IV, VII: The Orange and Red, White & Green
“I write this letter, our 25th since my exile, simply because for many years we conversed and you always provided the courtesy, to be honest and frank to me and to show me, in your eyes, the best turn of course and the best way to proceed. You have shown deference to one’s dignity and honour in the face of challenges. I am truly sorry that we have been forced to have such a public feud from my exile in Paris, but may I attempt to resolve the feud, however superficial it may be as we both know, by providing you with a crucial piece of information: you are in danger, and you must leave the country now.”
On August 3rd 1878, a day before the enacting of Operation Boyle, a dispatch was sent to Paris to leave plans for the Coup with Prince Albert-Edward in his home in Paris where he had been living for 4 years since his refusal to take the British Throne. The courier was greeted by the sight of Paris Police searching the King’s Parisian apartment but pushed past the various investigators to find Bertie, hunched in the corner. He delivered a case containing the detailed plans for his arrival, the arrest lists, the commanders and maps of key buildings to be seized. There were train tickets to Calais and details of a ship that would take the King and members of his family, including Albert-Victor, the Crown Prince, to England and details of an armoured train that would be leaving to take him to the centre of London, where it was planned he would be proclaimed on the night of August 23rd from Buckingham Palace. Understanding the contents, he moved to the office of a Conservative Member of the French National Assembly, Baron Haussmann, whom he had struck up a friendship with throughout his stay in the Capital. Haussmann, a Bonapartist, swore to secrecy but observed the plans with Bertie, and as he came over the list of planned executions, seeing Gladstone’s name, he noted a concerned frown come over the would-be King. Bertie immediately called for the courier, and knowing that the OMC would not listen to his plea for clemency and even if they would, a dispatch to Liverpool would take too long, decided that, under secrecy, the boy, who was 18 years old, should carry a letter to London as soon as possible warning his old friend of his fate, and advising him to leave the country.
Such a warning was a fit of emotional rage more so than any strategic planning, but it plays a wonderful part in illustrating the unbelievable folly of the Orangeist Coup Attempt of August 1877. It was the product of an echo chamber, produced in dimly lit basements rather than with the forethought of consultation. The men involved had meticulously planned but relied on many an assumption rather than fact, in this case, the assumption shared by the Parliamentarians: that the President-Regent and the King had severed their communication lines and that both wanted the other out of the equation. The OMC assumed that Bertie would wish the man who usurped him dead. He did not. Parliament assumed that the man deemed ill-fitting for the crown and the man they vested the power to replace him in to be estranged. They were not.
A day later, the first communique between the OMC and the Orange Order in Belfast arrived, instructing the leadership to restart the ransacking of military equipment, delivered along with an assortment of rifles that had already been assumed. What they did not know was amongst the men who were delivered the notice and dispatched to arrange a robbery of 150 rifles from a storage facility in Larne were 6 of the G Division that had been assigned by Duffy to pursue the workings of the Order in Belfast. Alerting the Belfast City & County Police, the group travelling to the coast were halted and arrested marking an auspicious start to the planned uprising. Reports sent back to the OMC declared that the Belfast group were compromised, but several other groups managed to secure armouries in Lisburn and areas of Belfast, giving them a number, along not quite what they had hoped, of arms that could be used in the insurrection. Viscount Cole declared the mission to be a qualified success, and as similar raids were launched on the mainland, they too achieved relative success, bringing about 3000 rifles into the hands of the Order in the first phase of the campaign, mainly from areas of the country in states that did not know the group's plans. What they did not know was after the arrest of the first Belfast group, an officer from the G Division had managed to uncover a section of the plans. Believing it to be as part of an assassination campaign, the G Division reported the findings to the Lieutenant, who in turn informed the Union Council of the stolen documents and advised Lieutenants to be on alert in Greater Yorkshire, Northumbria, the Palatinates, Scotland and the Metropolis. This led to a higher number of patrols on roads between cities which the Order hoped to use to avoid detection. After further groups in Bradford and Glasgow were apprehended, the Order attempted to throw together an arms purchase from overseas, sending a telegram to the Foreign Affairs Department in Berlin, which was intercepted and at the behest of Bismarck, the German Chancellor was passed on to the Foreign Secretary, Senator Granville. This news was leaked to the press and fear-mongering of an attempted Coup began to circulate, beginning a few days out from the pencilled starting date. The debacle caused the OMC to bring forward the plans, and Boyne was retooled to include a simultaneous assassination campaign and uprising using a smaller number of men, ditching the plan to use militias raised from the Order immediately, but instead to assist with the plan to assert control once key buildings in London were under the control of the OMC and the OMC & OPC had been declared the Privy Council of the Crown.
This smaller plan was more mobile and allowed for fewer numbers of better-trained troops to carry out the offensive, but even in London, the plan would come into trouble. The Boyne plan had envisaged that around half of the Metropolitan Police would be armed, but with the higher state of tension arising from the nationwide ransacking, the Mayor of the Metropolis had asked for as many to be armed as possible, meaning some 9,000 armed officers were patrolling the streets from August 16th. Sir Charles Yorke had also ordered that the Essex Regiment be put on alert in case of strife in the Capital. Rumours of the King travelling to Calais by train furthered these rumours, even though a telegram from Liverpool from the OMC delayed his arrival and meant he was still in Paris. Not that that would matter, as he was by this time under house arrest in the French Capital. With the plan falling around them, the OMC decided to further push forward the attack to the 19th and began mobilising the 9,000 troops, plus 2,000 volunteers, via trains commandeered on the night of the 17th.
Despite the advanced warning, the Union Council were still caught unaware of the insurrection. Most in the Home Office believed the plot to be a series of coordinated assassinations rather than a plan to overthrow the Union, and went to bed on the 18th believing they had put those plans in place. The first signs on the morning of the 19th that anything was amiss was the distant sound of gunfire in the capital, as Metropolitan Police on the outskirts of the city engaged in a light exchange of gunfire in the North of the City as the Lancers approached at around 7:30 am. A thoroughly professional force, the Met vestries in the North of the City were easily defeated, but messengers alerted the Union Council of the approaching forces and immediately a joint session of the Union Council and Provisional Metropolitan Chancellery was called to convene a response. Chamberlain and Dilke, however, were missing from the meeting and it was chaired by Granville. Joe and Charles had been alerted an hour or so before the Union Council of the oncoming forces, and instead headed to meet the Committee of the GFTU and its President, George Shipton. They insisted that special editions of the Bee-Hive be printed, along with a notice to the other merchants to disobey the orders of the approaching army, unaware of their exact numbers and links. He referred to them as the Orangeists, which gives the Orangeist Coup its name. The Notice, printed at 9:30 as the Lancers linked with the Battalions from the Middlesex Regiment in Tottenham, read as follows;
PEOPLE OF THE UNION
YOUR COUNTRY AND STATE IS UNDER ATTACK
RESIST! DISOBEY ALL ORDERS PUT TO YOU! THE GOVERNMENT REMAINS IN CONTROL OF THE UNION! THE PRESIDENT-REGENT RETAINS THE AUTHORITY YOU HAVE VESTED IN HIM! THE ORANGEISTS WISH TO SUSPEND DEMOCRACY, SUPPRESS THE PEOPLES WILL AND SUPPLANT YOUR DESIRE FOR FREEDOM!
THE UNION COUNCIL
Chamberlain and Dilke had understood that getting ahead of the situation was critical, and copies were printed and circulated in the city at breakneck speed. The address was syndicated through telegraphy, and State Governments, unaware of the crisis, declared lockdowns in major cities to protect them from an expected attack that would not come. He arrived at the meeting at 10 am to see that Council had authorised the reinforcement of Government buildings and State buildings in the city. There was, however, no sign of the President-Regent. It had emerged that he had left the city the night before to travel to Manchester, much to the confusion and ire of the Union Council. In his absence, the High Chancellor decreed that a decree could be drawn up that would be non-legal but would carry enough weight to have the desired effect, so Chamberlain and the Mayor of the Metropolis, as well as the Chancellor of the Metropolis Thomas Farrer, decided to issue a series of decrees to the London Gazette and the City of London Gazette (its State equivalent) to inform the public of their responsibilities. These stated that the forces entering the city were, in their entirety, outlaws and that cooperation with them would carry the sentence of treason. The wider notice urged officers to surrender their troops and guns in exchange for amnesty and urged civil resistance. The notice was distributed just in time.
On the OMC side, as the regular troops successfully occupied key buildings in the North of the City, the Sussex Regiment arrived around 11:15 to secure the South. Orders from the OMC moved to arrest the Union Council once the City of Westminster, where the Union Council and Metropolitan Chancellery were meeting, was surrounded and this occurred at 12:30. By 1 pm, the seven major train stations in the city had been occupied as the regular troops and irregulars were tactically vastly superior to the Met Police, and in the mornings fighting some 260 officers and civilians had been killed. London Bridge, Euston, Paddington, Waterloo, Kings Cross, Charing Cross and St Pancras were all now under OMC control, along with all major roads and canals out of the city. Finally, the city’s ports, postal exchanges and telegraphy apparatus were seized and the OMC & OPC used the printing press at the Bee-Hive, where the editor George Howell was beaten and severely wounded by the irregular troops who were sent to secure the use of the printing press. The joint councils printed the following decree and had it distributed around London:
BRITONS!
THE PRIVY COUNCIL HAS SEIZED CONTROL OF THE KINGDOM AND DECLARES THE FOLLOWING AS LAW OF THE LAND:
1.) King Edward VII is proclaimed the rightful King of Great Britain and Ireland, its Realm, Dominions and its Empire and sole Defender of the Faith and has declared the Orange Military Council & Orange Political Council to comprise his most Honourable Privy Councillors.
2.) The Rouge Parliament has been dissolved and its decrees declared void.
3.) The Anglo-Roman Church is dissolved and Popery is declared illegal
4.) The Metropolis is declared in a state of siege and martial law across the Kingdom is hereby declared
5.) The Union Council are declared to be outlaws and shall be arrested for treason.
6.) The treasonous villain, William Ewart Gladstone is declared to be an outlaw and is sentenced to death as proscribed by the Military Council
7.) The so-called State Governments and their Charters are dissolved
8.) The Popish Government in Dublin is declared dissolved
BY ORDER OF
THE PRIVY COUNCIL OF THE REALM
The OMC printed over 6,000 of these declarations and ordered newspapers to print them. They had conducted a clear sweep of the Beehive’s offices when they arrived, and although they found several members of the GFTU, of which one, Robert Danter, was killed after irregulars threw him from a window of the offices, they did not find one man they were instructed to arrest, Shipton. Shipton had moved to a hideout in the East of the City, and from there he coordinated the Trades response to the Coup attempt. 2:00 pm saw the last cohort of irregulars arrive, and the OPC decided, with important buildings seized and the city in seeming control, to finally arrest the Union Council. When he arrived, the Met Police had coordinated with a group of armed workers to move the Government and the Chancellery to the hideout. Finding several Ministers of State in Whitehall, however, they arrested a number of them and several Parliamentarians, including Harcourt, who was still resting and was dragged from his bed. They took them to the Tower of London but found fresh difficulties as they arrived at the Tower - the Guards remained loyal to the Commander in Chief, Field Marshall Yorke and pledged to keep the gates closed to prevent the men, some 40 in all, from being detained at the Tower. After a company from the Suffolk Regiment arrived and pleaded with the guards, they still refused and a gun battle ensued, with the Company and Irregulars finally repelled after the cannons in the Tower were fired to clear the area. 20 soldiers, 11 of the guards, 5 irregulars and 4 of the Suffolk Regiment, had died. The men were escorted to a building in Whitehall where they were held.
As news broke to Disraeli, he was escorted into the capital and demanded to speak with the OMC & OPC to alleviate the crisis. When he arrived at their base in Whitehall, a group of irregulars interned him at the gate and beat him, finally bringing him up to the Committee Room. Disraeli had come to reason with the Orangemen but had found himself badly injured by the irregulars, much to the displeasure of the group. Cole, a pre-Union member of the Carlton Club and an acquaintance of Disraeli, demanded that the irregulars responsible be interned and discussed the matter with Disraeli. When he instructed them to withdraw their men and leave the Capital, Scott and Sir George Jenkinson reacted furiously and demanded the men guarding the room to take Disraeli to be interned with the rest of the Parliamentarians. Disraeli was reported to have said to the Council, insisting to walk, rather than be dragged despite a badly broken leg, that “this insurrection will be the death of the Crown, the death of the Orangemen and the death of all of you!”
The Internment of Disraeli at around 3:30 pm and his perceived defence of the Union would have remarkable implications on his character and loyalty to the people. It would also mark the high point of the success of the Coup Attempt. From this moment, concurrent forces began to move against the insurrection. First was the work of the Joint Session of the Union Council, Metropolitan Chancellery and those who remained of the Executive Committee of the GFTU, as summoned by Farrer, Shipton and Dilke. The three organisations attempted to coordinate a response, and used their three main apparatus to resist the ever enveloping OMC. First, the Union Council assembled called upon the President-Regent to return to London and authorise troops to enter the city to relieve the state of siege. This was largely academic as Field Marshall Yorke had called upon the Essex Regiment to mobilise and they were doing so at the time. Second, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the Vice Chancellor for Internal Affairs, Sir Edmund Henderson and David Waterlow issued a central order that all Metropolitan Police districts should instruct their men to resist the insurrection and arm themselves and all those who wish to resist the insurrection. Finally, the Executive Committee of the GFTU called upon a General Strike for all workers in the Capital, and to aid the Metropolitan Police and the Army in their resistance to the Insurgency. At this stage, the Coup attempt had taken the form of isolated incidents around the capital and had not grasped the attention of the workers and merchants of the city - with the exception of the dockyards and railway stations, which were heavily guarded. But as the printing presses finished the printing of the three decrees, and their distributions around the factories and the shops in London began, the people of the Capital began to take to the streets to resist the occupation, with the largest walkout occurring on the Dockyards, where resistance was immediate from the Putschists. As this began, the division of the troops allied between the Regular and Irregular forces began to come to the fore. Many of the volunteers, hailing from Belfast and the militant sections of the Liverpool Order, began to fire on those who resisted the calls from the officers to return to the docks. The 600 or so guards, commanded by Officers from the Rifles Corp but manned mostly by volunteers were swamped by the nearly 65,000 workers on the docks, who resisted and chased them out of the Docks soon after 4 pm. Other detachments had similar problems, and as the Metropolitan Police arrived with a greater supply of arms, they began to arm strike leaders from the Dockyards to push the Putschists back. Despite being armed with a collection of revolvers which were nowhere near the quality of the military-grade weapons and artillery that was in the possession of the Putschists, the strikers had numbers and the weapons allowed them soon after 5 pm to free the Parliamentarians, including Disraeli from Whitehall and forced the OMC & OPC to relocate to the City of London, where the City of London Volunteers remained loyal to the Coup.
Workers walk out of the factories to protest the Orangeist Coup
As the workers and Met Police regained control of the City of Westminster, the Union Council, Chancellery and Executive Committee were able to safely travel back to Whitehall, but a member of the GFTU Executive Committee, H. R King, suggested to Chamberlain that the Council should speak publicly to encourage the resistance, with Trafalgar Square chosen. Notices were sent around the city for the gathering of supporters of the Union. The release of Disraeli brought him to the mass gathering of over 100,000 workers and merchants in Trafalgar Square, and he spoke before the Union Council arrived. At first, many denounced him, baying for blood as he was assumed to be a conspirator. As he limped onto the hastily constructed podium, however, and word spread through the crowd from the workers who had freed him that he had also been interned and defended the Union, cries of “let him speak” began to ring around the square. His speech was elegant, parliamentary in style and delivered effectively.
Gentlemen, the events of today have been the epitome of the continuous effort by a subversive element, brought forward in the supposed word of God, to shed blood on the streets of the Capital of this Empire. While the existence and object of the Tory party are to uphold the traditional institutions of the country, this cannot be held against the will of the people of the country, who have rallied and shown their discontent with the traditional institutions of this country by their affirming of a Convention Parliament and the vesting of power within the Regency and the Council therein.
Statesmen of the highest character, writers of the most distinguished ability and the most organised and efficient means have been employed to the endeavour of saving this great Empire from the disintegration that others have suffered. Today they continue to defend our capital from the clutches of terror. We must be forever vigilant and forever grateful for your service.
I have spoken in the Houses of Parliament, spoken in the meetings of various Tory organisations and I speak to you today with a resolute mind: the will of Parliament and the will of the people must be respected. The people today, in the face of coercion by an obsessive cult, have shed blood here. Let this day mark the end of such endeavours and the restoration of reason. There can be no turning back.
Disraeli was greeted with thunderous applause, and as the members of the group stood up to speak, Shipton, Farrer, Chamberlain and Granville, each commanded a rousing reception. Granville stood and spoke, delivering a solemn address in the city wherein 1867 he had ordered the massacre of workers assembled in much the same way. “I stand before you, people of the Union, with regret and gratitude. A decade ago I ordered your slaughter, but I shall be forever grateful for the events of today in which you have the savour of myself, and the ministers assembled. A decade ago I stood against you, today I stand with you in the defence of the Union”. By the end of the speech, he was greeted with a rousing reception. Farrer spoke to thank the assembled workers of the City and the Police for their role in the defence of the capital against the Putschists and delivered a foreshadowing of the consequences to come - “this day cannot be forgotten, our demands must be met with a lightning speed.” Dilke was the final member to stand and speak and offered the lasting legacy of the Orange Coup for the Union. As the Units loyal to the Orange Order marched under the Union Flag and the Armed Units arriving wore the same uniform as the rebels, Dilke asked that all those who allied with the Union wear colours to identify themselves. He said that those who were rallying to the Union should identify themselves with colour signifying their commitment to the Union; Red, to represent the Workers, Green, to represent the newfound synergy between the Tories and Liberals in this Trafalgar Coalition and White, to signify the peace between them. As the speech ended, the masses marched to Ede & Ravenscroft, the oldest tailor in the city, and gathered all the Red, White and Green they could and began to tie them to their arms. They used the last of the material to create a flag which now lives in the British Museum as the first flag of the Union of Great Britain & Ireland.
Flag raised in Trafalgar Square that would go on to become the flag of the Union of Britain
As the workers began to March the 100 or so yards to the City of London, they were met with gunfire and artillery which destroyed much of the historic city. Reinforcements under the command of Field Marshall Yorke entered the city at 7:30 pm and retook Euston Station with the help of rioting Railway Trade Unionists, who had been expelled when the Order took the station and barricaded the lines, which reopened the line to the oncoming train stopped in Peterborough carrying the President-Regent and allowed Gladstone to enter the city. His presence amongst the Union Council when he arrived at 8:25 aroused suspicion, as his hasty exit was too convenient and too well-timed. He was not allowed to attend the Three Council’s evening session but signed all the Orders-in-Council issued throughout the day. On the defensive, the OMC forces attempted to barricade themselves in the City of London, but with a force of nearly 100,000 men, 6,000 Met Police and 4,000 reinforcements from the army, carrying the Red, White and Green, their time in the Old City were numbered. They finally abandoned the City at 10:15 and moved to a stronghold in the East End, where the HQ for the operation was based. This however meant the irregulars were marched through Whitechapel, an Irish district, where they were abused and had faeces, rotten vegetables and stones thrown from windows at them. In retaliation, the irregulars lack of discipline saw rioting and the massacre of 25 souls in the district as they moved to the Headquarters, and a company from the Volunteers hailing from Belfast burned down a large portion of the neighbourhood, consuming a further 45 people in the flames. After being driven out, they set up and barricaded themselves in the buildings around St Pancras. Further strongholds pot-marked the city, and as the crowds dispersed home for the evening, it was clear that further fighting would be required to drive them out.
Workers drive out the Orangemen in the East End of London
The Army retook a further two of the railway stations, Charing Cross and Paddington overnight and as dawn broke, the workers remained on the streets, going house to house finding Orangemen and arresting them. 3,500 mostly volunteers were apprehended overnight and the General Strike in the city continued. As the railways opened, the rage across the country at Legitimist Churches continued, and several were ransacked and defaced in major cities. Gladstone called a meeting of all Regiments loyal to the Union in the immediate area together for 11 am, artillery units began shelling the areas that remained controlled by the OMC; Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest in the East, areas of Harrow and Barnet in the North, certain pockets in Kensington and Lewisham. The holdouts in Lewisham were driven out by the Navy, led by Alexander Milne who reported for duty to lead a barrage by gunboat from Greenwich. Workers in these districts barricaded the streets leading out, held sniper positions as Orangemen tried to leave. By 2 pm on the 20th, Orangemen in Lewisham had surrendered, Harrow and Barnet had been cleared by a company of the Oxfordshire Regiment who had come to reinforce the Essex troops, and workers and merchants volunteers had launched a successful mission to drive the Eastern Sector Orangemen, who contained the OMC & OPC, into a sieged section of Newham, finally cornering them with Regulars from the Army into a gun battle for control of a school board offices on Wakefield Street. The remaining 800 troops not captured or killed held the building despite light artillery attacks and the nearly 1300 troops and volunteers surrounding them. They would hold out for 3 days before the OMC & OPC had borrowed a tip from Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War and dipped their daggers in cyanide before cutting their arms, only Cole and Prince George remained. Eighteen of the members of the joint council were found dead in the building and after the building was captured, 550 irregulars and regular forces were marched through the centre of the city. They had rotten vegetables, guts and stones thrown at them as they were paraded through the Capital. The Coup had failed. Other rumblings in major cities had been quelled but the lack of success of the capital uprising sent many into hiding or to the ports, where a catalogue of nobles, aristocrats and Orange sympathisers went into exile. Some 15,000 would flee in the coming weeks as subjects furious with the attempted coup sought revenge.
The striking workers, however, did not return to work once the last of the Orangemen were apprehended. The Executive Committee of the GFTU met on August 26th to discuss the return of workers to work, and the various unions had a series of demands to allow for the ending of the General Strike. Despite three years having passed since the passing of the Constitutional Laws, there was no Union Trade Union Law, there was no guaranteed freedom to strike, no consolidation of Factory Acts, no Work Day Act which restricted working hours, no freedom of association and no replacement for the Bill of Rights. The GFTU met for the first time since the split with the TUC, and on their recommendation, a programme of lustration was demanded to purge the regime of those sympathetic to the coup and those who had conspired or had knowledge prior to the actions. This process would end up with a Trial in the Senate of the highest political figure in the land, but that would be to come. Farrer was presented with a list of demands from Shipton and a representative from the TUC, Daniel Merrick, that asked for the tabling of a series of Bills within 14 days to remedy these gaps in the programme of the Government and for Liberals to be removed from their positions in the Union Council in the Board of Trade, which had passed from the hands of George Ogder to Archibald Primrose, the Liberal, and finally asked that within 100 days, the Provisional Parliament would be dissolved and elections called. Farrer presented the demands to Chamberlain, and he consulted William Rolley, a Democratic Federation and GFTU official who had sponsored and supported Chamberlain’s work in Mercia. He said these demands had broad support, and that they should accept them. Chamberlain visited Gladstone and called him to convene a special, 100-day session of Parliament from the following Monday ending with an election and the presentation of eight bills to be considered with haste, and for Primrose to be replaced by Shipton, who was appointed to the Senate as Agent-General of the Chancellery of the Metropolis following the coup. These eight bills and their passing, in the aftermath of the Orangeist Coup, would be known as the Hundred Days. When the Bills were presented, the GFTU and TUC called off the General Strike, but not before a rampage across the city to tear down the Union Jack of the Orangeist Rebels and replace it with the Red, White and Green of the forces that held the country together.
The Orangeist Coup was an undoubted failure and only succeeded in building support for the Union and growing the confidence of the working-class in Britain. Its containment to London overstated the weakness of the Government in the Metropolis, it overstated the centralisation of the State and it overstated the support for the restoration of the Monarchy, at least via violent means. It crucially damaged the Monarchist cause and although the Paris Affair, which would break in the coming days, would see the end of serious attempts to install Albert-Edward as King, it would also create a break between the Conservative movement, hitherto nearly entirely associated with the institution of monarchy and the monarchy it wished to restore. This break would affect one man more than anyone - Benjamin Disraeli. His intervention, his capture and his tacit support for the Union in the Orangeist Coup rehabilitated him after the National Governments, and with Gladstone absent, and accusations of misconduct abounding at the suspicious nature of his departure from London, Disraeli regained his reputation as a respected Statesmen who now had the crucial advantage of his support for the Constitutional Laws. The Hundred Days would allow him to construct a different vision of the country that was palatable to Republicans as well as Monarchists, bridging the divide and creating a successful coalition going into the election, 100 days from the Coup. Other winners included Chamberlain and Dilke, whose support amongst the populous would have a cannibalising effect on Gladstone and the Liberals popularity and would allow them to continue their ascension into the new political elite of the Young Union. Farrer would build up support across the lower and middle class alike with his heroic defence of the striking workers and Police respectively and allowed him to present himself as a force for order. Finally, Granville’s contrition during the Trafalgar Procession would establish him as a popular figure for the revolution that had occurred. The biggest winner was the Union as a political system, which had overcome its greatest test and now united the people behind it going into its first elections. Very few, but not all, in the political sphere and the candidates for election, promised to abstain from the Union Parliament, people across the country had seen the strength of the Union and State Government as a force for order. The Union, it would seem, would not be provisional, but here to stay.