by Frank McLynn
O’Connor has always divided commentators, and a balanced and nuanced view of him is not easy. Some have seen him as an utterly negligible figure, vain, arrogant, self-regarding, intellectually incoherent, a gadfly or butterfly, a demagogue who lusted after popularity and basked in the pleasure of being a popular idol but had essentially nothing to say and nothing to contribute: ‘the ruin of the Chartist movement’ in one view.42 We must concede the critics many of their points. He was all things to all men, hail-fellow-well-met when meeting the workers, a figure of gravitas when dealing with the Establishment. He could not collaborate with equals and fell out with all other leaders of the Chartist movement, wanting always to be centre-stage. His espousal of ‘physical force’ was insincere. Basically he agreed with the ‘moral force’ faction, but he knew that if he came out openly on their side he would alienate the masses, who wanted stronger meat. He was one of those maddening ‘revolutionaries’ who claim that violence is necessary to achieve desired ends but only in certain circumstances which he would never specify; needless to say there never was a time when the ‘favourable conjuncture’ for violence presented itself. He lacked courage and was an irresponsible mob orator, whipping his audience up to expectations he knew in his heart he could never satisfy. In his vanity he claimed to be a theoretician yet he contributed nothing to Chartist thought.43 Quick-witted and cunning, he was nonetheless deficient in real intellect. As one hostile critic has remarked: ‘His mental culture was surprisingly limited, his legal education was neither comprehensive nor profound enough to separate him from the masses.’44 Some even condemn him because he was a habitual womaniser. The phrase ‘he never married’, which usually carries the connotation of homosexuality, in O’Connor’s case simply meant that he had a multitude of mistresses, girlfriends and one-night stands, though, as always with O’Connor, when the source for the philandering is his own ‘memories’, one should beware. All that is on one side. Yet the suspicion arises that O’Connor has been underrated and unfairly traduced simply because he ended as a failure. Alongside these (admittedly grave) defects were many virtues. O’Connor was a deeply attractive human being in many ways. A natural actor, with a bell-like voice that put him in the class of Pitt the Elder, Danton or Orator Hunt, he was supremely witty, a first-class mimic and a brilliant raconteur with an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes.45 He had a shrewd understanding of power and human nature and realised, unlike Lovett, that Parliament would never concede the Charter simply on the basis of quiet, peaceful lobbying. He had the common touch and could enthral working-class audiences by knowing exactly the right note to hit, exactly the right mixture of indignation and exhortation to work into his orations. He knew precisely how to articulate their hopes and fears. Amazingly, he very quickly overcame the innate prejudice of the English proletariat against the Irish, won them round and enthused them to the point where he became their idol. Nor was he a mere ‘champagne socialist’ of his times. His sympathy for the wretched of the earth was deeply sincere and he poured his own money into the cause. He could have become comfortable and wealthy by practising the law and would have had fewer interruptions to his hedonistic pursuits as a lawyer, but chose to commit himself to the working class.46 He never enjoyed robust health and was frequently ill during his Chartist heyday but drove himself on through willpower. His work rate was phenomenal. Between June 1838 and August 1839, he spent 123 days on the road, during which he made 147 major speeches as well as attending innumerable conferences, committee meetings and court hearings.47 His faults were legion but there can be no doubting his fundamental sincerity.
Other significant leaders of early Chartism were Thomas Atwood (1783–1856), the leading light of Birmingham Chartism and Peter Murray McDouall (1815–54), a Scottish surgeon in favour of physical force and the general strike.48 More formidable and prominent were the intellectuals of the movement, James Bronterre O’Brien and George Julian Harney. Bronterre O’Brien (1805–64), another Irishman, had aspects of his personality that were uncannily like O’Connor’s: like him he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, trained as a lawyer and suffered the same pattern of frequent ill health, ending with mental illness. Intellectually, he had a finer mind than O’Connor’s. As an undergraduate he had won the college’s gold medal for science and was deeply and widely read. He was radicalised by his intense study of the French Revolution, from which he derived a fervent admiration for the men of the Left, especially Robespierre and Gracchus Babeuf, and also by his leading role in the fight against stamp duty on newspapers.49 Faced with the elite’s blatant attempt at censorship by price, thus placing newspapers beyond the reach of the ordinary man, O’Brien hit back by publishing Bronterre’s National Reformer, which consisted of ‘essays’ rather than news items and so escaped stamp duty. The scale of the authorities’ paranoia about words written by dissidents can be gauged by the police raid on O’Brien’s house in 1838, when they seized a manuscript he was writing on the French Revolution! Known as the ‘schoolmaster of Chartism’ he deeply influenced Harney at the start of his career and continued to write voluminously.50 Despite his fine brain, O’Brien was a poor strategist and politician and, even at the abstract level, his thinking could be confused and incoherent – which some attributed to alcoholism. The seam-bursting eclecticism of his thought led him to some bizarre notions, such as that technology alone and unaided would bring about classlessness without the loss of any wealth or property or the loss of a single life. After 1840 O’Brien abandoned his early leftism, swung hard right and ended as a mild reformist, dedicated to cooperation with the middle class. Many contemporary observers thought him the most intellectually gifted of the Chartists, and this included Engels, who strongly disliked him at the personal level.51 His last decade was blighted by severe illness and tuberculosis; scholars dispute about whether mental illness or alcoholism was his bane. O’Brien’s main problem as a would-be political leader was that he was a perfectionist who hated compromise; he was also unstable, unable to hold down any job long, a Jonah figure and paranoid with it.52
In contrast to O’Brien, who made the conventional passage from youthful firebrand to elderly conservative (the political equivalent of jeune cocotte, vieille dévote), his early pupil George Julian Harney (1817– 97) moved ever leftwards, ending as a Marxist. Trained as a seaman, Harney was radicalised when he was arrested as a paper boy for selling an unstamped newspaper. Already by 1839 the most left-wing of the Chartists, he later became a close friend of Marx and Engels.53 He too was a great admirer of Robespierre but, unlike O’Brien, never recanted. A fine writer, he was never much of an orator – a facet of his personality seized on by his many critics in the Chartist movement – but on any rational analysis he emerges as more clearsighted than Lovett, O’Brien or O’Connor. The flavour of Harney’s thinking is well conveyed by one of his utterances in January 1839:
We demand universal suffrage, because we believe the universal suffrage will bring universal happiness. Time was when every Englishman had a musket in his cottage, and along with it hung a flitch of bacon; now there was no flitch of bacon for there was no musket; let the musket be restored and the flitch of bacon would soon follow. You will get nothing from your tyrants but what you can take, and you can take nothing unless you are properly prepared to do so. In the words of a good man, then, I say, arm for peace, arm for liberty, arm for justice, arm for the rights of all, and the tyrants will no longer laugh at your petitions. Remember that.54
To his delight Harney found ironworkers in Winlaton, near Newcastle upon Tyne, making weapons. At a meeting of the London Democratic Association, Harney proposed and passed a motion ‘to meet all acts of oppression with immediate resistance … we hold it to be the duty of the Convention [the forthcoming General Convention of Chartists] to impress upon the people the necessity of an immediate preparation for ulterior measures’. This meant that at the Convention O’Connor had to head off flank attacks from both the intellectuals, O’Brien and Harney. Whereas O’Brien always rathe
r resented the fact that O’Connor kept him on a tight leash, Harney was more sympathetic to his leader and regarded him as indispensable. He appreciated that O’Connor was far more accommodating to his followers than Orator Hunt or William Cobbett had been and that he had sacrificed a lucrative career as a lawyer for the cause.55
Harney came into his own at the General Convention of the Working Classes held in London on 4 February 1839, especially as O’Connor was absent. The great Irish leader had a distaste for such assemblies and preferred to campaign mainly through the hugely influential newspaper he founded in Leeds, the Northern Star. Fifty-three delegates foregathered for what was intended to be a grand strategy meeting, including 6 newspaper editors, 2 doctors, 2 religious ministers, 3 magistrates and a plethora of shopkeepers.56 Straight away there was tension between the ‘moral force’ and ‘physical force’ factions, with Harney openly expressing impatience and discontent with Lovett’s chairmanship. There was already bad blood between the LWMA and the O’Connorite faction, not just because of the general poor state of relations between Lovett and O’Connor but because the ‘physical force’ people accused Lovett and the LWMA of collusion in a parliamentary witch-hunt of trade union activities following the turbulent strike of Glasgow cotton-spinners in 1837. Factionalism – that besetting sin of the Left throughout history – was the most striking thing about a Convention that should have been preparing a common, united strategy. The general ambivalence has been well summed up by one student of the conference: ‘Some were prepared to threaten force, others were anxious to regard it as a last defence. Some dabbled in the rhetoric of revolution; others, a tiny minority, thought seriously but not very effectively how a revolution might be accomplished.’57 The main aim of the Convention was to prepare a national petition demanding the Six Points, to be presented to Parliament. Although there were minor and inconclusive debates about the correct attitude to take to the growing middle-class movement to repeal the Corn Laws, most of the discussion concerned the correct moral stance of the so-called ‘loyal rebel’. What was to be done if Parliament rejected the petition? And what was the role of violence? Harney reported that talk of violent action was in the air. The delegation from Tyneside stated defiantly: ‘If they Peterloo us, we’ll Moscow them.’58 Hardly surprisingly, with so many different factions jostling for supremacy, no firm decision was taken except for the anodyne resolution to meet all acts of government oppression with ‘immediate resistance’ (type unspecified).59 From afar O’Connor endorsed the formula ‘peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must’. Yet his most favoured formula – an alliance of the labouring classes in England and Ireland – met with indifference and sometimes outright hostility.60 Lovett seemed convinced by the ‘success’ of the Reform Act of 1832 that the Chartists could achieve their aims by incessant nagging and chivvying, almost as though he thought the government could be bored into granting the Six Points. The Convention can only be considered a failure and a wasted opportunity. The delegates did not seek to coopt the all-important London proletariat, nor did they make any realistic contingency plans in case the national petition was rejected.61 Always absent from Chartist deliberations was the chessplayer’s mentality, planning four or five moves ahead. They preferred to react to government initiatives, which meant they were permanently on the back foot. ‘Immediate resistance’ was given no realistic content.
While the Convention relocated itself to Birmingham in May 1839, social tensions were at white heat. Alarming reports were coming in of the arming of the working class and Chartists’ supervising military drills in secret bases. A bogus rumour stalked Whitehall that there would be a general insurrection on 6 May.62 By this time the Whigs had entered their second ministry and the prime minister was Lord Melbourne, by nature a jittery hard liner. His government secretly encouraged magistrates in the north to break up Chartist meetings and make arrests; McDouall was one of the first swept up in this net. Meanwhile the mass meetings in the north went on: Newcastle Town Moor on 20 May, Kersal Moor on 20 May. Hartshead Moor on 21 May. The firebrand Joseph Stephens told his impassioned listeners that God’s law called for the use of force against evil men.63 In June the Chartists presented the national petition to Parliament. There were 1,280,000 signatures – representing more than 50 per cent of those who had voted in the 1837 general election – and the document containing them was three miles long. Despite this signal demonstration of the popular will, Parliament contemptuously rejected the Charter by a vote of 235–46. This hit the delegates to the Convention, still in session at Birmingham, like a thunderbolt.64 The Convention had opted for petitioning for four main reasons: since they were disenfranchised, there was no other way for the working class to communicate with Parliament; the petition bound together the disparate groups operating under the umbrella of Chartism; women could take part in the activity as they could not in violent clashes; and it was thought that no deference was involved in petitioning.65 O’Brien, however, was vehemently opposed from the beginning. He argued that to petition was to show deference.66 He argued that the Convention had to collect 2–3 million signatures before it presented a petition or called a general strike; an overwhelming mandate was necessary. O’Connor, who attended the Convention in Birmingham, maintained that signatures were consequences not causes of Chartist activity; that presenting the national petition and preparations for a general strike should proceed pari passu. Overemphasis on numbers of signatures, he argued, missed the point, for a million signatures could not dislodge a single troop of dragoons.67 When the national petition was rejected, O’Connor and the Convention discussed countermeasures that stopped short of an armed uprising. These included the withdrawal of savings from banks and the conversion of paper money into gold and silver. Most popular of all counter-strikes was the option of a ‘sacred month’ during which the proletariat would do no work at all – a euphemism for a general strike.68
Why was the government so uncompromising in its rejection of the Charter, which, on the face of it, contained no revolutionary demands and could be construed as mild electoral reformism? The main evidence comes from Lord Melbourne and his home secretary, Lord John Russell. William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, was an oddity who earlier in life had suffered the indignity of being cuckolded by Lord Byron. Perhaps in compensation he turned to sado-masochism: spanking sessions with aristocratic ladies and, more sinisterly, brutal whippings of orphan girls he had taken into his household, allegedly out of charity.69 Melbourne was not, like the Duke of Wellington, an unregenerate reactionary, though he listened to Queen Victoria, whose favourite he was and whose hatred of Chartism was well known. Deeply influenced by Russell, he suppressed his natural hard-line instincts and determined on constitutionalism, prepared to use the military against the Chartists but only when he deemed it absolutely necessary.70 Lord John Russell, grandfather of the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, had few popular admirers, being despised for his diminutive size (5′ 5″), but his view of the Chartists was nuanced. Contemptuous of the Charter and its ideology, he was one of those who affected to patronise its benighted believers. He remarked disdainfully that the Chartists were really concerned about economic advancement while pretending to be interested in suffrage. But, he pointed out, surely the Chartists were not so stupid as to confuse the two; the example of the USA proved that economic prosperity had nothing to do with suffrage.71 He genuinely believed that universal suffrage would mean the death of property, that the Chartists had swallowed whole the myth of the French Revolution, and that the vengeful majority would sweep away all vestiges of privilege. For Russell, Chartism meant the end of the House of Lords, the monarchy and the equalisation of property. On the other hand, he was not so intemperate as O’Connell, who denounced ‘physical force’ Chartists as treasonous. Russell distinguished between abstract advocacy of the Charter, as plugged assiduously in O’Connor’s Northern Star, and genuinely revolutionary activity. There were some nervous moments for the Whigs in the winter of 1838–9 when Russell temporaril
y left his post to attend to his wife Adelaide’s illness and death, and the more volatile Melbourne took over his portfolio. Russell returned to the Home Office in early 1839, only to find himself accused by The Times of excessive leniency towards the Chartists.72 He was sufficiently alarmed by the reports of drilling and arming among the Chartists to persuade Melbourne to recall three regiments from Ireland.
