by Frank McLynn
In addition to the troops, the government deployed 4,000 officers of the Metropolitan Police – the new law-enforcement body founded by Peel less than twenty years earlier. Loathed and detested as class traitors by the Chartists, the ‘Peelers’ were an altogether new element in riot control – something the Chartist insurgents in the provinces had never had to face. By late summer police numbers had risen to 5,500.92 Over and above all this the government recruited able-bodied members of the middle classes as ‘special constables’. Bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, clerks and a host of ‘white-collar’ workers took an oath to defend property and uphold law and order and were issued with a badge and a truncheon. One of them was the future French emperor, Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III), on the eve of his rise to power, and whose periods in England bracketed his imperial years.93 Even more egregious examples of class treachery seemed to be provided by those members of the London working class who enrolled as ‘specials’, but it has been convincingly demonstrated that they joined up because their employers told them that otherwise they would lose their jobs.94 It is estimated that there was roughly one ‘special’ for every one-and-a-half demonstrators in London on 10 April, but this depends on a figure of about 85,000 specials on duty and 150,000 Chartists on Kennington Common.95 The numbers of specials has (implausibly) been put even higher, at 175,000–200,000 and some Chartist historian put the numbers of demonstrators higher, at 170,000–250,000.96 The final point of absurdity is reached if we take the official figures for demonstrators provided by the Metropolitan Police – a risible 15,000 – but this represents what has been well described as ‘the occupational tendency of the police to underestimate the size of popular gatherings. This is a bias shared by all in authority.’97 If we were to take seriously the police figures for the Chartists and the wilder figures for the specials we would have a ludicrous and hilarious situation where 15,000 marchers were opposed by 200,000 specials, providing a crushing ratio of 13:1 for the government, even when leaving the regular police and the military out of the picture. It is perhaps hardly surprising that so much confusion has arisen over numbers on 10 April 1848 since even the government was at a loss. Lord John Russell reported in his private correspondence that 170,000 ‘specials’ had been on duty on the ‘day of days’.98
The actual ‘confrontation’ on 10 April turned out the dampest of damp squibs. After all his rhetoric (the temptation to use the word ‘fustian’ in both senses is overwhelming), O’Connor essentially bowed his head and conceded that the government held all the cards. Before the meeting he met the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne (who had headed the Met since its foundation). Mayne told him that although the meeting on Kennington Common was technically an illegal assembly, the police would make no attempt to break it up; on the other hand, a mass procession to Westminster would be resisted with all the police and military power at the government’s disposal. Mayne later spread the canard that O’Connor seemed shaken and scared by the scale of the police preparations, but the truth is that the valetudinarian O’Connor, always under great stress, was ill again that day.99 He proceeded to Kennington Common, where he addressed a crowd acknowledged even by the Chartists themselves to be disappointingly small; some thought government intimidation had done its work well. A survey of ‘no shows’ later revealed three main categories: those who stayed at home because they were genuinely fearful of violence; ‘moral force’ Chartists, who thought the government ban had to be respected so that Chartism could retain the high moral ground; and those who took the pragmatic line that, since the threat of violence had not worked in 1839 or 1842, the government would simply call O’Connor’s bluff once again. The meeting dispersed peacefully; heavy rain in the early afternoon dissuaded any who might have been thinking of violence. The petition was then taken in three cabs to Westminster. There was no mass procession, but some Chartists drifted north of the river in dribs and drabs to view the outcome at the House of Commons.100 A massive petition, which O’Connor claimed had 5.5 million signatures, was presented to the House. All England waited tensely to see what Parliament’s response would be, for the Chartists had proclaimed often enough that the rejection of a third petition would trigger civil war. Next day a parliamentary committee reported that there were nowhere near 5 million authentic signatures on the petition, that the true figure was around 2 million (an allegedly exact count of 1,975,496). Something of a sensation was created when the committee reported that the House of Commons clerks had uncovered forgery on a massive scale, dozens of identical signatures purporting to be by different people, and hundreds of thousands of bogus signatures, some of them purporting to be by the Duke of Wellington, Victoria Rex (sic), Sir Robert Peel, etc. Not only were there large numbers of obviously fictitious names but there were also some obscene ones.101 The press took up the idea of Chartism as farce and this undoubtedly had a considerable propaganda effect. Yet several comments are in order. It is quite clear that some of the fictitious names had been added to the petition by spies and agents provocateurs. This obvious fact was pointed out by O’Connor, but his words were drowned in a cascade of Establishment derision.102 The Commons clerks had also discounted the ‘signature’ of anyone illiterate who got a proxy to sign for him and all signatures by women – which alone accounted for 8 per cent of the total. Moreover, as O’Connor pointed out, the ‘downsizing’ from 5.7 million to under 2 million could only have been an impressionistic hunch by the clerks. Only 13 of them had counted the signatures and for only 17 hours – which meant that they would have had to complete the impossible task of vetting the names of signatories at an average of 150 a minute.103 It was clear that, as had been shown over the Land Scheme, the ingenuity of the ruling class at finding dubious ways to discredit Chartism was almost inexhaustible. In any case, even if the clerks’ absurdly low figures were accepted, it still meant (with 2 million out of an adult population of 17 million) that Chartist support was double the size of the electorate and quadruple the number of the total votes cast in the general election of 1847.104
O’Connor reacted to the debacle of 10 April with a mixture of depression and fury. He had no answer to those who claimed that his advocacy of ‘physical force’ was always a sham, that he had been exposed as the emperor in his new clothes. He had done no better at Kennington Common than the much-derided O’Connell had done at Clontarf. One of O’Connor’s more maddening characteristics was an abstract insistence on the need to use violence as a reserve weapon, coupled with such a reluctance to employ it that in the end it was doubted that ‘physical force’ had any real meaning for him: the time was not right, he reiterated, but almost ex hypothesi it was never right and never could be.105 His rage manifested itself in an ill-judged challenging of a fellow MP to a duel and refusing to accept his apology in the House. In a fit of pique he also withdrew his motion to force the House to hold a committee of inquiry into the clerks’ alleged figures for the number of signatures on the petition. Some say this was the first clear sign of the dementia that would increasingly afflict him.106 The depression was surely indicated by O’Connor’s withdrawal from Chartist affairs and absence from the next national convention in May. In a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted, he went on a mission in Ireland to establish Chartism there at the very moment when both Chartism and Irish militancy were almost defunct.107 While O’Connor slunk away defeated, the euphoria of the ruling classes was boundless. Palmerston wrote to Clarendon on 11 April: ‘Things passed off beautifully yesterday, but the snake is scotched not killed.’ Prince Albert wrote to Baron Stockmar: ‘We had our revolution yesterday, and it ended in smoke.’ And to his equerry he wrote: ‘What a glorious day was yesterday for England: how mightily will this tell all over the world.’108 The middle classes spread a triumphalist and quite false view of 10 April, that middle England had rallied against the extremists and seen them off, and that the special constables, unaided by any police or troops, had ‘put down’ the rising. Just as with hindsight
everyone is omniscient, in the aftermath of a failed revolution every cowardly pipsqueak becomes a hero. The publisher, journalist and oenophile Henry Vizetelly (1820–94), a shrewd observer and eyewitness, more sapiently wrote: ‘The very people who had been almost prostrated with terror in the morning plucked up courage and laughed at what they described as their neighbours’ fears; pretending that they themselves had never for a moment believed there was reason for apprehending the faintest danger.’109 Probably the most profound reason for the failure of 10 April 1848, however it had been conducted and whoever had led it, was that London, by then a megalopolis of 3 million people was too large and too heterogeneous for a revolution to catch fire by mere rioting; a coup d’état by a dedicated cabal would have had to accompany it.110
