‘The most disagreeable seven days’
The mass meeting scheduled for 9 August in Manchester was widely advertised through the Manchester Observer and the prominent display of posters, as Hunt had wished. That the Home Office and local magistrates were fully aware of the reformers’ preparations is evident from the flurry of correspondence through early summer to and from Whitehall. The Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, the Earl of Derby, alongside his fellows in Cheshire and Yorkshire, were told to prepare their local forces. By now Manchester had its own citizen regiment, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, formed as a direct response to the Blanket March two years earlier.
The Yeomanry Cavalry regiments formed part of the system for maintaining law and order that was directed by the Lords Lieutenant, via the magistrates and constables. By the close of 1815 a sizable element of what was left of the regular army was divided between India and France, the latter as part of the army of occupation. The contingent that remained at home was not considered sufficient to maintain peace across a troubled land. Lord Sidmouth was therefore keen to encourage the formation of citizen regiments to supplement the regular troops which could be sent in to assist the civil powers. Some such regiments already existed in Lancashire and adjoining counties, for example the Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry – ‘the Earl of Chester’s Yeomanry Cavalry’ – whose colonel in 1818, and for some twenty years prior, was Sir John Fleming Leicester, an intimate of the Prince Regent and owner of Tabley House near Knutsford. Sir John was the proud owner of a very fine art collection – among his works by modern masters were paintings by J. M. W. Turner.* The government provided a little money to equip and arm these citizen regiments, but most of the essential kit, including a horse, horse furniture (or tack) and uniform, was the responsibility of the individual volunteer and/or his aristocratic commander.
In 1817, as Manchester had no such regiment, the magistrates had no local support to command during an emergency. Soon after the Blanketeers’ march, Anthony Molyneux, a Manchester manufacturer, wrote to Lord Sidmouth suggesting that this should be rectified.1 At the end of April 1817, the Reverend William Hay likewise wrote to Sidmouth stating, ‘I have the satisfaction to inform you that the Grand Jury has come to an unanimous declaration of their opinion as to the necessity of having a corps of Yeomanry Cavalry in the County; and that they have come to a resolution in which they have appointed a committee of their own body to confer with the Magistrates as to the best mode of carrying this measure into effect.’2 In June 1817 an announcement appeared in the Manchester Mercury, addressed to the boroughreeve and constables of Manchester and Salford: ‘It appears to us that a CORPS OF YEOMANRY CAVALRY, for the more effectual security of the Towns and Neighbourhood of Manchester and Salford is highly expedient’. Among the undersigned was Hugh Hornby Birley.3
By September 1817 the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry was established under the command of Thomas Joseph Trafford, a wealthy Roman Catholic, resident at Trafford Hall. The most senior of Trafford’s supporting officers was Hugh Hornby Birley, a mill owner, who had at one time been the town’s boroughreeve and who had opposed the Corn Laws, not through any concern for his workforce, but because he believed they would raise wages.4 The recruits that made up the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry troop, which would be supporting the civil powers at St Peter’s Field, were, according to contemporary chronicler and reformist Archibald Prentice, ‘hot-headed young men who had volunteered into that service from their intense hatred of radicalism’.5 They were mainly from Manchester itself and were by profession innkeepers, tailors, butchers, cheesemongers and the like. The regiment was not included in General Sir John Byng’s list of troops, as it was under the direct authority of the local magistrates.
That the Yeomanry were seen as enemies of reform is evident from the disdainful way in which they were characterized in the Manchester Observer. By July 1819, rumours were circulating that working people across Lancashire were preparing for the forthcoming mass meeting with regular military-style drills, equipped with pikes and other such weapons. In mid-July, the paper reported:
The stupid boobies of Yeomanry Cavalry, in the Neighbourhood, have only just made the discovery that the MIND and the MUSCLE of the country are at length united, and the poor dunghills have, during the past week, been foaming and broiling themselves to death, in getting their swords new ground, their pistols examined with the minutest scrutiny, and their bridle reins made impenetrable to the steel of the mere phantom of an improved Pike.
