It is not easy to determine which of many historic incidents of interest
should take precedence. The 10th of April, known as the day of Chartist
Terror--still spoken of in hysterical accents--will do, as it shows the
wild way with which sober, staid men can write history. I was out that
day with the Chartists, and well know how different the facts were from
what is believed to be the peril of the metropolis on that day. I have
long regarded it as one of the "bygones" having instruction in them.
The French have their 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794), when the Reign
of Terror ended, and their 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799), when the
Napoleonic Terror began, and the English have their 10th of April, 1848,
when a million special constables were out staff in hand, to prevent a
National Petition of the people being presented to the House of Commons.
Yet no conspiracy existed--nor even had the police fabricated a plot (as
they often did in those days)--no disorder had been threatened, not a
man was armed; the only imaginable enemy was the Chartist Convention
of less than two hundred persons. The most distinguished of the Special
Constables was Louis Napoleon, who four years later became known as the
assassin of French liberty, and whose career is one of the infamies of
Imperialism.
The 10th of April, 1848, has for more than half a century held a place
in public memory. The extraordinary hallucination concerning it has
become historic, and passes as authentic. Canon Charles Kingsley was the
chief illusionist in this matter. He wrote: "On the 10th of April,
the Government _had_ to fill London with troops, and put the Duke of
Wellington in command, who barricaded the bridges and Downing Street,
and other public buildings."* Nobody "had" to do what Kings-ley relates.
Nine years had elapsed since any one had taken the field against the
Government, and that was in a Welsh town 147 miles away. John Frost and
his tiny band of followers were the insurgents. All were put down
in twenty minutes by a few soldiers. Frost came to London in 1839 to
consult James Watson, Henry Hetherington, Richard Moore, William Lovett,
and other responsible Chartists, whom he most trusted. They besought
Frost to abandon his idea of an attack upon Newport, as no one would
support him. There were no arms in London on April, 1848, no persons
were drilled, no war organisation existed, and no intention of rising
anywhere. The Government knew it, for they had spies everywhere. They
knew it as well or better in 1848 than in 1839. For nine years John
Frost had then been in penal servitude, and no one had attempted to
imitate him. Nor had he any followers in London in 1848. At his trial
no noblemen, no aristocratic ladies, crowded the court to cheer him by
their sympathy, or mitigate his sentence by their influence--as they did
when Dr. Jameson and others were on trial for their wanton and murderous
raid on the Government of South Africa. Such is the difference between
the insurgency of poverty seeking redress, and the insurgency of wealthy
insolence seeking its further aggrandisement There was absolutely
nothing in the field against the Duke of Wellington in London but a
waggon, on which a monster petition was piled.
* Introduction to "Alton Locke," by Thomas Hughes.
Politically speaking, London has seen no tamer day than the 10th of
April, 1848. There was less ground for alarm than when a Lord Mayor s
procession passes through the city. The procession of actual Chartists,
able to leave their work to join it, could never have amounted to four
thousand. There was not a single weapon among them, nor any intention of
using it had they possessed it. There was only one weapon known to be in
London, in the hands of the Chartists, and that was a Colonel Macerone's
spear, fabricated in 1830, to assist in carrying the first Reform Bill.
That was hidden up a chimney in 3, Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster
Row. It came into my possession, and I have often shown it to members of
the Government to convince them what risks Society ran in Wellington's
days--and are exposed to still.
The Chartists had held a Convention in London the week before the 10th,
and were unable to obtain any place of meeting except a small social
institution in John Street, Tottenham Court Road, which could not seat
150 persons at the Convention table. The hall was lent to them by the
most pacific body of politicians in London--the followers of Robert
Owen. Yet Mr. Thomas Hughes adopted and authenticated Kingsley's
incredible belief, that the country was in danger of these earnest but
entirely impotent Chartist petitioners; and Mr. Hughes actually quotes
believingly in his introduction to "Alton Locke" a statement that: "The
Duke of Wellington declared in the House of Lords that no great society
had ever suffered as London had during the proceeding, while the Home
Secretary telegraphed to all the chief magistrates of the kingdom the
joyful news that the peace had been kept in London."*
* Prefatory Memoir of Kingsley's Works, by Thomas Hughes,
p. 13.
Never did the craziest despotic Government in Europe engage in such a
political imposture. It was pitiable that the Duke of Wellington should
have had no more self-respect than to compromise his great career
by fortifying London against an imaginary enemy. The Government had
plentiful information and must have known the truth--the contrary of
what they alleged.
It may be said in extenuation of these affected Ministerial terrors,
that the Parisian revolution of that year had communicated unrest to
the people of England. It had inspired them with pleasure, but not with
insurgency, for which they were as uninclined as they were unprepared,
and none knew this better than the Duke of Wellington. The Parisian
population had seen military service. They understood the use of arms,
had them, and knew how to settle their differences at the barricade.
London had never seen a barricade. The people were all unused to arms,
and were without the means or the knowledge to storm a police station.
Yet, according to Canon Kingsley, Wellington told the Government "that
no capital had gone through such days as England had on the 10th of
April," when no man was struck--no man was killed--no riot took
place anywhere. It would seem that ignorance, rashness, wildness, and
irresponsible language are by no means peculiar to the working classes.
We must cease to wonder at the Duke of Wellington when an accredited
publicist like Judge Thomas Hughes, who was educated at Rugby, could
tell the world himself that "It is only by an effort that one can
realise the strain to which the nation was subjected."
On that awful day, nobody was reported as found looking into a shop
window with a predatory glare in his eyes, and no account came up from
the provinces that a single Chartist was observed to peep over a hedge
in a menacing manner.
