A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  The Poor Law Reform Act, whose evils were so vividly portrayed by Dickens in Oliver Twist, proposed to abolish outdoor relief for the able-bodied poor, who were to be forced to find work or face the horror and shame of the workhouse. Opposition to the new Poor Law was not led solely by working-class activists. Initial leadership came from Sir Robert Peel and Robert Owen, both capitalist cotton mill owners, though of very different political stripes. Similarly, the ten-hours movement in Yorkshire in the 1830s was led by a Tory land steward, Richard Oastler, and was promoted in Parliament by his friend Michael Sadler, until the latter lost his seat as a consequence of the Reform Act. In Lancashire, the Owenite trade union leader John Doherty and the radical factory master from Todmorden, John Fielden, campaigned for even shorter hours, their supporters whipped up by the impassioned and increasingly incendiary preaching of J. R. Stephens. The imposition of the new Poor Law was fiercely resisted in the North, with Tories and working-class radicals lining up together against the regime of the ‘bloody Whigs’.

  Public pressure, and not infrequently the resort to physical force, bore positive results. The outrage of the North spilled over into violence as attempts were made to prevent the new Poor Law unions from electing their boards of guardians, and then, once defeated, to prevent the boards from electing their secretaries and getting to work. Led by Lawrence Pitkethly, Oastler’s right-hand man, the Huddersfield crowds used controlled violence to delay the implementation of the act for over a year, while in Fielden’s Todmorden the existing workhouses were closed and no new ones built. Many of those who had taken part in the anti-Poor Law movement became Chartists in 1838–9. Indeed, there was a great deal of overlap between membership of trade unions, the various campaigns for shorter working hours and action against the new Poor Law.

  However, the initial steps towards the creation of the Chartist organisation were made in the old radical hotbed of London. There were continuities of personnel as well as of geography with an earlier phase of radicalism. Agitation out-of-doors for electoral reform in 1830–2 had seen an unlicensed, cheap radical press emerge, led by Henry Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian, issued from July 1831. Hetherington was supported in his work by James Watson (no relation to the orchestrator of the Spa Fields meetings of 1816) and the already mentioned William Lovett, a Cornish cabinet-maker. Both Lovett and Watson were heavily influenced by the work of the veteran republican Richard Carlile. Lovett was also, like O’Connor, an acolyte of the hero of Peterloo, Henry Hunt, joining his Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty in 1827. All three men had also joined the Owenite London Mechanics’ Institute where Thomas Hodgskin, the intellectual critic of capitalism, was a lecturer. They were leading members, too, of the British Association for the Promotion of Cooperative Knowledge and its offspring, the Metropolitan Trades Union.

  However, though influenced by Owenite socialism, Hetherington, Lovett and Watson were convinced, unlike Owen, that socialism could be achieved, not only by the principle of cooperation, but also by radical political change at a national level. Lovett, in particular, is often associated with the ‘moral force’ wing of Chartism which supposedly repudiated the use of violence. Lovett, with his thin frame and weak constitution, certainly did not look like a violent revolutionary. Yet, when young, he had been branded ‘a dangerous man’ by government spies, and was known to have advocated the use of force and pledged his (admittedly limited) strength in the fight against the aristocracy. In 1830 he would publicly resist Hunt’s initiatives to purge ‘revolutionaries’ such as Carlile from his Radical Reform Association (the renamed Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty).

  After the reform bill crisis of 1831, when the rejection of the bill by the Lords had seen major riots in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol, Lovett, Hetherington and Watson formed the National Union of the Working Classes to spearhead the working-class campaign for a real reform bill. Hetherington’s paper was joined at this time by an Irish radical and law student, James O’Brien, who shortly became editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, publishing his comments under the pseudonym of ‘Bronterre’.* The academically brilliant O’Brien – he had won the gold medal for science at Trinity College, Dublin, the highest honour awarded to undergraduates – brought a broader perspective to the paper: he was widely read in the history of the French Revolution and his editorials spoke of class struggle in a wider European context. Like Lovett, O’Brien was not a physically imposing figure (O’Connor would later call him a ‘starved viper’) and his health was increasingly undermined by his unstinting workload and, some alleged, alcoholism.19 However, again like Lovett, he was also an advocate of armed insurrection, though he was very careful about voicing such opinions in print. Unlike Lovett, he did not repudiate this position in later life but remained one of Chartism’s most daring and original thinkers.

  At the peak of its popularity, the Poor Man’s Guardian sold sixteen thousand copies a week. Along with the struggle over the unlicensed press, it played a seminal role in the formation of the early Chartist organisation. In 1834, the paper won an important case, when it was upheld as a lawful publication by a London jury. The government responded by reducing stamp duty on newspapers to 1d (½p), enabling the ‘respectable’ press to compete with the unstamped, thus pricing the latter out of the market. Radicals in turn argued for the abolition of all ‘taxes on knowledge’.

  It was from this largely successful campaign – stamp duty on pamphlets was abolished in early 1836 – that the People’s Charter eventually emerged. In June that year, the Association of Working Men to procure a Cheap and Honest Press became the London Working Men’s Association, for Benefitting Politically, Socially and Morally the Useful Classes. However, the LWMA, led by Lovett, was a distinctly elitist association. Its membership rate was a hefty shilling a month, out of reach for most workers, and it further restricted admission exclusively to ‘persons of good moral character’. Moreover, a clear olive branch was extended to middle-class reform: gentlemen were admitted as honorary members; these included Augustus Beaumont, Colonel Perronet Thompson, MP, William Carpenter and Feargus O’Connor (though like many of the other ‘honorary’ members, O’Connor played no real part in the LWMA).

  By October 1836, the Association had already adopted resolutions containing five of the Six Points of the Charter, and all six were embodied in a petition prepared for submission to the House of Commons in January the following year. Public meetings were held, associations in the provinces were urged to cooperate, and on 31 May 1837 a meeting was arranged at the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street, Charing Cross, between members of the LWMA and radical MPs to consider the petition, which had already been signed by three thousand people. The meeting led to a joint committee of six MPs (Daniel O’Connell, J. A. Roebuck, J. T. Leader, Charles Hindley, W. Sharman Crawford and Colonel Perronet Thompson) and six working-class members (Hetherington, Watson and Lovett, plus John Cleave, Richard Moore and Henry Vincent). The committee issued a statement of the Six Points and set about preparing draft legislation on the subject. The People’s Charter’s status as draft legislation is often forgotten but, at least initially, the tactics of metropolitan radicals in the 1830s represented a revival of the strategy of the 1810s: to put reform bills before Parliament with the encouragement of pressure exerted out-of-doors through the press and public petitioning.

  The draft bill was scuppered when Roebuck, Thompson and Crawford lost their seats in the 1837 general election. Most dramatically, O’Connell turned his back on the working class, attacking unions and supporting the new Poor Law, a shift that would bring him into direct conflict with his fellow Irishman O’Connor. The People’s Charter itself, though fully in draft by spring 1837, was not published until May the following year. Though largely the work of Lovett, the aged Benthamite Francis Place also had a hand in drafting the printed version.

  In the meantime, the economic depression of 1837 had led the Tory industrialist Thomas Attwood to revive the Birmingham Political Union. Though for
merly an organisation advocating only limited electoral reform, based on household suffrage and triennial parliaments, by November of that year the BPU had moved towards advocating universal suffrage. Like the LWMA, in the spring of 1838 it was sending out groups of missionaries to proselytise on behalf of radical reform. On 14 May, the BPU adopted a national petition for reform; the following week, a delegation attended a Glasgow reform meeting which attracted an audience of 150,000.

  With representatives of the LWMA also present, the BPU men now endorsed the full Six Points of the Charter. The LWMA was still slow to produce propaganda to meet the upsurge in radical support: at the Glasgow meeting, Arthur Wade, the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union chaplain who had led the campaign to pardon the Tolpuddle Martyrs, was reduced to waving page proofs of the Charter in front of the audience. This was not such a disaster, perhaps, when one reflects on the text of the Charter itself, as opposed to the shorthand of the Six Points. The document betrayed Lovett’s influence in its attention to minutiae: the text even included diagrams and elaborate descriptions of automatic voting machines. Each box would feature a series of ‘apertures, with the Candidates’ names opposite, through which each voter drops a brass ball, which falling in a zig-zag direction, touches on a clock-work spring, which moves a pinion on which the hands are fastened, and thus registers one, each time a person votes’.20 Arguably, it was the impassioned platform oratory of men like O’Connor and Stephens that drew working-class supporters to the Chartist movement, rather than the dry fare dished up by Lovett and the LWMA.

  The LWMA and the BPU, both reform movements prepared to reach out to the middle classes, were now being challenged by other more distinctly working-class organisations. In September 1835 Feargus O’Connor, having lost his Irish seat at Parliament for having failed to meet the necessary property qualification, founded the Marylebone Radical Association. O’Connor, the son of wealthy Irish Protestant landowners, had already established a reputation for defending radical causes even before intervening in the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. In this he was following family tradition: both his father and uncle belonged to the United Irishmen. During the reform debate of 1831–2, O’Connor had come forth as an outspoken advocate of Irish rights and democratic change. Once elected MP for Cork in 1832, he was also active in the campaign for freedom of the press. His split with the Irish nationalists, led by Daniel O’Connell, ‘the Liberator’, was also precipitated by O’Connor’s increasingly radical political outlook, namely his opposition to O’Connell’s laissez-faire economics and anti-union stance.

  In December 1835, O’Connor went on a tour of the North, founding more radical associations. When he returned to London in autumn the following year he was already established as an English leader. His unsuccessful candidacy in Oldham had opened his eyes for the first time to the scale of degradation in the North: ‘I saw England for the first time with the naked eye … I then for the first time saw the Rattle Boxes [the rattles used by watchmen to wake factory workers] and their victims. I was up betimes every morning, and watched the pallied face, the emaciated frame, and the twisted limbs, wending their way to the earthly hell.’21 By November 1837 he had established the Northern Star newspaper in Leeds under the initial editorship of William Hill, a minister of the radical Swedenborgian sect. The paper quickly became a commercial success, turning a profit after its first month in business.

  The attention that O’Connor had given to cultivating support in the industrial North would prove crucial when contrasted with the artisan-led and London-based LWMA. Despite his honorary membership, he had a strong dislike for the LWMA because of its middle-class links. O’Connor had come from a wealthy family, and in all respects he appeared the antithesis of the sober, moralistic, radicalism-by-committee epitomised by Lovett. Unmarried, of no particular religious faith and on occasion a very heavy drinker, O’Connor made a poor fit with the LWMA’s idealised membership of temperate, respectable, orderly artisans. His political style was also at odds with the cautiousness of the LMWA’s public pronouncements. While his imposing physical presence, booming voice and skill on the platform echoed his political hero Henry Hunt, he flirted with the use of physical force in ways that the ‘Orator’ would have found both foolhardy and insupportable. By early 1838, O’Connor and Lovett were openly trading insults, the former accusing the LWMA leader of complicity in setting up a hostile parliamentary committee looking into trade union action in Glasgow following the murder of a ‘blackleg’ worker. Lovett responded in kind, calling O’Connor ‘the great “I AM” of politics, the great personification of Radicalism’.22

  Aside from setting up the Northern Star to promote his activities, O’Connor also aligned himself with radical groups urging change beyond the Six Points of the LWMA’s Charter. In January 1837 Bronterre O’Brien and George Julian Harney, a radical who, like O’Brien, idolised the French revolutionaries, formed a rival party, the East London Democratic Association, with the help of the biographer of Thomas Spence, Allen Davenport, and the radical tailor Charles Neesom. In contrast to the LWMA, the BPU and O’Connor’s Marylebone Radical Association, this was an explicitly republican organisation that worked to disseminate ‘the principles propagated by that great philosopher and redeemer of mankind, the Immortal Thomas Paine’. Reorganised in May 1838 as the London Democratic Association, the LDA set itself in direct opposition to the LWMA.

  The fragmentation of London radicalism, another echo of the 1810s, was by the summer of 1838 reduced to a sideshow as provincial organisations sprang up across the Midlands and the North. The Great Northern Union held its first meeting in Leeds to rally the North, while the members of the LWMA were in constant demand as lecturers.

  The first explicitly Chartist meeting took place at Kersal Moor near Manchester on 24 September 1838. Estimates of the crowd vary between 100,000 and 250,000. The meeting was ostensibly held to elect delegates to a national convention, not yet touted as an ‘anti-Parliament’ but designed to organise the Chartists’ national petition and see it through Westminster. Again, the tactics adopted by the Chartists, most notably mass petitioning, seemed a throwback to an earlier era. However, as the LWMA lecturers toured the country during the winter of 1838–9, drumming up support for the petition, they saw that some of their followers were already considering more desperate measures should the petition, as was strongly suspected, be rejected. Harney found ironworkers in Winlaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, making weapons. The Kersal Moor meeting was followed by another at Hartshead Moor on 15 October, where the speeches touched on the necessity of using physical force, to which O’Connor gave ambiguous support.

  The delegates to the convention finally met on 4 February 1839 at the British Hotel in Cockspur Street, London. In total, there were supposed to be fifty-three of them, but because of a few absentees the numbers did not exceed the maximum fifty persons prescribed by the Six Acts. Although the LWMA was well represented (Lovett operating as secretary of the meeting), the largest caucus came from the North, with twenty delegates led by O’Connor. There was only one representative of the agricultural labour force, George Loveless, the Tolpuddle Martyr, but he never took his seat. (Loveless seems to have been nominated without his knowledge, but in any case he could not attend as he was unable to pay someone to tend his Greensted smallholding for him.) In fact, only about half the delegates could be called working men, with the convention’s number including even one clergyman, Arthur Wade.

  The meeting was told that the petition had already been signed by over half a million people, but this cause for congratulation was quickly overshadowed by a number of potentially divisive questions. Was the convention an anti-Parliament, or merely concerned with the petition? Should Chartists oppose the middle-class Anti-Corn Law League, which threatened to siphon off some of their membership? Was physical violence to be contemplated? What should they do if Parliament rejected the petition? The militancy of some Chartist supporters was already attracting the attention of the government. John Fro
st, delegate for Newport and a JP, was ejected from the magistracy, Henry Vincent was arrested, and Major General Sir Charles Napier (whose letters reveal a sympathy for the plight of the poor if not with Chartism) was put in charge of six thousand troops in the Northern District, which included Yorkshire and Lancashire.

  On 14 June 1839, the first national petition was finally presented to the Commons. It was three miles long and contained 1,280,000 signatures, over 50 per cent more people than had voted in the 1837 election. The petition did not fare well in the House: the initial reaction when it was wheeled into the Chamber was not hushed awe but derision. Attwood, although he presented it, would not give it his unqualified support on the grounds of concerns over the advocacy of physical force by some Chartists, but also because he didn’t want two hundred of the seats of a reformed Parliament to go to the Irish – an early indication of the problems that the ‘British’ dimension of Chartism would provoke. The BPU’s commitment to the cause of reform had, in any case, been seriously weakened by the incorporation of Birmingham as a parliamentary borough that year. When a motion for the petition to be discussed by a parliamentary committee was eventually brought before the House almost a month later, MPs scarcely seemed involved in the debate at all: Disraeli spent his time leisurely eating oranges. The motion was defeated by 235 votes to 46.