Quoting Thomas Wooler, the article goes on to describe the Yeomanry as ‘generally speaking, the fawning dependents, or the supple Slaves of the Great, with a few fools, and a larger proportion of coxcombs, who imagine they acquire considerable importance by wearing Regimentals’. As for being soldiers, ‘their ridiculous assumption of being able to put down the PEOPLE, will one day be as dangerous as it is now contemptible’.6
This was followed by another tirade in the Manchester Observer in early August: ‘To the Official Gentlemen of Manchester… Gentry, I pity you, and your dernier resources, but,’ and here the tone becomes a little threatening, ‘whilst the world laughs at your foiblesse, I hope Englishmen will not forget to enter you in their Black Book.’7 Francis Philips, a local loyalist who had been one of the signatories for the creation of the regiment, complained in his Exposure of the Calumnies circulated by the Enemies of Social Order… Against the Magistrates and the Yeomanry Cavalry of Manchester and Salford, ‘The grossness of the terms lavished on the yeomanry, and on the Magistrates and the Town’s officers, just prior to the meeting… not only in the Observer, but in placards upon the walls, exceeded all bounds of decency – they met the eye in every direction.’8
It was in this atmosphere that Major Trafford now ordered his men to prepare for the mass meeting. A journeyman cutler called Daniel Kennedy, working for a Mr Richardson on Deansgate, was instructed to make their sabres ‘very sharp’ and by the week ending 17 July he had prepared sixty such weapons.9 Francis Philips challenged the interpretation that the sharpening of sabres suggested an exaggerated blood lust:
The simple history of all the tales we have heard of sharpening sabres is briefly this. On the 7th of July Government issued orders to the Cheshire and Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry, through the Lords Lieutenant of those counties, to hold themselves in readiness, and consequently most of the Manchester Cavalry sent their arms to the same cutler, which the corps during the last war had employed, to put them in condition; this was a month before the Manchester meeting of reformers had been advertised.10
Henry Hunt recalled in his memoirs that the advance publicity for the meeting, including in the London papers, had ‘excited a very considerable sensation throughout the country, and particularly in the North of England. As I strongly suspected that my letters to Manchester, about this time, were opened at the post-office, I sent them by other conveyances than by post.’11 The Manchester Observer made its first announcement on 31 July, in which it stated that the purpose of the meeting was ‘to take into consideration the most speedy and effectual mode of obtaining Radical Reform in the Common House of Parliament’ and ‘to consider the propriety of the “Unrepresented Inhabitants of Manchester” electing a Person to represent them in Parliament’, as had already been done in Birmingham, where an unauthorized poll had resulted in the ‘election’ in absentia of the reform sympathizer Sir Charles Wolseley. This phenomenon of the populace electing an alternative representative ‘without the King’s Writ’, as Henry Hobhouse informed an increasingly nervous James Norris, had been assessed by the Attorney and Solicitor Generals to be ‘a high misdemeanour, and that the Parties engaged and acting therein, may be prosecuted for a conspiracy’. Such a meeting, Hobhouse advised Norris, would be an unlawful assembly and the magistrates should decide whether to disperse it.12 However, the advertisement in the Manchester Observer had stated that the meeting would only ‘consider the propriety’ of a vote for a mock Member of Parliament, which would not, in itself, be illegal. Yet, Hobhouse continues, unlawful behaviour or resolutions might manifest themselves at any point during the course of the event, therefore the magistrates should be vigilant.13
Despite Hobhouse’s nuanced advice on the legality of proceedings, the special committee of magistrates, led by the young and relatively inexperienced William Hulton, chairman of the Lancashire and Cheshire magistrates, responded immediately to the Manchester Observer’s announcement by printing and circulating – for display in all prominent public spaces – a poster headed, in very large black letters, ‘Illegal MEETING’. The poster warned the public:
Whereas It appears by an Advertisement in the ‘Manchester Observer’ Paper of this day, that a PUBLIC and Illegal MEETING, is convened FOR MONDAY The 9th Day of August NEXT, To be held on the AREA, Near ST PETER’S CHURCH, in Manchester, WE, the undersigned Magistrates, acting for the Counties Palatine of Lancaster and Chester, do hereby Caution all Persons to abstain At their Peril from attending such ILLEGAL MEETING.14
A few onlookers may have scratched their heads at the idea that they would be in ‘peril’ should they not attend the meeting,† but the message of the poster was clear enough.
