One Sunday night I read, for a houseful of listeners, ten columns of the proceedings on the banks of the Seine which culminated in the deposition and flight of Louis Philippe, king of the French. Of course the Chartists in England and the Young Irish Repealers in the sister isle were jubilant, for they nursed the delusion that the revolutionary waves would soon beat up against the White Cliffs of Dover.13
But it was only with the benefit of hindsight that this expectation proved premature. In the spring of 1848, it seemed very possible that England would undergo a revolution equivalent to the one that had erupted in France. On 6 March, a reform meeting in Trafalgar Square was taken over by the Chartists. The crowd remained on the streets and was dispersed with difficulty by the police. That same evening, some of them marched to Buckingham Palace, smashing lamps and windows on the way. The mob ran free for some three days. On the same day that rioting broke out in London, looters raided shops in Glasgow, calling for ‘bread or revolution’. The army was called in and shot five of the looters. In Manchester the following day the workhouse was stormed, but the crowd was dispersed by police after a four-hour struggle. In reprisal, the police station in Oldham Road was attacked.
Across the country, more peaceful meetings were being organised by local Chartists, with speeches delivered by O’Connor, Jones, Samuel Kydd, George White and Joseph Barker. On St Patrick’s Day, a fraternal meeting of Chartists and Irish met at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester to be addressed by O’Connor. The meetings supported a new national petition, which was already gathering signatures by the thousand. These local meetings would be followed by a peaceful rally on Kennington Common in London on 10 April, after which a mass procession would present the petition to the House of Commons. If the petition were rejected, the Queen was to be called upon by a newly elected NCA national assembly to dissolve Parliament, and the assembly would remain in session until a new government had agreed to make the Charter the law of the land. This was a far more explicit and forceful endorsement of ‘ulterior measures’ than had accompanied any previous Chartist petitioning campaign.
Given the sobering precedent of events in Europe, the British government was taking no chances. The Queen was safely removed to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight (though Lord Palmerston was concerned that the island’s defences were inadequate). On 7 April, the Chief Commissioner of Police banned the procession from Kennington Common, and the government began to rush the Crown and government security bill through Parliament – a far-reaching measure that redefined and extended the offence of treason to include ‘open and advised speaking’. It was made law within twelve days, causing the black Chartist activist William Cuffay to wonder drily ‘how anything to abridge the rights of the working classes can be passed in a few hours’. The Duke of Wellington put himself forward to organise London’s defences, and 85,000 special constables were enrolled (including one W. E. Gladstone). If we accept a moderate estimate of the Kennington Common crowd as close to the 150,000 given by Chartism’s first historian, Robert Gammage – somewhere between the gross overestimate of 500,000 made by O’Connor or the blatant underestimate of Lord Russell at 15,000 – this probably amounted to one constable for every one and a half marchers.14 The philosopher Alexander Bain, then at the Board of Health, recalled the extent of the government’s preparations:
In our office and all other offices of Government, the windows of the ground floors were fitted with iron bars running up and down, like a lunatic asylum; there were, besides, barricades of deal boxes full of papers built up at each window to be a protection to the people within while firing out upon the mob through narrow openings between the sides of the boxes. Each man in the office mustered between eight and nine in the morning, and had a musket given him with twenty rounds of ball cartridge in a belt for going round the middle. I sat the whole day with my belt about me, snuffing up the smell of new leather.15
According to the author Charles Mackay, ‘There was scarcely a merchant, a banker, or shopkeeper, or clerk in London, except the very old, who did not take the oath and carry a truncheon, to crack the skull of a Chartist if it became necessary.’16 Backing up this massive police presence was the military, only to be used if the Chartists attempted to cross over the Thames into Westminster.
