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Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong: innocent solicitor or guilty murderer?
In May 1922, a respected solicitor was sent to the gallows after being convicted of poisoning his wife. But was he truly guilty? Stephen Bates asks whether Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong was the victim of a terrible injustice
In 1922, a country solicitor from the little town of Hay-on-Wye, nestled on the border between England and Wales, was in prison awaiting execution for murdering his wife. Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong – he always insisted on the rank – had been convicted at a sensational 10-day trial of killing his wife Katharine 15 months earlier. It was said he had dosed her with arsenic that he had bought legally in the local chemist’s shop, allegedly to kill the dandelions on the couple’s lawn. The case of Major Armstrong was so extraordinary that it seized not only the imagination of newspaper readers in Britain, but across North America and the rest of the English-speaking world. The twists and turns in the tale also inspired a new breed of crime novelists. It was, the Charlotte Observer in far-away North Carolina announced, citing the notorious medieval Italian dynasty: “The greatest poison drama of the century... All England is thrilled by the trial of a modern Borgia.” The story had everything, as it apparently involved far more than a private domestic tragedy, taking in petty professional rivalries and gossip; rumours that gave rise to astonishing speculation about a man who had been a pillar of the community. There were even tales of a poisoned box of chocolates and a deadly scone handed over at a tea party, allegedly with the words: “’Scuse fingers.” Read more | Arsenic: a brief history of Agatha Christie’s favourite murder weapon Who was Herbert Rowse Armstrong? Herbert Armstrong was a short, slight, dapper man, only eight stone in weight. He had strikingly blue eyes behind his gold-rimmed pince-nez spectacles and fashionably waxed the ends of his moustache. He was the picture of respectability, prominent at both the parish church and Freemasons’ lodge, and served as clerk to the justices at three local magistrates’ courts. He had been born into a middle-class family in Plymouth in 1869 and, after his father died, had been educated at Cambridge with financial support from two maiden aunts. He qualified as a solicitor in Liverpool before moving south, first to Devon, and then to take up a partnership at a legal firm in Hay. Armstrong had married his wife Katharine in 1907. She had been a school mistress and the couple had three young children. “I never knew a happier couple,” wrote their former vicar. Herbert was always attentive to his wife, who – according to local gossip – was nervy, highly strung and bossy, and once interrupted a tennis match in which her husband was playing with the command that he must come along because it was his bath night. The family lived in a large house in the hamlet of Cusop, just outside Hay, and by 1914 Herbert had taken over the solicitor’s firm. He had served in the Territorial Army for 20 years, so when World War I broke out he quickly volunteered, though he spent the conflict behind a desk, mostly in England. Read more | 6 notorious unsolved crimes from history Sickness and suspicion When the war ended, Armstrong returned to Hay and picked up where he had left off, though economic conditions made the job difficult. Katharine, meanwhile, seems to have been badly unbalanced by the war. She developed neuritis in her hands, which prevented her from playing the piano, and started suffering from delusions, convinced she was a bad wife and mother and had been cheating the local tradesmen. Eventually, in the summer of 1920, her husband – with the consent of her sister and the local doctor, Tom Hincks – agreed that she should be committed to the Barnwood Asylum in Gloucester. Katharine spent six months in the hospital before being released in January 1921, but her condition rapidly deteriorated. On one occasion, she apparently asked the family’s housekeeper whether she would kill herself if she fell out of an upper floor window. Within a few weeks, the former school mistress was desperately sick and unable to move, and a month after coming home, she died. At the time it was believed that it had been a natural death, and Armstrong’s friend Hincks signed the certificate with a diagnosis of “gastritis, heart disease and inflammation of the kidneys”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/09/dr-thomas-hincks-arriving-hay-magistrates-court-katharine-armstrong-case-9f754f5.jpg" width="4787" height="3639" alt="Prosecution witness Doctor Thomas Hincks arrives at the courtroom in Hereford, Gloucestershire, during the trial of solicitor Herbert Rowse Armstrong for the murder of his wife, Katharine, April 1922. Hinks treated Armstrong's wife before she died of what turned out to be arsenic poisoning in 1921. Armstrong was found guilty and hanged at Gloucester Prison the following May. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Hincks Arrives To Testify" /> Life returned to normal, but Major Armstrong had growing difficulties with a young solicitor named Oswald Martin, who had moved to a rival firm after the war. Martin – who was married to Connie, the daughter of local chemist Fred Davies – was a pushy figure who fell out with Armstrong over the sale of a local estate. Martin represented tenant farmers who wanted to buy their farms, while Armstrong handled the sale for the owner. Property prices had fallen sharply and the tenants wanted to renegotiate, but the owner was in financial difficulties – he owed money to Armstrong that he could not repay without the sale. This left the major in debt, and the sale grew acrimonious. In October 1921, Armstrong invited Martin to tea at his home, during which he handed him a scone, allegedly saying “’scuse fingers”. After he went home and had his supper, Martin fell excruciatingly sick, though he recovered in a few days. He and his wife then remembered that they had received an anonymous gift of a box of chocolates through the post a few weeks earlier and that after tasting one, his visiting sister-in-law had also fallen sick. It was then that Connie’s chemist father, Fred, recalled selling large quantities of arsenic to Armstrong to use as weedkiller on his dandelions. The sale of poisons was not strictly regulated then, and purchasers only had to sign a register when they bought some. Fred’s suggestion alarmed his son-in-law, and triggered a change of mind in Dr Hincks, who had treated Martin only for gastroenteritis. He started to wonder whether Katharine Armstrong had been poisoned too, and sent his concerns to the Home Office, which tested a specimen of Martin’s urine. It had a small trace of arsenic in it, but not enough to kill him. Two detectives from Scotland Yard were sent to Hay to carry out an undercover investigation. Read more | 22 of the best historical fiction novels to help you escape to the past The arrest of Herbert Rowse Armstrong Over the coming weeks, Oswald became terrified of any contact with the major, particularly when he was repeatedly invited across the road from his office to Armstrong’s for afternoon tea. He thought the major would try and poison him again, though Armstrong’s friends thought it was more likely that the major was just lonely and wanted to discuss masonic affairs. The arsenic finding – and rumours that others might have been poisoned too – led the Home Office and Director of Public Prosecutions to act, and Armstrong was confronted by police in his office while doing paperwork on New Year’s Eve. During their search, a little packet of arsenic was found: Armstrong had been wearing his gardening clothes and it had been in his pocket. Instead of an afternoon’s gardening, the major was arrested. He did not realise it at the time, but he would never see his home or his children ever again. Within days, Katharine’s body was exhumed from the local churchyard and a post-mortem was carried out by Bernard Spilsbury, the leading pathologist of the day. When tested, her organs were found to contain a lethal amount of arsenic. The trial and verdict Many local people were astonished at what had happened – Armstrong had represented many of them and was well liked, whereas the young newcomer, Martin, was not. Now the major found himself arraigned in his own court, charged with the murder of his wife and the attempted murder of his rival. He protested his innocence. Armstrong’s trial took place at Hereford Assizes in April 1922 and, although the evidence against him was circumstantial and he had one of the most eminent barristers in the country, Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, defending him, the major was facing an uphill battle. Remarkably, there had been a previous case only a year earlier when a Welsh solicitor named Harold Greenwood had been acquitted of poisoning his wife after a sloppy police investigation, and the authorities were determined that it should not happen again. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/09/henry-curtis-bennett-barrister-1d16bd0.jpg" width="3722" height="4533" alt="English barrister and politician Henry Curtis-Bennett (1879 - 1936) in his private rooms at Newington Butts, London, as he takes up his post as Chairman of the London Sessions, 1936. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Henry Curtis-Bennett" /> The judge, Mr Justice Charles Darling, continually ruled against the defence (most crucially in allowing evidence of Martin's illness to be heard) and he cross-examined Armstrong ferociously. In his summing up for the jury, the judge dismissed the arguments put forward by Curtis-Bennett and praised Spilsbury and the other witnesses for the prosecution. It was little wonder that the jury took a mere 48 minutes to convict the diminutive solicitor – and that included a stop for tea. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/09/herbert-rowse-armstrong-katharine-servants-nurses-wait-results-trial-3ab9a4e.jpg" width="4876" height="3577" alt="Left to right, Nurse Lloyd, Miss Rosser, Nurse Kinsey, Miss Pearce and Mrs Price outside the courtroom in Hereford, Gloucestershire, during the trial of solicitor Herbert Rowse Armstrong for the murder of his wife, April 1922. Armstrong was found guilty and hanged at Gloucester Prison the following May. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Armstrong Trial Bystanders" /> Explore | A murder mystery in 19th-century Dublin What happened to Herbert Rowse Armstrong? Armstrong's appeal failed and he was hanged at Gloucester Prison on 31 May 1922, exactly five months after his arrest. The hangman claimed that as he pulled the lever to open the trapdoor beneath the major's feet, he heard him whisper: "I'm coming, Kate." <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/09/crowds-assemble-hereford-assizes-herbert-rowse-armstrong-case-03b4f62.jpg" width="4884" height="3678" alt="Crowds outside the courtroom in Hereford, Gloucestershire, during the trial of solicitor Herbert Rowse Armstrong for the murder of his wife, April 1922. Armstrong was found guilty and hanged at Gloucester Prison the following May. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Sensational Case" /> The case, with its irresistible twists and turns, was reported in huge (and sometimes prejudicial) detail by the popular press – tens of thousands of words a day, some of them by the famous author Edgar Wallace – and the overwhelming assumption was that Armstrong was guilty. But was he really? There were considerable holes in the prosecution case and several questions remained. Could Katharine have poisoned herself in despair? Was Martin only suffering from a tummy ache? Who sent the anonymous chocolates? Why would Armstrong kill the wife to whom he seemed devoted? The children of Herbert Rowse Armstrong Tragically, the outcome left three small children orphaned and taken into foster care. It is said that the youngest only found out what had happened to her parents on a school visit to Madame Tussauds, when she came face to face with her beloved father in the Chamber of Horrors. Art imitating life The story of Katharine Armstrong’s demise inspired the greatest authors of the age... George Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay: “What would be... the ‘perfect’ murder? The murderer should be a little man of the professional class living an intensely respectable life... he should plan it all with the utmost cunning and only slip up over some tiny, unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should of course be poison.” He made it clear he was thinking of Major Armstrong, and indeed the case coincided with the rise of crime novelists such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, both of whom incorporated elements of the story in some of their plots. Their stories, like those of several other contemporary bestselling writers, involved amateur sleuths solving cunning and complex murders among the middle classes through ingenuity, almost like a game. The books were very popular in the 1920s – a thousand new titles a year were being published by the end of the decade – and the real- life Armstrong case fit the genre perfectly: a true crime just as vivid as fiction. Stephen Bates is a former senior correspondent for The Guardian. His new book about Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, The Poisonous Solicitor, has just been published by Icon Books This article first appeared in the May 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
From silver to platinum: a history of Queen Elizabeth II's jubilees
Royal anniversary celebrations have long been a litmus test of the public mood. As Queen Elizabeth II reaches her platinum jubilee, Stephen Bates looks at the major milestones in the reign of Elizabeth II, and Britons’ reactions to these events...