On becoming aware of this, Hobhouse wrote again to Norris on 3 August, repeating the advice given by the Attorney General, and reiterating that he could not see how the meeting on the 9th could be illegal, provided it adhered to the terms of the original advertisement. He therefore requested of Norris, ‘when the Magistrates next meet, you will call their attention to this Subject, with a view to their reconsidering the Resolution to which they came on Saturday, of preventing the assembly’. It was imperative, Hobhouse repeated, that the magistrates should ‘act strictly within the Law, because it would give a great advantage to the disaffected to find the Law on their side, & we know there will be many ready to take advantage of any error which may be committed’.15 The following day, he wrote again to Norris on the same subject. His letter described how, after reflection, Lord Sidmouth had become even more convinced ‘of the Inexpediency of attempting forcibly to prevent the Meeting on Monday’:
Every Discouragement and obstacle should be thrown in its way, and the Advertisement from the Magistrates will no doubt have a salutary effect in this respect. But his Lordship thinks that it would be imprudent to act up to the Spirit of the Advertisement. He has no doubt that you will make arrangements for obtaining evidence of what passes; that if any thing illegal is done or said, it may be the subject of prosecution. But even if they should utter sedition or proceed to the election of a Representative Lord Sidmouth is of opinion, that it will be the wisest course to abstain from any endeavour to disperse the Mob, unless they should proceed to Acts of Felony or Riot. We have the strongest Reason to believe that Hunt means to preside & to deprecate disorder. I ought to have mentioned that the opinion which I have expressed for Lord Sidmouth, is supported by that of the highest Law Authorities.16
In response to the magistrates’ declaration of illegality, John Saxton travelled to Liverpool to obtain legal advice on behalf of the Manchester Observer and was told, by a Mr Ranecock, that, to remain firmly within the law, advertisements for the meeting should omit any mention of electing members of Parliament.17 A new announcement was placed in the paper’s 7 August edition, declaring that the revised purpose of the meeting was ‘To consider the propriety of adopting the most LEGAL and EFFECTUAL means of obtaining a REFORM in the Commons House of Parliament’.18 It also contained the important information that the meeting was postponed to Monday 16 August. This gave the organizers an additional week to prepare themselves and attract more attenders – as Sir John Byng wrote to Hobhouse: ‘It will give the disaffected more time to muster their forces’ – for what promised to be the greatest gathering of people ever seen in the region.19 In the same letter, Sir John also suggested that to reduce tensions, the authorities and factory owners in the district might meet with deputations of local workers: ‘then an opportunity will be afforded to communicate with these men – the folly of the means lately used by them to seek redress, might in plain conciliatory language be pointed out to them, and their real wants might be [inquired] into and it might be seen if any good can be done for them.’20 There is no evidence that such a move towards meaningful dialogue was ever made.
Henry Hobhouse, having received a letter from James Norris (dated 5 August) which brought news of the rescheduling of the meeting, declared: ‘This Postponement His Lordship thinks the Magistrates may look upon as a triumph; & it occurs to his Lordship that they might avail themselves of the opportunity to put forth a monitory & conciliatory Address to the lower classes which might be productive of a very salutary effect.’ He also told Norris, ‘The subject of the drilling Parties has met with the most anxious & attentive consideration of Lord Sidmouth & his Colleagues.’21 In the opinion of the Home Secretary, the intelligence coming from Lancashire that large groups of men were drilling in a military fashion suggested the calculated involvement of a far from peaceable element. The Manchester Observer treated such fear-mongering (as they saw it) with disdain, particularly directed against the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry. As William Fitton wrote in a letter published in the paper, ‘what they smell danger, do they? They have heard rumours among the poor weavers of pikes have they? And now shrink back! Brave fellows! And well they may; for half a dozen hungry, angry weavers, would eat a whole corps of Yeomanry fellows.’22 That the editors of the paper were guilty of baiting the authorities is undeniable, if understandable.
As the day of the meeting drew near, Henry Hunt drove himself northwards from his home in Hampshire, in his own gig – pulled by his horse Bob, ‘a great favourite and most valuable animal’23 – and accompanied by his manservant, Henby Andrews. On the journey, Hunt met Sir Charles Wolseley, who had also been invited to the meeting on Monday, ‘but some family reasons prevented him from complying.’24 On Sunday 8 August, at Bullock Smithey near Stockport, about ten miles from Manchester, Hunt was informed that the meeting had been postponed until Monday next. ‘The cause’, Hunt recalled, ‘was that Mr. Johnson and those concerned in calling the meeting had, in their advertisements, stated one of the objects to be, that of electing a representative or legislatorial attorney for Manchester. This foolish proposition… was seized on by the Magistrates of Manchester, and they issued hand-bills, and had placards posted all over town, denouncing the intended meeting as illegal, and’, Hunt recalls with scorn, ‘cautioning all persons “to abstain at their peril from attending it”.’25 Hunt recounts the sequence of events – Saxton’s visit to Liverpool, the redrafting of the meeting’s purpose, the new date – all arranged, he observes, ‘without my having in any way received the slightest intimation of what was going on’.26
I had travelled two hundred miles in my gig for the purpose of presiding, and when I learned that I had been made a fool of, I expressed considerable indignation, and declared my intention of returning into Hampshire immediately. I was, however, at length prevailed upon to proceed to Stockport to sleep that night, as I understood that Mr. Moorhouse had provided a bed for me, and a stall for my horse.27
On the road to Stockport, Hunt was met by Joseph Johnson and John Saxton, who explained what had happened and ‘expressed a great desire’ for Hunt to attend the meeting on the 16th, as they had already advertised that he would be the chairman, ‘without my knowledge’. Hunt resisted, but was persuaded to go on to Manchester the following day, and to have dinner there with Johnson and others at Smedley Cottage, Johnson’s farmhouse.
Before leaving James Moorhouse’s residence on the Monday morning, Hunt received a note from Sir Charles Wolseley saying that he would like to accompany Hunt into the town, and ‘after breakfast, we proceeded together in my gig to Manchester, attended by many thousands of the Stockport people. Johnson, the brush-maker, and others, from Manchester, had come to meet us, and they followed in a chaise, and Mr. Moorhouse followed, with a party, in his coach. We were greeted with the utmost enthusiasm by the people of Manchester.’28 On arrival, Hunt addressed the gathering and then went on to Smedley Cottage with Sir Charles.
In the early twentieth century, Smedley Cottage, near Smedley Lane in the Cheetham Hill district to the north of Ancoats, was described as still ‘standing in the midst of fields’. The cottage was ‘a pleasant place to live in. In its garden and orchard were fine fruit trees that bore many great crops of apples, pears, plums and cherries. There was also a fountain and fish pond, together with a poultry yard, pig styes, and stables.’29
After dining there, Hunt was persuaded to remain at Johnson’s house until 16 August to chair the meeting that day – ‘still very much against my inclination, and quite in opposition to my own judgment’,30 as he recorded in his Memoirs. ‘Had Johnson’s life depended upon the result, he could not have been more anxious to detain me. He begged, he prayed, he implored me to stay; urging that without my presence the people would not be satisfied; and, in fact, foreboding the most fatal consequences if I departed before the meeting took place.’ Hunt recalled, ‘I solemnly declare that I never before consented with so much reluctance to any measure of the sort.’31 Even his manservant, Henby, had been desperate to return south when he realized the original meeting had been cancelled: ‘I left a wife and family behind me, besides, I had lost my linen in the way down.’32 To stay a further week would cause Hunt ‘the greatest personal and private inconvenience’. But he finally agreed, in the belief that his presence would ‘promote tranquillity and good order, and under the assurance that, if I did quit the place, confusion and bloodshed would, in all probability, be the inevitable consequence’.
