A Radical History Of Britain
Page 32
Hunt, for his part, was clear that his participation in the Spa Fields meetings came at a price: the abandonment of the Spenceans’ revolutionary agenda. In a private meeting with Watson, he demanded that the public platform for the meeting be universal male suffrage, annual parliaments and the secret ballot. There would be no mention of the redistribution of property and no attempt would be made to incite the crowd to riot.
The first meeting, on 15 November, passed without incident. Hunt addressed around ten thousand people from the window of a nearby public house. His speech concentrated on now-familiar themes in radical rhetoric: the oppressive burden of taxation that resulted from the corruption of the court, and its bloated, useless employees:
What was the cause of the want of employment? Taxation. What was the cause of taxation? Corruption. It was corruption that had enabled the borough-mongers to wage that bloody war which had for its object the destruction of the liberties of all countries but principally of our own … Everything that concerned their subsistence or comforts was taxed. Was not their loaf taxed? was not their beer taxed? was not everything they ate, drank, wore, and even said, taxed? … [The taxes] were imposed by the authority of a borough-mongering faction who thought of nothing but oppressing the people, and subsisting on the plunder wrung from their miseries.31
These problems were to be addressed by petitions, remonstrations and loud public calls for reformation. Only when such avenues had been utterly exhausted should the people resort to physical force. However, if that ‘fatal day should be destined to arrive’, Hunt promised the crowd that he ‘would not be found concealed behind a counter, or sheltering himself in the rear’.32 The meeting concluded with the signing of a petition in support of radical electoral reform, which was to be presented to the Prince Regent. The original plan was for Hunt and Burdett to offer the petition in person, but Burdett refused, signalling once again his disapproval of the ‘rabble-rousing’ tactics deployed by Hunt. Hunt then tried to deliver the petition to the Regent, but was not allowed into his presence.
The Spenceans felt this worked to their advantage. The Prince’s refusal to receive the petitions would raise public anger to the point where a spontaneous uprising would be on the cards. Their chance soon came. At the second meeting on 2 December, again attended by a crowd of ten thousand or so, James Watson’s drunken and unhinged son – he had already been treated in Bath for insanity – in an echo of Camille Desmoulin’s exhortation to the Paris crowd before the storming of the Bastille, asked the crowd, ‘If they will not give us what we want, shall we not take it?’33 Grabbing one of the red, white and green tricolours (the projected flag of the future British republic), Watson Jr called on the crowd to follow him and headed off towards Clerkenwell. However, most of the audience stayed to hear Hunt speak and passed a resolution to meet again in the New Year, once Parliament had reassembled. The group that had followed the younger Watson raided a gunsmith’s shop in Skinner Street near Newgate, then splintered off, some heading up the Strand, others moving towards the Minories and the Tower. By nightfall, however, order had been restored and most of the ringleaders of the riot were already languishing behind bars.34
For the middle- and upper-class reformers of the London Hampden Club, the debacle of the second Spa Fields meeting provoked a disastrous split. Burdett, who had been due to lead a new reform bill drafted by the Club in the Commons, absented himself from proceedings. Hunt, along with deputies from the more radical provincial clubs and later William Cobbett, denounced the other members of the London Hampden Club for rejecting the platform of annual parliaments and universal suffrage and for placing the cause of reform in the hands of such a pusillanimous friend of the people as Burdett. It was necessary to ‘draw a line of separation between the real and sham friends of reform’, he declared.35
