Henri Druey was a lawyer and politician in the Swiss canton of Vaud, created under French occupation during the revolutionary wars, but preserved by the Congress of Vienna. He was educated n the 1820s in a number of European cities and returned to the Vaud where he quickly attained political office. He was a defender of popular sovereignty, but also saw the need for stronger federal state institutions. When the Canton of Lucerne decided to re-admit the Jesuit order and give it control of their educational provision there was widespread protest in other cantons. The Vaud legislature took the position that , if Lucerne had agreed to it, that was their right. Druey was initially drawn to that position, but rejected it because he saw the decision as emanating from an elite, with it being difficult (for all the claims of popular sovereignty) for the people to object to the decision given that only a majority of the whole electorate (not merely those voting) could challenge a decision of the council. The Vaud did not follow Druey’s position, and on 2 February 1845 it mandated it’s delegates on the Federal Diet to vote against the expulsion of the Jesuits. With rising popular feeling in Vaud against the Jesuits, conflict broke out on 14 February 1845. A substantial Lausanne crowd forced the resignation of the Council, with Druey and radical colleagues from the Council joining the crowd. In an impromptu constituent assembly a provisional government was formed (including Druey) to act until the election of a new Grand Council and until a Council of State was approved. The new constitution gave much greater weight to direct democracy in the canton, and the canton was declared to be a democratic republic. Druey was named President of the Executive Council of State. In effect this was a successful popular coup, producing a revised constitution, and with Druey going on to become a leader on the Executive Council of the Swiss Republic. He also (uncharacteristically for a politician) expressed the hope that caricature would take off in the Swiss context, responding to a new Swiss satirical journal: “The tendency of the Charivari is radical, without any doubt, it also supports the unlimited sovereignty of the people in constitutional matters, and it attacks the doctrinaires, the Methodists and the new aristocracy. Its weapons, like that of newspapers of this kind, are ridicule, jokes, satire. It is a kind of imitation of the French Charivari, but it does not have as much mind, nor the same political tact. It is to be hoped that this will come, because this kind of newspaper is one of the needs of the time [...]. Indeed, he even seemed to admire a caricature of himself as Louis Philippe that appeared in La Guêpe in 1851. Caricature is often a weapon of the weak and an irritant for those in power, but while Druey approved of it in the first sense, there is little sign that he thought it objectionable. In that tolerance he exemplified his deep egalitarian and populist beliefs and his commitment to the development of an open public sphere.

The chaotic 'Manifestation Des Femmes', represents a critique of the women's emancipation movements of the era, depicting their demonstrations as the workings of hysterical women. Organised movements of women in France were mooted amongst St-Simonians in the 1830s, but the flourishing of such movements, and their independence from masculine guidance was more a feature of 1848 then at any time previously. The chaotic 'Manifestation Des Femmes', represents a critique of the women's emancipation movements of the era, depicting their demonstrations as the workings of hysterical women. Organised movements of women in France were mooted amongst St-Simonians in the 1830s, but the flourishing of such movements, and their independence from masculine guidance was more a feature of 1848 then at any time previously. In breaching the norms of patriarchal structures of the nineteenth century, a common trope used against female intellectuals was the de-feminised women. Disputing women’s aims to be involved in the political and public sphere through an educated presence, they were seen to lack womanly virtue. These women were critiqued for ignoring their duties as daughters, wives and mothers, and often played on the idea of the subordinate husband, forced to take up the role of the woman of the house. We can see this in the theme of neglect that is apparent in both prints. In the 1848 French satire ‘Women leaving their husbands to look after children while they go to their club’, the print captures the emerging salon culture and female literary spaces that were seen to distract women from their duties. A wife, holding a text on a discourse of women is in conversation with her husband. She instructs ‘Take care of the pot to the fire and my daughter to bed early. If she screams, give her to suckle… With what, missus? With the bottle, you idiot!’. In confronting and challenging their expected duties, the representations offers an insight into the subversion of traditional roles that was becoming more apparent in the nineteenth century.

