Wiltshire and Hampshire next proceeded to Dorchester, where a Special
Commission to try the Dorsetshire rioters was opened on 11th January.
The rising had been less serious in Dorset than in the two other
counties, and there were only some fifty prisoners awaiting trial on
charges of machine-breaking, extorting money and riot. The Government
took no part in the prosecutions; for, as it was explained in a letter
to Denman, ‘the state of things is quite altered; great effect has
been produced: the law has been clearly explained, and prosecutions
go on without the least difficulty.’[480] Baron Vaughan and Mr.
Justice Parke had given the charges at Winchester and Salisbury: it
was now the turn of Mr. Justice Alderson, and in his opening survey
of the social conditions of the time he covered a wide field. To the
usual dissertation on the economics of machinery he added a special
homily on the duties incumbent on the gentry, who were bidden to
discourage and discountenance, and if necessary to prosecute, the
dangerous publications that were doing such harm in rural districts.
But their duties did not end here, and they were urged to go home and
to educate their poorer neighbours and to improve their conditions.
The improvement to be aimed at, however, was not material but moral.
‘Poverty,’ said Mr. Justice Alderson, ‘is indeed, I fear, inseparable
from the state of the human race, but poverty itself and the misery
attendant on it, would no doubt be greatly mitigated if a spirit of
prudence were more generally diffused among the people, and if they
understood more fully and practised better their civil, moral and
religious duties.’
The Dorsetshire labourers had unfortunately arrived at the precipitate
conclusion that a spirit of prudence would not transform 7s. a week
into a reasonable livelihood. They used no violence beyond breaking up
the threshing machines. ‘We don’t intend to hurt the farmer,’ they told
the owner of one machine, ‘but we are determined that the land shall
come down, and the tithes, and we will have more wages.’ When money
was taken it seems to have been demanded and received in an amicable
spirit. The sums asked for were often very small. Sentence of death was
pronounced on two men, Joseph Sheppard and George Legg, for taking 2s.
from Farmer Christopher Morey at Buckland Newton. The mob asked for
money, and the farmer offered them 1s.: they replied that they wanted
1s. 6d., and the farmer gave them 2s. Sheppard’s character was very
good, and it came out that he and the prosecutor had had a dispute
about money some years before. He was transported, but not for life.
Legg was declared by the prosecutor to have been ‘saucy and impudent,’
and to have ‘talked rough and bobbish.’ His character, however, was
stated by many witnesses, including the clergyman, to be exemplary.
He had five children whom he supported without parish help on 7s. a
week: a cottage was given him but no fuel. Baron Vaughan was so much
impressed by this evidence that he declared that he had never heard
better testimony to character, and that he would recommend a less
severe penalty than transportation. But Legg showed a lamentable want
of discretion, for he interrupted the judge with these words: ‘I would
rather that your Lordship would put twenty-one years’ transportation
upon me than be placed in the condition of the prosecutor. I never said
a word to him, that I declare.’ Baron Vaughan sardonically remarked
that he had not benefited himself by this observation.
The tendency to give less severe punishment, noticed in the closing
trials at Salisbury, was more marked at Dorchester. Nine men were
let off on recognisances and ten were not proceeded against: in the
case of six of these ten the prosecutor, one Robert Bullen, who had
been robbed of 4s. and 2s. 6d., refused to come forward. But enough
sharp sentences were given to keep the labourers in submission for the
future. One man was transported for life and eleven for seven years:
fifteen were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment; seven were
acquitted. It was not surprising that the special correspondent of the
_Times_ complained that such meagre results scarcely justified the
pomp and expense of a Special Commission. In the neighbouring county
of Gloucester, where the country gentlemen carried out the work of
retribution without help from headquarters, seven men were transported
for fourteen years, twenty for seven years, and twenty-five were
sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from six months to three
years. All of these sentences were for breaking threshing machines.
The disturbances in Berks and Bucks had been considered serious enough
to demand a Special Commission, and Sir James Alan Park, Sir William
Bolland and Sir John Patteson were the judges appointed. The first of
the two Berkshire Commissions opened at Reading on 27th December. The
Earl of Abingdon, Lord-Lieutenant of the County, and Mr. Charles Dundas
were the two local commissioners. Mr. Dundas has figured already in
these pages as chairman of the meeting at Speenhamland. One hundred and
thirty-eight prisoners were awaiting trial at Reading: they were most
of them young, only eighteen being forty or over. The rest, with few
exceptions, varied from seventeen to thirty-five in age, and must have
lived all their lives under the Speenhamland system.
It is impossible to compare the accounts of the Special Commissions in
Berks and Bucks with those in Hampshire and Wiltshire without noticing
a difference in the treatment of the rioters. The risings had been
almost simultaneous, the offences were of the same character, and the
Commissions sat at the same time. The difference was apparent from
the first, and on 1st January the _Times_ published a leading article
pleading for uniformity, and pointing out that the Berkshire Commission
was ‘a merciful contrast’ to that at Winchester. The cause is probably
to be found in the dispositions and characters of the authorities
responsible in the two cases. The country gentlemen of Berkshire,
represented by a man like Mr. Dundas, were more humane than the country
gentlemen of Hampshire, represented by men like the Duke of Wellington
and the Barings; Mr. Gurney, the public prosecutor at Reading, was more
lenient than Sir Thomas Denman, and the Reading judges were more kindly
and considerate than the judges at Winchester. Further, there had been
in Berkshire little of the wild panic that swept over the country
houses in Hampshire and Wiltshire. The judges at Reading occasionally
interjected questions on the prisoners’ behalf, and in many cases they
did not conceal their satisfaction at an acquittal. Further, they had
a more delicate sense for the proprieties. Contrary to custom, they
asked neither the Grand Jury nor the magistrates to dinner on the first
day, being anxious, we are told, to free the administration of justice
‘from the slightest appearance of partiality in the eyes of the lower
classes.’ The Lord Chancellor and Lord Melbourne had been consulted and
had approved.
It must not be supposed that Mr. Justice Park’s theories of life and
social relationships differed from those of his brothers at Winchester.
In his address to the Grand Jury he repudiated with indignation
the ‘impudent and base slander ... that the upper ranks of society
care little for the wants and privations of the poor. I deny this
positively, upon a very extensive means of knowledge upon subjects of
this nature. But every man can deny it who looks about him and sees
the vast institutions in every part of the kingdom for the relief of
the young and the old, the deaf and the lame, the blind, the widow,
the orphan----and every child of wretchedness and woe. There is not a
calamity or distress incident to humanity, either of body or of mind,
that is not humbly endeavoured to be mitigated or relieved, by the
powerful and the affluent, either of high or middling rank, in this
our happy land, which for its benevolence, charity, and boundless
humanity, has been the admiration of the world.’ The theory that the
rich kept the poor in a state of starvation and that this was the cause
of the disturbances, he declared later to be entirely disproved by the
conduct of one of the mobs in destroying a threshing machine belonging
to William Mount, Esq., at Wasing, ‘Mr. Mount having given away £100
no longer ago than last winter to assist the lower orders during that
inclement season.’
