by M. J. Trow
This was unbridled democracy, to all of the authorities the most appalling scenario imaginable. It is very likely that Arthur Thistlewood and some at least of his Cato Street conspirators were present at this meeting.
Back in Manchester, by August, the magistrates were now thoroughly rattled. The Observer advertised Hunt’s meeting of the 9th and the authorities, on Home Office advice, cautioned people not to attend in that the meeting was illegal.4 There was, of course, nothing illegal about meetings of that type. Only if a resolution was passed that Manchester should select its own MPs (in 1819 they had none) could the meeting be declared illegal, speakers arrested and the crowd dispersed. Until that happened, no law would have been broken.
In the event, Hunt’s meeting was postponed until 16th, a Monday, which effectively gave both sides time to prepare. The loyalist and radical press attacked each other in print. ‘They began this way’, warned the Manchester Mercury, ‘in the French Revolution . . . they ended, by sinking into a tyranny more galling than that which they had endured.’ Hunt, for the radicals, wrote of the forthcoming meeting:
Our enemies will seek every opportunity, by means of their sanguinary agents, to excite a Riot, that they may have a pretence for spilling our blood . . .5
Prophetic words.
The morning of Monday 16 August was dry and bright. Between 8 and 9, all over the outlying parishes, thousands of men, women and children, with hand-embroidered banners streaming overhead, made their way to the agreed assembly points and began the march to St Peter’s Fields. Some flags were white, others green and red with inscriptions like ‘Universal Suffrage’, ‘Election by Ballot’, ‘Liberty is the Birthright of Man’. The grimmest – and no doubt the one the authorities eyed most carefully – was Dr Healey’s from Saddleworth – a black square with the stark white letters ‘Equal Representation or Death’.
‘There is no fear,’ Bamford roared to his own Middleton contingent, ‘for this day is our own.’
The Stockport column reached the field first. Perhaps 1,500 strong, they carried a cap of liberty and two banners. Eye-witness John Smith, watching the events from Mount Street that led onto the Fields, felt easier when he saw little children in the crowd, walking quietly with their parents. When Henry Hunt arrived, famous white hat gleaming in the sun, in an open-topped barouche, a huge cheer went up. With him was Mrs Fildes of the Manchester Female Reformers and a huge procession. The band from Royton struck up ‘Rule Britannia’.
By a little after midday everyone was ready. The estimates vary. Hunt, who had never addressed so large a meeting as this, assumed there were 200,000 there. Magistrate Thomas Tatton believed 30,000 nearer the truth. The Times later reported between 80,000 and 100,000. Today, the general consensus is 60,000 – an astonishing one-sixth of Lancashire’s population and this probably did not include the mildly curious who had followed the processions out of sheer nosiness from the Exchange and Deansgate.
We will never know how inflammatory Hunt’s speech was going to be or whether the huge crowds would have lifted his oratory to new heights, because he never made it. To one side of the Field, on a balcony of a house belonging to a Mr Buxton in Mount Street, the magistrates watched the growing spectacle with little short of terror. They did not see the women, the children, the lack of weaponry. They missed entirely the patriotic airs of the bands and the holiday atmosphere. All they saw was the mob.
All weekend they had been psyching up for this moment and made the fatal decision to arrest Hunt and the others now mounting the hustings in the centre of the Fields – John Knight, John Saxton, Mrs Fildes, Richard Carlile (up from London for the occasion) and, if they didn’t get out of the way in time, various journalists up there with them. The chain of command was shaky. The magistrates scribbled a quick affidavit, signed by thirty loyalists at Buxton’s house, to give them carte blanche to arrest Hunt. This was passed to Edward Clayton, the borough reeve, who in turn summoned Joe Nadin. The thief-taker told him flatly that it was impossible to arrest Hunt from the podium, especially with the untrained special constables he had with him that day. It was probably a sensible decision from a police point of view. Nadin was well aware how hated he was. The sight of him pulling Hunt down from his pedestal would probably have provoked a riot immediately. But it now meant that the magistrates had to resort to the army.
The build-up of tension in the area over the previous weeks had given the magistrates plenty of time to call up the military, but again the chain of command broke down. The ever-sensible Sir John Byng was at York, so his number two, Lieutenant-Colonel Guy L’Estrange, was left to command at Manchester. Under him were: eight troops of the 15th King’s Hussars who had arrived at the end of July; both battalions of the 88th Foot and six companies of the 31st. He had a detachment of the Royal Horse Artillery under Major Dyneley, a die-hard psychopath, with two six-pounder guns. He also had all troops of the Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry and three of the most local unit, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry (MYC).
And that was the problem. The Manchester Observer had written scathingly of this unit:
The yeomanry are generally speaking the fawning dependants of the great, with a few fools and a greater proportion of coxcombs who imagine they acquire considerable importance by wearing regimentals.
They were middle-class men (they had to be able to afford their horses and uniforms) who detested the working class and used every opportunity to keep such riff-raff in their place. On the other hand, they were appallingly part-time, without the training or skill to handle the kind of sensitive crowd control needed for a day like this. Ostentatiously, the regiment had sent its sabres to be sharpened only the previous week.
It may have been an unintentional over-reaction, but a separate note was sent to Major Trafford of the MYC independent of the one sent to L’Estrange. Accordingly, Trafford ordered his number two, Captain Hugh Hornby Birley, to mount his troops and get to the field to arrest Hunt. The first fatality of the day occurred off the field in fact. Alone of all the troops positioned at various places in Manchester that day, Trafford had allowed his men into pubs and the unit that left Pickford’s Yard was late. One of them, who may have gone off to relieve himself, found the Yard empty and galloped off down Cooper Street, hoofs clattering on the cobbles, accoutrements jingling and sent Ann Fildes6 and her child flying. Two-yearold William’s skull was smashed on the cobblestones.
It was 20 to 2 when the yeomanry arrived on the field. Various accounts, both modern and contemporary, refer to them galloping, but this is unlikely, given the size of the crowd and the space involved. Later radical cartoons all showed racing horses, one in particular with the MYC portrayed as overfed ‘Piccadilly butchers’ wielding axes.
In fact the MYC carried the 1796 pattern Light Cavalry sword, heavy and curved. It was 33 inches long and weighed 2 lbs 2 oz. Designed for use from the saddle, in the right hands it was every bit as murderous as an axe.7 The Manchester and Salford men wore dark blue Light Dragoon uniforms with white facings and black leather shakos. One of the men who came in for particular opprobrium that day was the trumpeter Edward Meagher, partly no doubt because he was so visible. Trumpeters wore white uniforms and rode grey horses.
There was only a narrow avenue through the crowd to the hustings and the conventional cavalry advance was conducted in line abreast. Unfamiliar with this situation, the MYC tried to follow Nadin and his constables down the avenue and found their formation broken. Panicking, with a sea of disbelieving and then hostile faces around them, the yeomen began to hack with their sabres, their horses whinnying and rearing in complete confusion. Captain Birley got to Hunt first and tried to arrest him. Hunt was polite, but firm and refused to be arrested by anyone but a civilian officer. At the same time, he was trying to shout above the rising screams of hysteria, to defuse the already desperate situation. ‘Stand firm, my friends. They are in disorder already. This is a trick. Give them three cheers.’
With the yeomanry and the constables forming a dense
mass around the hustings, Hunt came down the steps of his own accord. Others were not so lucky – Joseph Johnson was dragged off by his ankles and Mrs Fildes, whose dress got hooked on the wagon’s nails, was hit across the body by (luckily) the flat of a yeomanry sword.
With dust eddying all around them on that sweltering day, the MYC now hacked about them in all directions. ‘Have at their flags!’ somebody shouted and with the constables intent on getting the speakers away, the unit began to rip down banners and smash the hustings.
At about this point, it looked to the watching magistrates as if the crowd was attacking the yeomanry – and probably by now, in self-defence, it was.
‘Good God, sir,’ Magistrate William Hulton screamed at L’Estrange. ‘Don’t you see they are attacking the Yeomanry? Disperse them.’
In the dust and confusion, Bamford recognized the 15th Hussars forming up at the far end of the Field. There was blood and chaos all around him. ‘Nay, Tom Shelmerdine,’ he heard an old woman say as she came face to face with a yeoman in the melee, ‘thee will not hurt me, I know.’ She had nursed him as a child. He rode over her.
‘Damn you, I’ll reform you!’ he heard another bark and, ‘Spare your lives? Damn your bloody lives.’ Men were scrambling to get their women and children to safety, but nowhere was safe.
Briefly, a cheer went up when others saw the Hussars. These were no local bully-boys with class warfare on their minds, but the heroes of Waterloo, fought four years earlier. Some accounts say the men of the 15th wore their Waterloo medals pinned to their yellow-frogged jackets. We have no clear description of this regiment on the day. The army hated ‘aiding the civil power’ and no one in the regiment would have felt much pride in what happened in Manchester. Almost certainly, the troops wore scarlet shakos and as it was high summer, grey pantaloons and no pelisses. One of the few artefacts to have survived from St Peter’s Fields is a scarlet horsehair plume from the 15th.
Again, some modern accounts say that the Hussars charged. Again, there was no room. For cavalry to reach the gallop, they need to go through the ‘walk, march, trot’ phases first, their swords ‘at the slope’ on their shoulders with the trot. There simply wasn’t the space on what was now a battlefield to manoeuvre in this way. They probably came on at a walk, perhaps rising to a trot, but the effect would have been the same. People panicked and ran, trampling each other in their blind terror, crushing people with their own body weight, hurling others down into the open cellars that ringed the field.
Outside the Friends’ Meeting House, some of the mob had found loose pieces of timber and began bashing the yeomanry with improvised sticks. The yeomanry in turn slashed with their sabres. Lieutenant Hylton Jolliffe of the 15th knocked aside the swords of two of them and yelled, ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, for shame, forbear. The people cannot get away.’
In perhaps half an hour, it was all over. Samuel Bamford surveyed the field as his shattered people stumbled back through the Manchester streets to hobble the twenty miles home, numb, shocked, unbelieving.
. . . the hustings remained, with a few broken and hewed flag staves erect and a torn and gashed banner or two drooping, whilst over the whole field were strewed the caps, bonnets, hats, shawls and shoes . . . trampled, torn and bloody. The yeomanry had dismounted – some were easing their horses’ girths, others adjusting their accoutrements; and some were wiping their sabres. Several mounds of human beings still remained as they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these still groaning – others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath and others would never breathe again . . .8
No official enquiry was ever carried out into what happened at St Peter’s Fields. John Ashton, Thomas Buckley, John Lees and William Dawson died as a result of sabre wounds, all delivered, almost certainly, by the MYC. James Crompton, William Fildes, Mary Heys, Arthur O’Neill and Martha Partington were crushed to death. For the death of Sarah Jones and William Bradshaw, no actual cause is given. Joseph Ashworth was shot by the police in the dispersal of a near-riot later that same night as the mob returned, angry and vengeful. Thomas Ashworth was a special constable who had got in the way of the yeomanry at the hustings and suffered the same fate as the rest of the dead.
Of the 420 officially injured (and there are likely to have been many more with superficial wounds) John Baker was beaten with constables’ truncheons and lost a great deal of blood. Margaret Goodwin was trampled by horses and was losing the sight of both eyes. Catherine Colman had three ribs cracked. Mary Jervis had her calf sliced off. William Butterworth had his shoulder blade smashed by a sabre and the wound would not heal. Many of them were too ill to work, including 18-year-old John Lees who had fought as a drummer boy at Waterloo. He died of his injuries over two weeks later, his back slashed in several places, his elbow bone sticking through the skin. The woman who helped lay him out said, ‘I never saw such a corpse as this in all my life.’
The leaders of the day languished in prison before their trials and Dr Healey was added to the list on 24 August. Bamford was also in the New Bailey by the 26th. Hunt was sent to Lancaster gaol, escorted personally by Nadin (who, uncharacteristically, bought him a meal en route) and the few, but effective, legal champions on the radical side swept into action. Sir Charles Wolseley stumped up the ridiculously high £1,000 bail for Hunt and two solicitors, James Harmer and Henry Dennison, brought charges against members of the MYC.
