Countdown To Peterloo!

Manchester Heroes! Courtesy Library of Congress.

Tomorrow is the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre. I thought it would be useful to chart some of the key events which led to the tragedy in Manchester, and its aftermath. 

6 December 1816: The Spa Field Riots, London. Henry Hunt gives a speech on parliamentary reform.

10 March 1817: The Blanketeers' March. Later this month, the Home Office recruits the notorious Oliver the Spy.

June 1817: The Pentrich and Huddersfield Risings are quashed by the authorities.

January 1819. Huge parliamentary reform meeting held at St Peter's Field, Manchester.

June-July 1819. First women reformers' unions formed in Lancashire.

6 August 1819. Mysterious fire breaks out at Tabley House (home of Sir John Fleming Leicester, commander of the Cheshire Yeomanry). This suspected arson attack means that Sir John is absent on the 16th when the Cheshire Yeomanry musters at Manchester.

Henry Hunt.

8 August 1819. Henry "Orator" Hunt arrives in the Manchester area.

16 August 1819: The Peterloo Massacre. There's a detailed timeline of events on the day here on the Peterloo1819 website. A reported 15-18 people are killed, and hundreds injured, including men, women and children. The names of the victims, and others known to be present on the day, can be found here on the Peterloo Names website.

November-December 1819. The Government introduces the "Six Acts" to suppress "sedition".

20 January 1820. Death of George III.

February 1820: The Cato Street Conspirators are arrested.

March 1820: Henry Hunt, Samuel Bamford, John Thacker Saxton and others are tried at York for their seditious "conspiracy" at Peterloo. Hunt and Bamford later received prison sentences.

Lots of events are planned for the bicentenary commemorations this weekend, and there's a round-up of them here.

Sidmouth's New Spy

On 28 March 1817, William Oliver, using the name Mr Richards, delivered a letter in person at the Home Office. He requested a ‘private interview’ with Lord Sidmouth to offer his services to the government, as he had ‘material information for the welfare and justice of this country’.

Oliver knew Charles Pendrill, one of Col. Despard’s fellow conspirators. But Pendrill was now one of Arthur Thistlewood’s friends, and Oliver realized he too must be on the Home Office’s list of suspects. Oliver acted fast to save his own skin.

Sidmouth saw him the same day and accepted Oliver’s offer. The home secretary told him that Pendrill was a wanted man - there was a warrant out for his arrest. So Oliver must have felt that he’d done the right thing. Sidmouth gave Oliver a new mission: to infiltrate the reformers’ meetings in central and northern England. Did they want parliamentary reform by peaceful means – or were they planning to take up arms?

But Oliver could not just stroll into the reformers’ meetings and start asking questions. Pendrill told Oliver that Joseph Mitchell, a firebrand reformer from Liverpool, had come to London to get the ‘London Patriots’ to act in concert with the ‘Country People, who were all ready to strike a blow as the only Effort...left to obtain a Reform in Parliament’.

Fortuitously, Pendrill said, Mitchell wanted some ‘intelligent active Person from London’ to come to the manufacturing districts with him. With Pendrill’s help, Oliver met Mitchell on 17 April in London. Within a week, Oliver was on his way north with Mitchell – little dreaming that just a few months later, he would be ‘outed’ by the press as an infamous spy...

Images:

‘Conspirators, or Delegates in Council’. On the far left, Lord Sidmouth (with a cane) is given a paper by former spy Thomas Reynolds (who was given a consulship). A huge ‘green bag’ full of Radical papers sits on the table. Seated on the right, from left to right are spies John Castle (with his back to the reader), William Oliver, then Canning and Castlereagh.  On the far right, honest John Bull looks through the window, horrified by the proceedings. George Cruikshank, 1817. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-6856.

The start of Oliver’s ‘Narrative’ of his dealings in the Thistlewood papers, HO40/9.

Radicals and Reform

Famous Radicals.

By the early 1790s, it was blindingly obvious to liberal-minded thinkers that Britain's corrupt electoral system was long overdue for reform. Unless you were a member of the governing elite, of course - the rich had inherited the earth, and their sons were destined to rule over the middle and lower classes.

The Radicals included some prominent Whigs like Charles James Fox and Sir Francis Burdett. They wanted the abolition of rotten boroughs, the introduction of annual parliaments, and a more representative franchise. Reformers harked back to the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which they believed enshrined men’s civil liberties and rights. They looked back to a long-lost Saxon golden age in which all men had the vote. (On the other hand, the government asserted that there was no historical precedent for universal suffrage).

Major John Cartwright (1740–1824) was convinced that ‘many of the political evils of the day’ emanated from ‘ignorance of the principles of the constitution’.  This former naval officer, a neat, upright gentleman, had served with distinction until the American War of Independence, but resigned in disgust over what he perceived as Britain's unjust treatment of the colonists.

Charles James Fox.

Cartwright, a prolific writer and campaigner, believed that petitioning parliament was the only way to achieve radical reform. The Major was a founder member of the Society of Constitutional Information in 1780, along with John Horne Tooke and others. Even Pitt the Younger, then the great white hope of the reform movement, was a member – ironic considering his later treatment of the Radicals.

Thomas Paine.

In the 1790s, Thomas Paine’s revolutionary ideas were taken up by the Society of Constitutional Information and by the ‘corresponding societies’. These societies wrote to one another about parliamentary reform and the rights of man, and spread these ideas widely in Britain. One group, the United Englishmen, expressed the views of many freethinkers in its ‘Declaration, Resolutions and Constitution’: ‘The House of Commons...is now thoroughly corrupted, and from being the representative of a great and free People, is become a junto of Placemen, Pensioners and Court Dependents...The only effectual remedy...is a radical Reform of the Representation of the People in Parliament’ (PC/1/42/144, 1798).

Corresponding societies were formed in London, Manchester, Leeds,

Matthew Campbell Browne.

Nottingham, Norwich and Sheffield. The Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information had nearly two thousand members. The Society resolved that Paine should be thanked ‘for the affectionate concern he has shown in his second work on Behalf of the Poor, the Infant and the Aged; who notwithstanding the opulence which blesses other parts of the community, are by the grievous weight of Taxes, rendered the miserable victims of Poverty and wretchedness’. (Resolutions of the SSCI, 14 March 1792, Sheffield Archives, MD 251).

The government's spies kept close watch on the corresponding societies. Although most of the societies' members were peaceful, there were a select few with revolutionary intentions, as we shall see.

Images:

Noted Radicals: John Wilkes, John Horne Tooke, Sir Francis Burdett (5^th Baronet), William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. History of England, Henry Fisher, Son, & Co., 1828. Author’s collection.

Charles James Fox, Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale, T.N. Foulis, 1910. Author’s collection.

‘Mad Tom, or the Man of Rights’. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-3847.

Citizen Matthew Campbell Browne, ‘Delegate from the Sheffield & Leeds Constitutional Societies to the British Convention’ at Edinburgh in 1794. Engraving by John Kay, 1794. Hugh Paton (ed.), A Series of Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings by the late John Kay, Vol. 2, (Adam and Charles Black, 1877). Author’s collection.