by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
Martha Heys was trampled by the cavalry on the day, and complications caused by that injury meant that she died in childbirth two months later. Although reports are hard to locate, it seems that she suffered from fits after being trampled and gave birth two months prematurely. Margaret Downes, age unknown, bled to death when she was sabred by the yeomanry cavalry. Sarah Jones, of Silk Street, Salford, was fatally injured by a police truncheon blow. She had seven children. The lack of information speaks volumes for the importance of poor women in this period.
There is some surviving evidence relating to Martha Partington of Eccles, however. Martha was crushed to death when she was flung into a cellar in Bridge Street, Manchester. The information that survives is due to an apparent attempt to destroy her reputation. An unsympathetic newspaper report explained how Martha had been seen on the day by a ‘gentleman of the utmost respectability’.4 She was described as one of two noted reformers (the other was Judith Kilner) who, ‘liqueur in hand’, shouted to the whole pub that she was ‘hoping to God she might never go back alive if the reformers did not carry their point that day’. Later that day a failure in the iron palisades meant that she fell into the basement and was crushed. The gentleman seemed aghast that Martha was attending the ‘rebellious’ meeting, being political and making oaths; the subtext being that her death was a form of divine retribution. Newspapers all over the country reprinted the story uncritically for the next fortnight and were part of a pattern that tried to blame the victims for the tragic outcome of the day.
One month later, long enough for a lie to spread, the truth got its boots on. A Manchester resident who knew the people involved, wrote a letter giving another side of the argument:
I saw Judith Kilner on Sunday and she was with two other women who accompanied Mrs Partington from Eccles on the morning of the 16th, declare solemnly, that they never went into any public house on the way, nor did they ever hear any such expression anywhere from Mrs Partington as the writer imputes to her. These women further state that they did not accompany their husbands to the meeting. But as the husband of Mrs Partington means to bring an action against the Journal in which this paragraph first appeared, the whole truth will be fully elicited.5
No further information can be found about Mr Partington’s attempt to clear his wife – but then the whole weight of the establishment was against him; poor men protesting was bad enough, but the punishment for women daring to demand a voice was even more severe.
Chapter 15
The Freeborn Englishman?
Some of the freedoms cherished by the British 200 years ago do not seem like freedoms today. The freedom to be left alone by a government, no matter what the consequences, was greatly cherished. Personal property needed protection, even if this meant a harsh penal code. Radical reformers and members of the establishment were united against the idea of a professional police force that both feared would be a government spy. Freedom sometimes even meant the right to riot if traditional responsibilities were not being honoured.
However, we would recognise protection from arbitrary arrest, equality before the law, and a degree of free speech as important freedoms. These all existed in some form in the Regency. Britain, except Ireland, compared well with continental Europe, and while the British held foreign regimes in contempt, they did not primarily compare British freedoms with foreign despotism. British freedoms at any time were to be compared with British freedoms in the past; that might be Saxon England, the Levellers of the seventeenth century, or the freedoms gained after the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688, but people in the Regency period were conscious that they had something precious that could be taken from them by the government, and they were all – radical and reactionary – on their guard to protect it.
One established liberty was the right of ‘habeas corpus’ (literally, ‘you may have this body’). This originated at the time of the Magna Carta and was written down for the first time in 1305. It prevented false imprisonment by allowing anybody, including the prisoner, to question the legality of confinement in the courts. Habeas corpus was used in 1772 to prove that slavery was not allowed in Britain. James Somersett, a black slave brought back to the UK from Jamaica, was freed partly by the application of habeas corpus to his case. It was a cherished freedom, rightly, and still is. Lord Mansfield, the judge who gave Somersett his freedom, may or may not have said that ‘the air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it’, but most people subscribed to the sentiment.
After the 1816 Spa Fields demonstrations, and the apparent attack on the Prince Regent in January 1817, the government suspended habeas corpus in a panic on 3 March 1817, in order to prevent the revolutionary conspiracies that they feared were being planned.
Opposition MP Henry Grey Benett was a vocal opponent of suspension. He and others argued that so-called political conspiracies were rioting due to terrible economic circumstances. Benett objected to all people being abused for the illegal acts of the tiny minority, and the power given to the government by the law. In a debate with Lord Castlereagh, he claimed that when habeas corpus was suspended in Ireland in 1798, there were criminal acts committed under the shelter of legal indemnity. As Castlereagh was in charge of Ireland at that time, this comment caused a ‘violent altercation’ in the Commons, and Benett felt the need to clarify that he was talking generally, not about the actions of individuals.