On 16 August 1819, during the summer wakes holiday season, around 60,000 men, women, and children gathered together at St Peter’s Field in central Manchester. They marched from many outlying districts of Manchester, wearing their best clothes, carrying banners, and singing songs, including such patriotic staples as 'Rule Britannia' and 'God Save the King'. They came from Oldham and Bury, Stockport and Rochdale to hear the famous Henry 'Orator' Hunt speak on the need for electoral reform: universal male suffrage, annual elections, and a secret ballot. It was to become one of the most significant events in modern British history. Hunt took to the hustings at 2.00pm; twenty minutes later, eighteen were dead, including four women and a two-year-old child, and more than six hundred had been injured by the sabres and horses’ hooves of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry (MYC) and the Fifteenth Hussars. The Manchester Magistrates, fearful of unrest, had read the Riot Act out of an open window at the edge of the square and had subsequently given the order for the troops to arrest Hunt and the other organisers of the legal meeting. Hemmed in by buildings on all sides, there had been nowhere for the crowd to escape to and they became easy targets for a drunken yeomanry whose newly-sharpened sabres are a clear indication that they had been spoiling for a fight. As the historian E.P. Thompson so aptly notes, 'This was class war'. News of what was depicted as a massacre spread quickly throughout the country, due in part to the publication of a lengthy article in The Times on 19 August by John Tyas, the only journalist employed by a national paper present at St Peter’s Field and who was arrested alongside Hunt. In the article, he stressed the peaceful nature of the crowd, even when the MYC rode into their midst: 'Not a brick-bat was thrown at them — not a pistol was fired at them during this period — all was quiet and orderly'. Once arrests had been made, the MYC began to attack the banners and liberty caps carried by the marchers, 'cutting most indiscriminately to the right and the left in order to get at them'. Then the crowd began to fight back: 'From that moment the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry lost all command of temper'. In an ironic 'nod' to the Battle of Waterloo, fought four years earlier in 1815, the journalist, James Wroe, named the event ‘Peter Loo’ on 21 August in the Manchester Observer. Despite government and royal support for the actions of the Manchester Magistrates, the reaction to the massacre was largely condemnatory and took the form not only of newspaper articles and letters, but also of cartoons, poetry and even ceramics, many of which appeared within days of the massacre. Established radical journals, such as Leigh Hunt’s Examiner and Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf, voiced their outrage in the pages of their journals and were briefly joined by new publications, including The White Hat and The Briton, all of which sprang out of the wave of protest surrounding Peterloo and which fell victim to repressive legislation at the end of the year. ‘The Peterloo Man’ As with many of the songs written about Peterloo, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, who inflicted most of the deaths and injuries on an unarmed people, are depicted as cowardly, primarily due to their violence towards women and children whom they deliberately targeted. Published in the radical journal, Black Dwarf, on 6 October 1819, the tone of this poem is vitriolic and the comparison with the battle-field of Waterloo only serves to highlight the cowardly nature of the yeomen at Peterloo. The Meeting at Peterloo The Bodleian Library’s Broadside Ballads Collection contains two copies of this broadside ballad, neither of which states the printer. The use of colloquial language in the song lends authenticity to what seems to be an eye-witness account of events on the day and it begins by gathering an audience to listen to the song in a centuries-old ballad tradition. The fact that the chorus is not printed suggests the audience would have been familiar with it and it may have been a version of 'With Henry Hunt We’ll Go'. There were more than seventy poems and songs published in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. Almost half of these were published in radical journals with the rest comprising broadside ballads with a few from chapbooks. Despite many of them having 'song' in their title, only nineteen state a specific tune.

