Dark Days of Georgian Britain

by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)

  Proceed to the Metropolis …to present a petition to the Prince Regent that they may be able to undeceive him!! Aware of these intentions, and the dangers of an immense influx of strangers, irritated by the inflammatory appeals of their fractious leaders, who under the pretence of promoting Parliamentary reform, have been agitating the minds of the labouring classes.

  The newspaper was showing its prejudices but there was a kernel of truth. There was a real worry that this was a new, more dangerous form of protest. In the past, these radical reformers had been active, but now they were trying to organise the ‘deluded masses’ in a form of political action. The fact that they were going to visit the Prince Regent personally was an alarm; the normal thing to do was to petition the Prince Regent indirectly and then be ignored. Parliament, Lords and Commons, were being bypassed, and the monarch was being threatened by a mob who merely masqueraded as petitioners.

  Bagguley’s strategy was to work hard to avoid breaking any law, especially at the beginning of the protest. He told the marchers to remain peaceable, promising that the magistrate would be called if people misbehaved. It was not illegal to walk from Manchester to London, but considering that it was more than a day by stagecoach, it was perhaps ridiculous. Only 400 of the 5,000 could be persuaded to leave Manchester, and because they were on the move they did not fall foul of the new Seditious Meeting Act; by moving in groups of ten or less they stayed on the right side of the Riot Laws, which were in any case still invoked when the military caught up with them. It was the deliberation by which laws had not been broken that convinced the authorities that treason was afoot and drastic action was needed.

  The small group, armed only with knapsacks and blankets – hence the name ‘Blanketeers’ – set out from Manchester to go down to London; they were to be joined by more at Stockport and Birmingham. Bagguley, Johnson and Drummond had clearly offered the crowd something in addition to a long march to Carlton House. They expected reinforcements at every crossroads as they went. It was an organised version of Spa Fields, with a deliberate strategy to accumulate large numbers and confront the monarch directly, while blaming his advisors to avoid a charge of sedition. It was an attempt to repeat the events of 1381 when hundreds of thousands of labourers surrounded the king, killed his religious and political advisors, and tore up feudal contracts as they passed through villages. Bagguley was trying to organise a new peasants’ revolt with weavers instead of peasants, and the Prince Regent instead of Richard II.

  Drummond, Johnson and Bagguley had created a historical philosophy that they were going to use to incite a rebellion. Government spies reported that Johnson told meetings that if the prince did not listen to them, then the fate of Charles I awaited him. Bagguley told crowds that ancient law gave the monarch forty days to respond to petitions and then he could be imprisoned. It was common to use the analogy of the Peasants’ Revolt; and the key here is that the peasants by-passed the aristocracy and appealed to the monarch in great numbers, the numbers being an implicit threat. Drummond seems to have told them this too – by the time they arrived in London, they could not be ignored, he told them.

  There was never a chance for numbers to increase. The marchers were no match for the military; the Blanketeers were stopped at Ardwick and Stockport. There were some injuries through sabre charges and 200 arrests. Most were held in gaol for a few weeks without any evidence against them, and some were prosecuted using the vagrancy laws.

  As the ‘migratory reformers’ left Manchester on that morning, the twenty-seven local radicals who had agitated them into action were themselves arrested. A few weeks later, in the so called ‘Ardwick conspiracy’ an attempt to rescue the prisoners and burn Manchester to the ground, almost certainly organised by government spies and agents, allowed more suspects to be rounded up.

  Bagguley was kept in solitary confinement for five months due – ironically – to the suspension of habeas corpus that the original protest was ostensibly about. He was moved to the New Bailey in Salford, then in chains to Coldbath Fields, then to Horsemonger Gaol and finally to Gloucester and kept in near solitary confinement until 13 November when he was given leave to visit his dying mother. In September 1818 he was given two years’ imprisonment for another incident in Stockport. He was not yet 20 years old.

