The casualties of Peterloo were certainly seen as fitting objects for middle-class pity, but in most of the press this did not extend to sympathy for the cause for which they had suffered.54 The Times condemned the conduct of the authorities at Manchester, but it also complained of the ‘inflammatory manner’ in which that conduct was being described in reformist literature. The lesson of 16 August was that the magistrates should operate with more restraint, lest their actions contribute to the ‘poison’ spread by ‘those wretches’, the radicals.55 This had been largely the substance of Tyas’s account of Peterloo, which concentrated as much on subsequent rioting in Macclesfield and Oldham as it did on the events in Manchester. As James Wroe dryly noted in the first part of The Peter Loo Massacre! (1819), Tyas appeared to be more frightened by the looting of ‘new hats and tea kettles (dreadful emblems of civil commotion)’ by the Macclesfield mob than by the ‘newly-sharpened swords’ of the Manchester Yeoman Cavalry.56
Some of the treatments of Peterloo in the reformist press itself scarcely amounted to searing indictments of either the Manchester magistracy or Lord Liverpool’s government. John Edward Taylor, founder of the Manchester Guardian (launched in May 1821) and a witness at the meeting, in his pamphlet Notes and Observations Critical and Explanatory (1820), avoided the word ‘massacre’ and claimed, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that many of the yeomanry were ‘incapable of acting with deliberate cruelty’.57 However, such caution was not ill-advised. Booksellers who promoted strident indictments of the magistracy, like Wroe’s seminal Peter Loo Massacre!, risked conviction for seditious libel. At Salford Sessions, John Chorlton was charged and found guilty of ‘bringing the soldiers of Our Lord the King into discredit and disgrace by charging them with murder and cruelties’, when he was merely guilty of selling Wroe’s pamphlet.58 In total, there were seventy-five prosecutions for seditious or blasphemous libel in 1819.59
People could find themselves in trouble for simply discussing such literature. John Jenkins, an ex-weaver and Royal Marine, had taken to touring the country with one of the many radical engravings of Peterloo, giving his audiences a running commentary of the massacre while picking out details with the aid of a magnifying glass. In November 1819, Jenkins was showing his print in Chudleigh, Devon, when his activities came to the attention of Gilbert Burrington, the vicar of the village and also a local magistrate. He committed Jenkins to the Exeter house of correction as a vagrant and passed information concerning his seditious conduct to the Home Secretary.60
Of course, we often associate the radical response to Peterloo with the rousing lines of Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’, especially its stirring exhortation to the people to ‘Rise like lions after slumber’. The events of 16 August certainly stirred deep emotions in the poet: ‘The torrent of my indignation has not done boiling in my veins … I wait anxiously [to] hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers. “Something must be done.” … What yet I know not.’61 Shelley’s wife Mary wrote of his conviction that ‘a clash between the two classes of society was inevitable, and he eagerly ranged himself on the people’s side. He had an idea of publishing a series of poems adapted expressly to commemorate their circumstances and wrongs.’ But the plan to produce a volume entitled Popular Songs was never achieved in Shelley’s brief lifetime, and it is often forgotten that Leigh Hunt did not publish ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ in his Examiner. The libel laws ensured that it did not emerge in print until 1832.62 Engels may have described Shelley as the poet of the proletariat, but he only became so several decades after his death.63
Some of the radical commentary on Peterloo was wildly popular. Hone’s Political House that Jack Built (1819), with illustrations by Cruikshank – including the memorable portrait of the Prince Regent as a ‘dandy of sixty, / Who bows with a grace / And has taste in wigs, collars, cuirasses, and lace’ – reputedly sold over a hundred thousand copies in a few weeks. As biting as this satire was, true radicalism in Hone’s work had only a liminal presence, lurking, for instance, in his nods to classical republican accounts of tyrannicide in The Man in the Moon (1820). He might have been implying that the Prince Regent and his chief ministers, Canning, Castlereagh and Sidmouth, were worthy of the assassin’s bullet; but if so, he gave no more than a sly, cautious nod to his audience.64
The problem was that those few, like Richard Carlile, who were prepared to run the gauntlet of the libel laws and openly advocate armed resistance were spouting a rhetoric that had been proved hollow by the Pentrich rising. Carlile, in Sherwin’s Political Register, urged: ‘The People have now no recourse left but to arm themselves immediately, for the recovery of their rights, and the defence of their persons, or patiently to submit to the most unconditional slavery.’ Burdett was probably being more realistic when he said, ‘it is useless to prompt people to resistance when they have no arms’.65 Carlile himself was imprisoned for publishing his unambiguous rallying call to resistance. The alternative, promoted by Hunt and Wooler, was to continue with a policy of peaceful demonstration, the futility of which had been clearly shown at St Peter’s Fields.
In the immediate aftermath of Peterloo, it was the administration of Lord Liverpool that emerged as the real winner. Those who were prosecuted were the victims, the radical leaders and their followers, not the perpetrators of the violence. The latter were not only exonerated, but richly rewarded by the government. Hay, one of the Peterloo magistrates, was gifted the £2000 living of Rochdale. Liverpool publicly stated that the actions of the magistrates had been ‘substantially right’. The government’s critics, Carlile, Wroe, Hunt, Burdett and Cartwright, were imprisoned. Moderates such as Earl Fitzwilliam who expressed their disgust at the massacre were removed from office. The ‘threat’ posed by this peaceful demonstration was enough to allow the ministry to get the ‘Six Acts’ through Parliament.
14
THE CATO STREET CONSPIRACY AND THE BATTLE FOR REFORM
After Peterloo, some did follow Carlile’s call to arms. The reformer Ethelinda Wilson carried pistols with her to political meetings and spent much time in London attempting to secure weapons for a projected popular insurrection.1 A letter from Manchester posted on 4 December 1819 reported a conversation in an apothecary’s shop between the shop assistant and ‘a man of rough appearance’. When the assistant became aware of the man’s radical politics, he warned the customer that the soldiers in the city would be ‘very severe’ in the event of any disturbance. The man replied, ‘They’ll not Peterloo us again this time’, at which point he produced a long dagger from his coat, along with two pistols. That night, shots were fired in the street. The letter finished, ‘Reports of guns or pistols are heard every evening, in all directions in the town, to the great terror of the inhabitants.’2
Peterloo was the catalyst to the last major insurrectionary plot of the Georgian era. As we have seen, the ultra-radical London Spenceans had been fomenting plans for a general rising of the people since 1816. However, Henry Hunt’s successful co-option of the Spa Fields meetings as his democratic platform had made the use of such mass gatherings as a springboard for revolution an apparent dead-end. This prompted a shift of tactics on the Spenceans’ part vis-à-vis organising a coup d’état. An attempt at just such a plot in August 1817 at Bartholomew Fair was thwarted by last-minute government intervention. Under the leadership of Arthur Thistlewood, the Spenceans now looked to a mass assassination of the Privy Council as the best means to achieve their goals. Coups were planned for late 1817 and early 1818, but on each occasion had to be aborted.
The idea of an assassination plot was well established by the time that the government informer and agent provocateur George Edwards, a Fleet Street model-maker (he had been commissioned to execute busts of Thomas Paine and Richard Carlile) and brother of William, bona fide Spencean and London police officer, became involved in the conspiracy. Edwards reported back to the Home Office that the violent suppression of the Manchester meeting was s
tirring the Spenceans to action. They viewed Peterloo as ‘the revolution begun in blood’: Allen Davenport, a shoemaker, was reported as saying, ‘I compare the present time to the French Revolution, we must arm ourselves as they did.’
Having squashed the mass platform, the government now saw an opportunity to flush out ultra-radical insurrectionists. Edwards’s key role was to feed the group the false information that the Cabinet was meeting for dinner on 23 February 1820 at the Grosvenor Square home of the President of the Privy Council, the Earl of Harrowby. (Wellington’s suggestion that the Cabinet actually meet for dinner that evening, but with soldiers masquerading as servants, ready to seize the plotters, had been rejected as being too risky.) With the death of the old King, George III, on 29 January, the time appeared ripe for ultra-radicals to exploit the uncertainty within the government. The plan, such as it was, was for the conspirators to butcher the Cabinet en masse, decapitating Lord Sidmouth and Castlereagh and taking their severed heads around the slums of London on poles in order to whip up support for a general insurrection. Their misplaced confidence was revealed in their preparation of propaganda announcing the formation of a provisional republican government.
However, the trap was well set. On the evening of the 23rd, the Cato Street loft in which the conspirators gathered was raided by police and guardsmen. In the struggle that followed, one policeman, Richard Smithers, was killed with a sword by Thistlewood. The candles were knocked out and shots fired in the dark of the hayloft. Thistlewood and three other conspirators managed to escape through a back window, but William Davidson, a Jamaican mixed-race cabinet-maker, and the rest of the ultra-radicals were captured. Just as the soldiers were escorting their prisoners back to Bow Street, the Covent Garden theatre crowds were emptying out into the street. According to the Courier:
The Police Office surrounded by the military, their arms gleaming in the glaring light of the torches, many of them carrying muskets and other spoils taken in the affray, the roar of the coaches in consequence of the Theatres being just closed, and the confused buzz of the multitude drawn together by the appearance of the military, gave altogether a very un-English complexion to the night.3
The following day, Thistlewood was also turned in by Edwards, who knew the location of his bolt-hole. Edwards claimed, but never appears to have been paid, a £1000 reward for his arrest. Although the number of conspirators brought to justice remained small, the nationwide anger that Peterloo had provoked meant that the support for this latest insurrection came from more than just a small cadre of metropolitan zealots. Subsequent searches revealed that the assassination plot had received considerable material support from artisan friendly societies, and several caches of arms were also uncovered.
In all, eleven men were charged with high treason. Two of them, Robert Adams and John Harrison, turned King’s evidence, which allowed the prosecution to avoid having to rely on the testimony of Edwards, whose role, like that of Castle and Oliver in earlier treason trials, was already causing an outcry in reformist circles. In the Commons, Matthew Wood, the former London Mayor, now radical City MP, accused the government of entrapment, while the Observer flouted ministerial instructions not to report the trial. Adams was let off, thanks to his cooperation with the prosecution, though shortly afterwards he was imprisoned for debt. Harrison, along with four others, was transported for life to Australia.* Thistlewood and Davidson, along with John Brunt, John Ings and Richard Tidd, were all sentenced to death.
The condemned men met their end with defiance and revolutionary resolve. Ings wrote to his wife that he was sorry to leave her ‘in a land full of corruption, where justice and liberty has taken their flight from’. He hoped she would ‘bear in mind that the cause of my being consigned to the scaffold was a pure motive. I thought I should have rendered my starving fellow-men, women and children, a service.’ Brunt declared in court that he ‘had joined the conspiracy for the public good … He would die as the descendant of an ancient Briton.’ On the scaffold, Thistlewood resolutely maintained that he died for liberty. Byron’s friend, John Cam Hobhouse, noted in his diary that the ‘men died like heroes’.4 The five were hanged at Newgate on 1 May 1820. Their decapitated bodies were buried in quicklime inside the gaol. Though the revolutionary intent of the Cato Street conspiracy was undoubtedly more serious than that of the Pentrich rising, the involvement of government agents provocateurs continued to arouse public opposition. Matthew Wood’s call for an inquiry into the prosecution of the plot forced Edwards into hiding and, finally, into exile in the Cape Colony, South Africa (coincidentally, also the final destination of ‘Oliver the Spy’).5
The Cato Street conspiracy may have been a government-engineered trap, but the violent mood of many radicals was real enough. The sense of a nationwide conspiracy was fuelled by the discovery of plots in Glasgow and Yorkshire. On 5 and 6 April 1820, groups of armed weavers rose in the vicinity of Glasgow, leading to a violent clash with the military at Bonnymuir. One of the leaders of the rising, John Baird, fought ferociously:
after discharging his piece [musket] he presented it at the officer empty, and told him he would do for him if he did not stand off. The officer presented his pistol at him, but it flashed and did not go off. Mr Baird then took the butt end of his piece and struck a private on the left thigh, where upon the sergeant of Hussars fired at him. Baird then threw his musket from him and seized a pike, and while the sergeant was in the act of drawing his sword, wounded him in the right arm.6
They had, however, been betrayed by another government spy, named King, and after the arrival of other troops the rebels were forced to surrender. Several were sabred by the yeomanry after they had put down their arms. Baird and Andrew Hardie (an ancestor of Keir Hardie) were sentenced to death and executed on 8 September that year. Like Thistlewood and the other Cato Street conspirators, they went to their deaths protesting the justice of their cause. The magistracy had to use considerable force to prevent a riot by sympathisers at their executions. Over twenty other rebels were transported for life.7
These risings and conspiracies helped justify the government’s repressive ‘Six Acts’, but they were not fatal to popular radicalism. The Cato Street trial revived, if to a lesser extent, the concerns about the use of spies and agents provocateurs, which played well to pro-reform members of the middle class. Popular radicalism also enjoyed a brief resurgence thanks, paradoxically, to the royal family. One of George IV’s first acts as King was to initiate divorce proceedings against his wife Queen Caroline, from whom he had long been separated. His first step was to have her excluded from public prayers for the royal family. The Queen, exiled in Europe, incensed at this insult, determined to return to England to reaffirm her position as royal consort. By the time she reached England, her cause had been co-opted by leading London radicals, in particular Matthew Wood, who rightly saw the potential here to embarrass the government and drum up support for the cause of reform. Bootle Wilbraham, a Yorkshire landowner and MP, wrote in September 1820: ‘Radicalism has taken the shape of affection for the Queen, and has deserted its old form, for we are all as quiet as lambs in this part of England, and you would not imagine that this had been a disturbed county twelve months ago.’8 Mass petitioning and addressing were revived: a laudatory address from ‘the married ladies of London’ carried 17,642 signatures.9
Overall, the Queen Caroline affair proved a spur to the growth of middle-class female political activism.10 In total, Caroline received over 350 of these supportive loyal addresses, many of them from groups of women who saw their own domestic difficulties reflected in the royal drama. Campaigning came to a head over the so-called ‘trial’ of the Queen in August 1820, when a divorce bill was put before Parliament. The affair briefly revived the radical press, under severe pressure from the extended libel laws and raised stamp duty. The ‘trial’ saw the production of massive numbers of scurrilous libels and prints concerning the King – so many, in fact, that the Crown expended over £2500 to buy up and suppres
s them. Some ultra-radical broadsheets even used the tribulations of the Queen to justify regicide. A broadsheet called The Pig of Pall Mall threatened the King’s death. There were reports of seditious words being spoken to the effect that ‘if there was no necessity of a queen … they would have no king’. Rumours also circulated of men arming in the North in preparation for an insurrection.11 This radical pressure effectively stymied the divorce bill in Parliament. Though it passed the Lords on its third reading, Liverpool was forced to concede on 10 November that it would proceed no further. In celebration at Caroline’s ‘acquittal’, a massive thanksgiving service was held at St Paul’s Cathedral; the psalm sung was ‘Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man’.
A Radical History Of Britain Page 35