A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  As long as you continue to rear up your daughters as mere dolls for admiration; as long as you are content to educate them after the present doltish system, with a little dancing, a little French, a little sampler work and other little etceteras … with a great deal of attention to curls, the looking-glass, and fine clothes … so long will you find [man] content with his supremacy.12

  It is doubtful that the daughters of many mill workers had time, after an eighteen-hour working day, for dancing, French lessons or sampler work.

  Even those male writers who were more realistic about the challenges facing working women often couched their arguments more in terms of the impact of female labour on women’s ‘natural’ vocation as wives and mothers. Underlying a lot of Chartist writing was an understandable anxiety about the erosion of the traditional role of the man as breadwinner and head of the household. These were men who were no longer able to support their families themselves and were forced to watch their wives and children, now often working long hours to support the adult male of the household, going about their labours clad in no more than rags. J. R. Stephens urged the men in the crowd at Hyde, Manchester, on 17 February 1839, to support the Charter in order to keep their wives from having to work:

  You husbands! unless your minds be made up that your wives ought not and shall not work; that rather than kill your views by allowing them to work, you will allow God to take their lives by gradual starvation, – and that is what I should do; for before I would allow my wife to go to a mill and be worked there, that wife should stay at home, and die in her chair or on the floor, and the verdict should be ‘Died by the Visitation of God’ – she should not die by the visitation of the factory demon.

  Stephens retold the story of a doctor’s visit to a nearby mill:

  There was a stream of blood all the way from the factory door across a considerable piece of ground to the cottage where the woman lived. There was no limb broken; the machinery had not torn her. It was the most awful sight that an English father, or an English husband can imagine. It was the lawfully wedded wife of a hard-working English husband, who had been standing in that mill fifteen hours in the day (including meal times) in the last stage of pregnancy till nature could endure no longer, and had burst the over-charged vessels of her over-worked frame; and there the woman was bleeding to death in consequence … Now, until you, as husbands, say to yourselves, ‘I will work willingly, I will sweat freely, I won’t spare my own body, I will apply myself diligently and industriously to labour, but by the God that said “for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave unto his wife”, by that God, and by that dear woman whom he gave to be my crown and my glory, by that God, and by that woman, my wife shall never work at all’; until you do this, and refuse to sell the bodies of your wives and children to the mill owner, all the acts of Parliament that ever could be passed would not prevent it.13

  Conditions in the mills for women workers, as for men and children too, were undoubtedly dire, but the emphasis in Stephens’s story was the way that the ‘factory demon’ had destroyed a wife and mother. He believed that the remedy for this evil was greater male industry and diligence, not better working conditions for all. His portrayal of women as wives and mothers who had been wrenched into the unnatural sphere of labour ignored the important role they played in Chartist organisation and activism. By the early 1840s, there were over a hundred local women’s Chartist associations. They were often heavily involved in the collection of signatures for the Chartist mass petitions. As managers of their households, women had a key part to play in campaigns of ‘exclusive dealing’. Mary Savage, secretary of the Nottingham Female Political Union, instructed her members: ‘Let every shop and shopkeeper be noted in a book kept for the purpose, stating name, residence, trade and whether Whig or Tory; also another book containing the names of those friendly to the cause of the people.’14 Those deemed ‘unfriendly’ could expect a sharp decline in their trade in areas where Chartist support was strong. Some Chartist women went further, following their menfolk in resorting to the use of force. Elizabeth Cresswell of Mansfield was arrested carrying a loaded revolver and several spare bullets. She was sentenced to a month’s hard labour for unlawful assembly, despite having a young baby.

  While the NCA’s structure and the rights it accorded to women members were certainly radical, the relative moderation of its aims and objectives should not be overlooked. Writing at the time when the Association was at its most effective, Engels had spoken of the typical English Chartist as ‘a republican, though he seldom, if ever, uses the term. He prefers to describe himself as a democrat, although he gives his sympathy to republican parties all over the world. Indeed, he is more than a republican, because the democracy he supports is not only political but social and economic as well.’ The Six Points of the Charter might look ‘innocent enough’, but, Engels contended, they would undermine the whole English constitution, including the position of the Queen and the House of Lords.15 In 1852, in an article in the New York Tribune, Karl Marx wrote that, due to the growth of working-class consciousness in England, ‘universal suffrage in England would … be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent’.16 This was a viewpoint shared by Chartism’s political opponents: in 1841, Disraeli promised to defeat ‘Chartists and socialists’ and ‘Jesuits and infidels’.17

  Many subsequent commentators have also contended that the Chartist movement was republican through and through.18 Much of the evidence, however, points in quite the opposite direction. Both the NCA’s constitution and the earlier Declaration of Rights adopted by the convention in September 1839 essentially endorsed the existing ‘mixed government’ of monarch, Lords and Commons. The Chartist Declaration of Rights, while it defined monarchy as a public trust, with the royal prerogative subservient to Parliament, defined the legislative power as ‘essentially and rightly vested in the monarch, the peers, and the duly elected commons of the realm, in parliament assembled’.19 The Declaration may have countenanced some reform of the Lords, but it kept the monarchy firmly off the agenda. This fact wasn’t lost on the veteran republican Richard Carlile, who contended that there could ‘be no reformed House of Commons, of popular representation, with a House of Lords’.20 Some Chartists may have agreed with Engels (prefiguring the interpretation of Walter Bagehot in his influential English Constitution of 1867) that the monarchy was a ‘sham’, having only the ‘outward semblance of authority’ while real power resided in the House of Commons, dominated by the middle classes.21 As Thomas Doubleday, the editor of the major Chartist newspaper in the North East, the Northern Liberator, revealed, ‘under the present system neither King nor Queen has a particle of political power! That power is BEHIND THE THRONE and not upon it!’ 22

  However, comments like these, which were not essentially republican either, need to be set against the frequent appeals to the Crown made by Chartists after the failure of the mass petitions of 1839, 1842 and 1848. If Parliament proved deaf to the people’s demands, it was hoped that Queen Victoria would exert her authority on their behalf, a belief sustained by the apparent flexing of royal muscles during the Bedchamber Crisis. Chartists’ faith in the monarchy’s ability to supplement Parliament’s defects should not surprise us too much, given the extent to which many Chartist writers idolised ‘good’ kings and queens, especially Alfred and Elizabeth. Some held an utterly unfounded belief that Victoria was sympathetic to Chartism, on the grounds of a spurious rumour that it was her intervention that had spared Frost and the other Newport rebels from execution. In fact, the Queen’s political sympathies fell clearly on the other side: a mere six weeks after the rising, she invited the Mayor of Newport, Thomas Phillips, to stay with the royal family at Windsor, relaxing strict court etiquette by permitting him to dine with her in private. During the same stay, she also knighted him. Her consort, Prince Albert, was equally unsympathetic, saying after O’Connor’s unsuccessful trial for seditious conspir
acy in March 1843, ‘I am sorry that Feargus escaped, still the effect of the trial is satisfactory.’23

  Chartism was re-energised not only by the creation of the NCA but by Feargus O’Connor’s release from York Prison at the end of August 1841. Ever the showman, he emerged from gaol dressed in a suit of fustian, the rough fabric worn by working men. Having continued to contribute regularly to the Northern Star while in prison, he swiftly threw himself back into political activity, touring the country promoting the Charter. He also responded vigorously to a number of challenges to his leadership of the movement.

  Lovett had remained in prison until July 1840, refusing to be bound over for good behaviour in order to secure an early release: ‘we have been about the first political victims who have been classed and punished as misdemeanants and felons because we happened to be of the working class … to enter into a bond for our future good conduct would at once be an admission of guilt’.24 While incarcerated, he had written his Chartism: A New Organisation of the People, Embracing a Plan for the Education and Improvement of the People, Politically and Socially; Addressed to the Working-Classes of the United Kingdom, and more especially the Advocates of the Rights and Liberties of the Whole People as Set Forth in the ‘People’s Charter’. As the title suggests, Lovett’s work reconfigured Chartism, replacing the emphasis on political campaigning with a highly detailed programme, including mapped-out lesson plans, of morally and socially improving working-class education. As he had with the London Working Men’s Association, he also stressed the importance of weaning British workers off the immoral and destructive pastimes of drinking and gaming:

  Many of those who frequent public-houses in their houses of relaxation, are not so much induced by the love of drink, as to spend their hours in cheerful society; and if places were provided (unassociated with the means of intoxication) where they could spend a pleasant and agreeable evening, we should have little cause for lamenting the prevalence of intemperance, and its demoralizing consequences. Those who could not join in the dance might be amused with the games of chess and drafts, which are both rational and instructive; but cards, dice, and all kinds of gambling, should be scrupulously excluded.25

  However, alongside his concentration on reforming workingclass education and culture, there was a potential cause for confrontation with the NCA in Lovett’s plan for a ‘National Association of the United Kingdom for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People’. He had already pointedly refused to join the NCA, making his split from O’Connor clear. The latter responded bullishly to the apparent threat, attacking Lovett’s plan as ‘Knowledge Chartism’ and suggesting, without foundation, that it represented a surreptitious return to the Benthamite idea of intellectual qualifications for the franchise.

  The threat inherent in Lovett’s plan was indicative of a wider movement to link Chartism with temperance or teetotalism. Around the same time the Northern Star published an address that called for teetotal Chartist societies to be established, given that ‘NO GOVERNMENT CAN LONG WITHSTAND THE JUST CLAIMS OF A PEOPLE WHO HAVE THE COURAGE TO CONQUER THEIR OWN VICES.’26 O’Connor was resistant to this new movement, as he had been to Lovett’s plan, complaining, ‘I object to Teetotal Chartism, because all who do not join in, and I fear there are many, will be considered unworthy of their civil rights.’27 His hostile remarks were not simply the response of a man who was himself fond of a drink or two. He was increasingly concerned about the threat posed to the cohesion of Chartism as a movement by an alliance of middle- and working-class radicals forming in the Northern Star’s home city of Leeds. The city was more broadly based economically than its neighbours Manchester and Sheffield, and consequently less susceptible to their severe booms and busts. A softer form of Chartism emerged from this environment, more accommodating to the local middle-class reform movement headed by Samuel Smiles, now best known as the author of Self-help (1859) but then editor of the Leeds Times. In September 1840, Smiles established the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association (LPRA), which included several notable textile magnates and Anti-Corn Law League activists.

  The LPRA urged working men to unite around an agenda of household suffrage and triennial parliaments. It invited several radical MPs, including Daniel O’Connell, to speak at its ‘Great Reform Festival’, to be held in the Temple Works, at Holbeck, Leeds, in January 1841. (This extraordinary building was based on the Temple of Horus at Edfu in Egypt, and was said at the time to house the largest single room in the world.) The Northern Star published a number of hostile editorials in the run-up to the meeting. The NCA also organised a meeting, which ended just before the LPRA’s started. NCA members took the opportunity to speak at every available ‘public political meeting’, and, not surprisingly, they moved on to the Temple Works where the LPRA meeting was taking place. O’Connell, delayed en route, failed to show up, so the radical MP Joseph Hume took his place. Hume gave a speech that was ambiguous enough to hint at universal suffrage without making any clear commitment to it. However, his talk was followed by a number of speeches from Chartists who welcomed class cooperation but also insisted on the terms of the Charter. The mealy-mouthed pronouncements of Hume were thrown into sharp relief by the frank rhetoric of Chartists such as Robert Lowery:

  I know you will tell me that as Chartists, we have been violent, we have uttered language no honest man would ever assent to – but middle men, I ask you, have you ever stepped into the huts of poverty? Have you ever seen your wives in rags and your children without food? If you have not, then I ask you to bear in mind the causes why those of whom you complain have been violent, to keep in mind that those who have been violent have drained degradation to its bitterest dregs … What is the extent of representation that will truly represent the people, and secure to them their rights? I say no representation short of that which admits every man arrived at a mature age to a vote – that is to say Universal Suffrage.28

  The successful Chartist subversion of the ‘Reform Festival’ was a humiliation for the LPRA: it continued as an effective political force only until October.

  The same tactic was used at meetings held by the Anti-Corn Law League, now seen as Chartism’s main political rival. One such meeting, held in Dundee in May 1841, was placarded with reminders of the plight of John Frost, the ‘murder’ of John Clayton, the extent of the national debt, the disgraceful compensation paid ‘to the owners of Black Slaves’, and the £70,000 recently spent on the royal stables. By March 1842, the League was responding by disrupting Chartist meetings. At a Manchester Hall of Science meeting on the repeal of the Irish Union, ‘League assassins’ attempted to force a chairman of their own upon the participants. O’Connor, according to his own account, knocked out one of the League members but was hit on the head with a large stone ‘just above the right eye, which knocked me down, the blood gushing out copiously’.29

  At the National Charter Association’s formation, Bronterre O’Brien had suggested another tactic: if Chartist candidates stood at local parliamentary hustings, they could demonstrate the unrepresentative nature of the franchise by overwhelmingly winning the show of hands. This measure was employed for the first time during the 1841 election. In terms of votes, Chartism’s performance at the polls was an unqualified disaster: many candidates gathered only a handful. However, Chartists successfully exploited the hustings by making public speeches and convincingly demonstrating the unfairness of the electoral system: at the West Riding hustings, one observer noted that ‘there were in that crowd nine non-electors for [every] one elector’.30 The tactic was deployed by Chartists throughout the 1840 and 1850s. When Ernest Jones stood for election at Halifax for the second time in 1852, the contrast between the tens of thousands who gave their support to him at the hustings and the five hundred voters who eventually elected the Whig candidate Sir Charles Wood spoke for itself.31

  Despite the failure of the first great petition and the oft-made assertion that it would be the last, Chartists continued to utilise mass petitioni
ng as a political tactic. John Frost’s conviction for high treason proved to be a great rallying point. A petition for his pardon gathered 1,339,298 signatures. On 25 May 1841, it was presented to the House by Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, radical MP for Finsbury, who would be the most important spokesman for the Chartist cause in the Commons during the 1840s – indeed, for most of the decade he was its lone supportive voice.

  Duncombe was a remarkable character: an impeccably dressed former Guards officer educated at Harrow, the grandson of a bishop and nephew of 1st Baron Feversham, his upbringing and experiences could hardly have been more different from those of the average Chartist. Nonetheless, he was the most consistent supporter of parliamentary reform in the House, and regularly raised other issues such as the opening of Chartists’ mail for evidence of seditious activity and the raising of Church rates. In a fine piece of political theatre, he managed to convince the Commons to allow the petition to be carried into the Chamber on the shoulders of a team of stonemasons dressed in fustian. Of all the mass petitions submitted by the Chartists, this was the most successful, largely because it was only tangentially related to the Six Points of the Charter. It was voted down only when the Speaker cast his vote against, arguing that it infringed the royal prerogative of granting pardons.