man could have shown more zealous attachment to his Sovereign and his Country than Colonel Despard.’2 Nelson had thought so highly of his comrade-in-arms that he had expected him to rise to one of the most distinguished positions in the Army. But this was many years before: the two men had not met since 1780. From 1772, Despard served continuously in the West Indies and British Honduras, until his recall on half-pay in 1790. He appears to have been the very type of numbers of officers in this period, who, possessing neither wealth nor influence enough to secure recognition, found themselves defrauded of promotion, overtaken by nincompoops with interest at court, subjected to accusations of misconduct by their rivals, and left to kick their heels for years in the corridors of power.1 We can see in Despard some of the same mixture of the private, grievances of a serving officer and of general disgust at the corruption and insincerities of political life which made Lord Cochrane into a Radical.
But Despard was also an Irishman, and by 1796 or 1797 he had become so deeply committed to the cause of Irish independence that he was serving both on the committee of the London Corresponding Society and in the more shadowy circles of the United Irishmen and United Englishmen in London. He was one of the group with whom O’Coigly had made contact in Furnival’s Inn Cellar.2 Early in 1798 the Privy Council received various reports as to his activities, which suggested that he was building an underground military organization, in which the style of the Elizabethan soldier of fortune and that of the nineteenth century revolutionary were curiously compounded. While the aims of the organization were Jacobinical, those enlisting in Despard’s service were promised high rank and reward in the event of success. Imprisoned under the suspension of Habeas Corpus between 1798 and 1800, Despard’s case was prominent among those which featured in the ‘No Bastille’ agitation of Sir Francis Burdett and of the London crowd. On his release in 1800, it would seem that Despard set to work once more to construct his revolutionary army.
He was arrested in the last week of November 1802, at ‘The Oakley Arms’, Lambeth, in the company of about forty working men and soldiers. Certain facts were proved at his trial beyond question. Despard and certain of his associates had been passing in the previous months from one meeting-place to another in the taverns of working-class London: ‘The Flying Horse’ at Newington, ‘The Two Bells’ and ‘The Coach and Horses’ in Whitechapel, ‘The Ham and Windmill’ in the Haymarket, ‘The Brown Bear’ and ‘The Black Horse’ in St Giles’s, ‘The Bleeding Heart’ in Hatton Garden. The company in all these places included labourers and soldiers, with a high proportion of Irish, and certainly some kind of Jacobin conspiracy was mooted.
Other facts were adduced, at his trial or in the contemporary press, which must be viewed with a more critical eye. Thus it was alleged that Jacobin guardsmen at both the Chatham and London barracks had enrolled a considerable number of followers, bound to the conspiracy by secret oaths. Papers found on the prisoners gave the ‘constitution’ of their society:
The independence of Great Britain and Ireland – An equalization of civil, political, and religious rights – An ample provision for the families of the heroes who shall fall in the contest.
A liberal reward for distinguished merit – These are the objects for which we contend, and to obtain these objects we swear to be united.1
Soldiers had been invited to join this ‘Constitution Society’ in order ‘to fight, to burst the chain of bondage and slavery’. The organization (it was alleged) had no fewer than seven divisions and eight sub-divisions in Southwark alone, with further divisions in the Borough, Marylebone, Spitalfields and Blackwall, principally among ‘day-labourers, journeymen, and common soldiers,’ discharged sailors, and Irish dockers. It was a paramilitary organization, with ‘ten men in each company, and when they amounted to eleven, the eleventh took the command’ of a new company. Each company was commanded by a ‘captain’, each group of five companies amounted to a ‘deputy division’, commanded by a ‘colonel’. On the other hand, if this was the approved model, it does not appear to have been carried widely into effect. According to one witness, Despard said that:
a regular organization in London is dangerous to us, it is under the eye of Government; but a regular organization in the country is necessary, and, I believe, general…
Such an organization in London would be ‘a moral impossibility’. But he mentioned Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, and Chatham as ‘country’ centres where such organization existed, with which he claimed to be in touch.
The trial brought further allegations. Colonel Despard and his revolutionary army were accused of preparing an imminent coup d’éat. The Tower and the Bank were to be stormed, the barracks seized from within, the prisons thrown open, and the King was to be assassinated or taken prisoner. ‘I have weighed everything well within myself,’ Despard was alleged to have said, ‘and God may know, my heart is callous.’ The Cabinet were known to the conspirators as ‘the Man Eaters’. The seizure of the Tower or of the King’s person was to be the signal to the London crowd to rise; and the mail coaches (which all left London from a central point, at Piccadilly) were ‘to be stopped, as a signal to the people in the country that they had revolted in town’.
There is no real evidence to suggest that the case against Despard was a ‘frame-up’, although his innocence was widely believed at the time1 and the suggestion has been handed down in the Whig tradition of history. It is true that the Crown witnesses were disreputable – notably John Emblin, a former Jacobin watchmaker, and one of the guardsmen, both of whom turned King’s evidence, and the second of whom swore away the life of his own brother. It is true also that a good deal of the evidence as to the conspiracy in the Army implicated Despard himself only indirectly, and may have taken place independently of him or even against his advice; while the more colourful details as to the intended assassination of the King and seizure of the Tower may have been trumped up for the occasion. On the other hand, neither Despard nor his counsel offered the least explanation as to the purpose of these frequent meetings in obscure London taverns, in which a gentleman of Despard’s rank was an unlikely customer. Derspard broke the silence which he maintained throughout the trials of himself and his fellow conspirators only after sentence of death had been passed. And then it was to expostulate:
Your Lordship has imputed to me the character of being the seducer of these men; I do not conceive that anything appeared in the trial or the evidence adduced against me, to prove that I am the seducer of these men.
In the circumstances this can only be taken as an admission that a conspiracy existed, but that Despard, so far from initiating it, was drawn into it by others, as to whose identity he maintained a loyal silence.
‘Colonel Despard,’ Francis Place (who had served with him on the Committee of the L.C.S) annotated a manuscript over thirty years later: ‘he… was a singularly mild gentlemanly person – a singularly good-hearted man.’ ‘Orator’ Hunt, whose first contact with Jacobin notions was when (imprisoned in the King’s Bench) he met Despard, wrote in similar vein: ‘a mild gentleman-like man’. Must we accept the usual accounts – that his following was ‘microscopic’ or that ‘it is hardly possible to explain the folly of his plot except on the supposition that his mind was disordered’? 1 The state of Ireland in 1798 was enough to disorder the mind of any Irish patriot. And if we suppose (as we reasonably may) that Despard and his circle had access to former contacts of the L.C.S. as well as to the ‘United Irishmen’ in Britain,2 and that there was some loose link between them and such organizations as the ‘Black Lamp’ in Yorkshire,3 then the conspiracy was a serious business. Moreover, the mutinies of the fleet remind us that a revolutionary organization in the Army was by no means inconceivable. No less than the Navy, the Army seethed with grievances – as to pay, food and accommodation, the care of dependants, discipline and floggings. The soldiers, who included many Irish, were allowed to don mufti in the evenings and to mingle with labourers and artisans in the London taverns. There were few security precautions, and Jacobin emissaries might easily gain access to the soldiers’ quarters in the barracks – as Bamford and Mitchell were to do in 1817. It may seem unlikely today that a Grenadier Guardsman should christen his son ‘Bonaparte’; but such is the case with one of Despard’s associates. The Crown’s allegation that no fewer than 300 soldiers in the 3rd Battalion of the Guards, and thirty or forty in the 1st Battalion were involved in the conspiracy may appear far-fetched; but the six victims who were selected for trial and execution with Despard were all guardsmen, and such an example suggests that the Government was seriously perturbed by the extent of the conspiracy.
When a full view is taken of the evidence, the Despard affair must be seen as an incident of real significance in British political history. It linked the struggles of the Irish nationalists (Despard had some contact with Robert Emmet) with the grievances of London labourers, and of croppers and weavers in the north of England. It was a last flaring-up of the old Jacobinism of the 1790s, which suffered, with Despard, a most serious defeat. The affair appeared to justify the Government’s policy of ‘alarm’ and of the suspension of popular liberties. It initiated also, among a small circle of ultra-Jacobins, the strategy (or, perhaps, fantasy) of the coup d’état. This was to remain the objective of small groups in London until the time of the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820), while the notion of spreading the signal for a general rising by stopping the mail coaches was to recur in Chartist times.
Despard took most of his secrets with him. If he was, as he claimed, innocent of the charge of plotting the assassination of the King and Cabinet, he offered no further explanation as to the objectives of his society. By one account, he said on the scaffold: I know that, from having been inimical to the bloody, cruel, coercive, and unconstitutional measures of Ministers, they have determined to sacrifice me under what they are pleased to term a legal pretext…. I wish you, my fellow-citizens, health, happiness, and prosperity; although I shall not live to experience the blessings of the godlike change, be assured, Citizens, that the period will come, and that speedily, when the glorious cause of Liberty shall effectually triumph…
If Despard was innocent of complicity in the plot which existed among the Guards, it is possible that a defence was, in honour, impossible, because it would have implicated others. But the prosecution also underplayed its hand, confining its case to the proof of certain overt acts, and claiming to be in the possession of further information from informers who were not disclosed at the trials, since they ‘will remain unsuspected… for the future security of the State’. When the trial took place Britain was still at peace with France, and it was rumoured that evidence as to French complicity was withheld. Despard ‘was impressed with the opinion,’ declared the Morning Post,
that a revolution was not to be effected by extensive associations… but by a small party of desperate men, who, having struck one great blow, such as the assassination of the King, and filled the city with consternation, would find thousands to support them.
‘The poor… believe him a martyr,’ ‘Shall Despard’s headless corpse walk into every tap-room, to make proselytes an hundred fold…?’1
II. THE OPAQUE SOCIETY
For some years the alarm expressed by the Morning Post would seem to have been excessive. It was not until 1811 that the underground revealed itself again, and then it was in the form of violent industrial conflict – the Luddite movement. The Luddite attacks were confined to particular industrial objectives: the destruction of power-looms (Lancashire), shearing-frames (Yorkshire), and resistance to the break-down of custom in the Midlands framework-knitting industry. To explain their actions, need we look any further than into the immediate economic and industrial grievances?
We shall propose a different answer. But in attempting any answer the historian faces difficulties in the interpretation of the sources which must be explained. From the 1790s until 1820 these sources are unusually clouded by partisanship.
First, there is the conscious partisanship of the authorities, From Pitt to Sidmouth, Government pursued a single policy. Disaffection must be ringed round and isolated; and this might be done by attaching to it the suspicion of pro-Bonapartist conspiracy or (after 1815) wild, insurrectionary intention. Successive Committees of Secrecy of the House (1801, 1812, 1817) presented lurid and unsubstantiated allegations of insurrectionary networks. In a sense, the Government needed conspirators, to justify the continuation of repressive legislation which prevented nation-wide popular organization.
But the myth that all reformers were French agents or conspirators set in motion a curious logic. Not only did it mean that reformers were driven perforce into obscure, secretive form of activity. It also meant that, in order to penetrate these forms, the authorities were prompted to employ spies and informers on a scale unknown in any other period. The line between the spy and the agent provocateur was indistinct The informer was paid by piece-rate; the more alarmist his information, the more lucrative his trade. Fabricated information might be eagerly accepted by the authorities who propagated the myth. At a certain stage, it is impossible to know how far they were themselves deluded by conspiracies which their own informers engendered. To isolate and terrorize potential revolutionaries, it was possible to adopt a policy of deliberate provocation. In this sense, it was the policies of Pitt, in repressing the corresponding societies, which set in motion the logic which led to both Oliver the Spy and the Pentridge Rising of 1817. These years reveal such a foul pattern of faked evidence, intimidation and double agents, that it is possible to regret that the logic did not work itself out to its proper conclusion. If the Cato Street conspirators had achieved their object in the assassination of the Cabinet, the Cabinet would have been slain by conspirators whom their own repressive policies had engendered, and their own spies had armed.