This show of force led some Chartists to advise against going ahead with the Kennington Common meeting. On 9 April, Bronterre O’Brien spoke against it and resigned from the convention. Duncombe urged the convention to ‘Think! Think! Think! And remember – one false step may seal the fate of millions.’ Others, though, were less cautious, Ernest Jones suggesting that petitioning should be abandoned but that the leaders should not ‘damp a fine enthusiasm’. Despite the clear reservations of some, the meeting went ahead and a large crowd assembled. O’Connor was visibly in a state of high anxiety, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne noting that he was ‘deadly pale’ with ‘perspiration running down’. The next day, O’Connor would have to miss both convention and Parliament, complaining ‘my chest in great pain’. Some historians have read into this early signs of his later illness, but given the rumours of insurrection and the massive police presence, stress and fear are the most plausible explanations for his behaviour.
The petition was loaded into three cabs and taken to Parliament. O’Connor, having told the crowd to disperse, took another cab to the Home Office to assure Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, of the legality of the day’s proceedings. By two o’clock, the Prime Minister was able to inform the Queen that the crisis was over. Russell wrote to her, ‘the Kennington Common Meeting has proved a complete failure’, yet in the same letter could add, ‘At Manchester, however, the Chartists are armed and have bad designs.’17
If O’Connor is often condemned for his apparent loss of nerve at Kennington, it should be remembered that, given the scale of the government’s preparations, the alternative – to allow the crowd to remain in situ or even encourage them to march with the petition towards Westminster – could have led to a bloodbath that would have made Peterloo seem like a minor altercation. He should, rather, be applauded for having acted quickly to diffuse a highly volatile situation. Likewise, the attacks on O’Connor’s handling of the petition ignore both the actual strength of support demonstrated for the petition and the weakness of the government’s case against it. He is frequently blamed for inflating the number of signatures, claiming that there were over five million. The official figure given by the clerks of the Commons was 1,975,467, fewer than half that number. They also revealed that the petition contained a number of obviously fraudulent signatures: it was unlikely that ‘Victoria Rex’, ‘the Duke of Wellington’ or ‘Mr Punch’ had actually appended their names to it.
However, it needs to be pointed out that the number that the Commons clerks offered was an estimate, too. The calculation down to a single unit might give the impression that they had pored over the petition’s pages day and night, counting the signatures one by one. This, as O’Connor pointed out, was not possible in the time that they had actually taken to examine the document. They would have had to count 150 signatures a minute. Instead, the clerks would have followed standard Commons practice in estimating the size of mass petitions by counting the number of signatures on one yard of petition and then multiplying that figure by its full length. Also, in this case, the discovery of a number of bogus signatures would have led them to revise their estimate downwards, assuming that the same proportion of false names appeared on each yard of petition. The clerks also dismissed a lot of signatures that were perfectly legitimate. For example, they deemed fraudulent multiple signatures given in the same hand, even though this was almost certainly evidence that illiterate Chartist supporters had had literate individuals sign for them. They also discounted the signatures of women – estimated at 8000 in every 100,000 – despite the fact that the right of women to petition had been upheld by Parliament in 1829. These decisions, clearly, favoured a conservative estimate of the number of names on the petit
ion as a whole.
We will never be able to gain an exact figure for those who signed the 1848 petition, as, like many both before and after, the papers were not kept but probably went straight into the Commons’ furnace after the clerks had done their work. Even so, the estimate of just under two million signatures represented a considerable proportion of an adult population of just over seventeen million, and was several times the size of the electorate. This is the fact that is often overlooked: every one of the Chartists’ mass petitions gathered more supporters than there were electors under the existing franchise. Moreover, though the Commons rejected every one of them, on each occasion the Chartists succeeded in forcing a lengthy debate within Parliament, thereby pushing the Charter on to the political centre stage.
Undoubtedly, though, it was the government and not the Chartists who had greater cause for happiness in the wake of the Kennington Common meeting. Chartism appeared in disarray. O’Connor refused to be part of a national assembly that gathered in May. Harney was also absent: leadership, significantly, passed to Ernest Jones. The new security law was used to clamp down on the radical press. John Mitchel, editor of the United Irishman, was sentenced to transportation to Australia for fourteen years. His conviction led to rioting in Bradford and London. In Bradford on 28 May, a crowd of two thousand routed police and special constables; the troops had to be called in to restore order. The following day a massive silent march of eighty thousand workers through London appeared deeply threatening, and a further meeting in the East End on 4 June was broken up on instructions of the Home Office; sporadic street fighting followed.
Jones’s first period as leader of the Chartist movement was brief. The planned day of protest agreed by the provisional executive of the national assembly led to his arrest and subsequent sentencing to two years in prison. As Ben Wilson recalled, the conditions of Jones’s incarceration were harsh:
Mr Jones was suffering from dysentry at the time, and he was consigned to a dark cell from which a man dying from cholera had just been removed; their efforts, however, were in vain, as the prison authorities never succeeded in making him perform the degrading task [i.e. commit suicide]. In the second year of his imprisonment Mr Jones was so broken in health that he could no longer stand upright, and was found lying on the floor of his cell and only then was he taken to the hospital. He was told then that if he would petition for his release and promise to abjure politics the remainder of his sentence would be remitted, but he refused his liberty on those conditions and was again sent to his cell. During his imprisonment and before writing materials were allowed him he wrote some of his most admired poems, making pens from the quills that occasionally dropped from the wing of a passing bird in the prison yard, these he cut secretly with a razor that was brought to him twice a week to shave with; an ink bottle he contrived to make from a piece of soap he got from the washing shed, and this he filled with ink from the ink bottle when he was allowed to write his quarterly letter; paper was supplied by those quarterly letters, the fly leaves of a bible, prayer book, and any books he was allowed to read. One poem ‘The New World’ was composed before he had succeeded in securing ink and written almost entirely in his own blood!18
If the authorities had hoped to break Jones’s spirit as well as his body, they were not successful. When he finally emerged from prison in 1850 he had become a convinced socialist, no longer wedded to the language of the ‘ancient constitution’ but fully a disciple of Marx and Engels.
Chartist meetings on Whit Monday, 21 June 1848, which included a small demonstration outside Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, were taken as signs that a mass rising was being prepared. A large meeting in London was dispersed as soon as Peter McDouall heard that the magistrates and police intended to put it down. That same afternoon in the Albion beer shop, McDouall chaired a large and disaffected group of London Chartists who agreed to form a committee to ‘appoint the day and hour when the final struggle is to take place’. However, two Chartists, George Davis and T. R. Reading, contacted the Home Office, alerting them to these designs, almost certainly out of genuine concern over the shift towards conspiratorial violence. When the conspiracy took renewed shape in July, following the suspension of Habeas Corpus and the arrest of Patrick O’Higgins on charges of high treason, no NCA executive member remained involved.
McDouall having absented himself, the leading figures were now William Cuffay and the Irishman Daniel Donovan. Cuffay, born in Chatham, Kent, but the grandson of an African slave, had been noted for his militancy in the weeks leading up to the Kennington Common demonstration. Following the dispersal of the crowd, he had denounced O’Connor and the rest of the Chartist leadership as ‘cowardly humbugs’. The rising was finally set for the night of Wednesday 16 August, but plans for a coordinated rising in Manchester were smashed by police raids the preceding night. The London conspirators were arrested on the 16th as they assembled at the Orange Tree pub near Holborn. Cuffay had managed to flee to his lodgings but reportedly refused to make good his escape ‘lest it should be said that he abandoned his associates in the hour of peril’.19
Six of the conspirators were sentenced to transportation, while fifteen others received sentences of eighteen to twenty-four months. McDouall was sentenced to two years in prison. Cuffay spent the rest of his life in Tasmania. Though he eventually died in the workhouse, he was not buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. A headstone was provided by the authorities in the belief that his supporters might want to honour his memory. As we have seen, Chartists who moved to Australia, whether through free emigration or penal transportation, made a significant contribution to the reform movement in the colony. Cuffay was no exception. A radical to his dying breath, he took an active part in the campaign against Tasmania’s ‘law of master and servant’ and worked for universal manhood suffrage.20
According to Henry Solly, the founder of English working men’s clubs and a former Chartist, ‘Chartism was practically at an end on the night of 10 April, and all attempts to resuscitate it were only the old story of flogging a dead horse.’21 If that remark was somewhat sweeping, it was nonetheless true that 1848 marked the end of Chartism as an effective mass political movement. It was Robert Gammage, writing his history six years after the Kennington Common meeting, who first identified O’Connor as the chief culprit behind Chartism’s failure. By 1852, O’Connor had been committed to a lunatic asylum. When Ernest Jones visited him in 1853, he found a pathetic spectacle. The former radical leader sat playing with the toys brought by Jones’s children, singing ‘The Lion of Freedom’, the song written to celebrate his release from prison in 1841. Jones noted that he was well cared for, but he would not see out another two years, dying in 1855. Even in death, O’Connor proved controversial: a proposed memorial in Nottingham was the subject of a protracted local dispute – opponents feared that celebrating him would sully the city’s reputation. Two days after the statue was finally unveiled in the Arboretum (where it stands to this day), it was daubed with ink, and on a later occasion tarred and feathered.22
Before he was committed to the asylum, it was already clear that O’Connor’s greatest scheme, the Land Plan, was a dismal failure. The rural idyll that he had presented in the pages of the Northern Star had turned sour for most of those few subscribers who had received allotments. In 1850, sixty-eight eviction orders had to be served against those who had failed to pay their rent. The problems with the Land Bank were fully revealed by the select committee investigation into its operation. The Commons declared that it was ‘an illegal scheme, and will not fulfil the expectations held out by the directors to the Shareholders’.23 According to the estimate of the government actuary, it would have taken a hundred and fifty years for the scheme to make back their investments. Neither were the small plots of two, three and four acres sufficient both to maintain a family and to produce enough surplus to pay the ground rent.
The select committee investigation revealed the high hopes and commitment of subscribers to the sc
heme, and, at the same time, how many of them had no idea how to make their allotments a success. One allottee reported that his ‘Peas and the Beans got the Blight and the Great Part of the Potatoes Got the Disease, the Land is the only Remedy for the working man but it wants A Little Capital to begin.’ Nonetheless, he noted, ‘With my trade on Strike in London I would not think of Nobing it [giving it up] I would sooner eat Potatoes tops.’24 Many of these industrial workers had little understanding of what to plant when and how. Charles William Stubbs, an Oxfordshire clergyman and later Bishop of Truro, reported that a friend of his had visited the Chartist allotments at Minster Lovell. There he heard that one of the allottees had ‘actually inquired what he was to plant in order to make bread another sowed his turnips as thick as mustard and cress, and refused to thin them because they looked too nourishing; another wished to known how many bushels of the same seed to sow to the acre’.25
Yet, without O’Connor’s leadership, the movement rapidly fractured into a variety of political leagues and unions, including Bronterre O’Brien’s National Reform League and Thomas Cooper’s People’s Charter Union. The flagship of the Chartist press, the Northern Star, declined in sales to only five thousand copies a week, compared to forty thousand in 1839, as the paper floundered without the guiding hand of Harney, who left to produce his own paper, the Red Republican. Harney himself now saw Chartism divided between those interested in developing a social programme, ‘Chartists and something more’, and those prepared to compromise the Charter in order to win over middle-class reformists – ‘Chartists, or something less’. A clear shift towards the former by the NCA was indicated by the much broader social and economic programme agreed at the London convention on 31 March 1851. This represented less a realistic political manifesto and more a wish-list of almost every radical demand made from the 1790s onwards.
A Radical History Of Britain Page 43