It is the conventional view that Chartism was dead in the water by the evening of 10 April. Here is one view by a contemporary: ‘Chartism was practically at an end on the night of 10 April, and all attempts to resuscitate it were only the old story of flogging a dead horse.’111 All the evidence, however, suggests that, far from decreasing revolutionary fervour, the disappointment led to increased militancy. Lord John Russell agreed with Palmerston’s quote from Macbeth and, to extend the serpentine imagery, thought that Chartism was a movement with many heads, that a setback in London would by no means be the end of the story in the industrial north.112 In the aftermath of Kennington Common the government decided to take a ‘softly, softly’ attitude to the Chartist leaders, but were spurred into action four months later when the levels of ferment and agitation, especially in the northern cities, showed no signs of dying down. With O’Connor’s and Harney’s withdrawal from the Convention in May, the official leadership baton passed to Ernest Jones, but he was soon eclipsed by a revived figure from the past, the radical physician Peter McDouall. He had fled to France after the 1842 strike, with a £100 bounty for his capture hanging over his head, but he slipped back into the country surreptitiously in 1844 and continued to work for the movement.113 In the vacuum created by O’Connor’s and Harney’s withdrawal, he moved to centre-stage and called for the ‘final struggle’ – code for an armed uprising. Palmerston’s prediction was soon proved correct when there was serious rioting in Bradford, where there was a large Irish population. There were more grave outbreaks in London, at Clerkenwell for three days from 29 May to 1 June, and at Bishop Bonner’s Field, Bethnal Green, on 4 June. These outbreaks were scarred by ugly scenes, characterised by genuine and undeniable police brutality.114 McDouall now called for a monster demonstration followed by a national uprising; the signal for action was to be another rally in Bishop Bonner’s Field. Tensions again rose in the capital, and some thought both the atmosphere and the objective situation worse than on 10 April: ‘It was the events of Monday 12 June rather than of 10 April which proved the sterner test of the government’s resolve and capacity to subdue discontent, and led it to impose the most draconian legal and physical measures.’115 The idea of a national uprising on Whit Monday was bold, but once again depended on a level of discipline and organisation that had never been the Chartists’ strong suit; it did not help that O’Connor weighed in from the sidelines, opposing the idea of simultaneous nationwide action. McDouall pressed on with his idea of a giant rally despite a government ban, but on the day found a huge force of police and troops (4,300 officers of the Met and 5,500 soldiers, backed up with 6 big guns) awaiting him. Faced with this, McDouall could do no better than O’Connor and ordered the meeting cancelled.116 Infuriated, McDouall returned home and began plotting another uprising, this time for 18 June. The nervous strain soon told on him. He learned that his own organisation was deeply penetrated by government spies and, besides, he dared not divulge his plans in time for proper organisation lest O’Connor publicly denounce them again. Finally he admitted defeat and ordered the conspiracy postponed indefinitely.117
Further hammer blows were dealt to Chartism from the two quarters which had originally seemed to offer them much hope. Any expectations from Ireland were dashed when Young Ireland sustained a crushing debacle – the biggest flop in all the flops of 1848, the so-called turning point which failed to turn. A famous ‘battle’ in a cabbage patch on 29 July between 100 Confederates of Young Ireland and 40 police ended in something more like a traditional Saturday-night Donnybrook than a revolution. Chartism’s putative allies in the Emerald Isle ended their bid more as a laughing stock than a genuine threat, though the British ruling classes were taking no chances and continued nervous of an uprising, perhaps subsidised by sympathisers in the USA. They remembered how they had breathed a sigh of relief in 1798 at the passing of the threat from French Generals Hoche and Humbert, only to be overtaken by the far more serious indigenous rising.118 Meanwhile in France the ‘June Days’ had a demoralising effect on Chartism, for this seemed to be the Thermidorean reaction to the hopeful leftward turning taken in the February revolution. The bloodshed in Paris was indicative of what might have happened in London on 10 April or 14 June. More people were killed in the bloodbath of 24–8 June than in the entire period 1793–4; 15,000 were slain, many more perished afterwards and 20,000 were imprisoned either in France or the penal colonies overseas in what has been called ‘the greatest slave wars of modern times’, with the working class pitifully ranged against the combined weight of army, bourgeoisie and peasantry.119 In despair McDouall quit the arena, but his place in turn was taken by two other firebrands: an Irishman named David