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Détours

Thoughts from a Historian on a Selection of Radical Poems

Alexandra Sippel
p. 277-314

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  • 1 I am grateful to Rachel Rogers for suggesting to include the poems by Brunt and Hazard, and for pro (...)
  • 2 This note aims at looking at a small sample of poems to illustrate some of the perennial preoccupat (...)
  • 3 “Mask” is sometimes spelt “Masque”. The choice here was to adopt the same spelling as Anne Janowitz (...)
  • 4 Southey, Robert, ed. Attempts in verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant; With some Account of the Wri (...)

1This note aims at presenting a few plebeian poems either written by some reformist working men who feature in the articles collected in the first part of the volume, or produced in the Peterloo years, between 1815 and 1820, and to put them into perspective with our cover illustration, the Skelmanthorpe flag.1 Our wish is to give the readers of Caliban 65-66 a sense of the atmosphere that surrounded the events related.2 Apart from Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy,3 which is too long and too well-known to be republished in full, all the texts below were authored by men whom the then Poet Laureate Robert Southey called “poets of low life” in his introduction to Attempts in Verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant (1827).4 Southey mentions that he eventually decided to find subscribers in order to publish John Jones’s poems because

  • 5 Southey, Attempts, 11-12.

There were many, I thought, who would be pleased in seeing how much intellectual enjoyment had been attained in humble life, and in very unfavourable circumstances; and in this exercise of the mind, instead of rendering the individual discontented with his station, had conduced greatly to his happiness, and if it had not made him a good man, had contributed to keep him so.5

  • 6 Hazard’s arrest is mentioned in Malcolm Chase’s book 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kin (...)

2The poems selected for perusal here are those of men who did find their station in life unsatisfactory, and who adopted the traditional codes of radical, Jacobin or Spencean writers to further their cause. Not only were they tireless campaigners, but Samuel Bamford (1788-1872), Allen Davenport (1775-1846) and John Brunt (1782-1820) all served prison sentences for their role. Thomas Hazard, an elderly radical who held night classes near the Edgeware Road, was arrested on suspicion of high treason during the Cato Street conspiracy and held until May 1820 in Tothill Fields prison, but he was eventually released without charge.6 Brunt, however was executed for his role in the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820, and Bamford celebrated the memory of Jeremiah Brandreth who had been executed after the Pentrich (Pentridge) Rising of 1817.

  • 7 Taylor, Antony, “Shakespeare and Radicalism: The Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Centu (...)

3The poems that have come down to us were produced by fairly well-educated working men, even if often self-taught and those selected here testify to the poetic culture that had been appropriated by the working classes. Thomas Hazard’s many allusions to the “ploughman” in an age when agriculture had already undergone mechanisation, may have invited contemporary readers to envision labourers as heirs of their virtuous ancestors in Piers Ploughman, by William Langland, a piece that already called for some religious and moral reform in the late fourteenth century. The very last lines in the poem John Brunt wrote in the Tower of London, “Life’s but a jest and all things show it, I thought so once but now I know it!” echo the well-known lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “The whole world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts […]” (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, lines 139-143). Antony Taylor highlights the importance of Shakespeare’s plays in popular education, and in popular patriotism. To him, there existed “a tradition within popular politics that exalted the role of Shakespeare, and found in his works the inspiration for the radical ideas associated with the popular platform, from the middle years of the nineteenth century.”7 Shakespeare’s plays were often used in schools to teach children, including working-class children, how to read. Brunt shows here that he had retained the memory of these lines and that as he prepared to “have [his] exit,” he mused about the vanity of this world. Other, more contemporary sources were also familiar to poets of the lower orders. It is difficult to imagine that they should employ the word “rogue” without having Robert Burns’s iconic poem “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation” (1791) at the back of their minds. Lastly, they undoubtedly tried to emulate the Romantics in their fairly patriotic celebration of the British landscape. Although it is not a dominant theme of the choice of texts below, it is still quite visible in Samuel Bamford’s “God Help the Poor”: “God help the poor, who in lone vallies dwell, / Or by far hills, where whin and heather grow!” (l. 53-4). This body of evidence conveys the notion that they were eager to be included in this long canon of British poetry, and to become part of the popular culture that forged their patriotic feelings, despite the accusations they came to face because of their militancy. Their poems, like their actions, aimed at proving their patriotism by exposing how British ideals were betrayed in multiple ways in those years, and how their cause was really to restore, rather than to overturn, the natural, godly inspired social order. John Belchem insists on this brand of patriotism in Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain:

  • 8 Belchem, John, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1996), 20.

Appalled by the tenor of conservative propaganda […] radicals abandoned the French idioms and sought to appropriate the vocabulary of patriotism. Having been stigmatised as revolutionary, alien and traitorous Jacobins, radicals trusted to rehabilitate themselves as true loyalists and defenders of the Constitution. Henceforth, radicalism was legitimised through the people’s history.8

4In Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Anne Janowitz provides an extensive analysis of the ways in which popular song and poetry helped to disseminate radical messages and to make radicals part of the national culture:

  • 9 Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (...)

In the interventionist poetics of the 1790s, songs and lyrics which in form and theme straddled oral and print cultures, and yoked together the languages of reason and custom, were constitutive of that moment’s structure of feeling. Radical and reform poetry from the 1790s through the 1820s, particularly as it gained access to the public geography dominated by the juxtaposition of taverns, bookstalls, and lecture halls, was one of the vehicles through which was carried out the transmission of communitarian and individualist values.”9

  • 10 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 1991 [1963]), 489.

5In their militancy too, they walk in the footsteps of illustrious forebears. E.P. Thompson cites the Belper Street Song “The Levelution is begun” as the most emblematic of the age, and in The Making of the English Working Class places a few lines from the chorus as the opening quotation of Chapter 13 “Westminster Radicals.”10 In Chapter 15 “Demagogues and Martyrs,” he elaborates on the Belper Street Song and the Pentrich Rising:

  • 11 Thompson, The Making, 733.

The objectives of this revolutionary movement cannot perhaps be best characterized than in the words of the Belper street song–‘the Levelution is begun […]’. The attempt throws light upon the extreme isolation into which the northern and Midlands workers had been forced during the Napoleonic Wars, and it is a transitional moment between Luddism and the ‘populist’ Radicalism of 1818-1820.11

6It is worth singling out that song, before we proceed to focus on the other poems.

The Belper Street Song. The Levelution is Begun [c. 1810], Coope Boys and Simpson.
The Levelution is begun
And Belper’s where this song is sung
So I’ll go home and get my gun
And shoot the Duke of Wellington.

We do not hear the bugle’s note
We hav’n’t even got the vote
So for the likes of you and me
The Government opposed must be.

We’ve had enough of Kings and Queens,
Our jobs are taken by machines,
Our children starve for want of bred
Pray tell me how they should be fed!

Pentrich isn’t far away
Where those poor lads did sports and play,
Betrayed they were in a cruel game
And Oliver we know your name.

Don’t look to us for new recruits,
For we are not just slavish brutes.
And ’til you let us have our say,
We’re over Cow Hill and far away.

We do not hear the bugle's note
We haven’t even got the vote
So for the likes of you and me
The government opposed must be.

The Levelution is begun
And bells burst where this song is sung
So I’ll go home and get my gun
And shoot the duke of Wellington.

7The first verse harks back to the Levellers of the seventeenth century, wedding their cause to that of the Puritan Revolution. Rather than in Jacobin France, the roots of this period’s radicalism were to be found in John Lilburn’s attempt at making Britain more egalitarian. The song indeed does contain all the themes that we shall examine below in the other poems. The first stanza (and chorus), recalls that British labourers did not recoil when they were summoned to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. The second stanza deplores their lack of representation: “we ha’v’n’t even got the vote,” which casts the unenfranchised portion of the people as the adversaries of the government. Luddism and protests against the corn laws are at the heart of the third stanza: “Our jobs are taken by machines, / Our children starve for want of bread.” The mention of starvation is interesting here insofar as infant/child mortality was usually ascribed to ill health (caused by a lack of wholesome food attributable to the workers’ excessively large families) rather than to the lack of bread per se. The next stanza brings up the Pentrich (Thompson writes Pentridge) rising by name, and is a perfect illustration of how the leaders of the movement, especially the three who were executed, became hailed as martyrs by labourers near and far. “Betrayed they were in a cruel game / And Oliver we know your name” are lines replete with anger and resentment at the government’s methods, especially at its resorting to agents provocateurs, like this ‘Oliver’, known as the ‘Spy’ who had prompted the Pentrich Rising. The chorus closes the poem with the ominous threat of the people “get[ting] gun[s]” to topple the government, and the analysis of the other poems will show how this revolution in the making is justified by the authors, as the people are running out of patience.

8Four main lines of analysis will be followed in the study of the other poems. First, they will be shown to all rest on a definition of Liberty rooted both in ultra-radical (Spencean) notions of equality, and a much more constitutionalist faith in the rule of law and the idea that Britons are free thanks to, rather than in spite of, the law of the land. The second avenue that will be explored is that of how the enemies of the people are represented, often as devils or tyrants who are able to turn Nature itself into a predicament against working men. This corruption of the divine order cannot but harm the people, and the third part of the analysis will bear on the consequences suffered by martyrs and executioners alike, with the ultimate threat of a revolution. Finally and separately, this note will address the last poems’ main object, which is Queen Caroline and the celebration of her as the “Queen of the Isles” and the “people’s Queen” in 1820.

The law of Nature and the Rule of Law

9Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy is probably one of the best-known pieces associated with the memorialization of the Peterloo Massacre and the struggle of working-class radicals for “Liberty” in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It brings together many topoi of radicalism, like the equation of patriotism with liberty defined as equality before the law:

The old laws of England—they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo—Liberty! [stanza 82]

10Looking to the idealised Anglo-Saxon period, like their seventeenth-century forebears who forged the notion of the Norman Yoke that contrasted Anglo-Saxon natural freedom with Norman feudal tyranny, Shelley and his fellow radicals equated the rule of law with true freedom, typical of the state of nature for Englishmen. Shelley also insists on the resistance of the people in the face of cruelty, and dedicates stanzas 73, 74, 79 to their stamina:

Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free.

Be you strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With over their shade to cover ye.
[…]
Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.

11From the press accounts he had received about the Peterloo massacre, Shelley remembers that the campaigners were men, women and children of all ages, and that they had left their villages unarmed. Thus,

Let the laws of your own land,
Good or ill, between you stand
Hand in hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute.

The old laws of England—they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo—Liberty! [stanzas 81 and 82].

12Allen Davenport’s “The Land, the People’s Farm” starts from the same premise:

The God of nature at his birth,
Gave man his title to the earth;
Then let us show our title deed,
United and we shall succeed,
And prove, if need, with our right arm,
The Land is the people’s farm. [l. 1-6]

13This poem is particularly interesting insofar as it connects Davenport’s ultra-radicalism and his commitment to Chartism. The text was published in Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star in 1846, a few months before its author passed away, and was used to promote the Chartist leader’s Land Plan. Malcolm Chase edited Davenport’s autobiography in which he relates his conversion to Spenceanism:

  • 12 Chase, Malcolm, ed., The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport, with a Further Selection of (...)

[…] I purchased the book; and lo! And behold! What should this wonderful book be, but the Spencean System? A work by the honest and indomitable Thomas Spence, containing a new administration of the landed property of the kingdom; his trial in Westminster Hall for sedition, and a great number of letters on various subjects, all calculated to improve the condition of mankind, and if reduced to practice, would comparatively make the world a paradise! I read the book and immediately became a Spencean!12

14In his Editorial Afterword, Malcolm Chase questioned the apparent contradiction that existed in Davenport’s enthusiasm for the Chartist Land Plan after he had defended collective property of the land all his life:

  • 13 Chase, Life and Literary Pursuits, 53-4.

Why should a committed Spencean, for whom private property in land was anathema, endorse the Land Plan? As a political journalist, Davenport’s energies were firmly focused on the land question, sometimes to the exasperation of his colleagues. […] Davenport had always been impatient to get involved in a practical ‘back to the land’ scheme. […] His belief in the necessity of class co-operation was in part derived from the strength of his agrarian views. Following Spence in identifying the distribution of land as the key to economic and political injustice, Davenport inclined to view the middle class as potential allies against an all-powerful landed interest. […] After a lifetime dedicated to the tenets of agrarian reform, it was thus not out of character for Davenport to endorse a scheme which appeared to be able to undermine the monopoly of the land, ‘the source of every social and political evil, every law that grinds the face of the poor.13

15The poem indeed says nothing else when it goes on to describe the terrible consequences of mankind’s abandonment of the state of nature (and of common property):

All were supplied with daily bread,
Till proud usurpers raised their head;
Who trampled the law Divine,
And substituted ‘Mine’ and ‘Thine’,
Which through the world spread dire alarm.
They robbed the people’s farm. [l. 7-12]

16The Spenceans were quite Rousseauian in identifying the beginnings of private appropriation as the root of all evil, and the main consequence that Davenport identifies is that supposedly free men under “Christian governments” (l. 25) have lost rights while

The savage has his freehold home,
And hunting park wherein to roam,
No laws of ‘trespass’ there restrain,
The child of nature scorns the chain;
No ‘game preserves’ spread o’er the land,
All game is free to every hand. [l. 19-24]

17Theft and poaching were punishable by death until 1823 and remained illegal and judged severely after that. As game lived on the land, it made sense that Davenport should defend the right to game in the same way as the right to land. The full consequences of this breach of the original compact of nature can be measured in Samuel Bamford’s “God Help the Poor.” As they are deprived of their own means of subsistence, and are left without the support of the authorities, largely because of the New Poor Law adopted in 1834, nature is unleashed against the labouring classes. Men and women of all ages, infants and youths alike, of both sexes, become the prey of natural elements. Despite the hostility that existed between Bamford and the Chartists, that specific piece was published in The Northern Star in 1846. It is made up of five thirteen-line stanzas, each of which is replete with references to dying fires, stormy wind and biting cold. The poem is set “on a wintry morn,” the lass who stands there has to resist “the fitful blast” despite her being “so cold, the snow lies there congeal’d.” In the second stanza, the reader is made to listen to “an infant’s feeble wail,” and to see how its mother desperately tries “to screen it from the cold [and to] bide the ruthless gale of morn, / which almost to her heart hath sent its cold.” [l. 14, 17, 20-21] Lasses, mothers and infants are the weakest, but not the only victims of this dreadful weather, and a “famish’d lad” [l. 27] is featured next, “devour[ing] a crust of mouldy bread; / Unmindful of the storm around his head.” [l. 35, 37] Even the old and “venerable” are assaulted by “the rude winds [that] seem to mock his hoary hair.” [l. 41, 44] Bamford calls on God to “help the poor”, to put an end to this manifest injustice, all the more so as each stanza contrasts the wealth of the nation with the labourers’ destitution. Despite their hunger and misery, they still abide by the laws of the land, like the young mother who

sudden darts a ravening look,
As one with new hot bread comes past the nook;
And, as tempting load is onward borne,
She weeps. God help the hapless and forlorn! [l. 22-25]

18None of them gives in to the temptation of reaching for all the foods available to others, but they, like Bamford, are shown to rely on God’s mercy:

And shall they perish thus, oppress’d and lorn?
Shall toil and famine hopeless still be borne?
No! GOD will yet arise and HELP THE POOR! [l. 63-65]

  • 14 Bamford, Samuel, Homely Rhymes, Poems, and Reminiscences (London: Simpkin, Marshall & co., 1864). T (...)

19Years later, when he wrote his Reminiscences, Bamford mused that he had never imagined, at the time when his poem was published, that he would one day be the miserable old man he had written about.14

Men, not Nature, are the Enemies of the People

20In a land as rich as Britain was at the time, human decisions only could deny the working people’s right to their share of the fruit of their toil. Thomas Hazard’s “True Picture of Society” sheds crude light on the inequalities that divided society: “Alas! We labour but in vain, / Oppressors ov’r boast, / For they have rais’d the price of grain, / To feed a cruel host.” [second stanza] Although it does not occur all that often, the resentment at, and opposition to, the imposition of the Corn Laws in 1815 remained a constant in the radical movement until the duties were repealed in 1846. Yet the price of bread was merely visible evidence of the deep-seated inequalities that prevailed at the time:

You never labour, never toil,
But you can eat and drink,
You never cultivate the soil,
Nor of the poor man think.
You say the poor was born to work,
For you, dukes, lords, and squires;
And you was only born to lurk,
And have your base desires.
In coaches you do proudly ride,
And lord it over them,
That all your comforts do provide,
Your fellow equal men. [stanzas 20-22]

21These lines clearly reveal that Hazard, like many radical campaigners, had already developed a strong class consciousness by 1819 when the poem was published. The aristocratic elites and the gentry, who unjustly owned the land and its produce, were the enemies of the people.

