by Frank McLynn
During the halcyon years of 1845–7, when O’Connor still dreamed that he would transform England with his agricultural colonies, the wider Chartist movement went into steep decline. Apart from the failure and repression of 1842–3, there were many other reasons for the waning of working-class activism. For two years after 1845 there was a return to economic prosperity; many disillusioned proletarians, despairing of a future in England, joined the gathering exodus to the Americas. The People’s International League, founded in November 1847 and supposedly Chartism’s window to the outside world, directed the attention of radicals and the middle classes to foreign affairs.61 Most of all, the repeal of the Corn Laws and Peel’s consequent departure from the premiership meant not only that all chance of an alliance with the middle classes was lost but also that they no longer had any use for working-class agitation, thus proving that the attitude of the ACLL towards Chartism had always been deeply cynical. Three significant events in 1847–8, however, led to a significant revival of Chartism, if never at the level of the peak period 1839–42. First, 1847 saw a sharp reverse in prosperity, with the price of staples rising rapidly. In 1843–5 wheat prices never rose higher than 51s 3d per quarter, as against the crisis years of 1838–41 when Chartism was at its apogee and the average price was 64s 4d. But in 1847 the price per quarter suddenly soared to 69s 9d.62 At the same time there was a crisis in the cotton industry of Manchester, with only one-third of the 1841 factory labour force in the city still in work in 1847, and also in the textile trade in the Midlands. Abdundant US harvests in 1845–6 came to an end just when there was a general downturn in demand. Storm clouds were evident when bank rate shot up from 5 per cent to 8 per cent. Those industries hit by the trade cycle or under pressure from mass production elsewhere were disproportionately represented in Chartism, so militancy increased.63 Secondly, the 1847 general election took place without significant Chartist gains or, in some cases, involvement. Between 1839 and 1848 eighteen different Chartist candidates actually contested parliamentary elections, but the usual tactic of the National Central Registration and Election Committee (NCREC), apart from enfranchising a few Chartists or paying election candidates’ expenses, was to put up hustings candidates to demonstrate the farce of the electoral system. Such candidates would easily win a majority by public acclaim and then withdraw just before the real election, held under the limited franchise. The Chartists always won on the show of hands, and then the candidates who had lost democratically won on the restricted formal poll.64 Yet there were many complaints that the O’Connorites had lost interest in the election since they had become so obsessed with the Land Plan. The exiguous resources of the NCREC were contrasted with what seemed like the lavish funding available for the Land Plan. This was certainly true of O’Connor, who had been entered as a formal candidate at Nottingham, but by a fluke he emerged the winner there and so, after twelve years, was again an MP with a platform in Parliament.65 Otherwise the results of the 1847 election were very much a mixed bag. Nine radical or liberal candidates endorsed by the NCREC were elected, but this was just nine out of the hoped-for (and expected) thirty. There were none at all in Scotland, showing that the movement was virtually extinct there.
The third factor in the Chartist revival was probably the most important of all. In 1847 Daniel O’Connell died, opening up an opportunity for new leadership and a change of direction in the Irish party. The Liberator’s last years had not been happy. In October 1843 he called for a mass meeting at Clontarf, one of the sacred sites of Irish history, to demand repeal of the Act of Union; it was expected that millions would attend. The authorities banned the meeting and announced they would use force to break it up if it was held. To avoid bloodshed O’Connell called it off, but was rewarded for this signal act of loyalty to the English Establishment by being charged with conspiracy to alter the constitution by force. He was found guilty, but the sentence was quashed on appeal. The debacle at Clontarf, followed by seeing their leader hauled before the courts, was too much for the Irish. O’Connell lost caste and by his death was a discredited figure.66 His demise opened up the possibility for new alignments in Irish politics, and particularly for an Irish–Chartist alliance; O’Connell had often boasted that he had ‘saved’ England by holding the detested Chartists at arm’s length. All O’Connell’s methods were a demonstrable failure: loyalty to the British Crown, non-violence and especially (in the light of the famine) deference to the ‘market’. Here surely was an opportunity for O’Connor to bid for the Irish leadership and bring about the alliance of the English proletariat and the Irish so dreaded by the English authorities. The English media were sufficiently alarmed to run frequent articles talking scathingly of the ‘nuptials of Chartism and Repeal’.67 But the marriage of convenience never happened. O’Connor was too busy with his Land Plan to turn his attention to Irish affairs and, in any case, he had nothing to offer. The dreadful tragedy of the Great Famine was by this time devastating Ireland. The dying O’Connell had no solutions to this catastrophe and neither had O’Connor. The power vacuum in Ireland was quickly filled by the anti-O’Connellite faction known as Young Ireland. These men detested O’Connell at a personal level as a weak and ineffective leader but, until the year of revolution in Europe in 1848 gave them other ideas, were committed to pacific solutions to Ireland’s problems.68 They were opposed to the entire tradition of republican, ultra-democratic, insurrectionary nationalism, as typified by the United Irishmen and the great revolt of 1798. O’Connor by contrast was an admirer of the ‘martyrs’ Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet. Besides, an