  In 1817 there was another attempt, in the view of Lord Sidmouth, ‘maliciously and traitorously…by force of arms, to subvert and destroy the Government and the Constitution’, which bore some real comparisons to the Blanketeers’ march. This was Pentrich Rising, organised by a group of about forty framework knitters, stonemasons, miners and labourers from the Derbyshire villages of Pentrich, Heanor, Alfreton and South Wingfield, who believed that they could organise an armed revolt that would be picked up and strengthened by disaffected workers in the North and Midlands. Clearly this is not the same as having a drunken riot, attacking bakers and shopkeepers waving pieces of bread on pointed sticks.

  Rebel leader Jeremiah Brandreth and his supporters were arraigned for treason in Derby in October 1817, after the inevitable failure of the insurrection of a few hundred poorly armed people. There were too many to hold in one prison, so they were split – twenty-six in Derby and fifteen in Nottingham. On 3 October they were charged with treason in Derby. The Nottingham prisoners were shipped into town on the top of a coach still all chained together, except the two who had become sick while in prison. The newspapers reported that they were of various ages and states, but having in common that they wore the blue smock frocks of ‘the lowest and labouring classes of the community’.

  George Weightman and his three brothers were amongst the prisoners. Their mother, Nanny Weightman, ran the White Horse public house where a planning meeting had been held on 8 June. Nanny was the sister of Thomas and John Bacon. Thomas Bacon (‘an aged man, charged with having planned the insurrection’) and his relative John had been captured in St Ives, either by the excellent work of the Derby prison officials, or by a reward of £100 that no poor person would be able to resist, depending on whether the newspapers could be believed. There were also four Ludlams and three Taylors among the prisoners.

  The first day of the trial was 17 October, when the procession of prisoners from Derby and Nottingham happened again. The prisoners were once again in good humour, but the omens for their trial were not good. Behind the procession was a coach full of pikes and other sharpened agricultural implements that had been found after the attempted insurrection. This rather prejudiced the result of the trial.

  Before proceedings started, the bias continued. The judges attended a sermon at Derby All Saints Church with a sermon by the Reverend Foxglove based on Isaiah 5:20, ‘Woe unto them who call evil good and good evil.’ The Reverend Foxglove compared the treasons of the accused to the evils of Oliver Cromwell. He probably did not get as far as Isaiah 8:21, which was much more popular with the reformers, ‘and it shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward’.

  The newspapers were dismissive of the accused; they were in rags, they were inane and ignorant, and they addressed a clerk of the court as ‘My Lord’– so even when being deferential, it was not good enough.

  The Grand Jury consisted of the usual gentlemen and baronets who would have no sympathy for the accused – it included the aristocratic Lord George Cavendish, MP for Derbyshire, and his third son, the Honourable Henry Cavendish, the MP for Derby. Another member of the jury was Richard Arkwright junior, a man who had inherited his fortune from the mechanisation of textiles, who was not naturally inclined to favour framework knitters. It was their job to decide whether there was a ‘true bill’ – i.e., a real case to answer. They decided that there was.

  Derby County Hall was crowded on the outside and full on the inside. The patriotic newspapers gave no indication of the mood of the crowd, but even inside the building, it could take thirty minutes to get order on some days. All pleaded not guilty. Jeremiah Brandreth, who had
led the insurrection, appeared wearing a ragged sailor suit and with a long, straggled beard.

  Thomas Bacon was indicted first and it was fully expected that the prosecution would lead with his trial. Bacon was a political activist and conspirator in the new model, a follower of Thomas Paine, a republican, and a peripatetic agitator who wanted the end of the system rather than to wring concessions from it. He had a long track record of radicalism. He had been in contact with Oliver, another apparent radical agitator for a few months beforehand.

