Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Page 18
Wedderburn stood out in 1819. He was of mixed heritage, with a slave mother and a slave owning father from Jamaica; in the ugly language of the day, he was a ‘mulatto’ (mule). His views explain why the government linked sedition and blasphemy together; an attack on established theology would undermine the justification for monarchical government. Lord Sidmouth also correctly believed that Wedderburn’s chapel was the centre of the most violent insurrectionary group in the country. It was a magnet for illegal activity, seditious speeches and the possible collection of pikes and weapons for a planned insurrection. The landlord of the chapel was a known associate of Arthur Thistlewood. Both government and rebels believed, correctly, that the group was deliberately trying to exploit the anger over Peterloo to incite insurrection.
Wedderburn did not care what he said. He attended the monster Finsbury Park reform meeting in October 1819 and was severely reprimanded by the other radicals present for making a speech telling the crowd to arm themselves for an imminent battle with the authorities, and they could use iron rails if they ran short of pikes.
The government tried to silence Wedderburn again in May 1820, this time on a charge of blasphemy. The first witness was the government spy William Plush. Plush paid his shilling in October 1819 and noted what he saw and heard. Wedderburn did not disappoint. He started his sermon controversially: ‘While Christianity had certainly been introduced in Britain, it had never yet been carried out.’ He went on to claim that Moses was a liar; Moses’s claim to see God was directly contradicted by Jesus. Paul had twisted Christianity to suit the establishment. Jesus was a reformer, even a revolutionary.
Plush saw about 200 in the audience who were the very lowest in society. He also noted strong support for Richard Carlile in the room. Carlile was a religious free thinker who had a Fleet Street shop – more like a kiosk in size – called the ‘Temple of Reason’, (the Tory paper the Leeds Intelligencer had suggested that he had forgotten the ‘T’ on the beginning of the last word). According to the trial report, Plush – who claimed to be a parish constable – was backed up by another witness:
The account which this witness gave of the defendant’s speech harmonised remarkably with the report of the former witness. Indeed it was given almost in the same words even in the arrangement of the most trifling expletives; there was a most striking coincidence.
Wedderburn implied that there had been collusion. He declined the chance to cross-examine the witness – ‘they have learnt their catechism too well’. His defence was that blasphemy was a form of slander, and there could be no defaming of God, who was all powerful and all knowing, but beyond man’s capabilities to understand Him; therefore no human could judge blasphemy. He believed that he was essentially being accused of opposing the state religion. Wedderburn claimed that the greatest libel on Christianity was the belief that it needed laws and threats to protect it, and that was what the government was doing, not him.
The jury found him guilty but asked for clemency because of a lack of parental care. In Wedderburn’s case, this was because his father had sold his mother back into slavery after his birth. Wedderburn was still to spend two years in Dorchester gaol at the same time as Henry Hunt, who had tried different methods to oppose the establishment but ended up with the same result, although Hunt was able to buy much better prison conditions.
There was a real attempt in 1819 to restrict freedom of speech by muzzling newspapers. Closing them down was out of the question, but restricting circulation was possible by forcing price rises and increasing accountability. Newspapers had never been cheap. They could be printed for about 2d but cost nearer 6d; a 4d tax was added in 1815 in a deliberate attempt to put them beyond the reach of the poor. The move may have reduced sales but it had less effect on readership. Radical organisations would have reading groups where the cost of newspapers could be pooled by subscription; Luddites and other workers’ groups would often publicly read out the news to their non reading, poorer members.
William Cobbett and his journalism was the main target of the 1819 Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act. In 1816, he had produced a new version of his Political Register with all recent news taken out, and in a pamphlet rather than newspaper format. This could evade the newspaper tax; his enemies called it ‘Tuppenny Trash’ but it sold 40,000 copies a week when the Times or a similar establishment newspaper like the Morning Post would sell 4,000 a day. John Hunt defended Cobbett in his Political Examiner (which cost an eye-watering 10d). Why would the starving weavers of Manchester buy it? Why would they give their hard earned tuppences? It was because they believed him!
In 1819 the tax was extended to cover those publications which had previously escaped duty by publishing only opinions. Cobbett’s cover price went up, and his influence diminished, but this was also partly due to the return of slightly better times in the 1820s. As Cobbett himself said: ‘I defy you to agitate a man with a full stomach.’
Booksellers and newspaper sellers were often the subject of government anger, and many radicals were also printers and publishers. Crowds would gather around the windows of print sellers to see the latest disrespectful image of the Prince Regent or politicians. At least these people could be traced and punished; the iterant newspaper seller was feared more.
Joseph Swann of Macclesfield was a hatter who had encountered hard times in 1819 and given up his artisan profession to start hawking newspapers and periodicals around the North of England. In October 1819 he was accused of publishing (in his case this meant merely selling) the works of Richard Carlile and other political reformers. He was also accused of attending a reform meeting at Macclesfield in July 1819 where he had tried to ‘excite in the minds of the King’s liege subjects a spirit of discontent, dissatisfaction and sedition’. He was given bail, but spent eight weeks in prison without charge. He was re-arrested in December 1819, and separated from his pregnant wife.
Owning a poem that contained the following was one of the charges against him:
Off with your fetters; spurn the slavish yoke
Now, now or never, can your chain be broke
Swift then rise and give the fatal stroke
It was the last line that put Swann in prison. At his trial in January 1820, Swann, ‘a low, vulgar looking fellow’ (Staffordshire Advertiser), ‘this dangerous individual’ (Chester Courant), showed no deference at all to the court. When sentenced, he was defiant:
Swann with a vast deal of apparent sang froid, held up his Radical emblem – a white hat bound with crepe and exclaimed ‘Han ye done? Is that all? Why I thowt ye’d a got a bit of hemp for me and hung me!’
He received three punishments for seditious conspiracy, seditious writing and blasphemy which were ordered to run concurrently at a staggering four and half years. This sentence in Chester gaol was double the tariffs received by William Cobbett (two years for libel in 1810), Henry Hunt (two and half years in Ilchester for sedition after Peterloo in 1820) or Richard Carlile (three years in Dorchester in 1819 for seditious libel). His wife and four children survived on 9s a week, and a one off payment of £10 from Richard Carlile, whose October 1819 edition, denying the divinity of Christ was being hawked by Swann when he was arrested.
Swann was to receive an unbelievably severe sentence for his crime of selling pamphlets – Cobbett suggested that it was two publications in total – and attending a meeting, at which he claimed never to have spoken. Incarcerated in Chester prison, he also suggested that he was a victim of an agent provocateur called Buckley. Swann had not even spoken at the ‘treasonable’ Macclesfield meeting, but Buckley, who had organised the gathering, was not arrested and had been seen regularly on the streets afterwards. Swann wondered why and left it to others to provide the answer. He was clearly a stubborn and sarcastic individual; it is equally clear why he was given a salutary lesson.
Swann also claimed the magistrates were ashamed of what had been done to him and tried to get the authorities to remit the rest of the sentence. The prisoner was reluctant to ask
for clemency because he wanted to show ‘the severity with which an individual might be treated under a free government which was said to be the envy of surrounding nations and the admiration of the world’.
In 1831, Swann was still active selling unlicensed radical newspapers. This time he received three months’ incarceration in the Knutsford House of Correction and was dragged out of the court by force, declaring that he would not stop hawking these newspapers, and his next port of call would be the judge’s house.1
Although Swann was clearly cantankerous and fanatical, permitting a political principle to allow his wife and four children to languish in poverty, Swann and thousands like him deserve to be remembered as a friend of liberty as much as any radical journalist or reforming member of parliament. Over 120 ordinary people suffered prison sentences for selling Carlile’s Republican alone, some of whom were Swann’s father, wife and son. The British were clearly freer than most nations; but it was a struggle to keep those freedoms during the darkness years of the Regency.
Chapter 16
The Punishment Didn’t Fit The Crime
The criminal justice system, like the Poor Law, was not fit for purpose by the Regency period. Outside of London there was no adequate system for fighting crime, and nowhere in Britain was crime actively prevented. There was a crime wave in Britain after Waterloo, with 7,818 indictable offences in 1816 and 14,254 a mere three years later.1 Most people got away with their crimes, and to compensate for the unlikelihood of apprehension, punishments for those caught were exceptionally severe.
Not only were the punishments draconian, the number of new capital crimes in the eighteenth century meant that there was little differentiation between crimes of extreme violence and minor property crime. Severe punishments meant that the law was brought into disrepute, to the extent that juries would not reach true judgements in order to spare victims the noose. Many of those committed to hang were pardoned, giving significant power to the Crown to use or withhold a royal pardon. In 1817, the total number of executions was 115, although 1,300 received the death sentence.2 It was a random and capricious system.
The crime wave reached a peak because economic depression forced more people into crime – sometimes of a pathetic kind. In January 1816, Ann Jones, 59, came to London to claim some prize money payable to her husband who had been killed in the war. With, she claimed, only one penny in her pocket, she entered the house of John Croker, and stole two sheets and a coat, value £5. Even Catherine Rook, the servant, had some concern for her: ‘I then asked her what possessed her… she said she was a poor deranged woman, and begged I would pardon her.’
In the same year, Harriet Skelton, 33, was found guilty of passing false banknotes in Clerkenwell. She tried to get the note changed into silver coin and real notes. A witness reported:
I am a confectioner, and live at No. 198, Piccadilly. On the 6th of January, which was Twelfth Day, about seven o’clock in the evening, the prisoner came to my shop, bought a 10s. 6d. twelfth-cake, and offered me a 5l. note. I asked her what address I was to put on it? She gave me the name of ‘Moore, No. 29, Bury-street, St. James’s.’
Banknotes were usually endorsed with the name and address of the person passing it on; £5 was more than a year’s pay for a domestic servant. Mr Ragless the shopkeeper knew that address and knew that Harriet was lying.
In November of the same year, Francis Losch murdered his wife after an argument in the street. He first called her a drunk. A witness reported what happened next:
‘If I am drunk, it is by prostituting myself for an idle fellow like you’ – upon which he came forward with great violence, and forced something to her side – I did not see what was in his hand. She staggered a little on her left side, fell on her back, and called to me to take the knife out of her two or three times, but I never moved, I was so alarmed. She pulled her clothes up – I saw her bowels gush out. The prisoner never ran away, but said, ‘Here I am, to be taken as a prisoner, if you choose to take me.’
Losch was a hard-headed, German born soldier who had forced his wife into prostitution and killed her with four wounds to the stomach with a six inch knife when she tried to escape him.
On the other hand, Skelton was made an orphan when she was 3 years old, and in 1810 she married John Skelton, a vicious alcoholic who earned a living as a painter. She persevered in an abusive relationship for eight years until he abandoned her in 1818. She lodged with her brother, Mr Goodluck, in Holborn, but found that he was also a criminal – he passed forged notes. After six months of successfully resisting her brother’s demands to join his criminal activity, Harriet eventually took part out of loyalty to her brother and in order to pay his £60 debt. Or that was her story afterwards. Her defence at the Old Bailey trial was slightly different:
I never had any notes but what came from my husband or brother. When they gave them to me… I asked them what names and addresses were to be put on them? I thought the names were those of the persons they took them off. If I had known them to have been forged, I would not have passed them.
Some people have suggested that the first sentence implies some kind of link between husband and brother that contradicted her story about running away from one to the other. It is more possible that both men had the same criminal methods. Her claim of ignorance about countersigning the banknote was a poor defence; it did not prove her innocence, as both criminals and non-criminals understood the system well.
She had also refused a plea bargain with the Bank of England, which would have saved her life and transported her to Australia instead. She looked and behaved like an innocent ‘woman of genteel address and deportment’, said one newspaper, and she attracted the attention of Elizabeth Fry and others who were making long overdue moves to improve the prison system.
Despite the two cases being completely different, Losch and Skelton were both hanged at Newgate Prison. It seems remarkable today that they received the same punishment, with the important difference that Losch was handed over to the St Bartholomew’s Hospital for dissection.
How well you went to your death mattered. Francis Losch ‘went hard’ into eternity. His only regret was that he was being hanged and he refused to admit to his real motives, claiming his wife’s actions had made him jealous. He did not go meekly to the scaffold, requiring wine to quieten him and two people to forcibly point him in the right direction. There was insufficient penitence and resignation and no acceptance of the justice of his punishment.
Harriet Skelton died quite well, considering the circumstances. She had the support of the establishment, apart from Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth, the one person who really mattered. She was visited by the Duke of Gloucester, who listened to her story, shook her hand and ‘instantly repaired to the seat of royalty itself’ to try to respite her sentence. Harriet had also received religious instruction from Elizabeth Fry at Newgate, and her case was brought up at the House of Commons. However, the extensive and aggravated nature of the offence meant that no pardon was possible; she seems to have been passing forged notes in an organised way for five weeks.
Now her hopes were crushed. Her brother, Burnsley Goodluck, was not charged with a capital crime and was merely sent to the House of Correction. On the Thursday before her execution, she had a hysterical nervous attack and the attempt at administering the sacraments was aborted. Her criminal partner, James Ward, also fainted. The Reverend Horace Cotton of Newgate performed his condemned sermon to all prisoners awaiting death, with an open coffin the focus of the service. Harriet’s negative reaction was understandable.
By the evening they were composed enough to spend the evening in religious consolation. On the morning of the execution she showed the utmost fortitude and resignation until she saw the scaffold and then had to be supported by four people towards the drop. This temporary failure to compose herself was seen as a manifestation of her truly penitent nature, rather than boastfulness and cowardice. She regained her composure at the last moment, and that was what usu
ally mattered to commentators at executions. Her last words, according to her supporters were: ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner.’ Elizabeth Fry used the story of Harriet Skelton as instructional literature for young ladies; so her death was not in vain perhaps.
Ann Jones, the pathetic burglar, was reprieved, despite committing a capital crime like Losch and Skelton. There were over 200 capital crimes – too many for the system to dispense justice efficiently. Some of the odder ones are well known, such as impersonating a Chelsea pensioner or being in the company of gypsies for three months, but they were never used as a basis for execution. The bloody code was severe because it was the only way the establishment could protect property and keep order. It was a universal warning rather than an attempt to make the punishment fit the crime. In the words of the seventeenth-century aristocrat George Saville: ‘Men are not hang’d for stealing Horses, but that Horses may not be stolen.’
Ann Jones would have been transported for seven years, with the death penalty if she dared to return before this time. Around 100 people were executed in Britain each year; the system could not bear many more. In the year of Jones’s reprieve, thirteen people were executed for murder, but fourteen were hanged for stealing sheep. Crimes that damaged the confidence in the monetary system were punished mercilessly. Twenty-three of the ninety-six people executed in 1818 were guilty of either forgery of bank notes or passing of counterfeit coin.3 Paper bank notes were easy to copy and the silver coinage was in such a terrible state that forgeries did not have to be very good. It was just too tempting.