Carnival refers to the celebrations leading up to the beginning of the Christian lent period between Ash Wednesday and Easter. As a religious custom carnival has been celebrated for centuries from masked balls at courts to small street processions of the poor, always organised within and limited to specific societal levels or occupational groups. Lent requires abstinence from animal products and alcohol, among others, a sumptuous feast and celebration facilitates a farewell from meat, as one carnival etymology suggests (Carne vale). Other German terms for carnival are Fastnacht, Fastelovend and Fasching, which all refer to the last day or practices and food on the last day before lent starts. The economic hardship and political frustration followed the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in the first two decades of the 1800s. Festive spirit in the middling sorts of the Rhineland was low, which had repercussions in form of aggressive behaviour towards Prussian soldiers, the new occupiers so to say, as well as dwindling financial support from the elites for local poor relief. By 1823 a group of manufacturers, merchants and politicians in Cologne had come together to revive carnival celebrations as a bourgeois, i.e. upper-middle class, organisational endeavour that would provide greater support for poor relief, bring the rising classes of Cologne together and provide carnival with a less shabby and dirty outlook than the lower sorts wandering around the streets wearing grotesque masks and making noise. By the 1840s this ‘reformed carnival’ spread across various regions of south-western Germany. Carnival remains, until today a characteristic part of cultural life in the Rhineland and Franconia. Different variations exist in other parts of Germany and German-speaking regions. This exhibition focusses on the reformed carnival, also called organised or Rhenish carnival, and its variations. Influenced by Enlightenment clubs and associations extant in a few areas in Germany during the French Revolution, associative practices slowly gained momentum in the beginning of the nineteenth century and facilitated the establishment of a so-called public sphere in Germany. The public sphere refers to a space or spaces to discuss, debate and propose, in public, on matters of state, society, economy, science, art, literature among others. However, this necessitated freedom of speech as well as a free and open press. Most of German press was subject to censorship that prohibited outward criticism of government and monarchy, religion, civil rights and politics more generally. The Carlsbad Decree’s of 1819, which provided a catalogue for censorship in the entire German federation, even censored university teaching. With this background, Rhenish carnival had to achieve two things, 1. reinvigorate religious festivities and rituals, 2. provide a space for discussion, criticism and practice of ideas that crossed to Germany especially German middling sorts over from France since the French Revolution. James M. Brophy refers to Rhenish carnival as ‘crypto-political’ ‘cultural formation’ that introduced to and familiarised Rhinelander with political issues, political practice by bridging ideas about ‘civic freedoms’ and ‘Romantic glorification of the past’ (Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850, p. 213). We can witness two phases of carnival, a romantic bourgeois phase from 1824 to about 1830 and a political middling-sorts phase from 1840 to 1848. Studying this German festival highlights its significant contribution to protest culture and revolutionary practices in the early nineteenth century.

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).

The following address was printed - possibly in several versions - and circulated and posted on placards widely in central Western Scotland on 1 April1820, signed by the Committee of Reformation for Forming a Provisional Government. ADDRESS TO THE INHABITANTS OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND; FRIENDS AND COUNTRYMEN: ROUSED from that torpid state in which WE have been sunk for so many years, We are, at length, compelled, from the extremity of our sufferings, and the contempt heaped upon our Petitions for redress, to assert our RIGHTS, at the hazard of our lives and proclaim to the world the real motives, which (if not misrepresented by designing men, would have United all ranks) have reduced us to take up ARMS for the redress of our Common Grievances. The numerous public meetings held throughout the Country, has demonstrated to you, that the interests of all Classes are the same. That the protection of Life and Property of the Rich Man, is the interest of the Poor Man, and in return, it is in the interest of the Rich to protect the poor from the iron grasp of DESPOTISM; for, when its victims are exhausted in the lower circles there is no assurance but that its ravages will be continued in the upper; For once set in motion, it will continue to move until a succession of Victims Fall. Our principles are few, and founded on the basis of our CONSTITUTION which was purchased with the DEAREST BLOOD of our ANCESTORS, and which we swear to transmit to posterity unsullied, or PERISH in the Attempt. Equality of Rights (not of Property) is the object for which we contend, and which we consider as the only security for our LIBERTIES and LIVES. Let us show to the world that We are not that Lawless Sanguinary Rabble, which Our Oppressors would persuade the higher circles we are but a BRAVE and GENEROUS PEOPLE, determined to be FREE. LIBERTY or DEATH is our Motto, and We have sworn to return home in triumph–or return no more! SOLDIERS: Shall YOU, Countrymen, bound by the sacred obligation of an oath to defend your Country and your King from enemies, whether foreign or domestic, plunge your BAYONETS into the Bosoms of Fathers and Brothers, and at once sacrifice, at the Shrine of Military Despotism, to the unrelenting Orders of a cruel faction, those feelings which you hold in common with the rest of mankind? SOLDIERS, turn your eyes towards SPAIN, and there behold the happy effects resulting from the UNION of Soldiers and Citizens. Look to that quarter, and there behold the yoke of hated Despotism, broke by the Unanimous wish of the People and Soldiery, happily accomplished without Bloodshed. And shall You, who taught those Soldiers the principles of Liberty, refuse to spread them in your own Country? Forbid it Heaven! Come forward then at once, and FREE your Country and your King from the influence of those base maxims that have ruined our Country. FRIENDS AND COUNTRYMEN: The eventful period has now arrived, where the Services of all will be required, for the forwarding of an object so universally wished, as just and equal Laws. Come forward, then, and countenance those who have begun the completion of so arduous a task, and support the laudable efforts which we are making to give to BRITONS those rights consecrated to them by the MAGNA CHARTA and the BILL OF RIGHTS and Sweep from our Shores that Corruption which has degraded us below the dignity of Man. Owing to the misrepresentations which have gone abroad with regard to our intentions, we think it indispensably necessary to DECLARE inviolable all Public and Private Property. And, we hereby call upon all JUSTICES of the PEACE, and all others, to suppress PILLAGE and PLUNDER, of every description; and to endeavour to secure those Guilty of such offences, that they may receive that Punishment which such violation of Justice demand. In the present state of affairs, and during the continuation of so momentous a struggle, we earnestly request all to desist from their Labour from and after this day, the FIRST OF APRIL, and attend wholly to the recovery of their Rights and consider it as the duty of every man not to recommence until he is in possession of those Rights which distinguishes the FREEMEN from the SLAVE, viz. That of giving consent to the laws by which he is governed. We, therefore, recommend to the Proprietors of Public Works, and all others, to Stop the one, and Shut up the other, until order is restored, as we will be accountable for no damages which may be sustained; and which after this Public Intimation, they can have no claim to. And We hereby give notice to all those who shall be found carrying arms against those who intend to regenerate their Country, and restore its INHABITANTS to their NATIVE DIGNITY, We shall consider them as TRAITORS to their Country, and ENEMIES to their king, and treat them as such. By order of the Committee of Reformation for Forming a Provisional Government, Glasgow 1st April, 1820. Britons–God–Justice–The wishes of all good Men are with us. Join together and make it one CAUSE and the Nations of the EARTH shall hail the day when the Principles of LIBERTY shall be those of our Native Soil. Print copy in The National Archive, HO 102/32/296 (transcribed by Chase, 2013 pp. 128-9. A version that differs in a number of respects is in Trials for High Treason in Scotland, Under a Special Commission Held at Stirling, Glasgow, Dumbarton, Paisley and Ayr, in the Year 1820, Vol. 1, Edinburgh: Manners et Miller, 1825, p. 46-48.

Percy Shelley's best known response to Peterloo is his Masque of Anarchy, which he wrote very quickly after receiving news of the events, but which was not published until much later. The sources on which he drew has recently been discussed by Phil Connell in 'A Voice from over the Sea: Shelley's Masque of Anarchy, Peterloo, and the English Radiical Press' (Review of English Studies 2019, vol. 70, No. 296, 716-731), showing an awareness of some of the more radical sectors of the English press than it has been customary to attribute to Shelley. It also shows that Shelley himself remained more allied to the constitutional movement for Parliamentary reform than to any emerging insurrectionary wing. There is, however, a much shorter poem, probably written between mid October and mid December 1819, in which a rather different, more radical image is conjured in the last few lines. There is no similar optimism about an insurrectionary spark in Shelley's correspondence from this period, although there may have been an element of prudence involved in that. But it is plausible to think that it points to the knife edge on which people's sense of the situation balanced: that the government had far overstepped the bounds in its suppression of liberty, and that while few had the appetite for the measures, many increasingly felt that they would be justified. When Mary Shelley edited Shelley's papers she gave the poem the title: ‘England in 1819’ An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting Country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. A people starved and stabbed on th’untilled field; An army whom liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed; A senate, Time's worst statute, unrepealed— Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. In Shelley's A Philosophical Review of Reform also written in 1820, although not published until many years later, his commitment to gradual reform, rooted in a genuine enlightenment of the people is clear: 'A Republic, however just in its principle and glorious in its object, would through the violence and sudden change which must attend it, would incur a great risk of being as rapid in its decline as in its growth. It is better that they should be instructed in thewhole truth, that they should see the clear grounds of their rights, the objects to which they ought to tend; and be impressed with the just persuasion that patience and reason and endirance are the means of a calm yet irresistible progress.' (p. 68) And 'Any sudden attempt at Universal Suffrage would produce an immature attempt at a Republic. It is better that an object so inexpressible great and sacred should never have been attampted than that it should be attempted and fail' (72) A transciption of A Philosophical Review of Refor is available at: http://oll-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/2510/Shelley_PhilosophicalReform1623_Bk.pdf

Description After Peterloo and the Cato Street Conspiracy, in both of which the outbreak of substantial violence, either by the state or against it, seemed to threaten, political opposition in the country suddenly coalesced around the cause of Queen Caroline, the wife of the Prince Regent, who had been estranged from him more or less from the moment she had given birth to their daughter Princess Charlotte (one of the few popular members of the royal family, who died in childbirth in 1817). Rumors surrounding Caroline's conduct abroad were widespread, fueled by the Regent and his allies. An investigation had been conducted in anticipation of divorce proceedings in 1806, but while the inquiry censured her for 'levity of conduct', the Cabinet agreed not to exclude her from court. A further fishing expedition in Italy was conducted in 1816, producing the widely caricatured and notorious 'Green Bag' of evidence to be used against her. On the death of George III in January 1820, and with the prospect of Caroline attending the coronation, an attempt was made to buy her off (for £50,000) and get her to repudiate her title. This failed, and she declared she would return. As she approached Britain, popular enthusiasm for her cause became widespread. In part, she provided an excuse for organisation and public meetings, otherwise forbidden by the 'Six Acts' but permissible because they ostensibly offered 'sympathetic addresses', which fell outside the Acts; however, the meetings were also often rambunctious and sometimes violent. London provided a major focus. The new king brought a bill of pains and penalties to be heard in the House of Lords that would dissolve the marriage and deprive Caroline of all titles and privileges. The case made its way slowly and increasingly scandalously through the House of Lords, but as it did so support for the King ebbed, and while the bill passed a third reading, it did so barely. The government abandoned it because Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, could not see how it would pass the Commons. Hone and other radical satirists made much mock of the King and the government - with Hone's 'toy' - the matrimonial ladder - depicting the rise and fall of the Queen through the shabby behaviour of the King. The 'toy' had an accompanying pamphlet that spelt out in detail the sordid character of the King's behaviour. Caroline was locked out of the Coronation in July 1821 and died the following month. While her popularity had declined after the trial, falling again in March as she accepted a £50,000 pay off, and still more sharply after her behaviour at the coronation, her funeral generated huge crowds, who seized the initiative and the cortege and forced it into a new route through the city. At one point the crowd were fired on by the Life Guards. The whole sequence of events remains puzzling. Some historians see it as a resurgence of eighteenth-century traditional crowd behaviour, although the political and satirical value of the movement for reformers suggests that some part of the response was a function of the closure of other avenues of protest. But it is also true the catalogue of her indiscretions at the trial discredited her cause, and correspondingly increased public sympathies for the King. And the violence associated with the crowd produced, in turn, something of a loyalist backlash after the funeral. Perhaps the best explanation for the furore was the opportunity that the case provided to ridicule and attack a king who had done little or nothing to endear himself to his people, without fear of reprisal. What is clear is that there was much to be made fun of!

This exhibition offers a wider European perspective on the forms of protest and contention that developed between 1815 and 1850? There are a number of reasons for taking that perspective: The period can be seen as a final wave of reactions to the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleonic France. It is not an exaggeration to say that Europe was convulsed by the quarter of a century from the initial crisis of debt in the French monarchy in 1787/8, through the widespread domination of Europe by French forces, to the final stuttering end in Napoleon's Hundred Days. Portugal, Spain, Italy, North Africa, the Habsburg Empire, the low countries, Russia, and the lands of central and Eastern Europe were all profoundly affected by the changing constellations of power, the redrawing of boundaries, the mobilisation of mass armies, and the emergence of new ideas of government, administration and citizenship. The Congress of Vienna, which sat following the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig and his exile to Elba, was intent on re-establishing the old monarchical order where possible, and with consolidating the supervisory role of the great powers in relation to the wider European scene. It had not finished its deliberations when Napoleon reappeared on the southern shores of France in the Spring of 1815 and marched without opposition back into power. His final defeat at Waterloo and exile to St Helena laid one ghost to rest, but the legacy of French republicanism and of Bonapartism remained powerful currents in French politics, and much more widely influential among those who looked for more popular control over their governments. The genie could not be securely returned to the bottle. Out of Vienna came a number of new forms of governance and partition: great power supervision of the Italian and German states; the carving up of Poland; the creation of 'protectorates', such as the Ionian Islands and Malta; and a sense of remaining tutelage for states such as Portugal, under British guidance. These new experiences were also linked to an explosion in constitutional thinking and the emergence of 'chartes' or charters of government - becoming a central bone of contention, for example, in France, but also becoming a demand in many states for a set of terms of agreement about the conditions of rule and the preservation of personal and civil liberties. And while European war between the Great Powers was avoided, we can see ongoing attempts to police the 'lesser' states, and to expand their reach and order their peripheries - in particular, the wider Mediterranean - with action in Algiers in 1816, the Iberian peninsular in 1823, Greece in 1827-32, Poland in 1830, Rome in 1848-9, and so on. Treating events in entirely national terms fails to recognise this wider convulsive state and a shared set of forces driving more local events. This exhibition draws together a number of the interlocking themes that connect the very diverse range of materials to be found on the web-site.