  In April 1817 Oliver had arrived at the Talbot Inn, Derby, a well known meeting point for the disaffected, and declared that force and organisation were needed to make the government see sense. It was Oliver who had convinced people that they could rely on the resentment of the lower classes all over the North if they started an insurrection at Pentrich. However, Oliver himself was an agent provocateur in the same style as John Stones, whose dubious background had helped to acquit James Watson and made the trial of Thistlewood, Preston and Hooper collapse.

  Bacon now knew that Oliver was a spy, and the government knew that Bacon was aware of it. He took no part in the insurrection, fearing (rightly) that he was about to be set up. The government had no idea what Thomas Bacon would say. Perhaps for this reason the authorities tried to stop realtime reporting of the trial in the newspapers.

  Bacon was left in reserve and it was decided to start the process with the trial of Jeremiah Brandreth. It was still a surprise to many that Brandreth appeared on day two of the trial. It was suggested by the press that this was because the others did not want to be tainted by the charge of murder that stood against him and wished to be tried separately. The prosecution gave a narrative of the events:

  a great number of persons had organised a plan for a rising in arms on Monday the 9th June last, at two or three villages and then proceed to Nottingham and that assistance was expected from Sheffield, Leeds, Wakefield etc…that the Nottingham Captain [Brandreth] was particularly active in organising the measures – that pikes and guns and swords had been collected and were to have been distributed – that they went to several farmers houses, compelling them to either give them arms or join them, then on demanding arms at the house of Mr Epworth, and being refused admission, the Nottingham Captain was said to have broken the window and fired a shot at one of the servants, who died in consequence.

  Despite a clear-cut case for the killing of the servant, Robert Walters, Brandreth was accused of high treason instead. Thomas Denman, defence for Brandreth, asked why the charge was treason and not riot. Denman argued that it was very uncommon for ignorant members of the lower orders to be indicted for treason in this way. Lord Chief Justice Baron ruled that they were armed not for a personal grievance but to alter the government. They acted in the belief that their numbers would swell. Their poverty, ignorance, and utter wrongness about their chances of success were not relevant. The absence of Bacon at this point meant that nobody would mention Oliver, the person who had created these unreasonable expectations in the first place.

  The next day it was William Turner who was on trial, again for treason. He was seen by the prosecution as the second in command, the main procurer of weapons and the organiser of the men into military-like groups, creating ranks and a hierarchy as if they were an army. Thomas Denman and John Cross once again argued that this pathetic set of actions could not be treason – they had thrown down their weapons at the first appearance of resistance. The prosecution reiterated the difference between violence for a personal end and organised violence to change the government. The Treason Act of Edward III referred to ‘rebelliously plotting’ to kill the monarch, and the prosecution continued to argue that this is exactly what the Pentrich rebels were doing. The government had used the same arguments in the 1790s to accuse intellectuals and activists of treason, but this attempt to use it against the pike wielding lower orders was different.

  Turner was found guilty; so were Isaac Ludlum and George Weightman on the same evidence. There was still no sign of Thomas Bacon. When he did appear, with eighteen others, it was only to change his plea to guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court. He clearly knew which way the wind was blowing.

  The remaining men were acquitted when no evidence was produced against them. The prosecution said that enough had been done to put down the spirit of disaffection that had been excited, and some of these were young and impressionable men who needed the chance to mend their ways. The prosecution felt the need to stress the legitimacy of the trial; the men, they asserted, had had their choice of defence counsel. They failed to mention that the accused had sold all of their possessions to pay for their defence. It was stressed that it was a jury trial; it was not mentioned that it was packed with prosperous farmers, and the trial had been delayed until after the harvest to ensure their availability. Perhaps more realistically, the point had been made that the poor could successfully be accused of political crimes and that perhaps politics was not for the likes of them.

  Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac Ludlum and William Turner were sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. They were the last men in England to receive that sentence, but in the end clemency was shown and they were only hanged and beheaded. It was a botched job, causing unnecessary pain and humiliation. Thomas Bacon and thirteen others were transported.

  What had they planned to do? Brandreth at the White House pub allegedly said that people ‘must turn out and fight for bread. The time is come you plainly see, the Government opposed must be.’ As they turfed the local farmers out of their beds, they claimed to some that they were going to abolish the national debt, so they had some kind of economic programme. At his trial, William Turner deposed that at the planning meeting at the White Horse, he had only called for bread and work.

  Was this a time of revolution or not? The problem answering that question is that both the government and some radical reformers had good reasons for saying that it was, as they both gained politically from the idea. Clearly, from late 1816 there were active individuals who wanted to ferment revolution. By 1819 there was an interest in politics by those who had been excluded – it was to be a year of mass meeting and government repression worst than 1817. It also split the reform movement further and made the government suspicious of any kind of mass meeting or political reform, no matter how moderate it claimed to be. Then, in 1819, came Peterloo, and things got worse.

  Chapter 13

  Peterloo: Who Killed Joseph Lees?

  John Lees was a 22-year-old cotton spinner from Oldham. He attended the St Peter’s Field meeting on Monday 16 August 1819, where 80,000 people had come to hear Henry Hunt call for a reform of parliament. It was a peaceful and family-orientated crowd. John was near the front of the hustings. When the Manchester and Salford yeomanry cavalry received orders to arrest Hunt and the others on the platform, they galloped into a crowd that had no means of escape. John was slashed on the arm by a member of the cavalry, and then clubbed by more than one of the special constables that prevented the crowd exiting, and was then trampled by a horse. He died as a result of these wounds on 7 September 1819.

  The authorities were determined that neither the government, magistrates nor soldiers would be blamed for the deaths of protesters at St Peter’s Field-later, called ‘Peterloo’. There were no plans for any official enquiries, so the radicals decided to employ sympathetic lawyers James Harmer and Henry Denison to represent the family at the inquest. It turned out to be much more combative than most courts on the cause of death. The representatives of the Lees family wanted to prove the cavalry culpable, and shine a spotlight on the behaviour of the Manchester magistrates, who they accused of incompetence and panic. The legally required inquest would be their only chance to make these points.

  There was a lot wrong with the inquest, starting with the failure of the coroner to turn up for the first three days, which led to an adjournment. The radicals felt that the government was prevaricating, allowing enough time to pass for anger to subside. M
r Battye, the deputy coroner, barely managed to hide his contempt for Harmer and the inquest started each day with recriminations between the coroner and the newspapers, who were determined to report the proceedings. When he forbade publication of details, he was successfully ignored.

  Harmer called the first witness – Robert Lees, John’s father. Mr Lees senior reported that John had gone to the demonstration without his father’s consent. Robert Lees was a successful cotton factory owner in Oldham, more interested in profit than protest. He tried to set his son to work the next day when he returned home injured, but sent him away angrily when he realised that his son was unable to work. He told John to report to the overseer. It was a strangely cold reaction to his son’s bloody and bruised appearance, his inability to move freely, and the lack of a shoe. Mr Lees admitted that his indifference to his son’s condition was due to his anger, but also his belief that John’s stepmother would look after him.

  His stepmother Hannah was more observant; he had come home on the Monday night with a cut that had gone foul, his shoulder was sore and could not be moved and he could not hold down food. However, he continued to live as normal. Despite his mother’s comments that he was not a regular drinker, he was seen in various public houses over the next few days. The government offered up a witness to say that he was drinking on the Wednesday after the event and had even offered to show people the cut on his elbow.

  As the week passed, his condition became progressively worse. By Wednesday the twenty-fifth, he was seeing the local doctor who dressed John’s arm and cleaned his cuts. His left foot swelled and developed purple spots, and he lost the ability to use his left arm and eye. He took to his bed more or less permanently after Sunday 29 August and by Sunday 5 September, his father had changed his mind about his son getting better. John died on Tuesday morning after two days of cold, rigid, monosyllabic agony.