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Forgotten Heroes: The 1820 Radical War |
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© SCRAN |
However, the French Revolution changed all that for British radicalism, and as William Pitt the Younger led Britain into war with France in 1793, not only did the radicals become more vehement, but the propagation of these reformist ideas came to be viewed by the authorities as sedition, or even treason. In fact by 1795, following the public stoning of King George III’s carriage as it travelled to Westminster, parliament completely redrew the laws for treason, with the effect that holding public meetings in support of reform could lead to the stiffest penalties that the courts were at liberty to dispense.
The ideological wrangling of the reformists would continue, although in a more low-key fashion during the war with France, but it was discontent at the real working conditions of people that would result in events like those which took place at St. Peter’s Fields in industrial Manchester in 1819, when a public reform meeting attracted hordes of the discontented. The authorities estimated the crowd at around 50,000-60,000, big enough to warrant dispersal by military force. A massacre followed in which 11 died and 400 were injured when the Yeomanry were ordered to charge. The massacre became known as Peterloo, a pun on Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon four years earlier.
Peterloo sparked huge protests in Scotland, where the workers, and particularly the weavers, had much to complain about. The weavers in Scotland were skilled and literate people who traditionally worked to commission, chose their own hours, and managed their own lives in a way that was denied to many factory workers. Along with other skilled artisans, they formed an aristocracy of labour and were proud, independent, and increasingly radical in their outlook.
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