There are several important dimensions of comparison that cut across the continent. This was a continent largely of monarchies, which ruled with greater or lesser, more or less formal processes of consultation, and in many cases were accompanied by an aristocratic elite rooted in land, title, ritual and an acutely sensitive hierarchical order. Those orders felt and looked increasingly fragile in the wake of the French Revolution. Many reacted in draconian fashion to popular initiatives and demands for reform, and in doing so served to justify (for some of their subjects) the legitimacy of popular demands and their criticisms of the prevailing order. And the aristocracy, the emerging bourgeois elites, state servants, and the professional classes, all found themselves questioning where their allegiance lay, and how far they should ally with more popular forces. Throughout Europe, albeit at very different paces, we can recognize a process of agrarian societies developing urban centres and a degree of industrial activity, that was both dislocating for those who sought work there - and freeing. If historiography has celebrated the emergence of public spheres in the form of coffee houses and print culture in the 18th century, in the 19th we can see something similar as traditional communities fracture and men and women encountered each other in the facory and workshop, in markets and fairs, and in queues for jobs and food. In such contexts people talked and shared experiences and news. At the same time this is an era of the rise of mass communication and the widespread circulation of cheap print. Many states fought this, few were entirely successful. Printing presses became an essential weapon in the search for news, information, education and entertainment. And as print proliferated many people with only rudimentary education sought to express their views and their voice as part of a wider community demanding to be heard. If the mobility from countryside to town was one movement, there was also a much wider process of mobility - with populations in Southern Europe seeking livelihoods in North Africa, and with sizable populations of displaced people seeking new settlement, and political exiles moving to tolerant urban centres from where to plan new futures for their homelands. This increased mobility also intensified communication and the exchange of ideas, and did so across national and traditional language and cultural barriers. Moreover, it also, in many cases, generated demands from women for labour rights and for wider civil and political participation – especially in extensive urban areas and perhaps most among the professional and middle classes - but this was, in many cases, a new component of the reform agenda. One consequence is often overlooked: In the 18th century there was a common European language linked to diplomacy, dynastic rule, court languages and etiquette, and state and military ritual. In the first half of the nineteenth century we see the emergence across Europe of an common (and increasingly widely used) vocabulary of politics: one that created a new set of 'isms' with which to characterize and condense ideas, even if the serttling of exact reference was a protracted part of the process of contention itself and varied in different places depending on their traditions and experiences. But there is no doubt that we see both new terms - liberalism, republicanism, democracy, socialism, communism, conservativism - and a reinvestment and shift in meanings of older terms - radical, republic, moderate, and so on.

In these ngrams, we can see the slow development of this new lexicon of ideas and terms referring to change. Clearly, a great deal takes place after 1850, but it is in the first 50 years of the century that these new terms are first forged and then become a wider currency within the European world. (The term liberal has not been included because it has much wider use throughout the 17th and 18th centuries and it a feature of character or an understanding of culture and the arts, more than a political badge). LIberalism, on the other hand, is very much the product of the Spanish world, starting with the Constitution of Cadiz in 1812 and the subsequent two years of rule, before the reassertion of Ferdinand's heavy handed monarchy; and then most strikingly in 1820-23 - the trienio liberal - also forcibly shut down by Ferdinand (with French help)).

These ngrams chart the positive and negative uses of terms associated with political rule, suggesting the extent to which, in Britain, France and Italy, monarchy increasingly confronts discussions of despotism and tyranny. The exceptional case is Spain. For the most part the negative terms are well established 18th century terminology, often hailing back to the classical world (in the case of tyranny) or to discussions of forms of rule in the early to mid 18th century (as with Montesquieu and the discussion of despotism). Terms such as autocrat are much more modern. What we find, in many cases, is that monarchy continues to have positive associations - after all, it remains the standard model. But criticisms of political rule can draw on the languge of despotism and tyranny to characterize the threat they pose to citizen's liberty, without necessarily being anti-monarchical.