Lord Sidmouth proceeded to use his new power to initiate mass arrests of people about whom he was worried, but had little evidence against. Thomas Evans was an early and obvious victim of the suspension of habeas corpus, even before its ratification by parliament. He was an active member of the radical Spencean Philanthropists, became their new leader when Thomas Spence died in 1814, and was still a major theorist in 1817. His day job was as a braces maker, and it was at his work premises that he was arrested on 9 February 1817 – at the same time that the Spa Field leaders, Preston and Watson, were apprehended. Evans knew the law after more than two decades of falling foul of it. He insisted that the arrest was illegal and that an official wax seal be put on his bags of papers to prevent the authorities planting incriminating documents. He refused to leave his house until force had been applied, so a constable obligingly hit him on the head. Thomas Evans and his son, Thomas John, were then conveyed to Bow Street, where refreshments were served.
Tea and polite conversation soon turned to a possible charge of high treason, being placed in irons in solitary confinement at Coldbath Fields House of Correction and being denied pen, paper, and ink; his flute was also confiscated. After 10 April, he did not leave his prison cell until finally released, but was allowed two meetings a week with his wife Janet. He claimed not to have any dealing with Thistlewood and the other Spenceans, or any hand in the Spa Fields riots. Both statements were untrue, but the authorities were using some very draconian methods to contradict him.
Evans senior was suspected of publishing a leaflet demanding the division of aristocratic land into ‘People’s Farms’ for the use of everyone, and Evans junior was accused of planning to speak at the Spa Field demonstration. One newspaper used the expression ‘People’s Farm!!!!!!!’ to show their derision, but the authorities were clearly worried enough to use the suspension of habeas corpus to take the two men out of circulation. There was no charge against them, just imprisonment for suspicions.
Evans’s case was taken up in parliament by Henry Grey Benett and Sir Francis Burdett. Burdett bemoaned the paranoia of the lawmakers with the Spenceans and declared that corrupt members of the establishment who lived on taxpayers’ money were more of a problem – he called these people ‘Expensions’. Bennett explained that Evans was afraid that he would spend unlimited time in prison with no charges ever being brought. This was no idle worry. Evans had spent three years behind bars in 1798 when habeas corpus had last been suspended; he had been moved from prison to prison and denied visits from his family. No charges were brought then either.
; In June 1817, Watson, Preston, Hooper and Thistlewood were acquitted of high treason, but the man who was supposed to have worked with them was still in prison. On 17 June another debate in the Commons was fractious. Joseph Barham MP, who had approved the suspensions of habeas corpus during the war with Napoleon, was against it now. He wondered how it was justified to put a person in prison for a long time, when an English jury might find him innocent? Barham believed that much of the popular unrest was the work of government agents or the exaggeration of Home Office spies. Castlereagh, the chief government spokesman in the Commons because the others were members of the House of Lords, replied that Evans had coal, candles, a new bed, and a generous gaoler. With no sense of irony, Castlereagh confided that Evans was not allowed to walk in the garden because he would have been obliged to pass convicted felons to get there. Bennet pointed out that the problem was not just the conditions in the prison, but the very existence of the new law against habeas corpus. From Evans’s later petition it did seem that his life improved after this debate in parliament.
Despite these improvements, Evans still languished in Horsemonger Gaol at the end of July. Thistlewood, Preston and Watson were prepared to swear on oath that Evans had nothing to do with the Spa Fields Riots. This made no difference. Evans was still regularly interviewed by the Privy Council like an Elizabethan Jesuit and asked whether he had had any dealings with Thistlewood, which now seemed to be Sidmouth’s new definition of treason.
In early 1818 Evans was still in prison. He was offered his freedom on 1 February on the understanding that he paid £100 bail and held himself ready to answer any further questions. He refused, demanding either to be tried, or unconditionally released. He may have guessed – correctly – that habeas corpus was about to be reintroduced and he would have to be released soon in any case.
On 20 February, Thomas Evans and his son (who he had not seen since his imprisonment) were indeed unconditionally released, without charge, apology or compensation. Evans went home and transformed his now struggling business into a ‘Patriotic Coffee House’, perhaps in the spirit of sarcasm. It was raided by the constables, perhaps in the spirit of retribution. Evans then disappears off the radar of radical politics. However, it did rather prove that arbitrary power did the trick. He was not on the scene in 1820 during the Cato Street Conspiracy and little is known about him after that date.
Joseph Mitchell, radical printer and publisher, was another victim of the suspension of habeas corpus. His first mistake was to make an enemy of Joseph Nadin, deputy constable of Manchester. In his petition to parliament, Liverpool-born Mitchell said he had been in Manchester on business when his lodging house was raided in the middle of the night by Nadin and two constables. His possessions were opened illegally and Nadin chased him when he fled to the house of a friend, forcibly gaining entry. Nadin followed him to Liverpool, Yorkshire, London, and then Liverpool again as Mitchell tried to escape British justice by fleeing to the USA with his family. He was told by Nadin that he was implicated in a conspiracy to forcibly rescue the Blanketeers, and then make Manchester a ‘Second Moscow’ by burning it down in a manner similar to Napoleon’s attack on Russia in 1812. He spent nine months in prison without being charged on a conspiracy that was mostly the creation of government spies and agents provocateur.
William Ogden, another victim of the suspension of habeas corpus was 74 years old and had been heavily chained in Horsemonger Lane prison. A manacle of 30lbs had been put on his arm, creating fifteen hours of absolute agony. He was in prison for nine months without charge and, when released, was unable to work and support his seventeen children (he had married twice). Although he was not charged, he agreed that he was a supporter of parliamentary reform and implied that he was in prison because a corrupt constable wanted a reward. He was also worried that the Commons would pass an Act of Indemnity and that all mistreatments under the suspension of habeas corpus would go unpunished; they did indeed go on to do this.
Habeas corpus was reinstated in 1818 through a ‘sunset clause’ which limited the amount of time that such a political restriction could remain. Sidmouth’s arguments in favour of the suspension was its temporary nature, the fact that it was in response to a political crisis, and that it had been suspended before and then re-instated after the emergency had passed. However, this does not hide the fact that freedom from arbitrary arrest was a freedom that had been denied – again. Speaking in the 1790s, when habeas corpus was under attack, Mary Wollstonecraft, the campaigner for women’s rights, suggested that freedom of property was the only one that really mattered to the establishment. However, Britain was not despotism, and there were enough people who valued habeas corpus to make a long term suspension politically impossible. Britain was not equal or democratic, but it was, to a reasonable extent, ‘free’.
The British had always had some freedom of speech; the envy of the continent, but the problem was (and possibly still is), how much was desirable? In the period after Peterloo, freedom of expression and assembly were severely curtailed. The monster meetings, lower-class discontent, and stories of military-type drillings really worried the government. Some believed that an armed insurrection was on the way, and some who did not believe it thought it was politically useful to say so. Parliament did not meet for three months after Peterloo and when they did, it was to introduce the repressive Six Acts, rather than institute an enquiry into the events at Manchester in August. In December 1819, Castlereagh told the Commons: ‘I rise for the purpose of proposing to the House of Commons measures of severe coercion.’
One of the six new repressive laws – the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act – required official permission in order to have any meeting of more than fifty people if the topic was Church or state. Additional people could not attend such meetings unless they were local residents. At first this applied to any meeting, but parliamentary opposition changed this to outdoor meetings only; it was the likes of Peterloo that the government was trying to stop. Another part of the Six Acts was the Criminal Libel Act, which toughened the existing laws against ‘subversive’ material. After 1819, the state reserved the power to transport libellers to Botany Bay for fourteen years – in effect, silencing them into a Siberian-like political exile.
It was argued by the opponents of these new laws that the jury system was already strong enough to protect against blasphemy and sedition. Lots of individuals were tried for both during the darkness years; the reason for so much legal activity was that in Britain there was no pre-publication censorship, which is the way repressive regimes work. In Britain, you got into trouble after publication.
There had been victories as well as defeats. The right to parody was established in England by the victory of William Hone in his three-day trial for blasphemy and sedition in December 1817. He produced comic versions of the Catechisms, Litany and Creed of the Church of England to make pointed comments about contemporary life and politics, including some newly framed commandments:
Thou shalt have no other Patron but me
Thou shalt not support any measure but mine
Honour the Regent
Thou shalt not call starving to death murder
Thou shalt not call Royal gallivanting adultery
Thou shalt not say that to rob the Public is to steal
Thou shalt bear false witness against the people
His argument was that such parodies had a long history. Hone seemed to have brought most of them into court with him. He agreed that he was making comment about the present state of things but he was not disrespecting the original sacred texts and practices. It was a victory for free speech and religious parodies were never really tested in the British courts again. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Ellenborough, who presided over many famous trials in the Regency period, was humiliated by Hone and the decision of the jury, who ignored the judge’s strong direction to find Hone guilty. Ellenborough was ill at the time of the trial, but the trial may well have hastened his death a year later.
In 1819, sedition and blasphemy trials increased again. Robert Wedderburn, ‘a person of colour’, was prosecuted – unsuccessfully on the first attempt in September 1819 – for blasphemy and sedition at his chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho. He was linked to the Spencean Philanthropists but had – inevitably – fallen out with them. He was now drawing enthusiastic crowds of hundreds to his rented chapel, each paying one shilling a month each to hear his views on slavery and the present form of government. He was vehemently and violently against both. He first came to prominence in June 1819, when he complained to the local magistrate that the brewery workers behind his chapel were disturbing his sermons. He was told in no uncertain terms that his seditious and blasphemous uttering deserved to be drowned out and he needed to quit while he was ahead.
Despite the brewers’ labourers making a racket, somebody, possibly a spy, heard Wedderburn say in August 1819 ‘that potentates and rulers who did not do their duty towards their subjects should be destroyed’. On the morning of Peterloo, 16 August, Wedderburn was arrested and charged with sedition and blasphemy. In September, a grand jury came to the conclusion of ‘No True Bill’ – that there was no reason to believe that a crime had been committed. Juries often protected those who were prosecuted for sedition or blasphemy. The state conducted these trials with absolutely no certainty that they would get their own way, although they usually did.