alliance with the Chartists would bring Irishmen in England to the fore, and these, mainly based in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, were the most fire-eating and insurrectionist of the Chartists.69 Ireland in 1847 was pulled in at least three different directions: towards Young Ireland; towards O’Connor and Chartism; and, not insignificantly, towards the temperance movement headed by Father Theobald Matthew (signing the pledge), which by the mid-1840s had signed up some 3 million people (more than half the adult population). Although some Irishmen deserted the O’Connellites for Chartism, attracted by O’Connor’s frequent assertion that Ireland’s problems lay deeper than repeal and that the issues of Eire and Chartism were really two horns on the same ram, others inclined to political quietism, since neither O’Connell nor Young Ireland seemed to have a clue what to do about the island’s most pressing crisis: the famine. Still others saw that a union of Chartism and Ireland would be fissiparous, since Chartism was essentially a movement of the industrial proletariat while the key social class in Ireland was the peasantry.70
Nevertheless, although the new bearings in Ireland would eventually come to nothing, the absence of O’Connell seemed to open up myriad possibilities and gave the Chartists heart. Meanwhile the economic downturn in England accelerated discontent, and this was raised to a new pitch during the particularly harsh winter of 1847–8, when influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia, typhus, measles and scarlatina were all at near-epidemic levels.71 The working class was already in a combustible state when a match was thrown onto the pyre in the form of an outbreak of revolution in Paris in February 1848, which ousted Louis Philippe and set the tone for what would be a famous year of revolutions in Europe. Despite the scepticism of the Hungarian nationalist leader Lajos Kossuth, who regarded the events of February 1848 in France as a mere intra-elite transfer of power as against a ‘real’ revolution such as the one in 1789, most historians since have seen February 1848 as the inchoate form of a potentially seismic transformation in France, and certainly light years ahead of 1830, which merely replaced ‘a Bourbon with a baboon.’72 The Chartist leadership were already collecting signatures for a third petition to be presented to Parliament, having judged that the change in circumstances in 1847 justified another change of tactics. They were particularly encouraged by what seemed to be, from the evidence of the 1847 election, a renewed middle-class interest in Chartism, though the truth was that any favourable signs in that election repres
ented the misinterpetation of an anti-Tory protest vote. Nevertheless, the February revolution in Paris seemed at once to add urgency to Chartist endeavours and to suggest that there was a new spirit abroad which might waft its way to England. It is unquestionable that while the ruling classes were momentarily stunned by events across the Channel, the Chartists were euphoric, convinced that their hour was about to come.73 Once again the rank and file and the leadership were out of step. Although most Chartist meetings held to congratulate the French revolutionaries passed off peacefully, in Glasgow city centre there were serious riots and clashes between looters and cavalry which left two rioters dead. More ominously, there were serious disturbances in London on 6 and 13 March. A three-day riot followed a reform meeting in Trafalgar Square, which was hijacked by ‘physical force’ Chartists on the 6th, and a week later there was a violent outbreak in Camberwell.74 Chartist rhetoric became more insurrectionary. The ruling classes were warned that a third petition was about to be presented and it was broadly hinted that if this one received the contemptuous treatment of its two predecessors, armed rebellion and civil war would be the consequence. The date set for handing in the petition to Parliament was 10 April 1848. The plan was for a mass demonstration on Kennington Common followed by a procession to Downing Street.75
The government hit back by introducing a new law making seditious speech a felony. This time, unlike in 1839 and 1842, the police invoked moribund statutes to turn the screw on the demonstrators. It was declared illegal for more than twenty people to present a petition to the House of Commons or to hold a meeting within one mile of Westminster Hall; additionally the meeting on Kennington Common was declared illegal. The Whigs intended to call O’Connor’s bluff as spectacularly as they had called O’Connell’s at Clontarf five years earlier.76 The Chartists at first appeared unfazed. There was a kind of dress rehearsal on Kennington Common in March 1848, and on 4 April a series of militant speeches threatened an armed reponse to any attempt at government repression. It was announced that if the third petition was rejected, the NCA would call on the queen to dissolve Parliament, with any new government pledged to implement the Charter.77 The item in these speeches that most alarmed the government was the appeal to all Irish in London to support the third petition and thus to secure reforms which would have prevented the deaths of at least a million souls in the Great Famine.78 The participation of the Irish, enraged and vengeful after the famine, particularly alarmed the elite. They knew from their spies that Chartism was now closely linked to the situation in Ireland (the palmy days of the deferential and collaborationist O’Connell were over) and that Young Ireland now viewed a rising in England as essential to its own plans. What they most feared was a ‘perfect storm’ of a Chartist revival, a radicalised Ireland and the revolutionary example of Paris in February.79 They had some grounds for their fears. The Irish made up 5 per cent of the industrial proletariat in England and, given that by no means all workers were Chartists whereas the Irish were rock solid behind the Chartists, this made them an important element. Moreover, as it turned out, the Irish played a significant role in the great demonstration on 10 April 1848.80 The combination of both realistic and unrealistic fears led some people, even those highly placed, to panic. Queen Victoria, unpersuaded by her ministers that they had the situation in hand, decamped to her eyrie on the Isle of Wight on 8 April.81 The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray thought that revolution was imminent, and he was by no means the only one.82
