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But the drift of what he said, with increasing force and frequency, was clear. Despotism ought to be fought at home as well as abroad. The press was bought. The Ministry was inefficient and corrupt, supporting a mob of “court-sycophants, parasites, pensioners, bribed-senators, directors, contractors, jobbers, hireling-lords, and ministers of state”. The Civil List was a form of factional bribery, supported by money raised from excessive taxation. The upstart nouveau riche, fattened by the war, threatened the rights of the King and the liberties of the people. Only a free Britain could resist
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Cobbett, in 1804–6, was not initiating but flowing with a new reforming tide. In the next few years his Register voiced a pugnacious piecemeal Radicalism, which was the more formidable in that each particular abuse was aired and argued with individual detail. Cobbett exposed civil and military mismanagement, peculation, the sale of commissions by the Duke of York’s mistress, brutal flogging in the Army, with a force which compelled attention from men of different persuasions, for many of whom the old alignments of the 1790s had lost their meaning.
In three weeks of tumultuous campaigning, a new alliance of reformers was founded: Sir Francis Burdett, the patrician Radical, who nominated Paull on the hustings: Cobbett, the empirical reformer who directed his campaign: and Major Cartwright, the veteran advocate of manhood suffrage, who secured from Paull a pledge that he was a parliamentary reformer.
Moreover, they had provided a striking example of the effectiveness of a new kind of electoral organisation, dependent not upon the wealth or influence of the candidate but upon the voluntary exertions of the electors. In this sense the people of Westminster felt the victory to be their own.
The Committee became increasingly detached from the working people of London in the same proportion as Place’s sense of “self-approbation” and his dislike of the demonstration and the hustings grew.1 This was, in part, an inevitable outcome of the situation in which the Radicals of 1807 were placed. Anti-Jacobinism was by no means dead. Cobbett broke through the censorship almost by accident, and there was scarcely any other regular Radical press.
The Westminster Committee survived as an electoral organisation, but the authorities had no intention of permitting a new growth of popular clubs.
But the very nature of the incident, with its histrionic echoes of Wilkes and its confusion among the Radical leaders, underlines the weakness of the reformers. Even when they rode an
insurrectionary tide, they had neither organisation nor coherent policy. The laws outlawing corresponding societies and open political meetings had atomised the movement, so that the individualistic and quarrelsome behaviour of its leaders was a function of their situation as “voices” rather than as organisers.
It is a voice out of the old England of Winstanley and Bunyan, but of an old England which had begun to read Cobbett.
We have seen the origin of the illegal tradition in the shadowy societies of “United Englishmen” at the end of the 1790s.1 In 1800 and 1801 a rash of rioting broke out throughout England. Most of these were food riots,
But there are suggestions, also, of some sketchy organisation.
Clearly there was some underground organisation in existence, which sought to turn discontent at the soaring prices and food shortages into a revolutionary channel.
There is too much evidence, and from too many independent sources, for it to be possible to uphold the accepted historical fiction that “sedition” had no existence except in the imaginations of Ministers, magistrates and spies.
When a full view is taken of the evidence, the Despard affair must be seen as an incident of real significance in British political history. It linked the struggles of the Irish nationalists (Despard had some contact with Robert Emmet) with the grievances of
London labourers, and of croppers and weavers in the north of England. It was a last flaring-up of the old Jacobinism of the 1790s, which suffered, with Despard, a most serious defeat.
First, there is the conscious partisanship of the authorities. From Pitt to Sidmouth, Government pursued a single policy. Disaffection must be ringed round and isolated; and this might be done by attaching to it the suspicion of pro-Bonapartist conspiracy or (after 1815) wild, insurrectionary intention.
In a sense, the Government needed conspirators, to justify the continuation of repressive legislation which prevented nation-wide popular organisation.
In the heartlands of the Industrial Revolution, new institutions, new attitudes, new community-patterns, were emerging which were, consciously and unconsciously, designed to resist the intrusion of the magistrate, the employer, the parson or the spy. The new solidarity was not only a solidarity with; it was also a solidarity against
Hence the Home Office records (our main first-hand sources) often make perplexing reading. Like uncomprehending travellers, the magistrates and commanding officers were at the mercy of their informants. A friendly society might appear as an engine of sedition to a man who had never thought of the cost of burial to the poor. A ranting field preacher might sound like an agent of Despard. Employers might wish to freeze the magistrate’s blood with tales of Jacobins in order to ensure harsh treatment for trade unionists.
It was simpler for an informer to pass himself off as a Jacobin or a Radical than as a cropper or a framework-knitter. The political societies were gathered from a wide region and from different social groups; illegal unions or Luddite bodies grew out of workshops and communities in which each man was known. It was always at the point where one town or region linked up with another that the spy found infiltration most easy.
Jacobinism had become indigenous in working-class communities at exactly the same time as it had lost any national centre as well as most middle-class support. It was in old centres of Jacobin propaganda—Sheffield, Nottingham, south Lancashire, Leeds—that Thelwall’s “Socratic spirit” was now endemic in the workshops and mills. In part this was a conscious tradition.
The Jacobins or Painites disappeared; but the demand for human rights became diffused more widely than ever before. Repression did not destroy the dream of the egalitarian English republic; it dissolved the remaining ties of loyalty between working people and their masters, so that disaffection spread in a world which the authorities could not penetrate.
But in most manufacturing communities the initiation of any organised movement is likely to have fallen upon a minority of active spirits; and the men who had the courage to organise an illegal union, the ability to conduct its correspondence and finances, and the knowledge to petition Parliament or consult with attorneys, were likely also to have been no strangers to the Rights of Man
It was Pitt who, by passing the Combination Acts, unwittingly brought the Jacobin tradition into association with the illegal unions.
The larger the industrial unit or the greater the specialisation of skills involved, the sharper were the animosities between capital and labour, and the greater the likelihood of a common understanding among the employers.
At work no leader or deputation need approach the employer with the men’s demands; a hint would be dropped, an over-looker would be prompted, or an unsigned note be left for the master to see. If the demands were not met, there was no need—in the small workshop—for a formal strike; men would simply drop away or singly give notice. While the leaders might be known, it might also be impossible to procure evidence as to their activities. “So cautious are they now become,” wrote a Wakefield magistrate in 1804, “no general striking or communication with masters is necessary; it is done in a way
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More commonly, such direct action was carefully controlled within limits imposed by the moral culture of the working community. A blackleg was seen as an interloper who threatened to take bread from the mouths of the hard working and the innocent; but, while no tears were wasted on him if he was assaulted and “taught a lesson”, there was no moral sanction for murder or mutilation. Luddism was an extension of this kind of direct action,
Even in the rougher code of pit-villages and of seaports like Sunderland and North Shields, where the rowdy demonstration and the riot preceded more settled forms of organisation, violence was still held within limits which were felt rather than defined.
In this he received little help and some
resistance from trade unionists themselves: Working-men had been too often deceived to be willing to trust to any one who was not well known to them.
not only repealed the obnoxious Acts, but also explicitly excluded trade unionists from prosecution for conspiracy in common law.
the amending Bill of 1825 tightened up legislation to the point where almost any form of persuasion or intimidation of non-unionists was an offence, but left the main points gained: trade unionism and strikes were no longer offences as such.
First, trade unionists had reason to suspect Place. Their bitterness had been roused, not only by the Combination Acts, but (perhaps even more) by the simultaneous repeal or supersession of all legislation which protected their own interests.
When they saw what Place was about, they gave him support, not with enthusiasm, but on the principle that half a loaf was better than none. When the Acts were repealed, they made use of their new freedom with vigour. When it seemed likely that they would be reinstated, in 1825, even the Government was shaken by the storm of protests, petitions, meetings, and
deputations from every trade.
For the most cogent arguments for repeal of the Combination Acts were, first, their
continuing ineffectiveness in preventing the growth of trade unionism; and, second, the prevalence of violent trade union action, which had been dramatised by Luddism.
This analysis already exists,3 but it may be corrected and supplemented by evidence which has more recently come to light. Luddism proper, in the years 1811–17, was confined to three areas and occupations: the West Riding (and the croppers), south Lancashire (and the cotton weavers), and the framework-knitting district centred on Nottingham and taking in parts of Leicestershire and Derbyshire.
It is here that the flagrant class oppression of the Combination Acts bore down upon them at every point. At a time when the common law of conspiracy or 5 Elizabeth c.4 was being employed to defeat trade union action, every attempt to enforce statute law favourable to the workers’ interests ended in failure or financial loss. The west of England woollen workers raised subscriptions to empower attorneys to commence actions against gig-mills and against unapprenticed men, but none were successful.1 The masters, however, were disturbed enough to petition for the repeal of all protective
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It would be a sad understatement to say that the men’s witnesses before the 1806 Committee met with a frosty reception. They and their counsel were browbeaten and threatened by the advocates of laissez faire and the anti-Jacobin tribunes of order. Petitions were seen as evidence of conspiracy. Witnesses whom the croppers had sent to London and maintained at such expense were interrogated like criminals (“I mean to tell the truth as far as comes to my knowledge,” expostulated one cropper: “my character is my bread.”).
It was held to be an outrageous offence that they had collected money from outside their own ranks and had been in contact with the woollen workers of the west. They were forced to reveal the names of their fellow officers. Their
books were seized. Their accounts were scrutinised. The Committee dropped all pretence of judicial impartiality, and constituted i...
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Finally, in 1809 all the protective legislation in the woollen industry—covering apprenticeship, the gig-mill, and the number of looms—was repealed. The road was now open for
the factory, the gig-mill, the shearing-frame, the employment of unskilled and juvenile labour. The road to any constitutional redress was finally blocked. If there had been a “constitutional” and a “Luddite” faction within the croppers’ ranks, the latter now carried the day.
Unlike the skilled croppers, the framework-knitters were outworkers in a position exceptionally exposed to exploitation; like the weavers they looked back to better times.
Luddism in Lancashire arose out of a crisis between paternalism and laissez faire exactly parallel to those in the hosiery and woollen industries.
Both war and successive bad harvests had contributed to raising the price of provisions to “famine” heights. But this will not do as an explanation of Luddism; it may help to explain its occasion, but not its character.
But the character of Luddism was not that of a blind protest, or of a food riot (as took place in many other districts). Nor will it do to describe Luddism as a form of “primitive” trade unionism. As we have seen, the men who organised, sheltered, or condoned Luddism were far, from primitive. They were shrewd and humorous; next to the London artisans, some of them were amongst the most articulate of the “industrious classes
Luddism must be seen as arising at the crisis-point in
the abrogation of paternalist legislation, and in the imposition of the political economy of laissez faire upon, and against the will and conscience of, the working people.