A feature of the Reading Commission was the difficulty of finding
jurymen. All farmers were challenged on behalf of the prisoners, and
matters were at a deadlock until the judges ordered the bystanders to
be impannelled.
The earlier cases were connected with the riots in Hungerford. Property
in an iron foundry had been destroyed, and fifteen men were found
guilty on this capital charge. One of the fifteen was William Oakley,
who now paid the penalty for his £5 and strong language. But when the
first cases were over, Mr. Gurney began to drop the capital charge, and
to content himself, as a rule, with convictions for breaking threshing
machines. One case revealed serious perjury on one side or the other.
Thomas Goodfellow and Cornelius Bennett were charged with breaking a
threshing machine at Matthew Batten’s farm. The prisoners produced four
witnesses, two labourers, a woman whose husband was in prison for the
riots, and John Gaiter, who described himself as ‘not quite a master
bricklayer,’ to prove that Matthew Batten had encouraged the riots. The
first three witnesses declared that Batten had asked the rioters to
come and break his machine in order to serve out his landlord and Mr.
Ward, and had promised them victuals and £1. Batten and his son, on the
other hand, swore that these statements were false. The prisoners were
found guilty, with a recommendation to mercy which was disregarded.
Goodfellow, who was found guilty of breaking other machines as well,
was sentenced to fourteen, and Cornelius Bennett to seven years’
transportation. The judge spoke of their scandalous attempt to blacken
the character of a respectable farmer: ‘it pleased God however that the
atrocious attempt had failed.’ It would be interesting to know what
were the relations between Matthew Batten and his landlord.
On the last day of the trials Mr. Gurney announced that there would be
no more prosecutions for felony, as enough had been done in the way of
making examples. Some interesting cases of riot were tried. The most
important riot had taken place as early as 19th November, and the hero
of the proceedings was the Rev. Edward Cove, the venerable Vicar of
Brimpton, one of the many parson magistrates. A mob had assembled in
order to demand an increase of wages, and it was met by Mr. Cove and
his posse of special constables. On occasions like this, Mr. Gurney
remarked, we become sensible of the great advantages of our social
order. Mr. Cove without more ado read the Riot Act; the mob refused
to disperse; his special constables thereupon attacked them, and a
general mêlée followed in which hard blows were given and taken. No
one attempted to strike Mr. Cove himself, but one of his companions
received from a rioter, whom he identified, a blow rivalling that given
to Mr. Bingham Baring, which beat the crown of his hat in and drove the
rim over his eyes: it was followed by other and more serious blows on
his head and body. The counsel for the defence tried to show that it
was distress that had caused the rioters to assemble, and he quoted a
remark of the Chairman of Quarter Sessions that the poor were starved
almost into insurrection; but all evidence about wages was ruled out.
The court were deeply impressed by this riot, and Mr. Justice Park
announced that it had alarmed him and his fellow judges more ‘than
anything that had hitherto transpired in these proceedings.’ ‘Had one
life been lost,’ he continued, ‘the lives of every individual of the
mob would have been forfeited, and the law must have been carried into
effect against those convicted.’ As it was, nobody was condemned to
death for his share in the affray, though the more violent, such as
George Williams, alias ‘Staffordshire Jack,’ a ‘desperate character,’
received heavier penalties for machine-breaking in consequence.
Three men were reserved for execution: William Oakley, who was told
that as a carpenter he had no business to mix himself up in these
transactions; Alfred Darling, a blacksmith by trade, who had been found
guilty on several charges of demanding money; and Winterbourne, who had
taken part in the Hungerford affair in the magistrates’ room, and had
also acted as leader in some cases when a mob asked for money. In one
instance the mob had been content with £1 instead of the £2 for which
it had asked for breaking a threshing machine, Winterbourne remarking,
‘we will take half price because he has stood like a man.’
Public opinion in Berkshire was horrified at the prospect of taking
life. Petitions for mercy poured in from Reading, including one from
ladies to the queen, from Newbury, from Hungerford, from Henley, and
from other places. Two country gentlemen, Mr. J. B. Monck and Mr.
Wheble, made every exertion to save the condemned men. They waited with
petitions on Lord Melbourne, who heard them patiently for an hour. They
obtained a reprieve for Oakley and for Darling, who were transported
for life; Winterbourne they could not save: he was hung on 11th
January, praying to the last that his wife, who was dangerously ill of
typhus, might die before she knew of his fate.
Fifty-six men were sentenced to transportation from
Reading--twenty-three for life, sixteen for fourteen years, seventeen
for seven years: thirty-six were sent to prison for various terms.
The same commissioners went on to Abingdon where proceedings opened on
6th January. Here there were only forty-seven prisoners, all but two of
whom were agricultural labourers, most of them very young. The cases
resembled those tried at Reading, but it is clear that the evidence
of Mrs. Charlotte Slade, whose conduct we have already described, and
her method of dealing with the rioters, made a great impression on Mr.
Justice Park and his colleagues, and opened their eyes to the true
perspective of the rhetorical language that had assumed such terrifying
importance to other judges. One young labourer, Richard Kempster by
name, who was found guilty of breaking a threshing machine, had carried
a black-and-red flag in the mob, and when arrested had exclaimed, ‘be
damned if I don’t wish it was a revolution, and that all was a fire
together’: it is easy to imagine the grave homily on the necessity of
cutting such a man off for ever from his kind that these words would
have provoked from the judges at Winchester. Mr. Justice Park and
his colleagues sentenced Kempster to twelve months’ imprisonment. At
Abingdon only one man was sentenced to be transported; Thomas Mackrell,
an agricultural labourer of forty-three. Another, Henry Woolridge,
had sentence of death commuted to eighteen months’ imprisonment.
Thirty-five others were sent to prison for various terms.
The same three judges proceeded to Aylesbury to try the Buckinghamshire
rioters. The chief event in this county had been the destruction of
paper-making machinery at Wycombe. The Commission opened on 11th
January: the Duke of Buckingham and Mr. Maurice Swabey were the local
commissioners. There were one hundred and thirty-six prisoners to
be tried, almost all young and illiterate: only eighteen were forty
years of age or over. Forty-four men and boys were found guilty of
the capital charge of destroying paper machinery. Most of the other
prisoners who were charged with breaking threshing machines were
allowed to plead guilty and let off on their own recognisances, or
else the charge was not pressed. An exception was made in a case in
which some members of a mob had been armed with guns. Three men who had
carried guns were sent to transportation for seven years, and thirteen
others involved were sent to prison for two years or eighteen months.
