A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  Given the fate of Cartwright’s petitioning campaign in the 1810s, we need to ask why the Chartists resorted to a political tactic that had seemingly proved such a failure in the past. For a start, it was one of the very few legitimate means of political communication open to a working-class political organisation. The polls were, after all, largely closed to labouring men in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act, and property qualifications excluded all but gentlemen from standing as MPs. For a movement with a considerable amount of female support, petitioning also had the advantage of being a political activity in which women could participate legitimately. In fact, O’Connor encouraged both women and children to sign the national petition: ‘Let every man, woman and child sign the petition … Go on, good men! Go on, virtuous women! … we are engaged in the cause of justice which is the cause of God. Sign the petition!’23 Chartists also stressed that they would not petition in the obsequious style demanded by parliamentary custom. Speaking of petitioning in favour of the repeal of the new Poor Law, Bronterre O’Brien wrote:

  In my opinion petitions for the mere repeal of the new Act would be useless. – They would be disregarded and thrown contemptuously under the table, as all petitions from the oppressed classes are … I would recommend that instead of petitioning for a mere repeal of the Act, we should petition –

  THAT THE POOR OF ENGLAND SHALL BE HEARD BY COUNCIL AT THE BAR OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AGAINST THE LATE TYRANNICAL AND INHUMAN ENACTMENT MISCALLED THE POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT.

  A petition of this sort, accompanied to the House by 200,000 people and headed by all the popular leaders of good repute throughout the country, would be worth ten thousand of the ordinary kind.24

  However limited its influence on Parliament, petitioning did help to bind together the Chartist membership (Attwood described the national petition as a ‘holy league’).25 In some instances, whole communities subscribed to the petition. Overall, mass petitions presented a powerful, physical representation of the popular will. As O’Connor would say of the last ‘monster’ petition of 1848: ‘Did [O’Connor] ask them to petition parliament in the hope of this grievance being redressed? (no, no) Did he ask them to petition parliament in the hope of its having any effect on the legislature? (no) No; it was in the confidence that five millions of men were strong in the knowledge that they were fraternizing together.’26 Nonetheless, many Chartists questioned the usefulness of petitions, which could seem, in the words of some Yorkshire Chartists, ‘like throwing a feather into the wind’.27 More ominously, many said this was the last petition that they would deign to sign.

  16

  THE NEWPORT RISING – CHARTISM REINVIGORATED

  The summer of 1839 was a time of considerable political uncertainty. Fears about a political vacuum at the centre were raised by the so-called ‘Bedchamber Crisis’ when, following the resignation of Lord Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria refused to dismiss her Whig ladies-in-waiting as a condition of Sir Robert Peel accepting the offer to form a government. The Chartist convention itself, having relocated to Birmingham’s Owenite Lawrence Street Chapel, was considering what ‘ulterior measures’ could be used if the petition should be unsuccessful: proposals included the withdrawing of bank deposits, the holding of a ‘sacred month’ of strike action and the use of ‘exclusive dealing’ (buying goods only from shopkeepers known to be sympathetic to reform). Then, Parliament’s overwhelming rejection of the petition, though scarcely unexpected, acted as a catalyst to all these combustible elements.

  More mass meetings were held at Newcastle Town Moor (20 May), Hartshead Moor (21 May) and Kersal Moor (25 May). At some Chartist meetings, the political preaching of J. R. Stephens made an uncompromising argument for the use of force:

  resistance, active resistance, the resistance by force, to unjust oppression, is as high a virtue in the sight of God as obedience is when the enactments of the Parliament or the country are in accordance with the laws of God. We are to obey when the laws are good, and to disobey when the laws are bad – we are to yield up our homage to the rulers and governors of the land when the rulers and the governors are a terror to evil doers, and a praise to them that do well.1

  The convention reassembled in Birmingham on 1 July and resolved to return to London in a week. However, these plans were thrown into disarray when, on 4 July, a posse of police came by train from London to clear a crowd that had gathered in the Bull Ring to hear John Fussell, a jeweller and a Birmingham convention delegate, speak.

