THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS

V. PETERLOO

In the following months such men as Charles Smith mourned Brandreth in their thousands. Cashman apart, this was the first blood shed in the encounter. The psychic consequences were profound, and thereafter both Government and reformers saw the issue as a sheer contest of power. And yet the longer-term influence of the Oliver affair was to strengthen the constitutionalist, as opposed to the revolutionary, wing of the reform movement. A rising without Oliver would have panicked the middle class to the side of the administration. A rising with Oliver threw Whigs and middle-class reformers on to the alert. For three years the crucial political contests centred upon the defence of civil liberties, and the rights of the Press, where the middle class itself was most sensitive. The Oliver affair gave to the working-class reform movement after 1817 a determined but constitutionalist outlook. ‘Peaceably if we may’ took precedence over ‘forcibly if we must’. The acquittals of Wooler, Hone, the Folley Hall insurgents, and the protests at the ‘spy system’ of such men as Earl Fitzwilliam and Coke of Norfolk (and of much of the Press), emphasized the importance of vestigial rights and of the constitutionalist tradition. The failure at Pentridge emphasized the extreme danger of conspiracy. Only the shock of Peterloo (August 1819) threw a part of the movement back into revolutionary courses; and the Cato Street Conspiracy (February 1820) served to reinforce the lesson of Oliver and of Pentridge. From 1817 until Chartist times, the central working-class tradition was that which exploited every means of agitation and protest short of active insurrectionary preparation.

Moreover, moderate reformers and Whigs were not slow to turn the lesson of Oliver to their own advantage. Indeed, the Leeds Mercury drew a lesson from the exposures which was, in effect, that the working class must place itself under the guidance and protection of the Whigs and middle-class reformers. In its editorial on the Derby trials it advised reformers to:

… shun as an enemy every political missionary who should seek to instil the deadly seeds of rebellion into their minds…. Every one should be suspected henceforth as a spy, or an informer, or an incendiary, who talks of any force but that of reason…¹

In London the Burdettite Independent Whig drew much the same lesson: one of the victims at Derby had, earlier in 1817, cancelled his subscription to the Whig and announced his intention of subscribing to the Political Register, and the rising was seen as a consequence of the propagation of Cobbett’s ‘poisonous doctrines’.¹ Cobbett, for his part saw his warnings against all ‘clubs and correspondencies’ confirmed, while Hunt, on more than one occasion in the future, raised the cry of ‘Oliver’ to silence critics such as Watson, Cleary and Thistlewood. For forty more years, the name of Oliver tolled in the memory of physical force reformers and Chartists, and gave a fatal irresolution to all their preparations.

There is a sense in which Peterloo followed directly, and inevitably, upon Pentridge. It was the outcome of an extraordinarily powerful and determined ‘constitutionalist’ agitation, largely working class in character, within a potentially revolutionary context. What was displayed, in 1819, was not the strength but the growing weakness of the English ancien régime. Fragmented and terrorized, with many local leaders under arrest, the reform movement had little organized expression through much of 1818. But, in a curious way, the authorities were powerless also. The Government met in a hostile London, where juries had refused to convict Wooler and Hone, where grotesque prints and lampoons were displayed in the windows, and where publications which were, in the eyes of the authorities, seditious atrocities, were disseminated with impunity. One by one they were forced to release the reformers – Thomas Evans, Gravener Hensen, Knight, Bamford, Johnson, Bagguley, Mitchell and many others – held on suspicion in 1817. The released men refused to lie down: they addressed meetings, attended dinners in their honour, and attempted to sue the Government for illegal arrest. In Lancashire and the Midlands there were great strikes in which supposedly illegal trade unions paraded the streets. The repression of the 1790s had been endorsed not only by the landowners and many employers, but by enough public opinion in both the middle and working classes, to silence the Jacobins. The repression of 1817 provoked, on the contrary, an accession of strength to the radical reformers, while a large section of middle-class opinion held aloof from the Government. In 1795 Pitt could present himself as defending the Constitution against French innovation. In 1819 Liverpool, Sidmouth, Eldon and Castlereagh were seen as men intent upon displacing constitutional rights by despotic ‘continental’ rule.

1819 was a rehearsal for 1832. In both years a revolution was possible (and in the second year it was very close) because the Government was isolated and there were sharp differences within the ruling class. And in 1819 the reformers appeared more powerful than they had ever been before, because they came forward in the rôle of constitutionalists. They laid claim to rights, some of which it was difficult to deny at law, which had never been intended for extension to the ‘lower orders’. But if these rights were gained, it meant, sooner or later, the end of the old régime: as scores of magistrates wrote in to the Home Office, in very similar terms, if meetings or unions or seditious pamphlets were allowed, at what point would this stop? For no one supposed that the structure of power rested upon Pitt’s barracks alone. The integument of power, in the countryside or in the corporate town, was composed of deference and fear. If riots or strikes were, from time to time, inevitable, there must still be enough of these two requisites for insubordination to be cowed as soon as an example was made of the ring-leaders.

In 1817 this world was passing. By 1819, in whole regions of England, it had passed. The defences of deference had been weakened by Dissent and (despite itself) by Methodism. They had been challenged by Luddism and Hampden Clubs. In May 1817 Sherwin carried further Thelwall’s insight into the influence of manufactures on the working man. ‘The nature of his calling forces him into the society of his fellow men.’ In a manufacturing district political discussion is inevitable, while the workers have the means of organization in clubbing their pennies together. Numbers bring an absence of deference:

If an Aristocrat happen to meet a Weaver in the street, and the latter does not choose to off with his hat, the man of consequence cannot harm him. Hence arises that contempt for assuming greatness and petty despotism, which we may observe in all manufacturing towns. And from this contempt proceeds… that downright rooted hatred, that we may observe when we hear an Aristocratical minded man speak of those parts of the country wherein manufactures and political information have flourished…¹

The rights to which reformers laid claim in 1819 were those of political organization, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of public meeting; beyond these three, there was the right to vote. We may take these in order. For the first, the British working class had already become – as it was to remain for a hundred years – perhaps the most ‘clubbable’ working class in Europe. The facility with which English working men formed societies in the early nineteenth century is formidable. The influence of Methodism and of Dissenting chapels; the lengthening experience of the friendly societies and trade unions; the forms of parliamentary constitutionalism, as observed on the hustings or as mediated by middle-class and self-educated reformers to the working-class movement – all these influences had diffused a general addiction to the forms and proprieties of organizational constitutionalism. It seems at times that half a dozen working men could scarcely sit in a room together without appointing a Chairman, raising a point-of-order, or moving the Previous Question:

… a Motion was made, ‘That no person but Leaders of Sections should vote’ – one Gentn. got up and spoke as follows – Mr Chair! Mr Chair!! Mr Chair!!! I desire you will do Your Duty in keeping Order – after he had repeated this so often I was afraid of his Lungs, the Chairman called out Order! Order!! and with such a voice that made me tremble…. He then proceeded, – Mr Chair I look upon us here, as being Members sent to this here place, to transact the business of Reform, in same manner as our business should be done in Parliament, to which I compare us here…. He then took his Seat when up started two or three others… one of them saying he had only a few words to say in Opposition to that Gentn. who had compared this place to the House of Commons – that House of Corruption – that Den of Thieves, as Cobbett properly called it, if he thought they resembled that Company in any way he would never come into this place again…²

The account is from Manchester. But, if another informer’s report is to be believed, the Cato Street Conspirators, while plotting in a garret the assassination of the Cabinet, found it necessary to appoint one of their number as Chairman (with a pike as symbol of office), and to take the questions of beheading Castlereagh and firing the Tower of London in proper form, with a vote upon the substantive motion.

