They came in their thousands, from Lees, from Saddleworth and from Moseley. The discontented and the dispossessed, spinners and weavers from Middleton, Boarshaw, Hopwood, Chadderton and Back O’ the Brow. Men, women and children, wearing (if they owned such a thing) their Sunday best, even though it was Monday.
It was 19 August 1819. For eleven of them, it would be the last day of their lives.
If we look, as we must, for a motive behind the Cato Street conspirators’ bizarre enterprise, we should see it in part as an act of revenge. Because, in the short term at least, and in the area where it happened, there was no revenge.
Manchester, by the hot, dry summer of 1819 was huge. Together with nearby Oldham it boasted over 95,000 inhabitants, the poorest the Irish who lived in water-logged cellars on the edge of still open spaces like St Peter’s Fields. Nearly a third of that population – half of the able-bodied adults – worked in the city’s sixty mills, most of which were given over to spinning. The fastest growing of the English industrial sprawls, Manchester was on its way to becoming the cottonopolis, a centre of rich magnates and civic pride. It was also acquiring a reputation, along with Nottingham, Sheffield and London, as a dangerous radical centre. Later in the century, the hugely influential Anti-Corn Law Association would be born here, as would the Trades Union Congress.
If the Manchester spinners were already wage-slaves, working sixteen hours a day in stifling, unsafe conditions and living in unhygienic slums which would soon kill thousands of them, the weavers were in a more desperate situation. About 40,000 handloom weavers lived and worked supposedly as independents in the outlying villages, but as we saw in Chapter 2, their day had gone. Whole families were now subsisting on 12 shillings a week and yet the Corn Laws kept the cost of their staple diet sky high. The old Poor Law simply could not cope.
The radicals in the area understood their plight and as elsewhere, were doing their bit to alleviate distress. As we have seen, the first Hampden Club outside London was set up at Royton in 1816; this was only nine miles from Manchester. The grand old man of local radical politics was John Knight, who was arrested in 1812 for holding a seditious meeting. The thirty-nine men involved got off, but it was a warning shot over the bows in a cold war between radicals and loyalists that was about to get hot.
Samuel Bamford was another local leader, better known than the others because of his brilliant memoirs which inform our knowledge of the place and time. A weaver from Middleton, Bamford was highly articulate (though not much of a poet) and well educated. Like many of his contemporaries he was a devotee of Cobbett’s Political Register and a man with his finger on the pulse of local grievances.
There were all shades of reformers in Manchester, from the mild tinkerers with outmoded medieval by-laws to Spenceans who probably advocated outright revolution. Most men – and there was a strong female voice in Manchester too – opted either for trade union activity or parliamentary reform. Both of these were likely to be slow and unsure, but increasingly, as the summer of 1819 arrived, the authorities in the area became convinced that every working man was bent on revolution.
Ranged against the radicals in Manchester were the cotton magnates and they were spearheaded by largely high Tory, largely Anglican magistrates like James Norris and the Reverends William Hay and Charles Ethelston. The extent of Ethelston’s Christianity can be gauged by a line from one of his sermons: ‘Some of the reformers ought to be hanged and some of you are sure to be hanged – the rope is already round your necks.’1
Arguably the real power in the city was Joseph Nadin, from 1803 Deputy Constable in charge of sixty men. The only portrait of him shows a bull-necked, broken-nosed man with a permanent sneer. The people hated him. ‘Nady Joe’ was one of the last in a long line of thief-takers who walked a tightrope between legality and illegality. In a microcosm of what the central government was doing with its spies, stirring up and entrapping otherwise honest men, Nadin would regularly plant stolen goods on people and arrest them. He had virtually unlimited powers of arrest and took a rake-off from the city’s forty-seven brothels. His language appalled many, even those not of Manchester’s chapel and church going fraternity. He was corruption writ large and has been immortalized in a song of the time.
With Hunt we’ll go, we’ll go,
With Hunt we’ll go, we’ll go,
We’ll bear the flag of liberty,
In spite of Nady Joe.