Thus, evidence presented by the authorities as to a conspiratorial underground between 1798 and 1820 is dubious and sometimes worthless. This was, indeed, the main line of counter-attack of contemporary reformers, including Burdett and Samuel Whitbread. In a dramatic moment in 1817, H. G. Bennet, the Member for Shrewsbury, hurled the Report of the Committee of Secrecy on to the floor of the House, declaring it to be a libel upon ‘the whole people… trash which I only think fit for trampling under my feet’. Successive historians have taken much the same view, whether prompted by a scrupulous concern for the laws of evidence, by sympathy with the reformers, or, more recently, by the phlegmatic assumption that any determined revolutionary activity may be ruled out without examination as un-English. In reaction against the myths of Jacobin or Spencean conspiracy, they have propagated a counter-myth of English ‘constitutionalism’, and placed great reliance upon the major alternative source of information: the archives (manuscripts, reminiscences, pamphlets, cuttings, etc.) collected by Francis Place.
These archives are invaluable. But Place was far from being that mythical creature, the ‘objective observer’. He also was highly partisan, deeply involved in the Radical quarrels which disfigure the entire period, 1806–32, and impatient of opponents – Cobbett he saw only as ‘an unprincipled cowardly bully’, Orator Hunt as ‘impudent, active, vulgar’. The official fact-finder on working-class problems for the Utilitarians, when he came to write his reminiscences he was anxious to emphasize the contribution of the moderates, and to belittle the importance of the ‘mob agitators’. Moreover, he was profoundly suspect among advanced reformers. In 1810 he was foreman of a coroner’s jury which had exculpated the unpopular Duke of Cumberland from the well-founded suspicion of having murdered his valet; he was known to associate with people whom Radicals regarded as undesirable; he was publicly accused by both Burdett and Hunt of being a ‘spy’. The accusation is ridiculous: spies were an altogether more scruffy order of beings. On the other hand, Place was – after 1810 – so convinced as to the necessity for constitutionalist reform that if he had come into the possession of evidence as to insurrectionary conspiracy he might well have passed it on to the authorities. Hence, when we refer to Place’s archives we must remember that while he was well placed to collect information on metropolitan reform movements and on the more ‘respectable’ trade unions and trades clubs, there were areas in which his information was as sketchy as that of the authorities; he knew little of the Midlands and the north, little about illegal trade union organization, and if there had been any serious political underground its organizers would certainly not have admitted Place into its secrets.1
And here we are close to the heart of the problem. For the third great reason why the sources are clouded is that working people intended them to be so. And ‘intention’ is too rational a term. There were, indeed, two cultures in England. In the heartlands of the Industrial Revolution, new institutions, new attitudes, new community-patterns, were emerging which were, consciously and unconsciously, designed to resist the intrusion of the magistrate, the employer, the parson or the spy. The new solidarity was not only a solidarity with; it was also a solidarity against. From the point of view of the authorities, two-thirds of their problem was to obtain any reliable information at all. Magistrates rode through thronged neighbourhoods a few hundred yards from their seats, and found themselves received like hostile aliens. They were more powerless to uncover trade union lodges than Pizzarro’s free-booters were to uncover golden chalices in the villages of Peru.
Hence the Home Office records (our main first-hand sources) often make perplexing reading. Like uncomprehending travellers, the magistrates and commanding officers were at the mercy of their informants. A friendly society might appear as an engine of sedition to a man who had never thought of the cost of burial to the poor. A ranting field preacher might sound like an agent of Despard. Employers might wish to freeze the magistrate’s blood with tales of Jacobins in order to ensure harsh treatment for trade unionists. The J.P.s hawked for scraps of news from informers (paid or anonymous), and miscellaneous go-betweens such as publicans, travelling salesmen, and soldiers. Here we find one solemnly passing on to the Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding the gossip which his barber had brought that morning. There we find another, writing from Barnsley in 1802, to say that ‘the women all talk misteriously. There is a general expectation of they know not what.’ And there we find a Methodist minister writing to the Duke of Portland about a Grand Association of revolutionaries, based on Bolton in 1801 – the story having come from a ‘confidential friend’ who got it from the ‘leader of the Methodist Singers’ at a Sheffield chapel, who in turn got it from someone else.1
This kind of tittle-tattle is of course worthless. But here we must look rather more closely at the rôle of informers. It was the fond belief of the English people that the employment of spies in domestic affairs was un-British, and belonged to ‘the continental spy system’. In fact it was an ancient part of British Statecraft as well as of police practice. It goes back long before the time at which Christopher Marlowe was caught up in its toils; and espionage and counter-espionage against the Catholics, the Commonwealth, and the Jacobites take us well into the eighteenth century. It was sustained in criminal practice (and became most widespread in the fifty years between 1780 and 1830) for a quite different reason. The very inadequacy of the regular police forces had led to the system of ‘payment by results’, or graduated rewards (or Tyburn tickets) for securing different degrees of conviction. And this, in turn, had bred a nauseous kind of middleman, who profited from the disclosure of crimes which it was in his interest to magnify, or even to manufacture. The early nineteenth century saw several appalling disclosures of such provocations in purely criminal cases, and no doubt many others went undetected. The Luddites were pursued, like any group of criminal offenders, by large offers of rewards for information leading to convictions. Joseph Nadin, the notorious Manchester Deputy Constable, had come under suspicion of profiting from the sale of Tyburn tickets obtained by malpractices. In 1817 the Bank of England prosecuted 124 people for forging or uttering forged notes, and the Radical press exposed cases in which blood-money informers ‘planted’ forged bank notes on innocent victims, and then secured the reward for their conviction.1
Thus both a political and a criminal tradition endorsed the employment of spies; and, especially after 1798, this was much strengthened by the experience gained in the ‘pacification’ of Ireland. But the spies so employed were of very different qualities. In a few cases, when dealing with radical political movements, it was possible for the authorities to select and send in to the movement men of some education and ability: ‘Citizen Groves’, who succeeded in penetrating into the inner councils of the L.C.S., in 1794, was a man of this sort The great majority of informers, however, belong much more to the tradition of ‘blood-money’ mercenaries. Recent attempts to lift some of the odium traditionally placed upon such men as Oliver, by representing them as ‘detectives’ performing a dangerous but honourable part, according to their lights, are misplaced.1 It may be possible to take such a view of a spy in war-time, even in a civil war; but not in such a war as Pitt or Sidmouth waged against the reformers, with forces so unequally disposed. Moreover, these informers fall into two groups. There were, first, those who had fallen foul of authority in some way, and who purchased their immunity from prosecution (or secured their release from gaol) by taking up the trade. The most favoured recruiting grounds for such spies were the debtor’s gaols. At the turn of the century a particularly nasty example of such a recruit, named Barlow, was entertaining himself at inns in Manchester and Sheffield (and attempting to implicate middle-class reformers) and was frequently writing plaintively to the Home Office for the money, not only to meet his current expenses but also to pay off previous debts, which (he alleged) had been promised to him upon his entering upon the employment. He exceeded the bounds of discretion, and one of his begging letters is testily endorsed (perhaps by the Duke of Portland): ‘If any additional argument had been necessary to get rid of Barlow it is certainly furnished by this Letter. I incline to give him £20 & dismiss him without delay.’2 The connection between the Government and Castle, Oliver and Edwards (wrote a Scot who had become an informer himself, for less dishonourable reasons, and who had become ashamed of his own trade) ‘all originated in the Fleet Prison’.3
The second group of informers comprises turncoats who, having been active reformers, became spies to save their own skins or for money; or, more simply, of casual mercenary volunteers attempting to sell information by the ‘piece’. Notions of honour or of professional duty are scarcely relevant to men in either group.1 On the other hand, it is mistaken to suppose that the reports of these men are therefore all worthless. Bad men can work usefully in a bad cause.2 If generalizations may be attempted from the extraordinary diverse collection of documents (written reports and letters, transcriptions of verbal depositions, confessions of condemned men, etc.) to be found in the Home Office, Treasury Solicitor’s, and Privy Council papers, they might take this form:
1. The informer certainly had (as the Hammonds and others have noted) an occupational bias towards sensationalizing his reports. The more mercenary his motives, the more he was at pains to provide the kind of information his employers wished to buy.
2. The employers, however, were not all fools – a fact which is too often overlooked. They were aware of this bias. It was in the interests of magistrates to obtain accurate information. They disliked being sent on fool’s errands after non-existent depots of arms, or wasting their time in pursuit of tavern demagogues. They frequently took the precaution of employing more than one informer (unknown to each other) as a means of checking information. It was the general practice of J.P.s who forwarded information to the Home Office to add some kind of assessment as to the credibility of the information.
3. These informations are, nevertheless, a kind of distorting mirror in which to view history, not only because most spies tended to put a criminal construction upon even ‘innocent’ activities, but because of the information which they did not send. This covers, of course, the concerns and interests of the less political, more apathetic majority. But it also covers whole regions of Britain. We have to think, not only of the motives of the spies, but of the motives of the J.P.s who employed them. From the Public Record Office, Bolton appears to have been the most insurrectionary centre in England, from the late 1790s until 1820. But it is by no means clear whether this was because Boltonians were exceptionally revolutionary in disposition; or because Bolton suffered from two unusually zealous magistrates – the Rev. Thomas Bancroft and Colonel Fletcher – both of whom employed spies (or ‘missionaries’) on an exceptional scale.
The point is important. For the greater part of this period England was governed by the Tories. A magistrate who wrote industriously to the Home Office was likely either to be a fervent anti-Jacobin Tory or to be interested in gaining the notice of Government for some more private reason. In the same period, many reports from Yorkshire were more laconic than those from Lancashire, although there is no reason to believe that Sheffield or Barnsley were less revolutionary in temper than Manchester or Bolton. Yorkshire had a Whiggish magistracy under a Whig Lord-Lieutenant (Fitzwilliam), who had no liking for Tory intervention in his own affairs. And the same argument applies to many J.P.s of the ‘old school’, whether Whig or Tory in their allegiance. The maintenance of order was a parochial affair, the responsibility of the local aristocracy, and to write long letters to the Home Office was unnecessary, a nuisance, and somewhat humiliating.
This jealousy of central authority in fact led to a number of extraordinary tangles. Successive Home Secretaries came to rely upon certain magistrates, of proven zeal, whose authority was stretched beyond their own borders. Senior military officers and magistrates reported on each others’ activity or apathy. In the Luddite crisis, Mr Lloyd, an active Stockport attorney, was encouraged to stretch his authority into Yorkshire, even to the point of spiriting Crown witnesses across the Pennines. In the post-war years Colonel Fletcher of Bolton often had fuller sources of information on the Manchester reformers than the local Bench. When Oliver was sent directly by Sidmouth into the Midlands and north in 1817 he was more than once in danger of being arrested by local J.P.s who thought him to be a bona fide revolutionary.
Thus we must see that the Home Office papers give a distorted view, not only in this or that particular, but as a whole. We have to read, not only between the lines of the letters sent in, but also the letters which were never sent.
4. In general it can be said that the authorities succeeded, both nationally and locally, much better in penetrating illegal political organizations than industrial ones, and regional bodies rather than local ones. The reasons for this are self-evident. It was simpler for an informer to pass himself off as a Jacobin or a Radical than as a cropper or a framework-knitter. The political societies were gathered from a wide region and from different social groups; illegal unions or Luddite bodies grew out of workshops and communities in which each man was known. It was always at the point where one town or region linked up with another that the spy found infiltration most easy.
5. When all these points are borne in mind, we are left with only two reflections. The first is the truism that each separate report must be scrutinized with care, according to the normal rules of evidence. It is necessary to say this, since it has become somewhat fashionable to dismiss all such reports as unreliable, or at any rate all that do not suit a chosen interpretation. But few reports do not offer some purchase for criticism: corroboration or contradiction by other sources, internal evidence, inherent probability, and the like. We may take two examples, both in 1817. The first is an informer’s report of a Manchester reformer’s speech:
He then stated the situation of the poor man and his children. The Child says to his Father, give me some bread, the father replies, I have none; the Child says, Is there none? the Father says, yes, plenty but Tyrants or Robbers take it from us. It is for you (meaning the people) to stretch forth your hands and fetch it again.1
The second is a letter to a Crown lawyer:
Mr Litchfield sir thear is one thing that I am not serten weather I menshened but I have thought it most properest to cumenecate to you thear wos to have been small Detachements plased at Diferant Entereneses in and out of London to prevent Government for sending despatches to haney part of the Cuntrey as thear was oneley one hors soulger sent with them… proposed by young watson and thisilwood and a greed to by all.1
Need the contrast be pointed further? The first appears to be as credible as any account by an untrained reporter. Clearly, the informer was impressed, despite himself, by this passage in the speech; and he has recorded, more vividly than the ‘literary’ versions usually published in the Radical press, the manner of the democratic orator. The author of the second is the notorious provocateur, John Castle – the ‘protector’ of a brothel madam whose evidence was torn into shreds at the trial of Watson in 1817. But even if we did not know this, his style betrays him in the first line. He is falling over his illiterate pen in an effort to ingratiate himself further with the authorities. This does not mean that every word of his deposition is a lie. It does mean that each word must be critically fumigated before it may be admitted to historical intercourse.
The other reflection is this. So far from being led a dance by a series of impostors, one is impressed by the extraordinary skill with which Government, between 1792 and 1820, succeeded in forestalling serious revolutionary developments, and in maintaining a steady flow of reliable information as to insurrectionary conspiracies. Spies were placed successfully in the L.C.S. (although only intermittently at the centre). They discovered a certain amount about the United Irishmen and Englishmen. They entered and dispersed Despard’s conspiracy. They were eventually (but only partially and after great difficulty) infiltrated into certain Luddite districts. In the post-war years, as we shall see, Government knew before it took place of every detail of the conspiracy which culminated in the Pentridge Rising; while Arthur Thistlewood was shadowed from 1816 until his death on the scaffold in 1820. In Manchester ‘the Person whom we designate by the letter B’ was appointed Treasurer to collect subscriptions for Colonel Despard’s defence; and the same, or another ‘B’, was appointed Treasurer to a quasi-Luddite ‘secret committee’ in 1812, while he and other informers were fully conversant with each Lancashire development between 1816 and 1820.1 Notions as to the traditional stupidity of the British ruling class are dispelled by an acquaintance with the Home Office papers.
Indeed, a convincing history of English Jacobinism and popular Radicalism could be written solely in terms of the impact of espionage upon the movement. In its earliest years the L.C.S. became aware of the over-zealous and provocative attitudes struck by the typical spy. In 1794 one Jones, of Tottenham, was accused (mistakenly) of being a spy, because of his violent resolutions which were alleged to be for the ‘purpose of entrapping the Society’. Jones (the genuine informer, Groves, reported with wry relish) complained:
If a Citizen made a Motion which seemed anyways spirited he was set down as a Spy sent among them by Government. If a Citizen sat in a Corner & said nothing he was watching their proceedings that he might the better report it…. Citizens hardly knew how to act.2
In an attempt to tighten security, the L.C.S. in 1795 introduced a new Constitution which included the following Rule of Order:
Persons attempting to trespass on order, under pretence of showing zeal, courage, or any other motive, are to be suspected. A noisy disposition is seldom a sign of courage, and extreme zeal is often a cloak of treachery.3
But such rules, once made, could be circumvented by an actor who modified his style. And political Radicalism after the war had scarcely begun to revive before it encountered the shocks of Castle and Oliver. If we seek for one explanation for the fragmentation of post-war Radicalism, and the allegiance given to journalists rather than to organizations, we shall find it here.4
For this reason the secret political tradition appears either as a series of catastrophes (Despard, Pentridge, Cato Street), or else as a trickle of propaganda so secretive and small-scale, and so hemmed in by suspicion, that it scarcely had any effect, except in those places where it effected a junction with the secret industrial tradition. Such a junction took place in the Luddite movement, and in Nottingham and Yorkshire the Luddites resisted permeation by spies with extraordinary success. Here the authorities were faced with a working-class culture so opaque that (unless a Luddite prisoner broke down under questioning and in fear of the scaffold) it resisted all penetration. When two experienced London police magistrates were sent down to Nottingham, they reported to the Home Office: ‘almost every creature of the lower order both in town & country are on their side’.1
And here we may make several obvious points, as to the study of Luddism in particular. If there had been an underground in these years, by its very nature it would not have left written evidence. It would have had no periodicals, no minute Books, and, since the authorities watched the post, very little correspondence. One might, perhaps, have expected some members to have left personal reminiscences; and yet, to this day, no authenticated first-hand accounts by Luddites have come to light. But many active Luddites, while literate, were not readers and writers. Moreover, we have to look ahead from 1813. Luddism ended on the scaffold; and at any time in the next forty years to have proclaimed oneself as having been a Luddite instigator might have brought unwelcome attention from the authorities, perhaps even recriminations in the community where the relatives of those who had been executed still lived. Those Luddites who had left their past behind them had no more wish than a man with a criminal record to be reminded of their youth. For those who had not, we must remember that the revolutionary and conspiratorial stream runs onwards through 1816–20, 1830–32, and up to the last Chartist years. The working-class culture of the Midlands and north which nurtured physical-force Chartism in 1848 was scarcely less opaque to the genteel investigator than that of the years of war. Of those Luddites ‘whose lives were spared, and who remained in the country,’ wrote Frank Peel,
it is singular to note that many of them seem to have been all the rest of their lives mixed up with all the political and social movements which followed, and which were to some extent under the ban of the law.
Most became followers of Cobbett, Hunt, and of Feargus O’Connor. One old Luddite (Peel recounts) who would never reveal anything of Luddism’s secrets, nevertheless in his dotage sang Luddite songs to his grandchildren; another flitted from Yorkshire to Lancashire, and was imprisoned more than twenty-five years later for his part in the Chartist movement; another remained ‘morose and silent’ about Luddism until his death.1 In the Midlands framework-knitting villages, as in the West Riding, midnight meetings, drillings and insurrectionary rhetoric went on for forty years. There are legends of Luddite arms, buried in 1812, and dug up at subsequent crises. Such reminiscences as survived were handed down as a secret tradition.
It is, indeed, not until the 1860s and 1870s that the stories of survivors begin to break the surface of print; and a man who was twenty-one in 1811 would have been eighty in 1870. There were several such survivors in the West Riding, and their stories were gathered by local historians with sympathy and (so far as one may judge) some accuracy. Because these works are the last form of a secret verbal tradition, they must be taken as serious sources.2
In Nottingham we are faced with a perplexing and intriguing circumstance. At least one of the framework-knitters’ leaders was a man of unusual political and literary ability. Gravener Henson (1785–1852) was a man who challenges comparison with Francis Place, in one sense, with John Doherty, in another. There was (a contemporary wrote) ‘no trade combination in the three Midland counties during the first forty years of this century with which… Henson was not acquainted’. In 1812 he was the moving spirit behind the Framework-Knitter’s Committee, which was certainly a cousin to the Luddite movement. In subsequent years he was imprisoned (1817) during the suspension of Habeas Corpus, and later took a leading part in the campaign to repeal the Combination Acts. He was a self-taught man, thick-set, ‘with a short neck, keen small eyes, and a head very broad at the base, rising up angularly to an unusual height’. He was enormously well-informed in the laws relating to industry and trade unionism, published the first part of a History of the Framework-Knitting and Lace Trades (1831), and contributed to the Radical and local press. In the Nottingham district the reputation clung to him of having been a Luddite, even ‘General Ludd’ himself. This is almost certainly untrue; but, without any doubt, Henson knew the greater part of the Luddite story. And yet so fluent a writer showed, to the end of his life, a ‘decided repugnance’ to enter into details of the subject. Indeed, it is said that he left valuable manuscripts disclosing the secrets of Luddism in the hands of an ‘influential member’ of the Nottingham Corporation, ‘on the understanding that they will be given to the public when the demise of certain parties shall have removed the only difficulty’. These manuscripts have never turned up – perhaps the ‘influential member’ preferred to take them with him to his grave.1
So far from discounting the story of some effective Luddite underground, Henson’s ‘repugnance’ to disclose the facts lends weight to it And here we must pass from criticism of the sources to constructive speculation. From Despard to Thistlewood and beyond there is a tract of secret history, buried like the Great Plain of Gwaelod beneath the sea. We must reconstruct what we can.
III. THE LAWS AGAINST COMBINATION
One of the ‘hidden hands’ behind the disorder, whom the authorities most suspected, was Thomas Spence. Spenceans were believed to have instigated bread riots in 1800 and 1801, although when Spence was tried and imprisoned in the latter year it was on account of his seditious publications. In 1817 once again a Select Committee of the House detected a conspiracy by the ‘Society of Spencean Philanthropists’. Place on the other hand, said the Spenceans were ‘next to nobody and nothing’, ‘harmless and simple’.
We shall return to the events of 1816–17. But it is probable that, until Spence’s death in 1814, Place’s account is nearest to the truth. Spence did not have the discretion, nor the practical application, for a serious conspirator. On the other hand, his group kept some sort of underground discontent alive in London, with chalking and rough handbills. More important, in the context of repression, Spence did not believe in a centralized, disciplined underground. His policy was that of the diffusion of agitation. In March 1801, the Spenceans agreed to organize themselves as loosely as possible, with ‘field preachers’. Supporters should form societies, meeting in tap-rooms ‘after a free and easy manner, without encumbering themselves with rules’ – their function was to talk and to circulate Citizen Spence’s pamphlets. (A society called the ‘Free and Easy’ met every Tuesday at ‘The Fleece’ in Little Windmill Street in 1807.) Their intention seems to have been to make disaffection so amorphous that the authorities could find no centre and no organizing sinews.1
This was not the method of the ‘Black Lamp’ and of Luddism. But it provides a clue, in the very policy of diffusion. For the illegal tradition, from 1800 to 1820, never had a centre. There was no Babouvist Conspiracy of Equals, no Buonarroti who sent emissaries up and down the land; and if we search for one, we make the same mistake as the authorities. Jacobinism had become indigenous in working-class communities at exactly the same time as it had lost any national centre as well as most middle-class support. It was in old centres of Jacobin propaganda – Sheffield, Nottingham, south Lancashire, Leeds – that Thelwall’s ‘Socratic spirit’ was now endemic in the workshops and mills. In part this was a conscious tradition. Groups of Painites, who knew and trusted each other, met together in secret; the Rights of Man passed from hand to hand; in Merthyr, according to one colourful account,
a few who thought highly of his Rights of Man and Age of Reason would assemble in secret places on the mountains, and taking the works from concealed places under a large boulder or so, read them with great unction.1
Mayhew took down the account of an old London bookseller who used to sell ‘Tom Paine on the sly’:
If anybody bought a book and would pay… three times as much as was marked, he’d give the ‘Age of Reason’ in…. His stall was quite a godly stall, and he wasn’t often without a copy or two of the ‘Anti-Jacobin Review’… though he had ‘Tom Paine’ in a drawer.2
In Sheffield ‘old Jacks’ still met to toast Paine’s health and sing: ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’:
7 |
Facts are seditious things |
When they touch courts and Kings. | |
Armies are rais’d. | |
Barracks and bastilles built, | |
Innocence charged with guilt, | |
Blood most unjustly spilt, | |
Gods stand amaz’d…3 |
After Despard’s execution, such groups of Painites in manufacturing communities will have lost any national links. They drew back into their own communities, and their influence will have been shaped by local problems and experiences. Only at times of great unrest will they have reached out, with extreme caution, first for regional, later for national, contacts. But, as they drew back, so their ideas were shaped, in their turn, but the peculiarities of each community. The foci of dissatisfaction will have become economic and industrial; it was easier, in Bolton or Leeds, to organize a strike or a demonstration at the price of bread, than a political discussion, a petition, or an insurrection. The Jacobins or Painites disappeared; but the demand for human rights became diffused more widely than ever before. Repression did not destroy the dream of the egalitarian English republic; it dissolved the remaining ties of loyalty between working people and their masters, so that disaffection spread in a world which the authorities could not penetrate. An indignant clerical magistrate, the Rev. J. T. Becher, gave his own version of the origin of Luddism:
I attribute the… outrages to those Jacobinical principles with which the inferior orders have been sedulously inoculated by our Nottingham Reformers, who have, in many instances, become the objects of that secret organization and malevolent confederacy which they fostered by their pernicious examples, their licentious harangues, and their seditious Press for the attainment of their factious projects. Thus have the evils… been introduced and cherished until they have become intimately incorporated with the state of society in this and other manufacturing districts.1
Behind this outburst lie complex animosities. Becher as a Tory (Regent in his own person of both Church and King) felt that Nottingham hosiers had been hoist with their own petard. Some had been reformers in the 1790s; were Dissenters; had petitioned for peace in 1801: had helped to displace a Tory Member in 1802 to the accompaniment of riots and Ça Ira. (Ironically, this same Member, Daniel Parker Coke, reinstated to his place in 1803, proved himself more attentive to the framework-knitters’ case than their Whig employers.) Now the dragon’s teeth which they had sown in the Nottingham market-place ten years before were springing up in arms all around them. But Becher was right to see that what had once been a propaganda of a minority had now become ‘intimately incorporated with the state of society’. And the stock upon which Jacobinism had been grafted was the illegal trade union.
There is little evidence as to any deliberate decision on the part of Painites to ‘permeate’ trade unions and friendly societies.1 But at any time before the 1840s it is a mistake to segregate in our minds political disaffection and industral organization. In friendly societies which, while legal, were debarred from forming regional or national links, the ‘no politics’ rule was often observed. Some of the old-established trades clubs had a similar tradition. But in most manufacturing communities the initiation of any organized movement is likely to have fallen upon a minority of active spirits; and the men who had the courage to organize an illegal union, the ability to conduct its correspondence and finances, and the knowledge to petition Parliament or consult with attorneys, were likely also to have been no strangers to the Rights of Man. As younger trade union leaders came forward, they will have quickly been driven toward an extreme Radicalism by the very conditions of their conflict with employers, magistrates, and an indifferent or punitive House of Commons.
It was Pitt who, by passing the Combination Acts, unwittingly brought the Jacobin tradition into association with the illegal unions. This was especially the case in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where the Act of 1799 jolted the Jacobins and trade unionists into a widespread secret combination, half political, half industrial, in emphasis. ‘It originated at Sheffield,’ an informer (Barlow) reported:
… in the republican society there – is connected with the principal manufacturing towns in Yorkshire – & communicated to this Town [Manchester], Stockport, & particularly Bury.
In Sheffield the same informer found a ‘general spirit of disaffection created in every class of artisan & mechanics by the late Bill… which I am afraid has already caused more to combine than would have thought of such a measure but for the Bills’. The trade unionists (he reported) were making returns of the number of workers likely to be adversely affected by the Combination Act, and calculated 60,000 in Lancashire, 50,000 in Yorkshire, and 30,000 in Derbyshire. The secret committees of the new organization were ‘under the Management of Republicans’. Thereafter, it is interesting to note, the surviving political clubs in the north and Midlands dropped such titles as ‘Patriotic’ or ‘Constitutional’ Societies, and called themselves ‘Union Societies’ – a term whose ambivalence enabled them to encompass both political and industrial aims. The term (if not the clubs) survived into the Union Societies and Political Unions of the post-war years.1
In Lancashire the resistance to the Combination Acts was organized by a committee of skilled unionists, comprising the fustian-cutters, cotton-spinners, shoemakers, machine-makers, and calico-printers.2 In Yorkshire, persistent reports attributed to the cloth-dressers or croppers the rôle of initiators in secret organizations for both industrial and ulterior purposes. A Memorandum laid before the Privy Council at the time when the Combination Act of 1799 was passed singled out the croppers for particular condemnation: ‘the Despotic power they really possess and Exercise almost exceeds belief’.3 In 1802 Earl Fitzwilliam, the temperate Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding, sent successive reports to the Home Office, in which the organization of the croppers and more general illegal combination appear to be inextricably intermingled. Fitzwilliam inclined at first to take reports of serious insurrectionary conspiracy with a tablespoonful of salt. ‘The true Jacobinical sort of conspiracy,’ he wrote in July, ‘I fear does exist, in a greater or lesser degree…. I trust, the real secret is in very few hands, that the rest are dupes…’ Most nocturnal meetings, he considered, were only ‘for the purpose of raising their wages, and from which nothing is to be apprehended’. As to the propriety of acceding to the request of some large manufacturers that such meetings be forcibly put down, he was guarded. The need to suppress seditious meetings ought not to be made into a pretext for ‘obtaining more restrictive laws against combinations of journeymen for increase of wages’. Such men were entitled to their share of ‘the season of harvest’ when trade was good. To penalize their combinations would be unjust:
I am not sure that we should not afford them ground of complaint against the Constitution, that we should not drive them into the service of the true Jacobin, and by our own acts, furnish a justification for theirs…1
Within two months his opinion had changed. There were three reasons. First, he received reports both of the ‘Black Lamp’ and of secret trade union organization, which were more circumstantial, and in which trade union purposes were inseparably intermingled with rumours of ulterior revolutionary objectives. He was informed that:
… there were three houses at Leeds and three at Wakefield where the committees met – that one of them was expected to be searched some time since, and that their papers were hid under a trapdoor in the floor of the house and amongst the coals; that each member paid 1d. per week to the fund; that there were many committee men made, and that each committee man got ten more… that they carry their weekly pennies to Leeds; that there would be a rising all over the country on the same night, and everything overturned the next morning.
Second, he received from the Home Office convincing evidence as to the close connexion between the organization of the croppers or shearmen in Yorkshire and the west of England, where gig-mills had recently been destroyed. Third, he became increasingly alarmed at reports of a rising tide of successful trade unionism, involving a score of trades. In early September the Mayor of Leeds wrote to him in dismay at ‘the momentous shape which the spirit of combination amongst workmen of almost every class (but particularly amongst shearmen) has now assumed’:
Perquisites, privileges, time, mode of labour, rate, who shall be employed, &c., &c. – all are now dependent upon the fiats of our workmen, beyond all appeal; and all branches are struggling for their share of these new powers. It is now a confirmed thing that a bricklayer, mason, carpenter, wheelwright, &c., shall have 3s. per week higher wages in Leeds or in Manchester than at Wakefield, York, Hull, Rochdale…
At the end of September 1802, all of the croppers employed by Gott, the largest woollen manufacturer in Leeds, struck in opposition to the employment of two boys over the recognized age for apprenticeship (fourteen). (The issue was a pretext for a general show-down between Gott and the croppers, and thereby for the whole West Riding trade, on the apprenticeship question.) Earl Fitzwilliam now wrote to Lord Pelham, calling for ‘further restriction against the combination of journeymen’:
I cannot help feeling a strong opinion that all the meetings, and suspicion of meetings, takes its rise in the combination of the very men I am now speaking about, the croppers. They are the tyrants of the country; their power and influence has grown out of their high wages, which enable them to make deposits that puts them beyond all fear of inconvenience from misconduct. They are, however, an order of men not necessary to the manufacture, and if the merchants had firmness to do without them, their consequence would be lost, their banks would waste, their combinations would fall to the ground, and we should hear no more of meetings of any sort…1
We do not know whether any of the moving spirits in the cropper’s union were former members of the society of ‘Working Mecanicks’ who had written to the L.C.S. five years before.2 We do know, however, that small producers had established at the turn of the century in Leeds a new hall for free trade in cloth, by-passing the wealthy clothiers, and that it was known universally as the ‘Tom Paine Hall’. We know also that the main intermediary for postal communication between the croppers of Yorkshire and the shearmen of the West Country was a Leeds shoemaker, George Palmer, in whom we can surely detect the proverbial radical cobbler? It is reasonable to suppose that some of these literate, skilled, and very able men were Painites.
Moreover, the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 had forced the trade unions into an illegal world in which secrecy and hostility to the authorities were intrinsic to their very existence. The position of unions between 1799 and the repeal of the Combination Acts (1824–5) was complex. We have first to face the paradox that it was in the very years when the Acts were in force that trade unionism registered great advances. Not only did unions which reach far back into the eighteenth century – woolcombers, hatters, cordwainers and shoemakers, shipwrights, tailors – continue more or less unperturbed through many of the years in which the Combination Acts were in force; there is also evidence of organization spreading to many new trades, and of the first attempts at general unionism. The Webbs judged that a number of the London craft trades ‘have never been more completely organized… than between 1800 and 1820’.1 Many artisan trades, like the tailors, had their network of trades clubs or lodges, houses of call, tickets, support of members on tramp, control over apprenticeship (which entailed a substantial payment into union funds), benefits, bank deposits, and even on occasion official price-lists drawn up in agreement with the masters. Such evidence has led to suggestions that the Combination Acts were almost ‘a dead letter’, and that the notion that there was any ‘campaign against liberty’ during these years is much exaggerated.2
This is as untrue as the notion, sometimes found in popular accounts, that the Combination Acts made illegal trade unions which were legal before. There was, in fact, sufficient legislation before the 1790s to make almost any conceivable trade union activity liable to prosecution – as conspiracies in common law, for breach of contract, for leaving work unfinished, or under Statute law covering separate industries. The Combination Acts were passed by a Parliament of anti-Jacobins and landowners, whose first concern was to add to the existing legislation intimidating political reformers. They were also intended to codify existing anti-trade union law, simplifying the procedure, and enabling two magistrates to proceed by summary jurisdiction. Their novelty consisted in this; in the inclusive nature of their prohibition of all combination; and in the fact that, unlike legislation in the earlier paternalist tradition, they included no compensatory protective clauses. While technically prohibiting combinations of masters as well, they were, as Professor Aspinall has shown, ‘an odious piece of class legislation’.1
As such, they hung over the heads of all trade unionists for twenty-five years, and were often employed. ‘Two or more Justices meet daily at one or other of the Manufacturing Towns,’ a Home Office emissary wrote from the west of England in 1802, ‘and as the Combination Act affords a very convenient pretext for summoning and examining upon Oath any suspected Persons I have continually some before them.’2 It was this blanket nature of the Acts which proved so ‘convenient’. No count has been made of the number of cases brought under them (for this would involve lengthy research in the provincial press), but no one familiar with these years can doubt that their general prohibitive influence was ever-present. On the other hand, there were a number of interesting reasons why they were not as widely employed as might have been expected. First, despite the weight of legislation, there was a hazy area in which some kind of trade union activity was still, in practice, accepted as permissible. On the one hand, trades clubs – such as those in the London crafts – which emphasized their function as benefit societies, and which kept quiet as to their national correspondence and negotiating functions, might go for years unmolested, until some conflict or strike offended employers or the authorities. On the other hand, occasions arose in which it was lawful for the journeymen in a trade – at least in different towns and districts – to represent their interest in petitions to Parliament, or in attendance at Committees of the House. Moreover, the Acts did not altogether displace the older, obsolescent legislation empowering magistrates to arbitrate in wage disputes. For journeymen to apply, whether to a magistrate or to Parliament, for protection (and the authorities were reluctant to block altogether the constitutional outlets for grievances), then they must be permitted some organization in order to select their spokesmen and to raise the necessary expenses.
Here, then, was a disputed area on the border of legality, which proved important in the history which leads to Luddism. But, next, there were several reasons why employers were often reluctant to use the Acts as more than a threat. In the artisan industries, such as tailoring or shoemaking, there were many small masters with little organization amongst themselves. In London or Birmingham a good many of them were themselves Radicals, who despised the repressive legislation of which the Combination Acts were a part, and who had scruples against their use. Relations with their journeymen were often informal and personal; trades clubs had long been accepted as part of the scene; the very small employer still found apprenticeship convenient. He thought of his business as providing him with a reasonable living rather than in terms of expansionism, and consequently he was as jealous as his men of the few large employers who, disregarding custom and apprenticeship, were taking the cream off the market and employing cheap labour. Hence in such trades, the artisan unions existed within an undefined area of toleration. If they overstepped these limits, by strike action or ‘unreasonable’ demands, they might bring either prosecution or the counter-organization of the masters upon their heads. They were not free from the effects of the Combination Acts, but they had Iearned to live alongside them.
Outside the artisan trades – indeed, over the greater part of the manufacturing districts of the north, Midlands, and west, other conditions obtained. Wherever we find outwork, factory, or large workshop industry, the repression of trade unionism was very much more severe. The larger the industrial unit or the greater the specialization of skills involved, the sharper were the animosities between capital and labour, and the greater the likelihood of a common understanding among the employers. We find some of the sharpest conflicts involving men with special skills who attempted to attain to, or to hold, a privileged position – cotton-spinners, calico-printers, pattern-makers, mill-wrights, shipwrights, croppers, woolcombers, some grades of building worker. We find others involving large numbers of outworkers – notably weavers and framework-knitters – attempting to resist wage-cutting and the deterioration of status.
But even here the Combination Acts were not always brought into use. In the first place, these put the onus for prosecution upon the employers. But despite a number of early combinations among the masters in different industries, every employer was surrounded by the jealousy of his competitors. The larger his enterprise, the greater the jealousy, and the more likely his rivals were to profit from his embarrassment. (Thus Gott’s attempt to beat the croppers in 1802 was defeated by the capitulation of other Leeds manufacturers to the union’s demands.) Next wherever the union was strong, prosecution involved many difficulties. It was notoriously difficult to obtain two witnesses among the men to swear to the union’s existence. The employer knew that he was likely to lose many of his best craftsmen. If they were not imprisoned or on strike, they would simply peel off in ones and twos and ‘black’ his workshop or mill. Moreover, the results of a prosecution did not always justify the losses which might be entailed. For a first conviction, the punishment was only three months imprisonment; and while conviction was usually secured, it was not automatic. Employers were further deterred ‘by the power of appeal to the Quarter Sessions… which might hang them up for three months before a determination could be had, during all which time the informer could have carried on no business because his cropping shops would have been under an interdict’.1
Thus it was that prosecutions often took place, not under the Acts of 1799–1800, but under previous legislation – the common law of conspiracy, or under the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers (5 Eliz. c.4) penalizing workers for leaving work unfinished. The advantage of the first lay in the fact that it could be used against the ‘ring-leaders’ or officers of a union (accompanied by the seizure of papers and funds); that more severe penalties could be imposed; and, not least, that the onus for prosecution fell upon the authorities rather than upon individual employers. The advantage of the second was that it was possible, in the event of a strike, for the employer to proceed by summary jurisdiction on the evidence of the strike itself, without securing witnesses who would swear to formal trade union organization. ‘Very few prosecutions have been made to effect under the Combination Acts,’ wrote Gravener Henson, the framework-knitters’ leader:
but hundreds have been made under this law, and the labourer can never be free unless this law is modified; the combination is nothing; it is the law with regards the finishing of work, which masters employ to harrass and keep down the wages of their work-people.1
These qualifications are important; but they should not lead us to conclusions as to any temperate disposition on the part of authority towards trade unionism. From the point of view of the trade unionists, it made little difference whether they were prosecuted under the Acts, or under common law or 5 Eliz. c.4, except that the latter were more severe or more expeditious. To the general public, in any case, all this legislation was grouped under the generic term, ‘the laws against combination’. The effectiveness of the legislation is not to be judged by the number of prosecutions but by its general deterrent influence. Under one law or another, blows were struck at the unionists at critical moments, or at critical points of development: for example, the west of England woollen workers (1802), the Yorkshire Clothier’s ‘Institute’ (1806), Lancashire cotton-weavers (1808 and 1818), The Times compositors (1810), Glasgow weavers (1813), Sheffield cutlers (1814), framework-knitters (1814), calico-printers (1818), and Barnsley linen-weavers (1822). Such cases generally arose at times of widespread and successful organization, or at times when the Government itself had become alarmed at the disorder and ‘seditious’ agitation surrounding it. The Home Office correspondence reveals that such general considerations often took priority over the particular industrial issues; and, further, that a continuous tussle took place between the authorities (Home Office or magistrates) who wished the employers to prosecute, and the masters who wished to throw the onus on Government.1 Even the larger employers often acted with considerable misgiving. ‘The law is harsh,’ admitted a Sheffield employer to his protesting fiancée in 1814, ‘for wages are difficult to be advanced except by combination, and at a less insubordinate period I would not have attempted to put such a law in force.’2 Once again we can detect that indefinite area of toleration, which was upset only at the point where unionists became uncomfortably successful or ‘insubordinate’.
Thus in the artisan trades, especially in London, there was a twilight world of semi-legality, in which a very high degree of organization was achieved, and considerable funds built up. (We have seen Thomas Large’s suggestion that the Carpenters had £20,000 in 1812, and Davenport’s account of the shoemakers in the same years.3) It was from the London trades that the first periodical concerned with union affairs – the Gorgon, edited by John Wade, a wool-sorter, emerged in 1818. But in the northern and Midlands manufacturing districts, in conditions where combination must either be widespread and militant or else ineffectual, one or other of the laws against combination was frequently in use, as an auxiliary to wage-cutting or victimization, breaking up incipient unions and driving others into underground forms. In the textile trades Gravener Henson saw the Acts as –
a tremendous millstone round the neck of the local artisan, which has depressed and debased him to the earth: every act which he has attempted, every measure that he has devised to keep up or raise his wages, he has been told was illegal: the whole force of the civil power and influence of the district has been exerted against him because he was acting illegally: the magistrates, acting, as they believed, in unison with the views of the legislature, to check and keep down wages and combination, regarded… every attempt on the part of the artisan to ameliorate his situation… as a species of sedition and resistance of the Government: every committee or active man among them was regarded as a turbulent, dangerous instigator, whom it was necessary to watch and crush if possible.1
It was Henson’s association of framework-knitters in 1813 whose tickets carried a coat-of-arms with a loom, an arm holding a hammer, and the motto: ‘Taisez vous’ (Keep Quiet). The men of Notts county (he said in 1824) consider the combination laws ‘so oppressive, their motto has been, “If you will find gaols, we will find bodies.” ’2 The Webbs, whose materials for The History of Trade Unionism were collected at the end of the nineteenth century, noted that every old union had its ‘romantic legend of its early years’: ‘the midnight meeting of patriots in the corner of a field, the buried box of records, the secret oath, the terms of imprisonment…’3 Thus, the Society of Ironfounders, formed in 1810, is supposed to have met ‘on dark nights on the peaks, moors, and wastes on the highlands of the Midland Counties’.4 Where such nocturnal meetings took place (as undoubtedly they did) the whole atmosphere was one which will have encouraged revolutionary talk, even when the immediate objective was industrial. More commonly the unions met in a private room of a sympathetic inn-keeper. The form of organization was one which made penetration by spies difficult. In some cases it was based on ‘classes’ (a form borrowed from the Methodists),5 or upon refinements which perhaps owed something to Jacobin and Irish experience. Thus, by an elaborate system of delegation from the workshop to the town committee, and from thence to the regional committee, it was possible to shield the names of the officers and committeemen even from the union membership. (In certain cases, the officers were appointed by a secret ballot within the committee, and their names were known only to the Secretary or Treasurer.) 1 Hence, if one part of the organization became known to the authorities, other parts might remain intact.
Awe-inspiring oaths and initiation ceremonies were probably fairly widespread. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the well-known ceremony of the woolcombers (or builders?), with its inside and outside tilers, its bandaging of the eyes, its solemn oath of secrecy sworn before the figure of death:
I call upon God to witness this my most solemn declaration, that neither hopes, fears, rewards, punishments, nor even death itself, shall ever induce me directly or indirectly, to give any information respecting any thing contained in this Lodge, or any similar Lodge connected with the Society; and I will neither write, nor cause to be written, upon paper, wood, sand, stone, or any thing else, whereby it may be known…2
Such oaths had a long ancestry, owing something to freemasonry, something to old guild traditions, and something to commonplace civil ceremonies, such as the burgess oath. Thus an oath of the ‘Freemen of the Company of Basket-Makers’, in use in the mid eighteenth century, bound members to ‘well and faithfully keep’ the secrets of the craft, which might not be taught ‘to any Man but to such as be Free of the same Science’, and to pay ‘all manner of Duties, as becometh a Brother and a Freeman to do’.3 One of Colonel Fletcher’s Bolton ‘missionaries’ dug up a more horrific oath, supposedly imported by Irish ‘ribbon-men’:
I do swear in the presence of you my brethren and of our blessed lady Mary that I will maintain and support our holy Religion by destroying Heretics as far as my person and property will go, not one excepted.4
From these disparate sources, the oaths of the early nineteenth century were compounded, the Luddites drawing most upon the Irish tradition, the unionists upon the craft and masonic traditions.1 The union oaths probably fell into disuse earliest among the London crafts and the artisans of the large towns. But initiation ceremonies and oath-taking persisted in the Midlands and north (and elsewhere) for many years after the repeal of the Combination Acts, not only as a measure of security against the employers, but also because they had become part of the moral culture – solidarity, dedication, and intimidation – essential to the union’s existence. The Huddersfield branch of the Old Mechanics bought, on its formation in 1831, a pistol, a Bible, and ten yards of curtain material; clearly, the properties of the initiation ceremony were a first charge on the members’ funds.2 During the great wave of general unionism between 1832 and 1834, there appears to have been a revival in oath-taking, especially in the shadowy Yorkshire ‘Trades’ Union’. Paradoxically, the tradition of taisez vous seems to have flared up into a last phase of bombastic ceremony which was far from silent. The gentry were alarmed by rumours of ‘solemn and dreadful oaths’ binding men to kill traitors or bad masters. Colliers and building workers were seen entering inns where ‘they make a noise as if they were at a military drill, and… forty or fifty pistol shots are commonly fired off in one night. A pistol is fired over every man’s head immediately on his taking the oath…’3 Simeon Pollard, the Union’s leader, denied that any such oaths were taken; but John Tester, a leader of the wool-comber’s strike in 1825 (and now a bitter opponent of unionism) wrote caustically about the expense of union paraphernalia ‘swords, death-scenes, gowns, banners, battle-axes, and large empty boxes like military chests’. At an inquest upon a young Irish blackleg who died as a result of being beaten by unidentified assailants at Farsley, near Leeds (December 1832), details came out which seem credible. A branch of the union had met weekly at the ‘Bay Mare’, paying 3d. each week for the use of a private room on the second floor:
Extraordinary precautions were used to prevent what passed in the room from being overheard, the underside of the joists were planked with inch boards, and the interstices filled with wood shavings, and during meetings a guard was stationed on the outside of the door, and all the ale and other liquor was fetched into the room by one of the Unionmen.