This playing at Parliament was only the ridiculous side of the creative tradition of organization. To unite in the face of exploitation or oppression was almost the instinctual response of such men as weavers and colliers. They themselves had come to understand that it was only through organization that they could transform themselves from a mob into a political movement. Moreover, while Pitt’s legislation against national delegate or corresponding societies remained on the statute book, when the ‘Gagging Acts’ expired in 1818 the right of local organization could only with difficulty be challenged at law. The last months of 1818 and the first of 1819 saw a number of new models of local reform societies: the Stockport Political Union: the Hull Political Protestants: the British Forum in London. When compared with the Corresponding Societies or Hampden Clubs, they are distinguished by their open character. They were, above all, centres for debate and political discussion (in Newcastle they were called ‘Political Reading Societies’), and for the sale of Radical publications. As such, they were less open to provocations by spies. The spies could enter, but what else could they do? ¹

In the absence of national organization, the local societies took their lead from the Radical press. It was because this press provided the very tissues without which the movement would have fallen apart, that the claim for the fullest liberty of the press was one of the foremost Radical demands. 1816–20 were, above all, years in which popular Radicalism took its style from the hand-press and the weekly periodical. This means of propaganda was in its fullest egalitarian phase. Steamrinting had scarcely made headway (commencing with The Times in 1814), and the plebeian Radical group had as easy access to the hand-press as Church or King. Transport was too slow for the national (or London) newspaper to weaken the position of the provincial press; but rapid enough to enable the weekly Political Register or Black Dwarf to maintain a running commentary on the news. The means of production of the printed page were sufficiently cheap to mean that neither capital nor advertising revenue gave much advantage; while the successful Radical periodical provided a living not only for the editor, but also for regional agents, booksellers, and itinerant hawkers, thereby making of Radicalism, for the first time, a profession which could maintain its own full-time agitators. In favourable conditions the circulation of the publications of Cobbett, Carlile, Wooler and Wade competed with, or greatly exceeded, all but a handful of the established journals.¹

From the time of Cobbett’s defection, it was the Black Dwarf which commanded the largest Radical audience. Its editor, T. J. Wooler (1786–1853) was a Yorkshire-born printer, who had served his apprenticeship in Shoreditch, and his apprenticeship to politics in the small debating societies (such as the Socratic Union, which met at the ‘Mermaid Tavern’, Hackney) and periodicals of the war years.² In 1815 he had founded The Stage, whose mixture of heavy-handed satire and libertarian rhetoric set the tone also for the Black Dwarf. He had the moral support (and perhaps the subsidies) of Major Cartwright, and was himself exceptionally fluent both as an orator and as a writer – composing, on occasions, his articles directly on the stone. He was a consistent advocate of Radical organization, upon the open and constitutionalist pattern:

Those who condemn clubs either do not understand what they can accomplish, or they wish nothing to be done…. Let us look at, and emulate the patient resolution of the Quakers. They have conquered without arms – without violence – without threats. They conquered by union.

The ‘Political Protestants’ (whose first club was founded at Hull in July 1818) exemplified, for him, the expedient organizational form, with classes (of not more than twenty), a weekly penny subscription, and the main function of selling and discussing Radical publications. ‘Larger meetings are not so well calculated for discussions.’ By a rule all ‘secret transactions’ were disavowed, and members proposing such could be censured or expelled. ‘Our books and accounts… shall at all times be laid open for the inspection of the magistrates.’ Against such measures (he proclaimed) ‘spies will be useless’, and – in his characteristically overblown style – ‘the agents of a Sidmouth and a Castlereagh will be as harmless as the scowling fiend that was startled at the ear of the Eve by the touch of Ithuriel’.¹

Wooler had many competitors. In London, Henry White’s Independent Whig was a substantial weekly newspaper, admirable in its coverage, but (from its Whiggish or Burdettite politics) little interested in Radical organization. John Hunt’s Examiner served with brilliance as the weekly of the Radical intelligentsia, with Hazlitt as a regular contributor. John Thelwall had re-emerged to undertake the editorship of the Champion. These journals all held aloof from the plebeian movement – John and Leigh Hunt were irritated at being confused with their namesake, whose ‘vulgarity’ they disliked. (The Examiner dissociated itself editorially from the Orator after the first Spa Fields meeting – ‘he never utters a sentence worth hearing’ – with a discrimination that was both precious and obtuse.) ² Among the score of pamphlet-sized periodicals, the most influential were Sherwin’s Political Register and the Gorgon. Sherwin had been dismissed from the keepership of Southwell Bridewell for avowing himself a disciple of Paine. Although he was scarcely eighteen, his Register was (next to the Gorgon) perhaps the most cogent and well written of the periodicals. Moreover, it holds its place in the history of Radical theory because of Sherwin’s association with Richard Carlile, who took over first the publishing and then the editorial control of the Register, finally transforming it into the renowned Republican.³ The penny Gorgon had a smaller circulation, confined to London and Manchester. Edited by John Wade, a former journeyman woolsorter, it was the most austere and reputable in intellectual terms. Wade was also the author of the extremely impressive Black Book, whose well-researched evidence as to parliamentary corruption, sinecures, pluralism and absenteeism in the Church, and nepotism and extravagance in the Bank and the East India Company, was published in fortnightly sixpenny parts, with a sale of 10,000 for each. The Gorgon’s main influence was upon the shaping theory of the working-class movement, where it served as a junction between the Utilitarians and the Radical trade unionists: ‘we wish’ (declared Wade) ‘the Ultra Reformers, the Universal Suffrage men, to whom we belong, to make some advances to the moderate Reformers’.¹ On the other flank of Wooler and Cobbett, there were a dozen more or less ephemeral periodicals of the physical-force party, the most long-lived of which was the Medusa: or Penny Politician, edited by Thomas Davison, a Smithfield bookseller, which carried editorials on such themes as The Blowing Up of the Present System’, and which warned its critics that –

… there are trees, lamp-posts, and halters everywhere, if summary justice is required, to make examples of any hardened and incorrigible villain, or any great or little plunderer of property.²

These were the periodicals which radiated Radicalism out from London to the provinces, whose editors, publishers, booksellers, hawkers, and even bill-stickers were in the front of the contest for the liberty of the press between 1817 and 1822. A main business of the Radicals was to increase their sales. But, as the movement grew, the provincial centres began to develop their own press. By far the most impressive was the Manchester Observer, a newspaper rather than a periodical, whose circulation at the end of 1819 approached that of the Black Dwarf, and which had a greater sense of the news of the movement than any competitor. The Observer was, of course, closely involved in Manchester politics; and local politics gave rise to the need for journals in other centres. George Edmonds in Birmingham fought a sharp Radical campaign which secured his election, in April 1819, to the Birmingham Board of Guardians. He conducted his fight in a series of Letters¹ which later gave rise to Edmond’s Weekly Register. In Norwich where the old Jacobin-Whig alliance which had returned William Smith to Parliament in 1802 still had some reality, the General Election of 1818 gave rise to a Blue and White Dwarf. Small sheets appeared in Coventry, Dudley and no doubt elsewhere.