None of this, however, endeared Joseph Johnson to Henry Hunt: ‘As for Johnson, the brush-maker, he was a composition of vanity, emptiness, and conceit, such as I never before saw concentrated in one person. It was the most ridiculous thing in the world to see him assuming the most pompous and lofty tone, while every one about him did not fail openly to express contempt for his insignificance and folly.’ According to Hunt, Johnson was terrified at the prospect of managing the event on the 16th, and others agreed that Hunt ‘alone had the power of conducting this great meeting in a peaceable, quiet, and Constitutional manner’. Hunt concludes with the thought that he had only remained to support the people of Manchester and to thwart their ‘most base and bloodthirsty opponents’. Understandably, Joseph Johnson would later complain bitterly and publicly about Hunt’s description of him and the events leading up to and after 16 August.
The week that Hunt spent under Johnson’s roof was an uncomfortable one: ‘I can, with great truth, affirm that this was one of the most disagreeable seven days that I ever passed in my life… However, most fortunately for me, Johnson was from home a considerable portion of this time, attending to his brush-making and other business.’ This account was put to paper more than a year after the event, but the repeated references to the nature of Johnson’s business confirms Hunt’s disdain for his host. Johnson’s absences, Hunt recalled, ‘alone rendered the visit to Smedley tolerable’.33 Hunt refused to join his host on various local visits, which he later considered fortunate, as the authorities might have attempted to use such activity as evidence of conspiracy.
Holed up in Smedley Cottage, Hunt used his time to good purpose. On Wednesday 11 August, he wrote an address to the good people of Manchester and its environs. It began: ‘FELLOW COUNTRYMEN – Our enemies are exulting at the victory they profess to have obtained over us, in consequence of the postponement, for a week, of the public meeting intended to have been held on Monday last.’ Hunt’s main concern was the behaviour of the crowds and he was keen to set out how he wished the people to behave, relying, once more, on their inherent good-temperedness, their basic faith in and respect for their speaker, and their belief in the cause of parliamentary reform: ‘You will meet on Monday next, my friends, and by your steady, firm, and temperate deportment, you will convince all your enemies, you feel that you have an important and an imperious public duty to perform, and that you will not suffer any private consideration on earth to deter you from exerting every nerve to carry your praise-worthy and patriotic intentions into effect.’ He reminded his audience that the ‘eyes of all England, nay, of all Europe, are fixed upon you; and every friend of real reform and of rational liberty is tremblingly alive to the result of your meeting on Monday next.’ There was a danger, he said, that their enemies would ‘seek every opportunity by the means of their sanguinary agents to excite a riot, that they may have a pretence for spilling our blood, reckless of the awful and certain retaliation that would ultimately fall on their heads’.
With that in mind, Hunt turned to the issue of whether the people should come armed: ‘Come, then, my friends, to the meeting on Monday, armed with no other weapon but that of a self-approving conscience; determined not to suffer yourselves to be irritated or excited, by any means whatsoever, to commit any breach of the public peace.’ They must trust in the fact that the meeting on the 16th – unlike that of the 9th – had not been pronounced illegal. In the knowledge that the magistrates and Home Office, as well as reform sympathizers, would be sure to read his words, Hunt stressed that the meeting was lawful and that the gathering had no mischievous or seditious purpose. He drew attention to the oppressive tactics employed by the governmental opponents of reform, and emphasized the enduring strength of the principles that inspired the people in their struggle for change:
Our opponents have not attempted to show that our reasoning is fallacious, or that our conclusions are incorrect, by any other argument but the threat of violence, and to put us down by the force of the sword, the bayonet, and the cannon. They assert that your leaders do nothing but mislead and deceive you, although they well know that the eternal principles of truth and justice are too deeply engraven on your hearts; and that you are at length become (unfortunately for them) too well acquainted with your own rights ever again to suffer any man or any faction to mislead you.
