Peterloo Massacre

In 1819, Lancashire was represented by two county members of parliament (MPs) and a further twelve borough members sitting for the towns of Clitheroe, Newton, Wigan, Lancaster, Liverpool, and Preston, with a total of 17,000 voters in a county population of nearly a million. Thanks to deals by Whig and Tory parties to carve up the seats between them, most had not seen a contested election within living memory.[3]

Nationally the so-called rotten boroughs had a hugely disproportionate influence on the membership of the Parliament of the United Kingdom compared to the size of their populations: Old Sarum in Wiltshire, with one voter, elected two MPs,[4] as did Dunwich in Suffolk, which by the early 19th century had almost completely disappeared into the sea.[5] The major urban centres of Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Blackburn, Rochdale, Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham and Stockport had no MPs of their own, and only a few hundred county voters. By comparison, more than half of all MPs were returned by a total of just 154 owners of rotten or closed boroughs.[4] In 1816, Thomas Oldfield's The Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland; being a History of the House of Commons, and of the Counties, Cities, and Boroughs of the United Kingdom from the earliest Period claimed that of the 515 MPs for England and Wales 351 were returned by the patronage of 177 individuals and a further 16 by the direct patronage of the government: all 45 Scottish MPs owed their seats to patronage.[6] These inequalities in political representation led to calls for reform.[5][7]

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, a brief boom in textile manufacture was followed by periods of chronic economic depression, particularly among cotton textile weavers and spinners. The cotton textile trade was concentrated in Lancashire and the wool textile trade was concentrated over the border in West and North Yorkshire.[8] Weavers who could have expected to earn 15 shillings for a six-day week in 1803, saw their wages cut to 5 shillings or even 4s 6d by 1818.[9] The industrialists, who were cutting wages without offering relief, blamed market forces generated by the aftershocks of the Napoleonic Wars.[9] Exacerbating matters were the Corn Laws, the first of which was passed in 1815, imposing a tariff on foreign grain in an effort to protect English grain producers. The cost of food rose as people were forced to buy the more expensive and lower quality British grain, and periods of famine and chronic unemployment ensued, increasing the desire for political reform both in Lancashire and in the country at large.[10][11]

In the winter of 1816–17 massed reform petitions were rejected by the House of Commons, the largest of them from Manchester with over 30,000 signatures.[12][13] On 10 March 1817 a crowd of 5,000 gathered in St Peter's Fields to send some of their number to march to London to petition the Prince Regent to force parliament into reform; the so-called 'blanket march', after the blankets which the protesters carried with them to sleep in on the way. After the magistrates read the Riot Act, the crowd was dispersed without injury by the King's Dragoon Guards. The ringleaders were detained for several months without charge under the emergency powers then in force which suspended habeas corpus, the right to be either charged or released. In September 1818 three former leading Blanketeers were again arrested for allegedly urging striking weavers in Stockport to demand their political rights, 'sword in hand', and were convicted of sedition and conspiracy at Chester Assizes in April 1819.[14]

By the beginning of 1819 pressure generated by poor economic conditions was at its peak and had enhanced the appeal of political radicalism among the cotton loom weavers of south Lancashire.[8] In January 1819, a crowd of about 10,000 gathered at St Peter's Fields to hear the radical orator Henry Hunt and called on the Prince Regent to choose ministers who would repeal the Corn Laws. The meeting, conducted in the presence of the cavalry, passed off without incident, apart from the collapse of the hustings.[15][16][17]

A series of mass meetings in the Manchester region, Birmingham, and London over the next few months alarmed the government. "Your country [i.e. county] will not be tranquillised until blood shall have been shed, either by the law or the sword", the Home Secretary wrote to the Lancashire magistrates in March. Over the next few months the government worked to find a legal justification for the magistrates to send in troops to disperse a meeting when riot was expected but not actually begun. In July 1819, the magistrates wrote to Lord Sidmouth warning they thought a "general rising" was imminent, the "deep distress of the manufacturing classes" was being worked on by the "unbounded liberty of the press" and "the harangues of a few desperate demagogues" at weekly meetings. "Possessing no power to prevent the meetings" the magistrates admitted they were at a loss as to how to stem the doctrines being disseminated.[18]^: 1–3 The Home Office assured them privately that in "an extreme case a magistrate may feel it incumbent upon him to act even without evidence, and to rely on Parliament for an indemnity."[19]

Against this background, a "great assembly" was organised by the Manchester Patriotic Union formed by radicals from the Manchester Observer. Johnson, the union's secretary, wrote to Henry Hunt asking him to chair a meeting in Manchester on 2 August 1819. Johnson wrote:

Nothing but ruin and starvation stare one in the face [in the streets of Manchester and the surrounding towns], the state of this district is truly dreadful, and I believe nothing but the greatest exertions can prevent an insurrection. Oh, that you in London were prepared for it.[20]

Unknown to Johnson and Hunt, the letter was intercepted by government spies and copied before being sent to its destination, confirming the government's belief that an armed rising was planned.

Samuel Bamford led a group from his native Middleton to St Peter's Field. Following his imprisonment for "inciting a riot", Bamford emerged as a prominent voice for radical reform.

The mass public meeting planned for 2 August was delayed until 9 August. The Manchester Observer reported it was called "to take into consideration the most speedy and effectual mode of obtaining Radical reform in the Common House of Parliament" and "to consider the propriety of the 'Unrepresented Inhabitants of Manchester' electing a person to represent them in Parliament". The government's legal advice was that to elect a representative without a royal writ for an election was a criminal offence, and the magistrates decided to declare the meeting illegal.[21]

On 3 August however the Home Office conveyed to the magistrates the view of the Attorney-General that it was not the intention to elect an MP that was illegal, but the execution of that intention. It advised against any attempt to forcibly prevent the 9 August meeting unless there was an actual riot:

even if they should utter sedition or proceed to the election of a representative Lord Sidmouth is of opinion that it will be the wisest course to abstain from any endeavour to disperse the mob, unless they should proceed to acts of felony or riot. We have the strongest reason to believe that Hunt means to preside and to deprecate disorder.[22]

The radicals' own legal advice however urged caution, and so the meeting was accordingly cancelled and rearranged for 16 August, with its declared aim solely "to consider the propriety of adopting the most LEGAL and EFFECTUAL means of obtaining a reform in the Common House of Parliament".[18]

Samuel Bamford, a local radical who led the Middleton contingent, wrote that "It was deemed expedient that this meeting should be as morally effective as possible, and, that it should exhibit a spectacle such as had never before been witnessed in England."[23] Instructions were given to the various committees forming the contingents that "Cleanliness, Sobriety, Order and Peace" and a "prohibition of all weapons of offence or defence" were to be observed throughout the demonstration.[24] Each contingent was drilled and rehearsed in the fields of the towns around Manchester adding to the concerns of the authorities.[25] A royal proclamation forbidding the practice of drilling had been posted in Manchester on 3 August[26] but on 9 August an informant reported to Rochdale magistrates that at Tandle Hill the previous day, 700 men were "drilling in companies" and "going through the usual evolutions of a regiment" and an onlooker had said the men "were fit to contend with any regular troops, only they wanted arms". The magistrates were convinced that the situation was indeed an emergency which would justify pre-emptive action, as the Home Office had previously explained, and set about lining up dozens of local loyalist gentlemen to swear the necessary oaths that they believed the town to be in danger.[21]

St Peter's Field was a piece of land alongside Mount Street which was being cleared to enable the last section of Peter Street to be constructed. Piles of timber lay at the end of the field nearest to the Friends Meeting House, but the remainder of the field was clear.[31] Thomas Worrell, Manchester's Assistant Surveyor of Paving, arrived to inspect the field at 7:00 am. His job was to remove anything that might be used as a weapon, and he duly had "about a quarter of a load" of stones carted away.[32]

Monday, 16 August 1819, was a hot summer's day, with a cloudless blue sky. The fine weather almost certainly increased the size of the crowd significantly; marching from the outer townships in the cold and rain would have been a much less attractive prospect.[33]

The Manchester magistrates met at 9:00 am, to breakfast at the Star Inn on Deansgate and to consider what action they should take on Henry Hunt's arrival at the meeting. By 10:30 am they had come to no conclusions, and moved to a house on the southeastern corner of St Peter's Field, from where they planned to observe the meeting.[34] They were concerned that it would end in a riot, or even a rebellion, and had arranged for a substantial number of regular troops and militia yeomanry to be deployed. The military presence comprised 600 men of the 15th Hussars; several hundred infantrymen; a Royal Horse Artillery unit with two six-pounder guns; 400 men of the Cheshire Yeomanry; 400 special constables; and 120 cavalry of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry. The Manchester & Salford Yeomanry were relatively inexperienced militia recruited from among local shopkeepers and tradesmen, the most numerous of which were publicans. [35] Recently mocked by the Manchester Observer as "generally speaking, the fawning dependents of the great, with a few fools and a greater proportion of coxcombs, who imagine they acquire considerable importance by wearing regimentals,"[36] they were subsequently variously described as "younger members of the Tory party in arms",[7] and as "hot-headed young men, who had volunteered into that service from their intense hatred of Radicalism."[37] Socialist writer Mark Krantz has described them as "the local business mafia on horseback".[38] R J White described them as "exclusively cheesemongers, ironmongers and newly enriched manufacturers, (who) the people of Manchester … thought … a joke."[39]

The British Army in the north was under the overall command of General Sir John Byng. When he had initially learned that the meeting was scheduled for 2 August he wrote to the Home Office stating that he hoped the Manchester magistrates would show firmness on the day:

I will be prepared to go there, and will have in that neighbourhood, that is within an easy day's march, 8 squadron of cavalry, 18 companies of infantry and the guns. I am sure I can add to the Yeomanry if requisite. I hope therefore the civil authorities will not be deterred from doing their duty.[40]

He then excused himself from attendance, however, as the meeting on the 9th clashed with the horse races at York, a fashionable event at which Byng had entries in two races. He wrote to the Home Office, saying that although he would still be prepared to be in command in Manchester on the day of the meeting if it was thought really necessary, he had absolute confidence in his deputy commander, Lieutenant Colonel Guy L'Estrange.[41] The postponement to 16 August made it possible for Byng to attend after the races but he chose not to, having had enough of dealing with the Manchester magistrates. He had dealt firmly and bloodlessly with the blanketeers two years before; L'Estrange was to exhibit no such qualities of command.[42]

The crowd that gathered in St Peter's Field arrived in disciplined and organised contingents. Contingents were sent from all around the region, the largest and "best dressed" of which was a group of 10,000 who had travelled from Oldham Green, comprising people from Oldham, Royton (which included a sizeable female section), Crompton, Lees, Saddleworth and Mossley.[29] Other sizeable contingents marched from Middleton and Rochdale (6,000 strong) and Stockport (1,500–5,000 strong).[30] Reports of the size of the crowd at the meeting vary substantially. Contemporaries estimated it from 30,000 to as many as 150,000; modern estimates have been 50,000–80,000.[43] Recent work however has reduced these numbers. A reasonably reliable count of the numbers on the various marches indicates a total of around 20,000 who came in from outside Manchester, but the number who attended informally from Manchester and Salford is much harder to estimate. Bush argues from the casualty figures that two-thirds were from Manchester and Salford, suggesting a total crowd of 50,000,[44] but Poole revises this to a half, bringing the total down to 40,000.[45] Steele's estimate of the capacity of the ground suggests 30,000 which, if correct, lowers the attendance but raises the casualty rate.[46]

The assembly was intended by its organisers to be a peaceful meeting; Henry Hunt had exhorted everyone attending to come "armed with no other weapon but that of a self-approving conscience",[47] and many were wearing their "Sunday best" clothes.[31] Samuel Bamford recounts the following incident, which occurred as the Middleton contingent reached the outskirts of Manchester:

On the bank of an open field on our left I perceived a gentleman observing us attentively. He beckoned me, and I went to him. He was one of my late employers. He took my hand, and rather concernedly, but kindly, said he hoped no harm was intended by all those people who were coming in. I said "I would pledge my life for their entire peaceableness." I asked him to notice them, "did they look like persons wishing to outrage the law? were they not, on the contrary, evidently heads of decent working families? or members of such families?" "No, no," I said, "my dear sir, and old respected master, if any wrong or violence take place, they will be committed by men of a different stamp from these." He said he was very glad to hear me say so; he was happy he had seen me, and gratified by the manner in which I had expressed myself. I asked, did he think we should be interrupted at the meeting? he said he did not believe we should; "then," I replied, "all will be well"; and shaking hands, with mutual good wishes, I left him, and took my station as before.[48]

Although William Robert Hay, chairman of the Salford Hundred Quarter Sessions, claimed that "The active part of the meeting may be said to have come in wholly from the country",[49] others such as John Shuttleworth, a local cotton dealer, estimated that most were from Manchester, a view that would subsequently be supported by the casualty lists. Of the casualties whose residence was recorded, sixty-one per cent lived within a three-mile radius of the centre of Manchester.[50] Some groups carried banners with texts like "No Corn Laws", "Annual Parliaments", "Universal suffrage" and "Vote By Ballot".[51] The first female reform societies were established in the textile areas in 1819 and women from the Manchester Female Reform Society, dressed in white, accompanied Hunt to the platform. The society's president Mary Fildes rode in Hunt's carriage carrying its flag.[52] The only banner known to have survived is in Middleton Public Library; it was carried by Thomas Redford, who was injured by a yeomanry sabre. Made of green silk embossed with gold lettering, one side of the banner is inscribed "Liberty and Fraternity" and the other "Unity and Strength."[51] It is the world's oldest political banner.[53]

A print published on 27 August 1819 depicting Hunt's arrest by the constables

At about noon, several hundred special constables were led onto the field. They formed two lines in the crowd a few yards apart, in an attempt to form a corridor through the crowd between the house where the magistrates were watching and the hustings, two wagons lashed together. Believing that this might be intended as the route by which the magistrates would later send their representatives to arrest the speakers, some members of the crowd pushed the wagons away from the constables, and pressed around the hustings to form a human barrier.[54]

Hunt's carriage arrived at the meeting shortly after 1:00 pm, and he made his way to the hustings. Alongside Hunt on the speakers' stand were John Knight, a cotton manufacturer and reformer, Joseph Johnson, the organiser of the meeting, John Thacker Saxton, managing editor of the Manchester Observer, the publisher Richard Carlile, and George Swift, reformer and shoemaker. There were also a number of reporters, including John Tyas of The Times, John Smith of the Liverpool Mercury and Edward Baines Jr, the son of the editor of the Leeds Mercury.[55] By this time St Peter's Field, an area of 14,000 sq yd (11,700 m²), was packed with tens of thousands of men, women and children. The crowd around the speakers was so dense that "their hats seemed to touch"; large groups of curious spectators gathered on the outskirts of the crowd.

The Peterloo Massacre has been called one of the defining moments of its age.[78] Many of those present at the massacre, including local masters, employers and owners, were horrified by the carnage. One of the casualties, Oldham cloth-worker and ex-soldier John Lees, who died from his wounds on 9 September, had been present at the Battle of Waterloo.[25] Shortly before his death he said to a friend that he had never been in such danger as at Peterloo: "At Waterloo there was man to man but there it was downright murder."[79] When news of the massacre began to spread, the population of Manchester and surrounding districts was horrified and outraged.[80]

After the events at Peterloo, many commemorative items such as plates, jugs, handkerchiefs and medals were produced; they were carried by radical supporters and may also have been sold to raise money for the injured.[81] The People's History Museum in Manchester has one of these Peterloo handkerchiefs on display.[82] All the mementos carried the iconic image of Peterloo; cavalrymen with swords drawn riding down and slashing at defenceless civilians.[83] The reverse of the Peterloo medal carried a Biblical text, derived from Psalm 37:14:

The wicked have drawn out the sword, they have cast down the poor and needy and such as be of upright conversation.[84]

Peterloo was the first public meeting at which journalists from important, distant newspapers were present and within a day or so of the event, accounts were published in London, Leeds and Liverpool.[58] The London and national papers shared the horror felt in the Manchester region, and the feeling of indignation throughout the country became intense. James Wroe, editor of the Manchester Observer, was the first to describe the incident as the "Peterloo Massacre", coining his headline by creating the ironic portmanteau from St Peter's Field and the Battle of Waterloo that had taken place four years earlier.[85] He also wrote pamphlets entitled "The Peterloo Massacre: A Faithful Narrative of the Events". Priced at 2d each, they sold out every print run for 14 weeks and had a large national circulation.[85] Sir Francis Burdett, a reformist MP, was jailed for three months for publishing a seditious libel.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was in Italy and did not hear of the massacre until 5 September. His poem The Masque of Anarchy, subtitled Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester, was sent for publication in the radical periodical The Examiner, but because of restrictions on the radical press it was not published until 1832, ten years after the poet's death.[86][87]

The immediate effect of Peterloo was a crackdown on reform. The government instructed the police and courts to go after the journalists, presses and publication of the Manchester Observer.[85] Wroe was arrested and charged with producing a seditious publication. Found guilty he was sentenced to 12 months in prison and fined £100.[85] Outstanding court cases against the Manchester Observer were rushed through the courts and a continual change of sub-editors was not sufficient defence against a series of police raids, often on the suspicion that someone was writing a radical article. The Manchester Observer closed in February 1820.[85][88]

Hunt and eight others were tried at York Assizes on 16 March 1820, charged with sedition. After a two-week trial, five defendants were found guilty, on a single one of the seven charges. Hunt was sentenced to 30 months in Ilchester Gaol; Bamford, Johnson, and Healey were given one year each, and Knight was jailed for two years on a subsequent charge. A civil case on behalf of a weaver wounded at Peterloo was brought against four members of the Manchester Yeomanry, Captain Birley, Captain Withington, Trumpeter Meagher, and Private Oliver, at Lancaster Assizes, on 4 April 1822. All were acquitted, as the court ruled their actions had been justified to disperse an illegal gathering and that the murders were nothing more than self-defense.[89]

Notice "to the inhabitants of the Hundred of Salford", published by the magistrates the day after the massacre

The government declared its support for the actions taken by the magistrates and the army. The Manchester magistrates held a supposedly public meeting on 19 August, so that resolutions supporting the action they had taken three days before could be published. Cotton merchants Archibald Prentice (later editor of The Manchester Times) and Absalom Watkin (a later corn-law reformer), both members of the Little Circle, organised a petition of protest against the violence at St Peter's Field and the validity of the magistrates' meeting. Within a few days it had collected 4,800 signatures.[90] Nevertheless, the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, on 27 August conveyed to the magistrates the thanks of the Prince Regent for their action in the "preservation of the public peace."[10] That public exoneration was met with fierce anger and criticism. During a debate at Hopkins Street Robert Wedderburn declared "The Prince is a fool with his Wonderful letters of thanks … What is the Prince Regent or King to us, we want no King – he is no use to us."[91] In an open letter, Richard Carlile said:

Unless the Prince calls his ministers to account and relieved his people, he would surely be deposed and make them all REPUBLICANS, despite all adherence to ancient and established institutions.[91]

For a few months following Peterloo it seemed to the authorities that the country was heading towards an armed rebellion. Encouraging them in that belief were two abortive uprisings, in Huddersfield and Burnley, the Yorkshire West Riding Revolt, during the autumn of 1820, and the discovery and foiling of the Cato Street conspiracy to blow up the cabinet that winter.[92] By the end of the year, the government had introduced legislation, later known as the Six Acts, to suppress radical meetings and publications, and by the end of 1820 every significant working-class radical reformer was in jail; civil liberties had declined to an even lower level than they were before Peterloo. Historian Robert Reid has written that "it is not fanciful to compare the restricted freedoms of the British worker in the post-Peterloo period in the early nineteenth century with those of the black South African in the post-Sharpeville period of the late twentieth century."[93]

The Peterloo Massacre also influenced the naming of the 1821 Cinderloo Uprising in the Coalbrookdale Coalfield of east Shropshire. The uprising saw 3,000 protesting workers confronted by the Shropshire Yeomanry, leading to the deaths of 3 crowd members.[94][95]

One direct consequence of Peterloo was the foundation of the Manchester Guardian newspaper in 1821, by the Little Circle group of non-conformist Manchester businessmen headed by John Edward Taylor, a witness to the massacre.[7] The prospectus announcing the new publication proclaimed that it would "zealously enforce the principles of civil and religious Liberty … warmly advocate the cause of Reform … endeavour to assist in the diffusion of just principles of Political Economy and … support, without reference to the party from which they emanate, all serviceable measures."[96]

Events such as the Pentrich rising, the March of the Blanketeers and the Spa Fields meeting, all serve to indicate the breadth, diversity and widespread geographical scale of the demand for economic and political reform at the time.[97] Peterloo had no effect on the speed of reform, but in due course all but one of the reformers' demands, annual parliaments, were met.[98] Following the Great Reform Act of 1832, the newly created Manchester parliamentary borough elected its first two MPs. Five candidates including William Cobbett stood, and the Whigs, Charles Poulett Thomson and Mark Philips, were elected.[99] Manchester became a Municipal Borough in 1838, and the manorial rights were purchased by the borough council in 1846.[100]

On the other hand, R J White has affirmed the true significance of Peterloo as marking the point of final conversion of provincial England to the struggle for enfranchisement of the working class. "The ship which had tacked and lain for so long among the shoals and shallows of Luddism, hunger-marching, strikes and sabotage, was coming to port"; "Henceforth, the people were to stand with ever greater fortitude behind that great movement, which, stage by stage throughout the nineteenth century, was to impose a new political order upon society"; "With Peterloo, and the departure of Regency England, parliamentary reform had come of age."[101]

• Bruton, Francis Archibald (1921), Three Accounts of Peterloo
• White, Reginald J (1957), Waterloo to Peterloo, William Heinemann Ltd