The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  After the rejection of the national petition, Chartist anger reached a diapason, and the aggressive stance from the government once they got wind of the ‘sacred month’ made it seem likely that a major conflagration would sooner or later erupt. Typical of the heavy-handed approach from the authorities was an incident in Birmingham on 8 July. A peaceful meeting of Chartists in the Bull Ring was violently attacked by the police and many were injured.73 As a response to the intolerable provocation of a radical meeting the government arrested William Lovett, who was found guilty on public order charges and spent a dreadful twelve months in jail. Tempers were running high, and O’Connor had to use all the persuasive power of his Northern Star to dampen tensions.74 For a while England hovered perilously close to revolution. Lord Broughton told the cabinet, ‘As the object of the Chartists was to knock us on the head and rob us of our property, we might as well arrive at that catastrophe after a struggle as without it; we could only fail and we might succeed.’ To which Melbourne replied ominously, ‘Exactly so.’75 A general strike would probably have led to more violence and a nationwide rising, with unpredictable consequences. This was the juncture at which O’Connor persuaded the Convention to call off the ‘sacred month’. As he correctly pointed out, the Convention had made no proper arrangements for coordinating such an upsurge. The outright rejection of the national petition had shaken him, and made him realise that he had not thought through the consequences and implications of his call for ‘physical force’. He felt that he needed more time and that the Chartists, instead of winning a quick victory, would have to settle in for a long haul.76 Perhaps he did not dare to admit to himself the awful truth: that he had used the exhortation to violence as a bluff, which the government had now called. Some of the Convention members admitted other fears: either that government repression would be terrible and bloodthirsty or, even worse, that workers would fail to heed the call and the sacred month would fail spontaneously. To the fury of Harney, the Convention voted against a general strike in July.77 The ‘sacred month’, due to begin on 12 August 1839, was cancelled and a pointless three days of protest meetings substituted. Disgusted by the betrayal by their leaders, the workers scarcely heeded the Convention’s call for the three-day protest, and from this date the would-be ruling committee began to disintegrate as an effective body. Its dissolution in September signalled the end of the LWMA’s leadership of the movement.78

  We shall have occasion later to discuss the extent to which revolutions can fail through sheer bad luck or, conversely, how elites can survive through good fortune. Among the happy circumstances for Melbourne’s Whig government was the appointment of Major-General Sir Charles Napier as army commander in northern England (his official title was General Officer Commanding the British Northern District). Some of Napier’s sayings might have seemed ominous in the mouth of a man appointed to police Chartists: ‘The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed.’ ‘The human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear.’79 Yet, far from being a blimp, Napier was one of the most impressive and intelligent individuals the British armed forces have ever produced. He was as talented at administration as at conducting military campaigns, as he had proved in a memorable posting as British governor (resident) of the island of Cephalonia during the wars of Greek independence. Veteran of the Peninsular Wars and a man of leonine courage who had already survived three close encounters with death, Napier was also an intellectual with a wide range of interests. In politics he was a radical who had clashed bitterly with the reactionary O’Connell over the Poor Law and his visceral sympathies were with the Chartists. During his varied and fascinating life he won the admiration of at least two men of genius, Lord Byron and Sir Richard Burton.80 He was also witty, as he showed later when sending his one-word dispatch announcing the conquest of Sindh in India (Peccavi – Latin for ‘I have sinned’). Immediately on taking over military command in northern England, Napier showed his calibre. He made extensive preparations in Manchester, Nottingham and Derbyshire, while warning the Chartists in a friendly way that an armed rising was suicidal. At a personal level he liked O’Connor, admiring him for his wit as well as the way the Irishman seemed always to wear an expression on his face as though he expected all to be done with good behaviour and fair play. Napier attended Chartist meetings and was impressed by the power of O’Connor’s authority and the seemingly magical way in which the crowds would melt away after he had finished speaking.81 In his private correspondence Napier told his friends that he could find nothing to object to in the Chartists’ political programme, that they were right when they said that the people of England were ill-treated and ill-governed.

