A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  In June 1817, the full-blown popular insurrection that Liverpool’s government had been hoping for finally happened. One of its key orchestrators was Thomas Bacon, a sixty-four-yearold stockinger and veteran republican from Pentrich in Derbyshire, who had been a delegate to the Hampden Club rally in London in January and had taken a leading role in forming the Pentrich branch. The other was W. J. Richards, a.k.a. William Oliver and later better known as ‘Oliver the Spy’, a former surveyor employed by the Home Office as an informer and agent provocateur. In May, Bacon was already making enquiries with contacts at the Butterley ironworks near Ripley, Derbyshire, about supplying arms and munitions for a planned rising and telling of his plans to establish a republican government, headed (rather implausibly) by the gentlemen reformers Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Cochrane and Sir Robert Wilson. By this point, the government already knew about Bacon’s plans. Rather than jump the gun, however, as had happened at Ardwick, they wanted to allow this rising to come to fruition. By 4 June, the date set for it had been revealed, and a march on Nottingham to meet other revolutionary forces announced.

  Only on 5 June did the prospective leader of this rebellion, the ‘Nottingham Captain’ Jeremiah Brandreth, a dark, forbidding figure (some said of gypsy stock), enter the picture. At the rebels’ final meeting on 8 June at the White Horse in Pentrich, Brandreth promised his followers that each would receive a hundred guineas, bread, beef and ale once they reached Nottingham, where they would be joined by sixteen thousand other rebels. Brandreth’s fulsome promises, straight from the ‘land of Cockayne’, were given some credibility by the supporting testimony of Oliver, who was not present at the Pentrich meeting but had claimed at an earlier one at Thornhill on the 6th, at which other Pentrich rebels were present, that London was about to rise and Burdett was ready to head a new English republic.

  The rising had been known to the government for a while via its network of spies (two special constables had been present at the meeting at the White Horse), and it had now become public knowledge in Pentrich itself. The hand of the local magistrates was, though, stayed by the government. As the Lord Lieutenant of Nottingham, the Duke of Newcastle, explained to Lord Sidmouth three days after the rising:

  As Your Lordship is aware the plot had been hatching for some time, which we knew, and were prepared accordingly. We thought it much more desirable to let the matter come to a Crisis, than to endeavour to crush it before the Designs were openly disclosed – I am very glad that we adopted this mode, as we have now not only become acquainted with what the bad People will do, but we have ascertained that the Country People are not of their way of thinking.5

  Unaware that the authorities were completely cognisant of their designs, the Pentrich rebels, in total only about fifty men, set off at ten o’clock on the night of 9 June. Despite the attempts to secure arms from the local ironworks they were poorly armed, with only a few old muskets between them. As they marched, they attempted to force men living in nearby houses to join the rising. This led to the first fatality: a servant, Robert Walters, was shot through a window by Brandreth when his mistress refused to allow the rebels entry.*

  At three o’clock the following morning, the marchers reached the Butterley ironworks but found it heavily guarded – another sign that the rising had been anticipated. As the owner, Goodwin, reported, the marchers came out very much the worse in the clash with the cavalry and pikemen stationed outside:

  nothing could exceed the zeal & activity shown by the Cavalry & pikemen, they had made a race after the Insurgents, several of whom took refuge in the woods between Butterley & Swanwick, the Pikemen went in & beat them out & the Cavalry stationed on the outside took them prisoners. In the afternoon two Troops of Yeomanry from Derby & several Magistrates arrived – One troop remained at Ripley till noon on Wednesday the 11th when they left us escorting 15 more prisoners which had been taken.6

  The marchers who escaped the forces at the foundry continued on towards Nottingham. En route they stopped at several inns, demanding food, beer and weapons. The rising was finally brought to an end at Gilt Brook, the valley between Eastwood and Kimberley. Here, the revolutionaries came upon the soldiers of the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons, only eighteen mounted men, but enough to make them flee across the fields in terror. Some of them managed to get back to Pentrich, where they were hidden in a hayloft and supplied with food by a local nonconformist minister. They would later be uncovered by soldiers, but one, Miles Bacon, managed to escape by leaping across the Cromford canal. He eventually reached a farmhouse at Whitwick in Leicestershire, staying on as a farmhand and marrying Elizabeth Griffin, the daughter of the house, in March 1821. (He named his first son Jeremiah, after Brandreth, and died aged eighty-four in 1879.)

