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Part I, Chapter II
I, II: Bread or Blood
Outside of the bubble of Westminster, the basic game of politicking failed to quell malcontent in the nation they supposedly ruled over. Discontent at poor relief, parliamentary representation, lack of work, inflation and unemployment due to a post-war economic slowdown, forced the previously solid war-time alliance of property owners against skilled and guild workers, seeking protection and fair wages for their labour in ever-worsening conditions first damaged by the Napoleonic Continental System, then by the Inflation, bad harvests and depression that followed, to break down and caused previously ultra-loyal Urban Property owners to waiver towards a new politics of milder, ‘responsible’ government. A collapse of under-regulated country banks added to economic crisis and growing Government debt adding to economic fragility as the Government absorbed the liabilities of the private institutions. For the working class, the Treasury were reeling from a rapid increase in the Poor Law Relief debt, which topped £8 million in 1817. The poorly managed relief programs, purposefully underfunded in the line with the laissez-faire economic policy, now proved to be an expensive waste of Treasury funds and time. Lack of relief and the economic conditions caused Agricultural Farmers in East Anglia, largely apolitical to that point to riot demanding bread due to inflation the same year, brandishing a slogan that summed up the fervour of their ill-feeling: Bread or Blood. The correct belief that the aristocracy had ample access to food brought an anti-aristocratic sentiment in the areas of unrest. Suddenly, pro-establishment rioting against reformist plots, including Anti-Catholic riots and Anti-Reformist riots, prevalent before the war, ceased to be the foundation of any violence. The era of the rage against the machine had begun.
John Cartwright, Early Leader of the Reform Movement
Many Reformers were attracted to the spectacle of the candle-lit public meeting, with veteran Reformer John Cartwright attracted a massive following in the years following the victory at Waterloo, proposing equal constituencies, annual parliaments and universal manhood suffrage. A new breed of Reformers, like Henry Hunt, staged public meetings and began to attract a more revolutionary basis of support. Hunt's speaking tour attracted large numbers of attendees in major emerging Industrial Centres like Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham and Stockport, where crowds of up to 100,000 would gather to hear him speak. Hunt, a landowner with a reformist streak, would prove popular with the masses with his confident style and assured oratory. He would gain the moniker 'Orator Hunt', and would quickly, alongside Cartwright, become an early leader for the movement.
Influence of groups like those attached to Thomas Spence, the common-land philosopher whose followers practised a cult-like society of collaborators steeped in the secret societies of the age in cities like Newcastle, brought the radical movement to bookshops, newspapers and intellectual circles. The Spencean Principles & Constitution of Oceania, which called for the end of aristocracy and landlords, the nationalisation of land into self-governing 'democratic parishes', a social dividend of rents from the land, universal suffrage and a representative 'National Senate', represented the extreme-left of the ideology of Radicalism, but provided much of the basis of the paranoia exhibited by the establishment. Most Radicals wanted annual of more frequent elections, social guarantee of income during sickness or unemployment, equal constituencies and expanded suffrage with less power for the aristocratic House of Lords, but Spenceans remained a key organising force in the early parts of the Movement, especially in London, where the Spenceans had melded the land reform and free politics with a witty, pragmatic relationship with the cities poor and underground. They acted as a magnet for unemployed tradesmen, failed merchants of the metropolis of the capital and created an "obscene populism" of anti-clericalist sentiment found throughout the language of the "arse-bishops". The Spenceans were radical, controversial but ultimately were "a loosely-linked, semi-clandestine network of political organisations, groups, coteries and alliances", according to McCalman. The Committee of Secrecy saw it differently, noting in 1817 that 'the doctrines of the Spencean clubs have been widely diffused through the country either by extension of similar societies or by missionaries.'
Early in the post-war period, the Spenceans organised meetings and speeches as part of an agitation strategy for growing support for the wider movement to destroy the Social Order. They invited Hunt to a meeting in 1816 in Islington, London, where they would, on mass, present a petition to the Prince Regent demanding reform. Hunt was to deliver the petition alongside Francis Burdett. After the first in mid-November meeting was postponed until the next sitting of Parliament, on December 2, the Revolutionary Spenceans planned to cause a Riot, take over the Tower of London and the Bank of England and raise the tricolor, the symbol of the French Revolution over London. James Watson, a local Spencean, attempted to whip the crowd while raising the flag into a frenzy but only managed a few hundred or so out of the 10,000 crowd to follow the tricolor. Despite this, a Riot broke out and banks were robbed and the most violent riots since 1780's Gordon Riot, began. The Spa Field Riot of 1816 kicked off an nearly uninterrupted 15 years of violence in Great Britain. Soon followed an act of Parliament declaring Spencean Clubs to be illegal.
Sensing the coming struggle, in January 1817, Radicals from across the country met in London, bringing together Francis Burdett, who represented the Parliamentary-wing of the Radicals, John Cartwright, the veteran Radical rabble-rouser Henry Hunt, who represented urban Industrial towns, and William Cobbett, representing the press-wing. This meeting attracted men from all over, and allows an observer to understand the composition of the Radical organisation in Britain at this time.
Francis Burdett was a veteran Member of Parliament who was the epitome of the Radical cause through the Commons. He denounced corporal punishment in the army, was a staunch anti-corruption limelight and highly steeped in Radical lore through his early adoption of a range of Radical Pillars; universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot and annual parliaments. He also was an early campaigner against Roman Catholic disabilities, which drew support from the emerging Political Catholicism movement in Ireland and parts of the North-West.
John Cartwright was also in the 'veteran Radical' section of the movement, and been a member of the Society of the Friends of the People, an early Radical group within the Whig Faction in 1790s. Since the forced dissolution of the organisation under the Pitt Government, he remained a firebrand speaker who was capable of bringing greater consciousness to the masses. He was, even in 1817, considered a Father of Radicalism by the movement. His thinking in terms of reform of the political system centred around a basic tenet:
Universal Freedom - Based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man
Annual Elections - To ensure a link between Representative and Constituent
Voting by Ballot - To ensure a fair result
Equal Representation - To ensure the representation of Urban, Industrial Cities
He wished to create amongst the diverse coalition of Great Britain "A Sacred Union of Free States", with the traditional balance of power between different groups, a hallmark of the English System. He also enshrined the need for the right to effectively petition and have representatives who are bound to listen and base themselves in their districts.
Henry Hunt was a prosperous farmer, who was drawn into politics during the Napoleonic Wars, supporting Francis Burdett. He began circulating the political scene of Bristol, where he led campaign against both Whig and Tory and proclaiming himself a supporter of 'Democratic Radicalism'. After the Spa Field Riot in 1816, he was thrust into the national light and became known as the "Orator". He embraced a programmed that included annual parliaments and universal suffrage, but unlike the Spenceans, operated in open, favouring a tactic known as 'mass pressure', which he felt would achieve pressure on the establishment through large public acts on defiance and public meetings in the open would show the national support for the regimes. He attracted tens of thousands of supporters on a speaking tour throughout 1816, and radicalised large sections of the community in economical distressed areas. He represented the will of the people and the public face of Radicalism, supported by a Radical press that had exploded after the post-war tax decrease on printing. His non violent rhetoric was his hallmark and benefited from respect from both the papers and the moderate Radicals.
William Cobbett had been in the limelight for a number of years as an MP, but in January 1817, he was the King of the 'Two-Penny Trash', a pamphlet, rather than a newspaper that made it cheaper to the working man. His paper, the Political Register went from selling a thousand or so copies to a circulation of nearly 40,000. This made him a wanted man - with the events to follow, he would have an axe from the Committee of Secrecy over his head. At this time, he was a wanted man, although Radicals such as Samuel Bradford saw the influence of the burgeoning Press Baron;
At this time the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible. He directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings—misgovernment; and to its proper corrective—parliamentary reform.
While the members agreed on the key cornerstones of the Radical agenda; annual Parliaments, universal suffrage and equal constituencies, they began to coalesce while the wider movement disagreed around strategy. The subject of violence, and the need for it in the name of reform divided Hunt, who was fiercely non-coercive, from the rest of the group who understood the realism of the country, patrolled by the Committee of Secrecy. This divide would be the main fault-line of the Democratic Radicalist coalition. In urban, working-class areas, the economic hardship had made the issue of violent uprising that much more acute.
After an attempt on the Prince Regent's life in February 1817, claimed by some to have been caused by a rock thrown into the carriage of the Prince (although some maintained the 'rock' was in fact a potato), the Lords reconvened quickly and in response to the deteriorating domestic situation, revoked Habeas Corpus in the House of Lords, ending the right to fair trial. They swiftly also made it treason to assassinate the Prince Regent an act of High Treason, and passed the Seditious Meetings Act, banning any meeting of more than 50 people. The law did allow meetings, but required a complex glut of red-tape for the meetings to be legal. This attempted to stymy opposition, but did not stop the proliferation of violence in the country. The Pentich Rising saw a Derbyshire town attempt a rising to among a list of conflicting and vague demands, cancel the National Debt. Two to three hundred men, mostly stockingers, quarrymen and iron workers set out to march to Nottingham with light arms, pikes, scythes and a small collection of guns hidden in a quarry. Jeremiah Brandeth, the so-called 'Nottingham Captain' and his three men in the leadership of the gang were brash but compromised - William Oliver, a member of the group was a spy answering to the Committee of Secrecy, the plot was foiled and Brandeth and his accomplices Isaac Ludlam and William Turner, were hanged and beheaded at Derby Gaol. That year, a petition to parliament signed by 750,000 people was presented to the Commons, but the members rejected it outright - insisting there was no more perfect a system.
Henry Hunt, Leader of the Radical Reform Movement and Main Speaker at the planned Manchester Patriotic Society meeting at St Peter's Field
The heightened tension continued but the postwar fervour gave way to a period of paranoia among the elites and effective suppression of Radical activities in the aftermath of the Pentich Rising, the next eighteen months or so were relatively quiet. Despite this, the organisation and passion of the Radical base was growing, not subsiding. Especially in industrial areas in the belt across the North, meetings, gatherings, periodicals and newspapers became to flower advocating parliamentary reform and began shifting their strategy towards controlling the feeling of public anger towards mass action. Effectively, Hunt seized control of the movement and re-embarked on a tour of mass meetings across the UK with a strict exception to violence. He received an offer to speak at an event in Manchester, organised by the Manchester Observer, at St Peters Field, where an decision of a was set to be made of whether to meet at a later time to elect a Representative in lieu of a Member of Parliament. Hunt wished to postpone this vote to not be associated with any attempt at forming a para-state outside of the Commons. Regardless, the meeting went ahead and around 60,000 people gathered to discuss reform. The Magistrates in the City had no time for the protesters, who arrived in Manchester in their Sunday best and controversially and at Hunt's specific orders, without arms. Many of the Radicals in the city had seen meetings violently broken up using the tool of choice for repression in the post-Napoleonic period - the Yeomanry.
These volunteer brigades had been raised during the Napoleonic conflict from the need to police and guard the streets during the foreign conquest, managing the domestic disturbances that came with post-war economic depression, mechanisation and subsequent loss of employment for many in the previously cottage dominated industries. With policing shared between the Parish Constable, The Watchman and newer, more temporary measures such as the Special Constabulary, the Magistrates, the civil authority in a particular region, felt reassured to use the loyal Yeomanry, drawn from local landed gentry and loyal middle-class, rather than Militias with more working-class recruits. Subsequently, these units were trusted to deal with Radical suppression and their numbers were expanded throughout the late 1810s as a result. Their use and their development as an antipathy of the Radical & Reform Movements meant their reputation preceded them. Beginning with the suppression of the Combination Movement, they were called out to break up large scale meetings and their assert dominance and submission from the Radicals. Their use in throughout 1819 and 1820 would propel them, and the Radical cause into the national consciousness.
Outside of the bubble of Westminster, the basic game of politicking failed to quell malcontent in the nation they supposedly ruled over. Discontent at poor relief, parliamentary representation, lack of work, inflation and unemployment due to a post-war economic slowdown, forced the previously solid war-time alliance of property owners against skilled and guild workers, seeking protection and fair wages for their labour in ever-worsening conditions first damaged by the Napoleonic Continental System, then by the Inflation, bad harvests and depression that followed, to break down and caused previously ultra-loyal Urban Property owners to waiver towards a new politics of milder, ‘responsible’ government. A collapse of under-regulated country banks added to economic crisis and growing Government debt adding to economic fragility as the Government absorbed the liabilities of the private institutions. For the working class, the Treasury were reeling from a rapid increase in the Poor Law Relief debt, which topped £8 million in 1817. The poorly managed relief programs, purposefully underfunded in the line with the laissez-faire economic policy, now proved to be an expensive waste of Treasury funds and time. Lack of relief and the economic conditions caused Agricultural Farmers in East Anglia, largely apolitical to that point to riot demanding bread due to inflation the same year, brandishing a slogan that summed up the fervour of their ill-feeling: Bread or Blood. The correct belief that the aristocracy had ample access to food brought an anti-aristocratic sentiment in the areas of unrest. Suddenly, pro-establishment rioting against reformist plots, including Anti-Catholic riots and Anti-Reformist riots, prevalent before the war, ceased to be the foundation of any violence. The era of the rage against the machine had begun.
John Cartwright, Early Leader of the Reform Movement
Many Reformers were attracted to the spectacle of the candle-lit public meeting, with veteran Reformer John Cartwright attracted a massive following in the years following the victory at Waterloo, proposing equal constituencies, annual parliaments and universal manhood suffrage. A new breed of Reformers, like Henry Hunt, staged public meetings and began to attract a more revolutionary basis of support. Hunt's speaking tour attracted large numbers of attendees in major emerging Industrial Centres like Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham and Stockport, where crowds of up to 100,000 would gather to hear him speak. Hunt, a landowner with a reformist streak, would prove popular with the masses with his confident style and assured oratory. He would gain the moniker 'Orator Hunt', and would quickly, alongside Cartwright, become an early leader for the movement.
Influence of groups like those attached to Thomas Spence, the common-land philosopher whose followers practised a cult-like society of collaborators steeped in the secret societies of the age in cities like Newcastle, brought the radical movement to bookshops, newspapers and intellectual circles. The Spencean Principles & Constitution of Oceania, which called for the end of aristocracy and landlords, the nationalisation of land into self-governing 'democratic parishes', a social dividend of rents from the land, universal suffrage and a representative 'National Senate', represented the extreme-left of the ideology of Radicalism, but provided much of the basis of the paranoia exhibited by the establishment. Most Radicals wanted annual of more frequent elections, social guarantee of income during sickness or unemployment, equal constituencies and expanded suffrage with less power for the aristocratic House of Lords, but Spenceans remained a key organising force in the early parts of the Movement, especially in London, where the Spenceans had melded the land reform and free politics with a witty, pragmatic relationship with the cities poor and underground. They acted as a magnet for unemployed tradesmen, failed merchants of the metropolis of the capital and created an "obscene populism" of anti-clericalist sentiment found throughout the language of the "arse-bishops". The Spenceans were radical, controversial but ultimately were "a loosely-linked, semi-clandestine network of political organisations, groups, coteries and alliances", according to McCalman. The Committee of Secrecy saw it differently, noting in 1817 that 'the doctrines of the Spencean clubs have been widely diffused through the country either by extension of similar societies or by missionaries.'
Early in the post-war period, the Spenceans organised meetings and speeches as part of an agitation strategy for growing support for the wider movement to destroy the Social Order. They invited Hunt to a meeting in 1816 in Islington, London, where they would, on mass, present a petition to the Prince Regent demanding reform. Hunt was to deliver the petition alongside Francis Burdett. After the first in mid-November meeting was postponed until the next sitting of Parliament, on December 2, the Revolutionary Spenceans planned to cause a Riot, take over the Tower of London and the Bank of England and raise the tricolor, the symbol of the French Revolution over London. James Watson, a local Spencean, attempted to whip the crowd while raising the flag into a frenzy but only managed a few hundred or so out of the 10,000 crowd to follow the tricolor. Despite this, a Riot broke out and banks were robbed and the most violent riots since 1780's Gordon Riot, began. The Spa Field Riot of 1816 kicked off an nearly uninterrupted 15 years of violence in Great Britain. Soon followed an act of Parliament declaring Spencean Clubs to be illegal.
Sensing the coming struggle, in January 1817, Radicals from across the country met in London, bringing together Francis Burdett, who represented the Parliamentary-wing of the Radicals, John Cartwright, the veteran Radical rabble-rouser Henry Hunt, who represented urban Industrial towns, and William Cobbett, representing the press-wing. This meeting attracted men from all over, and allows an observer to understand the composition of the Radical organisation in Britain at this time.
Francis Burdett was a veteran Member of Parliament who was the epitome of the Radical cause through the Commons. He denounced corporal punishment in the army, was a staunch anti-corruption limelight and highly steeped in Radical lore through his early adoption of a range of Radical Pillars; universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot and annual parliaments. He also was an early campaigner against Roman Catholic disabilities, which drew support from the emerging Political Catholicism movement in Ireland and parts of the North-West.
John Cartwright was also in the 'veteran Radical' section of the movement, and been a member of the Society of the Friends of the People, an early Radical group within the Whig Faction in 1790s. Since the forced dissolution of the organisation under the Pitt Government, he remained a firebrand speaker who was capable of bringing greater consciousness to the masses. He was, even in 1817, considered a Father of Radicalism by the movement. His thinking in terms of reform of the political system centred around a basic tenet:
Universal Freedom - Based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man
Annual Elections - To ensure a link between Representative and Constituent
Voting by Ballot - To ensure a fair result
Equal Representation - To ensure the representation of Urban, Industrial Cities
He wished to create amongst the diverse coalition of Great Britain "A Sacred Union of Free States", with the traditional balance of power between different groups, a hallmark of the English System. He also enshrined the need for the right to effectively petition and have representatives who are bound to listen and base themselves in their districts.
Henry Hunt was a prosperous farmer, who was drawn into politics during the Napoleonic Wars, supporting Francis Burdett. He began circulating the political scene of Bristol, where he led campaign against both Whig and Tory and proclaiming himself a supporter of 'Democratic Radicalism'. After the Spa Field Riot in 1816, he was thrust into the national light and became known as the "Orator". He embraced a programmed that included annual parliaments and universal suffrage, but unlike the Spenceans, operated in open, favouring a tactic known as 'mass pressure', which he felt would achieve pressure on the establishment through large public acts on defiance and public meetings in the open would show the national support for the regimes. He attracted tens of thousands of supporters on a speaking tour throughout 1816, and radicalised large sections of the community in economical distressed areas. He represented the will of the people and the public face of Radicalism, supported by a Radical press that had exploded after the post-war tax decrease on printing. His non violent rhetoric was his hallmark and benefited from respect from both the papers and the moderate Radicals.
William Cobbett had been in the limelight for a number of years as an MP, but in January 1817, he was the King of the 'Two-Penny Trash', a pamphlet, rather than a newspaper that made it cheaper to the working man. His paper, the Political Register went from selling a thousand or so copies to a circulation of nearly 40,000. This made him a wanted man - with the events to follow, he would have an axe from the Committee of Secrecy over his head. At this time, he was a wanted man, although Radicals such as Samuel Bradford saw the influence of the burgeoning Press Baron;
At this time the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible. He directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings—misgovernment; and to its proper corrective—parliamentary reform.
While the members agreed on the key cornerstones of the Radical agenda; annual Parliaments, universal suffrage and equal constituencies, they began to coalesce while the wider movement disagreed around strategy. The subject of violence, and the need for it in the name of reform divided Hunt, who was fiercely non-coercive, from the rest of the group who understood the realism of the country, patrolled by the Committee of Secrecy. This divide would be the main fault-line of the Democratic Radicalist coalition. In urban, working-class areas, the economic hardship had made the issue of violent uprising that much more acute.
After an attempt on the Prince Regent's life in February 1817, claimed by some to have been caused by a rock thrown into the carriage of the Prince (although some maintained the 'rock' was in fact a potato), the Lords reconvened quickly and in response to the deteriorating domestic situation, revoked Habeas Corpus in the House of Lords, ending the right to fair trial. They swiftly also made it treason to assassinate the Prince Regent an act of High Treason, and passed the Seditious Meetings Act, banning any meeting of more than 50 people. The law did allow meetings, but required a complex glut of red-tape for the meetings to be legal. This attempted to stymy opposition, but did not stop the proliferation of violence in the country. The Pentich Rising saw a Derbyshire town attempt a rising to among a list of conflicting and vague demands, cancel the National Debt. Two to three hundred men, mostly stockingers, quarrymen and iron workers set out to march to Nottingham with light arms, pikes, scythes and a small collection of guns hidden in a quarry. Jeremiah Brandeth, the so-called 'Nottingham Captain' and his three men in the leadership of the gang were brash but compromised - William Oliver, a member of the group was a spy answering to the Committee of Secrecy, the plot was foiled and Brandeth and his accomplices Isaac Ludlam and William Turner, were hanged and beheaded at Derby Gaol. That year, a petition to parliament signed by 750,000 people was presented to the Commons, but the members rejected it outright - insisting there was no more perfect a system.
Henry Hunt, Leader of the Radical Reform Movement and Main Speaker at the planned Manchester Patriotic Society meeting at St Peter's Field
The heightened tension continued but the postwar fervour gave way to a period of paranoia among the elites and effective suppression of Radical activities in the aftermath of the Pentich Rising, the next eighteen months or so were relatively quiet. Despite this, the organisation and passion of the Radical base was growing, not subsiding. Especially in industrial areas in the belt across the North, meetings, gatherings, periodicals and newspapers became to flower advocating parliamentary reform and began shifting their strategy towards controlling the feeling of public anger towards mass action. Effectively, Hunt seized control of the movement and re-embarked on a tour of mass meetings across the UK with a strict exception to violence. He received an offer to speak at an event in Manchester, organised by the Manchester Observer, at St Peters Field, where an decision of a was set to be made of whether to meet at a later time to elect a Representative in lieu of a Member of Parliament. Hunt wished to postpone this vote to not be associated with any attempt at forming a para-state outside of the Commons. Regardless, the meeting went ahead and around 60,000 people gathered to discuss reform. The Magistrates in the City had no time for the protesters, who arrived in Manchester in their Sunday best and controversially and at Hunt's specific orders, without arms. Many of the Radicals in the city had seen meetings violently broken up using the tool of choice for repression in the post-Napoleonic period - the Yeomanry.
These volunteer brigades had been raised during the Napoleonic conflict from the need to police and guard the streets during the foreign conquest, managing the domestic disturbances that came with post-war economic depression, mechanisation and subsequent loss of employment for many in the previously cottage dominated industries. With policing shared between the Parish Constable, The Watchman and newer, more temporary measures such as the Special Constabulary, the Magistrates, the civil authority in a particular region, felt reassured to use the loyal Yeomanry, drawn from local landed gentry and loyal middle-class, rather than Militias with more working-class recruits. Subsequently, these units were trusted to deal with Radical suppression and their numbers were expanded throughout the late 1810s as a result. Their use and their development as an antipathy of the Radical & Reform Movements meant their reputation preceded them. Beginning with the suppression of the Combination Movement, they were called out to break up large scale meetings and their assert dominance and submission from the Radicals. Their use in throughout 1819 and 1820 would propel them, and the Radical cause into the national consciousness.
- President Conor
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