The father of the dead man gave evidence as to having joined the Union in order to discover its plans, at his master’s request. But his account appears authentic:
When a member is admitted there are two rooms, in one of which the Lodge is assembled. The first operation was to blindfold him; he was then conducted into the Lodge by two members; he was then required to give the pass word, which on that occasion was Alpha and Omega; he was then walked round the room, during which time a great rumbling noise was made by a sheet of iron – a hymn was then sung – and he still continued to walk about the room two or three times, and was asked if his motive was pure – they then took the bandage from his eyes, and the first thing he saw was a picture of death as large as a man, over which was the inscription ‘Remember Thy End’. Over this picture there was a drawn sword – his eyes were then bandaged again, and he was walked about the room, when, upon a signal being given, all the members made a great stamping noise with their feet – he was then ordered to kneel down beside a table, and the bandage was again taken from his eyes, when he saw a large bible before him, his hand having been placed upon it…. The 94th Psalm was then read, when the oath was administered which was to this effect: that he was to obey all the commands of the Union Committee, and to keep all secrets in every particular – the conclusion of the oath contained an imprecation, on which each person sworn is made to wish that if he violates the oath that his soul may be burnt in the lowest pit of hell to all eternity…1
In an age which has forgotten the God of Battles, we may quote some verses from the psalm which these trade unionists selected to read to the initiates:
O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth; O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself….
Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?
How long shall they utter and speak hard things? and all the workers of iniquity boast themselves?
They break in pieces thy people, O Lord, and afflict thine heritage.
They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless…
For the Lord will not cast off his people, neither will he forsake his inheritance.
But judgement shall return unto righteousness: and all the upright in heart shall follow it.
Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? or who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity…?
Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law?
They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood.
But the Lord is my defence; and my God is the rock of my refuge.
And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness; yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off.1
This oath and this psalm, before the picture of death in the back room of an inn, were serious things for people in whom deep superstitions still stirred – some of whom had, perhaps, believed in Joanna Southcott or been swept into the Wesleyan revival. Moreover, a man need only raise his eyes at work, or perhaps in tap-room or chapel, to meet the eyes of others who shared in the same vows of secrecy. It was for some such oath as this that the Dorchester labourers (or ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’) were transported in 1834, after which oath-taking fell rapidly into disuse. And it was at a mass meeting on Hunslet Moor, Leeds, to protest against the Dorchester sentences that a well-known reformer declared publicly:
I have known men of the strictest moral character, in the humbler walks of life, who have taken the same oath. So many… that to select them and transport them would almost dispopulate the West Riding.1
But we must not paint too colourful a picture of the heroic days of illegality. Much of the work done in the back rooms of inns was humdrum. Much of it was the solid and quiet work of the benefit and burial society. Many of the worst problems, in quiet years, came not from the masters but from the inexperience or ignorance of the officers. Funds slowly acquired would be lost with an absconding officer, with no possible recourse to the law, like those of the Tewkesbury branch of the Framework-Knitters which were unwisely entrusted to a Secretary who was ‘seemingly a Man of Abillities and a religious turn’.2 If the officers usually served without payment, committee meetings were well lubricated with ale paid for out of union funds. The social functions of the unions were important, but enough evidence has been left in early account books to suggest that another of John Tester’s complaints was not without basis:
I have seen scores of committee-men, who seemed to possess no… qualification, except for an extraordinary swallow. Their powers of deglutition were most prodigious.3
There is no reason why the secret tradition should not belong to the tap-room as well as to the midnight meeting on the moors. Gentlemen would not be found at either place, and a stranger would be noted as soon as he entered the bar. Secrecy must be seen as more than a matter of oaths and ceremonies; it involved, during the years of war and its aftermath, a whole code of conduct, almost a mode of consciousness. At work no leader or deputation need approach the employer with the men’s demands; a hint would be dropped, an over-looker would be prompted, or an unsigned note be left for the master to see. If the demands were not met, there was no need – in the small workshop – for a formal strike; men would simply drop away or singly give notice. While the leaders might be known, it might also be impossible to procure evidence as to their activities. ‘So cautious are they now become,’ wrote a Wakefield magistrate in 1804, ‘no general striking or communication with masters is necessary; it is done in a way perfectly intelligible to the masters, but so as impossible to be given in evidence to prove a combination.’1 There are some few individuals,’ wrote Place twenty years later,
who possess the confidence of their fellows, and when any matter relating to the trade has been talked over, either at the club or in a separate room, or in a workshop or a yard, and the matter has become notorious, these men are expected to direct what shall be done, and they do direct – simply by a hint. On this the men act; and one and all support those who may be thrown out of work…. Those who direct are not known to the body, and not one man in twenty, perhaps, knows the person of any one who directs. It is a rule among them to ask no questions, and another rule among them who know most, either to give no answer if questioned, or an answer to mislead.2
Moreover, conditions of illegality were those in which trade unionists most frequently took recourse to direct action in order to enforce demands which could neither be raised in law nor in open negotiation. This took place in a score of ways. In its milder forms, it was little more than extreme moral pressure. The craftsman working under the union rate would be boycotted; the ‘illegal’ man would find that his tools were ‘lost’, or would be ‘fined’ by his shopmates. In Spitalfields silk would be cut in the loom; in the woollen districts pieces would be slashed; in the framework-knitting industry the ‘jacks’, vital parts of the stocking-loom, would disappear. Blacklegs or bad masters would know themselves to be watched; a brick might come through the window, or they might be attacked in a lane at night. In Gloucestershire blackleg weavers were carried astride the beam from their own looms and thrown into a pond. At times even more violent forms of intimidation were employed; there was a scatter of cases reported from Glasgow, Dublin, Manchester and Sheffield, of actual or attempted assassinations, vitriol-throwing, or charges of gunpowder thrown into workshops. The most sensational cases were widely publicized, and created in the minds of even sympathetic people of the middle class a deep fear of the violent character of the secret unions.1
More commonly, such direct action was carefully controlled within limits imposed by the moral culture of the working community. A blackleg was seen as an interloper who threatened to take bread from the mouths of the hard working and the innocent; but, while no tears were wasted on him if he was assaulted and ‘taught a lesson’, there was no moral sanction for murder or mutilation. Luddism was an extension of this kind of direct action, but it also was carefully controlled within the same unspoken code. Even in the rougher code of pit-villages and of seaports like Sunderland and North Shields, where the rowdy demonstration and the riot preceded more settled forms of organization, violence was still held within limits which were felt rather than defined.
Paradoxically, the persistence of secrecy and of occasional violence encouraged the arguments for the repeal of the Combination Acts. Francis Place’s argument is familiar:
The laws against combinations… induced [working people] to break and disregard the laws. They made them suspect the intentions of every man who tendered his services. They made them hate their employers with a rancour which nothing else could have produced. And they made them hate those of their own class who refused to join them, to such an extent as cordially to seek to do them mischief.2
And Place’s own account of the successful agitation for their repeal has been repeated so often (and so uncritically) that it is now legendary. According to this, shortly after the Wars ended he commenced, almost single-handedly, to agitate opinion inside and outside the House. In this he received little help and some resistance from trade unionists themselves:
Working-men had been too often deceived to be willing to trust to any one who was not well known to them. Habitually cunning, and suspicious of all above their own rank in life, and having no expectation of any mitigation, much less of a chance of the laws being repealed, they could not persuade themselves that my communications were of any value to them, and they would not therefore give themselves any trouble about them, much less to give such information as might, they thought, be some day used against them. I understood them thoroughly, and was neither put from my purpose nor offended with them. I was resolved to serve them as much as I could.1
Eventually he found in Joseph Hume a Member sufficiently capable, persistent, and within the confidence of the Ministers, to pilot repeal through the House. A Select Committee was packed with supporters. Outside the House, Place set up a permanent H.Q. for the trade union movement, preparing the best witnesses and sending supplies of evidence to Hume; and (in 1824) a Bill was put through under the strategy of Taisez Vous, so quietly that even its staunchest supporters were warned not to speak. This Bill not only repealed the obnoxious Acts, but also explicitly excluded trade unionists from prosecution for conspiracy at common law. A wave of open trade union organization and strikes ensued, and in 1825 both the employers and the Government counter-attacked, appointing a new Committee which was expected to recommend the reinstatement of punitive legislation. But, once again, Place and Hume worked ceaselessly to resist or modify such legislation; petitions poured in from the country; the lobbies of the House were filled with delegations demanding to give evidence. In the event, the amending Bill of 1825 tightened up legislation to the point where almost any form of persuasion or intimidation of non-unionists was an offence, but left the main points gained: trade unionism and strikes were no longer offences as such.2
This account is not untrue. Place’s achievement was a remarkable feat of intelligent wire-pulling and of enormously industrious and well-informed lobbying. Not a point of vantage or of danger was overlooked. He exploited to the full the fact that he was dealing with a House full of gentlemen who found trade union matters boring, some of whom disliked the manufacturing interest, others of whom had made of laissez faire an unquestioned dogma, and most of whom were confused or indifferent as to the issues. But the story has long been due for re-examination. And these are among the points which must be taken into account.