  Whatever his private sympathies, Napier was a soldier and determined to do his duty. Informally he told the Chartist leaders that he deplored the prospect of large-scale casualties but considered them inevitable if the workers took up the sword. In his private correspondence he railed at the narrow-minded and bigoted magistrates (mainly recruited from the gentry) he had to work with and, in defiance of the general directives from the Melbourne government, warned them not to try to break up mass meetings like the one on Kersal Moor. He also despised the cowardice of his civilian collaborators, while grudgingly admitting there were reasons for it: ‘Funk is the order of the day … there is some excuse for the people seem ferocious enough.’82 Nevertheless Napier was confident that in any armed conflict with rebels he would prevail, confident of the discipline and massive firepower of his troops, knowing too that he held most of the cards, since the government ran an efficient system of spies, secret agents and postal interception. What he most feared was either that a hot-headed, fire-eating magistrate would start a conflagration by trying to break up one of the mass meetings, or that armed Chartists might score an isolated success against a small army detachment: ‘If only a corporal’s guard was cut off it would be “total defeat of the troops” ere it reached London, Edinburgh and Dublin; and before the contradiction arrived the disaffection, in the moral exaltation of supposed victory, would be in arms. This is more especially to be apprehended in Ireland, where rivers of blood might flow.’83 Napier’s combination of firmness, moderation and diplomacy paid off. He it was more than anyone who convinced the Chartist leaders that the government could not be cowed by mere threats and calls for revolution and convinced O’Connor that the ruling classes could not be panicked or stampeded into taking rash retaliatory measures, as they had done on the continent. This was all the more telling since Napier’s private criticisms of the government increased almost daily.84 The deeply impressive Napier made sure all the time that the ball was in the Chartists’ court while making them aware of the deadly consequences. It was the technique he was to use many years later at the end of his triumphant period in India. When faced with the custom of suttee (widow burning) after his conquest of Sindh, he called together the province’s tribal elders and played the Dutch uncle as follows: ‘You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom. When men burn women alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyres; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we shall follow ours.’85 It is hard not to see this, mutatis mutandis, as Napier’s posture towards the Chartists in 1839.

  Nevertheless, the avoidance of major armed conflict in 1839 was a ‘near run thing’, to quote Napier’s one-time mentor the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo. To quote one historian: ‘Chartism was a major threat to the British state, in the physical sense that the British ruling class was at times during the late 1830s and 1840s virtually in a state of siege as the people of this country protested, struck and armed against the Establishment.’86 Severely disillusioned with the failure of the national petition and the ‘sacred month’ and most of all, angry and bitter with the leadership for all its bold talk that had come to nothing, extreme elements in the rank a
nd file began to plan on their own, even daring to attempt a nationwide conspiracy. Among the most radical groups were the textile workers of Bradford, the coal miners of south Wales and the weavers of Ashton-under-Lyne.87 How concrete these plans were is still a matter of dispute, but it seems clear they were kept from the leadership, and O’Connor in particular.88 In the perfervid atmosphere of 1839 someone on either side was bound to snap sooner or later and accordingly, what everyone feared – a rerun of the Gordon riots – duly happened, though in Wales rather than London. On the night of 3–4 November 1839 a large crowd of Welsh Chartists assembled to force the authorities to disgorge some of their number held under arrest in the Westgate Hotel, Newport, and guarded by the army. They were led by three men: John Frost, a 54-year-old linen draper and defrocked magistrate, Zephaniah Williams, a free-thinking innkeeper, and William Jones, a travelling actor. As always on such occasions, there are disputes about the numbers involved. Most historians cite between 3–7,000 with 5,000 being a fair average, though The Times claimed 8,000 and contemporary Chartists spoke of 20,000.89 The attack on Newport was supposed to be coordinated with similar uprisings in Brecon and Abergavenny, but the operation was badly botched at every level. Not only did the other two assaults fail to materialise, but cold, rainy weather detained the Newport marchers, who did not reach the town until dawn. They found hundreds of troops and special constables waiting for them. Foolishly the attackers seem to have supposed that the soldiers would not open fire on them, but on approaching the Westgate Hotel they came under withering fire at close quarters. After twenty minutes of horrific scenes, with shouting, cursing and the screams of dying men in antiphonal counterpoint to the roll of musketry, the bloodbath was over. As at Peterloo, any estimate of the death toll must be impressionistic, as many badly wounded men made their escape to die later in bothies and hovels. Government sources admitted 24 rebels dead and 50 seriously wounded.90

  Even granted the raised temperatures and high emotions of the time, something of a puzzle still hovers over the Newport affair. Was it simply an incompetent attempt to trigger a general uprising? Certainly no Chartists in other localities acted in sympathy, though there were two more attempted risings in early 1840 in Sheffield and Bradford. Was it a disastrous attempt at class solidarity, with workers convinced that troops recruited from the same lowly background would not open fire on their ‘kith and kin’? Was it simply a show of Chartist strength that went disastrously wrong? Or was it perhaps an attempt to create martyrs, so that a conflagration would be ignited, rather like John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859? Worst of all, was it a failure of leadership, yet another betrayal by the upper echelons of the movement? Although O’Connor can be acquitted of foreknowledge, not all the Chartist leaders can, for John Frost made a tour of northern England just before heading the march on Newport, where he met a senior Chartist official, described as ‘a tall working man’ to whom he divulged his plans. This has led the most recent historian of Chartism to a sombre verdict: ‘What happened at Newport was no spontaneous outburst of fury or despair, nor a peaceful demonstration that went tragically wrong: it was the culmination of careful preparation.’91 Whatever its causes and motivations, the tragedy evoked a furious backlash from the government: 125 Chartists were arrested, and 21 were charged with high treason, including Frost, Williams and Jones. Altogether between June 1839 and early 1840 no fewer than 543 Chartists were imprisoned, some for a few weeks, others for several years. The conditions in which they were held were appalling, except in O’Connor’s case, and the prominent Chartists Samuel Holberry and John Clayton both died in captivity.92 The government made a virtual clean sweep of the movement’s leaders, with O’Connor and O’Brien both being sentenced to 18 months. Too late Joseph Rayner Stephens realised what a serious business he was now involved in. He had enjoyed his reckless and irresponsible oratory almost as if he was involved in an elaborate game, but as the spectre of the prison house loomed, he made desperate attempts to avoid his fate, abjuring his Chartist faith and offering a quite mendacious account of his activities. At his trial he pleaded thus:

  I am dragged here, my lord … as though I were a party to the Convention, and to the disturbances of Birmingham, to the Charter, to annual parliaments, vote by ballot, universal suffrage and all the rest of that rigmarole, in which I never had a share … I declared my detestation of the doctrines of Chartism, and declared that if Radicals were in power … my head would be brought first to the block and my blood would be the first blood that would have to flow.93

  The judge remained unimpressed by this special pleading and Stephens too was sentenced to 18 months. He held fast to his recantation, except that he continued to preach against the Poor Law, on the grounds that this was an imperative of his Christian conscience. Many of those who had been spellbound by his oratory simply refused to believe that their hero had recanted and regarded the news as government propaganda or disinformation.

  The decision to try O’Connor for seditious libel, get a verdict of guilty from a tame jury, and then imprison him for 18 months in York Castle seems an egregious example of broad-brush government injustice. O’Connor was accused of inciting the Newport disaster despite the absence of any ‘smoking gun’ linking him to the affair and despite the fact that he had actually been in Ireland at the time, trying to shore up his precarious finances.94 When the government was determined to secure a conviction, inconvenient facts like alibis counted for very little. To his credit General Napier protested to the government about the pointlessness of imprisoning O’Connor; it would make him a martyr and do nothing to retard the general Chartist movement.95 O’Connor himself confessed that he felt guilty about the Newport disaster even though it was not his fault. To his critics he again revealed himself as ‘flaky’, at once urging caution in public while declaring in private that blood would flow if the sentence of execution was pronounced on any of the men who came to trial.96 Ironically, the government’s attempt to silence O’Connor and leave the Chartist movement rudderless was stymied by its own bloodthirstiness. Frost, Williams and Jones were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death, which in 1840 still meant a barbarous execution by the medieval ritual of being hanged, drawn and quartered. This overreaction from the Melbourne government in turn triggered a nationwide backlash. At first Melbourne remained adamant that the sentence should be carried out and ranted and raved about the ‘softness’ of most judges and juries. More sober-minded colleagues pointed out to the prime minister that such an execution would be the talk of Europe and would take place at the very moment (February 1840) that the country would be celebrating Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert. Nonetheless Melbourne appeared implacable until the chief justice, Sir Nicholas Tindal, took him aside and pointed out some of the legal and political implications of the move, ending by solemnly warning him against the execution.97 The sentence was commuted to transportation for life. Frost, Williams and Jones, together with seven other ‘ringleaders’ began the long journey to the penal colony in Australia. O’Connor saw the chance to revive a movement that seemed in a terminal state. Many Chartists withdrew from political activity altogether, fearful and abashed by the violence at Newport and thinking it the prelude to many more such outbreaks, which promised massive loss of life. Others went into denial and pretended that petitioning was the way forward, even after the government’s contemptuous thumbs down. Even thoughtful Chartists were perplexed. They had tried petitioning, and that had got nowhere, they had opted for a general strike, but the leadership had called it off, and now the final option – armed violence – seemed also to have failed. What other options were there? The general despair after Newport is well conveyed in the outpourings of Chartist poetry in 1839–40, reminiscent in its doleful lamentations of the verses of the Gaelic bards after Culloden.98 O’Connor, though, headed a persistent and effective campaign to get the sentence of transportation on the Newport Chartists rescinded. Once again, as before the threatened execution, O’Connor displ
ayed great statesmanship, shrewdly pitching his appeal at the right position between the already converted and those he hoped to win over. The petition he organised for John Frost’s pardon from the conviction for high treason gathered nearly 1.5 million votes. It was presented to the House of Commons in May 1841 by Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, radical MP and the only consistent supporter of Chartism in the House in the 1840s.99 Such was the sympathy for Frost that the vote by members was tied, and thwarted only by the casting vote of the speaker, who voted against, arguing that the petition infringed the royal prerogative of mercy. Frost had to wait for his pardon until a general amnesty was declared in 1865. Nonetheless, O’Connor’s bold stand consolidated his followers when the entire movement might have imploded or melted away in the aftermath of Newport.100