Click on the image to enlarge it. Notice that the caption also addresses the "Female Reformers of Manchester" who had suffered in the "wanton and furious attack. During the period , it could be said that England suffered more, economically, socially and politically, than during the French Wars.
Consequently there were a number of manifestations of discontent and distress, in the shape of riots and disaffection , which epitomised the 'Condition of England Question'.
A series of demonstrations in favour of reform culminated in the deaths of eleven people in Manchester in August — the " Peterloo Massacre". We cannot have a doubt that some alarming insurrection is in contemplation Urged on by the harangues of a few desperate demagogues, we anticipate at no distant period a general rising, and possessing no power to prevent the meetings which are weekly held, we as magistrates are at a loss how to stem the influence of the dangerous and seditious doctrines which are continually disseminated.
In fact, a meeting in Manchester was planned for 9 August to elect Henry Hunt as the working-man's popular representative for Lancashire; it had to be cancelled because it was declared to be an illegal gathering. On 4 August, the Home Office wrote to the magistrates in Manchester about the proposed meeting:.
Reflexion convinces him [Sidmouth] the more strongly of the inexpediency of attempting forcibly to prevent the meeting on Monday. Every discouragement and obstacle should be thrown in its way He has no doubt that you will make arrangements for obtaining evidence of what passes; that if anything illegal is done or said, it may be the subject of prosecution. But even if they should utter sedition The main aim was to demand the reform of parliament as a step towards socio-economic betterment: ordinary people wanted government by the people for the people.
This is understandable when one considers that Manchester had a population of , and no M. This applied also to other large towns: Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds, for example. The organisers of the meeting were moderate men who wanted a peaceful event that would show that they were respectable working men, worthy of responsibility. The local magistrates brought in the Cheshire Yeomanry to control the crowd.
They were determined to enjoy themselves on a day out: many were dressed in their Sunday best and had taken their wives and children with them. The meeting went ahead, attended by 50, to 60, people. Eventually a more sober mood descended on the country and the revolutionary fever finally died out. Today it is widely recognised however, that the Peter Massacre paved the way for Great Reform Act of , which created new paliamentary seats, many in the industrial towns of northern England.
A significant step in giving ordinary people the vote! In March six English farm labourers were sentenced to 7 years transportation to a penal colony in Australia — for being in a trade union…. The story of how the American Civil War almost brought the British cotton industry to its knees…. The Rebecca Riots were a series of protests that took place between and in west Wales Not Waterloo but Peterloo!
But in a more serious demonstration took place in Manchester at St. A further three named people are believed to have either been stabbed or trampled to death, but their fate remains unconfirmed. A red plaque on Peter Street marks the spot, on the side of what is now the Radisson Blu hotel.
They wanted political reform. At that point, only the richest landowners could vote and large swathes of the country were not adequately represented in Westminster. Manchester and Salford, which then had a population of ,, had no dedicated MP, yet Oxford and Cambridge Universities had their own representation in parliament dating back to Many of them passed the morning drinking in local taverns, until a witness said they were so inebriated they were rolling on their saddles.
There was also a contingent of regular cavalry from the 15th Hussars, as well as a detachment of infantry with two small cannon, and special constables enrolled for the day and equipped with long wooden truncheons.
The magistrates — all local men of property, retired businessmen, lawyers, even a clergyman, none of them likely to be sympathetic to political reform — had also taken the precaution of calling in some local loyalist Tories who could be sworn to testify that they believed the town to be in danger if need be. They accordingly did so, even as the crowd gathered below. Later the magistrates would claim that they had also read the Riot Act, the formal rubric ordering the crowd to disperse, though if they did so no one heard them and they certainly did not allow the statutory hour for the gathering to leave.
Hunt arrived at the edge of the crowd in an open-topped barouche carriage at 1. It was just what the part-time cavalry had been waiting for: they clattered through the side streets, knocking over a woman and killing her two-year-old son as they did so, and charged into the crowd.
People were packed so tightly around the hustings that the yeomanry were soon lashing out with their sabres and becoming submerged in the terrified mass of onlookers. The constables themselves came under attack, probably accidentally, by the soldiers in the melee, with two being killed. The magistrates ordered the hussars into the crowd to rescue the yeomanry, who could be seen bobbing about in the midst of the crowd, slashing at the banners they were carrying.
The hussars may have been marginally more disciplined than the yeomanry but neither had any experience of crowd control and if the troops really did, as their officers later alleged, try to use the flats of their sabres to move people along, they too were soon slashing away at anyone within reach.
Some ran into the grounds of a nearby Quaker chapel and found the cavalry riding in after them, others fell down the cellar steps of nearby buildings or were pressed against walls and railings. When it had subsided a startling scene was presented. That was not how the survivors in the crowd saw it. The roads out of Manchester were clogged with the injured.
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