A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  They, the Members of that House, can make arrangements which advance the price of provisions – increase your taxes – introduce such a state of things as diminishes your business and employment, and reduces your wages, and when you state to them that you cannot exist under these accumulated and accumulating evils, they then coolly tell you they cannot relieve you. Had you possessed 70,000 votes for the election of Members to sit in that House, would your application have been treated with such indifference, not to say inattention? We believe not.26

  Cartwright, himself no social radical – he once told Thomas Hardy that he was opposed to ‘any attempt to excite the poor to invade the property of the rich’27 – had journeyed north on his first tour in 1812 in part to support the thirty-nine Manchester reformers, including John Knight, indicted over links with machine-breaking activities.28 Cartwright’s willingness to appeal to working-class groups led some moderate reformers, such as the Reverend Charles Wyvill, to denounce him as an incendiary.29 His decision to tour areas suffering from industrial unrest also brought him into conflict with the authorities. He was arrested at Huddersfield on 22 January 1813 at a meeting held only a week after the execution of fourteen machine-breakers, but managed to avoid any further punishment.30

  12

  KING LUDD

  The problem for reformers such as Cartwright who were willing to court popularity and attempt to bring to Parliament political pressure for reform was that petitioning was not the sole tactic employed by the depressed textile workers of the North West and the Midlands. Indeed, what is surprising, given its ineffectiveness, is how long workers persisted with mass petitioning as a means to influence the government. (Admittedly, as we shall see, this petitioning was not as humble as tradition required: it was often accompanied by the threat of violence.) Alongside petitioning, textile workers in these two areas used a combination of the anonymous – or, rather, pseudonymous – threat of damage to machinery and physical harm to employers, and the perpetration of real acts of violence against property and persons. A letter from one ‘Mr Pistol’, written in Nottingham in January 1812, warned

  all Persons what soever from takeing out work Called the Single Preess, or the two Course [hole]* which is Condemn by Law, any Persons Found so doing to the great ___ injuries of our Trade such People so found out shall be shot any Persons will bring me information of the offenders shall receive a reward of one Guinea to be Paid be me, Mr Pistol.1

  The news of the assassination of the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, in the lobby of the House of Commons on 11 May 1812 by a bankrupt merchant, John Bellingham, bearing a grudge against the British government, was received with joy in many depressed parts of the country. In a town in the Potteries, ‘A man came running down the street, leaping into the air, waving his hat round his head, and shouting with frantic joy, “Perceval is shot, hurrah! Perceval is shot, hurrah!”’2 The Vicar of St Mark’s, Liverpool, the assassin Bellingham’s local church, received a threatening letter signed ‘Jenkins, Lt de Luddites’, for giving a sermon deploring the ‘melancholy event’. ‘Jenkins’ poured scorn on the Vicar’s sermon and added, ‘Had it been in any other place than the church, my pistol would have silenced the blasphemy.’ The radical overtones of the letter were made clear by the author’s reference to the ‘brave and patriotic Bellingham’ and the threat of death to the ‘depraved George the Prince’.3*

  The pseudonym adopted by ‘Jenkins, Lt de Luddites’ linked Perceval’s assassination with the wave of machine-breaking that swept the North West and the Midlands in the 1810s. ‘Luddite’ is a term now associated with an indiscriminate technophobia. The Luddites reputedly took their name from the apocryphal story of a village idiot, Ned Ludd, who, when told to ‘square his needles’ (adjust the mechanism of his frame loom), had instead smashed the loom to pieces with a hammer.5 There has been a tendency, reflected in the work of some historians, to regard Luddite activity as essentially apolitical, or, at best, conservative in its outlook – seeking the restoration of a paternalistic ‘moral economy’ that the industrial revolution was inevitably consigning to the past.6 It is certainly true that there was nothing new about machine-breaking; nor, indeed, was there anything peculiarly English about it. Already in 1675, Spitalfields weavers had destroyed ‘engines’ that could do the work of several people, and in 1710 a London hosier employing too many apprentices in violation of the Framework Knitters’ Charter had his machines broken by angry stockingers. As a result of this unrest, by 1727 the breaking of machines had been made a capital felony.7 There had also been serious outbreaks of Luddite-like activity in France in the wake of the revolution of 1789.8

  The first Luddite attack took place in the Nottinghamshire village of Arnold. The workers’ grievances were to do, first, with the use of wide stocking frames to produce large amounts of cheap, shoddy stocking material that was merely cut and sewn rather than completely fashioned, and, second, with the employment of ‘colts’ – workers who had not completed the seven-year apprenticeship required by law. Further disturbances broke out in the Midlands in the spring and autumn of 1811. By January 1812, frame-breaking had spread to Manchester and its environs; it continued into the winter and spring of 1812, resurfaced in 1814, then again in Leicestershire in the autumn of 1816. The different nature of weaving in the North West, with looms located in large factories, affected the form the machine-breaking took, with attacks involving larger numbers of people and, as factory owners had often made preparations for the defence of their property, frequently accompanied by acts of violence. In Yorkshire, it was not weaving frames but shearing machinery, used to finish wool, that was targeted. Attacks were made on gig mills (prohibited by law since the era of Edward VI), which raised the nap on woollen cloth to make it easier to finish, and on the shearing frames that mechanised the process of shearing itself. (Shearing had traditionally been done with very heavy hand-shears that required a great deal of skill and physical strength to use – the average pair weighed around eighteen kilos.9)

  Some historians have pointed to the fragmented nature of Luddite activity – the main areas of unrest in the Midlands and the North West were separated by a distance of over fifty miles – suggesting that the outbreaks were essentially unconnected, with the sense of mass insurrection more a phantom of government paranoia than a reality.10 The notion that these were distinct, localised actions seems to be supported by the differences between Luddite rhetoric in the Midlands, in Yorkshire and in the North West. In Nottinghamshire, Luddites justified their actions on the basis of customary rights, enshrined in documents like the charter of the Company of Framework Knitters. This has often been contrasted with the more radical, Jacobin language found in Luddite letters from Yorkshire and the North West.11 Even this more clearly politicised language has sometimes been dismissed as empty posturing.

  The problem with viewing Luddism as essentially conservative, or simply apolitical, is that both Luddites themselves and their opponents saw them as members of a nationwide conspiracy. Whether machine-breaking took place in the Midlands, Yorkshire or Lancashire, ‘General Ludd’ was seen behind it all. As the ballad ‘Well Done Ned Ludd’ cautioned hostile readers, ‘Deface this who dare/Shall have the tyrants fare/For Ned’s Everywhere/To both see and hear.’12 Government spies firmly believed that a real ‘General Ludd’ existed, an insurrectionary mastermind orchestrating machine-breaking across the country. Abraham Kaye, a private in the Bolton militia, reported that he saw ‘one called General Ludd, who had a pike in his hand, like a serjeant’s halbert; I could not distinguish his face, which was very white, but not the natural colour’.13 A number of leading working-class radicals were identified as Ludd, most notably Gravener Henson, Jem Towle and George Mellor (though Henson pointed out that at the time of the alleged insurrectionary activity he had the cast-iron alibi of being in prison).14

  Real or imaginary, the figure of Ludd gave a sense of unity to the movement of industrial unrest. That feeling of community offered moral support to t
hose engaged in or supportive of machine-breaking. Luddite letters and ballads helped reinforce this sense of a common cause. A letter from John and Maria Middleton in the town of Haughton to their son James in Nottingham reported their happiness at the news of a ‘Luddite victory’: ‘We have enjoyed ourselves over a pot or two of beer and heared Mr Lud’s song.’15 Unquestionably, some of this Luddite literature was openly hostile to the government and the monarchy. A leaflet distributed in Yorkshire early in 1812 called on ‘all Croppers, Weavers &c. & Public at large … to shake off the hateful Yoke of a Silly Old Man [George III]’.16 Some letters were clearly revolutionary in tone. One from ‘Eliza Ludd’, dated 30 April 1812, stated: ‘Doubtless you are well acquainted with the Political History of America, if so you must confess that, it was ministerial tyranny that gave rise to that glorious spirit in which the British Colonies obtain’d their independance by force of arms, at a period, when we was ten times as strong as now!’17 This was almost certainly much more than mere talk. Failed attempts to effect a revolution by force emerged in former Luddite strongholds and involved personalities with past connections with Luddite activity.18

  In response to the Luddite threat, there were few figures in authority willing to challenge the repressive measures imposed by Lord Liverpool’s government. When the bill making frame-breaking a capital offence became law in 1813, it was condemned in the Lords by Byron: ‘When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporize and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off hand, without a thought of the consequences.’19 Byron’s essentially eighteenth-century Whig political ideology allowed him more faith in the jury system than in his fellow peers:

  Suppose [the bill] passed. Suppose one of these men, as I have seen them – meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your lordships are perhaps about to value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame – suppose this man (and there are a thousand such from whom you may select your victims) dragged into court to be tried for this new offence by this new law, still there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him; and these are, in my opinion, twelve butchers for a jury and a Jeffreys for a judge.20

  This stirring rhetoric fell on deaf ears. The House of Lords, accustomed to speakers who observed official norms of politeness, was unused to hearing the Prime Minister compared to ‘that Athenian lawgiver [Draco] whose edicts were said to be written … in blood’. Byron’s speech was deemed too impertinent even to be worthy of a reply. Though the Whig Party’s limited proposal for a commission to investigate measures to alleviate distress in the textile industry had been accepted, the resulting bill was hobbled by both Tories and opposition Whigs (including Byron’s political mentor Lord Holland). The affair served to convince Byron to give up his brief political career, his pessimism clearly reflected in a poem to Lady Melbourne written on 21 September 1813:

  ’Tis said – Indifference marks the present time,

  Then hear the reason – though ’tis told in rhyme –

  A King who can’t – a Prince of Wales who don’t –

  Patriots who shan’t – and Ministers who won’t –

  What matters who are in or out of place,

  The Mad – the Bad – the Useless – or the Base?21

  With the new legislation in place, prosecutions of Luddites proceeded quickly. The Cheshire judges of the special commission sentenced fourteen men to death, two of whom were actually executed. In Yorkshire, seventeen were hanged and one transported for life. In Lancashire, four people were sentenced to death, not for machine-breaking but for forcing dealers to sell bread, butter and cheese at lower prices. The destruction of Haughton Mill led to the conviction and sentencing to death of three men and one boy, Abraham Charlson, who had acted as a watchman: ‘He was young for his age, and when he was brought to the scaffold, he “called on his mother for help, thinking she had the power to save him”.’22 The garrisoning that had been part of the repressive measures of the 1790s was increased. One hundred and fifty-five new barracks were placed in industrial districts between 1792 and 1815. The numbers of troops sent to quell the Luddite disturbances – twelve thousand – exceeded the total number of men under the Duke of Wellington’s command on the Iberian peninsula.23

  The scale of the military forces deployed against the Luddites is less surprising when it is borne in mind that some Luddite activity was more akin to mass armed insurrection than limited industrial sabotage. The attack on Rawfolds Mill in the Spen Valley was the most violent clash of this kind. The mill owner, William Cartwright, had responded to the wave of machine-breaking by turning his factory into a fortress, defended by soldiers and armed workmen and protected by barricades of spiked rollers. Undaunted, on 11 April 1812 some hundred and fifty Luddites, led by George Mellor, a young Huddersfield cloth-dresser, attempted to storm the mill. As some tried to pin down the defenders with covering fire, others, armed with hatchets and hammers, tried to break down the armoured doors. These men suffered heavy casualities, and two were mortally wounded. In the wake of the bloody raid on Rawfolds, a local minister, Hammond Roberson, tried in vain to secure a deathbed confession from one of these men, John Booth. As Booth slid towards death he motioned to Roberson to come over. ‘Can you keep a secret?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ replied the eager Roberson, ‘I can.’ ‘So can I,’ replied Booth and promptly died.24

  The same code of silence protected the ringleader, Mellor, who now turned his thoughts to avenging his fallen comrades and shifting the target of Luddite attacks from the masters’ machines to the masters themselves. The mill owner at Marsden, William Horsfall, was singled out as a potential target. On 27 April, Mellor and two associates, hiding behind a wall, shot and killed Horsfall as he rode by. Horsfall’s murder, followed shortly after by the assassination of Prime Minister Perceval, sent the region into panic. The actions of extremists such as Mellor weakened the overall local support for the Luddites while hardening the resolve of mill owners and magistrates. Nonetheless, it was not until October of that year that Mellor was finally arrested, a sign that there remained some in the community willing to protect even homicidal Luddites. Mellor was tried by special commission, convicted and executed along with his two associates at York on 8 January 1813. Fourteen men were also executed for their part in the raid on Rawfolds Mill.

  The impact of Luddite activity on the reform movement as a whole was considerable. It made middle-class reformers distance themselves from the Hampden Clubs, which, according to one Derbyshire magistrate, came to be dominated by the Luddites who formed clubs ‘in almost every village in an angle between Leicester, Derby and Newark’.25 Although this was an exaggeration, the popular reform platform of universal suffrage certainly came to be more appealing in Luddite areas, if only because other avenues – petitioning, union organisation and direct action – had one by one been closed off.26

  Luddism may have been crushed by a heavy-handed government, but it was in the wake of Luddite activity that an uneasy alliance was formed between some of the radical reformers, led by Henry Hunt, and the Society of Spencean Philanthropists, which emerged from a murky underworld of brothels, cheap London taverns and Dissenting meeting houses.27 Not only ideologically, but culturally and socially, these two strands of radicalism had little in common. The movement for radical parliamentary reform was dominated by gentlemen like Hunt, Cartwright and Burdett. Hunt’s status as a leader of the movement was built to a considerable extent on his ‘natural’ authority as a major landowner, his immaculate dress (including his trademark white hat) and his stentorian voice. The Spenceans represented the diametric opposite of Hunt’s ‘John Bull’ figure. Their members were poor artisans, cabinet-makers, cobblers and butchers. The behaviour and appearance of some the Society’s leading lights deliberately flouted convention. Robert Wedderburn, a mixed-race tailor, and Samuel Ferrand Waddington, a four-foot-high shoemaker given to cross-dressing (respectively known as the ‘Black Prince’
and the ‘Black Dwarf’), played out a bawdy, profane and grotesque political theatre at Spencean meetings that was directly at odds with the studied orderliness and respectability of Hunt’s brand of radicalism. (Later, Waddington would take to wearing a huge white hat in derision of the ‘gentleman radical’.28) Hunt, an orthodox Anglican, could scarcely have had a more different religious outlook from the ultra-radicals, either. The radical underground in London had exploited the broadening of toleration in 1813 to include Unitarians, allowing them to take out licences as Dissenting ministers since the harsh legislation against political debating societies did not cover religious meetings. This was not, though, merely a pragmatic tactic, as many of the ultra-radicals were influenced by prophetic or millenarian groups: blasphemy as well as sedition was the substance of the sermons of men like Wedderburn and Waddington.

  These two disparate strands of English radicalism were brought together at the mass meetings organised by the Spenceans at Spa Fields in London on 15 November and 2 December 1816. The main organisers, the surgeon apothecary Dr James Watson, the shoemaker Thomas Preston and the professional plotter Arthur Thistlewood, had invited most of the leading figures in reform to attend a meeting of ‘Distressed Manufacturers, Mariners, Artisans and others’. The lapse of the Seditious Meetings Act of 1795 had made mass public meetings, briefly experimented with by the LCS, a possibility once more. However, with the exception of Hunt, none of the leading gentlemen reformers was prepared to accept the Spenceans’ call. For men like Burdett and Francis Place, it was not politicians like Hunt, prepared to whip up the mob, who were needed, but strong leaders in the shape of ‘men of consequence and talent’.29 However, it was not just the lack of gentry leadership that concerned men such as Burdett. At a Hampden Club meeting on 15 June 1816, he had conceded to Gale Jones that there was indeed an ‘essential power in the people’; but there was also, he noted, ‘an essential power at Hyde Park, at Knightsbridge, at the Tower, at Woolwich, at Hounslow, at Deptford and at Chatham. We are in fact, in this metropolis, in the midst of a circumvallation of fortresses.’ Burdett saw that beneath some of the talk of popular political agency lurked justifications for the use of physical force; but such talk, even in peacetime, was deeply reckless, the language of ‘desperation and bloodshed’; in such a heavily militarised society, it was madness.30 Yet it was exactly this kind of action that the Spenceans had in mind as James Watson trawled London’s docks and alehouses looking for demobbed soldiers, navvies and other hard men to provide the muscle for their projected insurrection.