by M. J. Trow
It was raining and dark by the time the Pentrich rebels reached Codnor. Here they were refused entry to a house by its feisty mistress, Mrs Hepworth, and in fury, Brandreth fired his pistol through the window, killing a servant, Robert Walters. For a while, Brandreth’s rhetoric and promises kept the band together. The plan was to storm the Butterley Iron Works, one of the biggest employers in the area, and make pikes and other weapons from the stock there. The owners would object; the owners would be killed. Each village was ‘to kill its own vermin’ and Brandreth even had a marching song for them, much quoted at his trial –
Every man his skill must try,
He must turn out and not deny;
No bloody soldier must he dread,
He must turn out and fight for bread.
The time is come you plainly see,
The government opposed must be.
‘The Marseillaise’ it was not, but its lyrics were revolutionary enough to see Brandreth hanged. He promised his followers, because Oliver had promised him, that the entire country would rise. One witness at his trial talked of ‘the Northern clouds, men from the North would come down and sweep all before them and every man that refused would be shot’.6 And in London, the Tower had already been taken and the keys handed over to the local Hampden Club. None of this, of course, was true; the men of Pentrich were on their own.
And some of them (who had not already crept home on that mad, wet night) may have been genuinely amazed to find that there was no Provisional Government already set up in Nottingham. On the contrary, there was just the army and the insurrection fizzled out.
A total of forty-six men were rounded up over the next few days and put on trial at Derby by special commission in October. In accordance with the usual procedure, each of the alleged four ringleaders – Brandreth, Turner, Ludlam and Weightman – was tried separately, the same jury (by and large) deciding all four cases. As in the Watson/Thistlewood trial, the big guns were brought in, both on the Bench and for the prosecution. Lord Chief Baron Richards presided, along with Mr Justice Dallas, Abbot and Holroyd. The Attorney-General and Solicitor-General led a team of eight as opposed to the defence’s meagre two, Denman and Cross.
The defence did their best and much of the argument, as in Watson’s case, revolved around the semantics of what was an insurrection and what was a riot. Cross in particular tried hard to put the whole thing in perspective – ‘Now there, Gentlemen, ends the history of the war against the great king of England in the year of our Lord 1817’ – but the jury weren’t buying it. They found Brandreth guilty in twenty-five minutes. One by one, Turner, Ludlam and Weightman followed suit, the deliberation period getting less and less each time. In the case of the others, they were advised to plead guilty and did so, receiving sentences of anything from transportation for life to six months’ imprisonment, depending on their actual role in the rising. In a rare moment of humanity, the court took pity on the last group sentenced. They were very young and mostly siblings of the more serious offenders. ‘Go home,’ snarled the judge, ‘and thank your God for His mercy.’
The defence put out dark hints during the trial of William Turner. ‘One assumes’, said Cross, and no one took him up on it, ‘that Mr Oliver is at the bottom of this.’ In the trial of Isaac Ludlam, he said:
the leader [Brandreth] himself was deceived and he was also in other hands. Why is a veil still spread before the mysterious machinery which sets the lower agents in motion?
In Turner’s trial, Denman raised a similar note, that there was someone ‘behind the curtain’ – ‘Who and what is he who set the machinery in motion? Gentlemen, there is something hid in mystery.’
There was – his name was W J Richards aka Oliver the Spy. On the gallows, as Brandreth waited to die, he had the sangfroid to shout to the Derby crowd, ‘God be with you all and Lord Castlereagh.’ William Turner, with the noose around his neck growled, ‘This is all Oliver and the Government.’ The editor of the Leeds Mercury exposed Oliver as early as June and it may well be that the jury in the London Watson case, having read all this, were influenced to find for the defendant, especially as the other spy, John Castle, was so blatantly a rogue.