22The political elites too were identified as the cause of the people’s distress. “Napoleon,” wreaking havoc as he did when he started wars across Europe, was a “devil” all right, but even after the wars had ended,

thousands of devils sprang up in his stead,
from the tale of the Nation, right up to its head;
There are DEVILS in every rank of the state,
All ages, all sizes, both little and great;
At COURT, in the SENATE, and if you will search,
Very many there are to be found in the CHURCH! [Davenport,
The Devil Out-Devilled, 1818, l. 7-12]

  • 15 Brunt wrote these lines “upon the Secretary of State sending a letter in answer to one written by t (...)

23The same enemies are identified by Shelley who lists “Bishops, lawyers, peers or spies” [The Mask of Anarchy, stanza 8]. In the second stanza of the same poem, the “voice from o’er the sea” shows men to be at fault for all the ills suffered by the people. “Murder” comes to the fore, with “a mask like Castlereagh—/Very smooth he looked, yet grim,” which reminds the reader how deceitful that government was judged to be by the people. Robert Steward, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry and Viscount Castlereagh, Lord Castlereagh, leads the way for “seven blood-hounds,” the last of which is “Anarchy.” To Shelley, and to radicals in general, Lord Castlereagh was notorious for his repression of the Irish rebellion of 1798, and infamous for supporting the yeomanry’s brutal behaviour on St. Peter’s Field in 1819. In his autobiography, Passages in the Life of a Radical, Bamford recalled that the yeomanry had “cut across the crowd,” most literally. Although his role was to uphold law and order, Castlereagh’s crushing of working-class demonstrations had made him the enemy of genuine Liberty. Other devils follow in his footsteps, one of them Lord Sidmouth, the then Home Secretary and notorious for his reliance on spies and agitators who infiltrated radical meetings and contributed the arrests, and sometimes executions, of leaders and demonstrators alike. Thomas Brunt too, in the poems he wrote shortly before his execution, identifies “The Home Department’s Secretaire” [l. 1, poem written in the Tower of London] as guilty of dehumanising imprisoned reformers with “orders [that] would make you stare, / An hour a day allowed to walk, / But mind you neither wink nor talk! / For these are gifts of human reason, / And you are adepts in high treason.”15 [l. 2-5]

24In the other poem by Brunt in these pages, one can read “Let Sidmouth and his base colleagues / Cajole and plot their dark intrigues.” The line echoes the allusion to “Edwards the espione” in the first paragraph. Indeed, like “Oliver” who is mentioned in the Belper Street Song and who had fomented the Pentrich Rising in 1817, [George] Edwards was an agent provocateur who had been sent by the government to fuel the radicals’ anger into action, culminating in the Cato Street conspiracy. That Brunt should use a foreign-looking spelling strongly reinforces the sense that the radicals were the true patriots while government and their spies were disloyal to their people and nation, and that they were enemies of British liberty. In the second chapter of her book, Alison Morgan explains:

  • 16 Morgan, Ballads, 65.

Radicalism and nationalism would appear to be unlikely bedfellows, given that they tend to be placed on the opposite ends of the political spectrum; yet this chapter demonstrates how many of the radical poems and songs written after Peterloo are underpinned by a radical English nationalism, with poets making a clear distinction between the un-English characteristics of a tyrannical state and monarchy and the true English patriots fighting for lost freedoms.16

25In the introduction to his memories in Early Days and Passages in the Life of a Radical, Samuel Bamford recalled:

It was believed that government spies were abroad, and that in the furtherance of their trade, in order to have something to disclose, the most violent suggestions came from them. It is certain that the government were greatly alarmed. Detective measures were set in motion and the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended to give them free play. [vol. 1, 10]

26‘Oliver the spy’ had been instrumental in the organisation of the Pentrich Rising, in which Jeremiah Brandreth took part. Brandreth accidentally killed a servant with the gun he held, which led to his execution shortly afterwards. He thus became one of the three ‘Pentrich martyrs’. Bamford wrote his poem “Brandreth’s Soliloquy in Prison” while jailed himself in the aftermath of the Peterloo events and added a long note to account for his choice to write and cleanse Brandreth’s reputation:

  • 17 Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 238.

Jeremiah Brandreth, William Turner and [Isaac] Ludlam […] were victims of a plot proposed and matured by the villain Oliver, the paid and protected agent of the Sidmouth and Castlereagh administration. The conduct of Brandreth, both in prison and on the scaffold, was represented in the public prints as being such as would have done honour to any sufferer, and it required not any great exercise of the imagination to picture such a man, so circumstanced, expressing all the sentiments of the soliloquy. The Turners were most unfortunate; William was executed and his brother and a nephew were transported for life. There are some harrowing details connected with the event. Their mother died shortly after, it is said, of a broken heart. […]17

  • 18 Thompson, Making, 726.
  • 19 Thompson, Making, 727.
  • 20 Thompson, Making, 727.

27E.P. Thompson calls William J. Oliver (c. 1774-1827), better known as ‘Oliver the Spy’, “the archetype of the Radical Judas,”18 and insists that the Pentrich Rising and its aftermath had a “disastrous effect on the government’s reputation”19 as using spies was considered an import of continental methods unworthy of British authorities, and that “[i]nstead of isolating the ‘physical force’ reformers, the revulsion against the actions of Oliver brought extreme and moderate groups together.”20 [727] This “revulsion” permeates the poems, so much so that all those in the selection illustrate the reversal of values, the Masquerade causing a charivari in which those supposed to represent authority end up standing for anarchy and the obliteration of the rule of law.

28Far from the respectable, civilised elite they were supposed to represent, in the second stanza of Hazard’s “True Picture of Society” they become “tyrants”, “oppressors”, “cannibals.” The yeomanry they rely on in order to impose their rotten order is brutal, and Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy yet again follows the descriptions of the Manchester massacre as they were produced by witnesses at the scene on St. Peter’s Field, in the words of Britain (‘their own indignant Earth’) addressing her people:

‘Let the charged artillery drive
Till the dead air seems alive
With the clash of clanging wheels,
And the tramp of horses’ heels.

‘Let the fixèd bayonet
Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood
Looking keen as one for food.

‘Let the horsemen’s scimitars
Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars
Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of mourning. [stanzas 76 to 78]

  • 21 Bamford, Samuel, Passages in the Life of a Radical, and Early Days, 2 vol. (London: T. Fisher Unwin (...)

29Bamford’s own account in Passages in the Life of a Radical is quite similar: “The Cavalry were in confusion, […] their sabres were plied to hew a way through naked held-up hands and defenceless heads; and then chopped limbs and wound-gaping skulls were seen.”21 [156] All are dehumanised in this scene, attackers because of their beast-like cruelty, and victims compared to slaves, savages or beasts of burden.

  • 22 The banner was selected by the BBC to be included in its History of the World in 100 Objects. The a (...)
  • 23 Josiah Wedgwood coined the phrase around 1787 and it was engraved on the seal of the Society for Ef (...)

30The yeomanry are the voluntary slaves of the devils in government, while the people are enslaved, even though they yearn for liberty. This dichotomy of freedom and liberty is central to all these poems. Ryan Hanley’s article in this volume highlights the ways in which the rhetoric of ‘slavery’ was used by the Peterloo campaigners. This preoccupation with ‘slavery’ can also be detected in the poems. When the tyrant triumphs, “This is Slavery—savage men, / or wild beasts within a den / Would endure it not as ye do—/ But such ills they never knew” writes Shelley in Stanza 51 of The Mask of Anarchy. In the “Soliloquy” Bamford shows Brandreth refusing slavery by complying with the verdict he has become the victim of: “I must die—but not like a slave / To his tyrant in penitence bending. / I shall die like an Englishman brave, I have liv’d so, and so be my ending.” [l. 1-4] Bamford again equates misery with slavery in the “Patriot’s Hymn”: “Hear thou thy people’s cry, / Behold their misery, / Groaning in slavery, Let man be free.” [l. 4-7] The Skelmanthorpe Flag22 that was embroidered in the Yorkshire village of the same name in 1819 to commemorate the Peterloo massacre also used this reference to slavery with the white labourer begging for his freedom, in an image modelled on the one invented by Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795)23 in order to demand the abolition of the slave trade and of ‘slavery’. Even where ‘slavery’ is not mentioned by name, the poems are replete with allusions to servitude: “chains” and “toil” are everywhere to be found. The refusal ‘to live as a slave’ permeates all the poems, and the calls for liberty are ubiquitous, and illustrated in the radical’s motto, as in Bamford’s last line of the “Song of Slaughter”: “We will perish, or live free.” Brunt too, as he awaited his execution, concluded his small poem written in Newgate prison on the same note: “Still each Briton’s last words shall be / Oh give me death, or give me Liberty.” Many banners in the Manchester rally bore similar inscriptions, demanding ‘liberty or death’. Liberty was to be understood as both economic and political liberty, which is made plain in Davenport’s “The Devil Out-Devilled,” as he concludes his poem on an accusation of “the borough-mongers,” who deprived the working people of the vote, of having “out-done the DEVIL.” His fight for civil and economic rights continued until his last and in “The Land The People’s Farm,” he concluded “Shall Christian governments destroy / Those rights which savages enjoy; / And reign supreme o’er field and flood, / And traffic with the people’s Blood! / Oh no! the millions now must make a stand, / And add to the Charter, their claim to the land.”

Shame and pride

31Castlereagh’s and Sidmouth’s treachery dehumanized the ministers, those who took orders from them, and their victims. As the latter became famed for the disproportionate punishments they suffered, even when only peacefully protesting or petitioning—all legal methods—their claims to a fairer treatment gained momentum in public opinion. Bamford’s “The Patriot’s Hymn” restores the world to its legitimate order: the “patriot band” is the one that “guard[s] their native land from tyranny” [l. 32-33]. Brandreth embodies the values of this band. In the last stanza of his imaginary soliloquy, Bamford writes “But conscience can never be bought, / Courage can never be sold! / The villain will die as he ought; / The good man may always be bold!” [l. 37-40]

  • 24 On the ancient constitution, liberty and radical rhetoric, see Rémy Duthille, Le Discours radical e (...)

32As the reformers stand on the side of a historical definition of constitutional freedom,24 they are the true patriots, and the shame that was imposed on them is reserved for their enemies. It is particularly obvious in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy and in Bamford’s homage to Brandreth. After the massacre:

Then they shall return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheeks.

Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand—
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street.

And the bold true warriors
Who have hugged danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company. [stanzas 86-88]

33Brandreth’s soliloquy depicts the executioners and all those involved in the manipulation that led to the rising ashamed of their past behaviour. Most of Brandreth’s Soliloquy is dedicated to their future regrets:

How shall my blood-shedders repent,
When the nation’s hot wrath is out poured!
The freed world will hail the event,
And the pride of its despots be lowered. [l. 9-12]

Further down, the poem reads:

What wealth would they freely give then
For the grave that poor Brandreth will cover;
To hide from the hatred of men,
From the terrors which fearfully hover!
And what is the gem that they would give,
For that conscience this firm heart supporting,
That when they no longer could live,
They might die with a Brandreth comporting! [l. 29-36]

34Thomas Hazard’s “True Picture of Society” opens on “Repent, ye tyrants, you have brought / Distress upon the poor, / And many men thro’ you have sought / Their bread from door to door” [l. 1-4], and continues with the accusation that the authorities had abused their power and turned into “oppressors.”

35Not only are those radicals patriots, but they are hailed as heroes too. Bamford’s “Song of Slaughter” offers a good example as it celebrates the people whom God “[has] made to inherit / Strength of body, daring mind; Shall we rise and in thy spirit / Tear away the chains that bind?” [l. 9-12] By contrast, all those who represent the corrupt power of the day are shown for what they are: traitors repudiated by God himself. Bamford’s “Patriot’s Hymn”, a martial prayer addressed to the “great power divine,” claims in the second stanza, probably pointing to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Castlereagh and King George IV:

Emperors, and lords, and kings,
Gaudy and glittering things,
Unloved by Thee. If they but nod the head,
Armies must be mustered,
Thousands to slaughter led,
For Tyranny. [l. 8-11]

36Further down, in the fourth stanza, the hymn reads “Rise, rise, Thou God of might, All her oppressors smite, / Sweep them to death and night. / Let man be free.” [l. 25-29] Antony Taylor demonstrates that

  • 25 Taylor, Shakespeare and Radicalism, 366.

A selective reading of Shakespeare reinforced the view that he was an instinctive opponent of kings and despots. This notion was echoed by writers in the radical press who claimed to find evidence that he condoned tyrannicide in cases where rulers transgressed the natural restraint of kingly actions.25

37Here again, it is plain that the poet-reformers drew on the English idiom of revolution, especially in the way they contrasted king and tyrant. This justified their eventual call to a popular uprising and a revolution that would bring about a truly just regime and distribution of wealth. Davenport thus calls on men to

Unite! Unite! For God decrees,
Though Justice works by slow degrees;
That all the land shall be restored;
and God is faithful to his word.
The day and hour is now at hand,
To repossess the stolen land. [l. 13-18]

38The comment on justice working by “slow decrees” is in all likelihood a sign of prudence (as well as a witty pun on degree/decrees) that might be cited in case the authorities were too concerned about an imminent revolution. The best-known and most powerful call for revolution, though, is Shelley’s repeated stanza [38, 91], in the voice of Nature: “Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number— / Shake your chains to earth like dew / Which in your sleep had fallen on you— / Ye are many—they are few.” This call follows two metaphors, one natural and one industrial, that justify the people’s anger and their right to protest at long last: “And that slaughter of the Nation / Shall steam up like inspiration, / Eloquent, oracular, / A volcano heard afar.” [stanza 89] By 1819, the British all knew what accumulated steam could provoke in an engine, and volcanoes too were a well-known phenomenon, and one that the eruption of Mount Tambora had made quite topical. The eruption was thus irrepressible and caused by extraneous causes rather than by the supposedly irascible character of the labouring masses.

Queen Caroline’s ‘Martyrdom’

39Iain McCalman showed very well how the Queen Caroline affair was weaponized by the popular press in order to discredit the new king George IV and denounce the “Old Corruption” that was rampant in the circles of power. He traces back the genealogy of radical interest in the affair to 1806:

  • 26 McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-184 (...)

The Queen Caroline affair is usually dated from the time of its mass eruption in summer 1820, but its origins as a popular radical cause go back much earlier. Caroline became an issue in radical—as well as Whig—politics and propaganda during the years between the ‘Delicate investigation’ scandal of 1806 and her exile in Europe in 1814. Over this period, number of London radical pressmen, including some who were again prominent in 1820-1, helped to define and publicise the essentials of the pro-Caroline/anti-Regent mythology. When Caroline landed in Dover on 5 June 1820 the framework of the populist aesthetic already existed; it had only to be reactivated. In the eyes of many ultra-radicals, Caroline was already a wronged woman, already the heroine of a gothic-romantic fantasy.26

  • 27 Gardner, John, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy(...)

40In his much more recent study of Poetry and the Popular Press, John Gardner concurs with McCalman to say that this was the last eruption after the Pentrich Rising, Peterloo Massacre and Cato Street Conspiracy, and that radical militancy was somewhat silenced after that, both from the succession of failures and punishments and from the infamous Six Acts that drastically curtailed freedom of expression. “Why should such a broad range of radicals and reformers, a group that includes figures as disparate as Bamford, Benbow, Brougham, Byron, Catnach, Cobbett, Hone, Lamb and Shelley [and we might add the Spencean Davenport], choose to support Caroline?” Gardner asks.27 […] “The answer seems to be that it was a cause in which, however temporarily, even those with different political sympathies could unite.”

  • 28 McCalman, Radical Underworld, 146.

41The last two poems in the selection below, one by Davenport (“Queen of the Isles”) and the other by Bamford, “God Save the Queen,” both dated 1820, exemplify the arguments that were summoned to celebrate Caroline and denounce King George IV’s alleged betrayal. Whether Queen Caroline was guilty or not is of little consequence here, and we shall only focus on how the plebeian poets appropriate the Queen’s misfortunes. Davenport thus cites the death of the Queen’s daughter in the third line of his poem, which turns the allegedly unfaithful, foreign-born queen into an epitome of grieving mothers. The relationship between Caroline and her daughter had been the object of extensive popular interest. When the queen-to-be left Britain shortly after the birth of her child, the people had partaken in her suffering as mother coerced into abandonment. When the same Charlotte died in childbirth in November 1817, the people grieved too, with the notable exception of ultra-radicals who, like Wedderburn, deemed her death a “judgement of God.”28 Caroline only came back to Britain after her husband had officially become king, and she was welcomed by a crowd of 200,000 people who hailed her as the people’s queen. Davenport gives a glimpse of this popular enthusiasm and fondness when he writes that “the people / await the return of the Queen of the Isles.” [l. 4-5] He continues in the following stanzas, assuring the queen of the people’s loyalty, as their “love shall protect thee from treachery’s toils” as their “love is now fix’d upon thee, and no other.” [l. 10, 17] Bamford too celebrates the return of the queen, and only wishes he could do it in person with companions:

Hail! To our lady brave […]
Then fill the sparkling glass,
I would if I were free,
To every lad and every lass
That would bear me company.
And holding it on high,
I’d toast that heroine,
Who hath beaten her foes so gallantly—
Triumphant Caroline. [l. 9, 29-36]

42Bamford and Davenport both write quasi-hagiographic texts that exalt Caroline’s innocence, insisting on the deceitfulness and villainy of her opponents who are “cowardly,” “mean” and “knaves” with “hollow heart[s]” in Bamford’s revised national anthem. Davenport also lays emphasis on her spotless conscience and is eager to cleanse her tainted reputation. Her enemies are “foes” who have wrongly tried “to blast thy fair fame with their falsehood and wit” [l. 13-14]. The people will not be deceived any longer, he claims because “The foul tongue of Slander no longer beguiles [l. 18] because popular affection for the martyr-like lady is now too strong: “We, who lov’d the daughter, / will cherish the Mother, / the lawful, Legitimate Queen of the Isles.” [l. 17-20]. Davenport’s praise and sympathy for both Caroline and Charlotte are in stark contrast to the inflammatory sermons that were produced just a few years before in Robert Wedderburn’s Spencean Chapel.

43Caroline returns from her exile, far from being the degraded woman she would have been if King George IV had had his way and had the Pains and Penalties Bill been adopted. Although she did remain queen consort, her name would soon be removed from the liturgy. She thus became somewhat of an exile even at home. That Princess Charlotte should have died in the year of the Pentrich Rising is of course a mere coincidence, but one cannot refrain from thinking that maybe the mention of this event also serves Davenport’s radical rhetoric. The princess’s passing meant that the queen could no longer count on her role as the mother of the heir apparent to command her husband’s respect, if not love. In many ways I believe that the two radical poems below show that the reformers identified with the queen. They too had become martyrs, and mourned loved ones after the Pentrich Rising, the Peterloo Massacre and the Cato Street Conspiracy; they too had been pushed into committing crimes by stipended agents provocateurs. They too were treated by the authorities as exiles within their own lands as they defended a common law that was held in contempt on a daily basis. The Six Acts were their Pains and Penalties Act, denying them rights of freeborn Englishmen. So, by celebrating the queen and her innocence, Bamford and Davenport tried to protest, again, that they were true patriots, while the King himself and his enablers broke the sacred covenant of marriage and of English law. This patriotism is what vindicates Bamford’s choice to write his verse to the tune of the national anthem, then sung in honour of the king, and to insist on Caroline’s title of “Sacred Majesty.” [l. 16] Davenport makes it even more plain as he repeats the phrase “Queen of the Isles” no less than four times, in lines 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 and 24. The people’s loyalty to the country is therefore well asserted: “Our hearts are the Throne of the Queen of the Isles. And the people testify this enduring love by this invite: “Accept from thy people the kind invitation; / Who long to proclaim thee, the Queen of the Isles,” in the last two lines of the poem.

44Maybe Bamford and Davenport, like the many other radicals who celebrated Caroline’s return from exile, had a vested interest in this proclamation of her innocence and of her people’s loyalty. Maybe they hoped that she would be able to speak to the king on their behalf and that her return would be beneficial to the people. Cobbett even wrote to her, in order to let her know personally of the enthusiasm she created among the people:

  • 29 Quoted by, Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest, 170. The emphasis is Cobbett’s.

Her Majesty knows, perhaps, little of what is passing amongst the public. Already are the windows of the shops exhibiting her Majesty’s Person, attired in Royal Robes, with a Crown on her head and a sceptre in her hand. And the person who humbly submits this paper to her Majesty assures her, that the united soul of this loyal and just nation is poured out in prayer, that she will not yield, either to threats or entreaties, any portion, or particle, of her rights as Queen of this Kingdom.29

  • 30 Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest, 213.

45The defence of the Queen’s rights, just as that of the people’s rights, was essential. Contemporary historians agree, though, to say that the Queen’s Affair was but a short-lived, disparate movement that represented the last attempts at bringing the people together. John Gardner approves Iain McCalman’s conclusion that “Caroline provided a rallying point for metropolitan popular radicalism when the movement was badly fractured as a result of the Six Acts and the post-Cato Dragnet.” [213] Gardner also insists that the loyalists and the Tory press considered Caroline as an ally of the ultra-radicals, which she was most certainly not, or at least only very unwittingly. He cites John Bull, a loyalist newssheet that likened Caroline to ‘Orator Hunt’ and described her as “the veritable Mother Red-Cap of the faction.”30 The queen died shortly afterwards in 1821, and on the surface at least, radicalism appeared to recede.

Conclusion

46The poems compiled in this selection are but a very small choice of texts among those that have survived. Gardner insists that Bamford, for one, did not keep all the verse he produced at the time when he was a fiery campaigner for the suffrage:

  • 31 Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest, 199.

Bamford’s privileged status as an eyewitness did not allow him to present the events as unmediated by myth. In fact, I argue, Bamford not only mythologised the events of that day and his role in them, but over the course of many years, he developed, corrected, and redirected his myth. Bamford’s first responses to the event are angry and seditious, and daringly recommend an aggressive revolutionary reply to the violence that had been exercised upon peaceful demonstrators. In later years, Bamford revised, or deleted, his more inflammatory poems.31

47Davenport on the other hand, never recoiled from his engagement as a Spencean, transitioning from campaigning for a Jubilee that would abolish property in the land to Feargus O’Connor’s Land Plan that attempted at distributing some portions of it to the working classes. Malcolm Chase showed very well how “the People’s Farm” was a rallying cry that united working men from the times of Spence who coined the phrase, to the Chartists:

  • 32 Chase, Malcolm, The People’s Farm, English Agrarian Radicalism, 1775-1840 (Oxford: Oxford Universit (...)

Much has been made of the opposition to the Land Plan encountered by O’Connor from the other Chartist leaders: less appreciated is the extent to which the scheme enjoyed support from those who, whilst their national reputations were slender, were locally figures of considerable eminence. […] In London the Owenite T. M. Wheeler was central to the success of the plan, while the Spenceans Allen Davenport and Thomas Preston were also influential in gathering support. It was provincial support of this nature which largely secured approval for the plan at the Birmingham Convention of 1843.32

48The dreams of Thomas Spence for a fairer allocation of resources rooted in true benevolence also permeate Shelley’s poem. Anne Janowitz proposes a Spencean reading of the poem:

  • 33 Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, 27.

It is in the ambience of Spencean communitarian lyrics that we can a place for Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, which, I will argue, displays a Shelley who, in this instance, fits less of a Godwinian and more of a plebeian model. The collective subject Shelley invokes in his poem on the Peterloo Massacre derives from customary myths about communal property which were rekindled among the second-generation Spenceans.33

49Yet, if the likes of Davenport and Bamford found their inspiration in the rich popular and radical culture of the past decades, and sometimes centuries, they were also a source of inspiration for those who came after them. When the war is referred to, for example, they make it plain that all soldiers, British and otherwise, share in the same tragic fate and that death does not discriminate between foreign- or British-born servicemen. In Bamford’s patriot’s hymn, a piece written shortly after the British victory in the Battle of Waterloo, he writes about “emperors, and lords and kings” [l. 8]:

If they but nod the head,
Armies must be mustered,
Thousands to slaughter led
For tyranny.
Gory is Europe’s plain,
Whelmed beneath her slain,
Dreadful to see.
Bleeding promiscuously,
Victors and vanquish’d lie,
Mingled in butchery,
Let man be free. [l. 11-21]

  • 34 “La raison tonne en son cratère.”

50Although it could be argued that these lines are referring to Napoleon’s bloody campaigns, the choice of the word “butchery” and “promiscuously” rather tend to suggest that dead soldiers were all innocents now resting together. It seems to foreshadow the stance that Internationalists would adopt at the end of the century, in the hope that workers from all countries would unite as they realise that class interests should bring them together. One thing that the poems show very well is that class consciousness was strong among the radical campaigners and that their resentment and defiance was targeted at their own governments rather than at foreign powers. Other, more accidental, similarities can be pointed out with the late-nineteenth-century socialist movement, like the reference to the people’s anger as lava accumulating in the vent of a volcano. Shelley uses that image, just like the French version of The Internationale.34 More relevant in English though may be the fact that Shelley’s last verse “Rise like lions after slumber” finds a direct echo in the very first line of the English version of The Internationale, and the same motifs resurface, yet again, in order to encourage workers to recover their full status as free human beings: reason, rights, dignity and economic security are all to be found in the first stanza of the socialist hymn:

Arise ye workers from your slumbers,
Arise ye prisoners of want,
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
35

51The one marked difference maybe is that radicals of the late 1810s campaigned for rights they thought they had been deprived of and were entitled to regain, in the name of the ancient English Constitution that harked back to the seventeenth-century rhetoric of the Norman yoke, while the socialists of the later part of the century rather looked forward to a brighter future. On the one hand, revolution was to restore what had been stolen; on the other it was to create a new world. In both cases, though, the oppression of toiling men would be ended and their birth rights respected.

  • 36 Bamford’s poems are all to be found in the book he published towards the end of his long life, Home (...)

POEMS BY SAMUEL BAMFORD36

  • 37 As the date suggests, this poem was written in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Waterloo (1 (...)

The Patriot’s Hymn (music: God Save the King), July 181537 (Samuel Bamford)

O thou great power divine,
Wisdom and might are thine,
And majesty.
Hear thou thy people's cry,
Behold their misery,
Groaning in slavery,
Let man be free.

Emperors, and lords, and kings,
Gaudy and glittering things,
Unlov'd by thee.
If they but nod the head,
Armies are mustered,
Thousands to slaughter led,
For tyranny.

Gory is Europe’s plain,
Whelmed beneath her slain,
Dreadful to see.
Bleeding promiscuously,
Victors and vanquish'd lie,
Mingled in butchery;
Let man be free.

See Britain's patriot band,
Guarding their native land,
From tyranny.
Rise, rise, thou God of might,
All her oppressors smite,
Sweep them to death and night.
Let man be free.

Blest be our native isle,
Heaven upon it smile,
Let it be free.
Sheath’d be the warrior's brand,
Love shall go hand in band,
Triumphing o'er the land,
With liberty.

  • 38 This poem was written by Bamford when he was himself serving his year long prison sentence in 1820. (...)

Brandreth’s Soliloquy in Prison, 182038 (Samuel Bamford)

I must die—but not like a slave
To his tyrant in penitence bending;
I shall die like an Englishman brave,
I have liv’d so, and so be my ending!

I must die—and my doom is my pride;
The death that awaits me is welcome;
The daemon's last pang is defied,
But a day of deep vengeance there shall come.

How shall my blood-shedders repent,
When the nation's hot wrath is out poured!
The freed world will hail the event,
And the pride of its despots be lowered.

They shall howl like the yell of the storm;
They shall flee like the deer-herd affrighted;
They shall, weeping, lie down with the worm:
They shall pray, and their prayers shall be slighted:

Whilst vengeance, and guilt, and dismay,
Their blood-scented footsteps pursuing,
Shall chase ev'ery comfort away,
And leave but affliction and ruin!

Their children shall then be like mine,
No father's fond arm to protect them;
Their ladies in sorrow may pine,
For none will be found to respect them.

What wealth would they freely give then,
For the sleep that I soon shall be sleeping!
To never feel sorrow again—
To know not its watching and weeping!

What wealth would they freely give then
For the grave that poor Brandreth will cover;
To hide from the hatred of men,
From the terrors which fearfully hover!

And what is the gem they would give
For that conscience this firm heart supporting;
That when they no longer could live,
They might die with a Brandreth's comporting!

But conscience can never be bought,
Courage can never be sold:
The villain will die as he ought;
The good man may always be bold!

  • 39 Although the date of writing remains unknown, the poem was already included in Bamford’s first edit (...)

God Help the Poor39 (Samuel Bamford)

God help the poor, who on this wintry morn
Come forth of alleys dim, and courts obscure!
God help yon poor pale girl, who droops forlorn,
And meekly her affliction doth endure!
God help the outcast lamb! she trembling stands,
All wan her lips, and frozen rod her hands;
Her mournful eyes are modestly down cast,
Her night-black hair streams on the fitful blast;
Her bosom, passing fair, is half reveal'd,
And, oh! so cold, the snow lies there congeal'd;
Her feet benumb'd, her shoes all rent and worn:
God help thee, outcast lamb, who stand'st forlorn!
God help the poor!

God help the poor! An infant's feeble wail
Comes from you narrow gate-way! and behold,
A female crouching there, so deathly pale,
Huddling her child, to screen it from the cold!
Her vesture scant, her bonnet crush'd and torn;
A thin shawl doth her baby dear enfold:
And there she bides the ruthless gale of morn,
Which almost to her heart hath sent its cold!
And now she sudden darts a ravening look,
As one with new hot bread comes past the nook;
And, as the tempting load is onward borne,
She weeps. God help thee, hapless one forlorn!
God help the poor!

God help the poor! Behold yon famish'd lad;
No shoes, nor hose, his wounded feet protect;
With limping gait, and looks so dreamy-sad,
He wanders onward, stopping to inspect
Each window stor'd with articles of food.
He yearns but to enjoy one cheering meal;
Oh! to his hungry palate, viands rude
Would yield a zest, the famish'd only feel!
He now devours a crust of mouldy bread;
With teeth and hands the precious boon is torn,
Unmindful of the storm which round his head
Impetuous sweeps. God help thee, child forlorn!
God help the poor!

God help the poor! Another have I found,
A bow'd and venerable man is he;
His slouched hat with faded crape is bound;
His coat is grey, and thread-bare too, I see,
'The rude winds' seem to 'mock his hoary hair;'
His shirtless bosom to the blast is bare.
Anon he turns, and casts a wistful eye,
And with scant napkin wipes the blinding spray;
And looks again, as if he fain would spy
Friends he hath feasted in his better day:
Ah! some are dead, and some have long forborne
To know the poor; and he is left forlorn!
God help the poor!

God help the poor, who in lone vallies dwell,
Or by far hills, where whin and heather grow!
Theirs is a story sad indeed to tell;
Yet little cares the world, nor seeks to know
The toil and want poor weavers undergo.
The irksome loom must have them up at morn;
They work till worn-out nature will have sleep;
They taste, but are not fed. Cold snow drifts deep
Around the fireless cot, and blocks the door;
The night-storm howls a dirge o'er moss and moor.
And shall they perish thus, oppress'd and lorn?
Shall toil and famine hopeless, still be borne?
No! GOD will yet arise and HELP THE POOR!

  • 40 Like “God Help the Poor,” “the Song of Slaughter” already featured in Bamford’s first edition of 18 (...)

The Song of Slaughter. Tune: Sicilian Mariner’s Hymn40 (Samuel Bamford)

PARENT of the wide creation,
We would counsel ask of Thee,
Look upon a mighty nation,
Rousing from its slavery.

If to men our wrongs are stated,
We are but faster bound,
All our actions reprobated,
No redress for us is found.

Thou hast made us to inherit
Strength of body, daring mind;
Shall we rise, and in thy spirit
Tear away the chains that bind?

Chains, but forgèd to degrade us,
Oh the base indignity!
In the name of Him who made us,
We will perish, or be free.

  • 41 Allen Davenport’s poems are to be found in Malcolm Chase’s edition of his writings. The Life and Li (...)
  • 42 Chase, Life and Literary Pursuits, 64.

POEMS BY ALLEN DAVENPORT41
The Devil Out-Devilled (1818)
42

It has long been asserted the old one, the DEVIL,
Is the father of vice, and the cause of all evil;
But I’ll make it appear to both wicked and sainted,
There are men still more black than the DEVIL is painted.

This devil, NAPOLEON, once haunted our shore,
He’s banished, and now we’re worse off than before;
For thousands of DEVILS sprang up in his stead,
From the tail of the Nation, right up to its head;

There are DEVILS in every rank of the state,
All ages, all sizes, both little and great; -
At COURT, - in the SENATE, - and if you will search,
Very many there are to be found in the CHURCH!

There are devil informers, each a devilish spy,
And some that sell boroughs and others that buy,
Some feed on large pensions they do not deserve,
While other poor devils are ready to starve! –

There are DEVILS trained up in all parts of the Nation,
Then sent up to town to perform legislation;
Where sessions are held in that great PANDEMONIUM,
Where every last action receives and “encomium”.

For SATAN himself never gained more applause,
Than the ruffian set who suspended our laws;
Though the world he betrayed, as in record we find,
’Twas left to these DEVILS to torture mankind;

Who INNOCENCE punish, then pass a decree,
To indemnify DEVILS, and let them go free,
Then rail not against SATAN, the champion of evil,
The base BOROUGH-MONGERS have out-done the DEVIL!

  • 43 Chase, Life and Literary Pursuits, 120. The poem was originally published in Feargus O’Connor’s Cha (...)

The Land, the People’s Farm 1846 (Allen Davenport)43

The God of nature at his birth,
Gave man his title to the earth;
Then let us show our title deed,
United and we shall succeed.
And prove, if need, with our right arm,
The land, the land’s the people’s farm.

All were supplied with daily bread,
Till proud usurpers raised their head;
Who trampled on the law Divine,
And substituted “Mine” and “Thine”,
Which through the world spread dire alarm
They robbed the people of their farm.

Unite! Unite! For God decrees,
Though Justice works by slow degrees;
That all the land shall be restored;
And God is faithful to his word;
The day and hour is now at hand,
To repossess the stolen land.

The savage has his freehold home,
And hunting park wherein to roam;
No laws of “trespass” there restrain,
The child of nature scorns the chain;
No “Game preserves” spread o’er the land,
All game is free to every hand.

Shall Christian governments destroy,
Those rights which savages enjoy;
And reign supreme o’er field and flood,
And traffic with the people’s blood!
Oh no! the millions now must make a stand,
And add to the Charter, their claim to the land.

  • 44 The document bears the following information on its title page: “Thomas Hazard, School Master, 54, (...)

Thomas Hazard, A True Picture of Society, as Displayed by Certain Rich Characters towards their Poor Neighbours. A Poem44
London, Printed for and Sold by the Author, 1819.

1.
Repent, ye tyrants, you have brought
Distress upon the poor,
And many men thro’ you have sought
Their bread from door to door.

2.
Alas! We labour but in vain,
Oppressors ov’er us boast,
For they have rais’d the price of grain,
To feed a cruel host.

3.
Like cannibals they drain our blood,
Our bread is tax’d, with tea,
And every evil they call good,
Lest mankind should be free.

4.
T’enjoy the blessings God bestows,
So bountiful for all,
Oppressors you, his love oppose,
And honest men inthral.

[…]

20.
You never labour, never toil,
But you can eat and drink,
You never cultivate the soil,
Nor of the poor man think.

21.
You say the poor was born to work,
For you, dukes, lords, and squires;
And you was only born to lurk,
And have your base desires.

22.
In coaches you do proudly ride,
And lord it over them,
That all your comforts, do provide,
Your fellow equal man.

23.
Behold the ploughman tills the field,
But muzzled must he be;
The best of fruits the Autumn yields
Is swallowed up by thee.

24.
The refuse only is for him
That ploughs, and sows, and reaps;
The basket holds, what left by him,
That (John,) the ploughman eats.

  • 45 “The following lines were written by Brunt upon the Secretary of State sending a letter in answer t (...)

John Thomas Brunt, two short poems written when in jail.
Written in the Tower of London
45

The Home Department’s
Secretaire,
His orders they would make you stare,
An hour a day allowed to walk,
But mind you neither wink nor talk!
For these are gifts of human reason,
And you are adepts in high treason.
No bigger rogues on earth there be on,
For so says Edwards the
espione
Let them eat and drink and sleep,
But knives and forks pray from them keep,
As they’ll commit assassination─
The rogues would overturn the nation
In modes of faith let graceless zealots fight,
He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right
Life’s but a jest and all things show it,
I thought so once but now I know it!

  • 46 “The following verses were written by Brunt, in Newgate, on the Sunday evening, after taking leave (...)

J. T. Brunt, written in Newgate, 30 April 182046

Tho’ in a cell I’m close confin’d
No fears alarm the noble mind,
Tho’ death itself appears in view,
Daunts not the soul sincerely true
Let Sidmouth and his base colleagues
Cajole and plot their dark intrigues,
Still each Briton’s last words shall be
Oh give me death or liberty.

  • 47 “Erin gobragh” was first used as a motto by the United Irishmen in the 1790s and has been a rallyin (...)

Two poems on the Queen Caroline Affair
Queen of the Isles (1820). Tune: Erin gobragh
47 (by Allen Davenport)

O haste, Caroline, haste, o’er the wide water,
And bless all thy people, once more with thy smile,
That people who wept o’er the Tomb of thy Daughter;
Await the return of the Queen of the Isles.
Ah? Why dost thou wander in grief and dejection,
And why art thou number’d among the exiles,
While Britons remain with unchanged affection,
For Brunswick’s fair Daughter the Queen of the Isles?

When thy ship to our shore, by a breeze shall be driven,
Our love shall protect thee from treachery’s toils,
For Britons have sworn that no power under heaven,
Shall tear from their hearts the lov’d Queen of the Isles.
Thy foes have long threaten’d thy Union to sever,
And to blast thy fair fame with their falsehood and wit,
But shall guilt over innocence triumph? No, never,
Our hearts are the Throne of the Queen of the Isles.

Our love is now fix’d upon thee, and no other,
The foul tongue of Slander, no longer beguiles;
We, who lov’d the daughter, will cherish the Mother,
The lawful, Legitimate Queen of the Isles.
Then Caroline, haste to thy high destination,
Thy purity o’er thy detracters prevails,
Accept from thy people the kind invitation;
Who long to proclaim thee, the Queen of the Isles.

  • 48 This poem too was already part of the first edition of Bamford’s verse in 1823. He wrote it while h (...)

The Queen’s Triumph, 1820. (By Samuel Bamford)48

Hail to the lady fair,
In innocence who came
And turned with scorn from the proferr’d snare,
The barter of her fame—
My boys!
The barter of her fame.

Where is now that threat,
So cowardly—so mean—
Wherewith this lady they beset—
Our persecuted Queen.

Hail! To our lady brave,
Whom I have sung before—
She may laugh at the fool and defy the knave,
Their power can harm no more.

And he may shed his tear
Who tears at will can shed,
Whilst the blood doth boil in his hollow heart,
Like the fiery lava, red.

And they who sit in lawn,
From human passion free,
They will turn and pray most fervently
“For Her Sacred Majesty.”

For they will wait with bell,
And there they wait with book—
“Keeping an eye on the corporal,”
To catch a word or a look.

The sinner may fall to hell,
The saint may ’scape to heaven,
But without a word from “the corporal”
Not a word of grace is given.

And he may doff his gown,
Who slandered for pay,
And he may either hang or drown,
For “the dog hath had his day.”

Then fill the sparkling glass,
I would if I were free*,
To every lad and every lass
That would bear me company,

And holding it on high,
I’d toast that heroine,
Who hath beaten her foes so gallantly—
Triumphant Caroline.

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Bibliography

BAMFORD, Samuel. Homely Rhymes, Poems, and Reminiscences. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1864.

BAMFORD, Samuel. Passages in the Life of a Radical, and Early Days, 2 vol. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1843.

WILKINSON, George Theodore. An Authentic History of the Cato-Street Conspiracy […]. London: Thomas Kelly, 17 Paternoster-Row, 1820.

SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe, The Mask of Anarchy, REIMAN, Donald, H. Sharon B. Powers. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Authoritative Texts, Criticism. London and New York: W. W. Norton Company, 1977, 301-300.

SOUTHEY, Robert, ed. Attempts in verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant; With some Account of the Writer, written by himself; And with an Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of our Uneducated Poets, by Robert Southey. London: J. Murray, 1831.

BELCHEM, John. Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave, 1996.

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

CHASE, Malcolm. The People’s Farm, English Agrarian Radicalism, 1775-1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Breviary Stuff, 2010 [1988].

CHASE, Malcolm, ed. The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport, with a Further Selection of the Author’s Works. Aldershots: Scolar Press, 1994.

DUTHILLE, Rémy. Le Discours radical en Grande-Bretagne, 1768-1789. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2017.

GARDNER, John. Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011.

JANOWITZ, Anne. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

McCALMAN, Iain. Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

MORGAN, Alison. Ballads and Songs of Peterloo. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.

TAYLOR, Antony. “Shakespeare and Radicalism: The Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Popular Politics.” The Historical Journal. 45:2 (2002): 357-379.

THOMPSON, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin Books, 1991 [1963].

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Notes

1 I am grateful to Rachel Rogers for suggesting to include the poems by Brunt and Hazard, and for providing me with biographical information on these two reformers. Rachel Rogers and Helen Goethals kindly proofread the first version of this article.

2 This note aims at looking at a small sample of poems to illustrate some of the perennial preoccupations of the radicals between the mass platform years and the Queen Caroline Affair. For a definitive account of radical song and poetry written in the aftermath of Peterloo, see Morgan, Alison, Ballads and Songs of Peterloo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

3 “Mask” is sometimes spelt “Masque”. The choice here was to adopt the same spelling as Anne Janowitz.

4 Southey, Robert, ed. Attempts in verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant; With some Account of the Writer, written by himself; And with an Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of our Uneducated Poets, by Robert Southey (London: J. Murray, 1831). Southey explains at length the reasons why he chose to accept John Jones’s humble request that he should read his poems, and why he accepted to launch a subscription to have them published. The list of subscribers can be found at the beginning of the book, and runs over nine full pages. John Jones, though, was by no means a radical poet, which partly accounts for Southey’s benevolence to him while similar requests were usually described by him as “the plague of [his] life” (6).

5 Southey, Attempts, 11-12.

6 Hazard’s arrest is mentioned in Malcolm Chase’s book 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 77, 139. The charge of conspiracy to commit high treason initially brought against him can be found at HO 44 /5/f497 (The National Archives, Kew).

7 Taylor, Antony, “Shakespeare and Radicalism: The Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Popular Politics,” The Historical Journal, 45, 2 (2002): 358.

8 Belchem, John, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1996), 20.

9 Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64.

10 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 1991 [1963]), 489.

11 Thompson, The Making, 733.

12 Chase, Malcolm, ed., The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport, with a Further Selection of the Author’s Works (Aldershots: Scolar Press, 1994), 18.

13 Chase, Life and Literary Pursuits, 53-4.

14 Bamford, Samuel, Homely Rhymes, Poems, and Reminiscences (London: Simpkin, Marshall & co., 1864). The reminiscences encompass the first sixteen pages of the volume and, even though the memories of Peterloo are still to be found, they reveal his anxiety to see old age set in and generous friends disappearing, which gradually left him resourceless.

15 Brunt wrote these lines “upon the Secretary of State sending a letter in answer to one written by the Major, that the alleged traitors were not to be allowed knives or forks; and only to be allowed to walk on the leads an hour a day.” See “Brief sketches of the executed conspirators, with copies of their letters etc,” An Authentic History of the Cato-Street Conspiracy […], George Theodore Wilkinson (London: Thomas Kelly, 17 Paternoster-Row), 414.

16 Morgan, Ballads, 65.

17 Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 238.

18 Thompson, Making, 726.

19 Thompson, Making, 727.

20 Thompson, Making, 727.

21 Bamford, Samuel, Passages in the Life of a Radical, and Early Days, 2 vol. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1843), vol. 2, 156.

22 The banner was selected by the BBC to be included in its History of the World in 100 Objects. The archive can be found on this webpage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/0YMOwNq0TouwZ9JHk5PXNw

23 Josiah Wedgwood coined the phrase around 1787 and it was engraved on the seal of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. It travelled overseas and was adopted by the French Société des Amis des Noirs shortly afterwards, also to campaign for abolition. “See Ryan Hanley’s article “The Shadow of Colonial Slavery at Peterloo” in the present volume, p. 73-101.

24 On the ancient constitution, liberty and radical rhetoric, see Rémy Duthille, Le Discours radical en Grande-Bretagne, 1768-1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2017).

25 Taylor, Shakespeare and Radicalism, 366.

26 McCalman, Iain, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 163.

27 Gardner, John, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 212.

28 McCalman, Radical Underworld, 146.

29 Quoted by, Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest, 170. The emphasis is Cobbett’s.

30 Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest, 213.

31 Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest, 199.

32 Chase, Malcolm, The People’s Farm, English Agrarian Radicalism, 1775-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Breviary Stuff, 2010 [New York: The Clarendon press, 1988]), 149.

33 Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, 27.

34 “La raison tonne en son cratère.”

35 The lyrics of “The Internationale” can be found in full on the following website: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/sounds/lyrics/international.htm. Alison Morgan traces the history of this invocation to “arise” and “awake” to 1557. Morgan, Ballads, 40.

36 Bamford’s poems are all to be found in the book he published towards the end of his long life, Homely Rhymes, Poems and Reminiscences (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1864).

37 As the date suggests, this poem was written in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) and the end of the Napoleonic wars. Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 47.

38 This poem was written by Bamford when he was himself serving his year long prison sentence in 1820. Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 94-95.

39 Although the date of writing remains unknown, the poem was already included in Bamford’s first edition of his texts in 1823, so it may be one of the many poems he wrote when serving his jail sentence in 1820. It was published in Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist newspaper The Northern Star on 25 Nov. 1843. Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 104-105.

40 Like “God Help the Poor,” “the Song of Slaughter” already featured in Bamford’s first edition of 1823. Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 67.

41 Allen Davenport’s poems are to be found in Malcolm Chase’s edition of his writings. The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport, with a further selection of the author’s work. (Hants: Scolar Press, 1994).

42 Chase, Life and Literary Pursuits, 64.

43 Chase, Life and Literary Pursuits, 120. The poem was originally published in Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist newspaper The Northern Star on 27 June 1846.

44 The document bears the following information on its title page: “Thomas Hazard, School Master, 54, Queen Street, Edgeware Road. A True Picture of Society, as Displayed by Certain Rich Characters towards their Poor Neighbours. A Poem.” Three Biblical quotes promise the demise of the said rich men, as a warning: “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for miseries that shall come upon you – James c.5 v.1.

Learn to do well; seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow – Isaiah, c.1 v.17. Ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? Saith the Lord God of hosts, – Isaiah, c.3 v.14 &15.”

45 “The following lines were written by Brunt upon the Secretary of State sending a letter in answer to one written by the Major, that the alleged traitors were not to be allowed knives or forks; and only to be allowed to walk on the leads an hour a day,” in Brief Sketches of Executed Conspirators, with Copies of their Letters etc. etc.” An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy […] (George Theodore Wilkinson, London: Thomas Kelly, 17 Paternoster Row), 414-415.

46 “The following verses were written by Brunt, in Newgate, on the Sunday evening, after taking leave of his wife, they were inclosed [sic] in an envelope, which was addressed to his wife, it contained also a shilling, the last money he possessed, and he requested his wife to keep the shilling for his sake as long as she lived”, in Brief Sketches of Executed Conspirators, with Copies of their Letters etc. etc. An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy […] (George Theodore Wilkinson, London: Thomas Kelly, 17 Paternoster Row), 414-415.

47 “Erin gobragh” was first used as a motto by the United Irishmen in the 1790s and has been a rallying cry of supporters of Irish independence ever since. The tune must have been composed in the same years. The poem can be found in Chase, Life and Literary Pursuits, 78.

48 This poem too was already part of the first edition of Bamford’s verse in 1823. He wrote it while he served his year long sentence in the prison of the Lincoln Castle, in 1820. Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 159-160. The * in the penultimate stanza is his, and the comment reads: “Text written when he was a prisoner in Lincoln Castle.”

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References

Bibliographical reference

Alexandra Sippel, Thoughts from a Historian on a Selection of Radical PoemsCaliban, 65-66 | 2021, 277-314.

Electronic reference

Alexandra Sippel, Thoughts from a Historian on a Selection of Radical PoemsCaliban [Online], 65-66 | 2021, Online since 20 October 2021, connection on 06 December 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/10460; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.10460

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About the author

Alexandra Sippel

Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès

By this author

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