For Lord Liverpool’s government, the Spa Fields riot seemed to provide both the firm evidence of an insurrectionary conspiracy in the capital and the necessary pretext for the legal crackdown that would thwart both it and reform in general. However, such measures had been easier to pass through the Commons during wartime than while the country was at peace, as it now was. On 28 January 1817, though, the government was provided with the grounds that it required for new ‘gagging acts’. On the way to the opening of Parliament, a window of the Regent’s coach had been broken by a stone thrown from the crowd. By inflating this incident into an attempt on the Prince’s life, Liverpool secured the suspension once again of Habeas Corpus; the renewal of the act against seditious meetings; a law making attempts on the Regent as treasonable as those against the King; and the revival of measures making it treason to ‘seduce’ soldiers and sailors from their oaths of loyalty – this last aimed at the recruiting tactics of the Spenceans. The radical bookseller and satirist William Hone pictured Liverpool’s ministers thanking the stone that hit the Regent’s carriage in his cheap-print parody The Bullet Te Deum with the Canticle of the Stone: ‘We praise thee O stone: we acknowledge thee to be a Bullet … We believe that thou art a pretext: for rejecting Reform.’36
The government was soon given more evidence of insurrectionary activity via the investigations of a Lords’ secret committee on sedition. The committee not only condemned the Spencean programme of land reform but pointed to the connections between ultra-radicals and advocates of thorough parliamentary reform. It condemned the platform of universal male suffrage and annual parliaments as ‘a project which … would involve the total subversion of the British Constitution’.37 Parliament’s hostility to the reform programme made Cartwright’s continued use of mass petitioning to the Commons completely ineffective, if not counterproductive. By March, his campaign had amassed 514 petitions in support of universal suffrage, featuring a total of one and a quarter million signatures; but Parliament saw the size and scale of the petitions as evidence of a conspiracy against the government. They were rejected wholesale.38
The legacy of Cartwright’s provincial petitioning campaigns lived on, nonetheless. On 10 March 1817, some twelve thousand people gathered outside St Peter’s Church in Manchester for a brief meeting before beginning the first protest march in English history. But unlike later ‘hunger marches’, most notably the Jarrow Crusade, there was an implicit threat of insurrection in the behaviour of the ‘Blanketeers’ – so called on account of the ‘blankets, rugs, or large coats, rolled up and tied, knap-sack like, on their backs’ for sleeping rough en route. The Blanketeers planned to march from Manchester to London in order to present petitions to the Prince Regent, thus appealing over the head of a seemingly corrupt Parliament.39 The week before the meeting, Parliament had suspended Habeas Corpus again. The marchers attempted to respond to this by following very closely the strict letter of the law with regard to correct petitioning. Their leader, John Bagguley, directed them to form themselves into groups of ten, each with a leader who was to tie to his wrist a petition signed by twenty people. This they duly did.
However, Bagguley did not interpret the right to petition as purely supplicatory, declaring, ‘the law says that [if] the King did not give an Answer to the Petition within the space of 40 days, He was liable to be seiz’d & all his Family and confined in prison till he give an Answer’. The Salford tailor John Johnston warned that if the Prince ‘will not harken to our Petition, but we will punish him by taking his head off as was formerly by Charles 1st’. As well as invoking the memory of the regicide, the Blanketeers also marshalled England’s history of popular rebellion to their cause. William Benbow reminded his fellow marchers that ‘a blacksmith in the reign of Richard 2nd went to London with 20,000 men and got their Liberties which remained till they were destroyed by Tyranny’.40 The threat of violence was not a hollow one: at the same time as the marchers were engaged in exercising their rights to petition, ultra-radicals in London and Lancashire were planning nationwide uprisings, should the march fail.41
The vast majority of the petitioners got no further than St Peter’s Fields, the starting point for the mar
ch, where Bagguley along with twenty-seven other ringleaders was arrested. As Samuel Bamford, secretary of the Middleton Hampden Club, had presciently warned, the plans for the march had easily been detected by government spies, who had had two of the leading organisers, including the aged printer William Ogden, arrested the day before. In the confusion, significant numbers of people set off on the march anyway. Most got as far as Stockport before the military overtook them and dispersed them with force, wounding several. One unfortunate old man, who happened to be watching the mêlée from his cottage door, was shot dead. A few escaped to struggle on towards London, but only one, Abel Couldwell of Stalybridge, made it to the capital to present his petition.
As a consequence of the disturbance, the Manchester magistrates decided they needed their own military force ready to suppress any future popular demonstrations. They created the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a militia force recruited from the ranks of shopkeepers and tradesmen which would later commit the butchery at Peterloo. The Blanketeers had marched under Cartwright’s slogan, ‘Hold Fast by the Laws’. Their treatment at the hands of the Manchester magistracy demonstrated how misplaced that trust had been. In Parliament, the constitutionalist mottos of the march – described as a ‘foolish and absurd expedition’ by one MP – met with ridicule.* Henry Brougham, once seriously considered as a reform candidate to pair up with Sir Francis Burdett, told the Commons:
Sir, I would not be a party in telling the people, (monstrous assertion!) that twelve hundred years ago this country enjoyed a free and perfect constitution. (Hear, hear, hear!) This, sir, is a specimen of the historical knowledge, – of the antiquarian research, – of the acquaintance with constitutional law of these wiseacres out of doors, who, after poring for days and nights, and brooding over their wild and mischievous schemes, rise up with their little nostrums and big blunders to amend the British Constitution! (Laughter and loud cheers.)42
The same month as the Blanketeers’ march was forcefully dispersed, the government turned its attention to the radical press. Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, issued a circular to magistrates reminding them of their power to imprison any writer, publisher or bookseller believed to be guilty of writing or distributing seditious or blasphemous works and urging them to take action against ‘hawkers and pedlars’ without a licence to sell books. Mass arrests of members of provincial reform societies under the Suspension Act sent other radicals into exile. Cobbett publicly declared his disapproval of all conspiratorial activity before fleeing to America. This left the leading radical publishers William Hone, T. J. Wooler (whose Black Dwarf had a circulation of twelve thousand copies an issue) and W. T. Sherwin (who changed the name of his Republican to Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register in a bid to avoid prosecution). Hone was arrested for blasphemy and sedition on 3 May 1817. Importantly, he was charged only with blasphemy. A very high bail was set, forcing him to remain in prison until his trial, scheduled for December. Hone had in fact been assiduous in avoiding any taint of involvement in seditious activity, advising the Spa Fields crowd not to carry arms, withdrawing sensitive parodies from sale and even turning in seditious materials when they were planted on his premises by government agents.43
The Crown had vindictively decided to hold all three trials for blasphemy on consecutive days, hoping to grind Hone, who was representing himself, into the ground. The tactic, and the decision to prosecute him for blasphemy as the charge that would stick, failed disastrously. Hone’s ‘blasphemy’ consisted of publishing three parodies of the Church catechism, litany and creed. There was nothing at all unusual about this kind of parody. Indeed, as Hone cleverly pointed out, it had been used by George Canning, now a member of the ministry, in his former career as an anti-Jacobin poet. Moreover, as the parody was directed against the government and not against religion, the trials gave Hone the opportunity to renew his attacks within a packed courtroom – with a crowd of twenty thousand waiting outside, it was said. His brilliant defence speeches have been described as the finest ever uttered in an English courtroom. Hone’s defence was based on showing the ubiquity and orthodoxy of religious parody as a literary form. As he regaled them with one ridiculous parody after another, the court descended into hysterics, with the sheriff vainly threatening to arrest ‘the first man I see laugh’.44 The prosecution was no match for Hone’s encyclopedic knowledge of print culture, and the sources he used to support his case ranged so widely – he referred to over eighty texts – that at one point the Attorney-General suggested that Martin Luther, another author of religious parodies, might have been charged with blasphemy too.45 The government’s humiliation was completed by the calamitous decision of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Ellenborough, to preside over the last two trials personally.
The jury acquitted Hone of all three charges. Ellenborough tendered his immediate resignation, though it was not accepted, and the Chief Justice was forced to head up the Crown’s equally unsuccessful prosecution of James Watson for high treason, a task which so wearied him that he had to call on another justice to sum up the evidence. Hone’s victory in the courts had been preceded by Wooler’s acquittal at one of two trials for seditious libel in June 1817. The other verdict, one of guilty, which was later overturned on procedural grounds at King’s Bench, was damaging, too. Three jurymen entered a demur to the verdict that was effectively an indictment of the government: ‘As truth is declared by the law of the land to be a libel, we three are compelled to find the Defendant guilty.’46
The trials of Wooler and Hone were, in the short term, propaganda victories for the radicals, but their importance should not be exaggerated. The targeting of the radical press with charges of seditious libel and blasphemy had already had the effect of driving the most significant reformist writer, William Cobbett, out of the country. Wooler had only got off on a technicality, and Hone’s prosecution had failed not merely because of his own brilliant defence but also because he was one of the most circumspect radical writers and publishers.*
The pressure exerted by the government also had the effect of turning the leading radicals against each other, as Hunt recorded in his memoirs:
Mr Wooler, as well as Mr White, of the Independent Whig [another radical journal], lashed Mr Cobbett most unmercifully for his cowardice in flying his country, and abandoning the Reformers at such a critical moment. Mr Wooler was excessively severe, and he laid it on with an unsparing hand. I lost no opportunity to vindicate the character of my absent friend, and in doing this I attacked Mr Wooler as violently as he attacked Mr Cobbett, for which Mr Wooler denounced me as a spy of the Government!47
13
PETERLOO
Harrying the press was not enough for Lord Liverpool’s administration. The Spa Fields riots had failed to provide sufficient clear evidence of insurrectionary goings-on and the ‘attempt on the Regent’s life’ had too quickly become an object of public scorn. As Cobbett wrote of the administration in late 1816: ‘Oh, how they sigh! They are working and slaving and fretting and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a plot.’1
Evidence of potential insurrection was uncovered in the wake of the Blanketeers’ march. Later that month, a meeting was broken up at the Royal Oak in Ardwick Bridge near Manchester, where an attack on the city was being planned. The insurrectionists, probably encouraged by a spy called ‘Ackers’, aimed to free the imprisoned Blanketeers and ‘make a Moscow of Manchester’. Government spies reported that speakers were making inflated claims for the level of support for the rising: ‘two or three thousand would be sufficient to do what they had to do, for no doubt they would be fifty thousand strong by Daylight’. Another claim was that men in Leeds and Huddersfield were ready to rise too, and had been arming themselves since the Luddite machine-breaking episodes.2
The Ardwick ‘conspiracy’, though, barely merited the term. If it demonstrated anything, it was the successful penetration of working-class organisations by government informers. The Lords’ secret committee ha
d already identified the provinces, again the North West and the Midlands, as the main breeding grounds for rebellion. It reported that songs were being sung and speeches made in alehouses that were ‘destructive of the social order, recommending the equalisation of property’. Oaths were frequently administered, but worst of all, said the report, ‘arms were being collected in some areas’.3
The actual threat to security posed by this activity was, however, minimal. Although Blanketeers and ultra-radicals often alluded to the historical precedent of the Peasants’ Revolt, the contrast with the danger represented by popular rebellion in earlier periods is telling. As we have seen, in the late medieval period, a heavily armed populace had often posed a serious military challenge to royal armies. By the early nineteenth century, though, not only did the government possess a very large permanent army with which to suppress revolts, it also subjected the manufacture of arms in the country to close scrutiny. When a parcel of daggers arrived at a public house in Hinckley, Leicestershire, for collection by the secretary of the local Hampden Club, London soon knew about it. When a rural carpenter near Stamford received an order from ‘the East India Company’ for three thousand pike handles, the Home Office, quickly informed, enquired of the company’s chairman ‘how far you may be led by the circumstances … to believe the transaction to be a genuine one’. Spies were ubiquitous – they even reported to the Home Office seditious conversations overheard in the privy.4