Earl Fitzwilliam, the Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, wrote, fuming, to Sidmouth, stating plainly that without Oliver there would have been no trouble on his patch at all. Sidmouth, of course, in the time-honoured tradition of central government, denied that Oliver was anything but a reporter of events and that, in fomenting insurrection, he had exceeded his brief. Few people believed him then and fewer still today. What is different is the contemporary reaction to men like Castle and Oliver. The whole notion of undercover and preventative forces was alien and repugnant to Englishmen of every social class. When Robert Peel’s government introduced a plain clothes detective branch at Scotland Yard in 1842, there was a huge outcry; the whole thing was so sneaky, dishonest and un-British.
Oliver was not called at the Derby trials because the government realized that Castle’s appearance in court had been so lamentable; they would follow the same policy in the Cato Street affair three years later. A whole rash of acquittals followed as a result of Oliver’s exposure. The radical editors Wooler and Hone were acquitted on charges of seditious libel. Would-be revolutionaries in Glasgow and Folley Hall likewise won their freedom. A charge of sedition brought by the Lord Advocate, Alexander Maconochie, collapsed in July with lenient sentences, acquittals and counter-charges of bribery to secure a government verdict. This did not prevent Cruikshank producing his brilliant ‘Liberty Suspended’ cartoon, showing the pale, dead body of a female dangling from a gibbet on which the officials of church and state are pontificating. Around the gallows is a ring of the Life Guards with swords drawn.
Most worryingly for the government, the ‘singular baseness, the detestable infamy’ of Oliver drew the moderates and extremists together. The editor of the Gorgon wrote on 27 June 1818:
They who passed the Gagging Act . . . were such miscreants that could they have acted thus in a well-ordered community they would all have been hanged . . .
When, in 1820, Brandreth’s defence counsel, Mr Denman, was asked why he had not called Oliver as a defence witness, he admitted that his evidence would have been too incriminating and that he could not cross-examine in the usual way. Most radicals in the country believed that Mr Cross had been bought off by the authorities not to introduce Oliver into the proceedings.
Before her husband’s execution, Ann Brandreth wrote to him in a letter he never saw: ‘If you have (which is the general opinion) been drawn in by that wretch Oliver, forgive him and leave him to God and his own conscience.’
Jeremiah Brandreth, the Nottingham Captain, became a martyr to the people after all, the very thing the government had feared. Radicals like Hunt and Cobbett hailed him as a hero; so did Shelley, writing some of his bitterest poetry at this time. Oliver became synonymous with corruption and government intrigue, with everything that was wrong with the country in the years after Waterloo.
But worse was to come.
Chapter 8
Bloody Fields
They came in their thousands, from Lees, from Saddleworth and from Moseley. The discontented and the dispossessed, spinners and weavers from Middleton, Boarshaw, Hopwood, Chadderton and Back O’ the Brow. Men, women and children, wearing (if they owned such a thing) their Sunday best, even though it was Monday.
It was 19 August 1819. For eleven of them, it would be the last day of their lives.
If we look, as we must, for a motive behind the Cato Street conspirators’ bizarre enterprise, we should see it in part as an act of revenge. Because, in the short term at least, and in the area where it happened, there was no revenge.
Manchester, by the hot, dry summer of 1819 was huge. Together with nearby Oldham it boasted over 95,000 inhabitants, the poorest the Irish who lived in water-logged cellars on the edge of still open spaces like St Peter’s Fields. Nearly a third of that population – half of the able-bodied adul
ts – worked in the city’s sixty mills, most of which were given over to spinning. The fastest growing of the English industrial sprawls, Manchester was on its way to becoming the cottonopolis, a centre of rich magnates and civic pride. It was also acquiring a reputation, along with Nottingham, Sheffield and London, as a dangerous radical centre. Later in the century, the hugely influential Anti-Corn Law Association would be born here, as would the Trades Union Congress.
If the Manchester spinners were already wage-slaves, working sixteen hours a day in stifling, unsafe conditions and living in unhygienic slums which would soon kill thousands of them, the weavers were in a more desperate situation. About 40,000 handloom weavers lived and worked supposedly as independents in the outlying villages, but as we saw in Chapter 2, their day had gone. Whole families were now subsisting on 12 shillings a week and yet the Corn Laws kept the cost of their staple diet sky high. The old Poor Law simply could not cope.
The radicals in the area understood their plight and as elsewhere, were doing their bit to alleviate distress. As we have seen, the first Hampden Club outside London was set up at Royton in 1816; this was only nine miles from Manchester. The grand old man of local radical politics was John Knight, who was arrested in 1812 for holding a seditious meeting. The thirty-nine men involved got off, but it was a warning shot over the bows in a cold war between radicals and loyalists that was about to get hot.
Samuel Bamford was another local leader, better known than the others because of his brilliant memoirs which inform our knowledge of the place and time. A weaver from Middleton, Bamford was highly articulate (though not much of a poet) and well educated. Like many of his contemporaries he was a devotee of Cobbett’s Political Register and a man with his finger on the pulse of local grievances.
There were all shades of reformers in Manchester, from the mild tinkerers with outmoded medieval by-laws to Spenceans who probably advocated outright revolution. Most men – and there was a strong female voice in Manchester too – opted either for trade union activity or parliamentary reform. Both of these were likely to be slow and unsure, but increasingly, as the summer of 1819 arrived, the authorities in the area became convinced that every working man was bent on revolution.
Ranged against the radicals in Manchester were the cotton magnates and they were spearheaded by largely high Tory, largely Anglican magistrates like James Norris and the Reverends William Hay and Charles Ethelston. The extent of Ethelston’s Christianity can be gauged by a line from one of his sermons: ‘Some of the reformers ought to be hanged and some of you are sure to be hanged – the rope is already round your necks.’1
Arguably the real power in the city was Joseph Nadin, from 1803 Deputy Constable in charge of sixty men. The only portrait of him shows a bull-necked, broken-nosed man with a permanent sneer. The people hated him. ‘Nady Joe’ was one of the last in a long line of thief-takers who walked a tightrope between legality and illegality. In a microcosm of what the central government was doing with its spies, stirring up and entrapping otherwise honest men, Nadin would regularly plant stolen goods on people and arrest them. He had virtually unlimited powers of arrest and took a rake-off from the city’s forty-seven brothels. His language appalled many, even those not of Manchester’s chapel and church going fraternity. He was corruption writ large and has been immortalized in a song of the time.
With Hunt we’ll go, we’ll go,
With Hunt we’ll go, we’ll go,
We’ll bear the flag of liberty,
In spite of Nady Joe.
The radicals of Manchester watched events in London closely and, after Spa Fields, activity in the area quietened down for a while, although the city did get its most fearless radical newspaper the following year in the form of the Manchester Observer run by Joseph Johnson, a brushmaker, and John Saxton, from the cotton trade.
Simmering under the surface was the Ardwick conspiracy, which broke at the end of March. Taking a leaf out of Watson’s and Thistlewood’s book, the plan was to burn the city, rescue prisoners from the New Bailey gaol and to join with other groups that, it was generally believed, would be doing the same thing across the country. The Leeds Mercury described this as ‘a paper insurrection’ in that there was no actual trouble. Even so, Nadin arrested Samuel Bamford and Dr Healey and they, with six others, were taken by coach in leg-irons to Coldbath Fields in London. No charges were levied, but since habeas corpus was still suspended, this hardly mattered.
In a fascinating glimpse of ‘us v. them’, Bamford and Healey were interrogated by the Privy Council. Bamford found Sidmouth very affable, with ‘mild and intelligent eyes’. He was ‘much more encouraging to freedom of speech than I had expected’. For all Bamford was an impressive figure, a man of courage and resolution, he was also at heart a weaver. It does not seem to have occurred to him that Sidmouth was being affable and encouraging in the hope that Bamford would say something self-incriminating which might hang him. When Healey’s heavy Lancashire accent was incomprehensible to their Lordships they asked him to write his name down. Virtually illiterate, he couldn’t, so he gave them his medical card instead. Some wag had filled in what was actually a prescription form with the words ‘200 tablespoonsful each 2 hours’. The Privy Council had a ‘great titter’ at this and Healey laughed too. A moment’s reflection should have assured him that he was being laughed at and not with.
In January 1818 habeas corpus was restored, but the government quickly passed the Indemnity Bill so that no one who had been held during the suspension of habeas corpus could sue for redress. As always the oligarchy of gentlemen who ruled the country had hedged themselves in with total legal protection. In Manchester there was a wave of strikes among the spinners and, although no rational man could doubt that was an economic issue, the local magistrates saw it differently. ‘The lower classes are radically corrupted,’ wrote Ethelston. ‘Their aim is revolution.’ And Sidmouth, neither as mild nor as intelligent as Bamford believed, agreed.
It is impossible for the Secretary of State to contemplate with indifference the danger likely to result . . . from the existence . . . of large bodies of men, exposed to the harangues of disaffected demagogues.
What struck the authorities at the local level was the excellent behaviour of the strikers. ‘The peaceable demeanour of so many thousand unemployed men is not natural,’ observed Major-General Byng, believing that some sinister Machiavellian force was behind this new-found obedience and organization. When women joined the increasing number of mass meetings, this too was taken as a sinister front, not unlike Watson’s and Thistlewood’s use of girls to distract the garrison of the Tower.
Early in 1819, the local radicals wrote to Henry Hunt inviting him to speak on distress, the Corn Laws, universal suffrage, his usual themes, on St Peter’s Fields on 18 January. This time Hunt suggested that a Remonstrance rather than a futile Petition be sent to the Prince Regent. About 10,000 turned up, the meeting was peaceful and at the dinner which followed, at the Spread Eagle, the toasts included ‘The Rights of Man . . . the immortal memory of Tom Paine . . . the venerable father of reform, Major Cartwright . . . our banished countryman William Cobbett’ and, rather incongruously, ‘the beautiful Lancashire witches’.2
There was a little trouble that night when Hunt attended the Theatre Royal. When the crowd recognized him he was given a standing ovation and found himself thrown out into the street by officers of the 7th Hussars, stationed in the city. The fact that Hunt was a gentleman who had raised his own militia company counted for nothing. By appearing as the darling of the mob he was lumped together, like all radicals as a ‘libellous, seditious, factious, levelling, revolutionary, republican, democratical, aetheistical villain’.
By the summer of 1819, tensions were growing in the area. In June, at Stockport, 20,000 people attended to hear Sir Charles Wolseley, who had witnessed the storming of the Paris Bastille, say, ‘and Heaven knows I would assist in storming the English Bastille’. It was not the first (or last) time that oratory go
t a little out of hand. Some people in the crowd may have taken Wolseley’s words literally; all the authorities did. Magistrates, led by Norris, stepped up police patrols. Nadin’s men seemed everywhere, listening at doorways, rummaging for hidden stashes of pikes3 and particularly reporting on the increasing amount of drilling that was going on on local heaths and moorlands. There was actually nothing sinister in this. Anxious to avoid the image of a shifty, restless mob, many of the working class had followed the dictum of Bamford and others, to march briskly on and off the chosen meeting venue and to stand silently to attention while listening to speeches. Schoolchildren, after all, were drilled in the same way. But so, too, were soldiers. And if Nadin’s men could not see any weapons, they were only prepared to put the worst configuration of what they were witnessing.
While the panicky authorities sanctioned the setting up of the Armed Association for the Preservation of Public Peace, composed of the magistrates, the borough reeves and the constables, the radicals invited their darling again for 9 August.
In fact, a whole series of mass meetings served to unnerve the magistrates. On 12 July an estimated 30,000 met at Newhall Hill in Birmingham to listen to Major Cartwright and Thomas Wooler of the Black Dwarf. A week later, at Hunslet, near Leeds, another meeting was held, well attended despite the fact that this was lunchtime on a Monday, when most loom and jenny operatives should have been hard at work. At Smithfield, London on the 21st, Hunt addressed a large crowd and terrified the authorities by saying that
from and after the 1st day of January 1820 we cannot, conscientiously, consider ourselves as bound in equity by any future enactments which may be made by any persons styling themselves our representatives, other than those who shall be fully, freely and fairly chosen by the voices and votes of the largest proportion of the members of the state.
