Category: History

Prehistory: Why is it so entrancing?

Circles without Class Ceilings

Why can prehistory be so entrancing?

Why do some people find prehistory so entrancing?
Why do they become so spellbound
When walking by, let’s say, a long barrow?
How do they become so transported in time and space?
What’s it all about?

Is it because a standing stone, a circle,
A tumulus, barrow, or whatever,
Demonstrates the fragility of knowledge,
The equivocal nature of understanding,
In a sense, the ‘negative capability’ of John Keats:
Being conscious, simultaneously,
Of knowing and yet not knowing?
The recognition that sometimes any presumption
Of understanding the meaning of an edifice,
Can only be speculative
(Despite the accumulation of evidence and artefacts,
Despite measurement, mensuration and comparison,
Despite a commitment to the rigours of empiricism),
And a reflection of who we are in the here and now –
Or can Homo sapiens merely develop
A restricted trope of meanings, recognizable
And familiar, across time and space …
So some speculations are bound to be valid …
Or is signification, itself, a trope of modernity?
Nature and Nurture:
How circumscribed are we by time and space?
And how universal are we across the same?
What do these structures reveal and indicate
About what is quintessentially human?

So, prehistoric structures,
In an a priori, apostrophizing, manner,
The manner of an innocent wonderer,
As yet unread on the subject,
I question your meaning:
What were you for?

Circles without Class Ceilings

Why can prehistory be so entrancing?

Why do some people find prehistory so entrancing?
Why do they become so spellbound
When walking by, let’s say, a long barrow?
How do they become so transported in time and space?
What’s it all about?

Is it because a standing stone, a circle,
A tumulus, barrow, or whatever,
Demonstrates the fragility of knowledge,
The equivocal nature of understanding,
In a sense, the ‘negative capability’ of John Keats:
Being conscious, simultaneously,
Of knowing and yet not knowing?
The recognition that sometimes any presumption
Of understanding the meaning of an edifice,
Can only be speculative
(Despite the accumulation of evidence and artefacts,
Despite measurement, mensuration and comparison,
Despite a commitment to the rigours of empiricism),
And a reflection of who we are in the here and now –
Or can Homo sapiens merely develop
A restricted trope of meanings, recognizable
And familiar, across time and space …
So some speculations are bound to be valid …
Or is signification, itself, a trope of modernity?
Nature and Nurture:
How circumscribed are we by time and space?
And how universal are we across the same?
What do these structures reveal and indicate
About what is quintessentially human?

So, prehistoric structures,
In an a priori, apostrophizing, manner,
The manner of an innocent wonderer,
As yet unread on the subject,
I question your meaning:
What were you for?

Do you indicate liminality:
A corridor to another world:
A sacred, spiritual, site of worship?
Cotswold barrows:
Were you positioned high on the Wolds
So as to be close to the sun, stars, planets and moon?
Or merely because the soil was thin up there,
And high above the flood plains;
Or were you territorial markers,
Boundary-points, socio-political in meaning;
Or were you topographical in intent,
Adding meaning to a landscape;
Were you part of a network and fretwork
Of communication channels, made visible?

How did the practice of stone circle structure spread?
And why?
Was stone seen as sentient?
It warmed with the sun,
It cried with a thaw,
It spread patterns with lichen and moss,
It could be scented,
It could groan and cry out in anguish –

Or small stone and flints for tools,
Giant stones for thanks and worship,
The Gods of the Earth united with the Gods of the Sky
In calendrical geometry …
Or to demonstrate power over stone
In a belief-system’s symbolic display,
So as to ensure the continued production
Of rather more prosaic, but necessary, tools
That guaranteed survival and prosperity?

Now for a sort of social-psychological perspective,
Or is it anthropological …
Did everyone regard these structures,
And, indeed, the labour involved in their construction,
In a unified and collective way?
Were there, as it were, renegades,
Left field outliers, individualists,
Eccentrics and so on who questioned it all?
Commonality and cohesion are always assumed,
It seems to me on initial reading memory …
How was hierarchy, assuming it existed, revealed?
Doesn’t the assumption of hierarchy,
As both consequent cause and consequence
Of specialization- warriors and priests and rulers –
Merely reflect the assumptions
Of Western post-Enlightenment Capitalism …
Couldn’t those deposits –
Both human and artefact –
Symbolize the collective,
And be both part and representative of all?

The past might just be a different country,
After all,
And a prehistoric past might yet be a signpost
To a more sharing, caring future,
A collective rather than individualist one,
One that rejects hierarchy,
One that rejects celebrity,
One that embraces caring and sharing:
Circles without Class Ceilings …

Party like it’s 2500BC: Stonehenge building secrets unearthed

The process of building Stonehenge – and having a party at the same time – may have been more important than the finished monument, English Heritage has said.

Experts believe that choosing the stones, moving them and setting them up on Salisbury Plain, may have been a way of bringing people together to socialise and celebrate.

Over this weekend visitors, people who live close to the monument in Wiltshire and schoolchildren are being invited to try to move and set up a four-tonne stone similar in size and shape to the sarsen lintels at the famous stone circle.

The idea is not to puzzle out in a scientific way engineering aspects of moving and setting up the stones, but to bring people together to enjoy a communal experience.

English Heritage’s senior historian, Susan Greaney, said: “In contemporary western culture, we are always striving to make things as easy and quick as possible, but we believe that for the builders of Stonehenge this may not have been the case.

“Drawing a large number of people from far and wide to take part in the process of building was potentially a powerful tool in demonstrating the strength of the community to outsiders.

“Being able to welcome and reward these people who had travelled far, perhaps as a kind of pilgrimage, with ceremonial feasts, could be a further expression of the power and position of the community.”

Research showcased at Stonehenge reveals that prehistoric people brought animals to the site from as far afield as north-east Scotland, more than 500 miles away, to take part in lavish midwinter feasts.

Scientists examined some of the 38,000 bones and teeth (90% of them pig; 10% cattle) discovered at the site of a neolithic village called Durrington Walls, which lies about a mile and a half north-east of the main stone ring.

Durrington Walls was only settled for between 50 and 100 years but it is believed to have housed the circle’s builders and the first visitors after the sarsen stones were put in place.

Experts examined elements including strontium in the pig teeth found at Durrington Walls. Because isotopes of strontium differ chemically according to the geology of the place where the young animal fed, it is possible to discover where individual creatures came from.

They concluded cows and pigs were herded hundreds of miles along ancient byways and may even have been brought by boat to southern England. It suggested that in 2500BC Stonehenge was known across Britain as a place of pilgrimage and celebration.

Stonehenge experts have also been studying evidence from societies who more recently have practised moving huge stones – such as communities on the islands of Sumba and Nias in Indonesia, and in north-eastern parts of India.

Greaney said: “There are amazing photos from societies in Indonesia and parts of India within the last 100 years or so of people practising stone moving and raising. They show people in ceremonial dress, amazing feasts happening, hundreds of people coming together and having a good time.

“As soon as you abandon modern preconceptions that assume neolithic people would have sought the most efficient way of building Stonehenge, questions like why the bluestones were brought from so far away – the Preseli Hills of south Wales – don’t seem quite so perplexing.”

Over the weekend groups of about 40 people will use rollers and ropes to move a hunk of limestone (prosaically brought from a local quarry on the back of a lorry) before helping to erect it into a pre-dug hole. Visitors can simply turn up and join in.

Prehistory and Wormholes of Time

As the traffic rumbles past on Cotswold roads,
It’s hard to hear the chip of stone on flint,
Or the croak of corvids with their blood-drip beaks,
Or the breaking of the bones of a skeleton,
Or smell the rotting flesh on the capstone,
Or taste the ashes of the dead on the nightfall wind,
Or see the blood red sunset behind the silver river
Or the standing stone’s silhouette,
But try hard on a winter’s afternoon,
And you might just slip down a wormhole of time,
To rituals of death and memory,
And recognize the prehistoric past
For what it is and was:
Not something primitive and alien,
But something shared.

As the traffic rumbles past on Cotswold roads,
It’s hard to hear the chip of stone on flint,
Or the croak of corvids with their blood-drip beaks,
Or the breaking of the bones of a skeleton,
Or smell the rotting flesh on the capstone,
Or taste the ashes of the dead on the nightfall wind,
Or see the blood red sunset behind the silver river
Or the standing stone’s silhouette,
But try hard on a winter’s afternoon,
And you might just slip down a wormhole of time,
To rituals of death and memory,
And recognize the prehistoric past
For what it is and was:
Not something primitive and alien,
But something shared.

Peterloo and Revolution

REVOLUTION 1819-2019

This was the time when the age of Marx replaced that of Burke,
The time when the ‘swinish multitude’ and ‘the mob’ became a working class,
When there was not just the economic revolution of school textbooks,
But also a presence of a possible political one,
A time when Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (sic),
Viewed as seditious and libellous
By the nation’s rulers,
Could sell 200,000 copies in a year,
When the population was only around ten million,
And so many could not read – but they listened,
And learned and remembered,
Despite the patriotic cavalcades
And violent contrived disruption of ‘Jacobin’ meetings,
Despite the show trials and government spies,
The arrest of booksellers, the banning of political meetings,
The censorship and illegalisation of criticism of government or monarchy.
This was our land in the 1790s:
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women,
Pitt’s repression at home and war abroad,
Food riots all around our five valleys
(‘We might as well be hanged as starved’),

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-1766-food-riots-and-the-hangmans-noose/

The Naval Mutinies of 1797
(“An attempt was made to give to the ships
in mutiny the name of ‘The Floating Republic’.”)
‘Secret Jacobin springs’ were rumoured:
‘Jacobin emissaries and the Corresponding Society …
Jacobin management and influence is at the bottom of this evil’;
The Red Flag was hoisted;
Richard Parker was elected President by the mutinous delegates:
‘… We are not rebels to our country, our country are rebels to us.’
‘I and my brother delegates are all united, and acting in the cause of humanity;
and while life animates the heart of Dick Parker, he will be true to the cause.’
Anything else to rock the ship of state?
Riots against the Militia Act in Scotland,
Wolfe Tone and rebellion in Ireland –
When more people were killed by the army
Than in the ‘Reign of Terror’ in Paris …
Pamphlets such as King Killing;
The Happy Reign of King George the Last;
100, 000 people meeting at Copenhagen Fields, Islington;
The King’s carriage attacked:
‘No War! No King! No Pitt!’
This sung to the tune of ‘God Save the King’ at Drury Lane Theatre:
‘And when George’s Poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The Guillotine.’

REVOLUTION 1819-2019

This was the time when the age of Marx replaced that of Burke,
The time when the ‘swinish multitude’ and ‘the mob’ became a working class,
When there was not just the economic revolution of school textbooks,
But also a presence of a possible political one,
A time when Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (sic),
Viewed as seditious and libellous
By the nation’s rulers,
Could sell 200,000 copies in a year,
When the population was only around ten million,
And so many could not read – but they listened,
And learned and remembered,
Despite the patriotic cavalcades
And violent contrived disruption of ‘Jacobin’ meetings,
Despite the show trials and government spies,
The arrest of booksellers, the banning of political meetings,
The censorship and illegalisation of criticism of government or monarchy.
This was our land in the 1790s:
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women,
Pitt’s repression at home and war abroad,
Food riots all around our five valleys
(‘We might as well be hanged as starved’),

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-1766-food-riots-and-the-hangmans-noose/

The Naval Mutinies of 1797
(“An attempt was made to give to the ships
in mutiny the name of ‘The Floating Republic’.”)
‘Secret Jacobin springs’ were rumoured:
‘Jacobin emissaries and the Corresponding Society …
Jacobin management and influence is at the bottom of this evil’;
The Red Flag was hoisted;
Richard Parker was elected President by the mutinous delegates:
‘… We are not rebels to our country, our country are rebels to us.’
‘I and my brother delegates are all united, and acting in the cause of humanity;
and while life animates the heart of Dick Parker, he will be true to the cause.’
Anything else to rock the ship of state?
Riots against the Militia Act in Scotland,
Wolfe Tone and rebellion in Ireland –
When more people were killed by the army
Than in the ‘Reign of Terror’ in Paris …
Pamphlets such as King Killing;
The Happy Reign of King George the Last;
100, 000 people meeting at Copenhagen Fields, Islington;
The King’s carriage attacked:
‘No War! No King! No Pitt!’
This sung to the tune of ‘God Save the King’ at Drury Lane Theatre:
‘And when George’s Poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The Guillotine.’

Anything else?
The Combination Acts of 1799-1800,
Illegalising trade unions,
Colonel Despard and the United Englishmen:
‘Aristocrats to the lamp posts… we’ll hang them … we’ll break them …
We shall have no more nobles and priests.’
The colonel, married to a woman of colour,
Meeting at Furnival’s Inn, Holborn, and in Soho Square,
With the idea of a coup d’etat:
With the provinces to follow the following action:
Attacks on the Tower of London, Woolwich Arsenal,
The Royal Mint, the Bank of England …
But here come the Bow Street Runners,
Arresting the conspirators in the Oakley Arms, Lambeth:
‘You have been separately indicted for conspiracy against his Majesty’s person,
his crown and government, for the purposes of subverting the same
and changing the government of this realm’;
‘Each of you … are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution,
where you are to be hanged, but not until you are dead;
for while you are still living, your bodies are to be taken down,
your bowels torn out and burned before your faces,
your heads cut off and your bodies to be divided into quarters
and your heads and quarters to be then at the King’s disposal
and may Almighty God have mercy on your souls.’
(The disembowelling and burning were later rescinded.)
John McNamara whispered to Despard on the scaffold:
‘I am afraid, Colonel, we have got ourselves into a bad situation.’
Despard: ‘There are many better and some worse.’
He then addressed the crowds with a democratic greeting:
‘Fellow citizens’ –
And then coolly informed them that he was about to be executed
Because:
‘He has been a friend to the truth, to liberty and to justice,
because he has been a friend to the poor and oppressed.’
Let’s jump on a few years …
And we have the Luddite action in the north
(More troops stationed there than used against Napoleon),
Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords
on the Disturbed State of Certain Counties, 1812:
‘All the societies in the country are directed … by a Secret Committee … these societies are governed by their respective secret committees … delegates are continually dispatched from one place to another, for the purpose of concerting their plans’,

On top of that,
There were bread riots in Leeds, Sheffield, Barnsley, Carlisle and Bristol;
The Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated;
In Stoke, it was reported that,
‘A man came running down the street, waving his hat round his head
And shouting with frantic joy:
“Perceval is shot, hurrah!”
There were parties in the street,
Drum beats and flags unfurled in Nottingham,
While, locally, we could look at Uley and all around the five valleys:

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/class-conflict-in-uley-1795/

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/before-the-luddites/

While back in William Cobbett’s ‘Great Wen’?
Thomas Spence with his plans for agrarian communism,
To end, as he put it:
‘the poor man’s poverty and the rich man’s gout’;
He and his followers, such as William Davison, a man ‘of colour’,
Chalked their egalitarian plans and messages
All over London walls and pavements;
Spence issued medallions with circumferential revolutionary slogans;
Their anthem ended with these lines:
‘From landlords, once set free,
The bells shall ring, we’ll dance and sing
On Spence’s Jubilee’,
Thomas, selling his journal from a baker’s cart:
Pig’s Meat: or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude,
‘a few Contingent parishes have only to declare the land to be theirs and …
other adjacent parishes would immediately follow the example …
thus would a beautiful and powerful New Republic
instantly arise in full vigour’;
His other publications included:
Restorer of Society to its Natural State,
The Real Rights of Man,
The Restorer;
Theirs was a dream of a revolutionary Utopia:
Spensonia!

But the end of war in 1815 and peace at last!
And …

Soldiers and sailors on the streets,
Unemployed weavers,
Corn Laws to protect landlord profits by keeping out cheaper corn imports
(Lord Sidmouth, Home Secretary:
‘Man cannot create abundance where Providence has inflicted scarcity’;
‘The alleviation of the difficulties is not to be looked for
from the intervention of Government and Parliament’),
‘Bread or Blood’ riots in East Anglia in 1816,
Hampden Clubs formed for political reform, and
Extension of the suffrage, secret ballot, and annual parliaments,
Republican newspapers such as The Black Dwarf,
And The Gorgon, and William Cobbett’s Political Register
(Derided as ‘Twopenny Trash’ by the patrician ruling class,
Yet it would sell 60,000 a week,
Ten times that of the Times and Observer):
‘If the skulkers will not join you,
If the decent fireside gentry still keep aloof,
Proceed by yourselves’ …
And so we proceed to Spa Fields in 1816,
Thousands present with the tricolour, the Cap of Liberty,
When followers of Thomas Spence attempted something of a coup d’etat,
Trying to scale the walls at the Tower of London,
Devising an ‘Anti-Cavalry Machine’, ‘The Night Cat’,
Designed to suffocate soldiers in their barracks.
The leaders were charged with High Treason,
But the involvement of a government spy
Led to their acquittal;
One year later and we have a sort of hunger march,
The March of the Blanketeers,
The same year, the Pentridge Rising of 1817 –
Another armed uprising of sorts,
With agent-provocateur fabulations (Oliver the Spy) …
But, this time, executions and transportation followed:
‘The jurors of our Lord the King upon their oath present that …
Jeremiah Brandreth … otherwise called the Nottingham Captain …
together with a great multitude of false traitors …
to the number of five hundred and more,
arrayed and armed in a war-like manner,
that is to say with swords, pistols, clubs, bludgeons, and other weapons …
did then with great violence parade and march in a hostile manner
in and through divers villages, places, and public highways …
and did then and there maliciously and traitorously
attempt and endeavour by force of arms
to subvert and destroy the Government and Constitution of the Realm’;
The Black Dwarf remembered Jeremiah Brandreth differently:
FORMED BY NATURE FOR DEEDS OF DARING
HIS SOUL POSSESSED A DEGREE OF PERSONAL COURAGE
AND AN EXTENT OF SELF-COMMAND
WHICH
UNDER THE SMILE OF FORTUNE MIGHT HAVE ENABLED HIM
TO ECLIPSE THE FAME OF MARLBOROUGH
AND RIVAL THE GLORY OF NAPOLEON’;
William Turner cried out on the gallows:
‘This is all Oliver and the Government’,
But a parliamentary secret committee talked of:
‘some general plan of simultaneous or connected insurrection;
the object … after consolidating a sufficient force,
to march upon London,
and there to overthrow the existing Government
and to establish a republic’;
And from Manchester:
‘the lower orders
are everywhere meeting in large bodies
and are very clamorous’ about
‘a general union of the lower orders throughout the kingdom’;

The suspension of Habeas Corpus followed in 1817,
And the Seditious Meetings Act,
The use of government spies and agents-provocateurs
(In passing, btw,
even if the government did use spies
and agents-provocateurs,
to furnish the justificatory evidence
necessary for policies of repression,
we have to say that the plots still happened),
The spread of barracks: 26, 000 troops stationed in barracks,
Rather than in inns where they might become disaffected:

The Black Dwarf 1817:

‘The army and the people are … separated from each other … no intercourse must be allowed … lest the soldier should begin to remember that he is a man’;

William Hone, 1817:

‘Our Lord who art in the Treasury,
whatsoever be thy name,
thy power be prolonged,
thy will be done throughout the Empire …
Turn us not out of our places,
But keep us in the House of Commons,
The land of Pensions and Plenty;
And deliver us from the People.
Amen.’
Joseph Swann, a newspaper seller,
Imprisoned for four and a half years in 1819,
For selling ‘treasonable material’:
‘Off with your fetters; spurn the slavish yoke,
None, now, or never, can your chain be broke;
Swift then, rise and give the fatal stroke.’

In 1819, the ban on political meetings ended,
There were calls for female suffrage in the North,
40,000 Glasgow weavers met to petition the Prince Regent
for assistance so as to emigrate to Canada –
But for radicals, the answer would have to be universal suffrage,
And the secret ballot and annual parliaments;
The summer would be the time for a signal meeting,
Manchester to be the venue
(Hunt at Smithfield, 21st July 1819:
‘After the first day of 1820 we cannot, conscientiously,
consider ourselves … as bound by any persons styling themselves
our representatives, other than those who shall be
fully, freely and fairly chosen by the voices and votes
of the largest proportion of the members of the state’),
With Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt to address 60,000 people
(‘Libellous, seditious, factious, levelling, revolutionary,
Republican, democratical, atheistical villain’)
All in orderly procession, dressed in their Sunday best,
All following Hunt’s request that they should bring
‘No other weapon that that of an approving conscience’,
Banners were profuse:
UNITY & STRENGTH;
PARLIAMENTS ANNUAL – SUFFRAGE UNIVERSAL;
Red caps of liberty at this perfectly legal meeting,
With nigh on 20% of Lancashire’s population present,
But in rode the Yoemanry,
And then the Hussars, flashing their swords
(Nearly three foot long and weighing two ibs two ounces)
Within minutes eleven dead and over four hundred wounded,
Sprawled everywhere on the ground were
‘Hats, bonnets, shawls, shoes, musical instruments …
In the midst stood the hustings with its broken flag-staffs
and tattered banners’;
Samuel Bamford described it thus:
‘the hustings remained,
with a few broken and hewed flag staves erect
and a torn and gashed banner or two drooping,
whilst over the whole field were strewed the caps,
bonnets, hats, shawls and shoes …
trampled, torn and bloody.
The Yoemanry had dismounted –
Some were easing their horses’ girths,
Others adjusting their accoutrements;
And some were wiping their sabres.
Several mounds of human bodies still remained as they had fallen,
Crushed down and smothered.
Some of these still groaning – some with staring eyes,
Were gasping for breath and others would never breath again …’
Eleven dead and over four hundred wounded;
The Prince Regent offered his congratulations for
‘prompt, decisive and efficient measures
for the preservation of the public tranquillity’;
Lord Sidmouth, Home Secretary, in private:
‘an essential principle of government … the confidence of the magistracy …
a readiness to support them in all honest, reasonable, and well-intended acts,
without inquiring too minutely whether they might
have performed their duty a little better or a little worse.’
The local authorities thanked the Yoemanry:
‘Their extreme forbearance exercised
when insulted and defied by the rioters’;
And so that was the meeting at St Peter’s Fields,
Peterloo, 1819,
Witnessed thus, by Lieutenant Joliffe, 15th Hussars:
‘although nine tenths of the sabre wounds were caused by the Hussars,
it redounds to the human forbearance
of the men of the 15th that more wounds were not received,’;
Peterloo, followed by the dictatorial Six Acts,
And Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy –
‘I met Murder on the way
It had a face like Castlereagh …
Ye are Many, They are few’ …
Peterloo, followed by the spy-riddled 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy:
Arthur Thistlewood, Watson and co. organised
The Committee of Two Hundred,
They met surreptitiously at the White Lion in Wych Street,
Planning a coup d’etat with the formation of a Provisional Government
(Thistlewood’s planned speech:
‘Your tyrants are destroyed.
The friends of liberty are called upon to come forward.
The provisional government is now sitting.’),
The spark – the assassination of the cabinet in revenge for Peterloo,
Whilst they were dining at Lord Harrowby’s,
The idea being to decapitate the cabinet
(Henry Bathurst’s would have been included, btw),
And parade the heads on spikes through London’s chartered streets:
James Ings:
‘ I will enter the room first, I will go in with a brace of pistols,
a cutlass and a knife in my pocket
and after two swordsmen have despatched them,
I will cut off every head that is in that room
And Lord Castlereagh’s and Lord Sidmouth’s
I will bring away in a bag …
As soon as I get into the room I shall say:
“Well my Lords, I have as good men here as your Manchester Yoemanry.
Enter Citizens, and do your duty.”’
But the Bow Street Runners broke into the stable loft in Cato Street,
The conspirators were taken prisoner after a skirmish;
Whilst they were held at the Horse and Groom,
A search of the loft revealed
‘a great quantity of pistols, blunderbusses, swords and pikes’;
Charges of high treason followed,
For the conspirators ‘ did compass, imagine, invent, devise
And intend to deprive and depose our said Lord the King of …
The style, honour and kingly name
Of the imperial crown of this realm’;
Secondly, they intended
‘To move and excite insurrection, rebellion and war against the King …
and to subvert and alter the legislature, rule and government
and to bring and put the King to death’;
Ings emphasised the role of Edward the Spy:
‘The Attorney-General knew …
when I was before Lord Sidmouth,
a gentleman said,
Lord Sidmouth knew all about this for about two month’;
Bruit said,
‘Should I die, by this case,
I have been seduced by a villain,
who, I have no doubt,
has been employed by Government’;
Thistlewood: ‘Liberty and Justice
Have been driven from confines by a set of villains,
Whose thirst for blood is only to be equalled …
By their plunder’;
Apart from castigating Edwards, he spoke also of Peterloo:
‘when infants were sabred in their mothers’ arms
and the breast from which they drew the tide of life,
was severed from the parent’s body’;
‘High treason was committed against the people of Manchester,
I resolved that the lives of the instigators of the massacre
should atone for the souls of the murdered innocents’,

But Black Cap Chief Justice was unmoved:
‘You and each of you; be taken here to the gaol from whence you came
and from thence that you be drawn upon a hurdle to a place of execution
and there be hanged by the neck until you be dead; and that
afterwards your heads shall be severed from your bodies
and your bodied be divided into four quarters
to be disposed of as his majesty shall think fit.
And may God in his infinite goodness have mercy on your souls’;
Thistlewood disdainfully took snuff as he listened to the verdict;
The date chosen: a hurried May 1st 1820 –
Thistlewood:
‘The sooner we go, sir, the better’;
And on the scaffold, Tidd and Thistlewood shook hands:
‘Well, Mr Thistlewood. How do you do?’
‘I was never better.’
After they had hung for half an hour,
Their bodies were taken down, de-hooded,
And their heads were placed on the block:
‘This is the head of Arthur Thistlewood, the traitor.’
One by one, the heads were shown,
But the crowd shouted:
‘Bring out Edwards!
Shoot that bloody murderer!’
Windows were smashed afterwards …
The Home Office had received a plenitude of anonymous letters
Before May 1st, threatening violence:
‘To Ministers, Privy Councillors, Bloody-minded wretches –
Ye are now brooding with hellish delight
On the sacrifice ye intend to make on those poor creatures
Ye took out of Cato Street on pretence
Of punishing them for what your own horrid spies
And agents instigated … But know this,
Ye demons, on an approaching day
And in an hour when you least expect it
Ye yourselves shall fall a sacrifice to
The just vengeance of an oppressed
And suffering people who shall behold
Your bloody corpses dragged in Triumph through their streets.’

The 1820s saw the rise of trade union action again
(The consequence being the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834),
And then in 1830, the Captain Swing agricultural riots,
When southern England was ablaze,
Followed by the crisis of 1830-32 over parliamentary reform,
When the Whig government divided the middle from the working class
(‘Seducing the bourgeoisie’),
By giving the vote to householders on a stiff property qualification,
Thereby ensuring continued aristocratic dominance,
And preventing any possibility of revolution.
In the words of Macaulay:
“Reform that ye may preserve”
(Remember! The word ‘democracy’
was a pejorative then to our rulers),
But when it seemed that the House of Lords was determined
To prevent any semblance of reform
and even limited extension of the franchise,
Riots followed at Derby, Nottingham and Bristol,
There was a run on gold at the Bank of England,
There were rumours of armed marches from the provinces on London,
Of refusals to pay taxes,
Of mutinies in the army and refusals to obey orders,
Windows were smashed in the houses of infamous reactionaries,
Such as the Duke of Wellington,
There were strikes in the industrial north, midlands and Wales …

An Interlude not The Prelude:

Wordsworth might have grown up ‘fostered alike by beauty and by fear’,
But it was fear alone that stalked him in 1817,
Seeing treason and sedition, ‘even among these mountains’,
Informing the prime minister of the necessity
Of an armed presence in the capital,
Otherwise, ‘four and twenty hours would not elapse
before the tricoloured flag would be planted …’

An Epilogue of Sorts

When next in London, let’s walk the sites of these radical pubs,
Where treason and sedition were discussed as standard:
The Two Bells, the Flying Horse, the Ham and Windmill,
The Bleeding Heart; the Coach and Horses;
The Brown Bear and the Black Horse.

The Country 1830-32,
Through they eyes of those who lived then:

Mrs Arbuthnot’s Journal Nov 4 1830

‘The Duke of Wellington was ‘hooted and hissed’ at ‘wherever they could see him’ at the opening of Parliament by ‘the people who were … very disorderly’ and called out ‘No police! … and in various parts of the town attacked the police most furiously … we have taken great precautions against the mobs. Troops and artillery have been brought to London, the guards doubled, the police all on the alert … wherever the mobs have assimilated they have been routed & severely beat by the police … Hunt and Cobbett have opened a meeting house they call the Rotunda near Blackfriars Bridge, and there they assemble & harangue crowds of the lowest order in the most seditious manner, and from that place they issue in large bodies & come & alarm the … West End … I hope the mob will soon be tired of getting nothing but blows from the police.’

29th November

‘The country is in a terrible state, thanks to all the people who have been lauding the French Revolution up to the skies and dinning in the ears of the people that, if they choose to rise, nothing can resist them. The consequence has been that all over the country the peasantry, who in many parts really do suffer under great privations, have been worked upon by incendiaries & agitators & have burnt rickyards & broke machines; in many parts there have been violent conflicts between the mob & the constables.’

Mary Frampton

‘The unpopularity of the Duke of Wellington was extreme, so as to render his life in danger from the pressures of the crowd, stones being thrown at him &c.’

The Times 9 December 1830

‘if enemies to universal suffrage .. it is because such a principle would be, in effect, a narrowing of the representative system, by the virtual exclusion of all influence derived from property, and an absolute surrender … to a single class – a class moved to frequent warfare … by the extremes of destitution and desperation acting upon incurable ignorance, prejudice and distrust.’

Mrs Arbuthnot’s Journal 16 May 1831

‘The Duke has lost heart entirely. He thinks the revolution is begun and that nothing can save us … he foresees nothing but civil war & convulsion.’

Mrs Mundy to Lady H. Frampton, Markeaton, 15 October 1831

‘MY DEAR MOTHER … Conceive how horrid it was on Sunday morning, just as we had finished our doleful breakfast, having been up all night, and having the yells of the multitude and the crash of windows, and doors still ringing in our ears to have a gentleman (My Meynell) ride up, saying that he was just come from Derby (where he had expected to be annihilated by the mob …), that they had forced the town gaol and liberated twenty-three prisoners, were proceeding to the county gaol … and were coming on to us … Fortunately the gaoler made a gallant defence, which delayed the rioters until the dragoons arrived from Nottingham, which was only just in time, as they were preparing to scale the walls … We are very thankful for our preservation … for the Nottingham rioters plundered much more; and at Colwick, near Nottingham – Mr Muster’s place – they entered, seized the furniture and pictures, which they made into a bonfire before the door; and utterly ruined it.’

Mrs Arbuthnot’s Journal 23rd October 1831

‘…the mob broke the windows of several houses. They broke all the Duke of Wellington’s windows in broad daylight … there was not a single policeman came till the mob had been throwing stones for 55 minutes & then not one man was taken up.’

The Reverend J.L. Jackson to C.B. Wollaston, Clifton 31st October 1831

‘…the knots of men standing about the streets were of the most awful character. Three individuals were killed by the soldiers and more wounded. In the afternoon we heard that the multitude was assembled in much greater masses, and about four o’clock we saw the new City and County Gaol in flames; afterwards the Bridewell and another prison in the Gloucester Road … In the course of the evening Queen’s Square was fired and the Bishop’s palace … the … Mansion House … the Custom House … Other property to an immense amount is also destroyed. This morning an actual slaughter has taken place; it is supposed … that above seventy persons have been killed, besides a large number who have been wounded. The military charged through some of the principal streets.’

Charles Greville’s Journal 11 November 1831

‘The country was beginning to sleep after the fatigues of Reform, when it was rattled up by the business of Bristol, which for brutal ferocity and wanton unprovoked violence may vie with some of the worst scenes of the French Revolution … nothing could exceed the ferocity of the populace, the imbecility of the magistracy or the good conduct of the troops. More punishment was inflicted by them than has been generally been known, and some hundreds were killed or severely wounded by the sabre. One body of dragoons pursued a rabble of colliers into the country and covered the fields and roads with the bodies of wounded wretches, making a severe example of them …’

Lord Fitzroy Somerset to the Duke of Wellington, Horse Guards, 2 Nov 1831

‘MY DEAR LORD
… The force we shall have in and about London on Monday next …
The 1st Life Guards, from Windsor to Hyde Park Riding House.
The 2nd Life Guards, Regent’s Park Barracks.
The Blues, Hyde Park Barracks.
The 9th Lancers, King’s Stables, Pimlico.
The 7th Dragoon guards … to assemble either at the Obelisk
or Vauxhall Bridge.
One squadron of the Greys … to move up from Croydon to Vauxhall Bridge or some other convenient spot.
Four guns, Riding Establishment, St. John’s Wood.
Four guns or more, Carlton House stables.
One Battalion of Foot Guards and detachment of Artillery, Tower.
Four battalions of Foot Guards, Portman Street Barracks, Knightsbridge Barracks, Mews Barracks, Westminster quarters daily duties.
500 marines, from Woolwich, at Deptford Dockyard or the Obelisk.
To these four guns might be added.
This is all the force we can at present muster, and the garrisons at Portsmouth and Chatham are not as strong as they ought to be.
Your most faithful and affectionate,
Fitzroy Somerset.

The Poor Man’s Guardian, No. 22, Saturday 19 November 1831

‘BURNING A BISHOP IN EFFIGY!
Remember, remember,
The Fifth of November
Between fifteen and twenty thousand persons paraded the streets … For, lo! And behold! Here is a fat, bloated, blundering bishop … we hereby commit his infernal body to the flames … in the certain belief that eternal damnation will be his portion, and that he will never inherit a glorious resurrection.
Good Lord! Put down aristocrats;
Let boroughmongers be abhorred;
And from all tithes and shovel hats
Forthwith deliver us Good Lord!’

Lord Lyttelton to Lady Lyttelton

‘London 9 May
My Yoemanry Commission I shall probably … resign … God grant that I may not be obliged again to turn out again … for the suppression of a local riot.’

The Times on the demand for gold at the bank, 15 May
‘MONEY-MARKET and CITY INTELLIGENCE

Monday evening

The demand for gold at the Bank is increasing … According to the best estimate that can be found, about 1,000,000l in gold may have been drawn out.

16 May

A steady demand for gold is kept up at the Bank … Every man of common understanding is convinced that the gold in the Bank will be exhausted in a week if a Tory ministry is appointed in the face of the obstinate determination against it on the part of the people.’

Alexander Somerville’s Autobiography of a Working Man

‘At Birmingham, two hundred thousand persons … resolved to pay no King’s taxes, until the bill passed, and, if need be, to remove bodily the whole two hundred thousand of them, and encamp, with other political unions, on Hampstead … Heath, to be near parliament … It was rumoured that the Birmingham political union was to march for London that night; and that we were to stop it on the road. We had been daily and nightly booted and saddled, with ball cartridge in each man’s possession, for three days ready to turn out at a moment’s notice. But until this day we had rough sharpened no swords … to make them inflict a ragged wound … we implored the people … not to allow rioting, window breaking, or any outrage on property; else, if refusing to draw swords on them, in the event of our being brought before a court martial for such disobedience, we would have no justification.’

Hobhouse’s Recollections

19May

‘I went to Place. He told me that there would, positively, have been a rising if Wellington had received power yesterday. Everything was arranged for it, he himself would not have slept at home …’

22 May

‘Charles Fox [MP] … said to King, “By recalling Lord Grey, you have saved the country from civil war.”
“Yes,” said the King, “for the present.”

The Peterloo Massacre, Robert Reid, Windmill Books 2018
Artisans and Sans-Culottes Gwyn A. Williams Libris 1989
Democracy and Reform D.G. Wright Longmans Seminar Series 1981
The Floating Republic Manwaring & Dobree Pen and Sword Books 2004
The Cato Street Conspiracy John Stanhope Jonathan Cape 1962
Reform or Revolution E.A. Smith Alan Sutton 1992
Waterloo to Peterloo R.J. White Heinemann 1957 (It was Bernard Crick’s copy!)
The Lives of … The Leaders of the Cato Street Conspiracy … Primary Source Edition Nabu Public Domain Reprints
Enemies of the State M. J. Trow Pen & Sword 2010

A new poem about Peterloo

06
Dec

A new poem about Peterloo

Lynette Cawthra

People use our collections for all sorts of reasons. A poet called Oliver Lomax came in recently to read some of our eye-witness accounts of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. He is now generously sharing his resulting poem:

Peterloo

I beg you will endeavour to preserve the most
perfect silence. Put your hand to the ground and
take its pulse.

The time of the martyr is at your feet. A climate
of angels lying low in a buried world, fragment
seeds of liberty,

sixpences of bone spent for us. This is the archaeology
of the heart, be meticulous with it and know that
their ballad is in your blood.

Their cries still rent the air outside the room
where The Sex Pistols played, outside the rooms
chasing Michelin stars,

where borough mongers and their abettors from
an umbilical distance away severed the contract
of the heart.

As hussars’ sabres cut the seams of heaven
and bled down on to the field a holy alliance,
not to be petitioned by prayer.

A flock that had drawn from the four corners of the
North West, a forest of men, women, children and liberty
cut down, made to buckle in its bloom.

The ball in their right breast a Tory sphere
that still orbits the poor today as they rust in a
half-life harbour.

Eclipses the truth on bedroom tax suicides and
blots out the sun on the homeless wards. All evidence
must be received, we are all the body of John Lees.

Look up two hundred years and see time like
a mirage, the ghosts of us, hold their dreams aloft
like something new born.

And let us sit beside poverty, have a word in its ear.

Say, listen ‘We are here’.

Henry Hunt and Peterloo

‘With Henry Hunt, we’ll go my boys,
With Henry Hunt, we’ll go,
We’ll mount the Cap of Liberty,
In spite of Nadin Joe.

On the 16th day of August
Eighteen hundred and nineteen,
A meeting held in Peter’s Field
Was glorious to be seen,

Joe Nadin and his big bulldogs,
As you might plainly see,
And on the other side,
Stood the bloody cavalry.

With Henry Hunt, we’ll go my boys,
With Henry Hunt, we’ll go,
We’ll mount the Cap of Liberty,
In spite of Nadin Joe.’

So how did a Wiltshire gentleman farmer
End up on the hustings at Peterloo?
How did a seemingly egotistical,
And self-regarding rhetorician,
End up being eulogized by the North,
And revered by the industrial working class?

Tell me, Mr. Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt,
Up there, on the hustings and platforms,
In your self-centred, narcissistic white hat,
How did it happen?

‘With Henry Hunt, we’ll go my boys,
With Henry Hunt, we’ll go,
We’ll mount the Cap of Liberty,
In spite of Nadin Joe.

On the 16th day of August
Eighteen hundred and nineteen,
A meeting held in Peter’s Field
Was glorious to be seen,

Joe Nadin and his big bulldogs,
As you might plainly see,
And on the other side,
Stood the bloody cavalry.

With Henry Hunt, we’ll go my boys,
With Henry Hunt, we’ll go,
We’ll mount the Cap of Liberty,
In spite of Nadin Joe.’

So how did a Wiltshire gentleman farmer
End up on the hustings at Peterloo?
How did a seemingly egotistical,
And self-regarding rhetorician,
End up being eulogized by the North,
And revered by the industrial working class?

Tell me, Mr. Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt,
Up there, on the hustings and platforms,
In your self-centred, narcissistic white hat,
How did it happen?

‘I was born on the 6th November 1773, in Wiltshire, at Widdington Farm, not within a mile of any other habitation, near Upavon. Widdington Farm lies about a mile from the turnpike road … a lone farm, in a valley upon the downs. How well I remember bringing my newly wedded wife there! A deep silence reigned around; not a tree nor even a bush was to be seen; and since we left the turnpike road, the carriage having passed over the turf for nearly the last mile, the well-known sound of wheels rattling over the stones had never once vibrated.
But as a young man, both bachelor and husband, I was a patriotic loyalist, as you would expect of a gentleman of my lineage. And when my father died, what he rented, and what he left of his own, was nearly all the tything of Littlecot, as well as Chisenbury farm, and I was in possession of Widdington farm, about two miles distant. All the farms were now in my occupation, and, as I thought it proper to live more centrical, I took Chisenbury House, a large old-fashioned, handsome mansion.
But not withstanding my elevated position as a landowner, other gentlemen showed a degree of condescension towards me; and that disinclined me to show any support for them. My loyalism began to wane; and my patriotism began to wither.
And, of course, the policies of Pitt, and the French War, led to further disenchantment: the government spies, the informers, the threat to liberties, the pauperization of the laboring classes; I was stirred, too, by the adamantine example of Colonel Despard, and by the despicable use of the military in the North in 1812. No too mention the sybaritic decadence of the rich.’

And all this helped turn Henry Hunt Esq.
Into white hat Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt,
Who whilst wary of armed revolt,
Was equally wary of milksop political reform:
He wanted universal suffrage,
Not just household suffrage,
Together with annual parliaments and the secret ballot;
In short,
This 18th century gentleman farmer,
Who spent over two years in prison after Peterloo
Became a bridge and a conduit to the age of Chartism –
Hear the Chartist William Lovett
On Hunt’s brief but industrious time
In the House of Commons:

‘In vain do all sides of the House unite, cough, shuffle and groan … he pauses for a moment, until the unanimous clamour of disgust is at its height, and then, re-pitching his notes, apparently without an effort, lifts his halloo as clear and distinct above the storm, as ever ye heard a minster bell tolling over the racket of a village wake.’

His speeches acted as a clarion call –
His antagonism towards corruption
And the political control of a few aristocrats
Was exemplary from the beginning:

‘It was they who voted away the public money, and created the debt. It was they who squandered the resources of the country upon their relatives, their friends, their pomp, and their parasites. The people had nothing to do with the anti-Jacobin war. That war, and the debt which grew out of it, had been voted by a corrupt House of Commons, chosen by these 157 worthies.’

And then a year later, in 1812,
Alliterative again at the Bristol elections:
‘I am of no party but the people and I detest all those who plunder that people.’
He may have lost that election, but the shouts of
‘Hunt for ever’ resounded through the streets,
As Oxymandian-like, the King’s statue,
Came tumbling down in Portland Square;

And then at the end of the French Wars,
When the Corn Laws were passed to keep out cheap foreign corn,
And so enrich the aristocracy at the expense of the poor,
‘Under the protection of a military force, in defiance of the prayers, the petitions, and the remonstrances of a great majority of the people of England’;

And then a year later at the Spa Fields meeting in Clerkenwell,
Where, at times, he spoke in the third person:

‘he knew well what ought to be done in such a crisis. He knew well the superiority of mental over physical force; nor would he counsel any resort to the latter till the former had been found ineffectual. Before physical force was applied to, it was their duty to petition, to remonstrate … Those who resisted the just demands of the people were the real friends of confusion and bloodshed; but if the fatal day should be destined to arrive, he assured them that, if he knew anything of himself, he would not be found concealed behind a counter, or sheltering himself in the rear’;

And after Spa Fields, he spoke at Bristol,
At Brandon Hill, in the pouring rain:

‘We want no tumults, no riots, only our rights … The partisans of corruption wanted a Plot – they would give anything for a Plot – but we shall disappoint them … Let them surround us with their cavalry and artillery – we will oppose to them the artillery of truth, reason, and justice’;

Spa Fields made him a national figure:
And it emphasised his position
Betwixt the minority revolutionaries
And the reformist household suffragists –
He introduced himself to the London Convention in 1817
(Of Hampden Clubs, at the Crown and Anchor),
As one who was supported by the following:
14,000 petitioners of Bristol,
8,000 of Bath,
And over 100,000 at Spa Fields;
And even though he opposed physical force activity,
He nailed his colours to the mast in 1817,
In the spy-riddled atmosphere of that year –
Hoping to save the men of the Pentridge Rising
From execution;
Defending the Spa Fields revolutionaries
Against charges of high treason,
Exposing the role of Castle, the government spy,
In the aftermath of Spa Fields and the Rising;
Hunt was now the radical champion in the West Country
(A freeman of Bristol),
In London,
And in the industrial midlands and north, too;
He was the people’s choice –
See the red flag unfurled, inscribed thus:
‘UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE’,
With a Cap of Liberty, inscribed thus:
‘Hunt and Liberty’;

Radical thought now turned to plans for mass campaigns –
The 1817 Seditious Meetings Act had nearly run its course –
There was a plethora of ideas:
Petitions and Remonstrances
And Declarations to the Prince Regent,
But once Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary,
Rejected the idea of such a proposal,
Hunt decided to take these documents north to Manchester –
He was acclaimed by thousands at mass meetings,
For he was the Spa Fields’ leader and salvation,
And Samuel Bamford led his praises in verse:
‘Thou raised thy voice and the people awakening
Beheld the foul source of corruption display’d
And loyal stupidity, quickly forsaking …
The shouts of thousands for freedom arose …’,
And as the fateful year of 1819 progressed,
Hunt was resolute:
The planned mass meeting at St Peter’s Field would be legal,
And it would be peaceful,
He famously declared that people should attend,

‘armed with no other weapon but that of a self-approving conscience; determined not to suffer yourselves to be irritated or excited, by any means whatsoever, to commit any breach of the public peace.’

He even offered himself up to the magistrates beforehand,
To ensure they would have no pretext to stop the meeting,
Yet Bamford excoriated Hunt after the disaster,
Viewing him as an egocentric coward in an egocentric white hat –
In fact, Hunt was arrested on a charge of high treason,
And spent eleven days in solitary confinement;
He wrote to Lord Sidmouth, deploring the

‘illegal conduct of the military towards an unarmed and peaceable people,
met for the purpose of exercising what they thought they had a perfect right to do’;

He wanted to take the Manchester magistrates to court,
He wanted to speak at the victims’ inquests …
On his eventual release on bail
(His charge dropped to one of seditious conspiracy),
Vast crowds greeted him en route to Manchester,
Where he was greeted as a conquering hero,
Celebratory white hats were everywhere,
And green ribbons: ‘Hunt and Liberty’,
‘The daring Champion of unrivall’d fame,
The Patriot Hunt (immortal be his name!),
Has sworn to advocate the suff’rers’ cause,
And bring to light the spurners of the laws’.

Hunt wrote thus: ‘The day is arriving when we shall see whether Corruption has left any virtue in our Courts of Justice, or whether our Constitutional rights were buried in the Tomb of Peterloo.’

The government, of course, praised the Manchester magistrates,
And the dictatorial Six Acts followed,
While Hunt was eventually convicted on a charge
Of unlawful seditious assembling
For the purpose of exciting discontent;
He wrote his transparently egotistical memoirs
In Ilchester gaol, but he still campaigned
For political unions to mobilise for universal suffrage;
He also developed ideas for a radical museum in London:

‘an ocular demonstration that all the wealth of the nation consists of the labour and talent of the useful or working classes’ and ‘where the Radicals from all parts of the kingdom may be seen to meet each other when they are in the metropolis’;

National celebrations followed his release in 1822,
Especially in the industrial north;
A year later he gave a speech in Bristol,
That epitomised the extent of his radicalism:

‘I have had all the magistrates, all the parsons against me … I am an enemy to the injustice that naturally arises from the system on which they act … (loud cheers.) I am an enemy to Corn Laws, game laws, and to all laws that mark a degrading contrast between the lazy and the industrious … There must be high and low, rich and poor, but the honest hard-working man ought to have all the conveniences of life, and some of its comforts (Cheers).’
But despite this attitude, he never wavered from support for universal suffrage –
And so, he had little stock for the Whigs and their eventual 1832 Great Reform Act –
‘All plans for reform which do not embrace universal suffrage, with the protection of the ballot, are unjust in principle … and are calculated … to prolong the slavery and degradation of the intelligent and industrious workmen of the United Kingdom’;

Thus, when he returned to Manchester in 1830,
A crowd of 50,000 awaited him:

‘Although it is now eleven years since you saw me, did you ever hear of me deserting my colours? Did you ever hear of me deserting the cause of the people, even when confined in a gaol? (Loud cries of “we never did.”) I know you have not, and you never will. (“Bravo Hunt.”)

Out in the southern countryside,
In the winter of 1830,
He was seen as a possible mediator,
As the Captain Swing riots rapidly spread,
And then, of course, he was elected as MP,
For the pot-walloper Preston constituency,
In the December 1830 election,
But Hunt would continue to remain aloof,
Even when there was an arguable threat of revolution,
In the furore over the terms of the eventual Reform Act:

‘The lying press had deceived them, or they would know that Lord John Russell …
had never pretended that the bill was to give any substantial benefits to the working classes; they had all along declared that they had proposed it as a means of cementing the tottering institutions of the country, by giving to a larger portion of the middle class the right of exercising the elective franchise. It was their agents and the public press … that … endeavoured to make the people believe that it would benefit the mass of people’;

And when he was rapturously received at Preston,
On Guy Fawkes Night in 1831,
With a 19th century light show,
Flags, banners and a band,
He third person observed:

‘Never before, I believe, was a Member of Parliament so caressed
by so very great a majority of his Constituents, as the Member of the Working Classes of Preston’;

He went on to declare about the crowd of 5,000 that,

‘even if I had been the father of the whole of this … it is impossible
they could have received me with more affection, or with more enthusiasm’;
Such was the fervour and excitement that troops were moved to Preston;

Not that that deterred the Orator,
For when at Leeds, he declared that he was,
‘John Bull’s watchman’:

‘I came only to visit the Working Classes, and no other… I profess only to represent the Working Classes of England in the House of Commons … I am determined the Working Classes shall have the reform they want and by the living God I’ll resign my trust before I desert my Constituents of the Working Classes of England’;

(Immense cheers)
But he received no cheers in the Commons,
On the over a thousand occasions of his speaking there,
With single minded focus on the working class,
And the occasional on women’s rights,
But, the third person self-importance was never far away:

‘They might ask him what good he had done during the year and a half he had been in Parliament? It was true he had done very little, but he took credit for having consistently and fearlessly advocated the right of the working classes to earn not only the necessaries of life, but some of the comforts also – [cheers].’

After defeat in the next election at Preston,
Hunt would still act as a bridge between the 18th century and Chartism,
For example, in his address,
‘To the Unrepresented Seven Millions
of Working Men of England, Ireland, and Scotland’,

‘Therefore my advice is to the working, producing Seven Millions, never to join in any public meeting – never to join in or sign any petition – that does not embrace a prayer for Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, the Ballot, an immediate repeal of the Starvation Act, called the Corn Bill’,

And when a Peeler was killed at a political meeting at Cold Bath Fields,
And after which the jury returned the remarkable verdict of justifiable homicide, Hunt gave forth his inspirational address,

‘To the Friends of Humanity and Justice,
Male and Female, of the United Kingdom’,
‘Let the people meet at all parts of the metropolis;
let the people meet at Manchester, at Bolton, at Blackburn, at Preston;
let them meet in every town and village in the north, in the south, in the east, and in the west; let all people, male and female, do honour and justice
to the brave jurymen of Calthorpe Street’;

This was to be Hunt’s last public appearance
On a London radical platform;
He would be presented with a silver cup,
‘For his unwearied exertions in advocating the cause of liberty,
and promoting the welfare of the labouring community’ –
This was from the Female Union of Preston;
He would revisit the North in his remaining months,
To give the occasional rousing speech,
And after his death, he would adorn inn signs,
And even though it was declared that:
‘Who boldly said in thirty-two,
The Bill was a cheat and vain,
Have we not found his judgement true,
We shall never see his likes again’,
Feargus O’Connor saw himself as Henry Hunt’s heir,
No wonder the Wigan Chartist banner
Foregrounded him with The People’s Charter,
With Hunt’s monument in the background,
A gold and scarlet motto running thus:
‘O’Connor Hunt’s successor’;
His birthday would be a Chartist celebration,
His Ancoats monument would be unveiled
As the 1842 Plug Riots kicked off –
It would be demolished, a generation later,
John Belchem concludes:

‘a bronze plaque was installed in the Manchester Reform Club in 1808,
where it has long been since forgotten by lunching Mancunuan businessmen. A more suitable memorial and greater recognition is due to ‘Orator’ Hunt, the man of the people, the pioneer of working-class radicalism.’

John Belchem ‘Orator’ Hunt Henry Hunt and English Working Class Radicalism
Breviary Stuff Publications 2012
Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 Henry Hunt Tredition Classics

PETER-LOO
From the Manchester Observer 28th August 1819

This is the field of Peter-Loo.
These are the poor reformers who met, on the state of affairs to debate; in the field of Peter-Loo.
These are the butchers, bloodthirsty and bold, who cut, slash’d and maim’d young, defenceless and old, who met, on the state of affairs to debate; in the field of Peter-Loo.
This is Hurly Burly, a blustering knave, and foe to the poor, whom he’d gladly enslave, who led on the butchers, bloodthirsty and bold, who cut, slash’d and maim’d young, defenceless and old, who met, on the state of affairs to debate; in the field of Peter-Loo.
These are the just-asses, gentle and mild, who to keep the peace, broke it, by lucre beguil’d, and sent Hurly Burly, a blustering knave, and foe to the poor, whom he’d gladly enslave, who led on the butchers, bloodthirsty and bold, who cut, slash’d and maim’d young, defenceless and old, who met, on the state of affairs to debate; in the field of Peter-Loo.

William Hone in The Political House that Jack Built followed suit with this description of the Prince Regent:

A dandy of sixty who bows with a grace,
And has taste in wigs, collars, cuirasses and lace;
Who, to tricksters, and fools, leaves the State and its treasure,
And, when Britain’s in tears, sails about at his pleasure.

Radical Inns and Coffee Houses of London

Radical inns, taverns, alehouses, coffee houses, homes, houses, chapels,
Institutes, debating clubs and Spencean ‘free and easies’
Derived from a reading of Radical Underworld by Ian McCalman,
Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance 1790-1820
by David Worrall,
William Cuffay The Life & Times of a Chartist Leader by Martin Hoyles,
The Spirit of Despotism by John Barrell,
Ian Newman http://www.1790salehouse.com/
and Francis Boorman’s thesis on Chancery Lane
https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/5797/1/Francis_Boorman_- The_Political_space_of_Chancery_Lane_c._1760-1815.pdf

First up, the Bell in Exeter Street, where the LCS was formed in 1791,
To hear Thomas Hardy, founder of the LCS:
‘The Rights of Man’ ‘are not confined to this small island
But are extended to the whole human race, black or white,
High or low, rich or poor’;
Then to the Globe Tavern, corner of the Strand and Craven Street,
Where LCS divisions met in 1794:
‘We must have redress from our own laws and not from the laws
of our plunderers, enemies and oppressors’
Next, to Soho for the Panton Street Debating Club of 1795,
And the London Corresponding Society, once more:
“If the King … dare attempt to trample upon the Liberties of the People,
I hope they will trample upon his head”;
Other LCS pubs: The Friend at Hand, Little North Street,
The French Horn, Lambeth Walk,
The Queen’s Arms, Kennington Lane,
The Fox and Hounds, Sydenham,
But we’re off to Lunan’s public house,
Academy Court, Chancery Lane,
With Jacobins and spies in Bell’s Yard, too:
‘He talked of killing the King with blow-pipe
and poisoned arrow’;

Radical inns, taverns, alehouses, coffee houses, homes, houses, chapels,
Institutes, debating clubs and Spencean ‘free and easies’
Derived from a reading of Radical Underworld by Ian McCalman,
Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance 1790-1820
by David Worrall,
William Cuffay The Life & Times of a Chartist Leader by Martin Hoyles,
The Spirit of Despotism by John Barrell,
Ian Newman http://www.1790salehouse.com/
and Francis Boorman’s thesis on Chancery Lane
https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/5797/1/Francis_Boorman_- The_Political_space_of_Chancery_Lane_c._1760-1815.pdf

First up, the Bell in Exeter Street, where the LCS was formed in 1791,
To hear Thomas Hardy, founder of the LCS:
‘The Rights of Man’ ‘are not confined to this small island
But are extended to the whole human race, black or white,
High or low, rich or poor’;
Then to the Globe Tavern, corner of the Strand and Craven Street,
Where LCS divisions met in 1794:
‘We must have redress from our own laws and not from the laws
of our plunderers, enemies and oppressors’
Next, to Soho for the Panton Street Debating Club of 1795,
And the London Corresponding Society, once more:
“If the King … dare attempt to trample upon the Liberties of the People,
I hope they will trample upon his head”;
Other LCS pubs: The Friend at Hand, Little North Street,
The French Horn, Lambeth Walk,
The Queen’s Arms, Kennington Lane,
The Fox and Hounds, Sydenham,
But we’re off to Lunan’s public house,
Academy Court, Chancery Lane,
With Jacobins and spies in Bell’s Yard, too:
‘He talked of killing the King with blow-pipe
and poisoned arrow’;

Then to Furnival’s Inn cellar in the Strand:
‘The very general resort of the most Jacobinical politics in London’,
Another haunt of the London Corresponding Society,
And the United Englishmen, too;
The George alehouse in Clerkenwell next,
At the junction of Compton Street and St John Street,
Where the United Englishmen debated arming for a coup d’etat –
1799 saw raids on the Royal Oak in Red Lion Passage,
And the Nag’s Head in St John Street;
After that, the Green Dragon in Fore Street (Moorfields)
Became a new radical port of call,
While the Ham and Windmill Tavern in Windmill Street,
Saw spies reporting on Colonel Despard :
“May the wings of Liberty never lose a feather” –
Then in 1802, Colonel Despard was caught in a raid
On the Oakley Arms in Lambeth – and would lose his head …
At his trial in 1803, a soldier spoke of the Ham and Windmill
And how he had been asked to be ‘sworn in’, to ‘a free and easy society’ –
‘Free and Easies’:
Political sing songs, debates, discussions and readings:
‘A free and easy society
To overthrow the Government,
And have our nation the same as the French’;
Next: the Cock on the corner of Lumber Court and Grafton Street, Soho,
Where the Polemic Club met,
And Thomas Spence in his free and easy style, too;
And then, after his death:
The Society of Spencean Philanthropists, founded in October 1814,
By Thomas Evans,
Where numbers grew from around sixty before the end of the French Wars,
To two to three hundred in the febrile days of 1815 to 1820,
With sometimes 2 – 3, 000 regular attenders at political meetings;
Now on to Thomas Evans’ house in Fetter Lane near Fleet Street;
And the Seven Stars in Bethnal Green
Where the United Irishmen practised drilling in the garden in 1798;
Other Spencean meeting places and ‘free and easies’ included
The Swan in New Street Square
(Where Spence held his free and easies from 1803 onwards),
And the Fleece in Windmill Street;
Next up:
’Doctor’ Watson of the Cato St Conspiracy and his surgeon-apothecary shops,
In the Strand at 5 Newcastle Street and 6 Catherine Street,
And later out at Somers Town, in Clarendon Place,
Next, what became the chief Spencean watering-hole:
The Mulberry Tree in Moorfields
(Mary Johnson, wife of the publican, was interrogated as a Spencean in 1798);
Now, for other public houses with a radical reputation:
The Green Dragon in Fore Street and the Ben Jonson’s Head in Red Lion Street

(United Englishmen ports of call in 1798; Spencean after that);
The Baptist’s Head in St John’s Lane,
The Old Paul’s Head Tavern, 5 Cateaton Street,
The Crescent in Jewin Street, Cripplegate,
The Mermaid Tavern – meeting place of the Socratic Club;
Other Spencean ‘free and easies’: the Nag’s Head, Carnaby Market,
The Northumberland Arms, Bethnal Green,
The Waterman’s Arms, Castle Street, Bethnal Green
(‘May the Skin of the tyrants be burnt into Parchment
and the Rights of Man be written on it’),
The King’s Head in St Luke’s,
The Red Lion, Spitalfields,
The Spotted Dog, Clement Lane, Spitalfields,
And the Golden Key in Spitalfields;
A spy reported on Thomas Preston, shoemaker and author,
At the Red Hart in Shoe Lane,
“He usually asked, in the Tap-room he visited, if there were any Men out of Work; if there were, he immediately sent for Bread, Cheese & Beer, saying, ‘It is the Duty of every one not to see any one in distress, but to divide all equally.’”

Now for some Spencean debating clubs and taverns:
The Commercial Rooms in Whitechapel,
The George, East Harding Street, and the Cecil in St Martin’s Lane;
Spencean Thomas Wedderburn shook his fist at Robert Owen
In the City of London tavern;
He, along with fellow Ultras,
Also frequented (in addition to all those named above)
His new chapel at the corner of Hopkins St and Brewer St, Soho,
The Falcon in Fetter Lane, the White Horse Tavern,
The Borough Road Chapel, in High Holborn,
Archer Street Chapel (number six),

The ‘New Assembly Room’ for ‘Christian Diabolists’
At 12 White’s Alley, Chancery Lane;
Now to the Saracen’s Head
(Where Samuel Waddington practised comic, burlesque Spenceanism),
And the Scotch Arms in New Round Court –
Waddington also entertained at trades’ alehouses
In Goswell Street and the Barbican;
There was a radical printing works at 21 Clerkenwell Green;
The ‘Society of Infidel Publicists’
Met at the Patriot Coffee House, Soho,
And at the apothecary-pressman Griffin’s place in Holborn.
The First London Cooperative Manufacturing Society
Was established at the Spencean
Charles Jennison’s shoemaking place in Old Street,
Before moving to be closer to Robert Owen’s Grays Inn Road Exchange,
Where Owenite festivals were held –
Allen Davenport’s play about ‘Co-operation’, The Social Age,
Attracted an audience of some 300 at the Charlotte Street Exchange,
He lived by Goswell Street, frequenting, with fellow Radicals,
The Cornish Coffee House, Bunhill Row, and the Hope Coffee House –
As president of the Tower Street Mutual Instruction Society,
And the Gould Square Mechanics’ Institute,
Honorary member of the Finsbury Mutual Instruction Society, in Bunhill,
And of William Lovett’s somewhat Dickensian-sounding
National Association for Promoting Social and Political Improvement;
The Cato Street conspirators met beneath a portrait
of executed Arthur Thistlewood
At Walker’s Coffee House, Union Street, Spitalfields,
While other Ultras, apart from James Walker,
Opened coffee houses as way of avoiding too much surveillance:
For example, James Whittaker, Thomas Evans
And James Ings, who was, of course, beheaded
With Thistlewood at Newgate, after Cato Street –
The spy, Shegog (nom de guerre?) faithfully delivered reports
On these coffee houses, as well as the Patriot in Soho,
The Chapter and the Sun in the Barbican,
And Williams’ Coffee House in St Martin Le Grand
(Shegog: “the most successful auxiliary the seditious and corrupt press have”);

Just around the corner from Walker’s was
Sampson Elliot’s Coffee Shop in Old Street,
And close by in these radical coffee shop environs:
The Phoenix in Grub Street, The Cambridge in Shoreditch,
And the Albion Coffee House in Lantern Wall, Shoreditch;
The British Forum republican anti-slavery debating club,
With its practice of discussion, readings, debates and singing,
Met five times in the week at Lunts Coffee House, Clerkenwell Green,
While Spencean free and easy traditions
Were perpetuated into the 1820s and 30s
At the Mercer’s Arms, Longacre,
The Cheshire Cheese became the haunt of radical shoemakers
And some who had been on the fringes of the Cato Street Conspiracy;
The shoemaker’s union and sundry Spenceans
Also met at the York Arms, Holborn,

Members of groups pivotal to the formation of metropolitan Chartism –
From organisations such as the 1830 Metropolitan Political Union,
The National Union of the Working Classes,
The Finsbury Forum of 1834-35,
The East London Democratic Association
(Became the LDA) 1833-34) –
Veteran Spenceans and Ultras such as Davenport, the Neesoms and Waddington
Met regularly at old favourites such as Lunts, the Albion,
And Benbow’s Commercial Coffee House at Temple Bar;
The blasphemous chapels were favourites too:
The Philadelphia Chapel in Windmill Street,
The Old Borough Chapel in Chapel Court,
Benbow’s Chapel at 8 Theobald’s Road,
The Bowling Square Chapel, Bethnal Green;
And then, old pubs were remembered too:
The Green Dragon in Fore Street,
The Spotted Cow in the Old Kent Road,
And the Standard of Liberty in Brick Lane,
(Spies wrote of Benbow meeting in Hoxteth alehouses,
In 1834, discussing assassination plans),
While eleven years later, close by the Mulberry Tree,
Elizabeth and Charles Neesom, at 5 Moor Lane,
Would nurse Allen Davenport as he declined towards death;
Over in Pentonville, when Davenport was younger,
Shegog the spy reported that
‘many of the Spencean’, ‘And other seditious characters’
Were congregating in ‘some of the Publick Houses’
‘In the neighbourhood’ of the Belvidere Tavern, Pentonville Road,
Where some Ultras were optimistic that
‘some enthusiastic characters may be worked upon to commit Assassination’;
Thomas Preston was one of those involved in the planning
Of the aborted uprising at Bartholomew’s Fair in 1817,
But when he went to the Broad Arrow Tavern in Grub Street,
‘One of his Daughters … implored him not to begin on account of the soldiers’ –
But Shegog reported that the Revolutionaries
‘Are very busy in getting Arms and Ammunition & Cutlasses’ …
He attended the meeting held at the Duke’s Arms, Upper Marsh, Lambeth,
‘There were about 40 or 50 of the Chief leaders present,
Some from Bethnalgreen, Spittalfields, Bermondsey, the Borough and Lambeth,
Men of the worst description, ready for any desperate enterprize’;
Thomas Preston exclaimed that ‘if 25,000 men would join him
He would give Liberty to the world’;
The future Cato Street Conspirators embarked
on a ‘desperate enterprize’, of course,
And they met regularly at the White Lion in Wych Street:
“a Little man in a black Coat & White Apron a large Pistol in a Black belt the rest to the amount of 40 all armed & loaded …
Thislewood came in & inspected them …”;
They also met at the White Lion in Turnmill Street,
Pledging to attend a meeting in Covent Garden ‘armed …with Flags’,
They also frequented Pitts Place, Drury Lane,
And the Rose in Wild Street, Drury Lane;
In the wake of Peterloo, in August 1819,
Two hundred heard John Gast read the news
at the George in East Harding Street,
Nearly three hundred met in sombre mood at the Jacob’s Well
Almost a week after Peterloo, on August 22nd 1819;
A spy reported on ‘monies being expended on ammunition’
At the Red Cross in Fore Street, Cripplegate,
While a report from the Crown & Anchor at Seven Dials,
Mentioned that ‘several’ were ‘armed with Pistols & spring Bayonets’ …
In conclusion, we remember the Fox and Goose in Pooley Street,
And the Salmon and Ball, Bethnal Green Road:
‘Sing and meet and meet and sing,
And your Chains will drop off like burnt thread’,
While we walk, talk and map the streets and palimpsests
Of radical London pubs, coffee house, chapels, institutes and meeting places,
c. 1790-1850,
On Thomas Spence’s birthday, June 21st,
Focusing upon Islington, Hackney, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Finsbury, Spitalfields, Holborn, Marylebone, Soho,
& South of the river:
Lambeth and Southwark,
Not forgetting the site of Thomas Spence’s bookshop,
The Hive of Liberty in Little Turnstile, High Holborn;
And Spa Fields, Clerkenwell,
The Globe, Shoe Lane, Fleet Street
(A postal collection point in 1830,
For the Metropolitan Political Union),
Cold Bath Fields Prison, Clerkenwell,
The Reformers’ Memorial in Kensal Green,
And remembering Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt’s triumphal entry into London,
On his way to stand trial, less than a month after the Manchester tragedy,
And there, the ghosts of the future Cato Street conspirators,
There, in the ‘tens of thousands’,
Together with the ghost of John Keats:
“It would take me a whole day and a quire of paper
to give you any thing like detail…
The whole distance from the Angel Islington to the
Crown and anchor” in the Strand “was lined with multitudes” …
Within a week, he would pen lines that could speak to Spenceans,
And their dream of common ownership of land:
‘To Autumn’ …
‘… Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor …

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours…’

The Life of Allen Davenport

Allen Davenport

Prologue

When you were there at the Hopkins Street political chapel,
Or the Archer Street chapel in Soho,
Or listening at the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields,
In those months before the Cato Street Conspiracy,
There, with Robert Wedderburn –
Your rhetoric celebrating atheism,
Denouncing Christian hypocrisy
And espousing armed sedition,
In this, the most revolutionary
Of all the Spencean and political chapels,
Did your mind ever wander madeleine-like,
To the green in Ewen where you taught yourself to read,
And where you taught yourself to write?

(‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’)

Part the First

You had been a friend of Thomas Spence,
Since you had first met him in 1804,
It was Spence’s Restorer of Society to its Natural State
That set you on the path to political prose and poetry,

Allen Davenport

Prologue

When you were there at the Hopkins Street political chapel,
Or the Archer Street chapel in Soho,
Or listening at the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields,
In those months before the Cato Street Conspiracy,
There, with Robert Wedderburn –
Your rhetoric celebrating atheism,
Denouncing Christian hypocrisy
And espousing armed sedition,
In this, the most revolutionary
Of all the Spencean and political chapels,
Did your mind ever wander madeleine-like,
To the green in Ewen where you taught yourself to read,
And where you taught yourself to write?

(‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’)

Part the First

You had been a friend of Thomas Spence,
Since you had first met him in 1804,
It was Spence’s Restorer of Society to its Natural State
That set you on the path to political prose and poetry,

Spence’s writings were an epiphany for you:
‘’Tis reason’s light – an intellectual sun,
Whose influence, none but fools and tyrants shun.
‘Tis human knowledge, and a sense of right,
That burst upon me like a flood of light’;

You would be Thomas’ biographer,
A prolific versifier and poet,
A delegate to the Shoemakers’ Union,
And in defiance of the Combination Acts,
A supporter of a general strike,
In 1813, just after the northern Luddites;
Later, a radical and revolutionary writer,
Turning towards physical force
After ‘reason’s light’ failed to sway ‘fools and tyrants’,
A government spy reported thus on the Spencean view
About the projected peaceful meeting at St Peters Fields
(When Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt famously declared:
‘Bring nought but your self-approving consciences’) –
‘They expect the Row to begin, and this they look upon as the signal to begin. They will be much disappointed if that meeting goes off quietly.’

Part the Second

There was a rush of Spencean publications
In the lead up to Peterloo:
Address of the Society of Christian Philanthropists to All Mankind,
on the Means of Promoting Liberty and Happiness’
More Plots, More Treason, More Green Bags,
But you, Allen, still remembered the quintessential
Principles of agrarianism:
‘Thus all the world BELONGS TO MAN,
But NOT to Kings and Lords;
A country’s lands the people’s farm,
And all that it affords:
For why? Divide it how you will,
‘Tis all the people’s still:
The people’s country, parish, town;
They build, defend and till’.
But, part of the web and fringe of Cato Street Conspirators,
You spoke thus in the wake of Peterloo:
‘War … has … been declared against us why then should we hesitate,
for my own part I am ready now … I compare the present time to the crisis of the French Revolution, we must arm ourselves as they did.’
A close confidante of Robert Wedderburn,
Radical atheist and physical force revolutionary,
Arthur Thistlewood ‘ says he depends more on
Wedderburn’s division for being armed than all the rest’;

Part the Third

After the failure of the Conspiracy,
In the quieter 1820s
(The decade of so-called ‘Liberal Toryism’),
You would write verse in praise of Owenism,
Extend the principles of the ‘People’s Farm’
(‘I have no doubt that it was the Agrarian fellowship in land
that presented to the minds of the ancients the idea of Paradise’),
To the wider industrial means of production
And transport infrastructure
(‘Manufacturing machinery’ should be ‘public property’),
Propose action redolent of an Amazon boycott:
‘the middle and lower classes of shopkeepers are as much dissatisfied with the government as the working people are. The plan by which I propose to form an alliance between the working classes and the lower class of shopkeepers or middlemen, is exclusive dealing’.
You would write a ‘Cooperative Catechism’,
Give lectures with fellow working class leaders,
Write for Richard Carlisle’s The Republican,
Write for the Cooperative Magazine,
Support the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge,
Become president of the Great Tower Mutual Instruction Society
At the Society for Scientific, Useful and Literary Information
(The Bowling Square chapel in Lower White Cross Street),
Support the Society for Promoting Anti-Christian and General Instruction,
Where three hundred could meet at the ‘Optimist Chapel’
(The clergy? ‘robbing the lower class of people
and not only them but the poor Farmers …
Tythes and Taxation all owing to them
by their Extravagance and Luxury’);

Part the Fourth

Speak at protest meetings at the Borough Chapel,
Support contraception on feminist grounds,
Speak for the National Union of the Working Classes,
At the ‘Finsbury Forum’
(Was it really in an old cow shed near St Luke’s,
Before moving to a house in Bunhill Row?),
But the Finsbury group was in the radical vanguard
Over the 1832 Reform Act:
‘Confiscate the estates of obdurate peers!’
It helped lead the unstamped press campaign;
It took the lead with the NUWC,
And led criticism of the new police in 1834 at Cold Bath Fields,
With AD once more in the vanguard:
‘The object of the Government was not to warn but surround and slaughter … this police mob … It behoves every friend of peace, order and good government to be on their guard against these common disturbers of peaceable society’,
Then you’re in Brighton Street at a ‘Mechanics’ Forum’,
Trumpeting the thoughts of Thomas Spence.
‘Author of the Spencean system, or Agarian Equality’
At the London Co-operative Society,
Then a founder member of the London Manufacturing Community,
Becoming its storekeeper,
But still finding the time to use your quill:
‘We manufactured boots, shoes, brushes, etc., and for a time, our little establishment inspired us with the most ardent hopes that it would realise our fondest anticipations, and convince the world of the superiority of the co-operative principle over that of competition.’

Part the Fifth

Your life bridged and fused together
So many different strands of thought,
In a span that stretched from the American Revolution
To the ‘Hungry Forties’ and Chartism:
Agrarianism; Revolution; Owenism; Secularism,
And, finally, metropolitan Chartism:
You were president of the ELDA,
And a founder member of the East London Democratic Association,
You campaigned, spoke and lectured all over London,
Your 1836 biography of the great pioneer,
Life, Writings, and Principles of Thomas Spence,
Was acclaimed by old comrades and new Chartist companions,
When you spoke on the celebration of Spence’s birthday,
Before a rerun of the rousing old songs of Spence,
And when the first Chartist Land Plan scheme
Came to fruition at O’Connorville in Hertfordshire,
You jubilantly declared that ‘The Jubilee is come at last’,
For ‘the Agrarian Revolution’ had seemingly commenced.

Part the Sixth

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

Post-script:

‘I feel I should add a few lines about just what I owed my wife. She was tireless in supporting my work as a cobbler and tireless in helping me develop as a thinker, polemicist and writer. She gave me confidence, love and a child.
When she died, my income though shoemaking plumbed the depths. She was my indefatigable partner in the industrious production of shoes, clogs and boots. And Thomas Spence was too, in a sort of numinous manner: with his dedication of some words to our patron saint, to the ‘Service of St Crispin’, after our 1812 strike failed to improve our lot in the metropolis.’

Post-post-script:

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Post-post-post-script:

Concluding Remarks on Allen Davenport
The King, or Legitimacy Unmasked, A Satirical Poem
Printed by the celebrated exponent of the Spencean burlesque,
Samuel Waddington in Oxford Street in 1819;
This poem written by the son of a weaver in Ewen,
Was bought by a government spy from Robert Wedderburn;
This boy who taught himself to read and write,
Would become a noted writer for Sherwin’s Political Register,
But when he made his last recorded visit to Wedderburn’s chapel,
So he ceased to contribute to the radical press –
The Theological Comet asked:
‘What is become of A.D.?’
Followed by Davenport’s poem,
‘Saint Ethelstone’s Day’,
Which commented upon Peterloo’s
‘Yoemanry Butchers’ who
‘hacked off the breasts of women
and then cut off the ears and noses of men’,
Then his lines about consequent Christian hypocrisy;
So let us remember Allen Davenport with his own concluding words:

‘Every man should study Politics, for my part I study them all Day. I write on them, I dream of them at Night, I stand here twice a week preaching Blasphemy and Sedition (as they call it and will continue to do so unless they rob me of my liberty.’
And, finally, his speech from October 27th 1819: “Let us prepare to knock down this system of tyranny to rush upon the Cannon’s Mouth and if we should not succeed Die gloriously in the Struggle.”