The radicals of Manchester watched events in London closely and, after Spa Fields, activity in the area quietened down for a while, although the city did get its most fearless radical newspaper the following year in the form of the Manchester Observer run by Joseph Johnson, a brushmaker, and John Saxton, from the cotton trade.
Simmering under the surface was the Ardwick conspiracy, which broke at the end of March. Taking a leaf out of Watson’s and Thistlewood’s book, the plan was to burn the city, rescue prisoners from the New Bailey gaol and to join with other groups that, it was generally believed, would be doing the same thing across the country. The Leeds Mercury described this as ‘a paper insurrection’ in that there was no actual trouble. Even so, Nadin arrested Samuel Bamford and Dr Healey and they, with six others, were taken by coach in leg-irons to Coldbath Fields in London. No charges were levied, but since habeas corpus was still suspended, this hardly mattered.
In a fascinating glimpse of ‘us v. them’, Bamford and Healey were interrogated by the Privy Council. Bamford found Sidmouth very affable, with ‘mild and intelligent eyes’. He was ‘much more encouraging to freedom of speech than I had expected’. For all Bamford was an impressive figure, a man of courage and resolution, he was also at heart a weaver. It does not seem to have occurred to him that Sidmouth was being affable and encouraging in the hope that Bamford would say something self-incriminating which might hang him. When Healey’s heavy Lancashire accent was incomprehensible to their Lordships they asked him to write his name down. Virtually illiterate, he couldn’t, so he gave them his medical card instead. Some wag had filled in what was actually a prescription form with the words ‘200 tablespoonsful each 2 hours’. The Privy Council had a ‘great titter’ at this and Healey laughed too. A moment’s reflection should have assured him that he was being laughed at and not with.
In January 1818 habeas corpus was restored, but the government quickly passed the Indemnity Bill so that no one who had been held during the suspension of habeas corpus could sue for redress. As always the oligarchy of gentlemen who ruled the country had hedged themselves in with total legal protection. In Manchester there was a wave of strikes among the spinners and, although no rational man could doubt that was an economic issue, the local magistrates saw it differently. ‘The lower classes are radically corrupted,’ wrote Ethelston. ‘Their aim is revolution.’ And Sidmouth, neither as mild nor as intelligent as Bamford believed, agreed.
It is impossible for the Secretary of State to contemplate with indifference the danger likely to result . . . from the existence . . . of large bodies of men, exposed to the harangues of disaffected demagogues.
What struck the authorities at the local level was the excellent behaviour of the strikers. ‘The peaceable demeanour of so many thousand unemployed men is not natural,’ observed Major-General Byng, believing that some sinister Machiavellian force was behind this new-found obedience and organization. When women joined the increasing number of mass meetings, this too was taken as a sinister front, not unlike Watson’s and Thistlewood’s use of girls to distract the garrison of the Tower.
Early in 1819, the local radicals wrote to Henry Hunt inviting him to speak on distress, the Corn Laws, universal suffrage, his usual themes, on St Peter’s Fields on 18 January. This time Hunt suggested that a Remonstrance rather than a futile Petition be sent to the Prince Regent. About 10,000 turned up, the meeting was peaceful and at the dinner which followed, at the Spread Eagle, the toasts included ‘The Rights of Man . . . the immortal memory of Tom Paine . . . the venerable father of reform, Major Cartwright . . . our banished countryman William Cobbett’ and, rather incongruously, ‘the beautiful Lancashire witches’.2
There was a little trouble that night when Hunt attended the Theatre Royal. When the crowd recognized him he was given a standing ovation and found himself thrown out into the street by officers of the 7th Hussars, stationed in the city. The fact that Hunt was a gentleman who had raised his own militia company counted for nothing. By appearing as the darling of the mob he was lumped together, like all radicals as a ‘libellous, seditious, factious, levelling, revolutionary, republican, democratical, aetheistical villain’.
