The brutal history of Peterloo

As director Mike Leigh’s film tells the story of the Peterloo massacre, Simon Basketter argues the events show how the ruling class reacts when its position is threatened

For days people prepared their banners, practised hymns and marched with bands. In the summer of 1819, Lancashire was filled with excitement.

A campaign for parliamentary reform had called a mass meeting in St Peter’s Field in Manchester, to be addressed by some of the foremost radical speakers of the time.

On Monday 16 August the field was packed with at least 60,000 men, women and children.

As the radical speaker Henry Hunt took to the stage, the mood rapidly changed. Watching from the edge of the field, local magistrates ordered mounted yeomanry to clear the area.

They charged, followed by cavalry hussars. Their sabres flashed and the air became thick with the noise of thundering hooves and the screams of the injured.

At least 18 died from their injuries, including a two year old child and a pregnant woman. Over 600 were injured.

Within moments, recalled the radical Samuel Bamford, most of the crowd had fled.

But “several mounds of human beings still remained where they had fallen, crushed down and smothered.

Some of these still groaning, others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath, and others would never breathe more.

“All was silent save those low sounds, and the occasional snorting and pawing of steeds.”

A cavalryman’s sabre came down on John Lees. Another came up behind the 22 year old factory worker and slashed his right elbow to the bone.

He was then severely beaten by men wielding truncheons. Lees died from his wounds on 7 September.

Major Thomas Dyneley saw the deserted place strewn with the refuse of conflict. “In short,” he said with relish, “the field was as complete as I had ever seen one after an action.”

A poster warning that military exercises relating to ‘sedition and treasonable purposes’ are illegal

Lees and Dyneley had both fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 with the Royal Horse Artillery.

Murder

A friend wrote that Lees said, “At Waterloo there was man to man; but at Manchester it was downright murder.”

Major Dyneley wrote in his report that the “first action of the Battle of Manchester is over, and has I am happy to say ended in the complete discomfiture of the enemy”.

On the day itself, a group of special constables taunted wounded protesters by shouting,

“This is Waterloo for you! This is Waterloo.”

Within days the Manchester Observer newspaper had started calling it Peterloo.

The massacre took place during the severe economic depression that followed two decades of war. The government, spooked by the spectre of revolution, fretted that any reform would bring insurrection.

Manchester was a city, The Times newspaper reported, where thousands of spinners and weavers lived in “squalid wretchedness” and “repulsive depravity”.

Britain in the 1810s was haunted by the fear of Jacobinism from the revolution that had overthrown the monarchy in France. Meanwhile only one in ten men—and no women—could vote, while many towns had no MPs at all.

There was pressure for reforms from some of the middle class as well as workers.

The instincts of Lord Liverpool’s Tory government were always repressive.

In 1817, an attack on the Prince Regent’s carriage prompted the government to suspend the right to appeal unlawful imprisonments. It also clamped down on “seditious” meetings.

In response at one Stockport rally, a speaker wished for a “sword in my hand to cut off the heads of all tyrants”.

Another told the crowd that they must “get all armed for nothing but sword in hand will do at all—Liberty or death!”

But conspiratorial insurrectionism had generally been crushed by infiltration by government spies.

That peaceful petitioning had proved ineffectual meant reformers for political change had to look to mass mobilisation.

Demands

That meant that demands for political reform started to coincide and merge with broader demands.

Henry Hunt insisted that a great deal of radical effort remained focused on the election of MPs and the sponsorship of moderate reform bills.

But conflict over tactics between the reformers in London led Hunt and others to look to the provinces, and to mass meetings, to build pressure for change.

A mass meeting held at Palace Yard, Westminster, in September 1818, denounced the Prince Regent.

It asserted the sovereignty of the people and demanded their rightful share for workers in the fruits of their labour.