  Fussell had been arrested back in May for making inflammatory speeches advocating the use of force, but released due to lack of evidence. The attempt to arrest him a second time led to a serious riot. The police were severely outnumbered and lacked additional support. The crowd routed them within twenty minutes. Several officers were injured, three with serious stab wounds. Additional troops were called in and two leading Scottish Chartists and doctors, John Taylor and Peter McDouall, both prominent advocates of physical force, were arrested. The arrests flew in the face of eyewitness accounts, which recorded that both Taylor and McDouall had urged the crowd to disperse peacefully. The apparent injustice drew comparisons with Peterloo, though at Birmingham the crowd unquestionably gave as good as they got.

  The convention issued resolutions the following day, protesting against the actions of the authorities and deploring the arrests of McDouall and Taylor. Unwisely, these resolutions were then placed on placards with William Lovett’s name on them. The following day, Lovett and the Birmingham delegate John Collins, who had taken the manuscript of the resolutions to the printers, were arrested. With these arrests and with the rejection of the national petition, the convention, which had relocated to London, began to disintegrate as an effective governing body. Votes on motions became more sparsely attended until the convention was prorogued on 6 August and finally dissolved a month later by its remaining twenty-three delegates. The dissolution represented the formal end of the LWMA’s leadership of the Chartist movement.

  In the late summer and autumn of 1839, violence and insurrection, in the words of George Harney, were very much ‘in the air’.2 There were rumours of risings being prepared in the West Riding, but only in South Wales did anything happen. The area had a recent history of industrial violence: in the mining districts militant cells of workers, known as the ‘Scotch Cattle’, handed out beatings to ‘black-leg’ workers and set fire to the homes of antiunion shopkeepers. In the spring of 1839, there had been heated confrontations between Chartist demonstrators and police. On the night of 3–4 November, seven thousand colliers and ironworkers marched on Newport at the beginning of what was to have been a rising in the valleys to capture key towns and, some alleged, establish a republic.3 They were led by John Frost, now ousted as a magistrate for his obvious support for insurrection, Zephaniah Williams, a free-thinking innkeeper and collier, and William Jones, a travelling actor from Bristol and flamboyant radical speaker. What followed represented the most fatal clash between radicals and the authorities in modern British history, worse even than Peterloo. One of the rebels, nineteen-year-old George Shell, left this note for his mother: ‘I shall this night be engaged in a struggle for freedom, and should it please God to spare my life, I shall see you soon; but if not, grieve not for me. I shall fall in a noble cause.’4

  The planned night attack on the town was botched as the marchers, delayed by poor weather, did not reach Newport until after daybreak. Alerted to the rising, the town authorities had already enlisted hundreds of special constables, as well as a small contingent of regular soldiers. The main focus of the rising was the Westgate Hotel, where a number of Chartist prisoners were already being held. The hotel was heavily protected by both constables and soldiers, and the Chartist assault quickly became a bloodbath, with soldiers delivering a devastating barrage of rifle fire into the crowd that had thronged around the building, before turning their guns on the few militants who had broken in. Twenty-four people were killed or later died from their injuries, including young Shell
, who was shot several times; he took over three hours to die. A further fifty were seriously injured. As with Peterloo, the actual numbers of casualties and fatalities will probably never be known, as wounded rebels slunk into hiding to avoid detection and subsequent prosecution. One hundred and twenty-five were arrested and twenty-one charged with high treason, including Frost, Williams and Jones. Eyewitness reports of the carnage convey the severity of the injuries incurred:

  There was a dreadful scene, dreadful beyond expression – the groans of the dying, the shrieks of the wounded, the pallid, ghostly countenances and the bloodshot eyes of the dead, in addition to the shattered windows and passageways ankle-deep in gore.

  One special constable recalled many

  who suffered in the fight, crawled away, some exhibiting frightful wounds, and glaring eyes, wildly crying for mercy, others, desperately maimed, were carried in the arms of the humane for medical aid; and a few of the miserable objects that were helplessly and mortally wounded, continued for a some minutes to writhe in tortures, crying for water.5

  The Newport rising accelerated the government’s judicial campaign against Chartism, leading to the last mass treason trials in British history. Between June 1839 and June 1840, at least 543 Chartists were detained, for periods of between a few weeks and a few years. Lovett and Collins were sentenced to a year in prison in August 1839 and Stephens to eighteen months, as was O’Connor in March 1840. Harney was one of the few to escape, when a grand jury refused to indict him for one of his milder speeches, also in March that year. Frost and the other Newport leaders were sentenced to death but, anxious not to create political martyrs, the government commuted this to transportation for life. The Chartist ringleaders were taken from gaol in the dead of night, leaving no opportunity for their families to see them before they were sent to the other side of the world. For some, this would have been the last time they would have been able to see their relatives alive: Williams and Jones would die in Tasmania.6

  Capital punishment was also eschewed in the trials of other insurrectionists too. Robert Peddie of Edinburgh, who was identified as the leader of an abortive rising in West Yorkshire, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. At Beverley Gaol, Peddie spent six weeks in total silence, working a treadmill in full view of spectators outside the prison. He was then placed on stone-breaking duty for another three months until it was reduced to half-time on health grounds. After sixteen months of this backbreaking work he was allowed to do some tailoring. Samuel Holberry, the leader of a planned rising in Sheffield, was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. The poor diet, hard labour and terrible conditions proved too much for him and his fellow conspirator John Clayton. Both men died in prison. Holberry’s pregnant wife Mary was rigorously examined by the authorities about her knowledge of the uprising: the stress proved too much, and she miscarried. At Chester Castle, Chartist prisoners were placed in cells below ground level, at one point with water running down the walls. At Monmouth, the Newport prisoners slept three to a bed. In York Castle, conditions were so bad that they cost Barnsley Chartist Peter Hoey the use of his leg. In contrast, O’Connor’s incarceration was relatively pleasant: his cell was made comfortable with his own furniture, he was allowed his books and newspapers and was even permitted to keep caged birds for company.

  Historians used to portray the dissolution of the convention and the subsequent Newport rising as evidence of Chartism’s gradual drift from ‘moral’ to ‘physical’ force, with O’Connor eclipsing Lovett as the movement’s human totem. In fact, no such transition took place. Of course, O’Connor was a more belligerent character than Lovett, occasionally willing to use his fists to convince his opponents where argument would not, but here their differences ended. The justification of the use of armed force was almost a constant in Chartist rhetoric, simply becoming more pronounced at moments of particular tension, as in the summer and autumn of 1839. The right to bear arms had been discussed and defended in the convention’s debates. Lovett’s own Manifesto of the General Convention was a clear endorsement of the use of ulterior measures, including armed resistance. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to suggest that Chartism was at core an insurrectionary movement. In fact, the Newport rising was the only significant Chartist-inspired action of this kind.

  Instead, we should understand the Chartist rhetoric of physical force as an argument that developed from some mainstream elements of Whig political thought. Even when they seemed most radical, the Chartists’ arguments were deeply constitutional. Those who publicly defended the right of resistance did not support their claims with reference to the French or even the American Revolution, but rather employed English legal precedents. The clear assertion in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 of the right of Protestant subjects to bear arms for their defence was central to arguments in defence of physical force, but so too were a whole slew of other historical examples, from the ‘code of Alfred’ to the works of the seventeenth-century republican Algernon Sidney.7

