1819 What is hyperbolically called the Massacre (or the ‘Battle’) of Peterloo took place on St Peter’s Field, in Manchester, on 16 August 1819, in the wake of the profound industrial unrest that followed the Napoleonic wars. Such periods are invariably feared by authorities as potentially revolutionary.
Some 80,000 working-class Lancastrians (and ‘agitators’ from outside – notably the firebrand orator, Henry Hunt) massed to demand the reform of Parliament, so as to give greater representation to the unenfranchised non-householders in the country. Anger at the relaxation of the Corn Laws and widespread unemployment had further inflamed popular resentment.
The panicked magistrates mustered the local military, and instructed them to disperse the crowd and arrest Hunt. The crowd was not unruly, and the demonstration, despite radical speeches, was not violent. Organised by their chapels (i.e. trades unions) the workers in the crowd were, in point of fact, better disciplined than the nervous soldiers facing them.
Cavalry charged on the crowd, causing panic. Something under twenty people were killed (compared with 48,000 at Waterloo) and around 500 injured – more by horses’ hooves and trampling than by sabres. Hunt, along with eight others, was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for ‘sedition’.
The ‘Massacre’ tilted political agitation in Britain towards ‘physical’ rather than ‘moral force’ solutions. And the event entered the calendar of radicalism as a holy day in the workers’ struggle. It was helped there by the poet Shelley. In Italy, he got the news on 5 September and fired off his anthem to the oppressed classes of England:
Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many – they are few.