In a bold touch, he invited the boroughreeve or any of the nine ‘wise Magistrates’ who had proclaimed the illegality of the earlier meeting to join the rescheduled gathering. If the organizers’ aims were wrong, it was the authorities’ ‘duty as men, as magistrates, and as Christians, to endeavour to set us right, by argument, by reason, and by the mild and irresistible precepts of persuasive truth. We promise them an attentive hearing, and to abide by the result of conviction alone. But once for all we repeat, that we despise their threats, and abhor and detest those who direct or control the mind of man by violence or force.’
This address was then printed. Copies were circulated throughout the district and displayed on the walls of public spaces, in taverns and in hostelries, for all to see and read. According to Hunt, two thousand copies were sold at a penny each in a few hours.34
Hunt also sent a copy of his address to The Star in London, asking them to publish it. The Times, having got hold of a version, duly did so, alongside a letter from Hunt addressed to the former paper and dated 12 August, which stated:
At a reform meeting held at Leigh yesterday, it is reported two of the speakers had warrants issued against them by Mr. Fletcher, of Bolton, and they were arrested without opposition. We have our meeting here on Monday next, and the preparations for a riot (to be produced, if any, by the agents of the police) are equal to those made by the Lord Mayor previous to the meeting in Smithfield. I have no doubt but we shall conduct the proceeding with great quietness and order, although I dread any mad attempt, to produce disturbance, as the people here, although disposed to peace, are much more determined to resist any illegal attack made upon them; however, I shall do my duty, and I hope to keep them firm and quiet.35
As the week progressed, a number of visitors ventured to Smedley Cottage. One was Samuel Bamford, who arrived on Friday 13 August, apparently while Hunt was having his portrait painted by one ‘Tuke’, possibly a local artist.‡ Bamford does not seem to have had much faith in the painter’s ability, as he watched Mr Tuke amend the portrait, ‘which indeed it wanted’. No doubt this is one of the depictions that Bamford considered did not fully capture the nuances – physical and psychological – of the illustrious sitter, though the mention of it adds to the impression of Hunt’s vanity.§
While this was going on and the two brother reformers were engaged in conversation, Hunt expressed concern that some people might come to the meeting armed. He showed Bamford a copy of the address that he had had printed the day before, and asked him ‘to caution those from Middleton’ against bringing weapons. Bamford found this advice ‘unpalatable’:
I had not the most remote wish to attack either person or property, but I had always supposed, that Englishmen, whether individually or in bodies, were justifiable by law in repelling attack when in the King’s peace, as I certainly calculated we should be, whilst in attendance at a legally constituted assemblage. My crude notions… led me to opine that we had a right to go to this place; and that consequently, there would not be any protection in law, to those who might choose to interrupt us in our right. I was almost certain there could be no harm whatever in taking a score of two of cudgels, just to keep the specials [constables] at a respectful distance from our line. But this was not permitted.36
Bamford continued to argue: ‘I scarcely liked the idea of walking my neighbours into a crowd, both personally and politically adverse to us; and without means to awe them, or to defend ourselves?’ Was it not the case, he enquired of Hunt, that many men who had been sworn in as special constables would be armed, and that weapons had been liberally distributed throughout the town? Had the sabres of the Yeomanry Cavalry not been sharpened? What, he asked, ‘could we do, if attacked by those men, with nothing to defend ourselves?’ Hunt responded that the laws of the land would protect them, since the magistrates were sworn to uphold them. Would the magistrates interfere with a peaceable and legal assembly? If ‘we were in the right,’ said Hunt, ‘were they not our guardians?’ Bamford recalled that Hunt summed up with the reassurance that ‘whilst we respected the law, all would be well on our side’.37 Bamford left Smedley Cottage far from reassured, but, apparently, willing to go along with Hunt’s request.