By the summer of 1819, tensions were growing in the area. In June, at Stockport, 20,000 people attended to hear Sir Charles Wolseley, who had witnessed the storming of the Paris Bastille, say, ‘and Heaven knows I would assist in storming the English Bastille’. It was not the first (or last) time that oratory got a little out of hand. Some people in the crowd may have taken Wolseley’s words literally; all the authorities did. Magistrates, led by Norris, stepped up police patrols. Nadin’s men seemed everywhere, listening at doorways, rummaging for hidden stashes of pikes3 and particularly reporting on the increasing amount of drilling that was going on on local heaths and moorlands. There was actually nothing sinister in this. Anxious to avoid the image of a shifty, restless mob, many of the working class had followed the dictum of Bamford and others, to march briskly on and off the chosen meeting venue and to stand silently to attention while listening to speeches. Schoolchildren, after all, were drilled in the same way. But so, too, were soldiers. And if Nadin’s men could not see any weapons, they were only prepared to put the worst configuration of what they were witnessing.
While the panicky authorities sanctioned the setting up of the Armed Association for the Preservation of Public Peace, composed of the magistrates, the borough reeves and the constables, the radicals invited their darling again for 9 August.
In fact, a whole series of mass meetings served to unnerve the magistrates. On 12 July an estimated 30,000 met at Newhall Hill in Birmingham to listen to Major Cartwright and Thomas Wooler of the Black Dwarf. A week later, at Hunslet, near Leeds, another meeting was held, well attended despite the fact that this was lunchtime on a Monday, when most loom and jenny operatives should have been hard at work. At Smithfield, London on the 21st, Hunt addressed a large crowd and terrified the authorities by saying that
from and after the 1st day of January 1820 we cannot, conscientiously, consider ourselves as bound in equity by any future enactments which may be made by any persons styling themselves our representatives, other than those who shall be fully, freely and fairly chosen by the voices and votes of the largest proportion of the members of the state.
This was unbridled democracy, to all of the authorities the most appalling scenario imaginable. It is very likely that Arthur Thistlewood and some at least of his Cato Street conspirators were present at this meeting.
Back in Manchester, by August, the magistrates were now thoroughly rattled. The Observer advertised Hunt’s meeting of the 9th and the authorities, on Home Office advice, cautioned people not to attend in that the meeting was illegal.4 There was, of course, nothing illegal about meetings of that type. Only if a resolution was passed that Manchester should select its own MPs (in 1819 they had none) could the meeting be declared illegal, speakers arrested and the crowd dispersed. Until that happened, no law would have been broken.
In the event, Hunt’s meeting was postponed until 16th, a Monday, which effectively gave both sides time to prepare. The loyalist and radical press attacked each other in print. ‘They began this way’, warned the Manchester Mercury, ‘in the French Revolution . . . they ended, by sinking into a tyranny more galling than that which they had endured.’ Hunt, for the radicals, wrote of the forthcoming meeting:
Our enemies will seek every opportunity, by means of their sanguinary agents, to excite a Riot, that they may have a pretence for spilling our blood . . .5
Prophetic words.
The morning of Monday 16 August was dry and bright. Between 8 and 9, all over the outlying parishes, thousands of men, women and children, with hand-embroidered banners streaming overhead, made their way to the agreed assembly points and began the march to St Peter’s Fields. Some flags were white, others green and red with inscriptions like ‘Universal Suffrage’, ‘Election by Ballot’, ‘Liberty is the Birthright of Man’. The grimmest – and no doubt the one the authorities eyed most carefully – was Dr Healey’s from Saddleworth – a black square with the stark white letters ‘Equal Representation or Death’.
‘There is no fear,’ Bamford roared to his own Middleton contingent, ‘for this day is our own.’
The Stockport column reached the field first. Perhaps 1,500 strong, they carried a cap of liberty and two banners. Eye-witness John Smith, watching the events from Mount Street that led onto the Fields, felt easier when he saw little children in the crowd, walking quietly with their parents. When Henry Hunt arrived, famous white hat gleaming in the sun, in an open-topped barouche, a huge cheer went up. With him was Mrs Fildes of the Manchester Female Reformers and a huge procession. The band from Royton struck up ‘Rule Britannia’.
