by Colin Brown
A slowly progressive intracranial bleed or re-bleeding into a bleed resulting from the blunt assault could cause subsequent deterioration from raised intracranial pressure in this time frame. However, this is longer than one would usually expect without underlying factors, such as the victim being elderly or alcoholic (with associated clotting abnormalities) …
Dr Johnson suggested another possibility: John Lees was so badly beaten he suffered a broken spine, with possible infection leading to septicaemia (blood poisoning):
I think the possibility that John Lees could have suffered an unstable fracture to his upper posterior neck during the beating should be considered. This would allow for a prolonged period of normal function and then for rapid deterioration if the fractured vertebra moved and caused compression of the spinal cord in the upper neck, which would adequately explain the severe shoulder pain, pain in the leg and loss of all limb function. The compression could also be caused by further bleeding or abscess development at the fracture site.
I also think that sepsis provides a good alternative explanation for his general deterioration, including vomiting, progressive weakness and his death. Since the head, and therefore the deep posterior neck, were not apparently examined during the autopsy, then in addition to a potential neck and/or head injury being missed, a deep source of infection either around the vertebral fracture (or skull fracture – with meningitis) would not be found either …
The description of reddening and inflammation around the neck could represent spreading infection in the skin and soft tissue – potentially spreading from infection in or around the putative neck fracture site … Given that the surgeon looked in the wound and described the appearance of the fracture but not any infection, it is unlikely that the sabre injury contributed to the delayed death. This makes it likely, on the available evidence, that the blunt force assault described to the back of John Lees was the central factor.
In all, at least 15 people were killed and 650 were injured in twenty minutes.* Over 200 suffered sabre wounds, including 31 women. They included Margaret Downes, who bled to death from a sabre-slash to the breast, and Elizabeth Farren, who was slashed by a sabre twice over the head and almost had her wrist severed defending herself from the blows. Perhaps most shocking of all, they included a mother and child. Ann Fildes (no relation to Mary who carried the flag in Hunt’s barouche) was carrying her baby when she was knocked down by a horse ridden by a sergeant major riding after the Yeomanry; the child was thrown out of her arms onto the ground and died at about 10 p.m.
Hunt wrote to Sidmouth to protest his innocence from his cell at the New Bailey prison on 19 August, saying, ‘I saw one man with his nose cut off …’ A drill book in use by the Hussars showed how to carry out six cuts across the face, slashing across the nose diagonally and horizontally.
Research of the casualty lists shows that, as a proportion of the crowd, women were more likely to be attacked by the Yeomanry Cavalry or beaten up by the Special Constables with truncheons than men. Women demanding political rights offended their idea about how women should behave, but it also seems that, to the marauding Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry and Nadin’s Runners, the women in virginal white resembled Marianne, the French symbol of revolution. They had to be struck down. Mary Fildes had her dress slashed open and she was badly injured. Some women were slashed by sabres more than once, even when they were lying on the ground bleeding – the body of Sarah Howarth was cut in twenty places. The greatest number of casualties – 187 men and 31 women – were inflicted by sabre cuts, but nearly as many (136 men and 52 women) were injured by being trampled by horses and some were both slashed and ridden over. A total of 47 men and 23 women were beaten black and blue by truncheons, like John Lees. A volunteer constable was heard gloating at the crowd: ‘This is Waterloo for you.’ Within a week, the radical Manchester Observer coined the title: ‘The Peter Loo Massacre.’
It is astonishing that the only inquest that was held was into the death of John Lees. It is often reported that this was because Robert Lees was a magistrate and rich enough to pay for the legal costs. But a careful reading of the evidence suggests the opposite. According to his wife, Robert Lees did not want to pay for the inquest or the fancy lawyer who came up from London to represent the Lees family.
When campaigners called on Hannah Lees to see if she would agree to it she said at first she did not want an inquest. ‘I wished him to be buried without any disturbance,’ she said. But she told the campaigners she wanted justice for the death of her stepson. They assured her that her husband would not have to bear the cost. ‘I did not believe my husband would like to be at any expense on account of law suits. They said, “God forbid”.’ The campaigners wanted the inquest to highlight the scale of the outrage, while the government wanted it to show evidence of the revolutionary threat facing Britain. The inquest on John Lees therefore was treated as a show trial by both sides.
In the aftermath, on 21 August, Sidmouth wrote again to convey to the magistrates the ‘great satisfaction’ of the Prince Regent for their ‘prompt, decisive and efficient measures for the preservation of the public tranquility …’ But the Prince Regent was already in the Isle of Wight, enjoying the sailing at Cowes Week. A cartoon published three days after Peterloo showed a fat Prince Regent being carried by two voluptuous bathing ladies from Brighton to his barge. The message was clear: the monarchy was more interested in having fun than the plight of the people of Manchester.
John Harmer, a skilled London lawyer, travelled up to Oldham to represent the dead man’s family. The inquest started on Wednesday, 8 September 1819 at a pub in the town called the Duke of York and the jury were taken to see the body of John Lees before settling down to hear the evidence in a large room at the inn. The inquest makes compulsive reading as a courtroom drama – the coroner’s irritation with Harmer, the hotshot lawyer from London, leaps off the pages of the verbatim accounts. There was a row with the lawyers at the outset when the Coroner Thomas Ferrand failed to show up, leaving the inquest in the hands of a deputy, Mr Battye, who angrily told the lawyers: ‘If Mr Ferrand were here I am sure he would not allow one of you in the room.’ Battye also objected to reporters taking short-hand notes of the proceedings, and tried to throw them out. Battye had been told by the police that Lees had been ‘crushed to death’ – an obvious cover-up – and even Battye could not allow that to stand because, he said, he had seen that Lees had been cut. But he immediately adjourned the inquest, despite protests by the lawyers, and it was not until 25 September that the inquest got going under Ferrand, this time at the Angel Inn in Oldham, when Robert Lees was called. He recalled seeing his son the next morning after the meeting at Manchester at the top of the landing in his factory and seeing his shirt was bloody. He had his coat and waistcoat off, said the father. ‘Did he do any work?’, asked the coroner. ‘I judged he was unable to work and feeling angry at his having been to the meeting, I told him if he could not work, he must go to the Overseer [of the parish poor relief] for I would not support him.’ “What did he say to that?’, the Coroner asked. ‘He never spoke, and I said no more …’ The next time Robert Lees spoke to his son was ‘the Sunday but one following’ – thirteen days later – when he was ‘very ill’.
Robert Lees admitted he had failed to inquire after his son’s health in the coming days. He was questioned about why he had taken so little interest in his son’s health. He said he thought his son would get better and left his care to his wife, Hannah, but it sounded less than convincing. The truth is – as Robert Lees told the inquest – he was angry with his son for going to the rally, though he clearly did not know that he was so badly injured.
One of the most telling lines at the inquest came from William Harrison, the blunt-speaking spinner from Oldham, who said he saw Lees some days later ‘with a face like a cap’. Asked what he meant by that, Harrison said: ‘White as a cap … He told me he was at the battle of Waterloo but he never was in such danger there as he was at the meeting
for at Waterloo it was man to man, but at Manchester it was downright murder.’ It is open to question whether a modern inquest jury would bring in a verdict of murder that the campaigners clearly wanted after the Peterloo Massacre.
The inquest lasted about six weeks but Coroner Ferrand adjourned the hearings in October until 1 December before the jury could bring in a verdict of murder, and they were eventually abandoned when the Court of the King’s Bench intervened and ruled the inquest proceedings null and void. There were protests in Parliament, accusations of cover-up, countless petitions, and no reform. Sir Francis Burdett presented a petition to Parliament from Robert Lees and Henry Brougham, a lawyer and Radical MP, saying Lees believed ‘a verdict of wilful murder must and would have been given against many individuals engaged in the cruel attack [on his son] and that Mr Ferrand, the coroner, stated that he had no doubt such a verdict would be pronounced if he allowed the jury to come to a decision.’ It is claimed today that the inquest led to the reforms that Hunt and John Lees wanted. But the shocking truth is that nothing really happened for more than a decade. Most shocking of all, no one was ever tried for murder.
The inquest evidence suggests that the Hussars were not as culpable as the Yeomanry Cavalry and special constables, who seemed determined to ensure the campaigners would never dare hold another protest meeting at St Peter’s Field. They were right about that – it still stands out as the worst atrocity of its kind in British history, apart perhaps from Bloody Sunday in Derry. It has been compared to the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in China. Percy Bysshe Shelley vented his anger against Castlereagh – who was also Leader of the House of Commons and a symbol of repression – in the Mask of Anarchy:
I met Murder on the way He had a mask like Castlereagh Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight, For one by one, and two by two, He tossed them human hearts to chew Which from his wide cloak he drew.
The reform protestors after the ‘Peterloo’ Massacre adopted the anti-slavery medallion with a twist. Whereas the anti-slavery medal, struck by pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, depicted a black slave in chains on bended knee posing the question: ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’, the Peterloo medallion depicted a spinner on his knees pleading for his life with a soldier who is about to bring a sabre down on his head.
The Peterloo Massacre and the victims like John Lees became a cause célèbre among left-wing activists and was seen as a landmark in the establishment of workers’ rights in Britain by historians such as E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class. I researched it at the historic Chetham’s Library in Manchester, where Karl Marx met Engels. It would take another decade of repression before the reforms John Lees had given his life for were partially conceded by the government, and a long time after that before the unions that grew up out of the struggles of the Regency period were allowed to organise. Wellington, as Tory prime minister, used the authority he gained from his great victory at Waterloo to hold back the tide of Parliamentary reform until it was unstoppable.
Hulton, the chairman of the Manchester magistrates, was still indignantly justifying his actions as late as 1831 in a letter to Lord Althorp, the Chancellor in Grey’s Whig ministry after Wellington had been forced out of office. Althorp was a passionate supporter of the Great Reform Bill and Hulton insisted that only two people were killed at St Peter’s Field: ‘one a woman who having personated the Goddess of Reason was trampled to death in the crowd; the other a special constable who was cut down unintentionally by a private of a dragoon regiment.’ This absurd letter of denial made Hulton a laughing stock, but it underlined the unshakable belief of those involved in the rightness of their action. Hulton pointed out that on the day after the Manchester rally ‘a pensioner was beaten to death with portions of his own loom’.
It is one of the great ironies that politicians gather in the autumn each year for party rallies near the site of the massacre at the Manchester Central convention centre (formerly the Central Railway station and G-Mex Centre). They enjoy the free speech that the men and women, gathered to hear Hunt denounce the Corn Laws that day, were denied. The Manchester Free Trade Hall was built on this historic site in 1853 to commemorate the repeal of the hated Corn Laws, but it is probably better known today as the venue for concerts in the 1960s by Pink Floyd, B.B. King and where Bob Dylan went electric. The only sign that the massacre took place here is a red plaque on the front wall of the hotel. The political leaders who come for their annual rallies rarely give the plaque a second glance.
John Lees was buried in the family plot at the parish church of St Mary with St Peter on the hill overlooking Oldham. John’s father was to follow him less than six months later, which adds greater poignancy to their role in the Peterloo Massacre. I found the register listing Robert Lees’ death in a fine looping hand – ‘No 127: Robert Lees of West Street died March 2 aged 54’, but it did not give the cause of death. Perhaps it was the stress. The inscription on their headstone read: ‘Sacred to the memory of Robert Lees of Bent-Green who died Feby 29 1820 in the 55th year of his age. Also John Lees his son who died Sept 7 1819 in the 22nd year of his age.’6
I went to Oldham in search of John Lees’s gravestone but it has been cleared away in the landscaping of the grassy knoll around the church. Using the church’s burial map, I did locate the place where the grave of John and Robert Lees had been, however. Their plot number is M40 on a parish map. With the help of a church official, I discovered it is roughly where a circle of paving slabs have been laid above a flight of steps on the south side of the church. I was told their remains were moved to another cemetery some years ago, and although John Lees, one of the forgotten heroes of the Battle of Waterloo, has become a working-class hero, he has no marker.
The man in charge of the Hussars, Major General Sir John Byng, is seen by some fair-minded experts on the Peterloo Massacre as a moderate who was in sympathy with the campaigners like John Lees for Parliamentary reform. It is true Byng became a Whig MP and backed reform in 1832, but only four months after the Peterloo Massacre he wrote to Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary from Pontefract, on 18 November 1819, warning of more ‘seditious and blasphemous tracts’ circulating in the North. Byng said he had intelligence that ‘simultaneous meetings had been agreed upon to assemble at Newcastle, Carlisle, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield and Barnsley in the West Riding of Yorkshire; at Manchester, Bolton, Wigan, Blackburn and Burnley in Lancashire; at Newcastle under Lyme at Nottingham at Leicester and at Coventry …’ He gave the impression he was ready to order the army in again to dispurse the protestors. Byng did not know it, but soon the Guards he had commanded at Waterloo would be called out to stop the assassination of the Cabinet. And this time they would be dealing with real revolutionaries.
Notes
* Vansittart was one of the two MPs for the ‘rotten borough’ from 1802 to 1807. It continued to return two MPs until 1831, although it only had eleven voters.
* It was around the corner from Gloucester Street where Francis Stiles, the man who claimed he had captured an eagle, went to live. Stiles could have been there. Spa Fields, Skinner Street, is now an urban playground.
* This would have made him 15 when he joined, not 14, as it says on the Muster Roll.
* Estimates of the injured vary from 400 (the official figure) to 800 - eight casualty lists were drawn up and some included two men shot in a separate incident at night and a constable killed by a mob in revenge.
1. 5th Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, (London: John Murray, 1888), p. 92.
2. ‘An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte Percy’, pamphlet issued to the press by Bysshe Shelley, reprinted (London: Thomas Rodd, circa 1817).
3. The Whole Proceedings Before the Coroner’s Inquest at Oldham on the Body of John Lees, Who Died of Sabre Wounds at Manchester, August 16, 1819 (London: Joseph Augustus Dowling, 1820)
4. ‘Report of the Inquest into the death of John Lees’, The Examiner, 1819.
5. Official Report into the Peterloo Massacre, 1820, British Library online.
6. Register of Burials 1820, No. 127, St Mary Parish Church, Oldham.
11
WELLINGTON’S WATERLOO
At 8.30 p.m. on 23 February 1820, a picquet from the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Regiment was ordered to a halt by their commanding officer, Captain Lord Frederick FitzClarence, in a street just off the Edgware Road in north London. They had been called out from their Portman Road barracks to give support to a police operation that was taking place here. It was a ten-minute march through the dark streets in their famous scarlet uniforms, armed with pikes and muskets. Some of the troops were ‘Waterloo Men’, veterans of the Battle – Sergeant James Lott was in Sir William Gomm’s company at Waterloo, Sergeant William Legg was in the company of Colonel Daniel Mackinnon, the Coldstreams’ historian, who reinforced Hougoumont during the siege, and Sergeant James Graham, who had been dubbed ‘the Bravest Man in England’ for his courage in helping to close the north gate at Hougoumont during the siege, allegedly was there.
Captain FitzClarence had been commissioned in 1814 when he was just 14 but he had missed the great victory at Waterloo, possibly for his own safety. He was the third son – one of ten illegitimate children – by the Prince Regent’s younger brother, William, the Duke of Clarence, and his mistress, a beautiful Irish actress Dorothea Bland, who was famous under her stage name of ‘Mrs Jordan’ – a name chosen because she had ‘crossed the water’ to England. In the days before the contraceptive pill, such affairs with multiple births were tolerated by the aristocratic elite, providing they were carried out with due decorum. William, later crowned as William IV, openly lived with ‘Mrs Jordan’ for twenty years until 1811 when his brother George became Prince Regent. ‘Mrs Jordon’ was paid off and William eventually married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen in 1818. He recognised his illegitimate offspring but he had no legitimate heirs when he died.