‘The Web of Villainy’
Both the Reverend William Hay and the Reverend Charles Ethelston used informants and spies to gather intelligence on the activities of reformers in Manchester and beyond. They despatched this information to the Home Office in London on a regular basis, for the delectation of the clerks and the under-secretaries, including Parliamentary Under-Secretary John Hiley Addington (known as Hiley) – Sidmouth’s beloved younger brother and confidant – and the hard-working John Beckett, the Permanent Under-Secretary. The two under-secretaries each commanded salaries of £2,000 rising to £2,500 after three years’ service, and the Chief Clerk, from 1816 Mr T. H. Plasket, a salary of £1,000 rising to £1,250 after five years. In 1803 the number of clerks had increased to a total of thirteen. Among their key activities was the methodical copying for the record of all correspondence generated by the department, including letters from Lord Sidmouth and his under-secretaries, and the filing of all correspondence and documentation, including depositions, coming into the Home Office.1
The Home Office occupied Dorset House on Whitehall, a building with origins in Henry VIII’s tennis courts, part of the old Palace of Whitehall, later converted into lodgings for Charles II’s favourite and ill-fated illegitimate son, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (executed by his uncle, James II, after the Monmouth rebellion of 1685). By the late seventeenth century it was the office of the Lord Chamberlain, the Duke of Dorset, and remained in the family until the early nineteenth century when the leasehold was purchased by the Crown for occupancy by a relatively new department in Whitehall terms, the Home Office, created in 1782.2 By 1815 large stones were coming loose from the facade and landing in the street, which led to the encasing of the entire frontage in brick, much to the irritation of some contemporaneous architects.3 However, the building maintained an appearance of antiquity, with buttresses and corner turrets still visible. Within, the Home Secretary occupied a large office with a generous bay window. Maintaining this increasingly busy and understaffed department in some semblance of domestic order was the ‘necessary woman’ or housekeeper, Mrs Anne Moss, who commanded a combined annual salary and allowance of £140.4
The central role of the department was the keeping of the King’s Peace, for although day-to-day responsibility rested with the constables and magistrates of each district and town, ultimately the Home Secretary, as one former occupant declared, ‘exercises a general controlling and co-ordinating authority over the whole country’.5 In addition, during the nineteenth century, the Home Office was responsible for industrial laws, including the various Factory Acts.6
By late 1816, information was arriving at Dorset House that would have done little to allay the Home Secretary’s fears of an imminent uprising in the northwest. And the leaders of the local Hampden Clubs were accused of being the main agitators.
Like Hay and Ethelston, Colonel Ralph Fletcher, who had jurisdiction in Bolton, maintained a regular correspondence with the Home Office. Notable among the spies and informers he used was one William Chippindale, a manufacturer from Oldham. In December 1816 Chippindale reported details of a strike by weavers at Denton, near Ashton, and Newton Land, near Manchester, which ‘has excited a great Sensation throughout the whole of this neighbourhood & it would not at all surprise me if the example was immediately followed throughout the whole of the District of which Manchester is the focus’. He considered the matter to be of such importance – ‘if the contagion should spread, many days cannot elapse before the Country [region] becomes a scene of outrage’ – that he wanted to alert General Sir John Byng, now happily ensconced at Pontefract, Yorkshire, as the commander of the Northern District. Chippindale had perceived a sudden rise in activity among the reformers,
& their spirits appear to have experienced a sudden Revival. They have taken four or five empty Rooms for the Purpose of reading Cobbett in. – The lower class are invited to attend & admission is gratuitous. One or more of the Leaders attend & perform the office of reading which is generally accompanied with a short commentary. Every thing connected with them & their Proceedings in my opinion indicate that the[y] are rapidly advancing to an Insurrection & I hope you do not fail to impress this upon the mind of the Secretary of State. They appear to have given up every Expectation of bringing over the middling & higher Classes & all their Efforts are consequently directed to corrupt the minds & inflame the Passions of the working class, whom they now urge to trust to their own Exertions without looking for bid to those above them. The instruments chiefly employed by them for effecting this purpose are Cobbett & the Statesman.*
The reformers, Chippindale concludes, consider the ‘Great day is now near at hand. – This is again industriously circulated & operates no little upon the minds of the People in the way of alarm.’7 What the ‘Great day’ actually meant is not explained, but Chippindale’s inference is revolution.