By a little after midday everyone was ready. The estimates vary. Hunt, who had never addressed so large a meeting as this, assumed there were 200,000 there. Magistrate Thomas Tatton believed 30,000 nearer the truth. The Times later reported between 80,000 and 100,000. Today, the general consensus is 60,000 – an astonishing one-sixth of Lancashire’s population and this probably did not include the mildly curious who had followed the processions out of sheer nosiness from the Exchange and Deansgate.
We will never know how inflammatory Hunt’s speech was going to be or whether the huge crowds would have lifted his oratory to new heights, because he never made it. To one side of the Field, on a balcony of a house belonging to a Mr Buxton in Mount Street, the magistrates watched the growing spectacle with little short of terror. They did not see the women, the children, the lack of weaponry. They missed entirely the patriotic airs of the bands and the holiday atmosphere. All they saw was the mob.
All weekend they had been psyching up for this moment and made the fatal decision to arrest Hunt and the others now mounting the hustings in the centre of the Fields – John Knight, John Saxton, Mrs Fildes, Richard Carlile (up from London for the occasion) and, if they didn’t get out of the way in time, various journalists up there with them. The chain of command was shaky. The magistrates scribbled a quick affidavit, signed by thirty loyalists at Buxton’s house, to give them carte blanche to arrest Hunt. This was passed to Edward Clayton, the borough reeve, who in turn summoned Joe Nadin. The thief-taker told him flatly that it was impossible to arrest Hunt from the podium, especially with the untrained special constables he had with him that day. It was probably a sensible decision from a police point of view. Nadin was well aware how hated he was. The sight of him pulling Hunt down from his pedestal would probably have provoked a riot immediately. But it now meant that the magistrates had to resort to the army.
The build-up of tension in the area over the previous weeks had given the magistrates plenty of time to call up the military, but again the chain of command broke down. The ever-sensible Sir John Byng was at York, so his number two, Lieutenant-Colonel Guy L’Estrange, was left to command at Manchester. Under him were: eight troops of the 15th King’s Hussars who had arrived at the end of July; both battalions of the 88th Foot and six companies of the 31st. He had a detachment of the Royal Horse Artillery under Major Dyneley, a die-hard psychopath, with two six-pounder guns. He also had all troops of the Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry and three of the most local unit, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry (MYC).
And that was the problem. The Manchester Observer had written scathingly of this unit:
The yeomanry are generally speaking the fawning dependants of the great, with a few fools and a greater proportion of coxcombs who imagine they acquire considerable importance by wearing regimentals.
They were middle-class men (they had to be able to afford their horses and uniforms) who detested the working class and used every opportunity to keep such riff-raff in their place. On the other hand, they were appallingly part-time, without the training or skill to handle the kind of sensitive crowd control needed for a day like this. Ostentatiously, the regiment had sent its sabres to be sharpened only the previous week.
It may have been an unintentional over-reaction, but a separate note was sent to Major Trafford of the MYC independent of the one sent to L’Estrange. Accordingly, Trafford ordered his number two, Captain Hugh Hornby Birley, to mount his troops and get to the field to arrest Hunt. The first fatality of the day occurred off the field in fact. Alone of all the troops positioned at various places in Manchester that day, Trafford had allowed his men into pubs and the unit that left Pickford’s Yard was late. One of them, who may have gone off to relieve himself, found the Yard empty and galloped off down Cooper Street, hoofs clattering on the cobbles, accoutrements jingling and sent Ann Fildes6 and her child flying. Two-yearold William’s skull was smashed on the cobblestones.
It was 20 to 2 when the yeomanry arrived on the field. Various accounts, both modern and contemporary, refer to them galloping, but this is unlikely, given the size of the crowd and the space involved. Later radical cartoons all showed racing horses, one in particular with the MYC portrayed as overfed ‘Piccadilly butchers’ wielding axes.
In fact the MYC carried the 1796 pattern Light Cavalry sword, heavy and curved. It was 33 inches long and weighed 2 lbs 2 oz. Designed for use from the saddle, in the right hands it was every bit as murderous as an axe.7 The Manchester and Salford men wore dark blue Light Dragoon uniforms with white facings and black leather shakos. One of the men who came in for particular opprobrium that day was the trumpeter Edward Meagher, partly no doubt because he was so visible. Trumpeters wore white uniforms and rode grey horses.
