by Frank McLynn
However, the Whigs made it clear that the Reform Act was as far as they were prepared to go in granting concessions to the lower orders. Accordingly, in the 1830s social unrest and agitation grew exponentially. There were many reasons for the tense and febrile politics of the decade, but four may be identified as salient. In the first place, in all but elite circles the much-trumpeted Reform Act was a severe disappointment. It was true that 143 rotten boroughs had been abolished and 135 new seats created in the northern industrial areas, thus aligning the electorate to some extent with demographic reality, but even at this level not all the ‘pocket boroughs’ had been phased out. In its other aspects the Reform Act was a grave let-down. Much was made of the increase in the electorate from around 400,000 to 653,000 (out of a population of some 13 million in Great Britain) – about one in six of the male population – but these men comprised a smaller proportion of the population than those eligible to vote in 1640.9 In Ireland the situation was even worse, with just 90,000 eligible to vote out of a population of 7.8 million. Moreover, as well as extirpating most rotten boroughs the act swept away the ratepayer ‘scot and lot’ franchise that had existed in 37 boroughs, including radical strongholds like Westminster. Whether through ineptitude or Machiavellianism the 1832 act disenfranchised large numbers of working-class men by opting for a £10 property qualification instead of a ratepayer franchise. On the other hand, it enfranchised the £50 tenants at will, whose lack of security of tenure made them essentially the creatures of their landlords at election time. Though more people could now vote, it was simply more of the wealthy, making the electoral system in net terms less democratic than before.10 To the fury of early nineteenth-century feminists, women were now expressly forbidden the vote in general elections; hitherto a few wealthy female landowners had squeezed in. The essential factor of the secret ballot to prevent intimidation, for which Orator Hunt had striven, was not conceded. It is not surprising that, in the opinion of most later historians, the 1832 act changed very little at all. It was a classic illustration of the Lampedusa dictum in The Leopard: ‘Everything must change so that everything remains the same.’11
A second reason for working-class ferment was the introduction of the New Poor Law in 1834. Since 1795 indigence had been tackled through the ‘Speenhamland system’, which doled out relief to paupers according to the size of families and the prevailing cost of bread, but by the early 1830s this approach was deemed ruinously expensive, since it cost the Exchequer £7 million in 1832 alone. The 1834 act ended out-relief to the poor and instituted workhouses, which were to become a shibboleth of horror to the working class. The workhouse system was directed by a central department and three commissioners. Paupers were separated by age and sex and made to work in dreadful conditions for a stipend below the level of the lowest-paid worker in regular employment. Rather than enter the dreaded workhouses the unskilled would accept almost any job and at almost any level of pay; some families even starved to death rather than accept the humiliation and stigma of the workhouse. One of the aims of the radical movement after 1834 was to end this iniquitous system.12 Yet another proletarian grievance was the ferociously hostile attitude of all governments to the nascent trade union movement. In the 1790s William Pitt the Younger, that unregenerate foe of all things radical and progressive, had effectively made trade unions illegal with his Combination Act. Pitt’s law was repealed in 1824 after assiduous lobbying by a fascinating troika of individuals: Francis Place, Joseph Hume and Sir Francis Burdett. Hume (1777–1855) was the most interesting of the three since his radicalism evolved, and he eventually became a ‘moral force’ Chartist. Burdett (1770–1844), who had earlier suffered imprisonment for his beliefs, gradually became more and more conservative as he grew older and eventually abjured all his earlier beliefs. Francis Place (1771–1854), often thought of as the key link between the eighteenth-century politics of crowd agitation and the mass movements of the 1840s, was an anomalous figure. Supposedly a leader of the Labour movement, he was a Benthamite who thought that unions were a fetter on free trade and the workings of the market; he confessed that his motives for working so hard for the repeal of Pitt’s Combination Act was that he thought a carefully revised act – the one he achieved in 1825 – would kill off trade unions for good.13 Instead they grew rapidly in the years thereafter. The 1825 Combination Act accepted the legality of unions but imposed limitations on the right to strike and confined unionism within severe guidelines: men could meet to bargain over wages and conditions but anything beyond this – intra-union solidarity, sympathetic strikes, unions with political aims – was to be considered a criminal conspiracy. Trade unions were informed that they could not ‘molest, obstruct or intimidate’ anyone, with the precise meaning given to these verbs to be decided by judges, not a group known for their working-class sympathies.14