Just over a month later, John Lloyd, secretary of the Stockport magistrates, was reporting on a future meeting of the local Hampden Club, and another meeting he had attended at Macclesfield at which a petition to the Prince Regent was discussed. One of the speakers at Macclesfield was John Knight, whose words Lloyd characterized as an invitation to ‘farther & support revolutionary Principles’. Knight had described the response of ‘the late King of France’ to the principles of reform: ‘The King refused Gentlemen – & what was the consequence? Why – He lost his Head!!’ The insinuation, stated Lloyd, ‘was obvious – The Prince [Regent] refuses & he is to be impeached by his subjects! Such I believe to be within their sapient speculations… They wish to see distress and poverty because they derive specious arguments from misery. They wou’d increase it with the same cold blooded design.’8 The language here attributed to John Knight flies in the face of his reputation as a promoter of protest by peaceful means, of open public meetings (as opposed to secret ones), and his advice that ‘the Language used should be mild and constitutional, but firm and clear’.9
Nine days after Lloyd’s report, on 16 January, Charles Ethelston wrote to Lord Sidmouth to confirm that he had employed ‘Campbell’ and ‘Fleming’, who were considered useful to the government pro tempore. Ethelston emphasized that he was ‘paying due attention to the caution given me to do this’ – that is, to employ spies – ‘on a moderate scale’, and he alluded to ‘a development of the plans & Machinations of the disaffected as I conceive will not be deem’d trifling… when the enclos’d Depositions taken before me are consid[ered]’. He had compared the enclosed document with ‘other collateral Testimony procur’d by secret Agents in the pay of the Constable of Manchester’ and, as their accounts tallied, he was confident that they presented a true reflection of what had occurred. He also refers to ‘seditious & inflammatory publications… preparing the populace for riot & Insurrection’. The magistrates were vigilant and already adopting measures to counter these evils. In the meantime, Ethelston adds, ‘I hope I shall not be deem’d obtrusive or acting the part of an Alarmist in endeavouring to afford Government, as far as my humble efforts may extend, such a Clue to the Web of Villainy’ in the area, which he is determined ‘to unravel’.10
The enclosure Ethelston refers to was entitled ‘The Information of Peter Campbell of Manchester’. On 13 January, according to his testimony, Campbell had attended a Hampden Club meeting in Eccles, to the west of Manchester. He recalled that one Jones, formerly a Methodist preacher from nearby Flixton,
after a very labour’d & most inflammatory speech, highly calculated to excite sedition, ask’d the multitude what they wou’d do provided the Prince Regent did not listen to this petition – wou’d they lie down & die – The answer was No – No – And the result was to form a Committee to determine upon a plan in conjunction with their Brethren in Manchester to be ripe for execution after they had receiv’d their answer from the House of Commons.
Campbell made particular note of an eighteen-year-old machine maker called John Bagguley, who ‘declar’d with vehemence, the country was govern’d by a bad Government & a bad King & a bad ministry – that the said Baguley [sic] vociferated repeatedly the King Government & Ministry were hellish, damnable & infernal’. Campbell reported also ‘that a load of abuse was pour’d upon the Prince Regent’.
Following this meeting, Campbell had returned to Manchester arm in arm with Bagguley, talking of politics. Campbell ventured to say that ‘you are well aware, Baguley [sic] that Parliament will not grant your petition’, to which Bagguley replied, ‘I know… but all the multitude who join us are not to know that secret.’ ‘How’, Campbell pondered out loud, ‘shall we manage when our petition is rejected – we have not an organis’d body,’ to which Bagguley apparently responded that ‘three fourths of us are already organis’d for we have been in the Militia in volunteer corps & in the regular Army’. But, said Campbell, ‘where are your arms?’ Bagguley answered, ‘Independent of the Depot in Chester there are 3 places in Manch[este]r where we can procure them; & from our Brethren in Sheffield we can get any quantity as well as from Birmingham where we have Friends in great numbers with whom we are in constant & regular correspondences.’
That evening, Campbell attended another meeting at New Islington, in ‘the Garretts’, where ‘a very numerous Body were collected’. John Bagguley spoke at length ‘of the enormous revenue of the Prince, whom he abus’d as the most infamous of Characters’. Other speakers, more measured in their language, ‘blam’d Baguley [sic] for his openness & said he shou’d be sly & cautious tho’ they allow’d what he said to be right & proper.’11
All this signalled to Sidmouth and his helpers that the Hampden Clubs, active purveyors and disseminators of Cobbett’s revolutionary rantings, as they saw it, were a new and significant threat to the nation’s tranquillity. Cobbett himself decried the lies, in his opinion, that were being viciously and perniciously circulated against the fraternities:
It is also a very scandalous falsehood to say, that the HAMPDEN CLUBS, or any of the Reformers, endeavour to urge the people to compel the state (the parliament, is meant, I suppose) by force of arms, to an immediate submission to their demands. We have uniformly, and, hitherto, most successfully, exhorted the people to adhere to a peaceable and orderly conduct. Such a falsehood as this, therefore, merits public execration, though the promulgation of it cannot fail to shew the badness of the cause of our enemies, who, unless their cause were desperate, would not resort to any falsehood at all.12
An event would soon occur that would bring these tensions to a head.
* Unsurprisingly, a few years before William Cobbett described the pro-reform Statesman as ‘the very best daily news-paper that we have’ (Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, Vol. XXIII, No. 16, 17 April 1813, p. 578). In 1822 he bought a sizable share in it.