  About forty men were seized, in addition to those taken prisoner at the ironworks. Brandreth managed to escape and stayed on the run for a month, twice stowing away on ships bound for America, only to be discovered and thrown off. He was finally captured on 22 July in Nottingham, having sought refuge in the home of his ‘old friend’ Henry Sampson, in fact another government informer. Thomas Bacon was captured the following month in St Ives, then in Huntingdonshire.

  The Pentrich rebels were tried by special commission at Derby. The main problem for the government was how to avoid William Oliver’s role in the rising being discussed (his identity had already been revealed, though too late to help the Pentrich men, by the Leeds Mercury). The role of another government informer, John Castle, brought to light by the evidence of Henry Hunt, had helped persuade the jury to acquit Arthur Thistlewood, Dr James Watson, John Hopper and Thomas Preston at their trials for treason in June.7 However, Oliver’s role posed problems for the defence too, as his testimony would have confirmed the existence of revolutionary cells in the Midlands and in Yorkshire. Oliver had certainly helped bring the rising forward, but he had not conjured the insurrectionary mood out of thin air. In the end, the defence contended that the marchers were simple men after bread, beer and cash, not revolution. The argument did not save Brandreth, who along with his lieutenants, William Turner and Isaac Ludlum, was executed at Nuns Green, Derby, on 17 November 1817. In a gesture of princely clemency, the Regent remitted the usual punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering, and Brandreth and his associates were merely hanged and beheaded. A further eleven Pentrich men were sentenced to transportation for life, another three for a period of fourteen years.

  Although Oliver played a key role in ensuring that the Pentrich rising unfolded as it did, as the earlier Ardwick conspiracy showed, insurrectionary plotting was ongoing in the North and Midlands. There are hints of connections between Luddism and revolutionary activity, but the taciturn Brandreth, despite the efforts of the prison chaplain, gave little away in the days before his execution (his last letters display no more than a reasonable level of literacy, a love for his wife and firm faith in God). More significant was the role that Oliver unwittingly played in eliciting sympathy for the Pentrich men from middle-class and gentlemen reformers.8 His involvement transformed the Pentrich rising from a dangerous proletarian revolt into a shameful government-orchestrated sham. Burdett, no friend of revolution, complained in the Commons that nothing ‘could be more atrocious, especially in these times of wretchedness and distress, than for the government to hire and pay people to excite sedition’.9 Caricatures showed Oliver and Castle as rapacious foxes tricking the poor chickens – the London Spenceans and the Pentrich men – into their lair. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s bitter pamphlet, An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (better known by its Painite subtitle, We Pity the Plumage but Forget the Dying Bird), contrasted the public outpouring of grief at the death of the Princess, a day before the execution of Brandreth, with the lack of sympathy for the Pentrich men:

  The news of the death of the Princess Charlotte, and of the execution of Brandreth, Ludlam, and Turner, arrived nearly at the same time. If beauty, youth, innocence, amiable manners, and the exercise of the domestic
virtues could alone justify public sorrow when they are extinguished for ever, this interesting Lady would well deserve that exhibition. She was the last and the best of her race. But there were thousands of others equally distinguished as she, for private excellences, who have been cut off in youth and hope.

  The execution of Brandreth, Ludlam, and Turner, is an event of quite a different character from the death of the Princess Charlotte. These men were shut up in a horrible dungeon, for many months, with the fear of a hideous death and of everlasting hell thrust before their eyes; and at last were brought to the scaffold and hung. They too had domestic affections, and were remarkable for the exercise of private virtues. Perhaps their low station permitted the growth of those affections in a degree not consistent with a more exalted rank.