The most sensational manifestation of government attitude to trade unions came in 1834 when six Dorset farm labourers were arrested and charged with administering unlawful oaths during a meeting of an agricultural labourers’ friendly society. Their actions were not in any way sinister – no different from the oaths taken at masonic or Orange lodges, as the Irish Nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell, ‘the Liberator’, pointed out – but the government chose to take the line that the Tolpuddle men were planning a violent uprising. The real purpose was to arrest the burgeoning trade union movement, which had alarmed Place and those who thought like him by its rapid take-off after the passage of the 1825 Combination Act. The ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ were each sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia. A national outcry convinced Lord Melbourne and his cabinet the sentences were excessive and they were pardoned, but not before the seven men had endured two years of the harshest conceivable treatment in Australia’s penal colonies. Although the men returned to England and a heroes’ welcome, the Labour movement had been made aware, as had the reformists at Peterloo, that in the English ruling class they faced a ruthless and bloodthirsty enemy.15 Nonetheless middle-class reformers plugged away at the Ten Hour Movement to limit the working day. Perhaps the three most powerful streams feeding into the river that finally became Chartism were opposition to the new Poor Law, the movement for factory reform and the campaign for the ten-hour day. There were other important issues, too, such as the campaign for repeal of the newspaper stamp duty and, for middle-class radicals, the worsening situation in Ireland, exacerbated by the government’s Irish Coercion Bill of 1833.16 All this took place against a background of worsening factory conditions as industrialisation reached its apogee, increasing unemployment in the weaving industry, rising prices – the price of wheat rose from 39 shillings a quarter in 1836 to 68 shillings in 1840 – resentment at factory discipline and especially the employment of women in textile mills, as this was thought to break up family life, and general hatred of the Whig government. Although radical concern over the ancient issues of ‘old corruption’ and the powers of the Crown lessened in the 1830s, in part because of the 1832 act and the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837, the working classes and their supporters loathed the Whigs for their actions over the Poor Law, the Tolpuddle martyrs and the repression of the Captain Swing riots in southern England. Most of all they detested them for not passing on the perceived benefits of increasing prosperity to the proletariat.17
All of these issues at play simultaneously created the ‘perfect storm’ of radical opposition that came to be known as Chartism. It was the abiding ambition of Chartism, never fully realised, to build a national, coherent mass movement that would fuse all these discontents. The spectrum of opposition to the ‘bloody Whigs’ ran all the way from the Tory leader Sir Robert Peel, who particularly disliked the 1834 Poor Act, through Robert Owen and other like-minded cotton-mill owners to the benighted paupers themselves. The Ten-Hour Movement was headed by Tory gentry in Yorkshire, where an alliance between Tories and working-class radicals was particularly evident. There was considerable overlap between trade union membership, the campaign for
shorter working hours and action against the poor law. The first man to try to integrate all this into a single movement was William Lovett, whose London Working Men’s Association (LWMA) was formed in June 1836.18 The essential problem with the LWMA was that its aim was a trans-class coalition. Seeking to reach out to the middle classes, it was expensive to join and restricted to ‘persons of good moral character’. This reflected William Lovett’s essentially conservative temperament.19 Partly as a reaction to this, a rival organisation, led by Bronterre O’Brien arose in 1837, known as the London Democratic Association (LDA) and dedicated to the principles of Tom Paine. Meanwhile an Irish politican named Feargus O’Connor, who in 1835 lost his seat as an MP through allegedly not having the proper property qualifications, founded yet another radical organisation in London, the Marylebone Radical Association; London thus had three rival radical organisations. By 1837, with a worldwide economic depression beginning to bite, the provinces began to get in on the act. The Birmingham Political Union, like the LWMA a reform movement reaching out to the middle classes, was the first to adopt all six points of what would later be the People’s Charter, the manifesto of Chartism. These were the very far from revolutionary Six Points: universal male suffrage, payment of members of parliament, equal constituencies, no property qualifications for members, the secret ballot and annual parliaments.20 The upshot of all this activity was the first explicitly Chartist national meeting at Kensal Moor near Manchester on 24 September 1838 attended by a crowd estimated at anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000 and called to organise a national petition to Parliament. It was agreed that fifty delegates from the meeting would meet in London early the following year at a national convention to plan strategy. A further triumphal and highly optimistic meeting was held at Hartshead Moor in Yorkshire on 15 October.
