A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  John Frost would not receive a pardon until 1854, again through the efforts of Duncombe in the Commons, and then only partial. He was unable finally to return to England under a free pardon until 1856. Nonetheless, the success of the petitioning campaign seemed to bode well for a revival of mass petitioning in support of the Charter. At a Chartist meeting in Birmingham in September 1841, Peter McDouall proposed a plan for another national petition and convention. The NCA took up the proposal, and plans were made for a convention to meet in London in February the following year. The new petition reflected both the growth of Chartism as a British political force and also some of the problems that this raised. The president of the Irish Universal Suffrage Association, Patrick O’Higgins, spoke of his members as ‘the Prussians whose coming up will enable their English brethren to win the great moral Waterloo’. The importance of the IUSA to the movement as a whole was reflected in the text of the petition: ‘your Petitioners complain of the many grievances borne by the people of Ireland; and contend that they are fully entitled to a repeal of the Legislative Union’.32

  However, the involvement of Irish politicians in the Charter cause had provoked some consternation in England, as witnessed by Thomas Attwood’s equivocal stance on the 1839 petition. In the same year Carlile complained, with O’Connor obviously in mind:

  I dislike the sound of these Irish O’s, in connection with the question of English Reform, and look upon an Irish Protestant as a base and bastard Irishman, a traitor to his persecuted country, without the apology of philosophical dissent from the Romish Church. If this be an unsound prejudice of mine, I feel, express and submit it to correction. I count such men obstacles to the public good of this country, and that the temper of an Irishman is best suited to the state of Ireland. I wish them all at home and happy, reforming themselves and Ireland. They are not solid and steady enough, not sufficiently philosophical, for the necessities of English Reform. I dislike the mixture, and think it does not work well.33

  In 1842, the apparent sop to Irish nationalism caused some disagreement in Scotland, where there was little support for the repeal of the Union. Sectarian divisions were also involved: Chartism had considerable strength among Scottish Presbyterians, who were less than ecstatic at the thought of political cooperation with Irish Catholics.

  In terms of the gathering of subscriptions, the 1842 petition was, however, an unqualified success. In all, 3,317,752 people subscribed to it, more than two and a half times the total who had signed the 1839 petition. When it was delivered to the Commons on 2 May, it was accompanied by a crowd of some fifty thousand workers. The petition itself had been carried on a decorated box by relays of workmen. However, the box was so big that it could not be brought through the members’ entrance: despite the Chartists’ efforts, not only the box and parts of the door frame had to be disassembled, but the petition itself had to be split up into sections.

  Once again, it fell to Duncombe to present the petition to the Commons. Though the House refused his request to allow six representatives of the Chartists to speak at the Commons bar, the petition nonetheless prompted a heated debate. Lord Macaulay laid out the dire consequences if Parliament allowed the Chartists to succeed:

  The Government would rest upon spoliation … What must be the effect of such a sweeping confiscation of property? No experience enables us to guess at it. All I can say is, that it seems to me to be something more horrid than can be imagined. A great community of human beings – a vast people would be called into existence in a new position; there would be a depression, if not an utter stoppage of trade, and of all of those vast engagements of the country by which our people were supported, and how is it possible to doubt that famine and pestilence would come before long to wind up the effects of such a state of things. The best thing which I can expect, and which I think everyone must see as a result, is, that in some of the desperate struggles which must take place in such a state of things, some strong military despot must arise, and give some sort of protection – some security to the property which may remain.34

  In contrast to the extremely close division on Frost’s pardon, the House decided not to receive the petition by 287 votes to 49.

  In the wake of the failure of the second great petition, a spate of direct industrial action caught the national leadership off guard. Strikes erupted across the country, beginning among coalminers in Staffordshire in July 1842 and spreading to fourteen English counties, eight Scottish and one Welsh. One anonymous Ashton mill worker gave a vivid description of the spread of the unrest:

  Tuesday 9th Met at 5 o’clock went to Oldham, Hyde, Manchester, Stockport, & Newton lees – Hurst and all other places round about and stopt every Mill in them – Soldiers and police trying to stop us, took a sword from one of the Soldiers, broke it in pieces made bloody noses for the policemen. Wednesday 10th went to Glossop dale Stopt every Mill there. Masters thought to stop us got knocked down … the Shop keepers are going hand in hand with us giving £5, £4, and £2 a piece for men to go to preston, Hull & every Manufacturing town in Great Britain and Ireland to stop them – now is the time or never – lose this opportunity and we are lost! lost! Lost!!!! We get plenty of something to eat the Shops are open they give us what we want. Today Augt 11th to Stockport, they are stopt but we go parading the Streets like Soldiers 6 a breast. News from Manchester Bloody fights Soldiers ready to fight for the people police the same Now’s the time for Liberty we want the Wages paid 1840 if they wont give it us Revolution is the consequence. We have stopt every trade – Tailors, coblers – Brushmakers – Sweeps, Tinkers, Carters – Masons – Builders – Colliers &c and every other trade. Not a Cart is allowed to go through the Streets.35

  By 11 August, over a hundred cotton factories, many dyeworks and machine shops and about fifty thousand workmen lay idle. A conference of eighty trade delegates met at Carpenters’ Hall in Manchester, appealed for law and order and endorsed the Charter. The strikes then spread across the Pennines to Yorkshire, where gangs of strikers pulled out the boiler plugs to put out the fires and halt the works (lending the name ‘the Plug Plot’ to the episode), while in Manchester the trades delegates continued to meet. The unrest was marked by greater violence than had accompanied the strikes of 1839. A bloody confrontation occurred at Salterhebble, Yorkshire, on the road to the nearest station, at Elland, where strikers attacked cavalry who were returning from dropping arrested demonstrators there. One of the ambush party, a carpet weaver named Charles Greenwood, returned home having spent a night hiding in a drain only to find that his sixteen-year-old son had died ‘of tuberculosis and want of food’ during his absence. Eight men who were thrown from their horses were robbed as they lay semiconscious on the road. Fighting broke out in Halifax on 16 August, soldiers using their bayonets and firing shots to disperse the crowd. At least three people, one a soldier, were killed in the attack.

  The liberal press unhesitatingly linked the unrest to Chartism, but at the national level it appeared that the Chartist leadership was essentially caught unawares by the strikes. At the same time as trade unionists were meeting in Manchester, the NCA was gathering there to commemorate the anniversary of Peterloo and unveil a statue of Henry Hunt. Most members had received little information about the strike activity, and George Harney and William Hill opposed Peter McDouall’s motion to give it official support. The Northern Star itself remained under the editorship of Hill, and the 20 August issue stayed focused on the commemoration of Peterloo. What little comment the Star made on the strikes offered a pessimistic verdict on their chances of success. Belatedly, most members of the NCA followed O’Connor in giving the so-called ‘Plug Plot’ their support. However, connections between the trade union action and Chartism only really existed at the local level. The NCA did little more than offer the strikers its sympathy. As one Wiltshire Chartist grumbled: ‘the general complaint is that there is no public body sitting, either in London or Manchester, to direct the Movement’.36

  Indeed, many Chartists
suspected that the unrest was actually being provoked and orchestrated by the Anti-Corn Law League. Derided by Chartists as the ‘mill owners’ ramp’, the League was alleged to be stirring up strike action in order to allow industrialists, suffering in the economic depression, to shut down factories and lay off workers. The government too had its suspicions, ordering that the ACLL leader Richard Cobden’s post should be watched and read. These suspicions were not without foundation. The ACLL in Derby distributed leaflets to households praising ‘the determination of the people’ and advising that ‘you have a moral right to subsistence … you receive misgovernment instead’.37 Worried about the repercussions of the strike, some Chartists signed up as special constables to help contain the disorder.

  But the militancy of some of the strikers and their attachment to Chartism were indisputable. Looking back on the Plug Plot from 1887, Joseph Lawson of Pudsey recalled how he had watched a striker stand directly in front of a troop of cavalry, shouting out that he was

  determined that no more work should be done till the ‘People’s Charter’ was the law of the land. He bared his breast as he spoke, and told both the magistrates and soldiers, they might pierce his heart with bullets or lances, but the people were moved to no longer starve when there was an abundance in the land, kept from the producers of all wealth by bad and unjust laws.38

  Similarly, strikers in West Yorkshire promised ‘Not to work again until the charter was established’.39

  However, by the end of August, the strikes had dissipated. The resources that the strikers could call upon were minimal. Some accounts reported that they were close to starving to death. One eyewitness recalled seeing one of the marchers drop down dead as they passed through Ovenden, between Bradford and Halifax. Many had little choice but to give in and take what scant relief they could get under the new Poor Law, or die. In addition, though the strikes were serious, they were also localised. Some areas, such as Birmingham, London, Monmouthshire and Tyneside, were largely unaffected.

  The government also had powerful military resources at its disposal, made even more effective by the development of the railway system. Regular troops were supplemented by England’s developing local police forces, which in turn were supported by large numbers of special constables: thirteen hundred were drafted in Halifax alone. As the industrial action weakened, the government returned to the tactics of 1839–40 and a wave of mass arrests began. In October, 274 cases were heard in Staffordshire: 54 men were transported and 154 imprisoned. The Chartist leadership was again targeted. McDouall went into self-imposed exile and O’Connor was arrested and indicted in September for seditious conspiracy. He was tried, along with fifty-eight others, at Lancaster on 1 March 1843. The Attorney-General made clear his intention to paint O’Connor in the blackest light possible:

  I propose to charge O’Connor as a general conspirator with the others and not to proceed against him for libel merely, or for acting as a Delegate, or taking part at the meeting of Delegates – I propose to try him in the same indictment with the worst of the defendants who headed mobs, made seditious speeches, and stopped mills and factories. I shall blend in one accusation the head and the hands – the bludgeon and the pen, and let the jury and the public see in one case the whole crime, its commencement and its consequence.40

  The trial, however, was a failure. Fifty-nine prisoners were acquitted, the juries recording not-guilty verdicts on all the major charges. Those that were found guilty of minor offences were never called for sentencing.

  17

  THE LAND PLAN, O’CONNOR AND THE LEGACY OF CHARTISM

  On 20 January 1843, Daniel McNaughtan, a Scottish wood-turner, shot and killed Edward Drummond, Sir Robert Peel’s private secretary, mistaking him for the Prime Minister. McNaughtan escaped the death penalty through a successful plea of insanity.

  However, the killing, and McNaughtan’s acquittal, caused considerable public alarm, coming as it did soon after the turmoil of the summer of 1842. The links between political radicalism and Drummond’s murder may have been more than the product of politicians’ nightmares. Drummond had managed to acquire a large amount of cash (£750 – over £50,000 in today’s money) in the two years before the incident when he had been travelling around Britain and France. The leading Glasgow Chartist Abram Turner had worked in McNaughtan’s shop. More suspicious still was the fact that McNaughtan’s reader’s ticket for the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute library showed that he had recently been reading works on insanity. As both a former actor and a medical student, it may not have been beyond his skill to feign the symptoms of a lunatic. However, whether his subsequent fate was better than execution is debatable. He spent most of the remainder of his life in solitary confinement in a tiny cell in Bethlem Hospital in London, and died in 1865, a year after being moved to the Crowthorne Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Berkshire.1

  Madness and confusion also characterised the next four years of the Chartist movement in Britain: the former in the shape of the folly that was the Chartist Land Company, the latter as the party splintered and weakened into a variety of factions, no longer under the effective control of the NCA.

  The threat from middle-class reform organisations had not been fully countered in 1841. A new challenge was mounted by the National Complete Suffrage Union, formed by the wealthy Quaker philanthropist and abolitionist Joseph Sturge. In April 1842, Sturge succeeded in organising a convention bringing together members of the NCSU and NCA to agree a common programme. However, his attempts to get the delegates to drop the party label ‘Chartist’ because of its associations with physical force were opposed by Lovett and other Chartist delegates. With the debate inconclusive, it was agreed to adjourn until a second meeting in December that year. Cooperation between Chartists and the NCSU nonetheless continued.

  At Nottingham, O’Connor supported Sturge’s candidacy at the election against the Tory nominee John Walter, editor of The Times. The atmosphere at the hustings was poisonous. It was the first time that J. R. Stephens had appeared in public since his trial and subsequent repudiation of Chartism. Angry Chartist supporters responded to his presence by tearing up prints of him from the Northern Star before his face. Stephens, who had come to support Walter’s candidacy, was given protection by Tory ‘lambs’, who started to move towards the hostile Chartists. At this point, Sturge and Henry Vincent, another Chartist won over by the NCSU, wisely fled the platform. O’Connor now stepped into the breach. According to Thomas Cooper, the Chartist shoemaker, schoolmaster and poet,

  [O’Connor] fought like a dragon – flooring the fellows like ninepins – was thrown – forty men upon him – tore him down (Stephens and the rest had cut) and then mounted the Tory wagon! What a shout then rent the air, amidst throbbing hearts! I shall never forget it! McDouall and others then crowded the wagon and it was dragged alongside ours – we stepped on to it and, successively, addressed the meeting.2

  After this drama, the election ended in a moral victory for the Chartists and the NCSU. Sturge overwhelmingly swept the hustings and Walter won the poll by just eighty-four votes. Shortly afterwards, he lost the seat when corruption charges against him were upheld.

  The alliance between the pacifist Sturge and the belligerent O’Connor was predictably short-lived. When the convention of 374 delegates assembled at the Birmingham Mechanics’ Institute on 27 December, the meeting quickly broke up over the NCSU’s proposal to replace the Charter with a new ‘bill of rights’. Lovett, a member of the NCSU’s council, had been purposely kept in the dark about this. Indignantly, he proposed on the morning of the 28th that an amendment be passed, stating that the People’s Charter retained precedence over all other documents. O’Connor, usually Lovett’s implacable opponent, seconded the motion. The amendment was carried by 193 votes to 94. Sturge and his supporters responded by walking out of the conference. For now, the prospect of cross-class cooperation was negligible.

  The failure to reach a compromise with the NCSU was a reminder of both the str
ength and the weakness of the Charter. The Six Points provided Chartism’s foundation stones, principles on which even O’Connor and Lovett could agree. By 1842, however, as a result of the Newport rising and the Plug Plot, the Charter was closely associated with the threat of ‘physical force’. Perhaps more importantly, it threatened a thorough transformation of the political landscape, not merely the reform of one component, the franchise. If Chartism was not the ‘socialist’ or ‘republican’ organisation that Engels and later Marx took it to be, it was nonetheless a good deal more radical than single-issue pressure groups like the Anti-Corn Law League and the National Complete Suffrage Union. Yet, by 1843, even the attachment of the Chartists themselves to the Six Points appeared to be weakening. George Julian Harney, subeditor of the Northern Star from 1843 as well as a member of the NCA executive, met Engels at the Northern Star offices in Leeds, and through him came into contact with a lot of European republicans. Following a meeting with the German communist Wilhelm Weitling in 1844, Harney formed the Democratic Friends of All Nations. The following year saw the emergence of a more extreme group, the Fraternal Democrats, whose members included Marx, Engels, Karl Schapper, Harney and a newcomer to British radicalism, the poet and barrister Ernest Jones.

  Jones’s background was scarcely typical among the Chartists: the son of an army officer and his wife, a daughter of a leading Kent landowner, Jones had received an expensive private education and was fluent in a number of foreign languages. A sequence of bad property deals, however, forced him to declare for bankruptcy in 1844. In part, as with Thomas Paine, it seems to have been Jones’s financial misfortune that awakened his interest in radical politics. By 1846, he had produced his first collection of political poems, Chartist Songs, which became very popular within the movement. O’Connor recognised that Jones’s intelligence and literary talents would be a great asset, and quickly brought him in as an intellectual collaborator. Through his opinion pieces in the Star, however, O’Connor made it clear that he saw alliances with European socialists as a threat to the movement’s national unity, writing a xenophobic article in July 1847 urging followers to have ‘nothing whatever to do with any foreign movement’.