The Scum of the Earth

by Colin Brown

  Their warnings went unheeded. In 1817 a mob attacked the Prince Regent’s carriage when he was returning from Parliament after reading the King’s Speech. The Lord of the Bedchamber, James Murray, who had been in the carriage with the Prince Regent, was summoned to the Commons to give evidence to MPs about the attack. He said:

  On his royal highness’s return from the House, between Carleton House Gardens and St. James’s gardens, the glass of the carriage on the left side of his royal highness was broken … It seemed to have been produced by two bullets of a small size; about a quarter of an inch apart.

  The incident was passed off as an exaggeration by the Prince Regent – many thought the bullets were probably a couple of stones. However, Murray’s evidence (two holes were punched in tough glass without smashing it) suggests they may have been bullets fired from an airgun (there was no sound or smell of powder) and two years later there was a serious assassination attempt on the Cabinet.

  The unrest was strongest in the burgeoning towns of the newly industrialised Midlands and the North – Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bradford and Leeds, which were denied representation in Parliament. The new mills with their spinning machines, driven by water or steam, put whole families out of work. One spinning machine operated by a single minder could do the work of over 700 spinners; they brought poverty to entire families who had made a living with their cottage looms and single-spindle spinning wheels. It was little comfort to them to know the factories in the cities would produce more jobs than the fields in the coming decades and drive the British export boom that boosted incomes in the Victorian period.

  In their frustration some organised gangs smashed the new weaving and spinning frames in the factories that had taken their jobs. The anonymous gang leaders penned death threats to the magistrates who tried to tackle the lawlessness signed with the nom-de-guerre ‘King Lud’ and the legend of the Luddites was born. Many were proud artisans whose skills were also lost to machines and new mass manufacture. While the landowning aristocrats remained the ruling elite at Westminster, the factory bosses and the merchants became the new ‘aristocrats’ of the Midlands and the North, with even less sympathy with the Luddites’ demands than the old aristocrats. There was no police force, and the mill owners mobilised volunteer militias, backed by the law through local magistrates, to smash the mobs who had smashed their machines, or make them swing for their crimes on the gibbets.

  Lord Byron – a month before he burst onto the literary world with his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – was so troubled by the plight of some Nottinghamshire weavers who were facing the death penalty that he travelled down from his stately home at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire to the House of Lords to denounce the government in his maiden speech:

  These men were willing to dig, but the spade was in other hands; they were not ashamed to beg, but there was none to relieve them. Their own means of subsistence were cut off; all other employments pre-occupied; and their excesses, however to be deplored and condemned, can hardly be the subject of surprise.

  The rural poor felt besieged. Not only were their cottage industries under attack from the mill owners, but their ancient rights to graze some sheep or a cow on the commons were taken away by Parliamentary Bills allowing local landowners to enclose their land. A total of 906 enclosure bills were introduced between 1800 and 1810 – nearly double the number in the previous decade. It was little more than legalised land theft, though it replaced the medieval farming system with modern production techniques. The cottage dwellers risked deportation to the colonies if they poached on the land.

  The peasant-poet John Clare poured out his heart in his poetry about the loss of his childhood haunts in the flat lands of Northamptonshire:

  These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall

  Is laid upon them and destroyed them all

  Each little tyrant with his little sign

  Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine

  But paths to freedom and to childhood dear

  A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’.

  ‘The Mores’, John Clare

  Clare shared a two-up-two-down cottage in Helpston with his family of ten, including his father and mother. The cottage is now a museum. Ironically, he was sponsored by the Tory Marquess of Exeter and the Whig, Earl Fitzwilliam, who enclosed his country lanes.

  In 1816, Byron was forced into exile because of rumours spread by his ex-lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Melbourne’s daughter-in-law, of his sodomy – then a crime punishable by death. He embarked on a journey to see the Alps, Mont Blanc in Chamonix, and Lake Geneva and visited the battlefield at Waterloo. In a letter from Karlsruhe on 16 May 1816, Byron told his old friend, John Cam Hobhouse, that while a coach wheel was being repaired in Brussels, he:

  of course seized the opportunity to visit Mont Saint Jean where I had a gallop over the field on a Cossack horse left by some of the Don gentlemen at Brussels and after a tolerably minute investigation returned by Soignies having purchased a quantity of helmets sabres and all of which are consigned to the care of a Mr Gordon at Brussels (an old acquaintance) who desired to forward them to Mr Murray – in whose keeping I hope to find them safe some day or other …

  The helmets and sabres went to Newstead but smaller souvenirs are still held by his publisher, John Murray, in their offices at 50 Albermarle Street, London. Virginia Murray showed me Byron’s Waterloo souvenirs. They are wrapped in tissue paper in boxes and include a large ball of canister shot stained red, perhaps by blood, an eagle badge of the 55th, and a couple of leather Napoleonic cockades that had the same shock effect in Regency London as a Nazi swastika still has now. Byron was disappointed to find the fields at Waterloo already under the plough, but was even more disparaging about the battle. He wrote to John Murray saying he had rode across the battlefield with ‘pain and pleasure’. ‘The Plain at Waterloo is a fine one – but not much after Marathon and Troy – Cheronea and Platea – Perhaps there is something of prejudice in this but – but I detest the cause and the victors – and the victory – including Blücher and the Bourbons.’ Byron compared Waterloo unfavourably to the Battle of Marathon in Ancient Greece:

  And Harold stands upon this place of skulls,

  The grave of France, the deadly Waterloo;

  How in an hour the power which gave annuls

  Its gifts, transferring fame as fleeting too!