‘Dustmen and porters read and discuss politics; and labourers, journeymen, and masters speak one language of disaffection and defiance.’² It would be tedious to rehearse the alarm voiced by magistrates or Ministers at this phenomenon. The effect of the press, in the eyes of one observer, was that –

a line of demarcation was drawn between the different ranks of society, and a rooted antipathy and ferocious spirit of retaliation was engendered in the minds of the labouring classes.³

At the end of 1819, during the high tide of Hone and Cruikshank’s brilliant lampoons (The Political House that Jack Built was supposed to have sold 100,000 copies) Eldon declared with indignation:

When he was in office [as Attorney-General in 1794] he never heard of waggons filled with seditious papers in order to be distributed through every village, to be scattered over the highways, to be introduced into cottages…. There was… scarcely a village in the Kingdom that had not its little shop in which nothing was sold but blasphemy and sedition.⁴

‘There is scarcely a street or a post in the Land but that is placarded with something seditious,’ wrote ‘Bolton Fletcher’. Prosecutions apart, there were many attempts to ‘write Cobbett down’, with subsidized loyalist journals: Merle’s White Dwarf, Shadgett’s Weekly Review of Cobbett, Wooler, Sherwin, and Other Democratical and Infidel Writers, the Manchester Patriot, and scurrilous pamphleteers of the ‘Job Nott’ tribe in Birmingham. (The perpetual quarrels in the reformers’ own ranks provided these journals with a good deal of their copy.)

We may take one example of such publications, as an indication of the tone of panic which is to be found at the end of 1819. It is a bogus Reformer’s Guide (designed to impersonate the genuine article), published in Leeds, a copy of which was sent by its proud authors to Lord Sidmouth, in the hope of gaining the eye of the Minister:

A radical reform means a complete revolution. It is a change of government, founded on republican principles, and its object is a new modification of the rights of mankind. This is its true character, and its features are pillage, murder, and massacre.

Reformers held to a ‘levelling principle’, and ‘if we have an equal right to the property of others… the same argument… would palliate and excuse the violation of their wives and daughters’.

Who are these that fatten on your folly? Turn to the political booksellers…. At first like certain venemous reptiles, they were found in dark alleys and holes, and hiding places, not daring to creep forth…

But now they were reaping profits from the people’s gullibility:

Bless God for his mercies to you. You cannot do that honestly, and be a factious discontented character. Be thankful that you are an Englishman…. Read your Bible…. Keep your wives and daughters at home…¹

The third right to which the constitutionalist reformers laid claim in 1819 was to the public meeting and open-air demonstration. Twenty years lay between the last demonstrations of the L.C.S. and the Spa Fields meetings. For all this time, popular political meetings had been largely in abeyance, except at times of elections or on those occasions when local Whig authorities had convened county meetings presided over by the gentry. In the provinces the very notion of working men attending meetings under the auspices of men of their own rank was, in the minds of loyalist gentry, synonymous with riot and insubordination. When a clerical magistrate prevented the holding of an orderly reform meeting in Birmingham early in 1817, the words which rose to his lips were ‘riotous and disgraceful proceedings – clamour and violence of a misguided populace – tumultuous proceedings… machinations of a few designing individuals… wicked artifices’.¹ When the first open-air reform meeting was held in the Potteries (at Burslem, January 1817), Earl Talbot, the Lord-Lieutenant of Staffordshire, and a group of magistrates thought it necessary to attend in person, while troops were held at a short distance out of sight.²

It was, above all, in Lancashire that the new pattern of the constitutionalist reform demonstration first matured. As early as October 1816 there is a record of an orderly open-air demonstration in Blackburn. In January 1817 an Oldham meeting was preceded by a procession, complete with band, which was headed symbolically by a Quaker apothecary.³ The Spa Fields affair – and then the experience of Pentridge – redoubled the determination of the constitutionalists to refute the accusations that they were a disorderly and ragged rabble. Bamford’s account of the preparations for Peteloo is well known:

It was deemed expedient that this meeting should be as morally effective as possible, and that it should exhibit a spectacle such as had never before been witnessed in England. We had frequently been taunted in the press with our ragged, dirty appearance… with the confusion of our proceedings, and the mob-like crowds in which our members were mustered…

‘ “Cleanliness”, “sobriety”, “order”, were the first injunctions issued by the committee, to which, on the suggestion of Mr Hunt, was subsequently added that of “peace”.’ This was a main purpose of the nightly or early morning drillings which preceded 16 August 1819. This was also a function of the discipline and pageantry with which the contingents moved towards Manchester – a leader to every hundred men (distinguished by a sprig of laurel in his hat), the bands and the great embroidered banners (presented with ceremony by the Female Unions), the contingent of ‘our handsomest girls’ at the front.¹

But Bamford overstates the novelty of this discipline and display. For the forms taken over by the Radicals came from several sources. The camp-meetings of the Primitive Methodists contributed something, but their influence can be seen more clearly in the camp-meetings of the northern Chartists. Something was also contributed by the Army veterans who became Radical drill-sergeants. The reformers owed much more to the Radical political tradition, to the trade unions and friendly societies. From the time of Wilkes the people of London had revelled in the ceremonial of the great political occasion. Even Place’s sober Westminster Committee expended more on the post-victory celebrations in 1807 than on the entire election campaign.² Each great occasion was planned by a special committee, which arranged for the order of the procession, its route, the appropriate favours and slogans to be displayed, the disposition of the bands and banners. When Henry Hunt made his triumphal entry into London on 15 September 1819 (in the interval between Peterloo and his trial), the orders for the day occupy a whole column of small print: ‘Some hundreds of footmen bearing large branches of oak, poplar, &c.’ ‘A footman, bearing the emblem of union – a bundle of sticks stuck on a pitchfork…’, ‘The Committees, bearing white wands, and all wearing knots of red ribband and laurel leaves in their hats’, ‘A green silk flag, with gold letters and Irish harp’, bands, horsemen, ‘A white flag surmounted and bordered with crape’, and inscribed in black to the victims of Peterloo, ‘The old red flag, with the inscription “Universal Suffrage” ’, a carriage containing Messrs Watson, Thistlewood and Preston and other friends of Mr Hunt, more bands, more flags, more horsemen, Mr HUNT.. and so on, down the page. Even a dog wore a favour, with ‘No Dog Tax’ on his collar. ‘It would take me a whole day and a quire of paper to give you anything like detail,’ Keats wrote to his brother George, ‘The whole distance from the Angel at Islington to the Crown and Anchor was lined with multitudes.’¹

This tradition was obviously less strong in the north, which had no Burdett and no Westminster elections. More influential here were the friendly society and trade unions. We have noted the medieval ceremonial of the Preston Guilds and of the wool-combers, from which the legal benefit societies had largely borrowed.² In the post-war years there is a growing evidence that the ‘illegal’ trade unions were openly displaying their strength. The miners at Dewsbury proceeded through the town, in 1819, with bands and banners flying; the framework-knitters formed orderly demonstrations in Nottingham in 1819; in Manchester, during the great strike of 1818, the spinners ‘marched By piccadilly on Tuesday and was 23½ minets in going Bye’, reported the informer, Bent: ‘One man, from Eich shop is chose by the People and he commands them he forms them in Ranks and… they obey him as Strickley as the armey do their Colonel and as Little Talking as in a Regiment.’³

‘The peaceable demeanour of so many thousand unemployed Men is not natural,’ General Byng commented on this occasion. It is a phrase worth pausing over. The gentry, who had decried the reformers as a rabble, were appalled and some were even panic-stricken when they found that they were not.