Another visitor was a friend of Hunt’s called Edward Grundy, who warned him that a rumour was circulating around Manchester that ‘it was the intention of the Magistrates to have me apprehended, under a plea of having committed some political offence, in order to interrupt the proceedings of the meeting’. Grundy had confirmed that he would stand bail for Hunt, should this be the case. But Hunt was determined to confront the magistrates. On Saturday 14 August he drove to the New Bailey to ask them ‘if there was any charge against me? – if there was, I begged to know what was the nature of it, as I was then ready to surrender myself and to meet it’. None of those present, including Constable Joseph Nadin, seemed to know anything about the matter. And, according to Hunt, they showed him ‘all the polite attention that they were capable of showing’. Hunt left the courthouse with the assurance that there was no charge against him. He had, he believed, deprived the magistrates of any excuse to interfere with the meeting on Monday.38
In fact the magistrates had been in contact with the Home Office concerning the possibility of arresting Hunt. In response to a letter from James Norris on 9 August on that subject, Henry Hobhouse observed, on behalf of Lord Sidmouth,
if you find good ground for issuing a warrant it will be adviseable [sic] not to forbear from doing so in the expectation of his giving you a better opportunity unless some other reason for your Forbearance presents itself. We know that all the Demagogues feel extremely sore on the subject of criminal Prosecutions, and that Hunt in particular observes extreme caution for the sake of avoiding them. It is therefore very desirable to take the earliest opportunity of proceeding against him.
Hobhouse also noted that Lord Sidmouth was extremely happy to know that the Reverend William Hay would be assisting the other local magistrates up to and including the meeting on Monday.39 The Home Office had little confidence in the Reverend Charles Ethelston and some of his fellow magistrates, but were relying on Hay and, to an extent, Norris – the two magistrates with formal legal training – for a sensible and measured response.
On Wednesday 11 August, Sir John Byng wrote to Hobhouse, enclosing a letter from Hay, and expressing some irritation at the to-ing and fro-ing in Manchester and the frequent and increasingly hysterical missives from the local magistrates. Sir John was commander of the entire Northern District, of which Manchester was a small part. Having originally handed over command of the troops to Lieutenant Colonel L’Estrange for the 9 August meeting, he had no intention of resuming that role at the rescheduled gathering. After receiving another letter requesting his presence in the town, Sir John was evidently exasperated. Given, he writes from York, ‘the extensive commerce I have, & business to attend to, they were not very considerate in requiring my presence so hastily’. L’Estrange had sent a message by express ‘to tell me there was no necessity for my coming’.40 11 August was, of course, the day before Sir John’s horse Sir Arthur was due to race.
The enclosed letter from William Hay was very apologetic, excusing their last correspondence as written in the heat of the moment, when it had seemed that only Sir John’s presence could allay the magistrates’ collective fears. ‘I am happy’, Hay wrote, ‘to say that that aspect has been materially altered from the reports which we have since received and in such a degree as to do away with the propriety of applying to you in any further instance.’41 Sir John was thus released from any sense of duty to attend Monday’s meeting in person.
On Sunday 15 August, Henry Hunt received an unexpected visitor at Smedley Cottage. Richard Carlile, who had maintained contact with James Wroe, had received an invitation from John Knight to attend the August meeting and, after arriving at the Star Inn on Deansgate, immediately set off again for Smedley Cottage three miles away. Despite the invitation, Carlile wanted to have Hunt’s express permission to attend the gathering and to join him on the hustings. Carlile carried several impressions, or copies, of a pamphlet entitled ‘Address to the People of Great Britain to the People of Ireland’, which was, in substance, the address made by Hunt at the mass meeting at Smithfield in London, less than four weeks before. Its purpose was to unite the reformers of England and Ireland under the single banner of ‘Universal Civil and Religious Liberty.’ Hunt saw no need to distribute these pamphlets straight away, since he was intending to focus on the subject of Universal Suffrage at the meeting the following day, but he thought they might be left on the tables at the dinner which was to be held in his honour, as had happened in January, directly after the close of proceedings on St Peter’s Field.