There was only a narrow avenue through the crowd to the hustings and the conventional cavalry advance was conducted in line abreast. Unfamiliar with this situation, the MYC tried to follow Nadin and his constables down the avenue and found their formation broken. Panicking, with a sea of disbelieving and then hostile faces around them, the yeomen began to hack with their sabres, their horses whinnying and rearing in complete confusion. Captain Birley got to Hunt first and tried to arrest him. Hunt was polite, but firm and refused to be arrested by anyone but a civilian officer. At the same time, he was trying to shout above the rising screams of hysteria, to defuse the already desperate situation. ‘Stand firm, my friends. They are in disorder already. This is a trick. Give them three cheers.’
With the yeomanry and the constables forming a dense mass around the hustings, Hunt came down the steps of his own accord. Others were not so lucky – Joseph Johnson was dragged off by his ankles and Mrs Fildes, whose dress got hooked on the wagon’s nails, was hit across the body by (luckily) the flat of a yeomanry sword.
With dust eddying all around them on that sweltering day, the MYC now hacked about them in all directions. ‘Have at their flags!’ somebody shouted and with the constables intent on getting the speakers away, the unit began to rip down banners and smash the hustings.
At about this point, it looked to the watching magistrates as if the crowd was attacking the yeomanry – and probably by now, in self-defence, it was.
‘Good God, sir,’ Magistrate William Hulton screamed at L’Estrange. ‘Don’t you see they are attacking the Yeomanry? Disperse them.’
In the dust and confusion, Bamford recognized the 15th Hussars forming up at the far end of the Field. There was blood and chaos all around him. ‘Nay, Tom Shelmerdine,’ he heard an old woman say as she came face to face with a yeoman in the melee, ‘thee will not hurt me, I know.’ She had nursed him as a child. He rode over her.
‘Damn you, I’ll reform you!’ he heard another bark and, ‘Spare your lives? Damn your bloody lives.’ Men were scrambling to get their women and children to safety, but nowhere was safe.
Briefly, a cheer went up when others saw the Hussars. These were no local bully-boys with class warfare on their minds, but the heroes of Waterloo, fought four years earlier. Some accounts say the men of the 15th wore their Waterloo medals pinned to their yellow-frogged jackets. We have no clear description of this regiment on the day. The army hated ‘aiding the civil power’ and no one in the regiment would have felt much pride in what happened in Manchester. Almost certainly, the troops wore scarlet shakos and as it was high summer, grey pantaloons and no pelisses. One of the few artefacts to have survived from St Peter’s Fields is a scarlet horsehair plume from the 15th.
Again, some modern accounts say that the Hussars charged. Again, there was no room. For cavalry to reach the gallop, they need to go through the ‘walk, march, trot’ phases first, their swords ‘at the slope’ on their shoulders with the trot. There simply wasn’t the space on what was now a battlefield to manoeuvre in this way. They probably came on at a walk, perhaps rising to a trot, but the effect would have been the same. People panicked and ran, trampling each other in their blind terror, crushing people with their own body weight, hurling others down into the open cellars that ringed the field.
Outside the Friends’ Meeting House, some of the mob had found loose pieces of timber and began bashing the yeomanry with improvised sticks. The yeomanry in turn slashed with their sabres. Lieutenant Hylton Jolliffe of the 15th knocked aside the swords of two of them and yelled, ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, for shame, forbear. The people cannot get away.’
In perhaps half an hour, it was all over. Samuel Bamford surveyed the field as his shattered people stumbled back through the Manchester streets to hobble the twenty miles home, numb, shocked, unbelieving.