First, trade unionists had reason to suspect Place. Their bitterness had been roused, not only by the Combination Acts, but (perhaps even more) by the simultaneous repeal or super-session of all legislation which protected their own interests.1 But both Place and Hume were devotees of orthodox ‘political economy’, and had given active assistance in the dismantling of all legislation restraining the ‘freedom’ of capital or of labour. Thus, in July 1812, Gravener Henson, then lobbying in the face of strong opposition for the safe passage of a protective Bill for the framework-knitters, wrote sadly back to the Nottingham committee: ‘Mr Hume opposed our Bill on Dr A. Smith’s grounds of letting Trade alone…’ The repeal of the apprenticeship clauses of 5 Eliz. c.4 was actively engineered by Place. The committee of the master-manufacturers which organized the campaign for repeal (1813–14) was under the chairmanship of Alexander Galloway, the former Assistant Secretary of the L.C.S., whose Smithfield works was now the leading engineering shop in London. Its secretary, John Richter, was for years one of Place’s closest associates. The issue had been bitterly contested by the trade unions, and hundreds of petitions had been forwarded for the retention or extension of apprenticeship regulation, carrying a total of 300,000 signatures. The opposition of the workers (and of many small masters in the London crafts) Place dismissed as ‘bigotry’ – ‘a proof of the ignorance of the journeymen of their real interests’. It is therefore not surprising that trade unionists still ‘suspected the intentions’ of Place and Hume in 1824.2
In the second place, it is by no means true that Place was conducting a ‘single-handed’ campaign. In fact, Gravener Henson (who carried far more authority among trade unionists, especially north of the Trent), had got so far ahead of Place that he had drawn up a Bill, and enlisted the support of Peter Moore, the Radical M.P. for Coventry, who introduced the Bill in 1823. Place and Hume moved swiftly, as much to sabotage Henson’s Bill, as to promote their own. Henson’s ideas are usually dismissed in Place’s words, as ‘complicated and absurd’, a ‘mass of absurdities’. The Webbs, more cautiously, noted that the Bill was ‘elaborate’, repealing the Combination Acts but ‘substituting a complicated machinery for regulating piecework and settling industrial disputes’. ‘Some of these proposals were meritorious anticipations of subsequent factory legislation,’ they continued, ‘but the time was not ripe for such measures.’ And they went on to compliment Place upon his ‘great political sagacity’ in using particularly devious Fabian techniques to ensure that Henson and Moore were pushed out of the way.1
In fact, Place’s ‘political sagacity’ was such that he was convinced that the Combination Acts were the cause, not only of secrecy and outrages, but of strikes and of trade unionism itself. Influenced by his own experience in small tailoring shops, he supposed that if masters and men were in a condition of complete freedom, each master would settle matters more or less amicably with his own workmen, the laws of supply and demand would regulate the price of labour, and in a few cases arbitration by magistrates would settle difficulties. ‘The business is really very simple,’ he advised Hume, when suggesting to him how to circumvent Moore:
Repeal every troublesome and vexatious enactment, and enact very little in their place. Leave workmen and their employers as much as possible at liberty to make their own bargains in their own way. This is the way to prevent disputes…
And in 1825 he wrote to Burdett:
Combinations will soon cease to exist. Men have been kept together for long periods only by the oppression of the laws; these being repealed, combinations will lose the matter which cements them into masses, and they will fall to pieces. All will be as orderly as even a Quaker could desire. He knows nothing of the working people who can suppose that, when left at liberty to act for themselves, without being driven into permanent associations by the oppression of the laws, they will continue to contribute money for distant and doubtful experiments, for uncertain and precarious benefits.1
‘This is the way to prevent disputes…’ This was the key-note of all Place’s lobbying; and it was an article by M’Culloch, the doyen of ‘political economy’, in the Edinburgh Review, putting forward similar arguments, which swung many M.P.s in support of repeal Henson, of course, had no such illusions. But, as an outworker himself, he knew from experience that for the weavers, framework-knitters, and others, trade unionism was not enough; and hence his Bill sought to provide the positive protective machinery for which the House of Commons may not have been ‘ripe’ but of which the outworkers stood in crying need.
The response of trade unionists to the events of 1824 and 1825 now seems more explicable. They saw Henson’s Bill manoeuvred out of the way by men who were known to have opposed trade union demands before and who appeared to have some understanding with the Government. Hence, a decided reluctance to come forward with support in the early stages; and when they did come forward, to give evidence before Hume’s Committee, Place found them full of reservations:
The workmen were not easily managed. It required great care and pains and patience not to shock their prejudices…. They were filled with false notions, all attributing their distresses to wrong causes…. All expected a great and sudden rise of wages, when the Combination Laws should be repealed; not one of them had any idea whatever of the connexion between wages and population…
When they saw what Place was about, they gave him support, not with enthusiasm, but on the principle that half a loaf was better than none. When the Acts were repealed, they made use of their new freedom with vigour. When it seemed likely that they would be reinstated, in 1825, even the Government was shaken by the storm of protests, petitions, meetings, and deputations from every trade. ‘Vigilant and intelligent men’ came down to watch the parliamentary proceedings, from Lancashire, Glasgow, Yorkshire, Tyneside. Any attempt to reenact the Combination Acts, John Doherty, the leader of the Lancashire cotton-spinners, wrote to Place, would result in a widespread revolutionary movement.1
Place was the main architect of repeal, and thus immortalized himself in trade union history. This he deserved. But we should not for this reason chide the unions for ‘apathy’ (as did the Webbs) 2 nor understate the almost hilarious confusion of the time. Place was a doctrinaire, who wished the Acts repealed because they offended against good political economy (and also because he was indignant at any repression of working men). He had no notion of ‘serving’ the trade union movement through consultation and common agreement. He wished to manage their delegates as he manipulated M.P.s: ‘I knew well enough that if they could be served… it must be done without their concurrence, in spite of them.’1 The trade unionists, for their part, summed him up; saw that he was in earnest and influential; and gave him qualified support, although it was not the Bill that they wanted. Place was almost certainly right that Henson’s Bill could never have got through the House, any more than Maxwell and Fielden’s Bill for regulating weavers’ wages succeeded ten years later. On the other hand, Place was grossly self-deluded as to the probable consequences of repeal; and it was in part the very force of this delusion (that repeal would prevent disputes) which enabled Hume to gather support in a bored or hostile House.
Once repeal was gained, not the ‘laws’ of M’Culloch but the organizations of such men as John Gast and Doherty, moved into the area of new freedom. The London unionists turned, not to Place, but to Thomas Hodgskin, for their theory. For a brief period, several unions looked with favour upon Place’s gospel of the common interests of workers and employers.2 But the theory of class collaboration had scarcely made its appearance before it came under fire, first from the Trades Newspaper, and, second, from the Owenite Socialists.3 Except in certain craft unions, it was pushed back so far that it scarcely influenced trade union development for fifteen or twenty years. One wonders whether Francis Place, the great wirepuller, was not himself at the end of a trade union wire?
IV. CROPPERS AND STOCKINGERS
This is to anticipate our narrative. For the most cogent arguments for repeal of the Combination Acts were, first, their continuing ineffectiveness in preventing the growth of trade unionism; and, second, the prevalence of violent trade union action, which had been dramatized by Luddism. We have attempted to draw closer to the Luddite movement from three directions: the shadowy tradition of some political ‘underground’; the opacity of the historical sources: and the vigorous traditions of illicit trade unionism. We must now analyse more closely the industrial context within which Luddism took place.
This analysis already exists,1 but it may be corrected and supplemented by evidence which has more recently come to light. Luddism proper, in the years 1811–17, was confined to three areas and occupations: the West Riding (and the croppers), south Lancashire (and the cotton weavers), and the framework-knitting district centred on Nottingham and taking in parts of Leicestershire and Derbyshire.
Of these three groups, the croppers or shearmen2 were skilled and privileged workers, among the aristocracy of the woollen workers; while the weavers and framework-knitters were outworkers, with long artisan traditions, undergoing a deterioration in status. The croppers come closest to the Luddites of popular imagination. They were in direct conflict with machinery which both they and their employers knew perfectly well would displace them. The cropper’s work was described before the Committee on the Woollen Trade in 1806:
The business of a cloth worker is to take a piece of cloth in its rough state as it comes from the market, or as it comes from the fulling mill; he first raises that cloth; after that, if it is a good piece, it is cropped wet; it is then taken and mossed and rowed; mossing is filling up the bottom of the wool after it has been cut with the shears wet, it is done with a handle set with teazles in each hand; after that it is rowed and tentered… and dried; if a fine piece it will receive three cuts dry after the tenter…
After this, the back was cut, and the cloth was examined for faults and repaired, brushed up, cleaned, pressed, and perhaps cut a final time.1 The cloth-worker or cropper undertook all these processes. Apart from the cleaning, the tentering (or stretching), and the pressing, the cropper’s skill resided in the central process, by which the surface or ‘nap’ of the cloth was raised by means of teazles; the shearing done with very heavy hand shears (four feet in length, from handle to blade, and 40 pounds in weight). Both operations required experience and skill. Moreover, while the croppers’ wages were regulated by custom at about 5% of the value of the finished cloth, ‘they can make a piece 20 pr. Cent better or worse by due care and labour or the reverse’. They were thus in an unusually strong bargaining position.2
By the end of the eighteenth century, the finishing of the cloth had become a highly specialized process. Some large manufacturers undertook the whole process in a single ‘factory’; and Gott employed as many as eighty croppers under his own roof. But most merchants bought their pieces in an unfinished state from the small clothiers, and put them out for finishing in workshops employing ‘forty, fifty, or sixty’ skilled men and apprentices in Leeds, but only five or six in the smaller finishing-shops in the West Riding villages. Estimates in 1806 vary between 3,000 and over 5,000 croppers in the West Riding (the second estimate taking in apprentices), with 500 master dressers. In the west of England there were perhaps one-third of that number.3
The croppers thus controlled the finishing processes; and, like the woolcombers, were in a strong position to organize and to keep out unskilled labour. They made up the aristocracy of the West Riding clothing-workers, and, when fully employed, could earn in the first years of the nineteenth century up to 30s. a week. They had a reputation for ‘independent’ or ‘insubordinate’ manners, political awareness, and rollicking relaxation. ‘The Cropper strictly speaking is not a servant,’ wrote a correspondent in the Leeds Mercury:
He does not feel, or call himself as such, but a cloth-worker, and partakes much more of the nature of a shoe-maker, joiner, taylor, &c…. Like them, he comes and goes, stops a longer, or a shorter time… according as he may chance to have work.1
According to another account, they had ‘twice or three times as much money at the ale house than the weaver, the dresser or the dyer’, and were ‘notoriously the least manageable of any persons employed in this important manufacture’.2
But at the same time they were well aware that their status had been made insecure by machinery which could change them almost overnight from an élite into ‘an order of men not not necessary to the manufacture’. The gig-mill was an old invention; indeed, much of the conflict leading up to Luddism turned on a Statute of Edward VI under which its use was prohibited. Essentially it was a simple device, by which, instead of the nap being raised by hand, the cloth was passed between cylinders set with teazles. The croppers (and some master dressers) maintained that the gig-mill was unsuitable for all but the coarsest cloth, tearing and overstraining cloth of finer quality; but these arguments were themselves overstrained in the attempt to prove the indispensability of hand skill The gig-mill, however, threatened to dispossess the cropper of only one part of the finishing process. More recent, and in its implications equally serious, was the invention of the shearing-frame – a device by which two or more shears, set in one frame, could be passed over the surface of the cloth, with a simplicity which dispensed with the need for skilled craftsmen.
The struggle against the gig-mill reaches back into the eighteenth century. Long employed in a few parts of the west of England, the clothing-workers had not become reconciled to its use; and, while a few gig-mills were operating in parts of the West Riding at the end of the eighteenth century, the croppers had organized to prevent its introduction into Leeds. For many years croppers had passed between Yorkshire and the West Country, since their skill was interchangeable; and by the 1790s the resistance to the gig-mill was reaching crisis point. In 1791 the cloth merchants of Leeds issued a public manifesto, signifying their intention to introduce the new machinery; and more than one Leeds mill was destroyed by the croppers in the next ten years. In 1799 the Privy Council was informed that the croppers had a ‘general purse’ amounting to above £1,000. They were strong enough to enforce a closed shop, and –
a Workman daring from Gratitude to stand by the Master in the hour of his need, becomes a proscribed Isolé. He can never be allowed to work where a Ticket Man is till he has adjured his neutrality and paid the penalty they please to impose.
If any master attempted to short-circuit any of the finishing processes, the croppers insisted upon a fine being paid into their funds. If masters returned work as ill-done, the case was adjudicated by a committee of the workers. A Leeds gig-mill had been destroyed in the presence of ‘hundreds’ of witnesses, but, despite the offer of liberal rewards, not one could be found to give evidence against the men:
The system exists more in general consent to the few simple rules of their union, than in any written Form, and by way of evading all chance of Conviction they have now formed themselves into a General Sick Club.1
This sick club was probably the first form of ‘the Institution’ or ‘Clothier’s Community’ (1802). Its headquarters were in Leeds, but it was Wiltshire, in 1802, which was the centre where the burning of mills and rioting took place. This was, perhaps, less a sign of strength than of despair. In Leeds the croppers were so strongly organized that it had become out of the question to introduce the gig-mill.2 In August 1802 the Mayor of Leeds had written to Earl Fitzwilliam:
From a perfect conviction that their threats would be carried into execution here, if any merchant infringed the clothworkers’ prescriptions, I have, within these last nine months, by my own personal influence, privately prevailed upon one or two houses who meditated the adding a gigmill or a shearing machine to their works, to desist for the present, or I am firmly convinced we should have had such horrid outrages to deplore here, as have been practised in the West.1
These ‘horrid outrages’ had reached their climax in the West Country in the last years of the eighteenth century. Bodies of rioters 1,000 or 2,000 strong, attacked the hated mills, and in Somersetshire in December 1797:
Two or three hundred men with their faces black’d & armed with Bludgeons enter’d the Houses of a Sheergrinder… about three miles from Froome, and demolish’d about thirty pounds worth of Shears.2 In Wiltshire, however, there is some indication that the croppers were already weakened by the waning position of their own industry in relation to the West Riding. With the discharge of shearmen from the forces during the brief peace, the problem of unemployment was more acute. ‘A Souldier Returned to his Wife and weeping Orphans’ wrote to a Member of Parliament from Bradford (Wilts) in 1802:
We know that it have been mentioned to our great men and Ministers in Parliament by them that have Factorys how many poor they employ, forgetting at the same time how many more they would employ were they to have it done by hand as they used to do. The Poor house we find full of great lurking Boys…. I am informed by many that there will be a Revolution and that there is in Yorkshire about 30 thousand in a Correspondent Society…. The burning of Factorys or setting fire to the property of People we know is not right, but Starvation forces Nature to do that which he would not…3
A Gloucestershire clothier was the recipient of a more alarming letter:
Wee Hear in Formed that you got Shear in mee sheens [i.e. Shearing Machines] and if you Dont Pull them Down in a Forght Nights Time Wee will pull them Down for you Wee will you Damd infernold Dog. And Bee four Almighty God we will pull down all the Mills that heave Heany Shearing me Shens in We will cut out Hall your Damd Hearts as Do Keep them and We will meock the rest Heat them or else We will Searve them the Seam.4
However obsolete the statute of Edward VI prohibiting gig-mills may have been, it is important that the croppers were aware of it and held that protection against displacement by machinery was not only their ‘right’ but also their constitutional right. They also knew of the clause in the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers enforcing a seven years’ apprenticeship, and of a Statute of Philip and Mary limiting the number of looms which might be employed by one master. Not only did they know of these laws: they attempted to put them in force. In 1802 they canvassed public opinion in the West Riding, and won great sympathy in their contest with Gott. Their opposition to new machinery does not appear to have been unthinking or absolute; proposals were in the air for the gradual introduction of the machinery, with alternative employment found for displaced men, or by a tax of 6d. per yard upon cloth dressed by machinery, to be used as a fund for the unemployed seeking work. The croppers seem to have cherished some hope of a general negotiation within the trade, and were chiefly indignant at the attitude of a few masters, motivated by ‘Revenge and Avarice’, and who sought to press home their advantage in the ‘consciousness of… the facility with which the law favours the conviction of illegal combinations’.1
It is here that the flagrant class oppression of the Combination Acts bore down upon them at every point. At a time when the common law of conspiracy or 5 Elizabeth c.4 was being employed to defeat trade union action, every attempt to enforce statute law favourable to the workers’ interests ended in failure or financial loss. The west of England woollen workers raised subscriptions to empower attorneys to commence actions against gig-mills and against unapprenticed men, but none were successful.2 The masters, however, were disturbed enough to petition for the repeal of all protective legislation covering the woollen industry. The Yorkshire woollen workers were drawn into the same legislative struggle. Heavy expenses were incurred to employ counsel on their behalf to attend the House during 1802–3, and to send witnesses to give evidence on the journeymen’s behalf. The master’s Bill was checked in 1803, and became lost in a Parliament preoccupied with the resumption of war with France. In successive years, an annual suspending Bill was pushed through the House with almost no discussion, waiving all protective legislation on the workers’ behalf, while the quasi-legal Institution incurred endless expenses trying to resist the masters’ progress. One of the croppers’ witnesses, in 1806, declared that the Yorkshire croppers and weavers alone had raised between £10,000 and £12,000 for legal expenses and attendance on Parliament in the previous three years.
Meanwhile, tempers were rising, and support for the croppers was growing. In Yorkshire the Institution had become a formidable organization. Not only did the croppers claim almost 100% organization (‘I do not suppose,’ declared one witness, ‘that there are twenty Cloth-workers in the county of York but what are in the institution’), but a great many small masters and weavers were subscribing to their funds. When their books were seized in 1806, it appeared that many other groups of workers either belonged to the Institution or had received grants from their funds: colliers, bricklayers, wool-sorters, clothiers, joiners, sawyers, flax-dressers, shoemakers, turnpike-men, cabinet-makers, pattern-ring-makers, and papermakers; while payments had been made to and received from the Manchester cotton-spinners. By 1806, indeed, the case of the croppers had almost melted into the general grievances and demands of the working community. For the croppers the grievance was specific: ‘now gigs and shearing frames are like to become general, if they are allowed to go on many hundreds of us will be out of bread’. For the weavers the issue was wider: could the obsolescent apprenticeship clauses of 5 Elizabeth c.4 be re-inforced, thereby stemming the influx of unskilled labour? All artisans saw this as a test case, indicative of the restoration or the total abrogation of the old protective or arbitrative labour code which alone afforded any hope of legal defence against the full impact of wage-cutting and labour dilution. For many of the small masters – thousands of whom were among the 39,000 who petitioned in 1805 in favour of a Bill to limit looms, put down gig-mills, and enforce apprenticeship – it appeared that the domestic system itself was at stake. In 1806 when a new Committee was appointed to enquire into the Woollen Trade, impressive delegations appeared to give evidence from most sections of woollen workers and small masters of both Yorkshire and the west. The witnesses all converged in a general detestation of the factory system; ‘they frankly allow,’ the Committee reported, ‘that they wish to retain this Law [i.e. apprenticeship] on account of its tending to embarrass the carrying on the Factory system, and thereby to counteract its growth’. The threat of the gig-mill was one element only in a general revulsion against the great employers who were breaking down working customs and disrupting a settled way of life.1
It would be a sad understatement to say that the men’s witnesses before the 1806 Committee met with a frosty reception. They and their counsel were browbeaten and threatened by the advocates of laissez faire and the anti-Jacobin tribunes of order. Petitions were seen as evidence of conspiracy. Witnesses whom the croppers had sent to London and maintained at such expense were interrogated like criminals (‘I mean to tell the truth as far as comes to my knowledge,’ expostulated one cropper: ‘my character is my bread.’). It was held to be an outrageous offence that they had collected money from outside their own ranks and had been in contact with the woollen workers of the west. They were forced to reveal the names of their fellow officers. Their books were seized. Their accounts were scrutinized. The Committee dropped all pretence of judicial impartiality, and constituted itself into an investigating tribunal. ‘Your Committee need scarcely remark,’ it reported to the House of Commons,
that such Institutions are, in their ultimate tendencies, still more alarming in a political, than in a commercial view…
It saw in the croppers’ organization ‘the existence of a systematic, and organized Plan, at once so efficient and so dangerous, both from the amount of its force, and from the facility and secrecy with which… that force can be called into action…’ It was this which called for ‘the most deliberate and serious consideration of Parliament’.1
The Institution, of course, went underground. For two more years suspending Bills were passed. In 1808 the croppers petitioned once more, declaring that ‘the great question respecting the use of that Machine… having been brought in so many Sessions of Parliament, the Expenses have greatly distressed them’. Finally, in 1809 all the protective legislation in the woollen industry – covering apprenticeship, the gig-mill, and the number of looms – was repealed. The road was now open for the factory, the gig-mill, the shearing-frame, the employment of unskilled and juvenile labour. The road to any constitutional redress was finally blocked. If there had been a ‘constitutional’ and a ‘Luddite’ faction within the croppers’ ranks, the latter now carried the day. Already, in 1805, an anonymous letter had been received at the Royal Exchange Insurance Office:
Gent. Directors,
At a general but private meeting of the Chairmen of all the Committees of cloth workers in this county (viz. York) it was ordered to desire you (for your own profit) not to insure any factory where any machinery was in belonging the cloth workers. For it was ordered again to petition parliament for our rights; and, if they will not grant us them, by stopping the machinery belong us, we are determined to grant them ourselves, but does not wish you to be any loser thereby.
By order of the
Cloth Workers.2
After 1806 and 1809 every vestige of legislation which suggested that the journeyman in wool might look to Parliament to defend their status had been abrogated. When, in the stagnant and distressed years of the Orders in Council, some large employers hurried to install the new machinery in the hope of cornering, with cheap labour, the little trade that was left, Luddism appeared with an almost inevitable logic. To the croppers Ned Ludd was the defender of ancient right, the upholder of a lost constitution:
We will never lay down Arms [till] The House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality, and repeal that to hang Frame Breakers. But We. We petition no more – that won’t do – fighting must.
Signed by the General of the Army of Redressers
Ned Ludd Clerk
Redressers for ever Amen.1
However, the signal for Luddism came first, not from the croppers, but from the framework-knitters. Their story is complicated by the fact that there was no single obnoxious machine, like the gig-mill, against which they were in revolt; and because with them, the constitutional and the Luddite strategies do not appear as alternatives so much as tactics simultaneously employed. It is the constitutional thread which we must unravel first.
The general process by which the framework-knitters were beaten down to poverty during the Wars follows very similar lines to that by which the weavers were degraded. The stocking-loom, however, was a more expensive machine than most hand-looms. The industry was controlled by the merchant-hosiers; the manufacture was undertaken by stockingers, working in their own homes, or in small workshops of master-stockingers. While some stockingers2 owned their own looms or frames, after 1800 these came more and more under the ownership of the hosiers, or of independent speculators who invested small or large sums in looms, upon which they drew the rent in much the same way as owners of cottage-property. Thus, to the general grievances concerning wage-cutting and working customs there was added the running grievance of frame rents. The hosiers, in fact, had two alternative means of lowering wages: to reduce the price paid for the work, or to raise the frame-rents. And, as in hand-loom weaving, the least scrupulous masters undermined conditions throughout the trade.
In 1811 there were perhaps 29,000 stocking-looms in the country, and 50,000 workers employed in and about the hosiery trade.1 Although a tiny pocket of the industry remained in London, its seventeenth-century home, the industry was now largely concentrated in the Nottingham-Leicester-Derby triangle. As in the Yorkshire woollen industry, a few large workshops or ‘factories’ were growing up, but by far the greatest number of stockingers worked in small industrial villages in workshops containing three or four frames. Unlike the skilled croppers, the framework-knitters were outworkers in a position exceptionally exposed to exploitation; like the weavers they looked back to better times. Accounts of the second half of the eighteenth century differ; but from 1785 until 1805 it seems that there was a fairly high level of employment, with wages of 14s. or 15s. a week for a twelve-hour day. But by the turn of the century the industry was facing difficult readjustments. The sombre tone of anti-Jacobin society led to a falling demand for the gorgeous hose of pre-revolutionary years, although this was compensated for to some extent by the increased demand for plain hosiery and the gradual introduction of machine-wrought lace. The stockingers experienced a growing deterioration in their conditions, and reacted with vigour. As in the case of the weavers, magistrates and masters were to be found who attributed the insubordination of the men to the ‘luxury and licentiousness’ induced by their former affluence: ‘Among the men the discussion of politics, the destruction of game, or the dissipation of the ale houses was substituted for the duties of their occupation during the former part of the week, and in the remaining three or four days a sufficiency was earned for defraying the current expenses’ – ‘the lower orders were almost universally corrupted by profusion and depravity scarcely to be credited…’2