by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
A surgeon at the inquest, Mr Basnett, agreed that the wounds were caused by external injuries, and that the loss of his left eye and left leg suggested a spinal injury; but it was still difficult to link it to the actions of the cavalry. It was caused, said the surgeon, by ‘cutting and maiming’ – but by whom? The cause of death did not seem to be linked to the elbow wound; the bruises seemed linked, but it was not the bruises he complained about. When witnesses were asked why Lees had not complained more, it was suggested that he was still afraid about how his father would react. Betty Ireland, who knew John and saw his injuries, agreed with the stepmother, but neither had the medical knowledge to testify that the wounds were caused by sabre cuts and crushing.
The government case was that Lees had not died as a result of his wounds at Peterloo, but that he had failed to look after himself, the mortification of his wounds was caused by his drinking and his apparent lack of concern showed the truth of this. There was also no evidence of a named or known individual attacking him, so murder was not a verdict that could be supported.
The government’s case went badly. John’s half brother, Thomas Whittaker, with whom he had shared a bed since John’s demobilisation from the army in December 1818, never saw him drunk, or even drink spirits. Another eyewitness at Peterloo, John Wrigley, had been at St Peter’s Field, close to the hustings surrounded by women and children, and he saw Lees slashed in the arm by a sabre. Lees had made no attempt to attack the cavalry. His walking stick was merely to help him with the cobbled streets between Oldham and Manchester. Three witnesses saw him cut; one saw him beaten by one of the local constables, who were regarded as the personal instrument of the deputy constable Joseph Nadin. The Manchester radicals called them ‘Nadin’s Runners’, and regarded them with equal measures of fear and contempt.
Friends, acquaintances and strangers all gave the same evidence. John Lees had offered no violence, was sober, and was clearly not a revolutionary. He had seen a doctor, he had carried on for a while – he had after all, joined the army aged 14 and fought at Waterloo aged 17 – he was a tough, resilient man – but he seemed to have died of wounds caused by cutting and maiming, and there were a considerable number of witnesses to this happening to others as well. The Riot Act, which would have legally privileged the cavalry’s action, had not been heard by anybody. The Manchester and Salford cavalry had struck him down illegally. Such were his internal injuries that Betty Ireland said ‘he was still bleeding when they put him in his coffin’.
The chaos of the events at Peterloo, and the dust caused by the out of control horses, meant that it was not going to be possible to identify the person who attacked John. Some witnesses were confused by the fact that yeomanry were in blue and white, and the 15th Hussars were in blue and with smaller yellow facings. One witness, when asked why he could recall so little, pointed out that it was every person for themselves. But the evidence for deliberate killing was mounting up. Harmer was able to produce one Daniel Kennedy, who neither knew nor saw John Lees but, as a cutler, had received orders to sharpen the blades of the cavalry and had completed sixty-three by 17 July in time for the St Peters Field meeting, initially scheduled for 9 August. Another damning witness, who talked to Lees after the attack, was William Harrison: ‘He told me he was at the Battle of Waterloo, but he was never in such danger as at this meeting, for at Waterloo it was man to man, but in Manchester it was downright murder.’
On 13 October the coroner ordered a long adjournment. He claimed to be worried about the health of the jury. During the six-week break it was discovered that the inquest was null and void due to the failings of the coroner. In November 1819 the Court of King’s Bench determined that the original inquest was illegal, because it was held not by the coroner (Ferrand), but by his deputy, and the coroner and jury had not seen the body at the same time. Sidmouth kindly forgave Ferrand and the inquest lapsed; no verdict was ever made. Lees’ representatives had many more witnesses who were never heard. The government had realised that with new repressive laws, no admission of guilt, and the passage of time, Peterloo was a storm that could be seen out.
The soldiers who did the slashing were officially supported. The Prince Regent, feeling under pressure from Lord Liverpool’s government, issued an unambiguous notice of thanks ‘for their prompt, decisive, and efficient measures for the preservation of the public peace’. As Archibald Prentice, a Manchester reformer commented: ‘This haste to thank the delinquents greatly added to the exacerbation of the public mind.’
The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry were a new, angry organisation. Most volunteer militias had been formed in the 1790s and had some experience of successful action. The Manchester cavalry was a much more recent militia force, formed in 1817 in a blind panic after the Blanketeers’ meeting at St Peters Field and the social tensions in Manchester and Salford. Joseph Nadin, the Deputy Constable, was the force behind their formation. Why did they end up killing people who were neither rioting nor aggressively protesting? The yeomanry were created as a result of fear and class war, and were always in opposition to the lower orders rather than complementary to them. Their fear seemed real enough, although the sources were unreliable; Nadin, the corrupt Deputy Constable, used spies whose jobs depended on them reporting conspiracy and hostile insurrection and this fear was transmitted to the cavalry. They sincerely believed that revolution was afoot on that day and were determined to nip it in the bud.
The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry were less effective and less dispassionate than any other similar force. The government relied on the local and volunteer principle that was unchanged since the time of the Spanish Armada. It needed wise magistrates who knew the people and wished to both control and support them, and relied on a voluntary militia force that, while ready to use violence to restore order, was still part of the community. Members of the yeomanry had to supply their own horses, and needed spare time to drill and practise, and this, by definition, put them into a different social group to most of the lower orders; but they were still expected to behave as if the rioters belonged to the same community. This was not the case in Manchester. They were brought up to hate the weavers and factory workers and the radicals who were deluding them.
As they knew the local people and the area and its history, most yeomanry cavalry in other parts of the country had done a reasonable job up to the Peterloo massacre. Previously, the gentry on horseback knew why people were rioting and how the action would pan out, so they did not over-react, remembering to use the flats of their sword and not exploit the advantages that their skilled horsemanship gave them.
Of the 101 members of the Manchester yeomanry present on that day whose occupation is known, thirteen were publicans who needed the magistrates to renew their licences. Sixteen were involved in the upper echelons of the Manchester cotton trade and were therefore on the side of capital rather than labour, and the rest were high-class workmen and shopkeepers who depended on the patronage of the rich. There was only one labourer and one servant who may well have felt uneasy in the presence of their social superiors.
When Joseph Nadin gave the order to clear the way to arrest Hunt, it was tragic that the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry received the order before the professional soldiers. It was the volunteers who did the slashing and trampling. They were drunk, they were amateur, they were incompetent, they were afraid, and they were malicious. They were the ones who decided that, once all the people on the hustings had been arrested, they would take the flags and banners and burn them. The regular soldiers were there on professional business, not for an ideological war. It was they who tried to calm down the proceedings; they trampled people in the course of their work, but did not slash and attack the crowd. The 15th Hussars were called into action when the magistrates told them the crowd were attacking the yeomanry, but they mostly used their military skills to hold back the amateur horsemen whose animals would have been more used to chasing foxes. For the yeomanry, the anger came out. It can be heard
in some of the shouted insults to the crowd, as reported at the John Lees inquest:
Damn you, I’ll reform you!
You’ll come again, will you?
And perhaps the most telling of all:
I’ll let you know that I am a soldier today!
The crowd hated the yeomanry as much as the yeomanry hated the crowd:
Feather bed soldiers
King and Guts men
A witness heard a professional soldier of the 15th Hussars plead with the cavalry:
For shame sir, won’t you give the people time to get away? Don’t you see that they are down?
Joseph Nadin ordered the cavalry to arrest Henry Hunt at Peterloo, knowing that the militia would have to force their way through the crowds. Without this order, there would have been no massacre on that day.
Nadin’s career had first prospered in London by the simple expedient of framing and arresting innocent people and taking the rewards offered by the government. He moved to Manchester in 1802, and by 1812 was in charge of fighting the Manchester radicals. In 1816 he was offering rewards of 200 guineas for information about anonymous letters being sent out by local radicals to members of the establishment. However, most of his illegal activity never reached the newspapers. In 1812 he attacked a meeting of radical weavers with blunderbusses and constables with fixed bayonets. The radicals were preparing a legal petition to the Prince Regent, in a local public house, the ironically named Prince Regent’s Arms. When told of the constitutional purpose of the meeting, Nadin’s carefully nuanced legal argument was, ‘I do not believe you – that is only pretence.’ Thirty-seven were taken away in chains to prison. They were locked up for seditious meeting and administering illegal oaths, on the evidence of the Deputy Constable alone. They were not to be allowed to be witnesses for each other and therefore seemed doomed, but they were able to produce a witness who had escaped the dragnet by hiding under the stairs and was able to say on oath that nothing illegal had happened. Nadin probably succeeded in the end however, as most of the weavers left the radical movement after the terrible prospect of a treason trial. To the radicals he was ‘this coarse man’ and the ‘real ruler of Manchester’.1
In 1820 Nadin gave his own account of the events at Peterloo. The town had been in a state of agitation for most of 1819 – that at least was correct. He had been present at another meeting in Manchester in January where Hunt was speaking. An attempt was made then to arrest Hunt at that time; Nadin believed him to be dangerous, a man of unbounded influence on the deluded. On the morning of Peterloo, Nadin got close to the hustings. The reformers recognised him – ‘It is Joseph…he has got great guts…he has more meat in his belly than we have.’ Nadin saw this as a comment about his well-built frame, and as a veiled threat. Nadin too claimed that he came under an attack of stones, some coming from a house owned by Quakers.
He believed the ring of constables around the hustings were in danger from the radicals. He thought he heard the words ‘knock them down’, and he thought it might have been Hunt himself who said them. He had also heard that one of his constables had already been trodden on so, on the basis of this speculation, he decided that the civil power could not cope and asked his good friend William Hulton for a warrant to arrest Hunt and the rest, to be enacted by the military. He was at the hustings, truncheon in hand, and arrested Hunt and another radical, Johnson, who was dragged off by his legs. Nadin’s reputation did not suffer at the time. Indeed, he gained some credit when it became clear that he had saved Hunt’s life on the hustings rather than assaulting him. Hunt accepted this proposition, and it became clear that the yeomanry was out of control and Nadin prevented a physical attack, although it did not stop Hunt being dragged to prison.