And so the Chartist movement was born. Two key questions immediately present themselves. What was the social composition of Chartism, and who were its leaders? In general Chartism appealed most strongly to radical intellectuals and the skilled workers of the northern and Scottish industrial cities and, to a lesser extent to the artisans and craftsmen of London. One analysis of recruitment into the movement in 1838–9 finds four main groupings: the hard core of radical reformers, some of whom would go on to embrace socialism; young men keen to see action who were new recruits to working-class politics; a large body of ‘infantry’ – loyal supporters who could be relied on to attend meetings, march in processions and sign petitions – or what one might call the ‘fellowship’ of Chartism; and a rank and file fluctuating between enthusiasm and apathy, depending on the fortunes of the movement at any given time.21 The horrors of the industrial north and the ‘Satanic mills’ in the early nineteenth century, as in Dickens’s Coketown, with its giant factories and clouds of choking smoke, are too well known to require elaboration and were famously described in Engels’s classic, The Condition of the Working Class in England.22 Another study of London Chartism identifies all the following groups as supporters: boot and shoemakers, tailors, members of the building trade (carpenters, joiners, stonemasons, bricklayers, plasterers, plumbers, painters, glaziers), silk weavers, hatters, jewellery and watchmakers, bakers, labourers, and members of the furniture, leather, printing and book trades, as well as those working in metals (coppersmiths, braziers, tinplate workers, boilermakers, engineers).23 Moreover, at least in its early days, Chartism had a strong appeal to women, who played an important role in the movement, albeit largely as ‘spear carriers’ to the disgust of later feminists.24 By drawing support from such wide and diverse sources, Chartism was able to establish itself as the first modern political party, drawing strength from Scotland, Ireland and Wales as well as England. The appeal of rival movements and ideologies, such as Luddism or Captain Swing, was minimal, as their potential supporters were swallowed up by the overarching ideology of Chartism.25 Modern techniques such as mass demonstrations, the raising of election funds and the disruption of rival meetings, were all perfected by the Chartists. The movement also appeared at a historical hinge, for the 1840s was a decade of industrial, technological and demographic change. Railways, the telegraph, the penny post and urbanisation all played their part in ‘shrinking’ the nation, and the plethora of newspapers meant that the English public was the most politically informed in Europe.26
The early leaders of the Chartist movement spanned the spectrum between a modest, almost deferential attitude to the ruling elite and a commitment to gradual reform on one hand and a foaming-mouthed rhetoric of revolution on the other. The two representative figures in the period 1838–40 were William Lovett and the Rev. J. R. Stephens. Lovett (1800– 77), a ropemaker, Methodist and union organiser, claimed to have inherited the mantle of Orator Hunt – an absurd claim as he had neither Hunt’s eloquence as an orator nor his skill as a politician. He did, however, have respectable credentials as a veteran of the campaign to pardon the Tolpuddle martyrs and he was a prolific journalist.27 A working-class intellectual, he had a naive belief in the automatically prevailing power of truth. For O’Connor he always had a visceral loathing. The leading advocate of ‘moral force’ as against O’Connor’s espousal of ‘physical force’ he fell out with the Promethean Irishman as early as 1837 when O’Connor criticised his ‘softly, softly’ handling of government repression of a Glasgow spinners’ strike. Lacking all O’Connor’s ability as a politician, his charisma and his power as an orator, Lovett was soon reduced to making peevish attacks on his rival. During his bitter quarrel with O’Connor in 1838 he accused the Irishman of always wanting to take credit for the achievements of Chartism and for ruthlessly cutting all other leading actors out of the historical record: ‘You carry your fame about with you on all occasions to sink other topics in the shade – you are the great “I AM” of politics.’28 The general opinion among historians is that Lovett was a distinctly minor figure, that both he and the LWMA have been overrated, and that he was unfitted to be either a tactician or a theorist of a revolutionary movement.29 Lovett’s obtuseness would later bring him, unwittingly, to deliver London Chartism into the O’Connorite camp, whereas originally O’Connor had concentrated on the provinces. But Lovett did not lack courage and later served a prison sentence in appalling conditions for his Chartist beliefs. To his credit, he detested O’Connell the ‘Liberator’ even more than O’Connor. In 1843 he made a bitter attack on the Liberator and, comparing O’Connor with O’Connell as both ‘most preeminent in the art of gulling’, called down a plague on both their houses.30
No greater contrast could be imagined than that between the mild Lovett and the tempestuous, fire-eating Methodist preacher Joseph Rayner Stephens, though Stephens was later to prove himself no more than a ‘talking horse’, to use racing parlance. An early Chartist, though he never called himself one, Stephens had distinguished himself in the campaign for the ten-hour day.31 An impassioned advocate of violence, Stephens had three main themes in his orations. One was that Christianity and radicalism/socialism were co-extensive. To this end he often claimed comradeship with John Ball and Jack Cade and, at the meeting at Hartshead Moor in October 1838, famously declared: ‘The Lord Jesus Christ was the prince of Jack Cades!’32 A second motif was that the Charter had an organic connection with the original Great Charter or Magna Carta. In his Hartshead Moor speech Stephens expressed this as follows: ‘We stand upon our rights – we seek no change – we say give us the good old laws of England unchanged … What are those laws? Aye, Magna Carta! The good old laws of English freedom – freedom of worship – freedom of homesteads – free and happy firesides, and no workhouses.’33 A third theme was the egregious wickedness whereby working-class men had to send their wives to work in factories merely to survive. In his own, admittedly paternalistic, way Stephens always cared about women. One of his mottos was: ‘For children and wife we’ll war to the knife.’34 Even O’Connor, no slouch at demagoguery himself, felt that Stephens’s over-the-top effusions damaged the cause by frightening the middle classes away. Posterity ha
s not been kind in its judgement on Stephens. Dorothy Thompson summed him up thus: ‘He was much more the kind of charismatic, irresponsible demagogue that the historians have presented O’Connor as being, than was O’Connor himself … his staring eyes and emotive language aroused crowds to hysteria … the Savonarola of the early Chartist movement.’35 A kinder assesment is this: ‘It was the impassioned platform oratory of men like O’Connor and Stephens that drew working-class supporters to the Chartist movement, rather than the dry fare dished up by Lovett and the LWMA.’36
Yet by any reckoning the titanic figure of the early years of Chartism was Feargus O’Connor (1794–1855) and, unlike Lovett and Stephens, who quickly faded from the scene, O’Connor dominated English radical politics for the next twelve years. O’Connor, an Irish Protestant aristocrat, was in the classic tradition of ‘gentleman radicals’ exemplified by Sir Francis Burdett and Orator Hunt in the Regency years, and by Sir Charles Dilke, Henry Hyndman and Sir Wilfred Lawson at the end of the nineteenth century. He was in many ways a quintessential Irishman, a fine horseman and expert whist player with an over-endowment of ‘blarney’. Allegedly a descendant of one of the high kings of Ireland, he inherited an estate from his uncle, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and called to the bar in 1820. He began his political career as a liberal organiser and was elected MP for Cork in 1831, but was unseated four years later on the grounds that he lacked the requisite property qualifications.37 At first he was a follower of Daniel O’Connell the ‘Liberator’ but fell out with the leader in the mid-1830s after growing disillusionment on a number of issues. O’Connell was something of a tunnel-vision politician, who had but two main aims: Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the 1801 Act of Union, which made Ireland part of the United Kingdom. His success on emancipation in 1829 led him thereafter to a monomaniac concentration on repeal, which, as O’Connor saw, was only a beginning to the solution of Ireland’s problems, not the end piece. Moreover, O’Connell was a Benthamite, in favour of laissez-faire economics and in politics believed in unwavering support for the Whigs. In everyday politics O’Connor found him much more interested in the health of the Irish party in Westminster than in Ireland itself.38 At any rate the split between the two men was not long in coming. Some see O’Connor as a divided self, with one half devoted to an independent Ireland and always hankering to lead the Irish to this promised land, and the other half committed to Chartism and the English working class. O’Connell’s vast power in Ireland cut O’Connor off from his Irish taproots and, so to speak, marooned him in English politics. Some see this as an inevitable consequence of O’Connor’s rebellious nature but others, more shrewdly, suggest that, once O’Connell discerned the political talent in the younger man, he wanted him ousted. He disliked O’Connor’s growing popularity as he could not bear ‘a brother near the throne’.39 After the split the antagonism between the two men became palpable. O’Connell could not bear O’Connor’s ferocious attacks on the English Whigs and dubbed him a Tory radical, though O’Connor was surely correct to discern in O’Connell much more kinship with the English propertied class than the Irish peasantry. In a series of pamphlets in 1837 O’Connor accused O’Connell of autocracy, corruption and servility to the English elite and would continue to assail him for his inept handling of Irish affairs; always in the back of his mind was the thought that one day he might supplant O’Connell as leader of the Irish.40 There is no question but that O’Connor won the propaganda war in the minds of all but the English elite. O’Connell replied with many savage and withering denunciations of Chartism, which he loathed viscerally and saw as a danger to civilisation itself.41