  They had sons, and brothers, and sisters, and fathers, who loved them, it should seem, more than the Princess Charlotte could be loved by those whom the regulations of her rank had held in perpetual estrangement from her. Her husband was to her as father, mother, and brethren. Ludlam and Turner were men of mature years, and the affections were ripened and strengthened within them.

  What those sufferers felt shall not be said. But what must have been the lone and various agony of their kindred may be inferred from Edward Turner, who, when he saw his brother dragged along upon the hurdle, shrieked horribly and fell in a fit, and was carried away like a corpse by two men. How fearful must have been their agony, sitting in solitude on that day when the tempestuous voice of horror from the crowd, told them that the head so dear to them was severed from the body! Yes they listened to the maddening shriek which burst from the multitude: they heard the rush of ten thousand terror-stricken feet, the groans and the hootings which told them that the mangled and distorted head was then lifted into the air.

  For Shelley, the Pentrich rising was solely the work of government spies, ‘the most worthless and infamous of mankind’, whose aim was to prop up a corrupt and oppressive administration:

  It was their business if they found no discontent to create it. It was their business to find victims, no matter whether right or wrong. It was their business to produce upon the public all impression, that if any attempt to attain national freedom, or to diminish the burthens of debt and taxation under which we groan, were successful, the starving multitude would rush in, and confound all orders and distinctions, and institutions and laws, in common ruin.

  To produce this salutary impression, they betrayed some innocent and unsuspecting rustics into a crime whose penalty is a hideous death. A few hungry and ignorant manufacturers seduced by the splendid promises of these remorseless blood-conspirators, collected together in what is called rebellion against the state.10

  Immediately after the Pentrich rising, the government had been able to exploit the fear of insurrection and pass the act suspending Habeas Corpus. As the details of the rising and the role of the spies emerged, the news of the plot worked against the administration, leading to some rapprochement between popular and middle-class radicalism.11 However, the extent of this closing of the gap should not be overstated. In metropolitan circles, 1818 was a year of unseemly squabbles over political precedence between Burdett and Hunt in particular, as a great deal of radical effort remained focused on the election of MPs to Parliament and the sponsorship of moderate reform bills in the Commons. The internecine conflict between the reformers in London led Hunt and Cartwright in particular to look to the provinces, and to mass meetings, as the best means of achieving their goals. With mass petitioning clearly ineffective, even when reformers followed the letter of the law, as had the Blanketeers, Cartwright and Hunt believed that the most effective way to exert pressure for reform was to put the unrepresented communities on show in vast popular assemblies. In Hunt’s case, this took the form of a plan for a union of non-represented people; in Cartwright’s, the idea of elected ‘legislative attorneys’ who would personally petition the Commons.12 With the lapsing of the Seditious Meetings Act, Hunt, in cooperation with some of the Spenceans, began to organise mass meetings. The first, held at Palace Yard, Westminster, in September 1818, remonstrated with the Regent, asserted the sovereignty of the people and demanded their rightful share in the fruits of their toil – a remonstrance that indicated Hunt’s rhetoric had become more flexible since the Spa Fields meeting.

  The Regent’s predictable refusal to accept the remonstrance prompted an escalation of the campaign. Mass meetings were arranged in the North and the Midlands in the summer of 1819 – those attending would constitute a significant part of Hunt’s projected union of the unrepresented. More meetings followed at Smithfield and in Birmingham, where Cartwright received a public vote of thanks. The final provincial meeting was set for Manchester, which would be followed by a vast open-air rally on Kennington Common in London, where it was imagined Hunt would be received as the conquering hero.

  The Manchester meeting, scheduled for 9 August, was banned by the local magistrates under advice from the acting Home Secretary, Henry Hobhouse. He informed them that the plan for the crowd to elect pseudo-MPs constituted a criminal offence. However, following clarification from Lord Sidmouth that only the action, not the intention, of electing such MPs was illegal, the meeting was rearranged for 16 August to take place on St Peter’s Fields, the scene two years earlier of the dispersal of the Blanketeers. Aware of the unfortunate precedent, and stung by loyalist propaganda that portrayed the mass meetings as assemblies of the great unwashed, the organisers took pains to ensure that the local reform societies presented an orderly meeting. In the rural areas around Manchester such as Samuel Bamford’s Middleton, which supplied many of the contingents that would be present at St Peter’s Fields, the preparations borrowed from older festive traditions, such as that of the rush-bearings, a pre-Reformation ritual that took place in Lancashire and involved the renewing of rushes on the church floor. (Ironically, rush-bearings had also played a part in anti-Jacobin ‘Paine burnings’ during the 1790s.13) Seen through the eyes of watching spies and special constables, however, the organisational activities of the radicals were sinister and suspect. The authorities received reports of night-time drillings on the moors; what reformers such as Bamford excused as ‘periods of healthful exercise and enjoyment’ looked to hostile observers like a ‘military array’.14

  The 16th of August 1819 was a fine, clear summer’s day. At first light, the area of St Peter’s Fields had been cleared of as many objects as possible that could be used as potential weapons. In any case, the processions of men, women and children that came in from the villages and towns surrounding Manchester had fully heeded Hunt’s instruction to bring no weapon other than that of a ‘self-approving conscience’. Samuel Bamford disagreed, arguing that there ‘could be no harm whatever in taking a score or two of cudgels, just to keep the specials at a respectful distance from our line’.15 But Hunt’s order prevailed: even when the military intervened, the crowd largely followed his direction from the platform not to resist.

  By mid-morning, a crowd had begun to gather. When finally amassed, it probably amounted to around sixty thousand people, then equivalent to about 6 per cent of the population of Lancashire. Groups had come from as far afield as Wigan to the west and Saddleworth to the east, plus a substantial number from Manchester itself. The crowd was largely, then, a mixture of the urban and the rural poor. Perhaps the most distinctive contingents, and to some the most threatening, were those from the female reform societies, the women all decked in white – the colour of virginity and the colour often associated with rush-bearings, but also the colour of the French ‘festivals of reason’ in the 1790s.16 Although women-only friendly societies had emerged during that decade, the overtly political female reform societies were a very recent phenomenon, the first having been established in June 1819 in Blackburn, quickly followed by others in Stockport, Oldham, Manchester, Royton, Failsworth and Leigh. In some areas, like Bamford’s Middleton, no separate female reform societies existed because women were already granted ful
l membership rights in the existing reform club.17

  The role of women at the St Peter’s Fields meeting, as at other reform meetings, was prominent but also largely silent and ceremonial. When Henry Hunt arrived at one o’clock to the strains of ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’, he was accompanied by the women of the Manchester Female Reform Society. Its president, Mary Fildes, sat beside Hunt in his carriage. Along with Hunt, Richard Carlile, the Times reporter John Tyas and the local organisers John Knight and Joseph Johnson, the women of the Society took the platform, proudly carrying their flag. Women did not speak at reform meetings, however: their main role was to present male leaders like Hunt with the symbolic ‘cap of liberty’, an emblem with Saxon as well as French connotations. At Peterloo, Fildes was to present Hunt with the ‘colours’ of the Manchester Female Reform Society. Cobbett patronisingly equated this action with the role of queens at jousts in blessing the participants.18

  Hunt’s arrival prompted the local magistracy into action. They were clearly prepared for a violent confrontation: present were 600 professional soldiers from the 15th Hussars, plus several hundred infantrymen, 400 men from the Cheshire Yeomanry, 400 special constables, 120 cavalry from the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry and a Royal Artillery force with two six-pounder guns.