Shrewder observers, however, and those in the know at the highest reaches of government, were confident that the Whig administration could see off any Chartist challenge, even an armed one. The composer Hector Berlioz, visiting London, expressed a typically Gallic contempt for the Chartists’ potential as revolutionaries; the would-be insurgents, he said, knew ‘as much about starting a riot as the Italians about writing a symphony’.83 Lord John Russell, the prime minister, was supremely confident that he could handle any set of emergency contingencies and had so much aplomb that he originally wanted to allow the Chartist procession to cross the Thames and present the petition to the House of Commons, but he was argued, or more properly, nagged and chivvied, out of this stance. The ‘nervous Nellies’ wanting a blanket ban on 10 April included Sir James Graham, C. E. Trevelyan at the Treasury, The Times and the Duke of Wellington.84 By this time the hero of Waterloo was in his late seventies, in the early stages of dementia and a veritable Jekyll and Hyde figure, notorious at this stage for his violently volatile moods. Wellington always portrayed himself as the man who had stood virtually alone against the Chartists in 1848, a latter-day Horatio on the bridge: ‘I was ready,’ he declared. ‘I could have stopped them whenever you liked, and if they had been armed it would have been all the same.’ The government humoured him and allowed him to think he was the supreme director of operations while getting quietly on with the job without him. As has been well said: ‘The Duke, in these last years of his life, tended towards a highly coloured view of the risks confronting the realm.’85 Russell’s real secret weapon was not the Iron Duke but a highly efficient police and espionage system, which kept him informed of every nuance of Chartist intentions until 10 April. He was tipped off the day before the meeting that the Chartists wanted at all costs to avoid a flat-out confrontation with the government.86 Russell’s only worry was what the public reaction to massive civilian casualties would be if his troops were forced to open fire. As one of the most sober and realistic observers of April 1848 remembered it: ‘There were no arms in London in April 1848, no persons were drilled, no war organisation existed, and no intention of rising anywhere. The government knew it, for they had spies everywhere. They knew it as well or better than in 1839.’87
By April 1848 the London proletariat, which in previous confrontations with the government had played almost no part, finally came out unambiguously for the Charter. The irony about the plans for Kennington Common was that on this occasion the Chartist leadership did not coordinate them with demonstrations of risings elsewhere in the country. Having previously neglected the capital, the leaders now neglected the provinces. Nevertheless, at a convention held on 4 April to make final arrangements for Kennington Common, there was euphoria mixed with sober-sided realism. O’Connell’s debacle at Clontarf was in the forefront of minds, and speaker after speaker urged the importance of avoiding another dismal rerun of the Liberator’s most humiliating hour. There was the usual chasm between ‘moral force’ and ‘physical force’ advocates, with Ernest Jones urging armed confrontation with the authorities, O’Brien recommending bowing the head and accepting the government’s demands 100 per cent, and O’Connor, as usual, the man in the middle. Worried about bloodshed, O’Connor felt he had signalled his pacific intentions clearly enough to the ruling class, since if he had intended violent revolution, he would not have held a mass meeting south of the river, allowing government troops to hold all the bridges and deny them access to central London; on the other hand, a venue at Trafalgar Square or Hyde Park might have hinted at an attempt at revolution.88 O’Connor was certainly wise to tread carefully, for in April 1848, even more than in 1839 and 1842, the government brought all its massive resources to bear on the problem. The Russell administration enjoyed at least two major strokes of good fortune. Several regiments of crack troops happened to be on home leave from imperial service at this very moment. This meant that, all told, the government had 33,738 soldiers on hand in Great Britain and another 28,942 in Ireland, as against, respectively, 26,345 and 13,112 in 1839–40.89 Technology too was on the side of the forces of law and order. The railway network had expanded considerably in the 1840s – the great boom period (which Dickens’s Dombey and Son pays eloquent testimony to) – and this increased the efficiency of the army exponentially. Whereas in 1839–40 a battalion of troops would take seventeen days’ marching to get from London to Manchester (or vice versa) and would arrive exhausted, by 1848 it would take just nine hours by train and the men would arrive fresh and ready for action.9
0 Early in April Russell stationed 7,122 troops in London and brought in another 500 on the morning of 10 April; 12 heavy guns were transported from Woolwich and put on emplacements guarding the bridges. Having learned from the uprising in Paris in February, the government was determined that no buildings should be occupied by demonstrators, as these could serve as rallying points or oases for rest and recreation, allowing insurgents to fight in relays. In this regard the British Museum became something of an obsession for the government, since its researchers informed it that if the museum fell into Chartist hands it could be turned into a fortress capable of housing 10,000 armed defenders.91