Around the same time, Hunt received reports of a troubling incident involving James Murray, ‘a sort of spy of the police’.42 Murray had been watching groups of men marching and drilling on the moors around White Moss, near Middleton, and had been attacked and badly beaten by some of them. Samuel Bamford heard of the incident the same day from his neighbours, who told him that Murray ‘had been conveyed in a shocking condition to a house in Middleton, and from thence in a coach to Manchester; and… was not expected to recover’. Later, in his autobiography, Bamford quoted from Murray’s own testimony, given a week after the event in the presence of the Bolton magistrate Colonel Ralph Fletcher – suggesting that Murray was one of Fletcher’s spies.43 He is identified as a confectioner from Withy Grove, Manchester, known as ‘Gingerbread’ Murray, and said he had been watching between fourteen and fifteen hundred men, ‘the greatest number of whom were formed in two bodies, in the form of solid squares; the remainder were in small parties of between twenty and thirty each: there were about thirty such parties, each under the direction of a person acting as a drill serjeant, and were going through military movements.’ Murray and some companions were walking amongst the marching men when one of the ‘drill serjeants’, on noticing him, told him to fall in. Murray made an excuse but, as he turned away, someone shouted, ‘Spies’! Others then cried, ‘Mill them’, ‘Murder them’. Murray and his confederates fled for their lives across the fields, pursued by about a hundred men throwing clods of earth at them. When they eventually caught up with Murray, he begged them not to kill him. The men began beating him anyway but then, on reflection, relented.
Bamford deeply regretted the violence of the incident in itself, but he also feared that it would play into the hands of the magistrates, as proof of the inherently violent nature of the crowds marching to Manchester, despite Hunt’s pleas and claims to the contrary. ‘It was however past, and so far irremediable, and all we could do was to exhibit the greater coolness and steadiness in whatever situation we might be placed. It was certainly a misfortune.’44 Bamford’s narrative of events includes the telling detail that Murray and his companions received a visit from the authorities on their arrival in Manchester, and that a special meeting of the magistrates was convened the same afternoon. Bamford believed that at this meeting it was resolved ‘to return a full measure of severity to us on the following day, should any circumstance arise to sanction such a proceeding’.45
Hunt shared Bamford’s regret at the assault on James Murray. Like his colleague, he feared that the authorities would use the incident to frighten the respectable citizens of Manchester with the spectre of violent unrest. His Memoirs capture his concern the day before the meeting: ‘I, therefore, passed the Sunday with that degree of anxiety which every person not wholly devoid of sensibility must have naturally felt for the result of the coming day.’46
Certain of the magistrates were in a similar state of trepidation. At 11 p.m. on Sunday 15 August, the eve of the meeting, James Norris wrote to Lord Sidmouth:
My Lord,
The Magistrates, the military, and civil authorities of Manchester have been occupied nearly the whole of this day in concerting the necessary arrangements for the preservation of the peace to-morrow, and for the safety of the town, in case riot should ensue. We have been much occupied in taking depositions from various parts of the country; and although the Magistrates, as at present advised, do not think of preventing the meeting, yet all the accounts tend to shew, that the worst possible spirit pervades the country; and that considerable numbers have been drilling to-day, at distances of four, six, and ten miles from Manchester; and that considerable numbers are expected to attend the meeting. I hope the peace may be preserved; but under all circumstances, it is scarcely possible to expect it; and in short, in this respect, we are in a state of painful uncertainty.47
* In 1823 Sir John offered his collection to Lord Liverpool as the core element of a new project to establish a National Gallery. This was declined.
† Perhaps the most famous grammatical error in British history.
‡ The identity of ‘Tuke’ and the whereabouts of the portrait itself are currently unknown.
§ Bamford, writing in his 1844 autobiography, may be misremembering when the portrait was painted. On 17 April 1819 the Manchester Observer carried an advertisement: ‘Portrait of H. Hunt, Esq. The Print Portrait of HENRY HUNT, Esq from a Painting by Tuke, and engrav’d by J. Sudlow, being now completed, the Subscribers thereto are respectfully informed, that the above Print is now ready for delivery, at Mr. Chapman’s, Observer Office, Market-street, and at Mr. Wroe’s, 49, Great Ancots-street [sic], Manchester. N.B. A limited number of Proofs are struck off on India paper, at 9s each. Ditto on superfine plate, at 7s. After Impressions, at 4s.6d.’