Donovan and a sixty-year-old black man, William Cufay, only five feet tall, with both legs and spine deformed from birth, and the son of an African slave. Donovan and Cufay laid plans for a joint rising in London and Manchester on 16 August, but by this time Chartist ranks were honeycombed by secret agents and informers. Police raids in Manchester nipped this attempted insurgency in the bud. Although the Cufay– Donovan plot has often been portrayed as opéra bouffe, it was far more serious than this; there was more backing for it in London than has usually been realised.120 The police coup was only just in time, for the situation in the north of England was extremely grave, with armed Chartists in Bolton, Oldham, Ashton-under-Lyne, Halifax and Bradford all waiting for the signal for a general rising which never came. The police fought pitched battles with Chartists in Halifax, Leeds and Bradford. The authorities now struck back with calculated venom. Mass arrests followed, with denial of bail terms, trials and draconian punishment. Fifteen ringleaders were handed sentences of between fifteen and twenty-four months; McDouall and Ernest Jones got two years’ jail apiece. There were sixteen sentences of transportation to Australia, including Cufay, who was transported to Tasmania. Paroled in 1856, he elected to stay on under Capricorn and died in 1870, aged eighty-two.121
By all reasonable indices the outward form of Chartism perished in 1848. The combination of troops and firepower, the determination to use force, mass arrests, the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the huge volume of spies and paid agents who infiltrated Chartist ranks made most parties to the movement despair by the end of the year. Chartism ceased to be a viable mass movement and became merely another pressure group. The leaders fell out among themselves spectacularly. Harney launched a violent verbal fusillade on O’Connor in 1849, but by then the Irishman’s increasingly erratic behaviour was common knowledge. A fourth Chartist petition in 1849 mustered only 53,816 signatures, and a Commons motion for the petition was defeated by the humiliating margin of 222–13. Sales of the Northern Star declined from the high point of 40,000 in 1839 to just 5,000 in 1849.122 In retrospect Chartist defeat in 1848 looks inevitable. The government held practically all the cards: physical force, money, the support of the media, the bureaucracy and most significant sections of the intellectual ‘clerisy’; they were in possession of all the sources of power, enjoyed a perceived political legitimacy, suffered no elite divisions and no fear of foreign invasion. Against this all Chartism could bring to bear was numbers, and not even highly organised numbers at that. Nevertheless, it was quite clear that 1848 was a decisive revolutionary moment, f
or one has only to imagine the scenario if a McDouall on one side or a Duke of Wellington on the other had been given their head. Most scholarly argument about 1848 reduces to whether it was a more serious threat to the political system than the Chartist incursions in 1839–40 and 1842 or a lesser one.123 Particularly noticeable in 1848 was the ferocious repression visited on both Chartists and the Irish via the new Treason Felony Act, introduced to buttress the existing laws of sedition and unlawful assembly. Harney commented ruefully on the government’s overt class warfare: ‘Place Fustian in the dock, let Silk Gown charge the culprit with being a “physical force” Chartist, and insinuate that he is not exactly free from the taint of “Communism”, and forthwith Broad Cloth in the jury box will bellow out: GUILTY.’124 One of the profound reasons for Chartist failure in 1848 was precisely this division of the nation along class lines. The importance of middle-class support for Chartism has long been disputed, with some seeing the movement as almost entirely proletarian and others viewing the middle-class contribution as ‘vanguard’ as of supreme importance. The truth seems to be that some members of the middle class were initially sympathetic, that without Chartist ideology they would never have campaigned on behalf of the working class, and that this was demonstrated by total bourgeois indifference once the movement declined after 1848.125 Yet even the most sympathetic members of the middle class sympathised with only a small and select part of the working class and its aspirations. In 1848 the choice was stark: back the government or support revolution. It was at this point that the entire middle class deserted Chartism, for 1848 showed ‘the closing of ranks among all those with a property stake in the country, however small that stake was’. The entire propertied sector of society – anyone with any property to defend, in a spectrum running from the ‘high’ wealthy bourgeoisie to the shopkeepers of the bourgeois variety – rallied to the government and the status quo.126