Several men were tried for rioting, and those who had combined a demand
for increased wages with a request for the restoration of parish
buns were sent to prison for six weeks.[481] One more trial is worth
notice, because it suggests that even in Buckinghamshire, where the
general temper was more lenient, individuals who had made themselves
obnoxious were singled out for special treatment. John Crook, a miller,
was indicted with four others for riotously assembling and breaking a
winnowing machine at Mr. Fryer’s at Long Crendon. As Crook was charged
with a misdemeanour his counsel could address the jury, and we learn
from his speech that Crook had been kept in prison since 2nd December,
though £2000 had been offered in bail and many other prisoners had
been allowed out. The explanation, it was argued, was to be found in
the fact that Crook had come into some property which qualified him to
hold a gun licence and to kill game. He was sentenced to three months’
imprisonment without hard labour, and to pay a fine of £10.
Thirty-two men in all were sent to prison for the agricultural
disturbances in addition to the three sentenced to transportation.
Forty-two of those concerned in the breaking of paper-making machinery
received sentence of death, but their punishment was commuted to life
transportation for one, seven years’ transportation for twenty-two, and
imprisonment for various terms for the rest. Two men were reserved for
execution. One, Thomas Blizzard, was thirty years old, with a wife and
three children. His character was excellent. At the time of the riots
he was a roundsman, receiving 1s. a day from the overseer’s and 1s.
6d. a week from a farmer. He told his employer at Little Marlow that
he would take a holiday to go machine-breaking, for he would endure
imprisonment, or even transportation, rather than see his wife and
children cry for bread. John Sarney, the other, was fifty-six years
old and had a wife and six children: he kept a small beer-shop and his
character was irreproachable. Petitions on behalf of the two men were
signed extensively, and the sentence was commuted to transportation for
life. The Aylesbury sentences seem lenient in comparison with those
given at Salisbury and Winchester, but they did not seem lenient to
the people in the district. ‘Pen cannot describe,’ wrote a _Times_
correspondent, ‘the heart-rending scene of despair, misery and want,
prevailing at Flackwell-Heath, the residence of the families of the
major part of the misguided men now incarcerated at Aylesbury.’ The
same correspondent tells of a benevolent Quaker, who had become rich as
a maker of paper, helping these families by stealth.
* * * * *
The work of the Special Commissions was now over. Melbourne had
explained in Parliament that they had been set up ‘to expound the law’
and to bring home to the ignorant the gravity of their crimes against
social order. In spite of the daily imposition of ferocious punishments
on poachers and thieves, the poor apparently did not know in what
letters of blood the code against rioting and discontent was composed.
These three weeks had brought a lurid enlightenment into their dark
homes. In the riots, as we have seen, the only man who had been
killed was a rioter, killed according to the reports of the time by a
yeomanry soldier, according to local tradition by a farmer, and for
that offence he had been refused Christian burial. On the other side,
not a single person had been killed or seriously wounded. For these
riots, apart from the cases of arson, for which six men or boys were
hung, aristocratic justice exacted three lives, and the transportation
of four hundred and fifty-seven men and boys,[482] in addition to
the imprisonment of about four hundred at home. The shadow of this
vengeance still darkens the minds of old men and women in the villages
of Wiltshire, and eighty years have been too short a time to blot out
its train of desolating memories.[483] Nobody who does not realise what
Mr. Hudson has described with his intimate touch, the effect on the
imagination and the character of ‘a life of simple unchanging action
and of habits that are like instincts, of hard labour in sun and rain
and wind from day to day,’ can ever understand what the breaking of all
the ties of life and home and memory meant to the exiles and to those
from whose companionship they were then torn for ever.
* * * * *
We have said that one feature of the rising was the firing of stacks
and ricks and barns. This practice was widespread, and fires broke
out even in counties where the organised rising made little progress.
Associations for the detection of incendiaries were formed at an
early stage, and immense rewards were offered. Yet not a single case
of arson was tried before the Special Commissions, and the labourers
kept their secret well. Many of the governing class in the early days
persuaded themselves that the labourers had no secret to keep, and
that the fires were due to any one except the labourers, and to any
cause except distress. Perhaps the wish was father to the thought,
for as the _Times_ observed, persons responsible for grinding the
faces of their labourers preferred to think the outrages the work of
strangers. Sometimes it was smugglers, suffering from the depression in
their trade: sometimes it was foreigners: sometimes it was mysterious
gentlemen in gigs, driving furiously about the country, led by Captain
Swing, scattering fireballs and devastation. These were the fashionable
theories in the House of Lords, although Richmond reminded his brother
peers that there had been a flood of petitions representing the
sufferings of the labourers from the very beginning of the year, and
that the House of Lords had not thought it necessary to give them the
slightest attention. Lord Camden ascribed the outrages to the French
spirit, and argued that the country was enjoying ‘what was undeniably
a genial autumn.’ The Duke of Wellington took the same view, denying
that the troubles were due to distress: the most influential cause of
disturbances was the example, ‘and I will unhesitatingly say the bad
and the mischievous example, afforded by the neighbouring States.’
Eldon remarked that many of the prisoners taken in the riots were
foreigners, a point on which Melbourne undeceived him. The speakers who
regarded the disturbances in the south of England as the overflow of
the Paris Revolution had no positive evidence to produce, but they had
a piece of negative evidence which they thought conclusive. For if the
labourers knew who were the incendiaries, they would surely have given
information. In some cases a reward of £1000 with a free pardon for
all except the actual author was waiting to be claimed, ‘and yet not
one of the miserable beings have availed themselves of the prospect of
becoming rich.’
Some eleven cases of arson were tried at the Assizes in Essex, Kent,
Sussex, and Surrey: all the prisoners were agricultural labourers and
most of them were boys. Eight were convicted, often on very defective
evidence, and six were executed. One of the eight, Thomas Goodman, a
boy of eighteen, saved his life by declaring in prison that the idea
had been put into his head by a lecture of Cobbett’s. Two brothers of
the name of Pakeman, nineteen and twenty years old, were convicted on
the evidence of Bishop, another lad of eighteen, who had prompted
them to set fire to a barn, and later turned king’s evidence ‘after
a gentleman in the gaol had told him of the big reward.’ This fire
seems to have been a piece of bravado, as no doubt many others were,
for Bishop remarked, as the three were sitting under a hedge after
lighting the barn, ‘who says we can’t have a fire too, as well as
them at Blean?’ The two boys, who had never been taught to read or
write, scandalised the public by displaying a painful indifference
to the ministrations of the chaplain, and dying without receiving
the sacrament.[484] A half-witted boy of fourteen, Richard Pennells,
was tried at Lewes for setting fire to his master’s haystack for a
promise of sixpence from a man who was not discovered. His master, who
prosecuted, remarked that he was ‘dull of apprehension, but not so much
as not to know right from wrong.’ The boy, who had no counsel, offered
no defence, and stood sobbing in the dock. The jury found him guilty,
with a recommendation to mercy on account of his youth and imperfect
understanding. Sentence of death was recorded, but he was told that his
life would be spared.
These same Lewes Assizes, conducted by Mr. Justice Taunton, afforded
a striking example of the comparative treatment of different crimes.
Thomas Brown, a lad of seventeen, was charged with writing the
following letter to Lord Sheffield, ‘Please, my Lord, I dont wise to
hurt you. This is the case al the world over. If you dont get rid of
your foreign steward and farmer and bailiff in a few days time--less
than a month--we will burn him up, and you along with him. My writing
is bad, but my firing is good my Lord.’ Lord Sheffield gave evidence
as to the receipt of the letter: the prisoner, who had no counsel, was
asked by the judge if he would like to put any questions, and he only
replied that he hoped that his lordship would forgive him. The judge
answered that his lordship had not the power, and sentenced Brown to
transportation for life.[485] Later on in the same Assizes, Captain
Winter, a man of sixty, captain of a coasting vessel, was tried for
the murder of his wife, who had been killed in a most brutal manner.
He had been hacking and wounding her for four hours at night, and she
was last seen alive at half past two in the morning, naked and begging
for mercy. Her body was covered with wounds. The man’s defence was
that he came home drunk, that he found his wife drunk, and that he had
no knowledge of what followed. To the general surprise Captain Winter
escaped with a verdict of manslaughter. ‘The prisoner,’ wrote the
_Times_ correspondent, ‘is indebted for his life to the very merciful
way in which Mr. Justice Taunton appeared to view the case, and the
hint which he threw out to the jury, that the parties might have had
a quarrel, in which case her death by the prisoner would amount to
manslaughter only.’
* * * * *
When the disturbances began, the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister,
and Sir Robert Peel Home Secretary. But in November 1830 Wellington,
who had made a last effort to rally the old Tories, sulking over his
surrender on Catholic Emancipation, by some sudden thunder against
Reform, had been beaten on the Civil List and resigned. Reform was
inevitable, and with Reform the Whigs. Thus, towards the close of the
year of the Revolution that drove Charles X. from France, Lord Grey
became Prime Minister, to carry the measure which as Charles Grey,
lieutenant of Charles Fox, he had proposed in the House of Commons in
1793, a few months after Louis XVI. had lost his head in the Revolution
which had maddened and terrified the English aristocracy. Fortune
had been sparing in her favours to this cold, proud, honourable and
courageous man. She had shut him out from power for twenty-three years,
waiting to make him Prime Minister until he was verging on seventy, and
all the dash and ardour of youth had been chilled by disappointment
and delay. But she had reserved her extreme of malice to the end, for
it was her chief unkindness that having waited so long she did not
wait a little longer. Grey, who had been forty-four years in public
life, and forty-three in opposition, took office at the moment that
the rising passed into Hampshire and Wiltshire, and thus his first act
as Prime Minister was to summon his colleagues to a Cabinet meeting to
discuss, not their plans for Parliamentary Reform, but the measures to
be taken in this alarming emergency. After a lifetime of noble protest
against war, intolerance, and repression, he found himself in the toils
and snares of the consequences of a policy in which war, intolerance,
and repression had been constant and conspicuous features. And those
consequences were especially to be dreaded by such a man at such a
time.
Grey became Prime Minister to carry Reform, and Reform was still
enveloped to many minds in the wild fancies and terrors of a Jacobin
past. To those who knew, conscious as they were of their own modest
purposes and limited aim, that their accession to power boded to many
violence, confusion, and the breaking up of the old ways and life of
the State, it was maddening that these undiscerning peasants should
choose this moment of all others for noise and riot. The struggle for
Reform was certain to lead to strife, and it was hard that before
they entered upon it England should already be in tumult from other
causes. Moreover, Grey had to reckon with William IV. So long as he
could remember, the Court had been the refuge of all that was base
in English politics, and it was a question whether Liberal ideas had
suffered more from the narrow and darkened mind of George III. or the
mean and incorrigible perfidy of George IV. In comparison with his
father, the new king had the wisdom of a Bentham or an Adam Smith; in
comparison with his brother, he had the generous and loyal heart of a
Philip Sidney or a Falkland. But seen in any less flattering mirror, he
was a very ordinary mortal, and Grey had known this jolly, drinking,
sailor prince too long and too well to trust either his intellect or
his character, under too fierce or too continuous a strain. These
riots tried him severely. No sooner was William on his throne than
the labourers came out of their dens, looking like those sansculottes
whose shadows were never far from the imagination of the English upper
classes. The king’s support of Reform was no violent enthusiasm, and
the slightest threat of disorder might disturb the uneasy equilibrium
of his likes and fears. In the long run it depended on the will of this
genial mediocrity--so strangely had Providence mixed caprice and design
in this world of politics--whether or not Reform should be carried,
and carried without bloodshed. Throughout these months then, the king,
always at Melbourne’s elbow, trying to tempt and push the Government
into more drastic measures, was a very formidable enemy to the cause of
moderation and of justice.
These influences were strong, and there was little to counteract them.
For there was nobody in the world which Grey and Melbourne alike
inhabited who could enter into the minds of the labourers. This is
readily seen, if we glance at two men who were regarded as extreme
Radicals in the House of Commons, Hobhouse and Burdett. Each of these
men had served the cause of Reform in prison as well as in Parliament,
and each with rather ridiculous associations; Hobhouse’s imprisonment
being connected with the ballad inspired by the malicious and disloyal
wit of his friend and hero, Byron, and Burdett’s with the ludicrous
scene of his arrest, with his boy spelling out Magna Charta on his
knee. It is difficult for those who have read Hobhouse’s _Diaries_
to divine what play of reason and feeling ever made him a Radical,
but a Radical he was, an indefatigable critic of the old régime, and
in particular of such abuses as flogging in the army. Burdett was a
leader in the same causes. To these men, if to any, the conduct of
the labourers might have seemed to call for sympathy rather than for
violence. But if we turn to Hobhouse’s _Diary_ we see that he was
never betrayed into a solitary expression of pity or concern for the
scenes we have described, and as for Burdett, he was all for dragooning
the discontented counties and placing them under martial law. And
even Radnor, who as a friend of Cobbett was much less academic in his
Radicalism, sat on the Wiltshire Commission without making any protest
that has reached posterity.
All the circumstances then made it easy for Grey and his colleagues
to slip into a policy of violence and repression. They breathed an
atmosphere of panic, and they dreaded the recoil of that panic on their
own schemes. Yet when all allowance is made for this insidious climate,
when we remember that no man is so dangerous as the kind man haunted
by the fear of seeming weak, at a moment when he thinks his power of
doing good depends on his character for strength; when we remember,
too, the tone of Society caught between scare and excitement, the
bad inspiration of the Court, the malevolent influence of an alarmed
Opposition, the absorbing interest of making a ministry, the game apart
from the business of politics, it is still difficult to understand how
men like Grey and Holland and Durham could ever have lent themselves to
the cruelties of this savage retribution. When first there were rumours
of the intention of the Government to put down the riots with severe
measures, Cobbett wrote a passage in which he reviewed the characters
of the chief ministers, Grey with his ‘humane disposition,’ Holland
‘who never gave his consent to an act of cruelty,’ Althorp ‘who has
never dipped his hand in blood,’ Brougham ‘who with all his half Scotch
crotchets has at any rate no blood about him,’ to show that the new
ministers, unlike many of their Tory predecessors, might be trusted to
be lenient and merciful. Two of these men, Grey and Holland, had made a
noble stand against all the persecutions of which Tory Governments had
been guilty, defending with passion men whose opinions they regarded
with horror; if any record could justify confidence it was theirs.