… that very ORDER they cried up before
Did afterwards gall them ten thousand times more,
When they found that these men, in their ‘Radical Rags’,
March’d peacably on, with their Banners and Flags.4

The comment, from Newcastle, serves with redoubled force for Manchester. Norris, the Chairman of the Bench, when committing Hunt for trial after Peterloo, spoke (perhaps in self-extenuation) of a meeting,

assembled, with such insignia and in such a manner, with the black flag, the bloody dagger, with ‘Equal Representation or Death’…. They came in a threatening manner – they came under the banners of death, thereby showing they meant to overturn the Government.¹

Bamford admitted that the pitch-black flag of the Lees and Saddleworth Union, lettered in white paint with ‘Love’, two hands joined and a heart, was ‘one of the most sepulchral looking objects that could be contrived’. But it was not the flags so much as the discipline of the sixty or a hundred thousand who assembled on St Peter’s Fields which aroused such alarm. The drilling, in the weeks preceding the meeting, sometimes undertaken by old Waterloo men – and, on occasion, with staves at the shoulder like muskets, or hand-claps to simulate firing – gave colour to the prosecution witnesses who spoke of a ‘military array’. (Hunt himself had deprecated this ‘playing at soldiers’.) Beneath this contingent response, however, we must understand the profounder fear evoked by the evidence of the translation of the rabble into a disciplined class.

Even the middle-class reformers witnessed this development with alarm: the ‘bustle and loss of time’ of the ‘constant succession of meetings’, the ‘violent resolutions’ and ‘intemperate harangues’, all do ‘infinite mischief – which utterly preclude moderate men from wishing them success’.² For the loyalist authorities, the challenge appeared as one between order and the loss of all moral, and even physical, authority. ‘Armed or unarmed, Sir,’ wrote a Yorkshire loyalist,

I consider such meetings, as that held at Manchester, to be nothing more or less than risings of the people; and I believe, that these risings of the people, if suffered to continue, would end in open rebellion…³

The effect upon the reformers’ morale of each successive demonstration was instantaneous. With each breach in the walls of deference, the waters of insubordination swept through. The morale of each individual weaver or shoemaker was higher from the reassurance of the numbers, the pageantry, the rhetoric. If the open organization of the people had continued on this scale it would have become impossible to govern. The weeks before Peterloo saw scores of small meetings and (week by week) ever more impressive demonstrations in the regional centres: at Manchester and Stockport in June, at Birmingham, Leeds and London in July.¹ The policy of open constitutionalism was proving more revolutionary in its implication than the policy of conspiracy and insurrection. Wooler and Hunt had achieved, without any secret ‘correspondencies’ or system of delegates, a position in which they could call out a national movement. The election (at Birmingham in July) of Sir Charles Wolseley as ‘legislatory attorney’ to represent the unrepresented, pointed the way to an even more dangerous development: a National Convention, appointed by Radical suffrage, challenging Parliament. Confronted by this swelling power, Old Corruption faced the alternatives of meeting the reformers with repression or concession. But concession, in 1819, would have meant concession to a largely working-class reform movement; the middle-class reformers were not yet strong enough (as they were in 1832) to offer a more moderate line of advance. This is why Peterloo took place.

This has to be said again, since it has been suggested recently that Peterloo was an affair, in part unpremeditated, in part arising from the exacerbated relations in Manchester itself, but in no sense any part of a considered policy of Government repression. Mr Donald Read, in a study of Peterloo which does much to place the event in its local context, holds the view:

Peterloo, as the evidence of the Home Office shows, was never desired or precipitated by the Liverpool Ministry as a bloody repressive gesture for keeping down the lower orders. If the Manchester magistrates had followed the spirit of Home Office policy there would never have been a ‘massacre’.

We shall probably never be able to determine with certainty whether or not Liverpool and Sidmouth were parties to the decision to disperse the meeting with force.¹ But we can no more understand the significance of Peterloo in terms of the local politics of Manchester than we can understand the strategic importance of Waterloo in terms of the field and the orders of the day. If the Government was unprepared for the news of Peterloo, no authorities have ever acted so vigorously to make themselves accomplices after the fact. Within a fortnight the congratulations of Sidmouth and the thanks of the Prince Regent were communicated to the magistrates and military ‘for their prompt, decisive, and efficient measures for the preservation of the public peace’. Demands for a parliamentary enquiry were resolutely rejected. Attorney and Solicitor-Generals were ‘fully satisfied’ as to the legality of the magistrates’ actions. The Lord Chancellor (Eldon) was of the ‘clear opinion’ that the meeting ‘was an overt act of treason’; he saw ahead ‘a shocking choice between military government and anarchy’. State prosecutions were commenced, not against the perpetrators, but against the victims of the day – Hunt, Saxton, Bamford and others – and the first intention of charging them with high treason was only abandoned with reluctance. If the Manchester magistrates initiated the policy of repression, the Government endorsed it with every resource at its disposal. Hunt, Cartwright, Burdett, Carlile, Sir Charles Wolseley, Wroe (of the Manchester Observer), Edmonds (of Birmingham) – these are only a few of those imprisoned or awaiting prosecution by the end of 1819. Hay, the clerical magistrate prominent on the Peterloo bench, was rewarded with the £2,000 living of Rochdale. Earl Fitzwilliam, for protesting at the massacre, was removed from his Lord-Lieutenancy. The Six Acts sealed what 16 August initiated. If the Peterloo decision was unpremeditated, it would appear to have been the signal for which the Government was waiting.¹

Lord Liverpool declared that the action of the Manchester magistrates was ‘substantially right’, although it was not altogether ‘prudent’. ‘There remained no alternative but to support them.’ At some point, the encounter was inevitable. But what made it less than ‘prudent’ was its peculiar savagery, and for this we must look to the Manchester context for the explanation. An exceptional antagonism obtained between the Manchester loyalists and the working-class reformers. In part this was the result of the maturity of the working-class movement; in part of a dozen factors – the loyalist sentiments of many of the great commercial and manufacturing houses; their antagonism to the trade unions; the legacy of Luddism and of 1817; the influence of Nadin; the influence of Tory churchmen. ‘These Manchester yeomen and magistrates are a greater set of brutes than you form a conception of,’ Place wrote to Hobhouse:

I know one of these fellows who swears ‘Damn his eyes, seven shillings a week is plenty for them’; and when he goes round to see how much work his weavers have in their looms, he takes a well-fed dog with him…. He said some time ago that ‘The sons of bitches had eaten up all the stinging nettles for ten miles around Manchester, and now they had no greens to their broth.’ Upon my expressing indignation, he said, ‘Damn their eyes, what need you care about them? How could I sell you goods so cheap if I cared anything about them.’