I was out on the 10th of April. On Sunday, the night before, I was the
lecturer at John Street The audience was composed largely of delegates
to the dreadful Convention that so perturbed the "Iron Duke."
My advice to them, published at the time, was to "Beware of the police,"
and not to strike again if they were struck. Many of them, I knew, were
willing to die for their country, if that would save it. They would
serve it much better by dying without resistance, than dying with it. If
any were killed whilst walking in the procession their comrades should
move quietly on. Nothing would tell more strongly on public opinion than
such heroic observance of order. Hetherington, one of the bravest who
walked in the ranks, told me he would do it. The Government, by their
ostentatious provocation, in garrisoning the Bank with soldiers,
crowding Somerset House with them, parading troops on Clerkenwell Green,
had brought, it is computed, more than two millions of persons into the
streets. The conclusion to which the Chartist leaders came, was that
the Government wanted to create a conflict, shoot down a number of the
people, and then proclaim to Europe that they had "saved Society,"
by murder, as one of their chief special constables did soon after in
Paris.
As I had been personally associated with all the chief Chartists, in
prison and out, from the beginning of the movement, I can speak with
some knowledge of them on that day.
On the morning of the 10th of April, Mr. C. D. Collet, the well-informed
Secretary of the People's Charter Union, myself, Richard Moore, and
others, organised a band of forty persons, who were to distribute
themselves over London, note-book and pencil in hand, in the character
of reporters. The police took kindly to us, and gave us good positions
of advantage, where we could see everything that took place thereabouts,
and even protected us from being incommoded. We were there to watch the
police, not the people, as the disorder, if there were any, would come
from them. My station was in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, where a row
of constables was drawn up. I found a coarse, plethoric alderman, going
from man to man, saying only three words: "Strike hard to-day."
The people behaved admirably. Not a blow was struck which gave a
colourable ground for outrage on the part of the police. In justice to
the police, it ought to be said, neither did they incite disorder.
At night the Home Secretary spent the money of the State, in
telegraphing to all the mayors in the land "the day had passed off
quietly," thus creating a false terror everywhere that London had been
in danger--danger of the Government's creating.
The Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham in 1839, when I was resident there,
were created entirely by the magistrates, who introduced a hundred
London policemen into the town, which led to the loss of life and
property.
I and others on the deputation to Mr. Walpole told him at the time, when
the railings were broken down in Hyde Park, that if he made a show of
soldiers and policemen, people were sure to be killed. At the peril
of his own reputation, he kept them out of sight, and no disorder took
place, though violent members of the Government tried to destroy
Mr. Walpole for his wise and noble forbearance. Dean Stubbs, in his
interesting book on Charles Kingsley, says (p. 97): "On the 10th
of April, 1848, a revolution was threatened in England. One hundred
thousand _armed men_ were to meet on Kennington Common and thence
to march on Westminster, and there to compel, by physical force, if
necessary, the acceptance of the People's Charter by the Houses of
Parliament." Could such a lunatical statement be written by any one,
and his friends not procure a magistrate's order for his removal to the
nearest asylum? How were the "hundred thousand" to get the arms into
London--if they had them. Whence were they to procure them? Where could
they store them, seeing that at that time there was not a single place
of Chartist meeting that was not known to be in debt, unless its rent
was paid by the charity of some well-to-do sympathiser? What were
muskets or pikes to do against the stone walls of the Houses of
Parliament or the Bank? How were cannon to be drawn from the centre
of London to Kennington Common with ample service of powder and shot?
Marvellous is the history which Churchmen can write!
The utterly groundless and incredible representations of the "10th
April," which Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes published, as we have
seen, were to my amazement resuscitated as late as 1902 for the historic
instruction of the students of the Working Mens College in Great Ormond
Street, London, by Mr. R. P. Lichfield, vice-principal of the college,
who for forty-seven years has rendered it important service, for which
all friends of education for workmen are grateful. Yet in his address to
the students (October 1, 1902), he tells them that in 1848 "the wave
of democracy which swept over Europe gave fresh impetus to the Chartist
agitation. On the memorable 10th of April it looked as if we were to
have a revolutionary outbreak on the Parisian pattern. This we were
saved from, partly by an army of volunteers, special constables, partly
by the Duke of Wellington's discreet placing of his troops.... The
attempt to overawe Parliament by a 'physical force' demonstration was a
fiasco." The world knows a good deal of historians who draw upon their
imagination for their facts, but here is a responsible teacher, drawing
upon his terrors of fifty years ago, for statements which nobody
believes now or believed then, who knew the facts. The Duke of
Wellington's great name in war imposed upon amateur politicians. The
Duke--contrary to his reputation for military veracity--readily lent
himself to the Government of that day, that they might figure before the
country as the deliverers of England, from the nation-shaking assault
of a miscellaneous crowd of penniless and unarmed combatants, who had
neither cannon nor commissariat. Everybody was aware that the knowledge
of the Iron Duke, outside war, was very limited, and his political
credulity was unbounded. At the end of the Peninsular War he wrote to
the Government of that day, informing them "the bankers of Paris were
furnishing large sums to Revolutionists in England." Only old residents
in Bedlam would believe that. There were no leaders of Revolutionists in
England, to whom the money could be assigned or consigned, and bankers
were the last persons in the world to subscribe money for a wild,
speculative, and uncertain enterprise. No spy of Pitt, or Sid-mouth,
would have sent home so insane a report, from fear of instant dismissal
from their sinister employment.
This is but a sample of the airy, false, and fictionary foundation on
which the Legend of the Tenth of April was built. These incidents of
historic perversion, though bygones of half a century ago, are worth
remembering.