A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Peterloo did not, then, lead inexorably to the reforms of 1832, limited though even these were. It was the leader of the yeomanry, Birley, not the radical spokesman, Hunt, who emerged the ‘winner’ in that year. Between 1830 and 1832, popular political action mainly had a negative, if significant, impact on events in Westminster, convincing MPs that reform was necessary to stave off revolution, via an alliance of the upper and middle classes.

  Yet Peterloo was important in a number of positive ways, too. It heralded the emergence of women-only political societies, while female involvement in politics would not be thwarted by the terms of the 1832 act. Women would play a significant role in Chartism, which in turn would provide an inspiration to the female suffrage movement. Hunt, the hero of Peterloo, had longer-term significance, too: though his political career ended in failure, his model of charismatic leadership arguably provided the template for every successful populist politician up to the twentieth century, when the advent of radio and television diminished the importance of oratorial magnetism. Hunt’s ‘mass platform’ also established the broad terms on which radical activity, most notably through the Chartist movement, would be conducted over the next twenty to thirty years, a platform that focused on universal male suffrage, annual parliaments and the secret ballot.

  Whether such objectives were the best means of bettering the conditions of the industrial working class is another matter, but for the most part, radical political language and ideas continued to be dominated by a constitutionalist outlook. The critiques of capitalism advanced by Owen and others sustained the interest of only a small minority. Yet, even shorn of social and economic critique, the basic elements of the mass platform remained transformative. Moreover, the adoption of radical tactics during the reform agitation of 1830–2 demonstrated that this programme could be successful, particularly when it gathered more respectable supporters.

  Most important, though, was the powerful memory that Peterloo conveyed of working-class solidarity. The memory of the demonstration, particularly Shelley’s poetic re-imaging of it in ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, proved a powerful spur to various liberation movements. Shelley’s words inspired Mohandas K. Gandhi’s campaigns for the rights of the Indian community in South Africa and, through him, Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement. In China in 1989, in a chilling replay of the events of 1819, the students in Tiananmen Square reportedly chanted the words of Shelley’s poem as government troops bore down on them.33 In Britain, too, the sense of radical identity created by Peterloo helped sustain popular radicalism in the 1830s and 1840s through difficult times. It became a seminal moment in the political education of many future radicals. As the Lancashire dialect writer and Chartist Ben Brierley recalled:

  My father was not only a Waterloo veteran, but he was at Peterloo in 1819, when that bloody massacre took place, and when many were cut down for peacefully agitating for freedom. At that time Radicals were not allowed to mix in bar-parlour company. The tap-room was the only place where they could give vent to their views, and they had to be careful of what they said even there, as there were so many spies going about in those days … I was then five years of age. I was sent with a can for some soup which was being given out to the people in the district. When I presented myself the person who was doling it out remarked: ‘That lad mun ha’ noan, his gronfeyther were a Jacobin’ … I went away without soup, but those words have rung in my ears ever since. They set me a-thinking, and I wondered what sort of an animal a Jacobin was that his little starving grandson could have no soup. This treatment had much to do with the formation of my political character, and as I grew up I felt determined I would never belong to a party which made me suffer for what my grandfather believed.34

  PART SIX

  A KNIFE-AND-FORK QUESTION? THE RISE AND FALL OF CHARTISM

  MR WEBB – What is the child to be called?

  MRS KING – James Feargus O’Connor King.

  MR WEBB – Is your husband a Chartist?

  MRS KING – I don’t know, but his wife is.

  Reported conversation between Mrs King, a Manchester Chartist, and Richard Webb, public registrar of the district1

  15

  THE TOLPUDDLE MARTYRS AND THE PEOPLE’S CHARTER

  On the morning of 24 February 1834, six farm labourers were arrested in the Dorset village of Tolpuddle. They were marched in chains to the gaol at Dorchester where, according to one of the prisoners, George Loveless, ‘we were ushered down some steps into a miserable dungeon, opened but twice a year, with only a glimmering light … The smoke of this place, together with its natural dampness, amounted nearly to suffocation: and in this most dreadful situation, we passed three whole days.’1

  The men were charged, under legislation ostensibly meant to tackle oath-bound conspiracies, with administering unlawful oaths during an agricultural labourers’ friendly society meeting. The guilty verdict in the trials was certainly dubious: it was doubtful that the oath that Loveless administered to his fellow labourers really amounted to the kind of sworn conspiracy that the Georgian legislation aimed to prevent.2 As Daniel O’Connell, the Irish nationalist leader and MP for County Clare, later remarked, if the Dorset labourers were guilty of swearing illegal oaths, then so were all the members of Britain’s Orange Lodges.3 The government of Lord Sidmouth was under little illusion that the Dorchester labourers were really plotting a violent insurrection. Rather, the case presented an excellent opportunity to curb the resurgence in union activity. Trade combinations, as we have seen, were already in existence in the late eighteenth century and by 1824, with the repeal of the Combination Acts, they were legal once again. In 1834, there were significant moves afoot by the Owenite GNCTU (the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union) to expand unionisation in the agricultural sector. The brutal sentences in the Tolpuddle case certainly helped Sidmouth’s government to put a damper on trade union expansion in this area.4

  The Dorset men were found guilty at Dorchester Assizes on 17 March. They each received a sentence of seven years’ transportation – considered harsh even at the time. Five of them set sail for Australia from Portsmouth on 11 April (Loveless’s departure was delayed because of illness), reaching Sydney in August of that year. A month later, Loveless landed in Tasmania and was put to work on a government farm. Conditions in the Australian penal colonies were appalling: one of the men, James Brine, had to go six months without shoes, fresh clothes or bedding, sleeping on the bare ground each night. The others fared a little better, though hunger, hard labour and the constant threat of brutal corporal punishment for minor offences were familiar to all six men.5 Transportation was certainly a long way from Lord Ellenborough’s ludicrous description in the 1810 penal reform debate – ‘a summer airing by an easy migration to a milder climate’.6

  The trial of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, as they came to be known, quickly became a cause célèbre in radical circles. Feargus O’Connor, the firebrand MP for Cork, denounced the government for its treatment of the men: ‘Earl Grey, Lord Brougham, the noble Lord, the Paymaster of the Forces, and the right honourable Secretary for the Colonies, should be on board the hulks in place of those unfortunate men.’7 Petitions and public demonstrations, including a forty-thousand-strong rally in Copenhagen Fields, London, demanded that the sentences be reversed. In the face of this considerable pressure, Lord Melbourne’s new government granted the men conditional pardons in June 1835; after further campaigning, they were made unconditional the following year.

  However, the men found out about their pardons only by chance, despite the fact that news of the quashing of their sentences had reached Australia in August 1836. Loveless was the first to return to England, gaining free passage in January 1837. The men were welcomed back as heroes. Funds had been raised to support them and their families, and a London committee had attempted to raise enough money to buy them farms of their own.

  Hailed, then and now, as heroes of the trade union movement, the Tolpuddle Martyrs were also integra
l to the development of nineteenth-century radicalism. Loveless, a pacific Methodist, had been radicalised by the experience of transportation: soon after his return, he was actively engaged not only in union activity but in agitation for the vote. He was soon involved with Chartism, the largest and most significant popular radical movement of the 1830s and 1840s. His pamphlet, The Victims of Whiggery, was widely read at Chartist meetings, and the Martyrs also established a Chartist committee at Greensted, Essex, where the London committee had secured for them a leasehold farm.8

  Chartism took its name from the ‘People’s Charter’, the movement’s founding manifesto. The Charter’s ‘Six Points’ demanded universal male suffrage, annual parliaments, the secret ballot, the equalisation of constituencies, salaries for MPs and an end to property qualifications for parliamentary candidates. In the context of the 1830s and 1840s, these demands remained radical in the sense that they went far beyond what the vast majority in Parliament was willing to consider. Indeed, five of the Six Points would not be fulfilled until the 1918 Representation of the People Act, while annual or even fixed-term parliaments have never been realised. However, the basic elements of the Charter were hardly innovative: they constituted the substance of the Peterloo marchers’ platform of twenty years earlier. This was no coincidence. Feargus O’Connor, the dominant figure in the movement from 1839 to 1848, like many other Chartists, was a great admirer of Henry Hunt, calling himself a ‘Huntite’ and proclaiming that ‘[Mr Hunt] was the great architect who taught the people what that edifice [meaning the reformed political system] should be; [Mr O’Connor] was only a humble workman endeavouring to raise that edifice to its completion.’9

  It used to be suggested that what was truly radical about Chartism was the methods advocated by some of its supporters for achieving its political programme, namely violent insurrection. A distinction was made between ‘physical force’ and ‘moral force’ Chartists, epitomised by the contrast between the slight, bookish, bureaucratic founder of the London Working Men’s Association, William Lovett, and the beefy, bombastic, belligerent leader of the Marylebone Radical Association, Feargus O’Connor. However, whatever the obvious differences between O’Connor and Lovett in style and personal appearance, the two men, as we shall see, shared a common belief in the ultimate right to use force to defend liberty. In fact, the concentration of historians on the Six Points, and especially the vote, in discussions of Chartism has obscured the genuinely innovative nature of the movement, which lay in Chartism’s strong claim to be the first truly modern British political party: unlike earlier radical movements, it drew its strength from Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as England. It established many of the basic forms and structures that would be fundamental to political organisations right up to the present day. Tactics pioneered by the Chartists – hijacking the public meetings of political opponents, establishing election funds, staging mass demonstrations – were all later exploited by the militant women’s suffrage movement, among others. Even Chartism’s more ridiculed initiatives – particularly O’Connor’s ‘Land Plan’, in the light of a growing global food crisis – appear increasingly prescient. Like Peterloo, however, the movement’s significance lies in far more than the bare facts of its aims and organisation. Chartism became an integral part of the cultural life of local communities, offering, despite many historians’ verdicts of ultimate ‘failure’, a powerful morale-boosting memory of working-class political activism and solidarity.

  Chartism was seen by both contemporaries and later historians as a reaction to economic distress and widening social inequality. The 1830s and 1840s were decades of intense industrial, technological and demographic change. Nowhere was this more evident than in the rapidly expanding conurbations of the North: Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. Speaking of the Manchester region, one contemporary observer recorded:

  The country has undergone a change scarcely to be credited, except by those who have witnessed it. Villages have sprung into towns, and ordinary sized towns have become rivals in population and wealth of the great capitals of nations; gigantic factories, vomiting their dense clouds of poisonous smoke, have obliterated from the face of a large part of the kingdom every vestige of nature’s beauty, while the plastered, tinselled, and gaudy palaces of the princes of commerce have sprung up, left and right, as if at the beck of an enchanter’s wand.10

  Early nineteenth-century Britain was a noticeably more connected, more informed and more urbanised nation than it had been one hundred years previously. By the 1840s, railways were replacing turnpikes and telegrams the penny post. These new forms of communication and improved transport links effectively ‘shrank’ the nation: in 1710, news of the trial of Henry Sacheverell had taken three days to travel just from London to Shropshire. In 1820, news of the ‘trial’ of Queen Caroline took the same length of time to get to the Isle of Skye. Coupled with rising levels of literacy, reflected in a buoyant provincial press, these changes arguably made the general British public the most politically informed in Europe (if not the most politically emancipated.)11

  But in terms of the working and living conditions of the British poor, the benefits of this process of ‘modernisation’ were hard to see. While most of the population continued to work the land, the balance was quickly shifting, as more and more people gravitated towards the industrial centres in search of work. The nature of the workforce was also changing, with mechanisation making the cheaper labour of women and children more and more attractive – a fact that caused no little anxiety among radicalism’s male leadership. For factory hands, these were decades of severe hardship. Wages were low and hours long. Wheat prices rose from 39 shillings a quarter (28 pounds) in 1836 to 68 shillings in 1840, while in the cotton mills of Manchester conditions steadily worsened.12 The rapid pace of urban growth, and the inevitable desire to cut costs, meant that housing for workers was usually shoddily built, with poor sanitation and ventilation.

  European visitors were shocked by the gaping gulf between rich and poor in England’s rapidly expanding industrial towns. Friedrich Engels, then working for his father’s textile firm in Manchester, recalled a conversation with one of the town’s gentlemen:

  I spoke to him about the disgraceful unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of the town in which the factory workers lived. I declared that I had never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the corner of the street at which we parted company he remarked: ‘And yet there is great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir.’13

  At the time that he wrote these comments in 1844, Engels believed that the stark social divisions made a revolution by the proletariat imminent and inevitable. If that prediction proved false, it was nonetheless true that such blatant social inequality had a politicising effect on some workers, as the Chartist George Flinn, a leading conspirator in the 1840 Bradford rising, recalled:

  [Flinn] was charged by his mill master with having a little more knowledge than most of his fellow workmen; and in the eyes of a mill master that is a crime of no small degree. Well, how was he situated in order to get this knowledge? He lived in a cellar, nine feet by seven. This dwelling was his workshop, his bed-room, his kitchen, his study; AND NOT UNFREQUENTLY HIS HOSPITAL. Could any man live thus and not ‘acquire knowledge’. Was he to close his eyes to the fact, that while he was obliged to toil in such a position, the fruit of his labour was filched from him, and splendid mansions arose in every direction around him, inhabited by those that mock him with expressions of sympathy?14

  There is certainly some correlation between peaks of Chartist activity and troughs of economic depression. However, the relationship is not a straightforward one. For one thing, Chartism remained a resolutely political movement. While the great Chartist preacher Joseph Rayner Stephens, may have described universal suffrage as a ‘knife and fork question’ in 1838, and the old Chartist Thomas Dunning referred to his early view of politics as ‘a-bread-and-cheese question’, yet
the remedies prescribed for grumbling bellies were political, not economic.15 Even its most apparently ‘economic’ endeavour, O’Connor’s Land Plan, was directed at creating independent, self-sufficient smallholders, thereby fostering the political autonomy of the working classes. The Land Plan was not designed to abolish private property of any kind or to ‘level’ social distinctions. The economic distress of the 1830s and 1840s could have inspired fresh waves of Luddite activity or ‘Swing’ riots. That it did not suggests that, rightly or wrongly, the millions who supported the Chartist cause saw the political agenda of the Six Points as the remedy to their problems.16

  Chartism coalesced out of three movements clearly rooted in the depression of the 1830s: the ‘ten-hours movement’, which aimed at limiting the working day; the movement for factory reform; and the opposition to reform of the Poor Law. Yet the underlying problems were seen as products of political despotism, a Whig ‘tyranny’ represented not only by the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834 but also by the Irish coercion bill of 1833 which gave the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland extensive powers to suppress political meetings, and the severe repression of the largely non-violent ‘Swing’ rioters who had attacked threshing machines across southern England in the summer of 1830.17 Lord John Russell’s famous speech, which earned him the nickname ‘Finality Jack’, declared that the 1832 act represented the end, not the beginning, of England’s political reformation. This betrayal of the cause of reform seemed to be followed by an attack upon the remnants of paternalism, which alarmed both traditionalist Tories and many radicals.