  In ‘pride of place’ here last the eagle flew,

  Then tore with bloody talon the rent plain,

  Pierced by the shaft of banded nations through;

  Ambition’s life and labours all were vain;

  He wears the shatter’d links of the world’s broken chain

  More down to earth, Frances, Lady Shelley, on her own tour to Waterloo and Mont Blanc, noted in her diary on 20 July 1816 that Byron was already engaged in another affair: ‘Lord Byron is living near here with Percy Shelley or rather with his wife’s sister as the chronique scandalous says.’ She was referring to Claire Clairmont, a starry-eyed 17-year-old who had had an affair with Byron in London and had pursued him to Geneva, where he had taken the handsome Villa Diodati overlooking the lake with his friend and physician John William Polidori. Claire had followed Byron to Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Shelley’s muse, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Claire’s step-sister, who stayed at the nearby Maison Chapuis. The weather was atrocious – the lake and the hills echoed to the boom of some spectacular storms of thunder and lightning in the summer of 1816, possibly caused by the after-effects of the Tambora volcano. They were forced to shelter indoors, and passed the time making up ghost stories that would make Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin famous as Mary Shelley. Mary was the daughter of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, a radical writer and supporter of the Enlightenment. Mary Wollstonecraft had been intoxicated with the Revolution; she had written a feminist response to Burke called The Rights of Men (1790) followed by A Vindication of the Rights
of Women (1792) and arrived in Paris a month before Louis XVI was guillotined.

  Villa Diodati is still there today, largely as it was when Byron and the Shelleys were there, though Cologny is a rich and exclusive suburb for the bankers and jewellers who still cluster in the Swiss city. The villa is elevated on a steep grassy hill with airy views over the lake, the marina with its towering fountain and the Jura mountains beyond.

  When I visited the villa, a crowd had gathered nearby to watch a couple of vintage biplanes marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War with a dog-fight over the lake. Byron and his friends had a similar grandstand view for the spectacular thunderstorms that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus:

  A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon, to whom I had given life.

  Mary Shelley’s original manuscript in the Bodleian library in Oxford contains Percy Shelley’s hand-written annotations in the margins and his personal revolutionary manifesto for Britain:

  The republican institutions of our country (Switzerland) have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it. Hence there is less distinction between the several classes of its inhabitants; and the lower orders, being neither so poor nor so despised, their manners are more refined and moral. A servant in Geneva does not mean the same thing as a servant in France and England …

  These were views that would strike a chord with the Radicals at home: the monster would soon be on the loose in Britain, and the real storm was about to break.

  Notes

  * Melbourne House is now the Scotland Office, next to Horse Guards.

  * Sheridan was a master at a play on words.

  * Doubts were cast on the modern porphyria diagnosis in 2013 by more research suggesting he was bipolar.

  1. W.H. Fitchett, Wellington’s Men – Rifleman Harris, 1900.

  10

  THE FORGOTTEN HERO AT PETERLOO

  Shortly after 8 a.m. on a warm summer’s day in 1819, John Lees stepped out of his family’s house in West Street in the centre of Oldham and walked the 100yds to the cotton mill, where he worked as a ‘rover’ loading yarn onto the cotton bobbins. It was a normal working day for John, who was now a month off his 23rd birthday and had settled down in the town with a job and a girlfriend. But after half an hour he quit the spinning machines, put on his brown coat and hat and left the factory. He was going off to join the thousands walking that day to St Peter’s Field in Manchester for an open-air rally. It would end in his death.

  John Lees was one of the ‘Waterloo Men’ – the forgotten heroes – who had served under Wellington. He had joined at 14 or 15 years of age in 1812 as a Royal Artillery Driver. Today, the role he played in the battle is not just forgotten – he is invisible; he does not appear in any of the memoirs, letters or journals concerning the battle. Like tens of thousands of other common soldiers who were there, it is as if he never existed, except for one thing – the list of soldiers who were awarded the Waterloo Medal. I found the name of John Lees listed as number 224 in the Waterloo Roll Call, among those in Bull’s I troop receiving the Waterloo Medal, and it is possible to piece together where he was on the battlefield as a result of his place on the Muster Roll, which I obtained from the National Archives.

  In fine flowing handwriting, it shows he enlisted in Manchester on 23 September as a Royal Artillery Driver. His age is given as 14 (although his birthdate suggests he was 15) and his trade is listed as ‘cotton spinner’. He was posted to Major Robert Bull’s Royal Horse Artillery I Troop on 1 January 1813 as a driver in time to join it at the end of the Peninsular campaign. It lists his height as 5ft 4¼in, his complexion as ‘fresh’, eyes grey and hair brown. He would have been with Major Robert Bull’s troop of 5½-inch howitzers on the slope above Hougoumont when Wellington asked Bull to carry out the delicate task of shelling Jérôme’s infantry over the heads of the defending force of Nassauers and Coldstream Guards as the French advanced through the wood. Lees had to keep the guns supplied with powder, shot and shells from a makeshift ammunition depot, riding his wagon behind the lines and back to the guns in the heat of the battle, until the howitzers overheated and could fire no more.

  Memorial plaque to the dead and injured at the Peterloo Massacre on the front of the Radisson Hotel, Peter Street, Manchester. (Author)

  Bull’s gunners had been overrun by French cavalry and had to retreat into one of the hollow squares until they could return to their guns. They had to pull out at about 5 p.m., before the fall of La Haye Sainte and the final assault on Wellington’s ridge by the Imperial Guard, but they had been in the thick of the action.

  John must have come back like a stranger to his family, with some terrible tales of Waterloo. The battle was a long way behind him that Monday morning, 16 August. He did not tell his father Robert Lees where he was going; John knew his father would be against it because his father owned the mill where he worked.

  The rally was to make a call for new northern cities such as Manchester to have the right to elect their own MP, but the reason why thousands of mill workers from all over the Oldham area were marching to Manchester was they wanted better pay and conditions in the mills – such as a ten-hour day and an end to child labour. The cotton workers flocking to the meeting wanted their own Member of Parliament to give them a voice at Westminster and represent their demands for relief against the grinding poverty in the Lancashire cotton mills – and that put John Lees at odds with the mill masters, like his father Robert.

  The case for electoral reform was clear. The population of Manchester soared in the ten years to 1821 from 409,464 to 526,230 but Manchester had no Member of Parliament for the city, while depopulated medieval villages like Old Sarum on Salisbury Plain had two MPs, including Sir Nicholas Vansittart, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.*

  Despite its rapid growth into the biggest cotton town in the world, Manchester was run under a system that had not changed since it was a medieval parish with a court leet, a baronial court and a borough reeve (the chief municipal officer) with parish beadles to keep order. But the Tory grandees such as the Duke of Wellington stoically resisted the demands for change that were being made at gatherings like the one in Manchester that day, because they feared that if they relaxed their grip on power, they would be risking a revolution in England.

  Robert Lees was one of the new mill masters of Oldham, who ruled their mills with iron discipline. By going to the rally, John knew he was defying his father. That is why John Lees did not tell his father where he was going. Robert Lees had established the mill on ‘The Bent’, a road close to the town centre, running into West Street, which adjoined the old market place. The Lees house was just over the road from the mill in West Street, Oldham, where the mill master could watch over it. He had to be vigilant because frame breakers were ready to burn down mills if they could. John lived at the house in West Street with his father, his step-mother, Hannah, her son Thomas Whitaker by an earlier marriage, and three children Robert and Hannah had together – Sarah, James and Benjamin Lees.

  Public notices signed by the great orator Henry Hunt had gone up in Oldham and other towns in that part of Lancashire, urging the people to come and hear Hunt speak at the rally. St Peter’s Field was not part of the countryside; it was an open space used for such meetings and enclosed on all sides by buildings of the city, including a row of houses at one end and the Quaker Friends Meeting House at the other. Two years earlier, St Peter’s Field had been the scene for a huge gathering before a march to London by textile workers, mainly spinners and weavers, carrying blankets over their shoulders to sleep on at night – the ‘Blanketeers’ meeting was broken up by the King’s Dragoon Guards.

  The magistrates were determined not to allow the troublemakers to gather again. A meeting pl
anned for 9 August had been banned by the magistrates, who were worried about it sparking civil unrest. The Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, clearly saw the political danger. He got one of his officials to write on 4 August on Sidmouth’s behalf urging the magistrates not to break up the meeting planned for 9 August with violence: ‘Reflexion convinces him that more strongly of the inexpediency of attempting forcibly to prevent the meeting on Monday,’ he said. Now that meeting had been banned, Sidmouth and the authorities appeared to relax, even after it was announced by Hunt that it was being rescheduled for 16 June. Hunt knew he was taking a risk by calling the meeting a week later in the open space by St Peter’s church off Deansgate in Manchester, and he knew the magistrates would be looking for another excuse to break up the meeting.

  In the posters, Hunt referred to the authorities’ ‘victory’ with their ban on the earlier meeting:

  Fellow Countrymen: our enemies are exulted at the victory they profess to have attained over us.

  You will meet on Monday next my friends and by your steady, firm and temperate deportment you will convince all your enemies you feel that you have an important and an imperious public duty to perform and that you will not suffer any private consideration on earth to deter you from exerting every nerve to carry your praiseworthy and patriotic intention into effect. The eyes of all England, nay, of all Europe are fixed upon you …