  Most telling was J. A. Richardson’s use of Major John Cartwright’s arguments in his speech to the convention on the right to bear arms, given in April 1839.8 Cartwright was hardly a revolutionary, even if loyalists had occasionally tried to smear him as such. His political ideology grew out of the ideas of the ‘true’ or ‘honest’ Whigs of the eighteenth century. Yet Richardson was not distorting Cartwright’s words: he had, like his Whig predecessors, acknowledged the right of the people ultimately to resist tyrannical government. To Cartwright, the early nineteenth-century British state, with its overwhelming military power, was tyrannical. One of the ways its power could be challenged, apart from political reform, was by the creation of a new citizen militia. In 1808, Cartwright had called for laws to establish definitively the right of subjects to bear arms.9 The difference among most British radicals on this question was not between those who advocated and those who repudiated the right to use force, but over what constituted tyranny and at what point it could only be resisted by resort to arms.10 Radicals, like their Whig predecessors, acknowledged the ultimate right of the people to resist tyranny by force. The question was whether the British government in the 1830s and 1840s was a tyranny: if so, could it be said that all other remedies had been exhausted?

  In the wake of the Newport rising and the mass arrests that followed, Chartism was forced to reorganise. With O’Connor and Lovett both in gaol, it was left to new figures to take the lead. Chief among these was the Manchester trade union activist and mill owner, James Leach. It was Leach who chaired the meeting held at the Griffin Inn in Manchester on 20 July 1840 that founded the National Charter Association of Great Britain. For the next eighteen years, the NCA would provide direction, leadership and organisational structure to the Chartist movement, though it was most effective in its first two years. The NCA was no mere substitute for the now defunct convention: it was established on quite a different basis, building upon local Chartist branch organisations, not mass meetings. With a constitution, an elected president, a national executive, local divisions and a subscription-paying membership, Chartism under the direction of the NCA could lay claim to be the first modern British political party. By December 1841, it could boast 282 branches and 13,000 card-carrying members; a year later, this had grown to 401 branches and 50,000 members.

  The aims of the NCA were clearly delineated in the Northern Star on 1 August 1840. It sought to obtain a ‘Radical Reform’ of the House of Commons, meaning ‘a full and faithful Representation of the entire people of the United Kingdom’. The principles embodied in the Six Points of the Charter would be achieved through ‘peaceable and constitutional means’, namely the familiar tactics of public meetings and petitioning. In addition, the NCA listed other ways in which the great aims of the Charter might be met. It would encourage local associations to follow Bronterre O’Brien’s plan to field as many Chartist candidates as possible in national elections. Given the nature of the post-1832 electorate, this was not aimed, naively, at putting only Chartist
MPs in Parliament. Members were instructed to attend as many ‘public political meetings’ (similar to election hustings) as possible, to ensure that there was a widespread discussion of ‘our rights and claims’. They were urged to set a positive example by observing ‘strict sobriety’, while ‘Political Knowledge’ would be diffused by ‘missionaries’ and through the active Chartist press.11

  As well as the sophistication of the political tactics it advocated, and its well-developed organisation, the NCA had one other revolutionary feature: unlike any previous national political party, it granted women members the same voting rights as men. (Its membership cards even carried images of both male and female workers.) In its statement of aims, of course, it continued to limit itself to fighting for universal suffrage for men over the age of twenty-one. Increasingly, though, it appeared as if the concentration on manhood suffrage came from a conviction that the public at large was not ready to support women’s political emancipation.

  Women, as we have seen, were encouraged to sign the monster petition of 1839 – John Collins claimed that twenty-four thousand Birmingham women signed it. William Lovett alleged that initial drafts of the People’s Charter had actually called for the enfranchisement of women, but this had had to be dropped for fear of setting back the cause of gaining votes for men. By 1840, however, some male Chartists, most prominently R. J. Richardson, were arguing that women were the political equals of men (though in Richardson’s case, this was undermined by his assumption that a wife resigned her political rights to her husband after marriage). The same point was made in John Watkins’s Address to the Women of England, which advocated the vote only for single women and widows, again, on the basis that they, unlike married women, could exercise political independence. Quite apart from all this, it was not always clear that the later Chartist press was in touch with its female audience. In O’Brien’s National Reformer, one editorial warned its women readers: