A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Fox did not live to see either abolition or Catholic emancipation achieved. A notorious rake, gourmand and imbiber, he died in September 1806 of dropsy. The post-mortem revealed a severely hardened liver, thirty-five gallstones and over seven pints of fluid in his abdomen. Though the short-lived ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ had done next to nothing for reform, Fox’s passing was mourned by leading radicals, including John Thelwall and William Godwin. There were certainly both positive and negative repercussions for radicals in Fox’s death: on the one hand, it seemed to weaken the possibility of an alliance between reformers outside of Parliament, but on the other, it necessitated another general election, which appeared to offer radicals the chance to elect members sympathetic to reform, especially within Fox’s old constituency Westminster, with its broad ‘scot and lot’ franchise. The reform candidate, James Paull, was defeated, but polled an encouraging number of votes. When another general election was called in April 1807, after Parliament had been dissolved when the King refused to give his assent to a bill allowing Catholics to become officers in the army, Paull – whose relationship with other London radicals was seriously strained – was rather unceremoniously dumped by the Westminster Freeholders’ Club and replaced with Burdett.*

  The dispute demonstrated the fissiparous nature of London radicalism and foreshadowed later splits and disagreements, but the divisions were obscured by Burdett’s convincing victory. It was met with an ecstatic response, the religious writer and actuary William Frend warning the Whigs and Tories that a third party, ‘the Public’, would now have ‘some share in the game’. The Whig candidate, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, reportedly polled so badly that the sherrifs allowed him to double-count his votes in order to save some face.4 The former London Corresponding Society member John Gale Jones called the final day of the election, 23 May, a ‘day sacred to Freedom’.5

  By the summer of 1807, radical hopes were firmly fixed on securing greater parliamentary influence. The future leader of the marchers at Peterloo, Henry Hunt, a gentleman farmer with an estate of over three thousand acres in Wiltshire and, like his fellow farmer William Cobbett, a late convert to reform, attempted, unsuccessfully, to follow Burdett’s example in Bristol.6 Cartwright also tried to gain a seat in the Commons, and shifted his literary energies from producing populist works like Take Your Choice to targeting ministers and MPs sympathetic to reform in England’s Aegis, or the military energies of the Constitution.7 Cartwright was nonetheless disappointed with Burdett’s inactivity in Parliament, especially his refusal to sponsor a reform bill immediately. Burdett responded that he needed to win over his parliamentary colleagues first by ‘not making violent motions and acting the savage’.8 However, events in Europe soon gave fresh impetus to reform. The decision of the British government to intervene militarily to support the Spanish and Portuguese people in their uprising against Napoleon in the summer of 1808 recast British foreign policy as a crusade for freedom against French tyranny. In this context, liberty and reform could scarcely seem unpatriotic. The Peninsular War, too, provided background for the successful campaign against Prince Frederick, the Duke of York, George III’s second (and favourite) son and the Commander-in-Chief of the British army, who was charged with having sold promotions to officers who had paid bribes to his mistress, Mary Anne Clark. After intensive pressure from the Whigs, along with Burdett, the Duke was forced to resign on 17 March 1809.

  The Duke’s resignation seemed to open up the opportunity for Foxite Whigs like Samuel Whitbread, Thomas Brand, Samuel Romilly, Henry Brougham and Lord Folkestone to unite with the more populist radicals, Burdett and Thomas, Lord Cochrane (whose naval successes against the French had raised his public stock). Cartwright engineered a number of dinner meetings under the auspices of the Committee of Friends to Parliamentary Reform (founded in 1808). At the triumphal dinner held at the Crown and Anchor tavern on 1 May 1809 and attended by over twelve hundred people, many leading reformers were present, including Cartwright, Cochrane and Francis Place. However, Whitbread and Lord Folkestone did not attend. Gwyllym Lloyd Wardle, MP, who had led the attack on the Duke of York, informed the attendees that there was widespread support across the country for reform, citing fifteen thousand signatures in support from Sheffield and another four thousand from Paisley. However, the prospect of cooperation between the Whigs and more radical reformers was weakened by the public animosity expressed by some, such as the linen draper Robert Waithman, who called them ‘professed lovers of Places, Pensions and Reversions’.9

  Despite the evident tensions within the movement for reform, the 1 May meeting did finally get reform bills placed before Parliament. The first of these was moved by Burdett on 15 June, an auspicious date, chosen because it was the date of the ‘signing’ of Magna Carta: Burdett was keen to assure the House that the bill was nothing more than a confirmation of England’s ‘ancient constitution’. There was nothing in it, he said, that could not already be found in ‘the Statute Book and recognised by the Common Law of the Land’.10 The bill called for annual parliaments, the equalisation of constituencies and a taxpayer franchise. Despite the evident moderation both in the substance of the bill and in the rhetoric used to promote it, Burdett’s motion was discussed by a very sparsely attended House and the bill was defeated by seventy-nine votes to fifteen.