Royal jubilee celebrations have a longer history than might be imagined, despite the fact that most British monarchs have not lived long enough to reach a major milestone. The first was celebrated in October 1809 on what was actually the 49th anniversary of George III’s accession, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars – which were not going well. A Mrs Biggs wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Dartmouth, suggesting a festival intended to “excite a spirit of loyal enthusiasm”. The event was a success, and its timing was fortunate – a year later the king, grief-stricken over the death of his youngest daughter, suffered a relapse of his mental illness. In June 1887, Queen Victoria had to be persuaded to mark her golden jubilee; she had not celebrated her silver jubilee in 1862, which fell just after Prince Albert’s death. After 50 years, the golden jubilee would be “just hustle and bustle”, she said, and the government was reluctant to spend money on it. Ten years later, the celebrations were more lavish; it became an imperial celebration, with troops from all over the empire on parade. The procession to St Paul’s was one of the first events to be filmed. Read more | Queen Elizabeth II: 50+ surprising facts about her life and reign Huge crowds cheered the queen, who by then was too frail to leave her carriage to attend the cathedral service, so it was held on the steps where she could see it. “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation,” she wrote wonderingly in her journal that night, adding: “The cheering was quite deafening.” George V’s silver jubilee in May 1935, eight months before he died, was suggested by the government partly as a patriotic display of British unity, a warning to Europe’s dictators, and partly with an eye to the forth coming general election. To his surprise, the gruff old king was greeted by cheering crowds on his way to the thanksgiving service at St Paul’s. “I am beginning to think they must really like me for myself,” he murmured, and that evening broad cast on the BBC his thanks to the nation. In 2022, Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her record-extending platinum jubilee – no other British monarch has ever reigned for 70 years. While not all her previous jubilees were as hotly anticipated as this one, they have all been a display of the monarchy's enduring popularity... 1977: The silver jubilee The success of the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II’s 25 years on the throne was by no means a foregone conclusion. The country was in an economic crisis, having been bailed out by the International Monetary Fund only the previous year. There was a mood of political instability and discontent. Irreverent punk rock was the sound of the late seventies: the Sex Pistols launched their version of God Save the Queen to coincide with the jubilee. The affair between Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener (and baronet) who was 18 years her junior, had prompted ribald headlines, and there was a general sense of fraying tawdriness about the country. James Callaghan’s minority Labour government was reluctant to spend money on a celebration, but was talked into it by Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, despite warnings in the press that it was unlikely to be a success because no one would want to celebrate the monarchy. The predictions were all proved wrong. Although the weather was grey over jubilee weekend in June, there were thousands of street parties – 4,000 in London alone – and the crowds along the Queen’s processional route from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s stood six deep. There was a roaring trade in silver jubilee mugs, commemorative medals, tea towels and even Union Flag underpants. Five hundred million people around the world were said to have watched the celebrations on television. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/05/GettyImages-3335882-db27dc3-e1653651854598.jpg" width="620" height="443" alt="The Queen was amazed at the warmth shown by the huge crowds during the silver jubilee celebrations, at a time when the monarchy had supposedly fallen out of favour (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)" title="The Queen was amazed at the warmth shown by the huge crowds during the silver jubilee celebrations, at a time when the monarchy had supposedly fallen out of favour (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)" /> The Queen was as surprised by the response as her grandfather had been 42 years earlier. She was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, both during her visits all around the nation (including Northern Ireland, then at the height of the Troubles) and on her trips to Commonwealth countries as far afield as Fiji and Canada. “I am simply amazed: I had no idea,” the Queen was overheard saying repeatedly. One innovation was the walkabout, previously seen only in her 1970 New Zealand tour. The informal greeting of people lining the streets was now tried in the City of London following the cathedral service, and proved to be such a success that it has been a feature of royal visits ever since. The only misstep came in the Queen’s speech to the combined Houses of Parliament, when she upset Scottish Nationalists by insisting: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps the jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred.” This was the nearest the Queen has ever come to expressing a politically contentious opinion. In pictures | Queen Elizabeth II on tour The poet laureate Sir John Betjeman’s celebratory hymn was also possibly a mistake: “From that look of dedication / In those eyes profoundly blue / We know her coronation / As a sacrament and true.” The sceptics were confounded, and the silver jubilee set a template for subsequent royal celebrations: a combination of formal official ceremonies and widespread visits, with informal local rejoicing. Charteris told the royal biographer Ben Pimlott later: “She had a love affair with the country.” Or, as one banner along the processional route had it, “Liz Rules OK”. 2002: The golden jubilee The 50th anniversary of the Queen’s accession followed a decade of shocks to the monarchy: the divorces of three of her children, including the highly public and acrimonious split between Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales and the subsequent death of Diana in an accident in Paris; and the fire at Windsor Castle, after which it was announced that the Queen wished to pay income tax for the first time. These were events that led to questioning of both the monarchy’s popularity and its long-term viability. As before the silver jubilee, there were predictions that the celebrations would be a flop. The emphasis of organisers at the palace, as one official told the journalist Robert Hardman, was informality: “A lot of effort went into making it look unplanned.” Read more | Diana: the rebel princess The centrepiece was to be the Queen thanking her people for their support. The year got off to a bad start with the deaths in rapid succession of Princess Margaret and then the Queen Mother at the age of 101. The public reaction to the latter’s death revealed a sizeable reservoir of respect and affection for the monarchy, as had the celebrations for her centenary two years earlier. The queue to walk past her coffin in Westminster Hall stretched for more than a mile. “As soon as I saw the length of the queue… it spelt to me that the troubles were now passed,” a private secretary told Hardman. Within a month, the Queen and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh were embarking on a tour of the British Isles. Once again enthusiastic crowds turned out, as they would when the couple visited Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/05/GettyImages-52109276-0885726-e1653651967433.jpg" width="620" height="403" alt="Considered something of a test of the public’s affections, golden jubilee festivities drew around a million people to The Mall to celebrate (Photo by Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)" title="Considered something of a test of the public’s affections, golden jubilee festivities drew around a million people to The Mall to celebrate (Photo by Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)" /> The centrepiece of the jubilee weekend was another innovation: two concerts, one classical and one pop, on a giant stage in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. There were concerns about the effects on the lawns, and the Queen – by then well into her seventies – did not actually turn up to the pop concert until towards the end. It was a star-studded show, with performances by Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton and Cliff Richard, among others, and was launched with a surprise appearance by Queen guitarist Brian May, who played a rock version of the national anthem on top of the palace roof. The event fitted into the pattern as before: a service at St Paul’s, formal lunch at the Guildhall in the City of London, followed by an RAF flypast over the palace, watched by the Queen and her family from the balcony. An extra public holiday helped prolong the celebrations, and there were again street parties across the country and crowds pouring into London to watch the spectacle. The monarchy was back on track. 2012: The diamond jubilee Ten years after the golden jubilee, the monarchy had sailed into calmer, more serene waters – though that was not the case for the centrepiece of the commemorations at the start of June. A spectacular regatta procession down the Thames from Putney to the Isle of Dogs was meticulously planned, comprising a flotilla of 1,000 boats, barges, cruisers, rowing boats, dinghies and skiffs. Unfortunately, the weather grew increasingly squally and wet as the fleet made its way past Westminster. Through it all, the Queen and her nonagenarian husband stood stoically in the open on their barge, watching the procession pass by – a gallant performance that landed the duke in hospital with an infection. Unlike earlier such anniversary events, the diamond jubilee was not a tentative testing of the public mood. The monarchy’s popularity was not now in doubt, especially in the wake of the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton the previous year. Even so, to forestall criticism of the cost at a time of recession, some elements of the celebrations were privately sponsored. Once again the Queen and duke toured the British Isles but this time, in a concession to their age, other family members were sent on tours abroad: Prince Charles and his wife Camilla to Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Prince William and Catherine to Malaysia and the Pacific islands; and Prince Harry to Belize, Brazil, Jamaica and the Bahamas. Read more | Prince Charles and Camilla: a history of their romance For the younger members, these tours were partly testing-the-water exercises to see how they performed in their royal roles. Each was a success. There were other, by-now traditional elements to the jubilee, such as a St Paul’s service, walkabouts, a formal dinner and a concert, though this time, in deference to the palace lawns, it took place at the Victoria Memorial on The Mall. Many of the stars were the same, too, with performers from each decade of the Queen’s reign. Shirley Bassey, Cliff Richard, Tom Jones and Paul McCartney rubbed shoulders with Grace Jones, Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, Elton John, Jessie J and Ed Sheeran. As before, the Queen put in a late appearance at the concert. Overall, the Queen’s jubilees have proved an increasingly successful element in promoting the monarchy’s popularity: an opportunity for an extra day’s holiday for the public, for street parties and uninhibited – though decorous – celebrations. Read more | Queen Elizabeth II: the constant face of a changing Britain 2017: The sapphire jubilee The 65th anniversary of the Queen’s accession passed without fanfare. On 6 February 2017, she spent the day privately at Sandringham, as she does every year, going diligently through the red boxes of official documents sent to her daily by the government. The chief reason for the lack of ceremony on the actual day is that the date of her accession is also the anniversary of her father’s death, which the Queen likes to spend in quiet reflection. George VI was found dead in bed by his valet in 1952, having suffered a heart attack in his sleep. He had been ill with lung cancer but his death was unexpected; Elizabeth II was on a tour in Kenya when she succeeded to the throne. Stephen Bates is a journalist and author. His books include Royalty Inc: Britain's Best-Known Brand (Aurum Press, 2015) This article appeared in BBC History Magazine's 'The Queen' Special Edition, republished in 2022
The Pentrich Rising: England's forgotten armed revolution
In 1817, a working-class uprising was brutally quashed amid accusations that government spies had deliberately incited the rebels. Stephen Bates relates the tragedy of the Pentrich Rising...
On 9 June 1817, a mob of men marched nervously through darkness and driving rain down the country lanes of Derbyshire. They were on their way – or so they thought – to capture Nottingham, 14 miles away, as part of a national revolt to overthrow the government. They did not know it at the time but the Pentrich revolutionaries, as they came to be called, were taking part in the last armed insurrection in English history – and, according to the late historian EP Thompson, the first entirely working-class political uprising. Armed with pikes and a few muskets, and led by an unemployed stocking weaver called Jeremiah Brandreth – known to them for his Luddite activities as ‘the Nottingham Captain’ – they expected to be joined by thousands of others marching down “like a cloud” from Yorkshire and Lancashire. Read more | Your guide to the Luddite movement They were assured that a further 50,000 men in London could be quickly summoned to seize the government and capture the Bank of England. In reality, they were on their own. Most of the men were unclear as to what the political aim was, beyond cancelling the national debt and shooting ministers. Perhaps a provisional government would be set up, one that would hand out provisions to the starving populace – but, more immediately, the men had been promised money, food, rum and boat rides on the river Trent. As they marched wearily on, Brandreth led the singing: “The time is come, you plainly see/The government opposed must be.” The men on the march were weavers, farm labourers and iron workers. Most were related to each other, and many – including Brandreth – were Primitive Methodists. They blamed the autocratic government and aristocratic ministers for their distress. Many were out of work and without food, the result of the contraction of the economy after the Napoleonic Wars. But they were also victims of a natural phenomenon of which they had no idea. An ash cloud from the 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, is now recognised to have affected the climate across the world over several seasons, wrecking harvests in the northern hemisphere. As a result, food and particularly bread had become expensive – landowners’ incomes were protected by the newly enacted Corn Laws, keeping wheat prices high – and in short supply. To maintain morale and keep out of the rain, the men – who had been gathered mainly from villages around Pentrich, South Wingfield and Ripley – stopped at pubs, demanding beer, bread and cheese. Brandreth led them to local farmhouses, where they coerced the residents into giving them money and firearms, and pressed workers to join the uprising. At the home of a widow named Mary Hepworth, they smashed the window shutters when the occupants refused to open up, and Brandreth fired his musket into the kitchen, fatally hitting a servant called Robert Walters in the neck. Read more | The Corn Law crisis: the bitter political war that threatened thousands with starvation The next target was the Butterley iron works. The company had recently sacked several men for attending a political meeting – some of them had joined the march – and the manager, George Goodwin, had set his remaining workers to guard the gates. When the crowd approached, he confronted them and said they should go home or risk being hanged. One young man, Isaac Ludlum, trembling violently, retorted: “I am as bad as I can be. I must go on – I cannot go back.” Others were not so sure; many peeled off and vanished into the night, pursued by threats from Brandreth. The depleted mob approached Nottingham on the morning of 10 June, only to be met by a detachment of the 15th Hussars. The authorities had been expecting them. The men turned on their heels and fled back across the fields, into the arms of waiting magistrates. An uprising against the government had been brewing for some time. While many people had joined Hampden Clubs (named after a 17th-century parliamentarian) across the country to discuss political reform, others vented their frustration more aggressively. Demonstrations in London’s Spa Fields in December 1816 had ended in violence as followers of the radical bookseller Thomas Spence campaigned for the abolition of private land and universal suffrage. Read more | Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain Fearing a repeat of the French Revolution, which he’d witnessed first hand as a student visiting Paris, prime minister Lord Liverpool hurriedly introduced repressive legislation, including the suspension of habeas corpus (which requires a person under arrest to be brought before a court). And when a delegation of 5,000 unemployed Lancashire weavers attempted to march from Manchester to London in March 1817 to plead for food, they were dispersed by troops before getting beyond Stockport. In the absence of a police force, home secretary Lord Sidmouth relied on spies to keep the government informed of what was going on. One of these was a man named William Richards, a carpenter and surveyor who had been an associate of radicals before being imprisoned for debt. On his release in March 1817, he went to see Sidmouth to offer his services, and was sent north as an undercover agent. He adopted the name William Oliver, and would become known as ‘Oliver the Spy’. Accompanied by his friend Joseph Mitchell, a genuine radical, Richards infiltrated meetings and reported back. Mitchell was arrested soon after, but Oliver escaped capture by showing authorities a secret letter from Sidmouth – “He is an intelligent man and deserving of your confidence” – and was allowed to slip back to London. Read more | A brief history of Chartism Oliver returned to the Midlands and Yorkshire in May, and continued to attend meetings. Known as “the London delegate”, he told the organisers that thousands across the country were ready to join an uprising. To what extent he actively provoked potential rebels remains unknown, but he certainly did not discourage the desperate talk at meetings in Huddersfield and Nottingham. One veteran radical, Tommy Bacon – described by the authorities as “a pertinacious old man” – returned home to Pentrich telling locals of a “coming blow”. Brandreth was another regular at the meetings, and in June he left his wife and three young children in Sutton-in-Ashfield, and moved to Pentrich, ready for the imminent uprising. He missed a meeting at the Punchbowl Inn in Nottingham, where increasingly suspicious plotters interrogated Oliver about his background. One told him: “They were not so fond of being hung for nothing at Nottingham as they were in Lancashire.” Lucky to escape with his life, the spy hurriedly departed for London. In the days following the rebels’ dispersal, authorities arrested 47 of the men. They were charged as false traitors, for “not having the fear of God in their hearts, not weighing the duty of their allegiance but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil”. Among the 47 was Brandreth, who had tried to escape to America, but returned penniless to Nottinghamshire. Listen | Stephen Bates examines a failed attempt to murder the entire British cabinet in February 1820. He also explores the background and aftermath of this violent plot By the time of the trial before the Lord Chief Justice at Derby in October 1817, Oliver had been unmasked by the Leeds Mercury – he had been spotted outside a pub in Wakefield talking to a servant of local military commander General John Byng – and the authorities were worried about using him as a witness. Oliver was spirited to a nearby hotel, but his name was never mentioned at the 10-day trial – incitement was no excuse for treason. Traditionally, charges of treason had been reserved for aristocratic rebels. Indeed, Tommy Bacon, who had lain low during the uprising but been arrested nonetheless, was quoted as saying: “[It’s been] never known in England before that labouring men were tried for high treason… men who can scarce tell a letter in the alphabet.” With a jury dominated by local landowners, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. In the dock, Brandreth cut a fearsome figure – the stuff of respectable nightmares – as his black beard had not been trimmed in prison. He had killed a man during the march and expected no mercy. His lieutenants, Isaac Ludlum the Elder, William Turner and George Weightman, were also sentenced to death, though Weightman’s sentence was later remitted on account of his youth and good character. Of the remaining men, 23 – including Bacon – were sentenced to transportation (none of them ever returned to Derbyshire) and 21 were acquitted. The Duke of Devonshire, owner of Pentrich, had the cottages of the rebels demolished. The punishment for traitors was still barbaric, and included beheading and quartering, though the Prince Regent remitted the last detail. Brandreth, who was literate, left his pregnant wife Ann all his worldly possessions, which amounted pathetically to “one work bag, two balls of worsted and one of cotton, a handkerchief, an old pair of stockings, a shirt and a letter I received from my beloved sister”. On the scaffold, a furious William Turner shouted to the crowd: “This is all Oliver and the government.” Read more | Peterloo: the English uprising But to what extent did the government deliberately provoke the uprising against them? The journalist William Cobbett was in no doubt. In his Political Register newspaper, he wrote: “The employers of Oliver might, in an hour, have put a total stop to those preparations and blown them to air. They wished not to prevent but to produce those acts.” However, Lord Sidmouth was having none of it. He wrote to the Yorkshire magnate Earl Fitzwilliam, insisting that such claims were incredible: “It was directly at variance with the instructions given to Oliver and with his communications… to myself.” The Pentrich Rising turned out to be the last attempt to overthrow a government by a general uprising, and not just because of the severe punishments meted out. In the ensuing years, prosperity returned to the country as harvests improved and the economy recovered. Eventually – gradually and reluctantly – parliamentary reform would be conceded. Soon, there would be local police forces (Derbyshire being the last to acquire one); governments would become more pervasive and responsive; and harassed ministers would grow more wary of employing untrained spies. Regency Britain: an age of rebellion The Luddites Between 1811 and 1816, there were numerous outbreaks of Luddism across the Midlands and the North. Gangs of weavers thrown out of work or fearing the loss of wages following the introduction of weaving frames wrecked machinery at mills and factories under the leadership of the mythical Ned Ludd. A plot to overthrow the government In November and December 1816, meetings at London’s Spa Fields – held to present a petition demanding parliamentary reform to the Prince Regent – were hijacked by radicals trying to incite an uprising to overthrow the government. There was arson and violence as a group marched towards the Bank of England, before being dispersed. The Blanketeers' march In March 1817, around 5,000 unemployed weavers, known as the Blanketeers because they carried blankets, attempted to march from Manchester to London to petition the Prince Regent for food. Most got no further than Stockport before they were dispersed by troops. The march alarmed ministers, leading to the arrests of several suspected radicals. The Peterloo Massacre In August 1819, a peaceful crowd attending a Manchester rally to call for political reform was broken up by Yeomanry and Army cavalry. At least 18 people lost their lives, and hundreds more were injured. The Cato Street Conspiracy In February 1820, a radical named Arthur Thistlewood and his small band of followers plotted to assassinate the cabinet. The London-based gang were exposed by an undercover agent and later seized as they gathered above a stable at Cato Street, near Edgware Road. Five were hanged and then beheaded, while five were transported. The plan became known as the Cato Street Conspiracy. The Great Reform Act In June 1832, in the face of a rising tide of disaffection at the absence of parliamentary reforms, the Whig government passed the Great Reform Act. This marginally extended the franchise, abolished rotten boroughs and gave parliamentary representation to new industrial cities. Stephen Bates is a journalist and author. His books include 1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo (Head of Zeus, 2015) This article was first published in the June 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine
Love before duty: the story of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson
When Edward VIII gave up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, it was the biggest constitutional crisis for the crown in the 20th century. His obsession with the divorced American actress set him on a collision course with the government, his brother and the wider British public. Here, former royal correspondent and journalist Stephen Bates examines the circumstances surrounding the king's abdication
"After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months.” So gruff old King George reputedly remarked to prime minister Stanley Baldwin about his son and successor, the future Edward VIII. He was scarcely a boy – Edward was 41 when he came to the throne in January 1936 – but his father was otherwise not far out: Edward’s reign lasted just 324 days before he abdicated to marry the woman he loved. It was the biggest constitutional crisis for the crown in the 20th century – no other monarch has voluntarily vacated the throne – and one that has shaped royal attitudes ever since. In the eyes of the family, David – the name by which they knew him – had shirked his duty, and cut and run. Evidence suggests that the majority of his countrymen and women thought so, too. When he succeeded his father, Edward VIII was a popular figure who had been in the public eye for many years. He was regarded as unstuffy, charming and unpretentious – at least, that was the image that the newspapers of the day chose to portray. No man, said The Times at his accession, ever came to the throne in more propitious circumstances: “In countless ways he has securely established his hold on the affections of his people.” The 8 most famous royal weddings in British history But senior politicians and many who served him as officials already had concerns. “I doubt he’ll stay the course,” Baldwin told the Labour leader, Clement Attlee. They thought him lazy and erratic, with a negligent attitude towards his duties – opinions that were only reinforced when he became king. State papers went unread and, it was suspected, were shown to Edward’s friends. He turned up late to events or cried off at the last minute, and he was rude and offhand. Then there was the king’s womanising. Over the previous two decades he had taken a series of mistresses, notably Freda Dudley Ward and Thelma Furness, both married women with complaisant husbands. But now a new partner had seen off the others: Bessiewallis (a combination of two family names, commonly shortened to Wallis) Simpson, who herself was already on her second marriage – and was an American to boot. None of this was known to the British public. Affair of the half-century: a timeline January 1931 Edward and Wallis first meet at a weekend house party given by his then mistress, Lady Thelma Furness, at her country home, Burrough Court, near Melton Mowbray. 20 January 1936 King George V (below) dies and his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, is proclaimed King Edward VIII. Government and the court are aware of Edward’s liaison with a twice-married American. August–September 1936 Edward and Wallis take a Mediterranean cruise aboard the Nahlin. Their relationship becomes public knowledge in Europe and the US. 27 October 1936 The Simpson v Simpson divorce petition is heard at Ipswich assizes. The decree nisi is granted on grounds of Ernest Simpson’s (phoney) adultery, based on a fake tryst staged at a hotel. 10 December 1936 Edward VIII abdicates, declaring in a BBC address (part written by Churchill) that he had found it impossible to discharge his duties “without the help and support of the woman I love”. 3 June 1937 Edward and Wallis marry at Château de Candé in France. In October they make a controversial visit to Germany, where they meet Hitler. Edward denies giving the Nazi salute, claiming that he was just waving. June 1940 The couple flee to Portugal as German forces invade France. The duke is made governor of the Bahamas to keep him out of the way of the Nazis. 1946–86 Edward and Wallis live in Paris, where in May 1972 the duke dies of cancer. The duchess dies in 1986. They are buried together in the royal burial ground at Frogmore, near Windsor. What drew Edward VIII to Wallis Simpson? In many ways, Wallis was a surprising choice. She was regarded as neither beautiful nor particularly charming, but she was witty, ambitious, single-minded and determined to add the king to her conquests, though friends claimed she was soon bored by him. Edward, however, was infatuated. As early as 1934 his equerry, John Aird, wrote: “The prince… follows W around like a dog.” The vilification of Wallis Simpson While Wallis was merely his mistress, ministers saw no reason to interfere – even when Edward told friends that he could not live without her and intended to marry her, come what may. Sometimes Wallis’s dull Anglo-American businessman husband, Ernest Simpson, accompanied the couple but increasingly he did not. In the summer of 1936, Edward set sail with Wallis (but without her husband) in a hired yacht, the Nahlin – which was, it was said, “furnished like a Calais whoreshop” – down the coast of Croatia and on to Greece and Turkey. They made quite a spectacle of themselves, the king often stripped to the waist (not the done thing for monarchs in the 1930s) and always accompanied by Wallis. A Romanian diplomat in Belgrade remarked that when his king travelled abroad he left his mistress at home. The continental and American papers had a field day. Why Wallis Simpson faked an affair Thanks to newspaper proprietors Beaverbrook of the Express and Rothermere of the Mail, both friendly with the king, the British public was kept in ignorance. Baldwin, though, returned home from a restful two-month summer holiday to find a sheaf of complaints about the king’s behaviour from expatriates abroad. By October, the prime minister was seriously alarmed: it had become obvious that Edward VIII was still determined to marry Wallis, and she was making plans to divorce her husband. The compliant Ernest went along with the scheme, and gallantly undertook to pose as the adulterer. He took a family friend, Mary Raffray, to the Hotel de Paris at Bray, near Maidenhead, where they were duly spotted in bed together by hotel staff on two successive mornings. The hotel was used to such ruses, and to supplying staff as witnesses in divorce cases, but the Simpsons had to be careful: if there was any suggestion of artificial collusion, the divorce could be denied – and it nearly happened. When the divorce hearing came up at Ipswich assizes (the first court with a slot for an early hearing), the judge – who had not been warned of the case’s significance – clearly smelled a rat and seemed poised to deny the petition. However, Norman Birkett, Mrs Simpson’s barrister, smoothly steered him to approve “what you might call the ordinary hotel evidence”. The decree nisi was granted but the couple would have to wait six months before it was made absolute and Edward and Wallis could marry. “King Will Wed Wally,” the New York Journal confidently predicted. Edward VIII: Nazi sympathiser, playboy prince or peace-loving reformer? Baldwin had first discussed the case with the king a few days earlier. They met at Fort Belvedere, the miniature castle in the grounds of Windsor Great Park where Edward chose to live, rather than more publicly at Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace. It was a stilted meeting: they inspected the herbaceous borders before the prime minister asked for a whisky and soda, then steeled himself to say: “I don’t believe you can go on like this and get away with it.” He asked for the divorce to be delayed and for Wallis to go abroad, but the king declined to answer. At this stage Baldwin had not consulted his full cabinet – some of whom were still ignorant of the affair – but he was starting to sound out prime ministers from the empire, notably Canada’s Mackenzie King. He did not see the king again for a further month. Various solutions were discussed. The king could not be persuaded to give up Mrs Simpson and find someone more suitable. She in turn made only a half-hearted attempt to let him go. Edward made it clear that he was determined to marry her as soon as possible, and would rather abdicate otherwise. The possibility of a morganatic marriage – whereby Edward could marry Wallis but she would not be queen, and any children would not succeed to the throne – was briefly considered but the idea was quickly abandoned. Only one member of the cabinet, Duff Cooper – a friend of the king – was in favour, and the ‘white dominions’ prime ministers (of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada) were resolutely opposed. “The Australian outlook on life is distinctly middle class and on morals distinctly Victorian,” the US consul in Canberra reported to Washington. Éamon de Valera, head of government of the Irish Free State – still then within the ‘white commonwealth’ – offered to back Edward if he would support the Irish takeover of Ulster. But ultimately even he came down on the side of abdication, though he used the crisis to remove all mention of the British monarch from the Irish constitution. View oEmbed on the source website Why did Edward VIII have to abdicate? The storm broke in Britain only on 1 December, when the aptly named Bishop Blunt of Bradford told his diocesan synod that the king ought to live a more Christian life. Poor Blunt, who knew nothing of Mrs Simpson, merely meant that Edward VIII should show an example by attending church more regularly, but his words gave the British press the excuse they needed to break the story. Pressure on the king was now steadily applied. He was cornered and forced to make a choice. Delay, said the censorious Neville Chamberlain, chancellor of the exchequer, would be bad for the Christmas trade. The uncertainty could not drag on. Baldwin murmured that the king “must wrestle with himself in a way he has never done before and, if he will let me, I will help him”. The prime minister offered to argue with him through the night if necessary, but it was obvious the government’s decision had been made: Edward could not marry Wallis and be king. “The only time I was frightened,” Baldwin said later. “Was when I thought he might change his mind.” Prince Charles and Camilla: a history of their romance Within 10 days of the story breaking, the king had abdicated. A late attempt to rally a loyalist party failed. Winston Churchill, Edward’s chief political supporter, was howled down in the Commons on 7 December when he demanded a delay to sound out public opinion – the speaker told him to shut up. It would have been unlikely to have been successful: letters in the National Archives from members of the public to the government show overwhelming hostility to Wallis, variously describing her as an octopus, fake, a legalised prostitute and “a woman climber from a boarding house in Baltimore”. The novelist Virginia Woolf recorded an overheard conversation involving a grocer’s assistant, also on 7 December: “We can’t have a woman Simpson for queen… She’s no more royal than you or me.” Labour and the Liberals backed the government. Attlee told Baldwin: “Despite the sympathy felt for the king… the party – with the exception of the intelligentsia, who can be trusted to take the wrong view on any subject – were in agreement.” More succinctly, Ernest Bevin said: “Our people won’t ’ave it.” Only the communists and Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts came out in support of the couple, the former in the hope that it would bring down the monarchy altogether, the latter believing that the king would catapult them to power. Most national and regional newspapers and periodicals also supported the government. Only the Mail and Express – whose proprietors had suppressed news of the affair and thus perhaps prevented a king’s party from forming – and the Daily Mirror rallied to the king. Spying on the king: when MI5 targeted Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson Why wasn't Wallis Simpson considered a suitable wife for Edward VIII? Just why was Wallis Simpson regarded as an unsuitable consort? The chief difficulty in a more religiously observant time was the fact that she had already divorced one husband, left another and was now hoping to marry a man who was supreme governor of the Church of England. There were also doubts about her faithfulness. Papers in the National Archives show that the Metropolitan Police was spying on her: a report detailed clandestine visits to a Ford car salesman called Guy Trundle. There may also have been concerns that she was sympathetic to the Nazis. An FBI report released in 2002 claimed that she had been the lover of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi German ambassador to London, but no conclusive evidence has been found to support this suggestion. Netflix’s The Crown: the real history behind the series Anti-American prejudice was a factor, too. The diarist Harold Nicolson wrote: “The upper class mind her being American more than they mind her being divorced. The lower class do not mind her being American but loathe the idea that she has had two husbands already.” The newly created Duke of Windsor was left to wrangle with his younger brother and successor, George VI, over money and the life tenancies of Balmoral and Sandringham. It was a bitter fight, which left a legacy of distrust between the brothers. Pleading poverty, Edward hid his £1m assets and secured an annual pension of £11,000. He also threatened to sue George for trespass if the new king ventured to either house until the life tenancies were purchased from Edward for £300,000. Edward was made Duke of Windsor, but the royal family’s refusal to give Wallis the title ‘Royal Highness’ embittered him for the rest of his life. Stephen Bates is a journalist, writer and former royal correspondent for The Guardian. He is the author of Royalty Inc: Britain’s Best-Known Brand (Aurum, 2015) This article was first published in the January 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
Stephen Bates describes the battle over bread prices that divided parliament in the mid-19th century
Author and journalist Stephen Bates describes the Corn Laws crisis, the battle over bread prices that divided parliament in mid-19th-century Britain.
The Corn Law crisis: the bitter political war that threatened thousands with starvation
In the 1840s, Britain was pitched into a huge political battle over the price of bread. The Corn Law crisis triggered a bitter civil war in the Tory party – and, writes Stephen Bates, threatened thousands with starvation
For 30 years in the first half of the 19th century, Britain was obsessed with the price of bread. Waves of unrest swept the country as bad harvests, food shortages and dire living conditions stalked the poorest in society. Calls for parliamentary reform grew ever more insistent as citizens demanded that politi- cians be more responsive to their hardships. The first modern pressure groups – among them the Chartists – hounded the govern- ment regularly. At the heart of this political and social turbulence was a growing row over the cost of food – an imbroglio we now know as the Corn Law crisis. On one side of the argument stood those who argued for strict tariffs on the import of foreign cereals into Britain; on the other were those who contended that such restrictions were bad for the economy and bad for those at the bottom of the nation’s social ladder. When the two sides clashed in the 1840s, what followed was a parliamentary battle every bit as divisive as the struggle over Brexit, and a Tory civil war so bitter that it kept the party out of majority power for nearly 30 years. In 1845, the Tory home secretary James Graham wrote: “We have lost the slight hold which we ever possessed over the hearts and feelings of our followers.” He was thinking of the Tory backbenchers, but his words could have been echoed 175 years later in our own time. A slump in prices There had been import restrictions on cereals for centuries, intended to stabilise prices and prevent commodity speculation. But it wasn’t until the end of the Napoleonic Wars that the government introduced restrictions intended to exclude foreign cereals altogether – by passing the 1815 Corn Law. With prices slumping following war with France, farmers and landowners were anxious to protect their harvests, even if it made the most staple food dearer for workers and their families. While there was a case for making British agriculture self-sufficient, and improving yields through more efficient farming, the landowning lobby was by far the most important in parliament and it demanded protection. The 1815 Corn Law prohibited grain imports until domestic prices reached 80 shillings a quarter (a quarter being 480lbs or about a fifth of a tonne) – which they never did in the 30 years of its operation. When harvests were poor, as they were for several years in the aftermath of the war, bread prices rose. A four-pound loaf, which could feed a family for a couple of days, surged to more than a shilling in 1817. This came at a time when cotton spinners had seen their earnings halved to about 12 shillings a week and farm labourers earned only seven shillings. The consequences for the poor could be catastrophic. It is hardly surprising that there was a direct correlation between price rises and a surge of political agitation during the four years following the end of the war. Meanwhile, as the industrial revolution made Britain the most dynamic economy in the world, calls for the removal of tariffs to benefit trade were growing louder. Free trade was becoming the period’s dominant eco- nomic theory: its proponents argued it would boost economic output, stimulate employ- ment for a growing population and lead to happier workers. Increased international trade would, it was confidently predicted, improve international peace and harmony. Agriculture would have to become more efficient to meet demand, and if food was cheaper, wages could be lowered. By the time Sir Robert Peel was returned to power as prime minister in 1841 with a sizeable Tory majority over the Whigs, he accepted this argument. The first party leader to come from a manufacturing rather than a landed background, Peel was the dominant figure in his party and in the Commons. “An iceberg with a slight thaw": the divisive life of Robert Peel Sir Robert Peel’s family made a fortune from calico cloth printing in Lancashire, though Peel (1788–1850) never worked for the company. Profits of £70,000 a year enabled his father – also Sir Robert – to buy a 4,000-acre estate near Tamworth, Stafford- shire in the 1790s and to send his son to Harrow and Oxford, where he was the first student at the university ever to be awarded a double first, in mathematics and classics. Aged 21, Peel became MP for Cashel, an Irish rotten borough. He was regarded as brilliant, but cold and arrogant: “an iceberg with a slight thaw”. By 24, he was chief secretary for Ireland, recognised as a rising Tory star. In 1822 he became home secre- tary, reforming the criminal justice system and introducing a professional police service in London – the Peelers, or Bobbies. Traditionalists grew suspicious when Peel changed his mind on Catholic emanci- pation, which he had previously opposed, in 1829 and remembered it 16 years later when he changed his mind on the Corn Laws. Peel was prime minister twice: in 1834–35 and 1841–46. He helped to re- shape the Conservative party, issuing the first party manifesto to the electors of his then constituency of Tamworth. In it, he promised the maintenance of order and good government and a review of civil and ecclesiastical institutions to correct abuses and redress grievances. His second administration reintroduced income tax and moved towards free trade, removing tariffs on many imported goods. In 1845, the Irish famine gave him the excuse to tackle the Corn Laws, earning the undying hatred of protectionist Tory land- owners and splitting the party. Peel died in 1850 after being thrown from his horse and crushed when the animal trampled on him on Constitution Hill near Buckingham Palace. Immensely wealthy from his family’s calico printing business, Peel was not only intellectually distinguished but had been in government service on and off as a minister for 30 years. His had been a professional political career, not an exercise in dilettan- tism. He was stiff and formal – famously described by Daniel O’Connell as having a smile like the silver plate on a coffin lid – and he regarded his backbench colleagues with disdain. They did not understand the eco- nomic arguments, not studying them dili- gently as he did. “How can those who spend their time in hunting and shooting and eating and drinking know what are the motives of those... who have access to the best information and have no other object under Heaven but to... answer the general interests of all classes?” he wrote to his wife, Julia, in 1845. In his view, as in the hunting field, “heads see, but tails follow”. This was a metaphor, he reasoned, such backbenchers ought to understand. In return, many Tories viewed Peel with suspicion. He had ratted once, changing his mind from being a firm opponent of Catholic emancipation – ‘Orange Peel’ – to accepting its necessity in the late 1820s to avoid poten- tial rebellion in Ireland. This was regarded as a U-turn on a central tenet of Toryism that saw him drummed out as the MP for Oxford University by its High Tory voters. A door at his old college, Christ Church, still has the slogan ‘No Peel’ hammered into it in nails. If he could abandon such a fundamental belief, what else might he surrender? Their suspicion was enhanced when Peel proposed a £30,000 government grant to rebuild the Catholic seminary at Maynooth in 1845. He saw it as a way of appeasing Irish Catholics; Tory backbenchers believed it was endors- ing heresy. James Graham wrote that Peel and supporters such as himself were “scouted as traitors”. Bonfire of the duties In the first Tory budget in 1842, Peel em- barked on a wholesale revision of the complex import tariff system, reducing duties on 750 items out of 1,200, while reintroducing income tax to offset the shortfall. Three years later, he cut tariffs on a further 430 imports, including cotton, glass, timber and sugar. Everyone knew that the outstanding remain- ing tariff was corn. The government was coming under increasing pressure from the working-class Chartist movement, demanding political reforms, but more importantly from the Anti-Corn Law League, founded among northern manufacturers with the single, focussed aim of repeal. The league was well-funded and increasingly sophisticated in its campaigning. It employed professional staff in Manchester, staged well-attended meetings and sent out thou- sands of letters a day. It also published newspapers and articles – the Economist magazine was founded in 1843 to promote the cause – and already had two MPs, Richard Cobden and John Bright, harrying the government. Intellectually convinced, Peel was finding it increasingly difficult to counter their arguments. In the summer of 1845, a natural disaster gave Peel the excuse to do what he had already privately decided. The potato crop was rotting in a wet summer. This affected the harvest across Britain, but the conse- quences were especially dire in Ireland, where potatoes were the staple diet. Peel, who had been a minister in Dublin many years earlier, knew how devastating a famine would be. He took urgent, though largely ineffectual, action: the government surreptitiously bought up maize in the United States. Nicknamed ‘Peel’s brimstone’ by the Irish, it rotted crossing the Atlantic, could not be unloaded where the need was greatest, and the recipients were unused to cooking it. Meanwhile, Peel seized the excuse to argue for repealing the Corn Laws, albeit cautiously and gradually. “Rotten potatoes have done it all,” growled the elderly Duke of Wellington, the Tories’ leader in the Lords. “They put Peel in his damned fright.” Nevertheless, the old soldier believed in loyalty and would remain by the prime minister’s side. “A good government for the country is more important than the Corn Laws or any other consideration,” he said. In December 1845, Lord John Russell, leader of the Whigs, tightened the pressure on Peel by announcing his conversion to repeal. With his cabinet divided, Peel re- signed but was back a fortnight later when Russell was unable to form a government from among his squabbling colleagues. Queen Victoria, her former dislike of Peel dissipated under the influence of Prince Albert, breathed a sigh of relief. He was, she noted in her journal, “the only person fitted to govern the country”. She, too, would back him through the crisis. The professional bowler Peel lost two cabinet ministers, and underes- timated Tory backbench opposition, because his opponents in the party had found an unlikely champion in Benjamin Disraeli: flamboyant, impecunious and an outsider due to his Jewish heritage. Although a Christian, Disraeli was described as “a Jew d’esprit” by a witty Tory, and by another as “a professional bowler we take round with us” – a reference to the aristocrat-sponsored cricket teams then staffed by paid players. But Disraeli, who had been denied ministerial office by Peel, seized the chance to excoriate his party leader repeatedly during the debates over the coming months as the repeal bill wended its way through the Commons. The debate – held mostly late at night in the candlelit Lords chamber, because the Commons was still being rebuilt following the fire of 1834 – became rowdy, as many MPs returned from dining. Peel diligently laid out the economic case for repeal, ponder- ously reciting statistics showing its benefits, and would then have to listen to Disraeli standing behind him, wittily and remorse- lessly undermining his case. Disraeli did so in highly personal terms, cheered on by his colleagues: Peel was the thief of other men’s intellect, without an original idea of his own (that must have stung). He was like a coach-man in directing the affairs of state: “no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind the carriage is a great whip”. The backbench laughter grew more raucous as Disraeli’s attacks gave them confidence. Peel, used to being heard respect- fully, grew rattled and close to tears. “I have abandoned no duty and betrayed no trust,” he insisted during the second reading debate. “I have listened to the attacks on me with sorrow but not with anger... Really, these interruptions are very unpleasant.” Tories sneered at the use of the famine as a reason for repeal: it was an exaggeration; the Irish were lazy and improvident. Peel resp- onded with real anger: “Are you to hesitate in averting famine because it possibly may not come? Good God... how much diarrhoea and bloody flux and dysentery (must) a people bear before it becomes necessary for you to provide them with food?” Attacks on Peel became increasingly overwrought. Lord George Bentinck, Disraeli’s ally, effectively accused Peel of killing his relative, the former prime minister George Canning, 20 years earlier by refusing to serve in his cabinet – Peel had to be talked out of challenging him to a duel for that. On a sweltering night in June, there was a final outburst from the backbencher Eliot Yorke, the MP for Cambridgeshire, demand- ing that the bill be called the Foreign Lands Improvement Bill, because it “would displace the labour of our hardworking countrymen in order to give employment to foreign serfs”. These interventions may have been incred- ibly painful to Peel but they never seriously threatened repeal, which passed the Com- mons with Whig support and went through the Lords swiftly under Wellington’s surveil- lance. However, two-thirds of Tories opposed the bill. In all, 86 per cent of Tory county MPs and 80 per cent of county office holders voted against. Peel’s moment of triumph was short-lived. A few hours later, the rebels combined with the Whigs to vote down an Irish coercion bill designed to strengthen security – which all would normally have supported – purely to bring down the government. Peel resigned. About 90 Peelites formed an independent bloc: most would eventually join what became the Liberal Party. Within four years, Peel was dead – and by then, too, Disraeli had convinced the Tories that the Corn Laws were a lost cause. Stephen Bates is a former senior correspondent with The Guardian. His books include Two Nations: Britain in 1846 (Head of Zeus, 2015). This article was first published in the May 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine
Georgian terrorists: the Cato Street Conspiracy
Stephen Bates examines a failed attempt to murder the British cabinet in February 1820 and explores the background and aftermath of this violent plot
On the 200th anniversary of the Cato Street Conspiracy, Stephen Bates examines a failed attempt to murder the entire British cabinet in February 1820. He also explores the background and aftermath of this violent plot.
The Peterloo Massacre: what did it achieve?
It started as a peaceful appeal for political reform, but ended with 18 dead and hundreds injured. Stephen Bates describes how the events of 16 August 1819 became a landmark moment in the struggle for democracy
What was the Peterloo Massacre? The Peterloo Massacre, which took place on 16 August 1819, was the worst violence ever to occur at a political meeting in Britain. Cavalry brutally dispersed a crowd of 60,000 protestors in Manchester taking part in a peaceful appeal for political reform. The many thousands of weavers and tradesmen and their families had gathered to consider “the propriety of adopting the most legal and effectual means of obtaining a reform”. The one thing they were not expecting as they made their way on foot to Manchester on that fateful Monday morning was a massacre. They came in from the suburbs and surrounding towns and villages respectably dressed, holding their children by the hand, marching in disciplined columns behind banners and flags, with bands playing patriotic tunes, to have an entertaining day out and to hear speeches calling for parliamentary reform. A “more shocking” massacre? How we might have overestimated the Peterloo crowds 16 August 1819: Militia massacres protesters at ‘Peterloo’ It was a fine summer day and the meeting was entirely legal. It had been called to consider – not to demand – “the propriety of adopting the most legal and effectual means of obtaining a reform”. And the demonstrators had been warned not to be provoked by what was sure to be a heavy presence of constables and local militia. They should, they were told, bring “no other weapon but that of a self-approving conscience”. “There were crowds of people in all directions, full of good humour, laughing and shouting and making fun,” recalled John Benjamin Smith, a 25-year-old businessman who witnessed the meeting. “It seemed to be a gala day with the country people who were mostly dressed in their best and brought with them their wives.” But what happened to them that day was the worst violence ever to occur at a political meeting in Britain, an event that shocked the nation and was pivotal in the long struggle for the vote. At least 18 people were killed and more than 600 injured when the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry and the regular cavalry of the 15th Hussars charged into the crowd gathered at St Peter’s Fields to break up the meeting on the orders of local magistrates. Listen | Historian and author Jacqueline Riding discusses the tragic events of the Peterloo Massacre The troops cleared the field in 20 minutes but what happened that day has reverberated for the best part of 200 years since. That’s at least partly due to the inspiration of the local journalist James Wroe, who described it as the Peterloo Massacre, in punning reference to the battle of Waterloo four years earlier. Wroe, incidentally, found himself imprisoned for a year and his newspaper closed down by the authorities in retaliation. The event did however give rise to the foundation of another progressive newspaper, the Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) by an outraged local businessman, John Edward Taylor, two years later. Why did the protest take place? At the time of Peterloo, Manchester was growing fast. It had quadrupled in size in the previous 50 years as a result of the industrial revolution and the expansion of the cotton trade. By 1819, the population was more than 100,000, with people pouring in from the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside and Ireland in search of better-paid work. Mechanisation in the mills was making the traditional home-based handloom weavers a declining workforce. More urgently, the economic depression that had followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars was leading to a halving of the weavers’ wages just at the time that a succession of poor harvests (partially caused, though they did not know it, by climatic changes resulting from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia) was increasing the price of food. Dissatisfaction under these precarious conditions led to pressure for parliamentary reform, to make legislators more responsive to the needs of citizens – and indeed to secure fairer representation at Westminster so that their plight could no longer be ignored. Manchester, now the largest and most important of the new cities of the north, elected no MPs, unlike some rotten boroughs (with their tiny electorates) down south, and so its influence on policy was limited. Campaigners who wanted to change the system in the years after Waterloo divided into those who pressed peacefully for constitutional reform to widen the franchise to all men (only a few thought women should get a vote, though female suffrage leagues were beginning to emerge) and a small, revolutionary minority who wanted violent upheaval. The Peterloo demonstrators were in the former category. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-3202701-0370a05.jpg" width="3920" height="2584" alt="Painting by George Cruikshank, 'The Massacre of Peterloo or Britons Strike Home'. (Photo by Spencer Arnold Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Painting by George Cruikshank, 'The Massacre of Peterloo or Britons Strike Home'. (Photo by Spencer Arnold Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Lord Liverpool’s Tory government of the day knew that the parliamentary system was unbalanced but were in no mood to give way to even peaceful campaigners. The French Revolution was well within living memory – Liverpool and his foreign secretary, Viscount Castlereagh, had been in Paris to witness it as students 30 years earlier – and they feared any concessions would lead to something similar in Britain. Ministers and their supporters particularly feared the Spenceans, followers of the radical Thomas Spence, who argued for the common ownership of land, universal suffrage and the abolition of the aristocracy. But the government had only limited means to contain disturbances: no police forces yet, only special constables to enrol, or local militias and regular troops to call out – and they were reliant on informers to keep them abreast of what was happening. What triggered the French Revolution? Fighting for freedom: the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution There had been a series of small-scale and easily contained uprisings in the previous four years, some shading into violence. England in particular was very far from the peaceful land depicted in Jane Austen’s novels. Long before the war ended, Luddites fearing for their jobs had been randomly destroying the new machinery that would replace them in mills across the north and Midlands. In 1817 starving Blanketeers (so called because of the blankets they carried) had attempted unsuccessfully to march from Manchester to London to petition the king for food but were headed off by mounted troops before they got beyond Stockport. In rural Derbyshire later that year, an attempted armed uprising had fizzled out with savage reprisals by the authorities against the ringleaders, three of whom were hanged and then beheaded. Much closer to Westminster, a reform meeting at Spa Fields, Clerkenwell in December 1816 had turned to violence as agitators attempted to lead a faction to storm the Bank of England before being repelled by troops from the Tower of London. The government’s difficulty was distinguishing between peaceful and violent protests, not helped by some reformers’ flirting with violent rhetoric. Viscount Sidmouth, the home secretary, quietly promised to offer magistrates legal protection if violence erupted and troops were called in. Listen | Acclaimed writer and director Mike Leigh talks about the creation of his major new historical epic, which explores the events of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 A series of large-scale public reform meetings had passed off peacefully across the country in 1819, including an earlier one at St Peter’s Fields, a three-acre open space on the edge of Manchester. Nevertheless, the local magistrates and government supporters, including factory owners and businessmen, were edgy in advance of the meeting on 16 August 1819, which promised to be the biggest gathering yet. Groups of those planning to attend had been drilling publicly in the foothills of the Pennines, as a means of keeping order on the big day. Unfortunately, the authorities did not see it that way, and there was concern that the meeting would be addressed by Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, the leading extra-parliamentary speaker for the reformists, whom they regarded as a rabble rouser. Hunt had been speaking at meetings across the country that summer, including the earlier rally in Manchester, without being arrested and, a few days before the St Peter’s Fields meeting, he checked with the local magistrates that it was legal and could go ahead. They told him it could. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-898094658-0c2ba74.jpg" width="3090" height="3780" alt="An illustration by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) depicting the Peterloo Massacre, for Camden Pelham "The Chronicles of Crime", 1887, London. (Photo by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" title="An illustration by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) depicting the Peterloo Massacre, for Camden Pelham "The Chronicles of Crime", 1887, London. (Photo by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Why did the Peterloo Massacre happen? Maybe the magistrates panicked that Monday morning when they saw the size of the crowd pouring into the space, from Manchester itself and the surrounding towns and villages. Later estimates reckoned there were about 60,000 people by 1pm when Hunt was due to arrive. They were so tightly packed that observers said their hats seemed to touch. The magistrates watching from the first floor of a neighbouring building had taken no chances. The newly formed Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a part-time cavalry force, proud in their new blue and white uniforms, made up of local businessmen, factory owners and their sons, were holed up in nearby back streets. Many of them passed the morning drinking in local taverns, until a witness said they were so inebriated they were rolling on their saddles. There was also a contingent of regular cavalry from the 15th Hussars, as well as a detachment of 400 infantry with two small cannon, and special constables enrolled for the day and equipped with long wooden truncheons. The magistrates – all local men of property, retired businessmen, lawyers, even a clergyman, none of them likely to be sympathetic to political reform – had also taken the precaution of calling in some local loyalist Tories who could be sworn to testify that they believed the town to be in danger if need be. They accordingly did so, even as the crowd gathered below. Later the magistrates would claim that they had also read the Riot Act, the formal rubric ordering the crowd to disperse, though if they did so no one heard them and they certainly did not allow the statutory hour for the gathering to leave. "Peterloo felt relevant, given all the crazy and chaotic things that are happening now": 5 minutes with Mike Leigh The workers’ revolution 5 of the worst years in British history The feared spinner Hunt arrived at the edge of the crowd in an open-topped barouche carriage at 1.15pm, accompanied by other members of the platform party, including Mary Fildes, the organiser of the newly formed local women’s suffrage movement, and John Tyas, a correspondent covering the meeting for The Times. Hunt mounted the hustings platform – two carts lashed together – and had no sooner started to speak than the magistrates ordered Manchester’s deputy constable, a corrupt and much feared former spinner called Joseph Nadin, to go and arrest him. To help him do so, they also sent in the yeomanry. It was just what the part-time cavalry had been waiting for: they clattered through the side streets, knocking over a woman and killing her two-year-old son as they did so, and charged into the crowd. People were packed so tightly around the hustings that the yeomanry were soon lashing out with their sabres and becoming submerged in the terrified mass of onlookers. The Rev Edward Stanley, rector of Alderley and a future bishop, who had ridden into Manchester on business that morning, was a witness to what happened: “With scarcely the semblance of line, their sabres glistened in the air, on they went, direct for the hustings… As the cavalry approached the dense mass of people they used their utmost efforts to escape but so closely were they pressed… that immediate escape was impossible… a scene of dreadful confusion ensued.” In the middle of all this, Nadin reached the platform and arrested Hunt, who was hustled back towards the magistrates’ building through a line of jeering constables and was beaten about the head as he reached the steps to the house. The constables themselves came under attack, probably accidentally, by the soldiers in the melee, with two being killed. The magistrates ordered the hussars into the crowd to rescue the yeomanry, who could be seen bobbing about in the midst of the crowd, slashing at the banners they were carrying. The hussars may have been marginally more disciplined than the yeomanry but neither had any experience of crowd control and if the troops really did, as their officers later alleged, try to use the flats of their sabres to move people along, they too were soon slashing away at anyone within reach. The crowd fled as best they could in the crush, falling over each other in their attempts to escape, trying to avoid the flashing blades and the horses’ hooves. Some ran into the grounds of a nearby Quaker chapel and found the cavalry riding in after them, others fell down the cellar steps of nearby buildings or were pressed against walls and railings. John Benjamin Smith, the young businessman, reported: “It was a hot, dusty day; clouds of dust… obscured the view. When it had subsided a startling scene was presented. Numbers of men, women and children were lying on the ground who had been knocked down and run over by the soldiers.” Within 20 minutes the field had been emptied and what was left behind were piles of bodies and the discarded debris of the rally: clothes, shoes and hats, banners and musical instruments abandoned by the bands. The troops rallied in front of the magistrates’ building and gave three cheers. They were congratulated by the Rev William Hay, one of the magistrates; they would receive the commendation of local Tories at a meeting the following day and would be sent a message later from the Prince Regent commending their “preservation of the public tranquillity”. The chief magistrate William Hulton wrote to Sidmouth praising “the extreme forbearance of the military”. Hiding their wounds That was not how the survivors in the crowd saw it. The roads out of Manchester were clogged with the injured. Apart from the 18 now thought to have died either on the day or from their wounds in the days afterwards, modern analysis of the casualty lists drawn up in the following weeks by reformist campaigners indicates that at least 654 people were sufficiently injured to require medical treatment. Others may have nursed their wounds in private, scared of the consequences for their jobs if their employers found out how they had been hurt. Strikingly, many of the injured were married men with children, the Irish present were particularly singled out (they were probably identified via their distinctive banners), and a quarter of the casualties were women, sabred or trampled by the horses. Margaret Downes bled to death after being slashed across the breast; Elizabeth Farren received a 3-inch gash from the crown of her head to her brow; Alice Heywood’s wrist was almost severed; and Sarah Howarth was wounded in 20 places. The troops and their defenders claimed that they had come under attack by demonstrators throwing stones but the wounds inflicted – 48 per cent injured by sabres, 26 per cent by horses and 26 per cent in the crush of the crowd – indicate that the injured must have been those closest to the cavalry’s path, not the stone-throwers. As one of the fatalities, 25-year-old James Lees, a former soldier who had fought at Waterloo but was now a weaver, told his relatives before he died from two deep sabre wounds to the head three weeks later: “At Waterloo there was man to man, but here it was downright murder.” Lees had been turned away from treatment at the Manchester infirmary after he refused to promise that he would not attend reform meetings in future. A fund was raised for the injured, but most of the £3,408 that was contributed went to the lawyers who represented Hunt – charged with seditious assembly – and four others in court at York the following spring. Sentenced to two and a half years, the great Orator settled down to writing his memoirs. He would later become, briefly, an MP. Six months after Peterloo came the Cato Street Conspiracy, led by the Spencean Arthur Thistlewood, the man who had tried to storm the Bank of England after the Spa Fields riot. He now wanted to assassinate the cabinet while ministers sat at dinner, but was cornered in a stable loft off the Edgware Road. He was tried and executed with five of his associates. It turned out that the government had known about the plot all along through an informer and may even have encouraged its development. It was the last attempt to overthrow the state by force. The reforms the crowd at Peterloo were seeking would gradually be enacted over the coming century, though it took 99 years for women to get the vote. From this distance it is hard to know what the Manchester rally would have achieved had it ended peacefully, as the organisers intended. But the cavalry’s brutal attack on unarmed, peaceful demonstrators ensured that it became a landmark in the struggle for democracy and has never been forgotten. Stephen Bates is a former senior correspondent with The Guardian and the author of 1815: Regency Britain in the Year of Waterloo (Head of Zeus 2015) The film Peterloo, about the 1819 massacre, written and directed by Mike Leigh, was released in cinemas in November 2018. Listen again: To listen to Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Peterloo Massacre on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, go to bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003k9l7 This article was first published in the December 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine -– Explore more content from week three of our Regency course: War and Conflict, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 11 mins Uncertainty and unrest: the madness of the Regency period – reading time 8 mins Reading between the lines: the real-life events that inspired Jane Austen – reading time 6 mins 1816: the year without summer – reading time 9 mins Regency Britain: An age of war and revolution – reading time 6 mins The Napoleonic Wars: everything you wanted to know – listening time 1 hour, 3 mins Podcast: Peterloo: the story of a massacre – listening time 37 mins