propaganda--for the planting of St. George’s Hill was doomed--and
some of Winstanley’s disciples made a tour through the counties of
Middlesex, Bedford, Hertford, Huntingdon, and Northampton, settling
down at last on some waste ground near Wellingborough. Here they were
very soon arrested by a local justice of the peace, the Council of
State ordered their prosecution, and the movement was suppressed.
To the Council of State these Diggers were “Levellers,”[127] “intruders
upon other men’s properties,” “seditious and tumultuous,” against whom
the public peace must be preserved.
Of Winstanley’s future, when the days of the digging were over, nothing
seems to be known. Only one pamphlet is issued by him after 1650--“The
Law of Freedom in a Platform; or, True Magistracy Restored”--an open
letter to Oliver Cromwell, February, 1652. With this final manifesto
on the land question, and on the whole social question, as he saw
it, Gerrard Winstanley disappears from history. In the multitude of
prophets and preachers, visionaries and practical reformers of the
Commonwealth, Winstanley is little heeded by his contemporaries. The
importance of his mission is seen more clearly to-day, when statesmen,
politicians, and philanthropists all urge agrarian changes and the
excellence of land culture.
As to Winstanley’s claim on behalf of the people to the common lands,
the advantage of possession of these lands was realized by the
landowners in the eighteenth century, and from 1760 to 1830 more than a
thousand acts of parliament were passed for enclosing these lands.[128]
In “The Diggers Song,” (of unknown authorship[129]), the outlook of
Winstanley and his followers is expressed in popular form:
You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name,
Your digging do disdain; and persons all defame.
Stand up now, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now;
Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,
But the Gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
With spades, and hoes, and plowes, stand up now, stand up now,
With spades, and hoes, and plowes, stand up now;
Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold
To kill you if they could, and rights from you withhold.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
Their self-will is their law, stand up now, stand up now,
Their self-will is their law, stand up now;
Since tyranny came in, they count it now no sin
To make a gaol a gin, to starve poor men therein.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Gentry are all round, stand up now, stand up now,
The Gentry are all round, stand up now;
The Gentry are all round, on each side they are found,
Their wisdoms so profound to cheat us of our ground.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Lawyers they conjoin, stand up now, stand up now,
The Lawyers they conjoin, stand up now;
To arrest you they advise, such fury they devise,
The devil in them lies, and hath blinded both their eyes.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Clergy they come in, stand up now, stand up now,
The Clergy they come in, stand up now;
The Clergy they come in, and say it is a sin
That we should now begin our freedom for to win.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The tithes they yet will have, stand up now, stand up now,
The tithes they yet will have, stand up now;
The tithes they yet will have, and Lawyers their fees crave,
And this they say is brave, to make the poor their slave.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
’Gainst Lawyers and ’gainst Priests, stand up now, stand up now,
’Gainst Lawyers and ’gainst Priests, stand up now;
For tyrants they are both, even flat against their oath,
To grant us they are loath, free meat, and drink and cloth.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The club is all their law, stand up now, stand up now,
The club is all their law, stand up now;
The club is all their law, to keep poor men in awe,
But they no vision saw, to maintain such a law.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now, stand up now,
The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now;
The Cavaliers are foes, themselves they do disclose
By verses, not in prose, to please the singing boys.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
To conquer them by love, come in now, come in now,
To conquer them by love, come in now;
To conquer them by love, as it does you behove,
For He is King above, no Power is like to Love.
Glory here, Diggers all.
Major Cartwright
“The Father of Reform”
1775–1824
AUTHORITIES: _Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright_, edited by
his Niece, 1826; _A Memoir of John Cartwright the Reformer_, 1831; _The
Times_, September 25th, 1824; Graham Wallas--_Francis Place_.
[Illustration: MAJOR CARTWRIGHT
(_From a Contemporary Drawing._)]
MAJOR CARTWRIGHT “THE FATHER OF REFORM”
1775–1824.
The substance of Major Cartwright’s life is told on the pedestal
beneath his statue in the dingy garden of Burton Crescent, to the south
of Euston Road, in London.
JOHN CARTWRIGHT,
Born 28th September, 1740. Died 23rd September, 1824.
The Firm, Consistent and Persevering Advocate of _Universal
Suffrage_, Equal Representation, Vote by Ballot and Annual
Parliaments.
He was the first English Writer who openly maintained the
Independence of the United States of America, and although his
distinguished merits as a Naval Officer in 1776 presented the
most flattering Prospects of Professional Advancement, yet he
nobly refused to draw his Sword against the Rising Liberties of
an oppressed and struggling People.
In Grateful Commemoration of his inflexible integrity, exalted
Patriotism, “profound Constitutional Knowledge,” and in sincere
admiration of the unblemished Virtues of his Private Life,
THIS STATUE
was erected by Public Subscription near the spot where he
closed his useful and meritorious career.
There is nothing false or exaggerated in this epitaph. Fox, in the
House of Commons, testified to Cartwright’s “profound constitutional
knowledge.” Hazlitt, who never met Cartwright, classed him with the
men of one idea (and lingered over the subject), but the charge is
ill-founded. It is true that for nearly fifty years, in season and out
of season, Cartwright, a pupil of Locke in politics, contended publicly
for annual parliaments and manhood suffrage, claiming personality and
not property as the ground for enfranchisement, and insisting that
while the right of the rich and the poor to the vote was equal, the
need of the latter was far greater. But this agitation was by no means
the limit either of his ideas or his activities.
Entering the navy at eighteen, John Cartwright, who came of an old
Nottingham family, devised improvements in the gun service, and, made a
lieutenant, was marked for high promotion. The revolt of the American
colonies cut short his professional career. An innate love of liberty
compelled the young naval officer to side with the colonists, and
he writes in 1776 that it is a mistaken notion that the planting of
colonies and the extending of empire are necessarily the same things.
Self-governing colonies, he declares, bound to England only by “the
ties of blood and mutual interests, by sincere love and friendship,
which abhors dependence, and by every other cementing principle which
hath power to take hold of the human heart,” are to be desired.
Lord Howe put Cartwright’s principles to the test by inviting him to
join the expedition against the Americans, and Cartwright, who was
“passionately attached to the navy,” and had an immense admiration for
Howe, could only answer that he was unable to take part in a war he
thought unjust. With this refusal his naval services were ended, in
spite of Howe’s quiet and dignified reply that “opinions in politics
are to be treated like opinions in religion.” (No word of reproach came
from Howe, no taunt of want of courage or lack of patriotism.)
Cartwright never condemned all war. He urged in a letter to a nephew in
the army that the answer to the question of the justice or injustice
of a war decided whether justifiable homicide or wilful murder was
committed by those engaged in battle. He hated standing armies and
barracks and barrack life, and all the pomp and glory of militarism, as
heartily as he hated the attempt to coerce the colonists. But no sooner
was he out of the navy than, with a major’s commission, he at once
set to work to train the Nottinghamshire militia, only retiring from
this post in 1791 when the government cancelled his appointment for
attending a meeting called to celebrate the fall of the Bastille.
The militia in Cartwright’s view was strictly a citizen army for home
defence. “The militia,” he wrote, “by its institution is not intended
to spread the dominion or to vindicate in war the honour of the crown,
but it is to preserve our laws and liberties, and therein to secure the
existence of the State.” Thirteen years before the fall of the Bastille
Major Cartwright had the cap of liberty displayed on the banners and
engraved on the buttons of the Nottinghamshire Militia. A greater
service than providing symbols of liberty was rendered to the army by
Cartwright in the matter of better clothing for the men. The misery
endured by ill-clad sentries aroused his compassion and indignation,
and Cartwright worried the government until it provided great-coats for
all private soldiers.
The humaner courage is as conspicuous in John Cartwright’s long life as
his political enthusiasm.
Four times he risked his life to save others from drowning, rescuing
two men from the Trent, a naval officer at sea, and, in late
middle-life, a small boy who had fallen into the New River, near
London. In the year 1800, hearing of a riot planned at Sheffield,
Cartwright made his way alone to the barn where the conspirators were
assembled, and stayed all night, reasoning with them against their
project. In the morning the confederates, dissuaded from violence,
quietly dispersed, and the riot was prevented.
An untiring advocacy of democratic politics earned for Cartwright,
justly, the title of “The Father of Reform.” He was the real founder
of that movement for political reform, which in the nineteenth
century swept away rotten boroughs, gave representation to all towns
of importance, and extended the franchise to the great bulk of male
householders in town and country; which to-day presses towards a
general suffrage for men and women.
Major Cartwright began his speeches and pamphlets on behalf of
political reform in 1776, just after his retirement from the navy, and
his acceptance of the commission in the militia.
The ideas of the French Encyclopædists, the writings of Rousseau, and
the revolt of the American colonists, had aroused a belief in social
equality, and the “natural” rights of man, and this belief Cartwright
championed till his death. His early pamphlets, beginning with
“Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated,” (1777) are heavy
reading to-day, but in them Cartwright argued for all the famous “six
points” of the People’s Charter of fifty years later--Universal Manhood
Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Vote by Ballot, Abolition of Property
Qualification for Parliamentary Candidates, Payment of Members, and
Equal Electoral Districts. He even uses the modern phrase in urging
“one man one vote.”
Unlike Thomas Paine, and many of the “Radical Reformers,” Cartwright
pleads for political democracy as the natural outcome of the Christian
faith, maintaining that “No man can have a right sense and belief
of Christianity who denies the equality of all conditions of men.”
Incidentally, challenged on the point of why not Votes for Women?
Cartwright could only fall back on certain passages in the Bible to
justify his objection to Women’s Enfranchisement. Nothing was more
abhorrent to his mind than the notion that government was a matter
for “experts,” an exclusive affair for persons with specially trained
intelligences. “Of all the errors to which mankind have ever submitted
their understandings,” he wrote, “there is no one to be more lamented
than that of conceiving the business of civil government to be above
the comprehension of ordinary capacities.”
The poor, because of their very poverty, had a need for the vote and
for parliamentary representation which the man of property could not
experience. This Cartwright emphasised in a petition he presented to
the House of Commons as late as 1820:
And when your Honourable House shall further consider that the
humblest mortal on earth is equally a co-heir of an immortality
with the most exalted who now wears stars, or coronets, or
crowns, your petitioner hopes that your Honourable House
will rise superior to the mean thoughts and vulgar prejudices
of the uncharitable among the wealthy, the ignorant, the
interested, the vain, and the proud; and will acknowledge
that, in reference to the respective claims of legislative
representation by the poor and the rich, the poor have equal
right but far more need.
Enthusiasm and an entirely disinterested zeal for democracy kept
the spirit of youth in Cartwright, and carried him at the age of
80 over a trial for sedition undisturbed. His zeal was not to be
quenched. “Moderation in practice may be commendable,” he declared,
“but moderation in principle is detestable. Can we trust a man who is
moderately honest, or esteem a woman who is moderately virtuous?”
This very allegiance to principle had its drawbacks in the world of
practical politics, of corruption and compromise. Three times Major
Cartwright stood for parliament: for the county of Nottingham in 1780,
for Boston in 1806 and 1807; and on each occasion he was at the bottom
of the poll. His nominations for Westminster in 1818 and 1819 received
no serious support at all. The old major was no more distressed by any
feeling of personal disappointment at these defeats than he was cast
down at seeing no signs of the triumph of political democracy in his
lifetime. At eighty-four we find him writing cheerfully, “To despair in
a good cause is to approach towards atheism.”
Cartwright did not live to see the passage of the great Reform Bill of
1832. Wilkes’ motion for reform in 1776 had been negatived in the House
of Commons without a division. In 1780 the Duke of Richmond’s motion
in the House of Lords for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments was
mocked by the outbreak of the Gordon (“No Popery”) Riots in London on
the very day the motion was made. Pitt’s third and last effort for
parliamentary reform was rejected in 1785. The French Revolution turned
men’s minds in Great Britain towards democracy, but reaction followed
hard on the Terror in Paris, and for a time a government terror crushed
every expression in favour of political liberty in England. Sir Francis
Burdett became the parliamentary leader of the “radical reformers”
early in the nineteenth century, and in 1809 found fifteen supporters
in the House of Commons. Ten years later the government, in the face
of a strong working-class movement for political reform, brought
out the military against the people at a peaceful meeting held at
Peterloo, near Manchester, and followed this up by six repressive acts
of parliament, and a general prosecution of the leaders of the reform
agitation.
Cartwright was eighty when, with several friends, he was charged “with
being a malicious, seditious, evil-minded person, and with unlawfully
and maliciously intending and designing to raise disaffection and
discontent in the minds of his majesty’s subjects.”
All England knew that Major Cartwright was a single-minded and
high-principled man, in whose heart was neither guile nor malice, a
man who had proved his loyalty and patriotism over and over again,
and was no more seditious than he was evil-minded or disaffected.
Apart from his advocacy of political reform and his services to the
militia, Cartwright had done much for farming and agriculture, he had
helped Clarkson and Wilberforce in their anti-slavery work, and he had
called the attention of the government, as loudly as he could, to the
defenceless state of the east coast against foreign invasion. Yet in
1820 a British jury, obedient to the orders of a political judge, found
John Cartwright guilty of “maliciously intending and designing to raise
disaffection and discontent,” and a fine of £100 was inflicted.
Francis Place, the radical tailor of Charing Cross, in whose shop the
later Chartists and Reformers were to be found, gives his impression of
Major Cartwright as he knew him in old age:
“When he was in town he used frequently to sup with me, eating some
raisins he brought in his pocket, and drinking weak gin and water.
He was cheerful, agreeable, and full of curious anecdote. He was,
however, in political matters exceedingly troublesome and sometimes as
exceedingly absurd. He had read but little, or to little purpose, and
knew nothing of general principles. He entertained a vague and absurd
notion of the political arrangements of the Anglo-Saxons, and sincerely
believed that these semi-barbarians were not only a political people,
but that their ‘twofold polity,’ arms-bearing and representation, were
universal and perfect.”[130]
To Place, chief political wire-puller of his age, industrious and
persistent in getting things done, with a typical cockney politician’s
scorn of disinterested enthusiasm, Major Cartwright appeared
“troublesome” and “absurd”--Francis Place had quite an honest liking
for the “old gentleman,” as he called him, all the same. By the
government Cartwright stood convicted as a “seditious, evil-minded
person.” Posterity is content to know John Cartwright by the title his
contemporaries conferred upon him--the Father of Reform--and to rank
him as the foremost man in England in the eighteenth century to raise
the standard of Political Democracy.
Ernest Jones and Chartism
1838–1854
AUTHORITIES: R. G. Gamage--_History of the Chartist Movement_; Thos.
Frost--_Forty Years’ Recollections_; Ernest Charles Jones--_Songs
of Democracy_; Graham Wallas--_Life of Francis Place_; J. A.
Hobson--_Ernest Jones_, in _Dictionary of National Biography_; _The
Times_, Jan. 27, 29; Mar. 31, 1869.
ERNEST JONES AND CHARTISM
1838–1854.
The Chartist agitation was at once the largest, the most revolutionary,
and the least successful of all the serious political movements of
the first half of the nineteenth century. For ten years, with varying
fortune, it threatened the authority of parliament, and then slowly
expired--destroyed by its own internal weakness and the quarrels of its
leaders rather than by the repression of the government.
The failure of the great Reform Act of 1832 to accomplish any
particular improvement in the lot of the mass of working people brought
the Chartist movement to life,[131] and roused the politically minded
leaders of the workmen to agitate for changes in the constitution that
would place political power in the hands of the whole people.
The six points of the Charter, embodied in the “People’s Charter” drawn
up by Francis Place and Lovett in 1838, revived the old programme
of Major Cartwright and, in substance, the earlier demands of John
Lilburne and the Levellers. Universal manhood suffrage, the ballot,
payment of members of parliament, equal electoral districts, abolition
of property qualification for members, and annual parliaments, these
were the “six points” of the Charter, the platform of its advocates,
and for ten years the hope of multitudes of earnest and devoted men and
women.
Francis Place and the Working-Men’s Association which gave Chartism
its name and programme never had any considerable voice in its
direction.[132]
Feargus O’Connor, who had sat in parliament from 1832 to 1835 for an
Irish constituency, was from the first the real leader of the movement.
His personality and his rhetorical powers roused the manufacturing
districts in the North and the Midlands to form political unions for
the Charter in 1838, and his presence dominated the first Convention,
held in London, with Lovett for its secretary. Later, O’Connor’s
obvious weaknesses, his vanity and egotism, his want of self-control
and that “one fatal disqualification for a leader of revolt--the fear
of the police”[133]--left leadership in his hands, but left him a
leader without followers.
Next to O’Connor stood another Irish orator, James Bronterre O’Brien, a
man of finer character, and clearer head, but smaller gifts of command.
South Wales, the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire,
and towns like Birmingham, Leicester, and Northampton, were the
strongholds of Chartism, and “in the dark days of the late thirties and
early forties it was a real and dangerous power.”[134] Feargus O’Connor
never advocated an armed rising, and advised the abandonment of the
huge torchlight processions; but pikes were being fashioned and men
were being drilled in preparation for a revolution that was to end the
Whig rule, and give the working classes the reins of government. The
circulation of the _Northern Star_, O’Connor’s weekly paper, stood at
50,000 in those days.
Riots at Newport (Monmouth) and Birmingham in 1839, followed by several
arrests and imprisonments of the Chartist leaders the following year,
ended for the time all notions of a successful revolution. Lord John
Russell declared strongly against manhood suffrage when the question
was raised in the House of Commons, and on a division in the House the
petition for the Charter was rejected by 237 to 48 votes.
The outbreak at Birmingham, provoked, in the first place, by the
interference of a body of London police with an orderly meeting in
the Bull Ring, was put down in two days by the soldiers; but not till
many houses had been attacked and a considerable amount of property
destroyed. No robberies or petty thefts accompanied the riot.
At Newport the harsh prison treatment of Vincent, a Chartist advocate,
convicted for what was held to be a political offence, brought a crowd
of 10,000 men, led by Frost, William, and Jones, to demand his release.
The insurgents had a few rifles and pikes, but were generally unarmed,
and the fire of the military soon overpowered them. But lives were lost
on both sides, and Frost and his two lieutenants were sentenced to
death, though the sentence was at once reduced to transportation for
life, and some years later to simple banishment from British dominions.
Feargus O’Connor, Bronterre O’Brien, and all the chief speakers of the
movement were brought to trial for seditious utterance in 1840, and in
most cases sent to prison either for twelve months or two years.
With these imprisonments and the general election of 1841 came the
first serious disintegration of the Chartist movement.[135] O’Brien and
O’Connor differed vigorously on the question of election policy, and
before they were released from prison were expressing their opinions
in the _Northern Star_. O’Connor, full of wrath at the repressive
treatment meted out to Chartists by the Whig Government, was for
attacking the Whigs at the election, and O’Brien objected to this as a
pro-Tory policy.[136]
The decision to run independent Chartist candidates for parliament in
certain constituencies, and the failure of these candidates to get
returned on the limited franchise of 1832, increased disunion in the
Chartist ranks and brought demoralisation.