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The Road to Peterloo

  • 1 For a full account of the massacre, see Poole, Robert, Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford: Oxfo (...)

1On 16 August 1819, a mass meeting for parliamentary reform at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, attended by men, women and children from local weaving villages such as Oldham, Middleton, Bury, Burnley, Stockport, Saddleworth and Royton, was brutally suppressed by the local yeomanry cavalry at the behest of town magistrates. The ‘Peterloo Massacre’, as it became known, was the hiatus of a period of tension which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars and which saw the resurgence of radical activism which had been stifled in the mid-1790s as Britain became embroiled in counter-revolutionary and later imperial war with France. The period after 1815, as the country readjusted to peace, was characterised by strain between those in authority–be it local magistrates and officials or the ministers of Lord Liverpool’s Tory government, many of whom were part of the landed aristocracy and exercised both economic and political power–and those from across the population at large who remained wholly excluded from the political process and thus without formal means to alleviate their economic distress.1

  • 2 See Belchem, John, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (New York: Oxford (...)
  • 3 This period of radical activity is given particular attention by Katrina Navickas in her book Prote (...)

2‘Mass platform’ meetings were held over the course of 1815-19 as part of a renewed campaign of action in favour of parliamentary reform which emerged in peacetime and which garnered support among working people suffering from the post-war economic downturn. As British people struggled to find work and feed their families, with the price of bread kept high through the application of punitive import duties on corn, calls for universal suffrage, representation for the growing industrial towns and an end to parliamentary corruption gained widespread currency among those who believed such reform would go some way to remedying the social and economic ills they laboured under. People gathered in outdoor spaces in towns across the North-West of England, in Scotland, London and the East Midlands to listen to local campaigners as well as speakers such as Henry Hunt, who gained a reputation as an inspiring orator and figurehead of the movement for parliamentary reform.2 Clubs and societies also proliferated, under the auspices of veteran reformer Major John Cartwright, and in March 1817 people from the north tried to march to London to present a petition for parliamentary reform only to be turned back before they reached their destination. Calls for an end to parliamentary corruption and a redistribution of political power were also disseminated in the radical press, in cheap prints such as Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf and William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register which became popular in the era.3

  • 4 The second lecture in a series entitled ‘Robert Wedderburn’s Insurrectionary British Atlantic,’ del (...)

3While some divergence did exist within radical circles as to the best way to achieve political redress, the majority of campaigners favoured a ‘constitutional’ strategy. There were however some figures within the movement who became convinced that more violent means of action were required to effectuate an overhaul of the prevailing system of government and end the social and economic distress of the poor. Some of these ‘ultras’ who gathered in the capital under the name of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists, after the death of land reformer Thomas Spence in 1814, became more and more virulent in their calls for radical change, and the means to bring this about, alerting spies in their midst to what appeared to be their subversive plans to challenge established authority.4 Riots occurred at a reform gathering in Spa Fields in London in late 1816 and an armed rising took place in June 1817 near Nottingham. The latter, known as the Pentrich rising, led to the execution or transportation of those considered the ringleaders, despite the fact that it was widely recognised that their actions were in large part incited by a ministerial spy who convinced the participants that a national insurrection would ensue.

  • 5 George Canning MP, House of Commons debate, 14 March 1817, Hansard vol. 35 cc. 1119.

4Lord Liverpool’s ministry reacted to the proliferation of radical initiatives and the threat to order they appeared to pose with repressive measures. Habeas corpus, the centuries-old right not to be imprisoned without trial, was suspended in early 1817 and the right to free assembly was restricted in the Seditious Meetings Act of the same year after the government argued that schemes were afoot across the country by subversive plotters intent on whipping up popular discontent. During the debate on the third reading of the draft Bill in the House of Commons on 14 March 1817, Tory minister George Canning warned his fellow MPs that “in the peculiar circumstances of the country, there is an unusual degree of inflammability in the public mind;—[…] there are incendiaries abroad who would avail themselves of this extraordinary inflammability to kindle the fires of rebellion in every corner of the kingdom.”5 Addressing the chamber during the same debate, Kirkman Finlay, a merchant and Tory MP for Glasgow, spoke out in favour of the proposed restrictions on liberty of assembly in the interests of stifling popular unrest. He stated that he

  • 6 Kirkman Finlay MP, House of Commons debate, 14 March 1817, Hansard vol. 35 cc. 1096. The Bill passe (...)

was deeply convinced of the necessity and propriety of the measures proposed by ministers, when he considered the great mischief which the meetings lately held in the country had produced. The country had a right to expect that ministers should take some effectual measures at a crisis so important as the present, and they had accordingly taken these measures. Unwilling as he or any British subject must be to relinquish any part of that glorious liberty which had been transmitted to us by our memorable ancestors, he still thought it was much better to give up for a time a share of that liberty, than run the danger of losing all. He would rather trust his majesty's ministers with the liberties of the people than he would trust those who were endeavouring to set the country in a flame.6

  • 7 Jason McElligott argues that two relatively well-known radical journalists, Thomas Wooler of the Bl (...)

5Nevertheless, despite heightened ministerial anxiety in the face of mass protest, the prevalence of ultra-radical, insurrectionary tendencies within the reform movement was relatively low. Although wider sympathy with more militant strategies may have spread after the repression of Peterloo, the vast majority of those who organised and attended mass gatherings sought meaningful change using peaceful methods.7 Most leaders were very careful to avoid association with those who contemplated more violent means, and sought to ensure that demonstrations and meetings were pacific occasions and met with the necessary stamp of legality.

  • 8 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin Books, 1991 [1963]) 752. Thompson (...)

6Spies in the pay of the Home Office, however, contributed to raising concern within local and national government about the likelihood of an armed uprising at such events and contributed to generating the degree of alarm which would ultimately lead to the violent repression of Peterloo. Reports of armed drilling and military practice on the moors outside Manchester in the run-up to the St. Peter’s Field meeting, of bludgeons, stones and pikes being carried on the day by protestors arranged in disciplined battalions, playing drums and holding aloft banners, reignited fear–prevalent since the French Revolution and galvanised by the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the ‘Luddite’ protests of the 1810s–of popular mass revolt. Such fear, mingled with “class hatred” (in E. P. Thompson’s words) and a conviction that the demonstrators were “in a posture of war […] armed and arrayed in a warlike manner,” induced the authorities to take measures to prepare for, carry out and subsequently justify armed repression of the people gathered at the Manchester meeting.8

Massacre at St. Peter’s Field

  • 9 Samuel Bamford lists some of the slogans in his account of the day’s events, first published in 184 (...)
  • 10 Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, 146. Bamford, who led the procession from Middleton, de (...)

7Monday 16 August 1819 was a sunny day in Lancashire. People in the surrounding weaving villages had been preparing for a long time for the procession–initially planned for the previous week–into town on their customary day-off. It was to be a family outing as well as a chance to gather in numbers to listen to those speakers who were spearheading the cause of radical political reform and lend support to those claims. Women, some of whom had founded their own female reform societies in early summer, had embroidered flags and banners with evocative slogans such as ‘Unity and Strength’ and ‘Liberty and Fraternity’ which expressed their desire for change, and their determination to militate for it.9 Marchers arrived early on the morning of the demonstration, dressed and ready for the walk into town. Men came in caps, some of which were stitched with words such as ‘libertas’, and women, dressed in white, carried sprigs of laurel. Local reform leaders made sure that those who joined the procession were aware of the importance of defying the expectations of their detractors, who saw them as “a mob-like rabble”, by exuding “a steadiness and seriousness befitting the occasion.”10 They were also advised not to put up a struggle if they were faced with officers of the peace.

  • 11 The names of those in attendance at St. Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819 are available for viewing o (...)

8Although the exact numbers are not known, historians suggest that around 60,000 people, if not more, went to the rally at St. Peter’s Field that day. Women’s reform clubs had a prominent place in the proceedings, and some were gathered close to the hustings where the speakers were due to address the crowd. Yet the brimming anxiety of the local magistrates, gathered together in a building overlooking the field, and their determination to stifle the growing mass movement, led to the decision to hastily read the Riot Act from an upstairs window before sending armed cavalry and constables through the crowd to arrest those giving or due to give speeches. It is now estimated, thanks to the efforts of scholars scouring the relief books and claims for compensation filed after the brutal clearing of the field, that between fifteen and nineteen people lost their lives at or after Peterloo, and between 600 and 700 were injured, many horrifically.11

  • 12 Carlisle Archive Centre D/LONS/L/2/67. Unreferenced newspaper clipping featuring a letter to the Ea (...)
  • 13 See The trial of Henry Hunt, John Knight, Joseph Johnson, John Thacker Saxton, Samuel Bamford, Jose (...)
  • 14 Samuel Bamford notes the reason for their conviction as “assembling with unlawful banners, an unlaw (...)

9Despite public outcry and press criticism of the way in which the protestors were dispersed, the military repression was largely vindicated in the courts and in ministerial communication in the immediate aftermath of what very quickly became known as ‘Peterloo’. The Prince Regent, future King George IV, congratulated the Manchester magistrates for “their prompt, decisive, and efficient measures for the preservation of the public tranquillity,” backed by the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth.12 A repressive set of laws–the Six Acts–was introduced in December 1819 to further restrict the right to public assembly and military drilling in the wake of the events at Manchester and the main organisers of the meeting were charged with “conspiracy, to alter the law by force and threats; and for convening and attending an illegal, riotous, and tumultuous meeting at Manchester, on Monday the 16th of August, 1819” and were brought to trial at York in March 1820.13 Five of the defendants, Henry Hunt, Samuel Bamford, Joseph Healey, John Knight and Joseph Johnson, were sentenced to between one and two years in prison for their involvement in the meeting.14

Commemorating Peterloo in Britain and France

  • 15 Fabrice Bensimon and Katrina Navickas both engage with the debate over the Peterloo memorial campai (...)
  • 16 An interview conducted by Alexandra Sippel with Boff Whalley, a member of the Commoner’s Choir whos (...)
  • 17 Polyp, Eva Schlunke, Robert Poole, Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre (Oxford: New Internationalist, (...)

10The Peterloo massacre has received renewed attention in the context of the bicentenary commemorations in 2019. A memorial was fought for by the Peterloo Memorial Campaign, and eventually commissioned by Manchester City Council from the artist Jeremy Deller.15 A number of public and academic events were held both in Manchester and across Britain to contribute to bringing the repression of 16 August 1819 to light and informing a wider cross-section of society about what happened on that day. The ballads of the post-1815 era and of Peterloo were sung, and new songs were composed, inspired by the legacy of the struggle than the men and women of Lancashire engaged in, and ultimately suffered for.16 A graphic novel was created, the result of a partnership between cartoonist Polyp, script writer Eva Schlunke and historian Robert Poole, and film director and native of Manchester, Mike Leigh, made a feature-length film about the events which was released in 2018.17 These commemorative actions often intersected with the ongoing work of historians and specialists of this era to excavate the history of popular radicalism and reactions to it and bring new aspects to the fore.

  • 18 “Peterloo, l’histoire d’un espoir, le mémoire d’un massacre dans l’Angleterre de 1819” (6 March 202 (...)
  • 19 A showing of Mike Leigh’s film was put on at the Sorbonne in Paris on 29 January 2020, an event sup (...)

11In France, scholars working on this period of British history have also sought to draw attention to the Peterloo massacre in classes, seminars, media coverage and academic publications. The groundwork for this particular volume was done at two conferences organised at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès in 2020 and 2021 which most of the contributors attended or presented papers at.18 The first of these events, held on 6 March 2020, formed part of a set of actions and publications during the Peterloo bicentenary year which sought to raise awareness of this relatively overlooked episode of British history among a French-speaking audience.19 The conference included a showing of Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo (2018), as well as papers by Fabrice Bensimon, Helen Goethals and Alexandra Sippel. The second conference was held online on 5 March 2021, during the Covid pandemic, and provided the opportunity to engage in discussion with invited speakers surrounding the aftermath of Peterloo and the exact nature and extent of the ‘crisis’ in Britain, Ireland and the wider European and colonial world, in the year following the massacre. We were honoured to be able to welcome to Toulouse, at least virtually, Professor Robert Poole, author of Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford University Press, 2019), who provided insight into the plans afoot for uprisings in the north of England and in Scotland in the murky months which followed the massacre in Manchester, a period hitherto neglected in accounts of the period. His article in this volume, drawing upon meticulous detective work in the Home Office archives, develops the issues presented in that paper, and provides a rich and detailed account of the possibilities of a coordinated uprising in the outlying provinces, far from the capital, in the months after the events.

  • 20 Malcolm Chase, ““The Real Rights of Man”: Thomas Spence, Paine and Chartism,” Miranda [Online], 13  (...)
  • 21 Bensimon, Fabrice, Rohan McWilliam, “Malcolm Chase (1957–2020),” History Workshop Journal 92 (Autum (...)

12The 2021 conference was framed as a homage to professor of social history at the University of Leeds, Malcolm Chase, whose death in late February 2020 cast a shadow over the first conference, and whose work on 1820 profoundly influenced the second. We were deeply moved by the presence of Malcolm Chase’s family at our online conference in March 2021. Malcolm had generously accepted our invitation to speak at a symposium organised in Toulouse in 2014 to mark the bicentenary of the death of radical land reformer Thomas Spence, who had featured prominently in his book The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840, first published in 1988.20 Those of us present at that conference, like those who knew him and worked with him closely, were able to grasp at first hand the special place he occupied in scholarship of the nineteenth century and his particular talents as a historian. We got a sense of his generosity, his warmth and his knowledge as well as his deft skill at bringing little-known lives into view and providing deep insight into how working families experienced the times they lived through in periods of often rapid and dislocating change. His craft was also in the detail. The past is given texture in Malcolm Chase’s work through his ability to pair incisive political and economic insight with history on a human scale. These are qualities that have been widely acknowledged, and that transcended borders, as this volume is testimony to. Fabrice Bensimon, who gave a tribute to Malcolm Chase at the first conference in March 2020, along with his co-author Rohan McWilliam, kindly agreed for the obituary of Malcolm Chase, that they wrote and published in the Autumn 2021 issue of History Workshop Journal, to be translated into French by Amélie Josselin-Leray and included here in this collection.21 We hope that French-speaking readers will, through this particular piece, and through the collection of articles as a whole, many of which engage closely with Malcolm Chase’s work, be able to gain an understanding of his contribution to the political and social history of Britain in the nineteenth century.

Malcolm Chase, 1820 Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom

  • 22 Chase, Malcolm, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester Universi (...)

13In 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom, Malcolm Chase opens with the contention that “Peterloo has long defined the years following 1815. As much as the 1832 Reform Act, it was the milestone to which radicals (working and middle class alike) would later refer in asserting the moral bankruptcy of aristocratic government.”22 Yet the author goes on to suggest that it was during the year which followed the massacre in Manchester–one characterised by a deep economic recession–that the greatest challenges were faced by the ruling Tory government. Those challenges, in his view, came not from the official parliamentary opposition, the Whigs, but from outside Parliament, across the four nations of Britain and Ireland. Chase relates the year 1820 through the eyes of those who lived through it, from its bitterly cold opening weeks, through the death of George III in January, the unravelling of the plot to assassinate Lord Liverpool’s cabinet in February that year, the trials of the St. Peter’s Field organisers in York in March, and the groundswell of resistance in the West of Ireland, in Clydeside in Scotland and in the West Riding of Yorkshire in April, through to its close, characterised by widespread support for the king’s estranged wife, Queen Caroline, who had returned to Britain in June to a carnavalesque reception and managed to unite different strands of opposition to the new king George IV’s Tory ministry.

  • 23 Chase, 1820, 71.

14Events and people’s preoccupations are recounted as the year unfolds, to the cadence of the seasons, following the calendar year in chapters entitled “winter’s end,” “Easter risings,” “late spring and early summer” and “autumn,” reaching the conclusion with “November’s illuminations seen by winter’s cold light.” It is a captivating and intimate portrait of how people–from weavers to ministers–lived and saw their world throughout 1820, in which the author knits together affairs of state, ministerial anxiety and the prevailing climate of discontent across Ireland and Britain with the intricate details of people’s private lives–conveyed through diary entries, letters, secret memos and carefully chosen extracts from vast archival deposits. Against the backdrop of economic dislocation, we learn about William and Mary Varley, handloom weavers working just outside Manchester in the hamlet of Higham, what they ate, how they heated their home, what worried them, and what they thought of the times they lived through. The death of George III on 29 January 1820 is seen from the small parish of Guisborough in Yorkshire where bell ringers were rewarded with ale for the peel of the local church bells. The accession of the heir to the throne, the unpopular George IV, is viewed through the graffiti which adorned Chester’s city walls: “No George the 4th;” “No Damned Royal Crown,” “No Damned King,” “A short Reign and a bloady [sic] one: Behead him.”23 The execution of the Cato Street conspirators outside Newgate prison on 1 May 1820 is not quite glimpsed through the eyes of the curious but nauseous Cecil Fane, his bravado snuffed out with the sight of Arthur Thistlewood, William Davidson and three others on the scaffold.

  • 24 Chase, 1820, 204.

15The manner in which those successive challenges were dealt with and overcome, how “stability” was maintained despite the threats to social order that were faced in 1820, as much as the particular challenges themselves, are the focus of Malcolm Chase’s book. The “cement” (in Chase’s words) that “held Britain together” was a blend of popular piety, social deference and effective and powerful local government. It was aided by the propensity of Liverpool’s administration to downplay the extent of unrest in order to minimise its threat and by the relative ineffectiveness of the Whig opposition. Discontent in the countryside was relatively low in 1820 and Wales remained largely immune from disturbance. Ireland was a very different case, however, and Malcolm Chase points to how governments in the early decades of the century saw Ireland–racked by rural unrest in 1820-21–as requiring quasi-colonial governance. For the author, the year 1820 saw the ultimate consolidation of aristocratic government, but also the beginnings of longer-term shifts which help to explain the later success of the Reform campaign in 1832 and the decline of aristocratic Toryism over the 1820s. Prominent new ‘liberal’ Tory ministers such as Robert Peel and William Huskisson, increasingly of the belief that the high Anglican and protectionist values of their party had run their course, took up positions of ministerial office. And 1820 heralded a new era dominated by emergent values of political economy, a “quiet constitutional revolution” which allowed members of the middling classes to enter local parish government for the first time, and signalled a gradual shift away from a period of intense working-class radical activity, influenced by the ideas and popular dynamic of the French Revolution and coloured by the experience of and fallout from the Napoleonic Wars.24

  • 25 Chase, 1820, 2. See also Chase, Malcolm, “Cato Street in International Perspective,” McElligott, Co (...)
  • 26 Articles written by Emmanuelle de Champs and Emmanuelle Perez Tisserant in this volume attest to th (...)

16Finally, in Malcolm Chase’s view, a view reiterated in a book chapter published in 2020, “even the four kingdoms cannot be conceived in isolation for 1820 was a year of European revolution.”25 The assassination of an heir to the French throne on 13 February and regime collapse in Spain, the kingdom of Naples and Portugal in March, July and August respectively made headlines and galvanised a spirit of revolt which transcended national borders.26

1820 and After: Taming Popular Protest through Political Economy

171820 was a watershed year in some respects then, as Malcolm Chase argued. While signifying the “high-water mark” (Gordon Pentland’s term in this volume) of conspiracies, and conspiracy anxiety, it also inaugurated an era of relative political stability and a turn towards the new science of political economy as a means to justify unimpeded industrial expansion and ensure that collective working-class grievances could be channelled more effectively into individual, moral efforts.

18As the economic downturn eased after 1820, working-class discontent abated somewhat. Also, the authorities, national and otherwise, came to realise that crushing popular demonstrations and uprisings by force contributed to giving the victims an aura of martyrdom. In 1817, Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac Ludlam and William Turner became known as the ‘Pentrich martyrs’ after they were tried and executed for their role in the uprising they led that year at the instigation of ‘Oliver the Spy’. The same phenomenon obviously applies to the Manchester demonstration known as the Peterloo ‘massacre’. Besides, like their Jacobin forebears and the Chartists after them, radical and ultra-radical leaders continued to promote self-education and to ask for books to read in their prison cells. They also wrote a lot, which helped to educate others and disseminate their political views, another source of anxiety for those in authority. For the ruling class, countering this growing wave of popular education became crucial and some like James Mill began contemplating the promotion of political economy as an efficient and necessary strategy. Together with the likes of David Ricardo, Thomas R. Malthus and John Ramsay McCulloch, he founded the influential Political Economy Club in 1821, whose statutes specified that their mission was to educate the wider public in the laws of free-market economics.

19Five years later, the Whig Henry Brougham created the ‘Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’ in order to provide affordable access to learning to those who were unable or unwilling to go into formal education. The members of the Political Economy Club soon realised that this Society could be a vector for the promotion of their science to the working classes, and Jane Marcet (1769-1858), a Swiss-born educationalist, began publishing chapters of her economics handbook in the Society’s pages. Marcet’s brother was a top official on the Board of the Bank of England and she was herself a close friend of Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and James Mill. She could therefore be trusted with summing up the main principles of political economy, namely free markets, competition, and how demographics impacted wages, and to break them down into sizeable portions for the literate working class of artisans, the exact same class that could be tempted to join radical movements for civil rights or improved working and living conditions. Teaching them the basics of political economy appeared more and more essential in order to nip protest in the bud and as an alternative to outright repression. Marcet had already published a volume of Conversations on Political Economy in 1816, the year of the Spa Fields meetings and at the beginning of the ‘mass platform’ campaign, in order to encourage better-off women to give rational, rather than sentimental, education to their sons. At that stage, Marcet’s mouthpiece, Mrs. B., considered that the labouring poor of Britain could not be taught economics as such, but principles compatible with the tenets of her science:

  • 27 Marcet, Jane, Conversations on Political Economy, in which the Elements of that Science are familia (...)

Caroline. Surely you would not teach political economy to the labouring classes, Mrs. B.?
Mrs. B. No; but I would endeavour to give the rising generation such an education as would render them not only moral and religious, but industrious, frugal, and provident. In proportion as the mind is informed, we are able to calculate the consequences of our actions: it is the infant and the savage who live only for the present moment; those whom instruction has taught to think, reflect upon the past and look forward to the future. Education gives rise to prudence, not only by enlarging our understandings, but by softening our feelings, by humanising the heart, and promoting amiable affections. The rude and inconsiderate peasant marries without either foreseeing or caring for the miseries he may entail on his wife and children; but he who has been taught to value the comforts and decencies of life, will not heedlessly involve himself and all that is dear to him in poverty, and its long train of miseries.”
27

20Protesting workers, much like “infants and savages,” were deemed unable to understand the underlying laws of nature that were at play and determined the wages they received and the price of goods they bought. Protest, whether in the guise of demonstrations, petitions or machine breaking, was an instinctive, immediate response that was utterly ineffectual as their living and working conditions would not improve until they had understood the tenets of (Malthusian) political economy and limited the size of their families. Some fifteen years later, in 1833, the year after the Reform Acts were passed, Marcet’s eponymous hero John Hopkins, fully embraces those values and abandons his radical aspirations for a fairer distribution of wealth and resources in Britain as he is convinced by the lessons he receives from his landlords and relatives regarding political economy. These are the type of texts that were published in the pages of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge’s publications from its foundation in 1826. The very short “advertisement” in the opening pages indicates that

  • 28 Marcet, Jane, John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), Advert (...)

the miscellaneous character of the following tracts is accounted for by their having been written at different periods. Some of them were published, with the author’s permission, about two years ago, by a society established in Glamorganshire for the improvement of the laboring classes. It will be obvious to the reader, that it is for that rank of life that this little work is principally intended.28

21James Ramsay McCulloch also published a collection of his lessons on political economy in 1824 and highlighted the need to educate the labouring masses in that new science. The lack of such knowledge, he asserted, rendered them “illiberal.” In the opening pages of his Discourse […], he writes:

  • 29 McCulloch, James Ramsay, A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Pol (...)

there is no class of persons to whom this knowledge can be considered as either extrinsic or superfluous. There are some, doubtless, to whom it may be of more advantage to others; but it is of the utmost consequence to all. […] Where wealth has not been amassed, the mind being constantly occupied in providing for the immediate wants of the body, no time is left for its culture; and the views, sentiments, and feelings of the people, become alike contracted, selfish, and illiberal.29

22Although he and Malthus had fallen out, McCulloch adopts a purely Malthusian stance on the issue of wages, and one that suggests that only workers better aware of the principles of political economy could improve their fate:

  • 30 McCulloch, A Discourse, 60.

Unfortunately, the labourers have very little power on the increase or diminution of the national capital, but they are all-powerful in respect to the increase or diminution of the supply of labour. And if they had only good sense and intelligence sufficient to avail themselves of this power, they might, by understocking the market with labour, render their wages high, notwithstanding the demand for their services should happen to be diminished; while, if they do not avail themselves of this power, but allow the principle of population to exert its natural tendency to overstock the market with labour, wages will be low, to whatever extent the demand for labour may be increased. It appears, therefore, that the lower classes are in a very great degree the arbiters of their own fortunes.30

  • 31 For a collection of excerpts of historical documents about the Peasants’ Revolt from the Middle Age (...)

23Jane Marcet was also a Malthusian educationalist and sought to demonstrate in her two major handbooks that unrest was pointless as only moral restraint would bring down the number of children in the labouring classes, and would therefore, ultimately lead to increased wages. In Conversations on Political Economy, as in John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy, she even used a fourteenth-century revolt of the lower orders to demonstrate that intervention, whether on the part of the government or on that of the people, could not be effective in driving prices down or wages up.31 What Robert Poole writes about political demands was also true of economic ones:

  • 32 Poole, Robert, “French Revolution or Peasants’ Revolt? Petitioners and Rebels in England from the B (...)

In late Hanoverian Britain, there was no model of peaceful, incremental political change. Neither the reformers, nor the authorities could know that the events of 1817 would be followed by incremental extensions of the franchise in 1832, 1867, 1884-5, 1918 and 1928. The available models were all of sudden change. Public meetings were reminded of Magna Carta in 1215, the peasants’ revolt of 1381, the great rebellion of 1642, the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, and the storming of the Bastille in 1789. […] Tumultuously exercised in the rebellions of 1381, 1450, and 1549, collective petitioning had established itself as an important form of political activity whose legitimacy could not be denied however much it worried government.32

24In much the same way, working-class radicals could not foresee the incremental changes that would be made to labour law over the following decades, starting with the 1833 Factory Act that Robert Owen had eventually succeeded in having adopted by Parliament. After child labour in the textile sector, other Acts of Parliament were passed in order to limit working hours for women and children, to ban their work underground in mines, and later on to allow the creation of trade unions, all of which eventually led to more bearable working conditions for the lower classes. Prior to all these, however, the diffusion of political economy was hoped to quench revolutionary—or merely radical—aspirations.

25R. B. Dobson wrote about the influence of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 on radicals at the turn of the nineteenth century:

  • 33 Dobson, R. B., The Peasants’ Revolt, 355.

Only after the outbreak of the French Revolution did Wat Tyler and John Ball begin to enjoy their posthumous careers as spokesmen for the eternal poor and apostles of popular liberty. The fact that they figured in the famous debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine was in itself enough to ensure the rebels of 1381 would be enlisted to serve as founding-fathers of the “good old cause” and the new English radical movement. A sense of fellow-feeling with the medieval English commons led to the brief appearance of such phenomena as Chartist ‘Wat Tyler Brigades.’ But the legacy of the Peasants’ Revolt to the nineteenth century working class was rarely relevant and often ambiguous.33

  • 34 Macpherson, David, Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries, and Navigation, with Brief Notices (...)

26Debunking radical interpretations and uses of the Revolt was essential. It is therefore interesting to dwell a moment on Jane Marcet’s apparent condoning of the Revolt, only to better conclude that working-class revolts were ill-advised in the early nineteenth century. She bases her accounts of the fourteenth-century events on the economic history of Britain produced by David Macpherson in Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries and Navigation, with Brief Notices of the Arts and Sciences Connected with them in four volumes that was published in 1805.34 In both her economics handbooks, she tells the same story, mediated by different characters. In Conversations, Mrs. B., the tutor, explains how misguided Edward III’s (1327-1377) economic decisions were in the decades that followed the plague epidemic of 1349, starting with the 1351 Statute of Labourers, and culminating in the capitation tax imposed in 1381 under his successor Richard II. The increase in capitation tax further increased prices in an artificial manner, and the attempt at keeping wages low against such a backdrop could not but cause a popular rising:

  • 35 A devaluation of the coinage.
  • 36 Marcet, Conversations, 355.

Eventually wages [did rise], no doubt; but after such a revolution in prices as an event of this nature35 produces, a length of time is required to restore the due level; and the rich always resist the rise of wages as long as it is in their power. In the instance I have mentioned, it does not appear that the labouring class made any effort to obtain a compensation by a rise of wages, until a dreadful pestilence, which originated in the east, extended its ravages to England, and carried off the greater part of the lower classes. The survivors then took advantage of the scarcity of hands to raise their terms; but the king, instead of allowing the remedy to pursue its natural course, considered this attempt of the labourers to raise their wages as an unwarrantable exaction; and in order to prevent it, enacted the Statute of Labourers. This statute ordained that Labourers should receive no more than the wages which were paid before the adulteration of the coin. It would be difficult to conceive a law more calculated to repress the efforts of industry.36

  • 37 Marcet, Jane, John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), 72.

27In John Hopkins’s Notions, the main character and his wife discuss the conditions that would make an increase in wages possible, and the latter reflects: “I can’t think the rich would ever allow us to fix our own prices. […] They would make a law to forbid the raising of wages perhaps!”37 (Mrs. Hopkins usually is the character who stands for the typical common sense of the working class and is unable to grapple with political economy while her husband is shown to gradually learn the lessons he receives in the successive tales.) He retorts:

  • 38 Marcet, John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy, 72-74.

[i]t reminds me, that when I went to pay the last quarter’s schooling, I found the master musing over an old book, and he bade me to stop to hear what it said; for it was a curious thing, and concerned the labouring people; and moreover that it was true. Well, as far as I can recollect, he read that once upon a time there was a mortal disease that fell upon the people of England, called the plague, and that as many as half of them died of it. […] The book went on to say, that those who survived took advantage of their numbers being reduced, to ask higher wages. […] The book went on to say, that when the King who reigned in those times heard that his subjects would not work without higher wages, he fell into a rage and made a law such as you were thinking of, wife, to forbid, under severe pains and penalties, that the poor should take higher wages than they had before the plague. […] But it would not do; and after a hard struggle, the king was obliged to give in, and the people got the wages they asked.38

28The excerpt is more technical in Conversations than in John Hopkins’s Notions because the latter was intended for a working-class readership and thus even more simplified than the former that was addressed to well-educated bourgeois and upper-class women. Nevertheless Jane Marcet conflates several protest movements of the second half of the fourteenth century with a view to demonstrating that the king’s meddling with prices and wages caused a justified rebellion among his subjects, and that, had nature followed its course, wages would have risen for a little while as long as the workforce was scarce, and then come down again once the comfort brought by these higher wages induced the labourers to have larger families. At that point, with more available labour, employers would have been justified in lowering the cost of labour again and wages would have fallen back to their pre-plague levels.

  • 39 In this respect, Marcet appears to follow Macpherson’s interpretation of the rebellion as a legitim (...)

29Sentimental ladies and working-class readers alike were invited to conclude by themselves that the royal intervention to bring wages down was misguided, which might seem to make Marcet an ally of labourers.39 Her aim was quite the converse: by showing that even a king could err in trying to prevent wages from increasing, she demonstrated that workers were as heedless as him when they demanded wage increases or shorter working hours in an age when the labouring population was too abundant. Until the workers brought their numbers down, as McCulloch and others had also suggested, no demonstration and no machine breaking would contribute to improve their living conditions in the slightest way. Harriet Martineau, another female populariser of political economy who gained fame in the 1830s as her Illustrations of Political Economy were published in the papers of Lord Brougham’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, advanced the same argument in her pamphlet on A Manchester Strike. The tale concluded with a summary of the main “lessons”, among which were the following:

  • 40 Martineau, Harriet, A Manchester Strike: A Tale (London: Charles Fox, 1832), 135. Essential reading (...)

Combinations of labourers against capitalists cannot secure a permanent rise of wages unless the supply of labour falls short of the demand; in which case, strikes are usually unnecessary.
Nothing can permanently affect the rate of wages which does not affect the proportion of population to capital.
Legislative interference does not affect this proportion, and is therefore useless.
40

  • 41 Bamford, Samuel, La Vie d’un radical anglais au temps de Peterloo, Fabrice Bensimon éd. (Paris : Éd (...)

30Although radicals, such as the Ricardian Socialists, did fight back by producing their own economic ideas, and sometimes by appropriating political economy to turn it on its head and in their favour, the dissemination of theories of political economy did succeed in silencing the movement. Decency and respectability were central values and Samuel Bamford, for one, insisted that nobler quests like the suffrage and parliamentary reform were more urgent than economic claims on wages or working hours. Fabrice Bensimon41 rightly insists that the ageing reformer was keen on showing himself as much less of a radical in Passages in the Life of a Radical than he had actually been in the late 1810s. Nevertheless, Bamford’s autobiographies still convey the sense that he was eager to show that he had been faithful to his struggle for parliamentary reform all along:

  • 42 Bamford, Samuel, Passages in the Life of a Radical, and Early Days, Vol. 2, (London: T. Fisher Unwi (...)

Concentrating our whole energy for the obtainment of annual parliaments and universal suffrage, we neither interfered with the House of Lords, nor the Corn Laws, nor the payment of Members, nor tithes, nor Church rates, nor a score of other matters which in these days have been pressed forward with the effect of distracting the attention and weakening the exertions of reformers; any or all of which matters would be far more likely to succeed with a House elected on the suffrage we claimed, then with one returned as at present. Quoting Scripture, we did, in fact, say, first obtain annual parliaments and universal suffrage, and, “all these things shall be added unto you.”42

31The same moderation was quite visible again some twenty years later when he deplored the hostility of the Chartists towards him. As he attended one of their meetings in order to report for a Manchester newspaper, Richard Oastler refused to go on with his speech until Bamford had left the room. This disciple of Feargus O’Connor considered Bamford a traitor, even though the latter still considered himself loyal to his early commitments. In his Reminiscences, published in 1862, some ten years before he died, Bamford wrote, speaking about himself in the third person:

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

In 1839 he was a leader of special constables, and took means for rendering the party which he directed as efficient as possible. This again was a cause of enmity on the part of the Chartists, who with their weak but mischievously minded leaders, were carried away by ideas of a national holiday and a “sacred month”–matters entirely at variance with the more sober aspirations of the old radical Reformers.43

  • 44 Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 15.
  • 45 Noel W. Thompson’s The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1 (...)

32In the same text, Bamford paid a special tribute to Lord Brougham, “the greatest man we have”, who had “led popular education from the dark and narrow crib where he found it. […] He cut the strays from its jaws and sent it forth, strong, beautiful and free.”44 Although Cobbett and many others45 produced a vast literature to debunk the claims of political economy to the title of only scientific approach to the distribution of capital and labour, Bamford’s testimonies suggest that some radicals at least could be convinced by popular education and led to oppose direct action in order to achieve respectability and parliamentary representation. Political economists continued to produce easily comprehensible handbooks in order to convince labourers that Whig governmental decisions were made in the name of the law of nature. The most instrumental figure in the 1830s, especially in run up to the adoption of the Poor Law Amendment Act, was Harriet Martineau who published tales entitled Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated between 1832 and 1834. The New Poor Law was nevertheless immensely unpopular and infamous among the labouring classes, and its repeal instantly became a central claim in contemporary working-class movements, on a par with the ten-hour work day and the right to unionise.

Articles in this collection

33This volume seeks to make a contribution to the discussion animating scholars of British radicalism in the industrial era over the extent to which the massacre at St. Peter’s Field and the events of the subsequent year, can be considered a watershed moment in the history of domestic working-class protest. It also aims to investigate whether broader echoes and connections can be detected, sometimes beyond the boundaries of the British state, with the anti-slavery movement, with protest by the enslaved themselves in the Caribbean, with the revolutionary dynamic in Europe and the Americas in 1820 and 1821 and with prevailing cultural, economic, literary and intellectual trends. Taking the repression meted out to peaceful demonstrators on 16 August 1819 as a starting point, the authors explore a range of issues which shed light on the Manchester massacre and its aftermath, placing it within a broader framework. The articles also engage to differing degrees with themes developed by Malcolm Chase in his work on the period, sometimes to respond to arguments that he made, sometimes taking observations and themes of his research and pursuing them, providing fresh insights and frameworks of analysis.

34Part One revisits the events of Peterloo, reassessing their significance through the lenses of memory and slavery. In his contribution, Fabrice Bensimon focuses on Samuel Bamford’s account of the massacre at St. Peter’s Field in a memoir entitled Passages in the Life of a Radical, first published in 1844. He argues that while Bamford’s autobiographical text is often seen as the definitive account of Peterloo, it was written by a man who had adopted a more conservative stance during the Chartist era when Passages was first published and who sought recognition as a writer and poet. The author pairs the issue of the problematic nature of the memoir with an assessment of how the events of Peterloo have been remembered, reappropriated and rewritten in subsequent periods since the massacre and right up until the present day.

35In his article, Ryan Hanley considers the prevalence and complexity of the notion of ‘slavery’ within early nineteenth-century radical culture. Increasingly used by reformers as a term to decry the harsh conditions that British industrial workers laboured under, it remained nevertheless inextricable from wider issues of African enslavement, colonialism and empire. Allusions to slavery at Peterloo, whether on the banner of the female reformers of Royton, in the songs sung on the day or in the visual culture of the contemporary radical press, reflected a range of often ambivalent and multi-layered meanings. The spectre of resistance, expressed in the language of anti-slavery, also heightened the sense of alarm within a ruling class already fearful of mass popular revolt. Ryan Hanley sees the question of colonial slavery as lurking in the ‘shadows’ of Peterloo, while Fabrice Bensimon investigates the shadow cast by Peterloo over subsequent British radical history.

36In Part Two, the aftermath of Peterloo is viewed from the perspective of outdoors politics and political poetry of the open air in the closing months of 1819. First Robert Poole investigates the radical culture in the provinces and in the capital forged in the wake of the massacre between August and December 1819, a period traditionally neglected in historical accounts of the event. The article considers the links between the massacre and the risings of 1820 and debates the likelihood of a successful coordinated rising across the country in the latter stages of 1819, using a wealth of archival deposits. The author suggests that the Cato Street conspiracy of February 1820 happened, not because a general rising was considered imminent but because the last hopes of such a coordinated rising had been dashed by January 1820.

37Drawing upon Robert Poole’s work on the open air and celebratory nature of political radicalism in the era of Peterloo, Helen Goethals considers the “festive qualities” of Keats’s last completed poem, “To Autumn,” written just after the massacre in Manchester. The author sees the poem as a celebration of the plenitude that comes after sufficient work, and a consolation to the many, whose hopes of reform had been dashed at Peterloo. This reading of Keats is set in against the intellectual landscape of the time, in which political economists and Utilitarian thinkers counselled the benefits of strenuous and unremitting labour as industrialisation advanced apace. The poem revels in the “sensuous enjoyment of the harvest” rather than the strain of over-work and anticipates the advent of new hope with the gentle passing of the seasons.

38Part Three examines in detail and from different vantage points some of the characteristics of the political and international crisis in the watershed year of 1820. The prevalence of the language of conspiracy both within the elite and among the governed, is the focus of Gordon Pentland’s article. For the author, the evidence points to most radical reformers adhering to broadly ‘constitutional’ methods in their efforts to militate for reform, despite the prevalence of plots and conspiracies in the years from the assassination of the prime minister Spencer Perceval in 1812 to the Cato Street conspiracy in 1820. However, inflating the danger of conspiracy within radical reformism could play to the advantage of the ruling ministry, while reformers themselves played on the government’s fear of conspiracy and could also be drawn to satirising and exploiting such anxiety.

39Through her careful retracing of Jeremy Bentham’s reactions to the political battles of 1820 in his private correspondence and writings of that year, Emmanuelle de Champs shows that far from being perched in an intellectual ivory tower, Bentham, along with his friends and acquaintances drawn from different strands of the reform movement, was actively and consistently engaged in the campaign for the freedom of the press in the aftermath of the Six Acts, introduced in the wake of Peterloo in December 1819. This campaign also led him to lend support to the revolutions which occurred that year in Spain and Portugal. Bentham therefore can provide a useful lens through which to study the radical movement in 1820, a year during which new fault lines within the movement emerged and existing ones deepened. The author also demonstrates that there is scope for revising our understanding of Bentham’s own place in British radicalism.

40This broader take on the international political scene in 1820 is pursued by Emmanuelle Perez Tisserant in her article which rounds up the volume. The author studies the revolutionary uprising in post-Vienna Spain—a movement which drew upon the legacy of resistance to Napoleonic occupation—and the effects of the short-lived re-establishment of the liberal ‘Cadix constitution’ of 1812 across Europe and also in the Spanish colonies of America over the course of 1820-23. The author argues that the impact of this backlash against strict monarchical rule in Spanish-ruled territories in what would in 1821 become independent Mexico, was complex, with independence fighters allying with reactionary royalist factions to ultimately achieve a compromise which would result in an inherently conservative brand of independence. Neither this, nor the reality of the expanding institution of slavery after 1820, did anything to prevent the incumbent US president James Monroe from elevating the American continent as the crucible of liberty in opposition to what appeared to be a backward-looking Europe.

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Bibliography

Primary sources

BAMFORD, Samuel. Passages in the Life of a Radical, and Early Days, Vol. 2. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1844.

BAMFORD, Samuel. Passages in the Life of a Radical vol. 1. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1984 [1844].

BAMFORD, Samuel. La Vie d’un radical anglais au temps de Peterloo, Fabrice Bensimon éd. Paris : Éditions Sociales, 2019.

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

Carlisle Archive Centre D/LONS/L/2/67. William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale. Notebook entitled ‘Manchester’.

House of Commons debate on the Third Reading of the Seditious Meetings Bill, 14 March 1817, Hansard vol. 35 cc 1096, 1119.

MACPHERSON, David. Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries, and Navigation, with Brief Notices of the Arts and Sciences Connected with them. Containing the Commercial Transactions of the British Empire and Other Countries, from the Earliest Accounts to the Meeting of the Union Parliament in January 1801. London: Nichols and Son, and al., 1805.

MARCET, Jane. Conversations on Political Economy, in which the Elements of that Science are familiarly explained, by the Author of Conversations on Chemistry. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827 [1816].

MARCET, Jane. John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy. Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833.

MARTINEAU, Harriet. A Manchester Strike: A Tale. London: Charles Fox, 1832.

McCULLOCH, James Ramsay. A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy, Containing an Outline of a Course of Lectures on the Principles and Doctrines of that Science. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and co., 1824.

SOUTHEY, Robert. Parliamentary Reform, Manchester, April 1817 [Feb. 1817].

The Trial of Henry Hunt, John Knight, Joseph Johnson, John Thacker Saxton, Samuel Bamford, Joseph Healey, James Moorhouse, Robert Jones, George Swift, and Robert Wilde, for an alleged conspiracy, to alter the law by force and threats; and for convening and attending an illegal, riotous, and tumultuous meeting at Manchester, on Monday the 16th of August, 1819: before Mr. Justice Bayley, and a special jury, at York, on the 16th of March, 1820, and ten following days […] (Manchester: T. J. Evans, 1820).

Secondary sources

BELCHEM, John. ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1985.

BENSIMON, Fabrice, Rohan McWilliam. “Malcolm Chase (1957–2020).” History Workshop Journal 92 (Autumn 2021): 272–281, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbab028.

BUSH, M. L. “The Women at Peterloo: The Impact of Female Reform on the Manchester Meeting of 16 August 1819.” History 89, 2 (April 2004): 209-232.

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

CHASE, Malcolm. ““The Real Rights of Man”: Thomas Spence, Paine and Chartism.” Miranda [Online], 13 | 2016, Online since 17 November 2016. DOI: https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/8989.

CHASE, Malcolm. “Cato Street in International Perspective.” The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland, Jason McElligott, Martin Conboy eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, 64-80.

CLAEYS, Gregory. Citizens and Saints, Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

CLAEYS, Gregory. Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815-1860. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.

CLAEYS, Gregory. Mill and Paternalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

DOBSON, R. B. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. London: Macmillan, 1989 [1970].

MATHER, Ruth. “‘These Lancashire women are witches in politics’: Female Reform Societies and the Theatre of Radicalism, 1819-1820.” Return to Peterloo, Robert Poole ed. Manchester: Manchester Region History Review 23, 2014, 49-64.

McELLIGOTT, Jason. “‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’: ‘Sensible’ Radicals and the Cato Street Conspiracy.” The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland, Jason McElligott, Martin Conboy eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, 49-63.

NAVICKAS, Katrina. Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.

POLYP, Eva Schlunke, Robert Poole. Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre. Oxford: New Internationalist, 2019.

POOLE, Robert. “French Revolution or Peasants’ Revolt? Petitioners and Rebels in England from the Blanketeers to the Chartists.” Labour History Review 74, 1 (April 2009): 6-26.

POOLE, Robert. Peterloo: The English Uprising. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

ROBERTS, Matthew. “Radical Banners from Peterloo to Chartism.” Return to Peterloo, Robert Poole ed. Manchester: Manchester Region History Review 23, 2014, 93-109.

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

THOMPSON, Noel W. The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816-1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

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Notes

1 For a full account of the massacre, see Poole, Robert, Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

2 See Belchem, John, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1985).

3 This period of radical activity is given particular attention by Katrina Navickas in her book Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

4 The second lecture in a series entitled ‘Robert Wedderburn’s Insurrectionary British Atlantic,’ delivered by Ryan Hanley on 27 April 2022 at the Hutchins Centre at Harvard University, sheds light on the increasingly militant posture adopted by a radical of mixed-race Jamaican and Scottish background, Robert Wedderburn, on issues such as slavery and personal and political liberty at his chapel in Soho. See https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/event/ryan-hanley-2.

5 George Canning MP, House of Commons debate, 14 March 1817, Hansard vol. 35 cc. 1119.

6 Kirkman Finlay MP, House of Commons debate, 14 March 1817, Hansard vol. 35 cc. 1096. The Bill passed the third reading by 135 votes to 44.

7 Jason McElligott argues that two relatively well-known radical journalists, Thomas Wooler of the Black Dwarf, and William Hone, were increasingly swayed by ultra-radical arguments in the wake of Peterloo. McElligott argues, based on evidence in “a recently discovered note” from Wooler to Hone, that both men may have been ready to lend their support to the ultra-radicals who plotted to assassinate the Prime Minister and members of his cabinet in February 1820, had their conspiracy been successful. See McElligott, Jason, “‘The Men They Couldn’t Hang’: ‘Sensible’ Radicals and the Cato Street Conspiracy,” Jason McElligott, Martin Conboy eds., The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 49-63.

8 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin Books, 1991 [1963]) 752. Thompson suggested that the particular brutality of the yeomanry cavalry was the result of “the panic of class hatred” among the middle-class “manufacturers, merchants publicans, and shopkeepers” who made up the force. He went on to argue that “There is no term for this but class war. But it was a pitifully one-sided war.” Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 753. Carlisle Archive Centre D/LONS/L/2/67. William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, though not a witness to the events and his estate 100 miles from the site of the massacre, kept a detailed personal notebook entitled ‘Manchester’ during the latter months of 1819 in which he pasted various newspaper clippings and wrote brief observations on the debates which followed, in particular on the supposed illegal nature of the meeting and on the rightful conduct of the cavalry. Given his position as a Tory landowner and former MP in an area of the country where radicalism was strong and an uprising feared, it is of no surprise to find that he considered the meeting unlawful and the yeomanry cavalry acting in the capacity of “citizen soldiers” justified in “preventing a breach of the peace.”

9 Samuel Bamford lists some of the slogans in his account of the day’s events, first published in 1844, which constitutes an important source for historians and which Fabrice Bensimon discusses in this volume. See Bamford, Samuel, Passages in the Life of a Radical vol. 1 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 146. Slogans such as ‘Strength and Unity’ were cited by the prosecution in the later trial of the meeting organisers as evidence of their seditious intentions. For an account of women’s involvement in radical politics and in the St. Peter’s Field demonstration see Bush, M. L., “The Women at Peterloo: The Impact of Female Reform on the Manchester Meeting of 16 August 1819,” History 89, 2 (April 2004): 209-232 and Mather, Ruth, “‘These Lancashire women are witches in politics’: Female reform societies and the theatre of radicalism, 1819-1820,” Return to Peterloo, Poole, Robert ed. (Manchester: Manchester Region History Review 23, 2014), 49-64. On the material culture of Peterloo, see Roberts, Matthew, “Radical Banners from Peterloo to Chartism,” Poole ed., Return to Peterloo, 93-109.

10 Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, 146. Bamford, who led the procession from Middleton, describes at length in his autobiographical account the measures undertaken at the outset to ensure the marchers arrived in Manchester in a peaceful manner.

11 The names of those in attendance at St. Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819 are available for viewing on the website of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign along with their address, occupation and role in the events: http://www.peterloomassacre.org/names.html.

12 Carlisle Archive Centre D/LONS/L/2/67. Unreferenced newspaper clipping featuring a letter to the Earl of Derby entitled “Thanks of the Prince Regent to the Manchester Magistrates and Yeomanry” signed off by Lord Sidmouth less than a week after the demonstration was put down (21 August 1819).

13 See The trial of Henry Hunt, John Knight, Joseph Johnson, John Thacker Saxton, Samuel Bamford, Joseph Healey, James Moorhouse, Robert Jones, George Swift, and Robert Wilde, for an alleged conspiracy, to alter the law by force and threats; and for convening and attending an illegal, riotous, and tumultuous meeting at Manchester, on Monday the 16th of August, 1819: before Mr. Justice Bayley, and a special jury, at York, on the 16th of March, 1820, and ten following days […] (Manchester: T. J. Evans, 1820).

14 Samuel Bamford notes the reason for their conviction as “assembling with unlawful banners, an unlawful assembly, for the purpose of moving and inciting the liege subjects of our sovereign lord the king, to contempt and hatred of the government and constitution of the realm, as by law established, and attending at the same.” Passages in the Life of a Radical, 265.

15 Fabrice Bensimon and Katrina Navickas both engage with the debate over the Peterloo memorial campaign in their contributions to this collection.

16 An interview conducted by Alexandra Sippel with Boff Whalley, a member of the Commoner’s Choir whose singers carried the Skelmanthorpe flag to Manchester and used the banner’s words to compose a variation of its verse as part of the bicentenary commemorations in 2019, can be found in the Detours section of this collection.

17 Polyp, Eva Schlunke, Robert Poole, Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre (Oxford: New Internationalist, 2019).

18 “Peterloo, l’histoire d’un espoir, le mémoire d’un massacre dans l’Angleterre de 1819” (6 March 2020) and “1820: Perspectives on a Year of Crisis in Britain and Ireland” (5 March 2021). The editors would like to thank the research centre CAS EA801 at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University, for the financial and administrative support provided in the organisation of both of these events.

19 A showing of Mike Leigh’s film was put on at the Sorbonne in Paris on 29 January 2020, an event supported by La Société d’histoire de la révolution de 1848 and the Centre d’histoire du xixe siècle. Articles on the subject written by Fabrice Bensimon also appeared in two French journals, Revue d’histoire du xixe siècle, and L’Histoire, while Marion Leclair, of the University of Artois, wrote an article on the memory of the massacre, entitled “Les fantômes de Peterloo” which appeared in the October 2019 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. A French translation of Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical by Laurent Bury was edited by Fabrice Bensimon and, with the contribution of Robert Poole, published under the title of La Vie d’un radical anglais au temps de Peterloo (Paris: Éditions sociales, 2019).

20 Malcolm Chase, ““The Real Rights of Man”: Thomas Spence, Paine and Chartism,” Miranda [Online], 13 | 2016, Online since 17 November 2016; DOI: https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/8989.

21 Bensimon, Fabrice, Rohan McWilliam, “Malcolm Chase (1957–2020),” History Workshop Journal 92 (Autumn 2021): 272–281, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbab028. Amélie Josselin-Leray’s translation of this obituary is published as a postscript to this volume.

22 Chase, Malcolm, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 1.

23 Chase, 1820, 71.

24 Chase, 1820, 204.

25 Chase, 1820, 2. See also Chase, Malcolm, “Cato Street in International Perspective,” McElligott, Conboy eds., The Cato Street Conspiracy, 64-80.

26 Articles written by Emmanuelle de Champs and Emmanuelle Perez Tisserant in this volume attest to the importance of this international perspective when considering the period after Peterloo.

27 Marcet, Jane, Conversations on Political Economy, in which the Elements of that Science are familiarly explained, by the Author of Conversations on Chemistry (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827 [1816]), 168-169.

28 Marcet, Jane, John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), Advertisement.

29 McCulloch, James Ramsay, A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy, Containing an Outline of a Course of Lectures on the Principles and Doctrines of that Science (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and co., 1824), 2-3.

30 McCulloch, A Discourse, 60.

31 For a collection of excerpts of historical documents about the Peasants’ Revolt from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, see Dobson, R. B., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1989 [1970]). The last part especially, from page 392 to the end of the volume, includes passages from writings by Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, Robert Southey, Friedrich Engels and William Morris. Although these were by no means the only ones to write on the Revolt in the period spanning the long nineteenth century, they certainly were essential, and quite well-known to the working population. Jane Marcet draws on a lesser-known source, and one that provides an economic history of Britain, as is fitting for an educationalist concerned with the spreading of the new science of political economy. Also, Robert Southey, the then Poet Laureate, had written and left unpublished Wat Tyler: A Dramatic Poem, on the Peasants’ Revolt in 1794 at the height of Jacobin agitation. This poem, written when he was a nineteen-year-old youth was mysteriously unearthed and made public in 1817, probably in an attempt to prevent his nomination as Poet Laureate, as well, possibly, as to remind Romantic poets of the first generation of their lost flame for radical reform. Incidentally, Shelley himself published a tract to oppose parliamentary reform that very same year, in which he warned that “rendering all elections popular” was “much worse than anarchy, as the vilest ruffians of a civilised country are more wicked than savages.” Southey, Robert, Parliamentary Reform, Manchester, April 1817 [Feb. 1817], 27.

32 Poole, Robert, “French Revolution or Peasants’ Revolt? Petitioners and Rebels in England from the Blanketeers to the Chartists,” Labour History Review 74, 1 (April 2009), 16.

33 Dobson, R. B., The Peasants’ Revolt, 355.

34 Macpherson, David, Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries, and Navigation, with Brief Notices of the Arts and Sciences Connected with them. Containing the Commercial Transactions of the British Empire and Other Countries, from the Earliest Accounts to the Meeting of the Union Parliament in January 1801 (London: Nichols and Son, and al., 1805). The book’s entries are organised in a chronological order, and the entries for 1349, 1351, 1379 and 1381 provide the insight Jane Marcet uses, spanning the years from the plague epidemic down to the increase in capitation taxes and ultimately the Revolt itself.

35 A devaluation of the coinage.

36 Marcet, Conversations, 355.

37 Marcet, Jane, John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), 72.

38 Marcet, John Hopkins’s Notions of Political Economy, 72-74.

39 In this respect, Marcet appears to follow Macpherson’s interpretation of the rebellion as a legitimate reaction on the part of the lower orders: “These taxes were exacted with much tyrannic rigour, indecency, and brutal insult, much more galling than the payment itself. The consequence was an insurrection of the lower class of the people, whom the severity of depression, and perhaps some faint glimpse of the independence which commerce and manufactures were destined to confer upon their posterity, disposed to engage in any desperate attempt to meliorate their condition.” Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, vol. 1, “The Middle Ages,” 591.

40 Martineau, Harriet, A Manchester Strike: A Tale (London: Charles Fox, 1832), 135. Essential reading when it comes to the diffusion of political economy, and especially of Malthusian thought is Huzel, James, P., The Popularization of Malthus in Early Nineteenth-Century England: Martineau, Cobbett and the Pauper Press. London: Routledge, 2017 [2006].

41 Bamford, Samuel, La Vie d’un radical anglais au temps de Peterloo, Fabrice Bensimon éd. (Paris : Éditions sociales, 2019), préface.

42 Bamford, Samuel, Passages in the Life of a Radical, and Early Days, Vol. 2, (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1844), 14.

43 Bamford, Samuel, Homely Rhymes, Poems and Reminiscences (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and co., 1864), 11.

44 Bamford, Homely Rhymes, 15.

45 Noel W. Thompson’s The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) delves into the popular press of those years and the treatises that were produced on behalf of workers’ interests. Gregory Claeys too has written extensively on the opposition between early socialists and early political economists, especially in Citizens and Saints, Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), in Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and in Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815-1860 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987).

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References

Bibliographical reference

Rachel Rogers and Alexandra Sippel, IntroductionCaliban, 65-66 | 2021, 7-33.

Electronic reference

Rachel Rogers and Alexandra Sippel, IntroductionCaliban [Online], 65-66 | 2021, Online since 20 October 2021, connection on 04 December 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/9975; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.9975

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About the authors

Rachel Rogers

Rachel Rogers teaches British politics and history in the English department at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès. Her book on the British residents of Paris in the 1790s was recently published under the title of Friends of the Revolution: The British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris, 1792-1794 (London: Breviary Stuff, 2021). She is currently working on unearthing the stories of some of the women and children who were imprisoned in France over 1793-1794.

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Alexandra Sippel

Alexandra Sippel is lecturer in British political and intellectual history. She teaches in the English department of the Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. Her research focuses on utopianism and socialism in the early nineteenth century, as well as on the rise of political economy. She will be a fellow of the CNRS unit LARCA (UMR 8225, Université Paris Cité) for the academic year 2022-2023. Her project is to study the role of the Political Economy Club in British politics in the nineteenth century.

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