‘They cut down and trampled down the people; and then it was to end just as cutting and trampling the furze bushes on a common would end.’¹ A writer in the Manchester Observer in the week before Peterloo addressed the ‘official gentlemen of Manchester’: ‘I defy the blood-thirsty partisans of Danton, Marat, Robespierre, to furnish a more despotic, tyrannical crew.’² A month after Peterloo a clerical magistrate afforded himself the privilege of the Bench to address the accused:

I believe you are a downright blackguard reformer. Some of you reformers ought to be hanged, and some of you are sure to be hanged – the rope is already round your necks…³

There are two points about Peterloo which have, somehow, become lost in recent accounts. The first is the actual bloody violence of the day. It really was a massacre. We need not give the hour by hour account once again.⁴ But, whatever some of the drilling weavers had in mind, Hunt had exerted himself effectually in the week before the event to ensure obedience to his request for ‘quietness and order’, and a ‘steady, firm and temperate deportment’. The leaders of the contingents had warned their followers to ignore all provocations. Many staves – or ‘walking-sticks’ – had been left behind. The presence of so many women and children was overwhelming testimony to the pacific character of a meeting which (the reformers knew) all England was watching. The attack was made on this multitude with the venom of panic.

But the panic was not (as has been suggested) the panic of bad horsemen hemmed in by a crowd. It was the panic of class hatred. It was the Yeomanry – the Manchester manufacturers, merchants, publicans, and shopkeepers on horseback – which did more damage than the regulars (Hussars). In the Yeomanry (a middle-class reformer testified) ‘there are… individuals whose political rancour approaches to absolute insanity’.¹ These were the men who pursued the banners, knew the speakers by name and sought to pay off old scores, and who mustered and cheered at the end of their triumph. ‘There was whiz this way and whiz that way,’ declared one cotton-spinner: ‘whenever any cried out “mercy”, they said, “Damn you, what brought you here?”.’ We may get the feel of the confused field from such a passage as this:

I picked up a Cap of Liberty; one of the Cavalry rode after me and demanded it; I refused to give it up. Two others then came up and asked what was the matter, when the first said, this fellow won’t give up this Cap of Liberty. One of the others then said, damn him, cut him down. Upon this, I ran…. One of the Cavalry cut at Saxton, but his horse seemed restive, and he missed his blow. He then called out to another, ‘There’s Saxton, damn him, run him through.’ The other said, ‘I had rather not, I’ll leave that for you to do.’ When I got to the end of Watson-street, I saw ten or twelve of the Yeomanry Cavalry, and two of the Hussars cutting at the people, who were wedged close together, when an officer of Hussars rode up to his own men, and knocking up their swords said, ‘Damn you what do you mean by this work?’ He then called out to the Yeomanry, ‘For shame, gentlemen; what are you about? the people cannot get away.’ They desisted for a time, but no sooner had the officer rode to another part of the field, than they fell to work again.²

There is no term for this but class war. But it was a pitifully one-sided war. The people, closely packed and trampling upon each other in the effort to escape, made no effort at retaliation until the very edges of the field, where a few trapped remnants – finding themselves pursued into the streets and yards – threw brick-bats at their pursuers. Eleven were killed or died from their wounds. That evening, on every road out of Manchester the injured were to be seen. The Peterloo Relief Committee had, by the end of 1819, authenticated 421 claims for relief for injuries received on the field (a further 150 cases still awaited investigation). Of these, 161 cases were of sabre wounds, the remainder were injuries sustained while lying beneath the crowd or beneath the horses’ hooves. More than 100 of the injured were women or girls. While there will have been some impostors, there will also have been scores of injured who did not claim relief, because their wounds were slight or because they feared victimization.¹ We may leave the field with Bamford’s unforgettable picture:

In ten minutes… the field was an open and almost deserted space…. The hustings remained, with a few broken and hewed flag-staves erect, and a torn and gashed banner or two drooping; whilst over the whole field were strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes, and other parts of male and female dress, trampled, torn, and bloody. The yeomanry had dismounted – some were easing their horses’ girths, others adjusting their accoutrements, and some were wiping their sabres…²

The second point about Peterloo which has somehow evaded definition is the sheer size of the event, in terms of its psychological impact and manifold repercussions.³ It was without question a formative experience in British political and social history. Once again, as with Pentridge, we may distinguish between the short-term and long-term repercussons. Within two days of Peterloo, all England knew of the event. Within a week every detail of the massacre was being canvassed in alehouses, chapels, workshops, private houses. At first it is difficult to distinguish any clear pattern of response. The key-note, among the reformers and their supporters, was certainly indignation, anger, or compassion, rather than alarm. Already, on the field, Henry Hunt (who showed at his best during the moment of crisis) seemed to sense that for the Radicals Peterloo was a moral victory. He had been himself the victim of the Yeomanry’s violence. After his arrest he had been forced to run the gauntlet between the special constables, who had struck him with their staves: General Clay ‘with a large stick struck him over the head with both hands as he was ascending the steps to the Magistrate’s house’, a blow which knocked down his famous white hat and ‘packed it over his face’. Notwithstanding this treatment, when he emerged from the house (a fair-minded opponent recalled):

I thought I could perceive a smile of triumph on his countenance. A person (Nadin, I believe) offered to take his arm, but he drew himself back, and in a sort of whisper said: ‘No, no, that’s rather too good a thing…’¹

For several days, in Lancashire, the immediate talk was of vengeance. Manchester appeared as if under martial law; there were riots, and rumours of the ‘country’ people advancing in military order; Bamford has described the grinding of scythes, and the preparation of ‘old hatchets… screw-drivers, rusty swords, pikels, and mop-nails’.² But by the end of August the impulse to insurrection was checked and steadied by the evidence of overwhelming moral support in the country. The epithet itself – ‘Peter-Loo’ – with its savagely sardonic confidence, indicates better than any other evidence, the tone of feeling. In the succeeding weeks, the storm of the Radical press was to be swelled by the inspired lampoons of Cruikshank and Hone; the ‘butchers’ of Manchester met not only with the full-blown libertarian rhetoric of Hunt and Wooler but with bitter jeering which it was more hard to bear. ‘These are THE PEOPLE all tatter’d and torn,’ ran The Political House that Jack Built,

Who curse the day wherein they were born,
On account of Taxation too great to be borne,
And pray for relief, from night to morn,
Who, in vain, Petition in every form,
Who, peaceably Meeting to ask for Reform,
Were sabred by Yeomanry Cavalry, who
Were thank’d by THE MAN, all shaven and shorn,
All cover’d with Orders – and all forlorn;
THE DANDY OF SIXTY, who bows with a grace,
And has taste in wigs, collars, curiasses, and lace;
Who, to tricksters, and fools, leaves the State and its treasure,
And when Britain’s in tears, sails about at his pleasure…

Even the Prince Regent’s speech at the opening of Parliament was matter for another parody:

but lo!

CONSPIRACY and TREASON are abroad!

Those imps of darkness, gender’d in the wombs

Of spinning-jennies, winding-wheels, and looms,

In Lunashire –

O Lord!

My L—ds and G—tl—n, we’ve much to fear!

Reform, Reform, the swinish rabble cry –

Meaning of course rebellion, blood, and riot –

Audacious rascals! you, my Lords, and I,

Know ’tis their duty to be starved in quiet…¹

Peterloo outraged every belief and prejudice of the ‘free-born Englishman’ – the right of free speech, the desire for ‘fair play’, the taboo against attacking the defenceless. For a time, ultra-Radicals and moderates buried their differences in a protest movement with which many Whigs were willing to associate. Protest meetings were held: on 29 August in Smithfield, with Dr Watson in the chair, and Arthur Thistlewood as a speaker: on 5 September a much larger meeting in Westminster, with Burdett, Cartwright, Hobhouse and John Thelwall among the speakers.² When Hunt made his triumphal entry into London ten days later, The Times estimated that 300,000 were in the streets.

No one can suppose that the tradition of the ‘free-born Englishman’ was merely notional who studies the response to the news of Peterloo. In the months which followed, political antagonism hardened. No one could remain neutral; in Manchester itself the ‘loyalists’ were placed in an extreme isolation, and the Methodists were the only body with a popular following to come (with fulsome declarations) to their side.¹ But if there were many gentry and professional men who were shocked by Peterloo, at the same time they had no desire to conjure up further monster demonstrations of the people.² Thus the effective movement after Peterloo, which swung from the cry of ‘vengeance’ back into constitutionalist forms of protest, was largely working class in initiation and character.

If Peterloo was intended to curb the right of public meeting it had exactly the opposite consequences. Indignation provoked Radical organization where it had never before existed, and open-air demonstrations were held in regions hitherto under the spell of the ‘loyalists’. At Coseley, near Wolverhampton, a Political Union was formed – the first in that part of the Black Country. ‘Disaffection,’ a local J.P. complained,

in this neighbourhood certainly cannot arise from distress, for in point of employment and Wages the Workmen in Mines and Iron Works are perhaps in a better situation than the Working Classes in any other branches in the kingdom.³

The most remarkable accession to the movement came from Newcastle, and from the pitmen of Northumberland and Durham. Here – despite a continuous tradition of Radicalism since the 1790s (Bewick and his fellow tradesmen and artisans, and the strong friendly societies and trade unions) – the Church and King party controlled the Corporation and had intimidated the reformers from open organization. It had ‘long been the boast of the Pitt faction,’ wrote the Independent Whig, ‘that the population of this part of England was perfectly passive and destitute of spirit.’ In July and August 1819 the Radical ‘Reading Societies’ gave rise to Political Protestants (on the model commended by the Black Dwarf). After Peterloo the whole district seemed to turn over to the reformers. An open-air protest demonstration was called (with the permission of the Mayor) on 11 October. It was expected that the ‘comparative steadiness’ of the coal trade, together with the threat of certain colliery viewers to dismiss men who attended, would limit support. In the event,

From the North, from the South, from the East, from the West, The RADICALS march’d into Town, six-a-breast, to the accompaniment of a band playing ‘Johnnie Cope, are ye waukin’ yet?’

From fifty to one hundred thousand people ‘started up, as if by magic’, and observers were astonished to see the instructions for ‘Order, Spirit, Unanimity’ observed, not only by the dreaded pitmen, but by sailors from Sunderland and Shields. After marching eight miles, the Shields contingent refused even ‘to partake of a barrel of ale provided for them’, being ‘determined not… to do anything which might endanger the harmony of the day’. The speakers included a weaver, a schoolmaster, a tailor, a master printer, a book-seller and a cobbler. After ‘Radical Monday’ (claimed as Newcastle’s ‘first public political meeting ever held in the open air’) the city never lost its position among the three or four leading Radical and Chartist centres. Radical ‘classes’ were formed in the next few weeks, with the rapidity of a revivalist campaign, in all the surrounding industrial villages and ports: in Jarrow, Sheriff Hill, Penshaw, Rainton, Houghton, Newbattle, Hetton, Hebbern, South Shields, Winlaton, Sunderland – the Black Dwarf could be seen ‘in the hat-crown of almost every pitman you meet’. Sedition spread as far as the pitmen of Bishop Wearmouth, who (an exasperated magistrate wrote to Sidmouth) ‘have had the Assurance to propose that Tradesmen known to be Radicals should be employed in supplying the collieries with Articles of consumption’.¹

Against this threat the Newcastle loyalists formed an Armed Association. Against the Armed Association the pitmen and forgemen began to arm in their turn. These are the preliminaries to civil war. We have been overmuch influenced by Bamford’s picture of the sober and restrained response of all but a few hotheads to Peterloo. For in the months of October and November Radical constitutionalism itself took a revolutionary turn. If their opponents were armed and acted unconstitutionally then they also would exercise the right (which Major Cartwright had long proclaimed) of every citizen to bear arms. If meetings were to be ridden down, then they would attend them with the means of defence. The staple means were pikes, stout wooden staves with a groove at one end into which a sharp blade (carried in a pocket) could be inserted. The blades could be easily made (at different sizes, from 1s. to 3s., according to the reformer’s means) in one of the small smithies in which Newcastle, Sheffield, Birmingham and Manchester abounded. We have some knowledge of one such Manchester entrepreneur (with one eye on his Black Dwarf and the other on a thriving market) called Naaman Carter. He was so in cautious as to employ as his main agent (whose business it was to tout samples of the pikes around the inns and ‘hush shops’ in the weaving villages, and collect the instalments from those who bought their pike blades on the ‘never-never’) a man who was employed in another capacity – as informer ‘Y’. ‘Y’s’ circumstantial and often irrelevant accounts can scarcely be dismissed as fabrications. On one occasion, when he called upon the Radical smith,

I found him and his wife fighting – I told him it was foolish to fight on the Sabbath-day, they had better adjourn it till Monday, when they might fight it out. The Wife said, I shall not be beaten by you, I will have you put into the New Bayley for making Pikes – She said this, just as he was pushing and kicking her out of the door…

But Naaman Carter’s problems of marital adjustment did not affect the pike trade, which was thriving in the first week of November. ‘Y’ found plenty of customers who admired the samples which (one said) ‘would do the business for the Prince and every Bugger of them’. One of his customers was none other than Bamford, who in the reports of ‘Y’, scarcely resembles the self-portrait which he drew twenty years later. At a hush-shop where the transaction was settled, Bamford gave the toast: ‘May the Tree of Liberty be planted in Hell, and may the bloody Butchers of Manchester be the Fruit of it!’ As the fumes of the illicit brew rose, one of his companions said, they would give the Manchester butchers ‘a damn good piking, and he would go home and work, till God damn him, his hands would fly off, and sing Brittania, and the Devil would fetch them all’.¹

There is no doubt that these sentiments were general in the manufacturing districts. It was rumoured that pistols were being smuggled from Birmingham to the north in the ‘pot-carts’. From town after town, in October and November, there came reports of arming, drilling, and demonstrations in arms: Newcastle, Wolverhampton, Wigan, Bolton, Blackburn. The Halifax reformers returned from a meeting at Huddersfield in November ‘marching in ranks about eight or ten abreast, with music, and six or seven flags, and lighted candles; many of them had sticks…’ At a certain point they ‘shouted and fired many pistols in the air’. At Burnley ten or fifteen thousand attended a demonstration, despite placards from the magistrates cautioning them not to do so. At their head was a man with a board on which was ‘Order, Order’ but here also they ‘fired scores of pistols’. At Halifax, at an earlier meeting, one of the forty-one banners had been inscribed: ‘We groan, being burdened, waiting to be delivered…. But we rejoice in hopes of a Jubilee.’ (It was not the jubilee of George the Third that was anticipated.) Another declared: ‘He that sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed.’ The contingent from Ripponden carried a picture of a half-starved weaver in his loom: ‘The poor man’s labour is as dear to him as the rich man’s property.’ At Sheffield a monster procession marched to the Brocco behind bands playing the ‘Dead March in Saul’ and ‘Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled.’²

But by the end of December 1819 the movement was in a virtual state of collapse. For this there were two reasons: the divisions among the Radical leaders, and the repression of the Six Acts. The first makes up a tangled story which has not yet been successfully unravelled. We have noted that the London Radical organization was always weak and amorphous. There was, in London, in 1818 and in the early part of 1819, no coherent central body similar to the Political Unions and Protestants of the Midlands and north. Activities were often called on an ad hoc basis – meetings of ‘the friends of Mr Wooler’ or special dinners at the ‘Crown and Anchor’. The two Westminster elections of 1818 had aroused much dissension between the supporters of Burdett (who insisted upon giving first a banker friend, Kinnaird, and then John Cam Hobhouse, his support as second candidate as against the claims of Cartwright, Cobbett, or Hunt), and other Radical groupings.

Despite the fiasco of Spa Fields, Dr Watson and Thistlewood remained at the centre of the most determined attempts at the organization of London’s popular Radicalism. If the reports of yet one more well-placed informer (John Williamson) are to be believed, Thistlewood and Preston started once again, in the autumn of 1817, the attempt to create the sinews of conspiracy.¹ They found the going hard, in the aftermath of the Pentridge rising. The distress in Spitalfields was no longer so severe. In September (according to Williamson) Preston said ‘he had been in Spitalfields… to two or three of his old acquaintances and he found they had got work and such men as he they did not like’. Instead of stopping to hear his ‘discourse’, they kept on working in the loom. Thistlewood moved from one midnight meeting to another. There was obscure talk of getting a subsidy from an Englishman in Paris, a refugee of the 1790s. Oaths were taken, but the organization remained minuscule because ‘Preston said that nobody should know what their plans were to be’ until three hours before they were to be set in motion. Preston paid a brief visit (December 1817) to Birmingham, and reported the men there in ‘good spirits’. Williamson himself was sent by Thistlewood to reconnoitre a barracks, and find out how many cannon were there. But apart from insurrectionary fantasies, the actual achievements of the group were very small. They provided Lord Sidmouth with some alarmist reading, they formed a few tavern groups, and they acted as cheer-leaders on several occasions for demonstrations of the London crowd.¹

While Dr Watson was still associated with Thistlewood, he was probably no party to this attempt at conspiracy.² In February 1818 Sidmouth found a convenient means of putting Thistlewood out of the way, without recourse to a trial. Thistlewood had published an open letter, in which public and private grievances were confused, demanding ‘satisfaction’ from the Home Secretary – that is, challenging him to a duel. As a result he was confined in the King’s Bench prison, as a disturber of the peace, Lord Sidmouth paying for his maintenance there out of his own pocket. In 1819 Radical London re-awoke, and scores of tavern groups and debating societies (some of them called Union Societies) were formed. Once again Watson attempted to build up some central organization, and he was joined in the summer of 1819 by Thistlewood, now released, who – it seems – accepted the policy of constitutional agitation and turned his back, for a time, upon plotting a coup d’état. By the summer of 1819 a London ‘Committee of Two Hundred’ was formed.³ From June until October Watson, Thistlewood, Preston and Waddington were the most active and influential London leaders, especially among working people. They had the support of the old Jacobin orator, John Gale Jones, as well as of Carlile’s Republican, the Cap of Liberty, and the Medusa. It was the ‘Committee of Two Hundred’ which took the initiative in the well-prepared arrangements for Hunt’s entry into London after Peterloo,¹ and the ‘Doctor’ himself performed the ceremonies of welcome, showing considerable self-restraint and tact in the face of the swollen arrogance and political fastidiousness of Hunt.

In 1820, after the Cato Street Conspiracy, a hostile observer gave an account of the ‘Radical Committee Room’, at the ‘White Lion’, Wych-street, which was regarded as a centre for London’s Radical ‘underground’. In the tap-room: sat a set of suspicious, ill-looking fellows… whilst at a small deal table to the right sat Mr —, with a book and some papers and printed bills before him; from the obscurity of the place, having no light but what proceeded from a candle placed before Mr —, or from that in the bar, a stranger coming in would not be able to recognize any of the faces on seeing them afterwards elsewhere. On. the right hand… is a small parlour; here of an evening a select committee assembled, and no others were admitted. This was the room in which the most private transactions were carried on; Mr Thistlewood or Dr Watson always came out into the passage to speak to any person who called there on business. In a very large room upstairs… upwards of a hundred ill-looking persons have assembled of an evening; in it the open committee and loose members of the society met… Here their processions, &c., were arranged; their flags… kept; whilst the more private business was carried on below in the parlour.²

Such a centre was, inevitably, the subject for the constant attention of Government spies. But it does not follow that all its proceedings were ridiculous. The London ‘ultra’ Radicals were, after Peterloo, placed in a very difficult predicament ‘Reform cannot be obtained without bloodshed,’ the Cap of Liberty declared flatly in October, while the more irresponsible Medusa wrote:

There is not a Post from every part of the Kingdom, which does not furnish some new and striking instance of the necessity of constantly wearing arms.³

Carlile (two years later) summed up the message of all his writings in this period: ‘Reform will be obtained when the existing authorities have no longer the power to withold it, and not before…’¹ Moreover, the two months after Peterloo displayed in its fullest extent the weakness of the national leadership. Hunt’s pusillanimity was at its worst. After Peterloo he held the centre of the stage, and both the reformers and the authorities watched anxiously his every move. This was rich meat for his vanity. Peterloo might have been a personal affront, and his processions through Lancashire and London personal triumphs. He disliked Watson having any share in the honours of the London demonstration; quarrelled with the route which the Committee had chosen, and upon which thousands of expectant Londoners were kept waiting for half the day. (He had a grudge against London, anyway, since he had been roughly handled and booed on the Westminster hustings in 1818.) He quarrelled with Watson about the Chairman (Gale Jones) chosen for his dinner of welcome, shouting at him in public: ‘You are a damned officious meddling fellow; why not I take the chair, as well as Sir Francis Burdett after his procession?’ He then commenced to quarrel about money-matters. In Lancashire he succeeded in giving offence to most of the local reform leaders, while he allowed a funeral procession of some thousands to attend the burial of his favourite horse. He was in fact (and not without reason) more preoccupied with manoeuvring for a position of vantage in the approaching trials than with attending to the movement in the country.²

By September the reformers were dividing into revolutionary and constitutionalist wings. The policy sanctioned by Hunt and Wooler was that of passive resistance, remonstrance, legal action against the perpetrators of Peterloo, and abstinence from all taxed articles. In August the policy had a good deal to recommend it, and was loyally supported by all sections of the movement. But by October it was wearing thin. It was abunantly evident that hopes of legal redress were empty, most of all in Lancashire; while it was superfluous to recommend abstinence to the northern weavers. Moreover, as week by week the protest movement grew larger, the moderates offered no advice except to await in patience the opening of Parliament. Then, if no enquiry into Peterloo was instituted – or if Habeas Corpus was suspended – some other, undefined, advice might be given. But Parliament did not meet until 23 November – more than three months after Peterloo. The ‘ultra’ Radicals argued, with some colour, that Hunt’s advice meant damping down the movement in the country, abandoning popular initiative, and, in effect, handing over the leadership to the parliamentary Whigs. Like other demagogues, Hunt appears to have been alarmed at the spirits which he himself had helped to conjure up.

After waiting nearly two months, the ‘ultra’ Radicals put forward an alternative policy, which was supported by Watson and Carlile. This was for ‘meetings… throughout the Kingdom on one and the same day’. The day first proposed was 1 November, although it was later twice postponed. On the face of it, this was only to take the constitutionalist movement a stage further, although the genuine conspirators (of whom Arthur Thistlewood was one) may have hoped the simultaneous meetings would lead directly to insurrection. Throughout October the policy gathered support, and meetings were planned at Newcastle, Carlisle, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield, Barnsley, Manchester, Bolton, Wigan, Blackburn, Burnley, Newcastle-under-Lyne, Nottingham, Leicester and Coventry. By the end of the month the usually well-informed General Byng considered that Thistlewood ‘has superceded Hunt in [the] idolatry’ of the London people. Thistlewood visited Manchester (where there was now an ultra-Radical Union as well as the Huntite Patriotic Society) where the proposal won wide support. Some meetings in fact took place, and further plans were made for 15 November. But in the middle of October, Hunt, observing that the movement was slipping out of his hands, exerted himself to reassert control. In a ‘Letter to the Reformers of the North’, published in Wroe’s Manchester Observer (19 October) he denounced the plan of simultaneous meetings. He followed this up with a further letter, recalling the name of Oliver, and specifically attaching to Thistlewood the imputation of being a spy.

Thereafter for weeks the press was open to angry letters passing between Thistlewood and Watson, on one hand, and Hunt and his supporters, on the other, which the loyalist press reprinted with delight under the sardonic heading: ‘Radical State Papers’. Dr Watson had been imprisoned for debt for the non-payment of a bill at Hunt’s reception, and Hunt made shifty attempts to explain what he had done with moneys collected towards the expenses. Much of the controversy was irresponsible on both sides. Beneath it, it would appear that Hunt had well-founded suspicions as to Thistlewood’s conspiratorial intentions, and as to Dr Watson’s weak and amateurish grasp as a political leader. On the other hand, it would appear that Thistlewood had indeed succeeded in building up an underground chain of communication in the country, which in parts of the Midlands and the north survived Hunt’s attacks.¹ The Manchester Political Union was downcast by the refusal of ‘Hunt and his Junto’ to support the proposed meetings. Revised plans were made for delegates of the ‘underground’, from London, west Scotland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Birmingham and the Potteries, to meet in Nottingham on the day that Parliament reassembled, and to remain in permanent secret session as an ‘executive’ with instructions to call simultaneous meetings in the event of the suspension of Habeas Corpus. Hunt’s bitter opposition prevented these plans from maturing.²

If Thistlewood can be accused of folly (for which he was to suffer with his own life) he acted under great provocation. The response of the national Radical leaders to the Six Acts, which were rushed through the House in December, was feeble in the extreme. At the beginning of November, Cobbett had returned from his exile, landing at Liverpool and meeting with a triumphant reception from the Lancashire people. Disorientated after his absence, and having not the least desire to head a working-class insurrection, he seemed like a man who had lost his head. At Liverpool he announced that he had brought back with him the bones of one of England’s greatest sons – Tom Paine. Then (it turned out) it was not Paine’s republicanism but his notions of currency reform which Cobbett wished to honour. The Register carried alternate bluster (‘the great mass have a right to arm in their own defence’) and cold water: ‘My earnest hope is that the people will place their grand reliance on the Debt.’ This ‘Hole-Digger’ would bring down Old Corruption by its own operation, without the people’s exertion:

It is the most effectual as well as the safest way, to let the trout exhaust himself, while we hold the rod and line and the hook.

After the passing of the Six Acts he brought forward one great new proposal for ‘carrying on the struggle for the rights and liberties of our country’. The proposal was for a Fund for Reform, of about £5,000, to be raised in tuppeny subscriptions by reformers and trades unionists ‘and lodged in my hands’:

to be used solely by me, of course, and without the check or countroul of any-body; and without any one ever having a right to ask me what I am going to do with it… I will tell nobody how I intend to employ the money: I will answer no questions…¹

The Six Acts appear as a codification and extension of the legislation of 1795 and 1817. The first Act prohibited drilling and ‘military’ training: the second authorized justices to enter and search houses, without warrants, on suspicion of there being arms: the third prohibited meetings exceeding fifty in number, with certain exceptions (county and parish meetings) and additions (designed to suppress Radical lecture-meetings): the fourth Act (of great importance in the next twelve years) increased the stamp duty on periodical publications, raising their cost to 6d. and above: the fifth and sixth Acts were designed to extend for seditious the powers of the authorities, especially in actions and expedite libel.² The only measure of the earlier repressions which was not repeated was the suspension of Habeas Corpus. Thereafter the Government launched upon the most sustained campaign of prosecutions in the courts in British history. By the summer of 1820 Hunt, and four Manchester reformers (indicted for their part at Peterloo), Wooler, Burdett, Sir Charles Wolseley, the Rev. J. Harrison, Knight, Carlile, Edmonds, Wroe, Johnston, Bagguley, Drummond and Mitchell were all imprisoned. A major assault had commenced against the ‘seditious’ and ‘blasphemous’ press. Scores of prosecutions, against publishers or newsvendors, had been instituted by the private prosecuting societies or dealt with by summary jurisdiction. And Arthur Thistlewood had at length made his public exit from the scaffold.