Nadin died in 1848 but the passage of time did at least allow the media to be honest about him. His obituaries pointed out that he had accumulated a lot of money in Manchester, had bought the Queen’s Theatre and owned a great number of public houses, which may strike us today as remarkably corrupt considering that he was in charge of issuing licences to sell alcohol in the city.
The man who so readily gave the order for the military to help the civil power (a undated and untimed three line scribble) was William Hulton, the 29-year-old chair of the magistrates, known behind his back as ‘Mrs Hulton’ due to his affectations, effeminacy, and love of fine clothes, despite his marriage and five children. He may have lost his nerve that day; he had already confided in the other magistrates that he was not keen on seeing violence and injury. He didn’t want it to happen, but his main concern is that he didn’t actually witness it himself. He was genuinely alarmed by seeing working men entering St Peter’s Field in apparent military formation; it was clearly done to show that the crowd was a disciplined protest movement, but to Hulton and others it looked like a revolutionary army.
After the horrid events unfolded, Hulton and the magistrates received the retrospective support of Lord Sidmouth and Lord Liverpool the prime minister. Liverpool described Hulton’s decision as ‘substantially correct’–hardly a ringing endorsement. Sidmouth had reminded the Manchester magistrates that they should judge a meeting not by their impressions alone, but by facts and evidence based on what actually happened, rather than on their fears. Hulton clearly ignored this and deserves some of the responsibility for the day.
Although it was hard to identify individuals, one person stood out as a perpetrator of violence at Peterloo. He was Edward Meagher, one of only two trumpeters on the day, and he was riding a very recognisable piebald horse. Witnesses singled him out as a particularly violent soldier during the meeting, and his behaviour did not improve after the demonstration had dispersed. In October there was an attempt to bring a prosecution against him by a William Cheetham. Cheetham and three other people he did not know were moving away from the meeting in an otherwise empty street. Meagher was reported to have said ‘damn you! disperse!’. Meagher temporarily gave them room to pass, but then lunged at Cheetham, threatened to behead him, but instead cut 7in off his hat and made a 3in cut on his neck.
Charles Pearson, a newspaper correspondent who was present at the trial, noted that these cases, and four others of malicious cutting, were rejected by the jury. Pearson said that the witnesses were believed, but the jury seemed to be working from a fixed principle – perhaps that the Riot Act had been read and therefore the consequences were acceptable in law. Pearson was angry; whether they were in ‘tottering old age, unsuspecting youth, manly spirit, defenceless womanhood or unoffending infancy’, there was no point in requesting justice from the law.
However, there were other forms of revenge. On one evening of the Lees inquest in October, Meagher went drinking in Deansgate. He was in a blind fury over the comments made about him; he seems to have exposed his weapons in the public house and dared anybody to comment on him. He was pushed out by shouts of ‘shame!’ and the altercation seemed to have spilled out on to the street. The Inverness Courier and other newspapers carried the story in detail; it was a national issue, not just a local one.
When Meagher started to go home, he was noticed by a group of men who called him out as ‘one of the bloody butchers’. Meagher drew a pistol and threatened two men with it. When he got home he barricaded himself in his house. A mob appeared, stones were thrown, windows were broken, and Meagher started firing into the crowd with his pistols, injuring two people severely. He was eventually rescued by the military, who escorted him to a local barracks.
The inquiry was told that the two injured men – Jones and Robinson – were too ill to be moved from the infirmary, but a witness recorded that he had indeed been shot by Meagher, who ‘had his coat off’, and fired at least twice.
At the same time, Meagher was being name-checked at the John Lees inquest. Nathan Broadhurst claimed that Meagher had cut him, and he was not the only one. Broadhurst went on to say that a regular officer of the 15th Hussars called out for Meagher to stop, which he did, but only for the time that the officer was there.
Here a little hissing was heard among the crowd collected below the bar, but it was silenced by threats of commitment to prison.2
Meagher then left the court ‘in high spirits’ and with good reason. He was another beneficiary of the establishment cover up at Peterloo.
Chapter 14
Peterloo: The Radical Women
On 28 July 1828, the Manchester Courier published a brief death notice:
On 13th inst, aged 34, Mrs Mary Fildes of Heaton Norris. This is the person who bore the flag on the hustings, at the meeting in St Peter’s Field, on 16 August 1819.
Mary Fildes was indeed one of the women around the hustings at Peterloo, but she did not die in 1828. She lived on until 1875. The newspaper had made an error; and this error shows how obscure the women reformers had become a mere decade after the terrible events at Peterloo, and how far the radical movement had receded after the economy recovered around 1820. This relative obscurity in 1828 does not reflect their lack of importance ten years earlier; although there were not many, they were new and active, and the male establishment was afraid of them and the example they represented to others.