  Not only was Parliament as a whole apparently unmoved by the cause of reform, it also continued to guard the privacy of its proceedings jealously. On 2 February Charles Yorke, MP for Cambridgeshire, had brought in a motion for the enforcement of the standing order expelling strangers (meaning reporters) from the Commons. John Gale Jones was then brought before the bar for allegedly placarding the House with bills calling Yorke’s motion a ‘public outrage’. Despite offering an apology, Gale Jones was sent to Newgate Prison. Burdett petitioned before the Commons for his release and, significantly, when this failed, published a letter in Cobbett’s Political Register denying the House had the power to imprison English subjects. The response of the Commons was to vote to commit Burdett to the Tower until the end of the parliamentary session. Fittingly for a man who had made his stand for reform on the basis of the liberties granted by England’s ‘ancient constitution’, he was arrested while at home listening to his son, just down from Eton, translate Magna Carta from Latin into English.11

  Burdett’s imprisonment raised his popularity among radicals to a pitch not seen since his election victory in 1807. However, the aspirations now invested in him frequently far exceeded the baronet’s own essentially Whiggish political ideology. He was depicted as the slayer of tyrants and despots, the ‘pilot’ who would lead England to an egalitarian Utopia. One handbill read:

  When the LION gets out of the Tower

  How Happy will ENGLISHMEN BE

  He’ll the RATS of the NATION DEVOUR

  And Britons, from Thraldom set Free – !!!12

  Cartwright and other London radicals hoped to exploit Burdett’s release, scheduled for 21 June 1810, as a great propaganda victory for the cause of reform. Crowds were to wear blue cockades and carry banners saying ‘Magna Carta’, ‘The Constitution’ and ‘Burdett For Ever!’ However, he proved unwilling to take on the mantle of popular champion, preferring to slink away on a Thames riverboat, thereby earning himself the nickname ‘Sir Francis Sly-Go’ from Henry Hunt.13 Burdett claimed that his no-show was borne out of fear of bloodshed, should the crowd’s behaviour get out of hand. He may also have been concerned about his own personal safety. Perhaps influential too was the advice of his mentor, John Horne Tooke, that courting popularity by implication left a politician’s reputation at the mercy of the mob.

  Another possibility is that Burdett was encouraged by the success that Foxite Whigs had already had in promoting more limited reform bills through Parliament. (Tellingly, it was another moderate reformer, William Frend, who had brought the vessel that had taken Burdett from the Tower unobserved.) A bill introduced in the Commons in May by Thomas Brand, an opposit
ion Whig, which substituted triennial for annual parliaments and the gradual, compensated elimination of rotten boroughs rather than immediate equalisation, had secured 115 votes in favour, the best showing by a reform bill since the 1780s.14 The success was, however, deceptive. The Whig leadership was never in any sense committed in principle to the cause of reform, and Brand’s relative success was not followed up. Meetings engineered by Cartwright between Brand, Burdett and their supporters petered out in the spring of 1811. As John Disney, Cartwright’s cousin, remarked, ‘We have nothing but general principle to unite us – and the moment specific propositions are named, we become a rope of sand.’15

  But even Disney’s sense that there were core principles uniting Whigs and London radicals was illusory. Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, in an article of January 1810 argued that a dangerous confrontation was building up between the ‘courtiers’ and the democrats, while the ‘constitutional Whigs’ in between were becoming increasingly powerless. He felt the democrats should ally themselves with more respectable bits of the popular party, ‘to temper its violence and moderate its excesses, till it can be guided in safety to the defence, and not to the destruction of our liberties’. Jeffrey urged figures like Sir Francis Burdett to stand behind a moderate reform programme aimed at eliminating rotten boroughs and extending the franchise to respectable citizens – exactly the kinds of proposal that Brand had had some success with in May of that year, and that would eventually become enshrined in law in 1832. In this formulation, as in 1832, Jeffrey proposed reform as offering a safety-valve that would release some of the popular hostility towards the political establishment. Reform, as Jeffrey indicated, was about consolidating ‘ancient liberties’, not winning new freedoms.

  Many Whigs were not even prepared to go this far. John Allen, confidant of Byron’s friend Lord Holland, stated: ‘When the country is decidedly for it, the object [reform] is so great that it might be worth while to break up the party to obtain it – but to take it up prematurely would divide opposition without advancing the cause of reform.’16 The exploitation of the revelations of corruption in the Duke of York’s case, while productive in the short term, carried fundamental problems for more radical reformers. It made the case for electoral reform as a measure that would cleanse the Augean stables of English politics, not as a means of bringing democracy to the people.*

  Away from Westminster, radical activity was also being squeezed as libel laws were broadened to allow ex-officio information – accusations filed by the Solicitor-General, Attorney-General or some other Crown officer – to be used in such cases. Now, the accusation of libel did not have to be approved by a grand jury. This new power caused Jeremy Bentham to conclude that ‘by law there exists no more liberty of the press in England than in Morocco’.17

  From late 1809, the radical press came under sustained attack in a spate of libel prosecutions. Daniel Lovell of the Statesman was sentenced on three counts of seditious libel, fined £1000 and imprisoned for three years, with a further three years on a good-behaviour bond after his release. John Drakard of the Stamford News was imprisoned for eighteen months for publishing an article against severe flogging in the army, even though John and Leigh Hunt had been acquitted for publishing exactly the same piece in their Examiner. (The government nonetheless managed to get them on another charge at the end of 1812.) Cobbett too was tried and convicted for libel: the government’s success, it was widely believed, signalled the death knell for his Political Register.18 Burdett’s reputation was tarnished further when it was revealed that he had been conducting an adulterous relationship with Lady Oxford, which had resulted in at least one love child. (The dubious paternity of the Oxford children meant they were widely known as the ‘Harleian Miscellany’, after the collected volumes of rare pamphlets in the library of the 1st and 2nd Earls of Oxford.) Burdett’s description of the Duke of York as ‘a picture of hypocrisy and profligacy truly revolting to propriety and decency’ was gleefully thrown back in his face by loyalist writers.19

  Cartwright’s tactic of encouraging cooperation between Foxite Whigs and parliamentary radicals through gentlemanly dinner meetings was also proving a dead end. Some radicals were losing patience with the idea that reform would come from within the Commons itself. Henry Hunt described the notion of Parliament reforming itself as ‘contemptible and ridiculous’.20 Burdett talked of politics at Westminster as a ‘low farce’. It was hoped that the King’s insanity, and the installation of his son as Prince Regent, would usher in a new ministry more sympathetic to reform. However, the general election of 1812, despite significant radical efforts to put up candidates, resulted in a convincing Tory victory, even in areas like Bristol where there was considerable reformist activity.

  Cartwright began to think that exerting pressure from outside of Parliament was the only realistic means of putting reform back on the political agenda. The previous year his friend, the Devon reformer, geologist and inventor (of unsinkable lifeboats, semaphore telegraphs and schemes for naming the bones of the body) Thomas Northmore, had proposed a reform society to be called the Hampden Club. The first of these opened in May 1811. Its subscription of three guineas and requirement of a £300 property qualification for full membership indicated that it was not designed to be a working-class institution like the old LCS. The aged Cartwright was opposed to the socially restrictive terms of the Hampden Clubs, seeing them as indicative of the lukewarm Whig approach to reform as a whole. He worked to establish more popular societies under the banner of the Union for Parliamentary Reform, launched in June of the same year.21 To spur the growth of these clubs, he went on extensive tours of the country. On his second tour of 1813 he travelled more than nine hundred miles in twenty-nine days and visited three hundred communities. By 1817, in no small part as a result of his efforts, 150 Hampden Clubs had been formed in the North West. Unlike the original, these clubs were far more socially inclusive, with much lower subscription rates. Aside from establishing political reform clubs, Cartwright’s tours were aimed at gathering signatures for mass petitions. To this end, he would print multiple copies of the petition in question, ready to be signed – an advance on the old method of affixing signatures to one long roll of manuscript. His tour of 1813 gathered 130,000 signatures in support of a taxpayer franchise and annual parliaments.

  Cartwright’s model for his tours had been the successful petitioning campaign that had contributed to the ending of British involvement in the slave trade in 1807. However, for all the names that had been gathered in support of them, Cartwright’s petitions received scant attention from the Commons. Indeed, despite Cartwright’s apparent intention to educate people in the provinces in the ways of correctly addressing the Commons, most of his petitions were rejected on the grounds that they were inappropriately framed. The implication, as the historian Olivia Smith has noted, was that ‘the disenfranchised could not write in a language which merited attention’.22*

  More importantly, Cartwright’s pro-reform campaign chimed with another, more threatening, popular movement. Between 1803 and 1814, Parliament repealed most of the Elizabethan paternalist legislation that had offered protection to weavers and cloth-workers. Regulations that forbade the use of machinery and the employment of unskilled or semi-skilled workers, and required the enforcement of a minimum wage in certain industries were swept away.24 At the same time, the Combination Acts enthusiastically supported by that lover of liberty William Wilberforce, severely limited workers’ ability to defend their rights by collective action. Although the terms of the act applied to combinations of employers as well as to trade unions, a legal action against four hosiers initiated by Gravener Henson, the leader of the Nottinghamshire framework knitters, failed in 1811. Whatever the letter of the law, it clearly applied only to employees. When stockingers in Nottingham succeeded in forming a union of 2390 members with a common fund of £195, their organisation was broken up by an employers’ committee that was equally illegal under the strict terms of the
Combination Acts.25

  Partly inspired by Cartwright’s tours, the textile workers began petitioning campaigns of their own, which were equally successful in securing signatures and equally unsuccessful in having any influence on Parliament. The indifference of the Commons was clearly demonstrated by the repeal of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers, which defined the conditions of apprenticeship, despite petitions signed by some 300,000 people urging retention. Between 1811 and 1812, a committee of trades representatives in the Manchester area, encouraged by John Knight, a small manufacturer who was to have a long career in radical politics, was trying to arrange a petition to the Commons to bring both peace and reform. The idea was scotched in June 1812 when the Deputy Constable of Manchester raided a meeting and arrested those present on a charge (subsequently refuted in court) of administering unlawful oaths. Economic grievances and political reform appeared to be becoming increasingly intertwined, as an address published in October 1811 complained: