Enemies of the State (13 page)

We will never know how inflammatory Hunt's speech was going to be or whether the huge crowds would have lifted his oratory to new heights, because he never made it. To one side of the Field, on a balcony of a house belonging to a Mr Buxton in Mount Street, the magistrates watched the growing spectacle with little short of terror. They did not see the women, the children, the lack of weaponry. They missed entirely the patriotic airs of the bands and the holiday atmosphere. All they saw was the mob.

All weekend they had been psyching up for this moment and made the fatal decision to arrest Hunt and the others now mounting the hustings in the centre of the Fields – John Knight, John Saxton, Mrs Fildes, Richard Carlile (up from London for the occasion) and, if they didn't get out of the way in time, various journalists up there with them. The chain of command was shaky. The magistrates scribbled a quick affidavit, signed by thirty loyalists at Buxton's house, to give them carte blanche to arrest Hunt. This was passed to Edward Clayton, the borough reeve, who in turn summoned Joe Nadin. The thief-taker told him flatly that it was impossible to arrest Hunt from the podium, especially with the untrained special constables he had with him that day. It was probably a sensible decision from a police point of view. Nadin was well aware how hated he was. The sight of him pulling Hunt down from his pedestal would probably have provoked a riot immediately. But it now meant that the magistrates had to resort to the army.

The build-up of tension in the area over the previous weeks had given the magistrates plenty of time to call up the military, but again the chain of command broke down. The ever-sensible Sir John Byng was at York, so his
number two, Lieutenant-Colonel Guy L'Estrange, was left to command at Manchester. Under him were: eight troops of the 15th King's Hussars who had arrived at the end of July; both battalions of the 88th Foot and six companies of the 31st. He had a detachment of the Royal Horse Artillery under Major Dyneley, a die-hard psychopath, with two six-pounder guns. He also had all troops of the Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry and three of the most local unit, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry (MYC).

And that was the problem. The
Manchester Observer
had written scathingly of this unit:

The yeomanry are generally speaking the fawning dependants of the great, with a few fools and a greater proportion of coxcombs who imagine they acquire considerable importance by wearing regimentals.

They were middle-class men (they had to be able to afford their horses and uniforms) who detested the working class and used every opportunity to keep such riff-raff in their place. On the other hand, they were appallingly part-time, without the training or skill to handle the kind of sensitive crowd control needed for a day like this. Ostentatiously, the regiment had sent its sabres to be sharpened only the previous week.

It may have been an unintentional over-reaction, but a separate note was sent to Major Trafford of the MYC independent of the one sent to L'Estrange. Accordingly, Trafford ordered
his
number two, Captain Hugh Hornby Birley, to mount his troops and get to the field to arrest Hunt. The first fatality of the day occurred off the field in fact. Alone of all the troops positioned at various places in Manchester that day, Trafford had allowed his men into pubs and the unit that left Pickford's Yard was late. One of them, who may have gone off to relieve himself, found the Yard empty and galloped off down Cooper Street, hoofs clattering on the cobbles, accoutrements jingling and sent Ann Fildes
⁶
and her child flying. Two-yearold William's skull was smashed on the cobblestones.

It was 20 to 2 when the yeomanry arrived on the field. Various accounts, both modern and contemporary, refer to them galloping, but this is unlikely, given the size of the crowd and the space involved. Later radical cartoons all showed racing horses, one in particular with the MYC portrayed as overfed ‘Piccadilly butchers' wielding axes.

In fact the MYC carried the 1796 pattern Light Cavalry sword, heavy
and curved. It was 33 inches long and weighed 2 lbs 2 oz. Designed for use from the saddle, in the right hands it was every bit as murderous as an axe.
⁷
The Manchester and Salford men wore dark blue Light Dragoon uniforms with white facings and black leather shakos. One of the men who came in for particular opprobrium that day was the trumpeter Edward Meagher, partly no doubt because he was so visible. Trumpeters wore white uniforms and rode grey horses.

There was only a narrow avenue through the crowd to the hustings and the conventional cavalry advance was conducted in line abreast. Unfamiliar with this situation, the MYC tried to follow Nadin and his constables down the avenue and found their formation broken. Panicking, with a sea of disbelieving and then hostile faces around them, the yeomen began to hack with their sabres, their horses whinnying and rearing in complete confusion. Captain Birley got to Hunt first and tried to arrest him. Hunt was polite, but firm and refused to be arrested by anyone but a civilian officer. At the same time, he was trying to shout above the rising screams of hysteria, to defuse the already desperate situation. ‘Stand firm, my friends. They are in disorder already. This is a trick. Give them three cheers.'

With the yeomanry and the constables forming a dense mass around the hustings, Hunt came down the steps of his own accord. Others were not so lucky – Joseph Johnson was dragged off by his ankles and Mrs Fildes, whose dress got hooked on the wagon's nails, was hit across the body by (luckily) the flat of a yeomanry sword.

With dust eddying all around them on that sweltering day, the MYC now hacked about them in all directions. ‘Have at their flags!' somebody shouted and with the constables intent on getting the speakers away, the unit began to rip down banners and smash the hustings.

At about this point, it looked to the watching magistrates as if the crowd was attacking the yeomanry – and probably by now, in self-defence, it was.

‘Good God, sir,' Magistrate William Hulton screamed at L'Estrange. ‘Don't you see they are attacking the Yeomanry? Disperse them.'

In the dust and confusion, Bamford recognized the 15th Hussars forming up at the far end of the Field. There was blood and chaos all around him. ‘Nay, Tom Shelmerdine,' he heard an old woman say as she came face to face with a yeoman in the melee, ‘thee will not hurt me, I know.' She had nursed him as a child. He rode over her.

‘Damn you, I'll reform you!'
he heard another bark and, ‘Spare your lives? Damn your bloody lives.' Men were scrambling to get their women and children to safety, but nowhere was safe.

Briefly, a cheer went up when others saw the Hussars. These were no local bully-boys with class warfare on their minds, but the heroes of Waterloo, fought four years earlier. Some accounts say the men of the 15th wore their Waterloo medals pinned to their yellow-frogged jackets. We have no clear description of this regiment on the day. The army hated ‘aiding the civil power' and no one in the regiment would have felt much pride in what happened in Manchester. Almost certainly, the troops wore scarlet shakos and as it was high summer, grey pantaloons and no pelisses. One of the few artefacts to have survived from St Peter's Fields is a scarlet horsehair plume from the 15th.

Again, some modern accounts say that the Hussars charged. Again, there was no room. For cavalry to reach the gallop, they need to go through the ‘walk, march, trot' phases first, their swords ‘at the slope' on their shoulders with the trot. There simply wasn't the space on what was now a battlefield to manoeuvre in this way. They probably came on at a walk, perhaps rising to a trot, but the effect would have been the same. People panicked and ran, trampling each other in their blind terror, crushing people with their own body weight, hurling others down into the open cellars that ringed the field.

Outside the Friends' Meeting House, some of the mob had found loose pieces of timber and began bashing the yeomanry with improvised sticks. The yeomanry in turn slashed with their sabres. Lieutenant Hylton Jolliffe of the 15th knocked aside the swords of two of them and yelled, ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, for shame, forbear. The people cannot get away.'

In perhaps half an hour, it was all over. Samuel Bamford surveyed the field as his shattered people stumbled back through the Manchester streets to hobble the twenty miles home, numb, shocked, unbelieving.

. . . 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 yeomanry had dismounted – some were easing their horses' girths, others adjusting their accoutrements; and some were wiping their sabres. Several mounds
of human beings still remained as they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these still groaning – others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath and others would never breathe again . . .
⁸

No official enquiry was ever carried out into what happened at St Peter's Fields. John Ashton, Thomas Buckley, John Lees and William Dawson died as a result of sabre wounds, all delivered, almost certainly, by the MYC. James Crompton, William Fildes, Mary Heys, Arthur O'Neill and Martha Partington were crushed to death. For the death of Sarah Jones and William Bradshaw, no actual cause is given. Joseph Ashworth was shot by the police in the dispersal of a near-riot later that same night as the mob returned, angry and vengeful. Thomas Ashworth was a special constable who had got in the way of the yeomanry at the hustings and suffered the same fate as the rest of the dead.

Of the 420 officially injured (and there are likely to have been many more with superficial wounds) John Baker was beaten with constables' truncheons and lost a great deal of blood. Margaret Goodwin was trampled by horses and was losing the sight of both eyes. Catherine Colman had three ribs cracked. Mary Jervis had her calf sliced off. William Butterworth had his shoulder blade smashed by a sabre and the wound would not heal. Many of them were too ill to work, including 18-year-old John Lees who had fought as a drummer boy at Waterloo. He died of his injuries over two weeks later, his back slashed in several places, his elbow bone sticking through the skin. The woman who helped lay him out said, ‘I never saw such a corpse as this in all my life.'

The leaders of the day languished in prison before their trials and Dr Healey was added to the list on 24 August. Bamford was also in the New Bailey by the 26th. Hunt was sent to Lancaster gaol, escorted personally by Nadin (who, uncharacteristically, bought him a meal en route) and the few, but effective, legal champions on the radical side swept into action. Sir Charles Wolseley stumped up the ridiculously high £1,000 bail for Hunt and two solicitors, James Harmer and Henry Dennison, brought charges against members of the MYC.

At every turn, the local authorities made life difficult. They delayed inquests on those who had died, refused to accept evidence that did not suit them and did their utmost to stifle the radical press. They thanked the MYC officially for ‘their extreme forbearance exercised when insulted and
defied by the rioters'.

And what was worse – they had the backing of the government. To be fair, this was not unreserved, but even tacit
acceptance
of the magistrates' actions was seen by the people as tantamount to wholesale approval. Sidmouth had been holidaying in Broadstairs when the clash happened and expressed his lily-livered congratulations that casualties had been kept to a minimum.

The Prince Regent, in one of his particularly badly judged decisions, rattled off
An Important Communication to the People of England
aboard the royal yacht moored off Christchurch, expressing his satisfaction with the ‘prompt, decisive and efficient measure for the preservation of public tranquillity' observed that day.

In the real world, of justice and sanity, the
Manchester Observer
was first into the fray. It noted that the ‘bastard soldiers' of the MYC were particularly targeting the women on the Field and the paper used for the first time the name ‘Peter Loo'. Not only the yeomanry but the magistrates were singled out for scorn – ‘A Friend to Order' promised he would ‘send a ball' to the head of Magistrate Hay in September and James Neville in the same month wrote from Liverpool:

Shame! Shame! That a clergyman should head a band of privileged murderers and invite them to acts of bloodshed and massacre.

One hundred and fifteen miles to the south of St Peter's Fields a troop of the Warwickshire Yeomanry was clattering through Smith Street in the county town when a crowd developed, spitting at them and calling them ‘Manchester butchers'. The radical cartoonists showed the MYC sabring the crowd and a little girl with her arms raised up under the flying hoofs crying, ‘Pray, Sir, don't kill Mammy. She only came to listen to Mr Hunt.'

Bamford wrote:

If the people were to rise and smite their enemies, was not this the time? Was every enormity to be endured and this after all? Were we still to lie down like whipped hounds, whom nothing could rouse to resistance? Were there not times and seasons and circumstances, under which the common rules of wisdom become folly, prudence became cowardice and submission became criminal? And was not the present one of these times and seasons?
⁹

Arthur Thistlewood could not have read these words because Bamford would not write them for another thirty years. But he and the other men of Cato Street shared their sentiments and made their plans and took their chance.

Chapter 9

Men of Colour

On 15 September 1819, while he was still free on bail, Henry Hunt made a triumphal entry into London. The various associations and societies turned out in force with flags, bands and horsemen. One banner was white with a black crape border, inscribed to the victims of Peterloo. In a carriage behind Hunt's rode the heroes of Spa Fields – Watson, Thistlewood, Preston. John Keats wrote to his brother:

It would take me a whole day and a quire of paper to give you anything like detail. The whole distance from the Angel at Islington to the Crown and Anchor was lined with multitudes.
¹

The authorities watched all this with unease. The Manchester magistrates, realizing they had been heavy-handed to say the least, now talked themselves into believing that they had been right. Magistrate Norris wrote of St Peter's Fields:

They came in a threatening manner – they came under the banners of death, thereby showing they meant to overturn the Government.

And a Yorkshire loyalist wrote:

I consider such meetings . . . to be nothing more or less than risings of the people; and I believe that these . . . if suffered to continue, would end in open rebellion.

There is a suggestion that Peterloo was one of those freak occurrences occasioned by a unique set of circumstances. This is nonsense. Such violence could have erupted anywhere in 1819–20 because the loyalists were terrified of the people and prepared to use excessive force against them. Some historians have tried to distance Sidmouth and the Cabinet, to imply that the Manchester authorities exceeded the ‘spirit of the Home Office'. The ‘spirit of the Home Office' was to keep working men in their place,
especially if such men cheered their heroes like Hunt or Thistlewood; or if they carried any sort of banner demanding justice. In one of the most famous radical cartoons of the Manchester massacre the cherubic face of the Prince Regent floats above the slashing yeomanry with the words ‘Cut them down, my brave boys!' This was the general attitude of the authorities, from the highest in the land to the Manchester Bench and below.

By the end of the year, many leading radicals, whether they had been involved in Manchester or not, were in gaol or awaiting trial on a variety of charges; Hunt, Bamford, Saxton and others who had been unceremoniously bundled from St Peter's Fields; James Wroe of the
Manchester Observer
; Burdett, Cartwright, Wolseley, Carlile.

What no one outside Manchester knew was that the heart had been ripped out of the local radical movement. Bamford wrote of men sharpening scythes and muttering in darkness about retribution. An ugly crowd milled for a night or two around the house of Edward Meagher, trumpeter of the MYC. But nothing actually happened. London, in particular, seemed unaware of this or perhaps they merely wanted to keep the open-air meeting alive. On 29 August there was a huge rally at Smithfield, at which Arthur Thistlewood was principal speaker. An even larger one took place the following week in Westminster, with Burdett, Cartwright and John Thelwall holding forth. And there were rumblings in the provinces too. In October and November there was talk of pike-production in smithies across Newcastle, Sheffield and Birmingham. Drilling was carried out in Halifax, Wigan, Bolton, Blackburn and Huddersfield.

It was in these weeks that Watson, Thistlewood and Preston began to plan their own revolution. Admittedly, the information came largely from an informer, John Williamson, but the authorities certainly believed it. The rising was initially planned to take place on the day of Bartholomew Fair, 28–29 August and the police were employed rummaging through agricultural baskets, oyster-tubs and sausage-stalls looking for pike-heads. The Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards were on stand-by just in case. By this time, it is clear that Thistlewood, not Watson, was the prime mover. He held secret meetings at midnight, made enquiries as to the number of cannon in certain London barracks and arranged for a crowd to cheer
Richard Carlile as he arrived for his trial at the King's Bench.

What prevented any rising at Bartholomew Fair (or anywhere else in London in these weeks) was an upswing in the economy, making the weavers of Spitalfields for instance less likely to get involved in dangerous politics. It didn't help that Watson, in particular, kept his plans a close secret in case of spies or informers, thereby confusing everybody, including himself. But the major reason, by November, was the passing of the government's Six Acts.

The term ‘police state' did not exist in 1819, but the measures rushed through by the government after parliament reconvened at the end of November almost defined it. The Training Prevention Act prevented the unarmed, silent drilling which had so unnerved Byng and Nadin's constables. Anyone found guilty would be liable to transportation for seven years or imprisonment for two. The Seizure of Arms Act gave the authorities the right to search any premises or individual for illegal weapons, especially no doubt the dreaded pike. The disturbing point about this was that the oath of only one witness was necessary for this law to be put into motion. When that witness was a spy or the searchers were Nadin's corrupt, evidence-planting constables, the scope for injustice was huge. The Misdemeanours Act was designed to rush judgments through the courts. The longer men like Hunt were allowed to wander round on bail stirring up discontent, the worse a situation was likely to get. The Seditious Meetings Act prevented the holding of meetings of more than fifty people without the written consent of a magistrate or sheriff. Even with consent, such meetings could be dispersed within fifteen, as opposed to sixty, minutes and there were to be no banners, no outsiders and no semblance of drill. The government was also aware of the inflammatory potential of newspapers and journals, no doubt the
Manchester Observer
foremost among them. The Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act threatened radical editors (and indeed non-radical ones like Thomas Barnes of
The Times
) with severe punishment including exile for articles likely to disturb the peace. The Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act, finally, hit journals like the
Black Dwarf
and
Twopenny Trash
with duties for the first time. This meant that cheap editions were now a thing of the past; editors had to deposit large sums of money against any fines that might be imposed.

It is true that habeas corpus was not again suspended, but it is difficult
to imagine how much tighter the radical cause could have been hemmed in. At a stroke, freedom of the press was censored. The right of Englishmen to bear arms was destroyed. The open-air meeting, the most public expression of working-class and popular grievance, was savagely curtailed. None of this excuses what nearly happened in Grosvenor Square two months later, but it does place it in context. As long as men like Lord Ellenborough could see ‘no possible good to be derived to the country from having statesmen at the loom and politicians at the spinning jenny', the only recourse open to the hard-liners of the radical movement was illegality and bloodshed.

In February 1818 the leader of the Cato Street conspiracy, Arthur Thistlewood, continued his headlong rush to self-destruction by challenging Lord Sidmouth to a duel. He published an open letter to the man, listing a whole variety of grievances, some personal, some national. As a result, Thistlewood found himself in prison, first at the King's Bench, then in Horsham. According to E P Thompson, Sidmouth paid for Thistlewood's time in gaol personally, but if he did, Thistlewood was singularly ungrateful, because on his release he not only sent a list of damages to Sidmouth, but had them published in pamphlet form. Thistlewood claimed he had been all set to emigrate with his wife and son to America and that Sidmouth owed him £180.

A rather miffed John Cam Hobhouse, Sidmouth's Under Secretary, told Thistlewood his demands were unreasonable. Thistlewood replied that he hoped Hobhouse

thenceforth . . . will cast off [his] hypocritical saintlyness . . . and appear in no other character but [his] own, that of the willing tool of the vilest of mankind.

And he sent Hobhouse a list of belongings from his family that he wanted back – a coat, a pair of pantaloons, a waistcoat, three shirts, two pairs of stockings, a hat, a coat, waistcoat and trousers for his little boy, as well as the lad's bed, box of colours, inkstand, two writing books, music books and several goose-quills. Not to mention Mrs. Thistlewood's umbrella.

By the autumn of 1819, Watson, Thistlewood and the rest had organized the mysterious Committee of Two Hundred; mysterious, because when Thistlewood needed their support in Cato Street, they were nowhere to be seen. Some of them certainly can be named. John Gale Jones, the old Jacobin who had been active in London radicalism since the 1790s
was there and apart from the old Spa Fields ‘gang' of Watson, Preston and Thistlewood himself, Samuel Waddington had joined the throng. They were backed by various hard-line publications – the
Republican
, the
Medusa
and the
Cap of Liberty
.

Increasingly the centre of activities for Thistlewood in the weeks before Cato Street became the White Lion, in Wych Street, alluded to several times in the subsequent trials. ‘Here of an evening,' deposed an eyewitness,

a select committee assembled and no others were admitted. This was the room in which the most private transactions were carried on. Mr Thistlewood or Dr Watson always came out into the passage to speak to any person who called there on business. In a very large room upstairs . . . upwards of a hundred ill-looking persons have assembled of an evening; in it the open committee and loose members of the society met . . . Here their processions etc were arranged; their flags . . . kept while the more private business was carried on below in the parlour.
²

It was as well, given the events of February, that Henry Hunt had already distanced himself from Thistlewood. He disliked Watson and John Gale Jones – ‘You are a damned officious, meddling fellow' he told him – and felt generally that the hero of Peterloo should be accorded even more adulation in London than he actually received. While Hunt and others still advocated slow, peaceful means to secure change, ultra-radicals like Thistlewood were now, especially after the Six Acts, going their own way.

A national day was planned for mass meetings, with 1 November, All Hallows Day, as the target. All over the North plans were being made for this throughout October and it says a great deal for the murderous shift of inclination that Major-General Byng, keeping his ears to the ground in Yorkshire, should now believe that Thistlewood, not Hunt, was the key. In the event, only a few meetings actually happened, partly because Hunt officially washed his hands of it. In an unworthy moment – although it may have been to avoid bloodshed – he fell back on the old expediency of accusing Thistlewood himself of being a spy.

Throughout November, the radicals tore themselves apart in their own newspapers, the loyalists clearly delighted by this turn of events. In the first week of that month, William Cobbett came home from his exile in America,
bringing with him the bones of Tom Paine. Cobbett
in absentia
was far more powerful than Cobbett in the flesh. He was never a hands-on rabble-rouser and he was out of the swim of the monumental events of a cold, wet November in England. Putting forward only one proposal after the Six Acts, he set up a fund for reform to be raised by the unions, but since only he would know how much was in it, only he would decide how it should be spent, the whole thing looked like the act of a man who was either deranged or needed to recoup personal cash fast.

There is no doubt that, at the end of 1819, there was a vacuum in the radical movement of this country. Into it, with both feet, stepped Arthur Thistlewood. Subsequent historians, building on ever more lurid accounts that appeared shortly after Cato Street, have branded the man as an ‘atombomb traitor' (R J White), given to ‘personal neuroses' (John Stanhope) and even ‘Britain's first professional terrorist' (Clive Bloom). None of these quite fits the bill. We have already charted what is known of Thistlewood's career up to 1819, but what of his followers?

Richard Tidd was born in Lincolnshire, probably in 1775, and the first we hear of him he was apprenticed to a Mr Cante of Grantham. Apprentices normally began work with a master at the age of 12. Four years later he left for Nottingham. Again, apprenticeships normally ran for seven years, so it may be that Tidd never actually finished his ‘probation' as a shoemaker. He would have arrived in Nottingham about 1791 when the town already had a reputation as a turbulent place prone to food riots. He stayed here for two and a half years, leaving at about the time when Jacobins were ducked in a local pond. We have no idea of young Tidd's politics at this time, but the thumbnail sketch provided by Wilkinson paints a picture of a dodgy character, on the run from
something
. By 1795 he was in London, presumably working as a shoemaker (a particularly radical profession at the time), and in 1803 ‘he thought it prudent to retreat into Scotland'.
³

The reason for this flight was that there was a price on his head – £100 to be exact – because he had tried to vote illegally for Francis Burdett against Mr Mainwaring at the Middlesex election. Middlesex was famous as the most ‘open' county (i.e. with the largest number of voters) but this did not apply to Tidd, who was not actually a freeholder and therefore had no vote.
⁴
Like all Wilkinson's summaries of the conspirators' lives, a great deal of the basic chronology is flawed. ‘He was engaged in the conspiracy
for which Colonel Despard suffered', Wilkinson writes and this, more than the Middlesex election, probably explains his rapid departure from London.

Where Tidd lived in Scotland is not recorded, but after five years he probably thought the coast was clear and came south again, living and working in Rochester for a further nine years. Wilkinson also records that Tidd worked a scam on and off for a number of years and this would have been made easier by the fact that he kept on the move. At a time when volunteers for the army were welcomed with open arms, Tidd enlisted in a number of regiments, took the king's shilling and the offered bounty. This was a cash inducement for likely lads to sign up. True, most of it was whittled away at the barracks for mysterious ‘expenses' but for a short time it was in the volunteer's hands. This was Tidd's window of opportunity and he took it, working his way (according to Wilkinson) through half the regiments of the army under assumed names.