At every turn, the local authorities made life difficult. They delayed inquests on those who had died, refused to accept evidence that did not suit them and did their utmost to stifle the radical press. They thanked the MYC officially for ‘their extreme forbearance exercised when insulted and defied by the rioters’.
And what was worse – they had the backing of the government. To be fair, this was not unreserved, but even tacit acceptance of the magistrates’ actions was seen by the people as tantamount to wholesale approval. Sidmouth had been holidaying in Broadstairs when the clash happened and expressed his lily-livered congratulations that casualties had been kept to a minimum.
The Prince Regent, in one of his particularly badly judged decisions, rattled off An Important Communication to the People of England aboard the royal yacht moored off Christchurch, expressing his satisfaction with the ‘prompt, decisive and efficient measure for the preservation of public tranquillity’ observed that day.
In the real world, of justice and sanity, the Manchester Observer was first into the fray. It noted that the ‘bastard soldiers’ of the MYC were particularly targeting the women on the Field and the paper used for the first time the name ‘Peter Loo’. Not only the yeomanry but the magistrates were singled out for scorn – ‘A Friend to Order’ promised he would ‘send a ball’ to the head of Magistrate Hay in September and James Neville in the same month wrote from Liverpool:
Shame! Shame! That a clergyman should head a band of privileged murderers and invite them to acts of bloodshed and massacre.
One hundred and fifteen miles to the south of St Peter’s Fields a troop of the Warwickshire Yeomanry was clattering through Smith Street in the county town when a crowd developed, spitting at them and calling them ‘Manchester butchers’. The radical cartoonists showed the MYC sabring the crowd and a little girl with her arms raised up under the flying hoofs crying, ‘Pray, Sir, don’t kill Mammy. She only came to listen to Mr Hunt.’
Bamford wrote:
If the people were to rise and smite their enemies, was not this the time? Was every enormity to be endured and this after all? Were we still to lie down like whipped hounds, whom nothing could rouse to resistance? Were there not times and seasons and circumstances, under which the common rules of wisdom become folly, prudence became cowardice and submission became criminal? And was not the present one of these times and seasons?9
Arthur Thistlewood could not have read these words because Bamford would not write them for another thirty years. But he and the other men of Cato Street shared their sentiments and made their plans and took their chan
ce.
Chapter 9
Men of Colour
On 15 September 1819, while he was still free on bail, Henry Hunt made a triumphal entry into London. The various associations and societies turned out in force with flags, bands and horsemen. One banner was white with a black crape border, inscribed to the victims of Peterloo. In a carriage behind Hunt’s rode the heroes of Spa Fields – Watson, Thistlewood, Preston. John Keats wrote to his brother:
It would take me a whole day and a quire of paper to give you anything like detail. The whole distance from the Angel at Islington to the Crown and Anchor was lined with multitudes.1
The authorities watched all this with unease. The Manchester magistrates, realizing they had been heavy-handed to say the least, now talked themselves into believing that they had been right. Magistrate Norris wrote of St Peter’s Fields:
They came in a threatening manner – they came under the banners of death, thereby showing they meant to overturn the Government.
And a Yorkshire loyalist wrote:
I consider such meetings . . . to be nothing more or less than risings of the people; and I believe that these . . . if suffered to continue, would end in open rebellion.
There is a suggestion that Peterloo was one of those freak occurrences occasioned by a unique set of circumstances. This is nonsense. Such violence could have erupted anywhere in 1819–20 because the loyalists were terrified of the people and prepared to use excessive force against them. Some historians have tried to distance Sidmouth and the Cabinet, to imply that the Manchester authorities exceeded the ‘spirit of the Home Office’. The ‘spirit of the Home Office’ was to keep working men in their place, especially if such men cheered their heroes like Hunt or Thistlewood; or if they carried any sort of banner demanding justice. In one of the most famous radical cartoons of the Manchester massacre the cherubic face of the Prince Regent floats above the slashing yeomanry with the words ‘Cut them down, my brave boys!’ This was the general attitude of the authorities, from the highest in the land to the Manchester Bench and below.