. . . 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 the caps, bonnets, hats, shawls and shoes . . . trampled, torn and bloody. The yeomanry had dismounted – some were easing their horses’ girths, others adjusting their accoutrements; and some were wiping their sabres. Several mounds of human beings still remained as they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these still groaning – others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath and others would never breathe again . . .8
No official enquiry was ever carried out into what happened at St Peter’s Fields. John Ashton, Thomas Buckley, John Lees and William Dawson died as a result of sabre wounds, all delivered, almost certainly, by the MYC. James Crompton, William Fildes, Mary Heys, Arthur O’Neill and Martha Partington were crushed to death. For the death of Sarah Jones and William Bradshaw, no actual cause is given. Joseph Ashworth was shot by the police in the dispersal of a near-riot later that same night as the mob returned, angry and vengeful. Thomas Ashworth was a special constable who had got in the way of the yeomanry at the hustings and suffered the same fate as the rest of the dead.
Of the 420 officially injured (and there are likely to have been many more with superficial wounds) John Baker was beaten with constables’ truncheons and lost a great deal of blood. Margaret Goodwin was trampled by horses and was losing the sight of both eyes. Catherine Colman had three ribs cracked. Mary Jervis had her calf sliced off. William Butterworth had his shoulder blade smashed by a sabre and the wound would not heal. Many of them were too ill to work, including 18-year-old John Lees who had fought as a drummer boy at Waterloo. He died of his injuries over two weeks later, his back slashed in several places, his elbow bone sticking through the skin. The woman who helped lay him out said, ‘I never saw such a corpse as this in all my life.’
The leaders of the day languished in prison before their trials and Dr Healey was added to the list on 24 August. Bamford was also in the New Bailey by the 26th. Hunt was sent to Lancaster gaol, escorted personally by Nadin (who, uncharacteristically, bought him a meal en route) and the few, but effective, legal champions on the radical side swept into action. Sir Charles Wolseley stumped up the ridiculously high £1,000 bail for Hunt and two solicitors, James Harmer and Henry Dennison, brought charges against members of the MYC.
At every turn, the local authorities made life difficult. They delayed inquests on those who had died, refused to accept evidence that did not suit them and did their utmost to stifle the radical press. They thanked the MYC officially for ‘their extreme forbearance exercised when insulted and defied by the rioters’.
And what was worse – they had the backing of the government. To be fair, this was not unreserved, but even tacit acceptance of the magistrates’ actions was seen by the people as tantamount to wholesale approval. Sidmouth had been holidaying in Broadstairs when the clash happened and expressed his lily-livered congratulations that casualties had been kept to a minimum.
The Prince Regent, in one of his particularly badly judged decisions, rattled off An Important Communication to the People of England aboard the royal yacht moored off Christchurch, expressing his satisfaction with the ‘prompt, decisive and efficient measure for the preservation of public tranquillity’ observed that day.
In the real world, of justice and sanity, the Manchester Observer was first into the fray. It noted that the ‘bastard soldiers’ of the MYC were particularly targeting the women on the Field and the paper used for the first time the name ‘Peter Loo’. Not only the yeomanry but the magistrates were singled out for scorn – ‘A Friend to Order’ promised he would ‘send a ball’ to the head of Magistrate Hay in September and James Neville in the same month wrote from Liverpool:
Shame! Shame! That a clergyman should head a band of privileged murderers and invite them to acts of bloodshed and massacre.
One hundred and fifteen miles to the south of St Peter’s Fields a troop of the Warwickshire Yeomanry was clattering through Smith Street in the county town when a crowd developed, spitting at them and calling them ‘Manchester butchers’. The radical cartoonists showed the MYC sabring the crowd and a little girl with her arms raised up under the flying hoofs crying, ‘Pray, Sir, don’t kill Mammy. She only came to listen to Mr Hunt.’
Bamford wrote:
If the people were to rise and smite their enemies, was not this the time? Was every enormity to be endured and this after all? Were we still to lie down like whipped hounds, whom nothing could rouse to resistance? Were there not times and seasons and circumstances, under which the common rules of wisdom become folly, prudence became cowardice and submission became criminal? And was not the present one of these times and seasons?9
Arthur Thistlewood could not have read these words because Bamford would not write them for another thirty years. But he and the other men of Cato Street shared their sentiments and made their plans and took their chance.