By general consent, continuous rain in Glasgow on Monday, 21 May 1838, subdued the extraordinary spectacle hardly at all.¹ All morning, the throng swelled on Glasgow Green preparing to welcome a delegation of the Birmingham Political Union (BPU). No other English organisation could have so galvanised Scotland. Equally, none but Glasgow’s combined trades could have organised an event on this scale. At 11.00 a.m., marching to the strains of 43 bands, a procession began winding its way across Glasgow towards Parkhead. Here the delegation from the midlands, which had already addressed a meeting there earlier that morning, was waiting for...

Abram Hanson addressed the great West Riding Meeting on Hartshead Moor, 15 October 1838, organised by the GNU. ‘They were the serfs and slaves of those who, possessing the power of law-making, had always the power of extracting the fruits of their industry for the promoting of their own selfish purposes’, he declared. ‘He would tell them as Oastler, the people’s friend, had told them – and he was a constitutional tory – he would tell them arm, arm, in defence of their rights (“we have done that lad”). Why did he say this? Because it was constitutional.’¹ Hanson was one of...

Chartism was buoyant as the New Year began. For example, on 26 January sales ofNorthern Starreached a new peak of 17,640. Further underlining the importance of the press to Chartism, a new paper appeared the following day:The Charter. Published by Robert Hartwell on behalf of a committee of working men (all LWMA members), it was edited by William Carpenter. Carpenter was yet another radical pressman who had entered politics (and suffered imprisonment) through the unstamped press.¹The Charterenjoyed initial sales around 6,000 an issue, highly encouraging given its implicit objective of counterbalancing the influence of the...

The cancellation of the sacred month and its substitution by three days of protest meetings was a climb-down of great significance for Chartism. Yet this was not entirely evident at the time, especially to opponents of the movement. The weeks since Lovett’s arrest had seen escalating disturbance, not only in Birmingham (with its most serious night of rioting on 15 July), but at Bury, Newcastle, Monmouth and Stockport. Tension was exacerbated by a series of church occupations by Chartists, some of the most confrontational of all Chartist publications and the passage through Parliament of legislation that briefly came close to...

In Newport the full enormity of events was quickly apparent to all concerned. TheMonmouthshire Merlinspoke for many when it speculated that, but for the torrential rain late on Sunday, ‘the attack would have been made in the night, instead of the morning: it must have been successful, and flaming houses would have proclaimed the town’s doom’. No air of triumphalism greeted the insurgents’ dispersal. It was universally feared that Chartist bands would regroup in the hills and attack again. Around noon that fateful Monday, the wounded Mayor sent a hurried dispatch to Bristol, predicting a renewed assault the...

‘Poor Frost is gone. Poor fellow!’ wrote Henry Vincent from his prison cell in March 1840. ‘He is one of the few really honest men that I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.’¹ John Frost faced an uncertain future in Tasmania, and so too did the Chartist movement he left behind. However, the local activities outlined in chapter 5 provided a resilient base, and from it a more-structured organisation emerged during 1840. Campaigning for Frost’s return (and by association Williams’s and Jones’s) helped to consolidate Chartism during the early months of 1840 when it might have drifted or lost...

In the autumn of 1841 Lord Francis Egerton (the Lancashire landowner glimpsed in chapter 2, gripped by indecision in the face of Stephens’s arrest) surveyed the ‘state of feeling in this fearful vicinity’. It was not Chartism alone that perturbed him, nor the onset of a further economic depression. The ACLL, determined in his opinion ‘to excite positive disturbances if possible’, leant a new dimension of menace to the disturbed state of industrial Lancashire. ‘In living in it all, I always feel as if I were toasting muffins at a volcano’, Egerton grimly observed. Volcanic similes were much favoured by...

The tensions within Chartism concerning the NCSU remained more significant than they appeared, even though few Chartists had walked out with Joseph Sturge from the Birmingham conference. Although William Lovett stayed with the Chartist contingent, the episode did nothing to alleviate his distaste for O’Connor and he rapidly drifted to Chartism’s margins with his beloved National Association. Bronterre O’Brien, too, was swiftly marginalised. George White was apprehensive that an ‘O’Brienite party’ was in the making.¹ In O’Brien’s adopted home, Brighton, there had even been fist-fights in the NCA branch; then, when it met to elect a delegate to attend the...

The context of the 1847 May Day rally at O’Connorville differed considerably from the People’s Jubilee nine months earlier, when the estate was first thrown open to inspection. At the most obvious and pressing level of human predicament, the full enormity of the Irish famine was becoming apparent, following the total failure of the 1846 potato harvest and a crisis of mortality over the winter. This had the incidental effect of making the land plan, which was regularly promoted as refuting Malthusianism, appear yet more timely and necessary. Second, within a fortnight of the May Day meeting, Daniel O’Connell had...

On Thursday 13 April, a House of Commons’ Committee reported on the mass petition O’Connor had presented three days earlier. At Kennington Common, O’Connor had claimed that it contained 5,700,000 signatures, which happened to be almost exactly double the size of the 1842 Petition. This figure had a spurious ring to it, even more so minutes later when Jones rounded it up to 6 million, the total that stuck in the public mind. Now, however, according to the committee, 13 clerks working for over 17 hours had calculated that total to be 1,975,496 signatures. Furthermore ‘a large number’ of signatures...

O’Connor in decline was an embarrassment to many Chartists. In death he became a rallying point. His last years were bereft of dignity. Evidently deranged from February 1852 onwards, he was finally committed to an asylum by House of Commons’ authorities in June after a minor assault on the Attorney-General. He had frequently claimed that devotion to Chartism had imperilled his health: the personal regimen he set himself in the decade from 1837 was certainly punishing. As early as January 1839 he had been laid low by a serious bronchial condition, possibly pleurisy, and he was similarly afflicted on several...