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Genuine disagreements upon matters of policy spilled over into personal jealousies; and, equally, the leader whose policy was endorsed by popular acclaim found in this food for his personal vanity.
The conflict between “moral” and “physical” force reformers is sometimes expressed too dogmatically, as if a clear line can be drawn between determined conspirators like Dr. Watson and Thistlewood, on the one hand, and immaculate constitutionalists like Place or Bamford,1 on the other.
Few reformers before 1839 engaged in serious preparations for insurrection; but fewer still were willing to disavow altogether the ultimate right of the people to resort to
rebellion in the face of tyranny.
And vanity was so common a disorder among the Radical leaders that it appears less as a cause of disagreement than as a symptom of the general lack of coherent organisation.
We have to accept Cobbett’s vices as the dark side of his genius, a genius which enabled him to exert more influence, week after week for thirty years, than any journalist in English history. It is when these vices are found without his genius that they appear less amiable.
The virtues of this intractable individualism can be seen in Carlile’s long contest with authority.2 But, whether in Hunt or in Carlile, the vices were offensive, and were thoroughly damaging to the reform movement.
The charismatic Orators were those with a taste for self-dramatisation. The roar of approbation from the throats of 20,000 people would have
inflated the self-esteem of most men.
We cannot understand the extraordinary untidiness of post-war Radicalism unless these problems of personality and leadership are borne in mind. It was the heroic age of popular Radicalism, but, on the national scene, its leaders rarely looked heroic and sometimes looked ridiculous.
But the Spa Fields affair had at least three serious consequences. First, it afforded the authorities the pretext they required for acting against the reformers. Second, at the very outset of the postwar agitation it frightened moderate middle-class reformers away from the popular Radical movement.1 Third, it threw the reformers’ leaders into confusion on the eve of the meeting of delegates of the Hampden Clubs.
All these factors, both of personality and of ideology, help us to understand why—scarcely a week after the Hampden Club Convention in London at the end of January 1817—the Radical movement fragmented in confusion.
In the last days of February and in March a succession of measures were passed against the reformers, re-enacting in their full severity the repressive legislation of the 1790s.
First, he chose the moment when the authorities were moving against the Hampden Clubs to issue his own blanket rejection of all reformers’ societies:
The end of March saw Cobbett’s second defection. Arguing that the Government’s repressive legislation was aimed especially at himself, he went into voluntary exile in America.
This coincidence of persecution and confusion is the background to the tangled story of the March of the Blanketeers, the Ardwick Conspiracy, and the Pentridge Rising.
By the end of 1816 more than thirty Hampden Clubs were claimed in Leicestershire towns and villages.
The immediate cessation of overt activity by the Leicester Hampden Clubs, on the suspension of Habeas Corpus, was interpreted by the same authorities (with good reason) as evidence that the reformers had retreated into secret forms of organisation for which the experiences of Luddism had prepared them.
But it is not difficult to suggest further reasons why the spinners held back from a leading position among the reformers. The Radicalism of Cobbett and of Hunt, with its emphasis upon the values of economic independence, its emotional hostility to the factory system, and its criticism of the present in the light of an ideal past of mutual ties and economic reciprocity, did not speak for the factory
workers’ predicament.
If the ideology of economic “independence” and sturdy political individualism, voiced by Cobbett and Hunt, was out of key with the factory-hands’ experience, it fitted that of the weavers like a glove.
Luddism, by 1817, was largely discredited. How was the weight of feeling in the provinces to be brought to bear on Government itself?
But there are overwhelming reasons for supposing that some kind of “physical force” conspiracy was under preparation in 1817, which was inextricably intertwined with the counter-conspiracy of Government provocateurs
Thus when Habeas Corpus was suspended in the first week of March some sketchy system of national organisation already existed.
The Government wanted blood—not a holocaust, but enough to make an example.
employment of informers had become virtually a routine practice on the part of magistrates in the larger industrial centres during the Luddite years; and ever since the 1790s a part of the Government’s own resources had been appropriated for such secret service purposes. But the practice was regarded by a very wide section of public opinion as being wholly alien to the spirit of English law.
While the historian may read Oliver’s reports in the Home Office papers with little surprise—seeing in him only one of the most industrious and daring of a Corps of informers—there were thousands of shopkeepers, country squires, Dissenting Ministers, and professional men who, in 1817, had no idea that such things could
take place in England.
This offers, in terms of realpolitik, a shred of justification for the actions of Sidmouth and the Government. Believing that some outbreak was inevitable, they determined to handle it in such a way as to exact an example of terror and punishment which would silence, once for all, the monstrous sedition of the “lower orders”.
From 1817 until Chartist times, the central working-class tradition was that which exploited every means of agitation and protest short of active insurrectionary preparation.
What was displayed, in 1819, was not the strength but the growing weakness of the English ancien régime.
The repression of the 1790s had been endorsed not only by the landowners and many employers, but by enough public opinion in both the middle and working classes, to silence the Jacobins. The repression of 1817 provoked, on the contrary, an accession of strength to the radical reformers, while a large section of middle-class opinion held aloof from the Government. In 1795 Pitt could present himself as defending the Constitution against French innovation. In 1819 Liverpool, Sidmouth, Eldon and Castlereagh were seen as men intent upon displacing constitutional rights by despotic “continental”
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And in 1819 the reformers appeared more powerful than they had ever been before, because they came forward in the rôle of constitutionalists. They laid claim to rights, some of which it was difficult to deny at law, which had never been intended for extension to the “lower orders”
But if these
rights were gained, it meant, sooner or later, the end ...
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The integument of power, in the countryside or in the corporate town, was composed of deference and fear.
The rights to which reformers laid claim in 1819 were those of political organisation, the freedom of the press, and the freedom of public meeting; beyond these three, there was the right to vote.
This playing at Parliament was only the ridiculous side of the creative tradition of organisation. To unite in the face of exploitation or oppression was almost the instinctual response of such men as weavers and colliers. They themselves had come to understand that it was only through organisation that they could transform themselves from a mob into a political movement.
In the absence of national organisation, the local societies took their lead from the Radical press. It was because this press provided the very tissues without which the movement would have fallen apart, that the claim for the fullest liberty of the press was one of the foremost Radical demands. 1816–20 were, above all, years in which popular Radicalism took its style from the hand-press and the weekly periodical. This means of propaganda was in its fullest egalitarian phase. Steam-printing had scarcely made headway (commencing with The Times in 1814), and the plebeian Radical group had as
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booksellers, and itinerant hawkers, thereby making of Radicalism, for the first time, a profession which could maintain its own full-time agitators.
In the post-war years there is growing evidence that the “illegal” trade unions were openly displaying their strength.
“The peaceable demeanour of so many thousand unemployed Men is not natural,” General Byng commented on this occasion. It is a phrase worth pausing over. The gentry, who had decried the reformers as a rabble, were appalled and some were even panic-stricken when they found that they were not.
The effect upon the reformers’ morale of each successive demonstration was instantaneous. With each breach in the walls of deference, the waters of insubordination swept through.
The policy of open constitutionalism was
proving more revolutionary in its implication than the policy of conspiracy and insurrection.
Confronted by this swelling power, Old Corruption faced the alternatives of meeting the reformers with repression or concession. But concession, in 1819, would have meant concession to a largely working-class reform movement; the middle-class reformers were not yet strong enough (as they were in 1832) to offer a more moderate line of advance. This is why Peterloo took place.
If the Government was unprepared for the news of Peterloo, no authorities have ever acted so vigorously to make themselves accomplices after the fact. Within a fortnight the congratulations of Sidmouth and the thanks of the Prince Regent were communicated to the magistrates and military “for their prompt, decisive, and efficient measures for the preservation of the public peace”.
State prosecutions were commenced, not against the perpetrators, but against the victims of the day—Hunt, Saxton, Bamford and others—and the first intention of charging them with high treason was only abandoned with reluctance.
There are two points about Peterloo which have, somehow, become lost in recent accounts. The first is the actual bloody violence of the day. It really was a massacre.
But the panic was not (as has been suggested) the panic of bad horsemen hemmed in by a crowd. It was the panic of class hatred. It was the Yeomanry—the Manchester manufacturers, merchants, publicans, and shopkeepers on horseback—which did more damage than the regulars (Hussars). In the Yeomanry (a middle-class reformer testified) “there are … individuals whose political rancour approaches to absolute insanity.”1 These were the men who pursued the banners, knew the speakers by name and sought to pay off old scores, and who mustered and cheered at the end of their triumph.
