Beyond the boundaries of reform

Title: Beyond the boundaries of reform
Description: In 2013 Malcolm Chase, the late and much missed historian of Chartism and labour movements in Britain, published his 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom. The book challenges the reader to rethink the traditional history of reform and the development of popular radicalism, which has tended to focus on Peterloo and on events in England, rather than attending to the wider United Kingdom. It has also tended emphasize the Queen Caroline affair, which, while important on many levels, has been allowed to eclipse a great deal else.

As Chase points out, 1820 was the culmination of a period of deep economic recession, with poor harvests and a bitter winter, long-standing unemployment, and widespread poverty.

The year began with the passing of the Six Acts – the major opposition to which came from without, rather than from within Parliament. Chase neatly distinguishes three types of popular response: spontaneous demonstrations; the constitutional movement for parliamentary reform; and revolutionary conspiracy (p. 46). The first were occasional and largely manageable. The second, under the leadership of Henry Hunt, who was still awaiting trial for his presence on the platform at Peterloo, was largely intent on distancing itself from more extreme, insurrectionary elements pressing for recourse to arms, and insisted that a victory for reform could be had on the back of opprobrium aroused by Peterloo. The third group were unconvinced, seeing Peterloo and the Six Acts as an intensification of the government’s struggle against the liberty of the people. Evidence for this view was not heard to find, with Chase identifying some ninety prosecutions for political libel in Britain in 1819-20, mostly brought against small booksellers and publishers, with more than half securing convictions, coupled with the prosecutions being brought against those on the platform at Peterloo, and the firm expression of intent contained in the Six Acts.

Although extremism grew in London, and had links in Manchester and other industrial areas of the North, it also took root in the industrial areas of West Scotland around Glasgow and Paisley, where marchers demonstrating against Peterloo in September were challenged for their quasi-military character, with more clandestine activity accelerating at the end of 1819. That activity included the creation of armed associations, paralleled by a renewed participation in loyalist military corps. Walter Scott noted: ‘in Glasgow the Volunteers drill by day and the Radicals by night.’ (p. 49) Moreover, radical agitators, form William Cobbett through to Spencean activists, including Arthur Thistlewood, toured the country in the last years of the decade, canvassing opinion and in a number of cases promoting a break with the constitutional campaign and the taking of more immediate action.

In Ireland, in a very different context of long-standing Catholic subordination to a Protestant Ascendancy reinforced by the Union with Britain in 1801, a dramatic rise in economic hardship in the west of the country produced rural rent strikes, cattle maiming and an array of agrarian disturbances associated with ‘Ribbonism’, named for the ribbons of red or green worn by those involved. These were just the latest of a number of secret, tightly-organized, oath-bound organizations that had stalked the rural politics of Ireland in the previous fifty years. And, as on other occasions, their actions tended to be conceived of in dramatically simplified sectarian terms by the authorities, and responded to entirely with repression. Their guerilla activities increased towards the end of February and into March, and there were fears of a more general rising being plotted, with suspicions of substantive connections with radical insurgents in England. British forces responded with mass arrests, speedy trials with swiftly executed sentences, ranging from death, transportation, whipping and imprisonment. With over thirty death sentences and at least fifty killed in clashes, military might largely restored order by the end of March.

The Cato Street Conspiracy is dealt with separately here, but Chase makes a strong case for it being able to draw on the support of an extensive network in London, especially among shoemakers, and for there being knowledge of the conspiracy in Scotland, with a willingness to take action locally once prompted, which may have been circulated by the Leeds reformer Joseph Brayshaw, who had been persuaded by Peterloo that the Parliamentary reform route to change was no longer viable. In February, he was delegated by the Leeds Radical Committee to visit Carlisle and Glasgow to sound out the preparations for positive action. His account of this trip benefitted from hindsight and prudence, but there is some evidence to suggest a network existed which was waiting on the actions of Thistlewood in London before launching its own insurrectionary attacks against local forces and institutions. There were even concerns about influence by radical republicans in France hoping to procure the release of Napoleon from St Helena, and about links to those who assassinated the Duc de Berry on 13 February 1820.

In these circumstances it is unsurprising that the General Election called on the death of George III should have been a highly contested and violent affair, not least because they enabled a range of meetings and activities that the Six Acts has blocked. Then in March Hunt was tried in York for ‘unlawful assembly for the purpose of exciting discontent and to bring the government into hatred and contempt.’ (114) By carefully ruling a range of questions out of court, the trial secured its verdict, but it seems also to have fueled further conspiratorial activity. On 31 March(Good Friday) a mobilization of some 2,000 men around Huddersfield threatened an attack on the town that never materialized, and there was a spate of radical activity in Oldham, Bolton, Wigan and Warrington in which arming was common.

On Easter Monday, Scottish radicals and unionists organized a general strike, placarding an Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland thorough the town. The intention was that the strike would become an insurrection when the English mail coach failed to arrive (indicating the success of a rising in England). Nonetheless, the coach arrived, leading to a impasse, with few working, but still fewer mobilizing for action. Skirmishes took place around Glasgow, between those seeking to enforce the strike and the military, but the wider uprising that had been planned collapsed, and the military and the local militia seized activists and led searches for arms throughout the communities of West Scotland. When a volunteer force was jostled by a crowd on leaving Greenock, after depositing five radical prisoners in the town jail, they panicked and opened fire killing eight and wounding twenty-six. In the subsequent trials twenty-two men were sentenced to death, with nineteen having their sentences commuted to transportation. The 63 year old weaver James Wilson was hanged and decapitated on 30 August in Glasgow; on 8 September in Stirling, John Baird and Andrew Hardie suffered the same fate.

The Scottish disturbances were echoed in reports of armed meetings the following week Yorkshire, with the local militia and yeomanry being called out in Huddersfield, and with marches expected from towns across both Lancashire and Yorkshire. There was clearly widespread activity, all of which failed to culminate in the insurrection the Scots had hoped for, and which seems to have fallen victim to poor planning and communication. The exact extent of the unrest and its mobilization remains unclear. What seems undeniable is that the constitutionalist movement for reform could no longer rely on the restraint of many of its past supporters. A willingness to turn to civil disobedience, and to riot and affray, is not the same as commitment to an insurrectionary project, but it seems that in the opening months of 1820, that additional step had come to be attractive to many.

Malcolm Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013).

Gordon Pentland, The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland, 1815-1820 (London, Pickering and Chatto, 2011).

Item sets: Insurrection in the UK in 1820

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Beyond the boundaries of reform