Sources used:
Artisans and Politics in Early 19th Century London John Gast and His Times
Iorweth Prothero Methuen 1979
The Life and Times of Thomas Spence P.M. Ashraf 1983
The Poor Man’s Revolutionary ed by Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong
The People’s Farm English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840 Malcolm Chase
The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport With a further selection of the author’s work Compiled and Edited by Malcolm Chase Scolar Press 1994
The Muses’s Wreath, containing Hornsey Wood and other Poems Allen Davenport
Radical Underworld Ian McCalman Clarendon Paperbacks
Radical Culture David Worrall Wayne State University

Worker’s Memorial Day Walk Remembering Allen Davenport

Remembering Allen Davenport

‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Thanks to Deborah Roberts for the above photograph.

Remembering Allen Davenport

‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Concluding Remarks on Allen Davenport
The King, or Legitimacy Unmasked, A Satirical Poem
Printed by the celebrated exponent of the Spencean burlesque,
Samuel Waddington in Oxford Street in 1819;
This poem written by the son of a weaver in Ewen,
Was bought by a government spy from Robert Wedderburn;
This boy who taught himself to read and write,
Would become a noted writer for Sherwin’s Political Register,
But when he made his last recorded visit to Wedderburn’s chapel,
So he ceased to contribute to the radical press –
The Theological Comet asked:
‘What is become of A.D.?’
Followed by Davenport’s poem,
‘Saint Ethelstone’s Day’,
Which commented upon Peterloo’s
‘Yoemanry Butchers’ who
‘hacked off the breasts of women
and then cut off the ears and noses of men’,
Then his lines about consequent Christian hypocrisy;
So let us remember Allen Davenport with his own concluding words:

‘Every man should study Politics, for my part I study them all Day. I write on them, I dream of them at Night, I stand here twice a week preaching Blasphemy and Sedition (as they call it and will continue to do so unless they rob me of my liberty.’
And, finally, his speech from October 27th 1819: “Let us prepare to knock down this system of tyranny to rush upon the Cannon’s Mouth and if we should not succeed Die gloriously in the Struggle.”

 

A Prehistory Trip to Stroud Museum

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

It’s a right regular education
When you visit Stroud Museum,
To process through the rooms,
On a trek to a prehistoric age:

For here’s a cabinet of curiosities:
Twenty-four exhibits, including
The tooth from an ancient Minchinhampton crocodile,
A coral from Newmarket, Nailsworth,
A Nautilus from Rodborough …
The Paris Situationists’ slogan
‘Underneath the pavements, the beach!’
Is displaced by this vista of the vastness of Time:
‘Over our heads as we walk the Stroudwater valleys,
The limitless ancient ocean!’

Stroud Museum and Prehistoric Stroud

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

It’s a right regular education
When you visit Stroud Museum,
To process through the rooms,
On a trek to a prehistoric age:

For here’s a cabinet of curiosities:
Twenty-four exhibits, including
The tooth from an ancient Minchinhampton crocodile,
A coral from Newmarket, Nailsworth,
A Nautilus from Rodborough …
The Paris Situationists’ slogan
‘Underneath the pavements, the beach!’
Is displaced by this vista of the vastness of Time:
‘Over our heads as we walk the Stroudwater valleys,
The limitless ancient ocean!’

.
And here is another cabinet of curiosities:
A cabinet of ammonites and molluscs
A mixture of the extinct and the extant:
Long gone species such as the ichthyosaur,
But ‘Incredibly, the Lingula bracheopods have existed for some 500 million years’:
It’s enough to blow your mind as you muse on the ineffable nature of Time,
Here by the cabinets in Stroud Museum.
And there within a cabinet,
Carefully labelled and dated
By some fossicking antiquarian,
Lie the exhibits with their discovery date:
May 1939,
That last innocent spring
Spent in ruminative discovery,
Before the Age of Blitzkrieg and Holocaust.

Visitors wander along chatting about the exhibits,
Two plan excursions to fossil sites,
A young mum educates her child,
Friendly staff chat to me about what I am doing,
Another two people pass me,
Talking about Cotswold long barrows,
And here, a board with artists’ impressions
Of a Mesolithic landscape at Stroud,
The Neolithic long barrow at Nympsfield,
And the Iron Age fort at Uley
And here, a photo of Uley Bury in the here and now,
Together with a reconstruction of way back then,
Together with text about Crickley Hill,
And Neolithic arrowheads found there,
And slingstones and arrowheads found at Uley Bury
(built c.300 B.C.)
Then a large cabinet full of old bones,
Including – possibly – the bones
Of a Neolithic hunting dog
Found at the ‘so-called “Soldier’s Grave”,
a Neolithic round barrow at Frocester’,
And here, copper and bronze axes from the Bronze Age,
And Neolithic flint flakes
And Iron Age slingstones
In another cabinet of curiosities,
When along came Ian, a Museum volunteer,
Who told me how he often stands by the Romano-British altars,
And the funerary exhibits,
Reflecting on life, death and the genius loci
OF time and space locked behind the glass doors of the cabinets,
It all felt a bit M.R. James ghost story-like:
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …
I wouldn’t dare whistle here if I were you …

For here is a cabinet with a boy’s skull and a beaker,
A Bronze Age cinerary urn
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …
There, a Neolithic trephined skull from Bisley,
This is a copy. The original is in the British Museum.
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ …

Well, tempus fugit and all that,
It was time for me to go;
Sense, sensibility and knowledge all augmented,
Horizons broadened,
Educated, informed and entertained
In the true traditions of public service.
I bought some polished ammonites before I left the museum,
A present for my wife on her birthday,
To help her reflect on the nature of time and mortality,
And walked out into a windswept mad March day,
Feeling slightly wired by what I had seen and read,
Slightly ever so pantheistic,
Aware and part of it all:
The robin singing in the blossom blackthorn,
The rising, rushing Painswick stream by Tescos,
No bow and arrow or slingshot,
But the corvids still cried in alarm.
Clacking and fluttering in the trees on Rodborough Hill
As I ascended the hill to home,
Just as they did five thousand years ago.

‘Museums make you more aware:
Give You
Sense
Sensibility
Knowledge
A foothold in time
Make you feel a part of it all’

A Wiltshire Town and Peterloo

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’

I travelled on the GWR,
Built not long after the Orator’s death,
Passing through a mill-scape valley
Known well by quondam colleague, William Cobbett,
On past antique ridge and furrow fields,
To Swindon, a town that I am sure
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt would have admired,
A new industrial work-town,
Full of mechanics and artisans and questioning,
Thence by the 49 bus across the windswept Downs,
Through a leafless Captain Swing landscape
On a Captain Swing late November rain-swept day,
To take my leisure at the Bear in the town square,
Where – against every grain – Henry Hunt took his wife:
‘How this betrothing came about I must now inform my readers, I had often
heard my father speak in very high terms of Miss Halcomb, the daughter of his
old acquaintance, Mr. Wm. Halcomb, who kept the Bear Inn at Devizes, well
known to be one of the very best inns between London and Bath.’
Middle England was at its elevenses
In the hotel when I arrived,
But there were drinkers in the bar,
Faux Pickwickian coaching scenes everywhere,
No mention of the Orator, of course,
And no mention of him in the square,
Despite the mother and father of all coincidence,
And irony, paradox, juxtaposition and antithesis –
For right opposite the Bear stands a memorial,
A memorial to Lord Sidmouth
Member of Parliament for Devizes,
The hated rather than revered Lord Sidmouth,
He of Peterloo and reactionary infamy,
The repressive Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth,
Operator of spies, informers and agents-provocateurs,
Reviled by Shelley in The Masque of Anarchy*,
The arch-reactionary who congratulated the magistrates
And the yeomanry after the Peterloo massacre,
And who was, in more than just a sense,
Responsible for Hunt’s imprisonment
And consequent solitary confinement:
*’Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by …
Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’

Swinish Multitude

Edmund Burke‘s Statue, Bristol, December 2018

Edmund Burke on the lower orders – ‘ a swinish multitude’ –

‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude … ‘

Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790

Edmund Burke ‘s Statue

Paid for by a Bristol tobacco baron,
We look on your works and despair:
You stand there, commanding Bristol’s heights,
Your ancien regime condescension
Masked by this deceptive commemoration:
“I wish to be a member of parliament to have my share
of doing good and resisting evil.”
Far more truthful if the plinth were etched
With this memorialization:
‘I regard all you common people,
Passing me by on your trivial tasks
As nothing more than a swinish multitude.’

Edmund Burke‘s Statue, Bristol, December 2018

Edmund Burke on the lower orders – ‘ a swinish multitude’ –

‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude … ‘

Reflections on the Revolution in France 1790

Edmund Burke ‘s Statue

Paid for by a Bristol tobacco baron,
We look on your works and despair:
You stand there, commanding Bristol’s heights,
Your ancien regime condescension
Masked by this deceptive commemoration:
“I wish to be a member of parliament to have my share
of doing good and resisting evil.”
Far more truthful if the plinth were etched
With this memorialization:
‘I regard all you common people,
Passing me by on your trivial tasks
As nothing more than a swinish multitude.’

Thomas Spence:
Pigs’ meat; or, lessons for the swinish multitude: Published in weekly penny numbers, collected by the poor man’s advocate (an old veteran in the cause of freedom) in the course of his reading for more than twenty years. Intended to promote among the labouring part of mankind proper ideas of their situation, of their importance, and of their rights. And to convince them that their forlorn condition has not been entirely overlooked and forgotten, nor their just cause unpleaded, neither by their maker not by the best and most enlightened of men in all ages.
London: printed for T. Spence, at the hive of liberty, No. 8, Little-Turnstile, High Holborn

Edmund Burke Statue Haiku

Swinish multitude?
Remember Mr. Shelley –
Ozymandias!

All Hail Thomas Spence!
We’re no ‘swinish multitude’!
Pig’s Meat! People’s Farms!

Tokens issued by Thomas Spence and on display include
‘PIG’S MEAT PUBLISHED BY T * SPENCE LONDON (depicting a boar trampling upon the symbols of monarchy, parliament and the established church), and
PIG’S MEAT PUBLISHED BY T * SPENCE LONDON (a boar, once more, trampling upon symbols of authority: coronet, crozier and staff).

So you stand there on this Christmas Sunday,
Regarding the yuletide shoppers and beggars,
Most, oblivious to the hypocrisy
Of your words (and your pocket borough past) –
But just once in a while someone walks by,
Muttering ‘Swinish multitude, indeed.’
For they know of the anger caused by Burke,
They know of the radical consequence:
An Address to the Hon. Edmund Burke from the Swinish Multitude
Pearls Cast before Swine by Edmund Burke Scraped together by Old Hubert
Hog’s Wash, later renamed Politics for the People or a Salmagundy for Swine
One Penny’s Worth of Pig’s Meat,; Pigs’ Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude
A Rod for the Burkites by One of the Swinish Multitude
Peas for the Swine and Grapes for Citizen
Husks for the Swine, Dedicated to the Swine of England, the Rabble of Scotland, and the Wretches of Ireland by one of the Herd
The Grunter’s Ode, or, an Heroic Poem, by a Swine … dedicated to Mr Burke, Godfather of the Swinish Multitude
The Rights of Swine
A New Catechism for the Use of the Swinish Multitude to be had in all Sties

Sources used:
Shelley and Burke’s Swinish Multitude Roland Bartel Keats-Shelley Journal Vol 18 (1969)
The Poor Man’s Revolutionary ed by Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong