16 August: The Peterloo Massacre

Today is the 200th anniversary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, a highly significant event in British politics. It took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, England, on 16 August 1819.

1. The background: after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, there was famine and chronic unemployment in the North of England. Wages had been slashed; people were starving. To cap it all, there were only two Members of Parliament for the entire county of Lancashire - Manchester didn't have one at all. Understandably, people were not happy about that situation.
2. The Manchester Patriotic Union organised a demonstration to be addressed by the radical orator Henry Hunt, who was campaigning for universal male suffrage, annual elections and a secret ballot.
3. 16 August 1819 was a Monday, which might seem an odd time to hold a rally, for surely people would be at work? However, many of the workers in Manchester at the time were handloom weavers, who worked from home and traditionally took Mondays off.
4. It was meant to be a peaceful event. People were so sure it would be that they brought their children and since it was a fine, sunny day, many families decided to make a picnic of it. They dressed up in their Sunday best, brought banners with slogans such as “Liberty and Fraternity” and “Taxation without Representation is Unjust and Tyrannical” and sang patriotic songs such as Rule Britannia and God Save the King.
5. Henry Hunt, the man they all came to hear, wasn't what you'd call a man of the people. He'd inherited 3,000 acres of prime land in Wiltshire but had squandered his inheritance and eloped with someone else's wife. This behaviour left him ostracised by the county gentry, and that was when he became a radical.
6. He hadn't even been all that keen on addressing the meeting. He'd travelled to Manchester for 9 August, the date the rally was originally supposed to take place but had been cancelled because the local magistrates thought the purpose of it was to “elect” an unofficial MP to represent the people of Manchester. Hunt wasn't best pleased to get there and find the meeting was off. He was persuaded to stay for the rearranged meeting a week later, but he wasn't happy about it. He was rude and ungracious in his memoirs about Joseph Johnson, one of the organisers of the Manchester meeting, a brush-maker, who'd been good enough to offer him accommodation. Hunt described staying at Johnson’s house as “one of the most disagreeable seven days that I ever passed".
7. Nevertheless, around 60,000 people crammed into the field to hear him speak. That amounted to about half the population of Manchester at the time and a larger crowd than typically attend home matches of Manchester City today. Contemporary accounts say people were packed so close together in the field that “their hats seemed to touch”.
8. As you might expect, the local cotton traders and mill owners were alarmed about this. They didn't want their workers getting more power at their expense. They feared the rally would turn violent. Many had sent their families out of town. They had formed a mounted militia, the Manchester Yeomanry, back in 1817 to deal with any riots. Manchester's magistrates were concerned, too, and had signed up 400 special constables armed with wooden truncheons. As well as the Manchester Yeomanry, they'd another 420 from Cheshire in reserve, and called in 340 regular cavalry from the 15th Hussars, plus 400 infantry and two six-pounder cannons from the artillery. There were more than 1,500 soldiers and constables. The troops charged into the crowd, killing 18 people and injuring more than 600 (the exact number of injured could have been much higher as many people might have concealed their injuries fearing retribution from their employers). The first casualty of the day wasn't even at the rally. It was a two year old child called William Fildes, who was being carried down the street by his mother when members of the Manchester Yeomanry, who'd been in the taverns drinking and getting well oiled before the fight, knocked him out of his mother's arms and trampled him on their way to the rally.
9. The name Peterloo Massacre was a pun on the Battle of Waterloo, which had taken place four years previously. Ironically, many of the troops and the people at the rally would have fought side by side at Waterloo. It was a local journalist named James Wroe who came up with it. Giving the event this name got Wroe a year’s imprisonment for seditious libel, and his newspaper was closed down.
10. Shelley wrote a poem about the Peterloo Massacre a few days after it happened. The poem was called Masque of Anarchy and was essentially an angry rant which ran to 91 verses and a chorus. It wasn't published until 1832, however.

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