Unfortunately the politician who was made Home Secretary did not share
in this past. The common talk at the time of Melbourne’s appointment
was that he was too lazy for his office; the real criticism should have
been that he had taken the side of Castlereagh and Sidmouth in 1817.
As Home Secretary he stopped short of the infamous measures he had
then approved; he refused to employ spies, and the Habeas Corpus was
not suspended. But nobody can follow the history of this rising, and
the history of the class that made it, without recognising that the
punishment which exiled these four hundred and fifty labourers is a
stain, and an indelible stain, on the reputation of the Government that
lives in history on the fame of the Reform Bill. It is difficult to
believe that either Fox or Sheridan could have been parties to it. The
chief shame attaches to Melbourne, who let the judges do their worst,
and to Lansdowne, who sat beside the judges on the Salisbury bench, but
the fact that the Prime Minister was immersed in the preparation of a
reform, believed by his contemporaries to be a revolution, does not
relieve him of his share of the odium, which is the due of Governments
that are cruel to the weak, and careless of justice to the poor.
One effort was made, apart from the intercession of public opinion,
to induce the Government to relax its rigours. When the panic had
abated and the last echo of the riots had been stilled by this summary
retribution, a motion was proposed in the House of Commons for a
general amnesty. Unhappily the cause of the labourers was in the hands
of Henry Hunt, a man whose wisdom was not equal to his courage, and
whose egregious vanity demoralised and spoilt his natural eloquence.
If those who were in close sympathy with his general aims could not
tolerate his manners, it is not surprising that his advocacy was a
doubtful recommendation in the unsympathetic atmosphere of the House
of Commons. He was a man of passionate sincerity, and had already
been twice in prison for his opinions, but the ruling class thinking
itself on the brink of a social catastrophe, while very conscious of
Hunt’s defects, was in no mood to take a detached view of this virtue.
The debate, which took place on the 8th of February 1831, reflects
little credit on the House of Commons, and the division still less,
for Hume was Hunt’s only supporter. The chief speakers against the
motion were Benett of Wiltshire, George Lamb, brother of Melbourne and
Under-Secretary at the Home Office, and Denman, the Attorney-General.
Lamb amused himself and the House with jests on the illiterate letter
for writing which the boy Looker was then on the high seas, and Denman
threw out a suggestion that Looker’s father had had a share in the
boy’s guilt. Denman closed his speech by pouring scorn on those who
talked sentimentality, and declaring that he would ever look back with
pride on his part in the scenes of this memorable winter.
So far the Government had had it all their own way. But in their
anxiety to show a resolute front and to reassure those who had
suspected that a reform Government would encourage social disorder by
weakness, Lord Grey and his colleagues were drawn into a scrape in
which they burnt their fingers rather badly. They decided to prosecute
two writers for inciting the labourers to rebel. The two writers were
Richard Carlile and William Cobbett. Carlile was the natural prey for
a Government in search of a victim. He had already spent six or seven
years of his lion-hearted life in prison for publishing the writings
of Paine and Hone: his wife, his sister, and his shopman had all paid
a similar penalty for their association, voluntary or involuntary,
with his public-spirited adventures. The document for which he stood
in the dock at the Old Bailey early in January 1831 was an address to
the agricultural labourers, praising them for what they had done, and
reviewing their misfortunes in this sentence: ‘The more tame you have
grown, the more you have been oppressed and despised, the more you have
been trampled on.’ Carlile defended himself in a speech that lasted
four hours and a half. The jury disagreed, but after several hours they
united on a verdict of acquittal on the charge of bringing the Crown
into contempt, and of guilty on the charge of addressing inflammatory
language to the labouring classes. He was sentenced to imprisonment for
two years, to pay a fine, and to find sureties.
Cobbett’s trial was a more important event, for whereas Carlile was the
Don Quixote of liberty of mind, Cobbett was a great political force,
and his acquittal would give a very serious shock to the prestige of
the Government that attacked him. The attention of the authorities
had been called to Cobbett’s speeches very early in the history of the
riots, and the Home Office Papers show that appeals to the Government
to prosecute Cobbett were the most common of all the recommendations
and requests that poured into Whitehall from the country. Some of these
letters were addressed to Sir Robert Peel, and one of them is endorsed
with the draft of a reply: ‘My dear Sir,--If you can give me the name
of the person who heard Cobbett make use of the expression to which you
refer you would probably enable me to render no small public service by
the prosecution of Cobbett for sedition.--Very faithfully Yours, Robert
Peel.’
In an evil moment for themselves, Peel’s successors decided to take
action, not indeed on his speeches, but on his articles in the
_Political Register_. The character of those articles might perhaps be
described as militant and uncompromising truth. They were inflammatory,
because the truth was inflammatory. Nobody who knew the condition
of the labourers could have found in them a single misstatement or
exaggeration. The only question was whether it was in the public
interest to publish them in a time of disturbance. From this point of
view the position of the Government was seriously weakened by the fact
that the _Times_ had used language on this very subject which was not
one whit less calculated to excite indignation against the rich, and
the _Times_, though it was the organ of wealthy men, was in point of
fact considerably cheaper to buy than the _Register_, the price of
which Cobbett had raised to a shilling in the autumn of 1830. But this
was not the only reason why the Government was in danger of exposing
itself to a charge of malice in choosing Cobbett for a prosecution.
The unrest in the southern counties had been due to a special set of
economic causes, but there was unrest due to other causes in other
parts of England. It was not the misery of ploughboys and labourers
in Hampshire and Kent that had made Wellington and Peel decide that
it was unsafe for the King to dine at the Guildhall in the winter of
1830: the Political Unions, which struck such terror into the Court and
the politicians, were not bred in the villages. There was a general
and acute discontent with extravagant government, with swollen lists
and the burden of sinecures, with the whole system of the control of
the boroughs and its mockery of representation. Now in such a state
of opinion every paper on the side of reform might be charged with
spreading unrest. Statistics of sinecures, and pensions, and the fat
revenues of bishopricks, were scattered all over England, and the
facts published in every such sheet were like sparks thrown about near
a powder magazine. The private citizens who wrote to the Home Office
in the winter of 1830 mentioned these papers almost as often as they
mentioned Cobbett’s lectures. Many of these papers were based on a
pamphlet written by Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty
in the very Government that prosecuted Cobbett. One of the Barings
complained in the House of Commons in December 1830, that the official
papers on offices and sinecures which the Reform Government had itself
presented to Parliament to satisfy public opinion of its sincerity in
the cause of retrenchment were the cause of mischief and danger. At
such a time no writer, who wished to help the cause of reform, could
measure the effects of every sentence so nicely as to escape the charge
of exciting passion, and the Government was guilty of an extraordinary
piece of folly in attacking Cobbett for conduct of which their own
chief supporters were guilty every time they put a pen to paper.
The trial took place in July 1831 at the Guildhall. It was the great
triumph of Cobbett’s life, as his earlier trial had been his great
humiliation. There was very little of the lion in the Cobbett who
faltered before Vicary Gibbs in 1810; there was very little of the lamb
in the Cobbett who towered before Denman in 1831. And the court that
witnessed his triumph presented a strange scene. The trial had excited
intense interest, and Cobbett said that every county in England was
represented in the company that broke, from time to time, into storms
of cheering. The judge was Tenterden, the Chief Justice, who, as a
bitter enemy of reform, hated alike accusers and accused. Six members
of the Cabinet, the Prime Minister himself and the Lord Chancellor,
Melbourne and Durham, Palmerston and Goderich listened, from no choice
of their own, to the scathing speech in which Cobbett reviewed their
conduct. Benett of Pyt House was there, a spectre of vengeance from one
Commission, and the father of the boy Cook of Micheldever, a shadow of
death from another. All the memories of those terrible weeks seemed
to gather together in the suspense of that eager crowd watching this
momentous encounter.
Denman, who prosecuted, employed a very different tone towards Cobbett
from the tone that Perceval had used at the first of Cobbett’s trials.
Perceval, when prosecuting Cobbett for some articles on Ireland in
the _Register_ in 1803, asked the jury with the patrician insolence
of a class that held all the prizes of life, ‘Gentlemen, who is Mr.
Cobbett? Is he a man writing purely from motives of patriotism? _Quis
homo hic est? Quo patre natus?_’ No counsel prosecuting Cobbett
could open with this kind of rhetoric in 1831: Denman preferred to
describe him as ‘one of the greatest masters of the English language.’
Denman’s speech was brief, and it was confined mainly to a paraphrase
of certain of Cobbett’s articles and to comments upon their effect.
It was no difficult task to pick out passages which set the riots
in a very favourable light, and emphasised the undoubted fact that
they had brought some improvement in the social conditions, and that
nothing else had moved the heart or the fears of the ruling class.
But the speech was not long over before it became evident that
Cobbett, like another great political defendant, though beginning as
the accused, was to end as the accuser. His reply to the charge of
exciting the labourers to violence was immediate and annihilating.
In December 1830, after the publication of the article for which
he was now being tried, Brougham, as President of the Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, had asked and obtained Cobbett’s
leave to reprint his earlier ‘Letter to the Luddites,’ as the most
likely means of turning the labourers from rioting and the breaking
of machines. There stood the Lord Chancellor in the witness-box, in
answer to Cobbett’s subpœna, to admit that crushing fact. This was a
thunderclap to Denman, who was quite ignorant of what Brougham had
done, and, as we learn from Greville, he knew at once that his case
was hopeless. Cobbett passed rapidly from defence to attack. Grey,
Melbourne, Palmerston, Durham, and Goderich had all been subpœna’d in
order to answer some very awkward questions as to the circumstances
under which Thomas Goodman had been pardoned. The Lord Chief Justice
refused to allow the questions to be put, but at least these great
Ministers had to listen as Cobbett told the story of those strange
transactions, including a visit from a parson and magistrates to a ‘man
with a rope round his neck,’ which resulted in Goodman’s unexplained
pardon and the publication of a statement purporting to come from
him ascribing his conduct to the incitement at Cobbett’s ‘lacture.’
Cobbett destroyed any effect that Goodman’s charge might have had
by producing a declaration signed by one hundred and three persons
present at the lecture--farmers, tradesmen, labourers, carpenters,
and shoemakers--denying that Cobbett had made the statement ascribed
to him in Goodman’s confession, one of the signatories being the
farmer whose barn Goodman had burnt. He then proceeded to contrast the
treatment Goodman had received with the treatment received by others
convicted of incendiarism, and piecing together all the evidence of
the machinations of the magistrates, constructed a very formidable
indictment to which Denman could only reply that he knew nothing of
the matter, and that Cobbett was capable of entertaining the most
absurd suspicions. On another question Denman found himself thrown on
the defensive, for he was now confronted with his own misstatements
in Parliament about Cook, and the affidavits of Cook’s father present
in court. Denman could only answer that till that day no one had
contradicted him, though he could scarcely have been unaware that the
House of Commons was not the place in which a Minister’s statement
about the age, occupation, pay, and conduct of an obscure boy was
most likely to be challenged. Denman made a chastened reply, and the
jury, after spending the night at the Guildhall, disagreed, six voting
each way. Cobbett was a free man, for the Whigs, overwhelmed by the
invective they had foolishly provoked, remembered, when too late, the
wise saying of Maurice of Saxony about Charles V.: ‘I have no cage big
enough for such a bird,’ and resisted all the King’s invitations to
repeat their rash adventure. To those who have made their melancholy
way through the trials at Winchester and Salisbury, at which rude boys
from the Hampshire villages and the Wiltshire Downs, about to be tossed
across the sea, stood shelterless in the unpitying storm of question
and insinuation and abuse, there is a certain grim satisfaction in
reading this last chapter and watching Denman face to face, not with
the broken excuses and appeals of ignorant and helpless peasants, but
with a volleyed thunder that swept into space all his lawyer’s artifice
and skill. Justice plays strange tricks upon mankind, but who will say
that she has not her inspirations?
* * * * *
One more incident has to be recorded in the tale of suppression.
The riots were over, but the fires continued. In the autumn of 1831
Melbourne, in a shameful moment, proposed a remedy borrowed from the
evil practices which a Tory Parliament had consented at last to forbid.
The setting of spring guns and man-traps, the common device of game
preservers, had been made a misdemeanour in 1826 by an Act of which
Suffield was the author. Melbourne now proposed to allow persons who
obtained a license from two magistrates to protect their property by
these means. The Bill passed the House of Lords, and the _Journals_
record that it was introduced in the House of Commons, but there, let
us hope from very horror at the thought of this moral relapse, silently
it disappears.
* * * * *
When Grey met Parliament as Prime Minister he said that the Government
recognised two duties: the duty of finding a remedy for the distress
of the labourers, and the duty of repressing the riots with severity
and firmness. We have seen how the riots were suppressed; we have now
to see what was done towards providing a remedy. This side of the
picture is scarcely less melancholy than the other; for when we turn
to the debates in Parliament we see clearly how hopeless it was to
expect any solution of an economic problem from the legislators of the
time. Now, if ever, circumstances had forced the problem on the mind of
Parliament, and in such an emergency as this men might be trusted to
say seriously and sincerely what they had to suggest. Yet the debates
are a mêlée of futile generalisations, overshadowed by the doctrine
which Grey himself laid down that ‘all matters respecting the amount
of rent and the extent of farms would be much better regulated by the
individuals who were immediately interested than by any Committee of
their Lordships.’ One peer got into trouble for blurting out the truth
that the riots had raised wages; another would curse machinery as
vigorously as any labourer; many blamed the past inattention of the
House of Lords to the labourers’ misery; and one considered the first
necessity of the moment was the impeachment of Wellington. Two men had
actual and serious proposals to make. They were Lord King and Lord
Suffield.
Both of these men are striking figures. King (1776-1833) was an
economist who had startled the Government in 1811 by calling for the
payments of his rents in the lawful coin of the realm. This dramatic
manœuvre for discrediting paper money had been thwarted by Lord
Stanhope, who, though in agreement with King on many subjects, strongly
approved of paper money in England as he had approved of assignats in
France. Lord Holland tells a story of how he twitted Stanhope with
wanting to see history repeat itself, and how Stanhope answered with
a chuckle: ‘And if they take property from the drones and give it to
the bees, where, my dear Citoyen, is the great harm of that?’ King
was always in a small minority and his signature was given, together
with those of Albemarle, Thanet, and Holland, to the protest against
establishing martial law in Ireland in 1801, which was written with
such wounding directness that it was afterwards blackened out of the
records of the House of Lords, on the motion of the infamous Lord
Clare. But he was never in a smaller minority than he was on this
occasion when he told his fellow landlords that the only remedy for the
public distress was the abolition of the Corn Laws. Such a proposal
stood no chance in the House of Lords or in the House of Commons.
Grey declared that the abolition of the Corn Laws would lead to the
destruction of the country, and though there were Free Traders among
the Whigs, even nine years after this Melbourne described such a policy
as ‘the wildest and maddest scheme that has ever entered into the
imagination of man to conceive.’
Suffield (1781-1835), the only other politician with a remedy, is
an interesting and attractive character. Originally a Tory, and
the son of Sir Harbord Harbord, who was not a man of very tender
sensibilities, Suffield gradually felt his way towards Liberalism. He
was too large-minded a man to be happy and at ease in an atmosphere
where the ruling class flew instinctively in every crisis to measures
of tyranny and repression. Peterloo completed his conversion. From
that time he became a champion of the poor, a fierce critic of the
Game Laws, and a strong advocate of prison reform. He is revealed in
his diary and all the traditions of his life as a man of independence
and great sincerity. Suffield’s policy in this crisis was the policy
of home colonisation, and its fate can best be described by means of
extracts from a memoir prepared by R. M. Bacon, a Norwich journalist
and publicist of importance, and printed privately in 1838, three years
after Suffield had been killed by a fall from his horse. They give a
far more intimate and graphic picture of the mind of the Government
than the best reported debates in the records of Parliament.
We have seen in a previous chapter that there had been at this time a
revival of the movement for restoring the land to the labourers. One
of the chief supporters of this policy was R. M. Bacon, who, as editor
of the _Norwich Mercury_, was in close touch with Suffield. Bacon set
out an elaborate scheme of home colonisation, resembling in its main
ideas the plan sketched by Arthur Young thirty years earlier, and this
scheme Suffield took up with great enthusiasm. Its chief recommendation
in his eyes was that it applied public money to establishing labourers
with a property of their own, so that whereas, under the existing
system, public money was used, in the form of subsidies from the rates,
to depress wages, public money would be used under this scheme to
raise them. For it was the object of the plan to make the labourers
independent of the farmers, and to substitute the competition of
employers for the competition of employed. No other scheme, Suffield
used to maintain, promised any real relief. If rents and taxes were
reduced the farmer would be able, but would not be compelled, to give
better wages: if taxes on the labourers’ necessaries were reduced,
the labourers would be able to live on a smaller wage, and as long as
they were scrambling for employment they were certain to be ground
down to the minimum of subsistence. The only way to rescue them from
this plight was to place them again in such a position that they were
not absolutely dependent on the farmers. This the Government could do
by purchasing land, at present waste, and compelling parishes, with
the help of a public loan, to set up labourers upon it, and to build
cottages with a fixed allotment of land.
Suffield’s efforts to persuade the Government to take up this
constructive policy began as soon as Grey came into office. His
first letters to Bacon on the subject are written in November. The
opposition, he says, is very strong, and Sturges Bourne and Lansdowne
are both hostile. On 17th November he writes that a peer had told him
that he had sat on an earlier committee on this subject with Sturges
Bourne, as chairman, and that ‘those who understood the subject best
agreed with Malthus that vice and misery alone could _cure_ the evil.’
On 19th November he writes that he has had a conference with Brougham,
with about the same success as his conference with Lansdowne and
Sturges Bourne. On the 23rd he writes that he has been promised an
interview at the Home Office; on the 25th ‘no invitation from Lord
Melbourne----the truth is he cannot find one moment of leisure. The
Home Office is distracted by the numerous representations of imminent
danger to property, if not to life, and applications for protection.’
Later in the same day he writes that he has seen both Grey and
Melbourne: ‘I at once attacked Grey. I found him disposed to give every
possible consideration to the matter. He himself has in Northumberland
seen upon his own property the beneficent effects of my plan, namely
of apportioning land to cottagers, but he foresaw innumerable
difficulties.’ A House of Lords Committee had been appointed on the
Poor Laws at the instance of Lord Salisbury, and Suffield hoped to
persuade this committee to report in favour of his scheme. He therefore
pressed Grey to make a public statement of sympathy. Grey said ‘he
would intimate that Government would be disposed to carry into effect
any measure of relief recommended by the Committee; very pressed but
would call Cabinet together to-morrow.’ The interview with Melbourne
was very different. ‘Next I saw Lord Melbourne. “Oppressed as you
are,” said I, “I am willing to relieve you from a conference, but you
must say something on Monday next and I fear you have not devoted much
attention to the subject.” “I understand it perfectly,” he replied,
“and that is the reason for my saying nothing about it.” “How is this
to be explained?” “Because I consider it hopeless.” “Oh, you think
with Malthus that vice and misery are the only cure?” “No,” said Lord
Melbourne, “but the evil is in numbers and the sort of competition that
ensues.” “Well then I have measures to propose which may meet this
difficulty.” “Of these,” said Lord Melbourne, “I know nothing,” and
he turned away from me to a friend to enquire respecting outrages.’
Suffield concludes on a melancholy note: ‘The fact is, with the
exception of a few individuals, the subject is deemed by the world
a bore: every one who touches on it is a bore, and nothing but the
strongest conviction of its importance to the country would induce me
to subject myself to the indifference that I daily experience when I
venture to intrude the matter on the attention of legislators.’
A fortnight later Suffield was very sanguine: ‘Most satisfactory
interview with Melbourne: thinks Lord Grey will do the job in the
recess.’ But the sky soon darkens again, and on the 27th Suffield
writes strongly to Melbourne on the necessity of action, and he adds:
‘Tranquillity being now restored, all the farmers are of course
reducing their wages to that miserable rate that led to the recent
disturbances.’ Unhappily the last sentence had a significance which
perhaps escaped Suffield. Believing as he did in his scheme, he
thought that its necessity was proved by the relapse of wages on the
restoration of tranquillity, but vice and misery-ridden politicians
might regard the restoration of tranquillity as an argument for
dropping the scheme. After this the first hopes fade away. There is
strong opposition on the Select Committee to Suffield’s views, and he
is disappointed of the prompt report in favour of action which he
had expected from it. The Government are indisposed to take action,
and Suffield, growing sick and impatient of their slow clocks, warns
Melbourne in June that he cannot defend them. Melbourne replies that
such a measure could not be maturely considered or passed during the
agitation over the Reform Bill. Later in the month there was a meeting
between Suffield and Melbourne, of which unfortunately no record is
preserved in the Memoir, with the result that Suffield declared in
Parliament that the Government had a plan. In the autumn of 1831 an
Act was placed on the Statute Book which was the merest mockery of all
Suffield’s hopes, empowering churchwardens or overseers to hire or
lease, and under certain conditions to enclose, land up to a limit of
fifty acres, for the employment of the poor. It is difficult to resist
the belief that if the riots had lasted longer they might have forced
the Government to accept the scheme, in the efficacy of which it had
no faith, as the price of peace, and that the change in temperature
recorded in Suffield’s _Diary_ after the middle of December marks the
restoration of confidence at Whitehall.
* * * * *
So perished the last hope of reform and reparation for the poor. The
labourers’ revolt was ended; and four hundred and fifty men had spent
their freedom in vain. Of these exiles we have one final glimpse; it is
in a letter from the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land to Lord Goderich:
‘If, my Lord, the evidence, or conduct, of particular individuals,
can be relied on as proof of the efficiency or non-efficiency of
transportation, I am sure that a strong case indeed could be made
out in its favour. I might instance the rioters who arrived by the
_Eliza_, several of whom died almost immediately from disease, induced
apparently by despair. A great many of them went about dejected and
stupefied with care and grief, and their situation after assignment was
not for a long time much less unhappy.’[486]
FOOTNOTES:
[449] Russell, _On Crimes and Misdemeanours_, p. 371.
[450] Sir J. B. Bosanquet (1773-1847).
[451] _Times_, December 15, 1830.
[452] Sir W. E. Taunton (1773-1835).
[453] The _Times_ on December 25 quoted part of this charge in a
leading article with some sharp strictures.
[454] Sir John Vaughan (1769-1839).
[455] _Times_, December 21, 1830.
[456] Sir James Parke (1782-1868).
[457] _Times_, January 3, 1831.
[458] Sir E. H. Alderson (1787-1857).
[459] _Times_, January 6, 1831. Cf. letter of Mr. R. Pollen, J.P.,
afterwards one of Winchester Commissioners, to Home Office, November
26: ‘It may be worth considering the law, which exempts all _Threshing
Machines_ from capital punishment, should such scenes as these occur
again amongst the agricultural classes. I confess I view with great
regret that they have found the mode of combining, which I had hoped
was confined to the manufacturing classes.’
[460] Sir J. A. Park (1763-1838).
[461] _Times_, January 15, 1831.
[462] _Ibid._, January 12, 1831.
[463] _Ibid._
[464] February 8, 1831.
[465] There are no statistics for Wilts, Hants, Bucks, and Dorsetshire
prisoners. At Reading out of 138 prisoners 37 could read, and 25 of the
37 could also write. At Abingdon, out of 47, 17 could read, and 6 of
them could also write. In Wilts and Hants the proportion was probably
smaller, as the people were more neglected.
[466] _Times_, December 24, 1830.
[467] _Ibid._, January 8, 1831.
[468] _Times_, January 7, 1831.
[469] _Ibid._, December 24, 1830. Henry Bunce was transported for life
to New South Wales.
[470] _Ibid._, January 14.
[471] Cobbett, _Political Register_, vol. lxxiii. p. 535, and local
papers.
[472] Fussell’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment. Boys was sent to
Van Diemen’s Land.
[473] H. O. Papers, Municipal and Provincial. Hants, 1831, March 24.
[474] As early as November 26, Mr. Richard Pollen, Chairman of Quarter
Sessions and afterwards a commissioner at Winchester, had written to
the Home Office, ‘I have directed the Magistrates’ attention very
much to the class of People found in the Mobs many miles from their
own homes, Taylors, Shoemakers etc., who have been found always very
eloquent, they are universally politicians: they should be, I think,
selected.’--H. O. Papers.
[475] For a full account of the incident, including the text of the
petition and list of signatures, see Cobbett’s _Two-penny Trash_, July
1, 1832.
[476] See p. 277.
[477] February 8, 1831.
[478] _Times_, January 8, 1831. The _Times_ of the same day contains an
interesting petition from the Birmingham Political Union on behalf of
all the prisoners tried before the Special Commissions.
[479] The scene is still vividly remembered by an old woman over ninety
years of age with whom Mr. Hudson spoke.
[480] H. O. Papers, Disturbance Entry-Book, Letter of January 3, 1831.
[481] See p. 268.
[482] Three boats carried the convicts, the _Eliza_ and the _Proteus_
to Van Diemen’s Land, the _Eleanor_ to New South Wales. The list of the
prisoners on board shows that they came from the following counties:--
Berks, 44
Bucks, 29
Dorset, 13
Essex, 23
Gloucester, 24
Hampshire, 100
Hunts, 5
Kent, 22
Norfolk, 11
Oxford, 11
Suffolk, 7
Sussex, 17
Wilts, 151
---
TOTAL, 457
If this represents the total, some sentences of transportation must
have been commuted for imprisonment; possibly some rioters were sent
later, for Mr. Potter MacQueen, in giving evidence before the Committee
on Secondary Punishments, spoke of the six hundred able-bodied men
who had been transported in consequence of being concerned in the
Swing offences.--Report of Committee, p. 95. Four years later Lord
John Russell, as Home Secretary, pardoned 264 of the convicts, in 1836
he pardoned 86 more, and in 1837 the survivors, mostly men sentenced
for life or for fourteen years, were given pardons conditional on
their ‘continuing to reside in Australia for the remainder of their
sentences.’ No free passages back were granted, and Mr. Hudson states
that very few, not more than one in five or six, ever returned.--_A
Shepherd’s Life_, p. 247.
[483] See Hudson, _Ibid._
[484] See _Annual Register_ and local papers.
[485] He was sent to Van Diemen’s Land. It is only fair to Lord
Sheffield to say that he applied in vain to Lord Melbourne for a
mitigation of the life sentence. See Criminal Entry-Book, H. O. Papers.
[486] Correspondence on Secondary Punishment, March 1834, p. 23.