The Quiet Before, page 6
The leaders were arrested next, including William Lovett. His alleged crime was sedition for writing, in the wake of the Bull Ring incident, that “there is no security for life, liberty or property, till the people have some control over the laws they are called upon to obey.” He would spend the next year in jail.
What would happen now? O’Connor himself was in York facing charges of libel for a column he’d written. In his absence, there was no one to speak up for the use of “moral force,” and the voices of more militant Chartists took over. There had always been, among the working-class leaders, men who were impatient to tap into the movement’s wilder instincts. A committee that met in Birmingham after the failure of the petition decided to call for a monthlong general strike in which every man and woman, in every factory and workshop, would abstain from work. It was to start on August 12, in a few weeks.
O’Connor was appalled. A strike was not a bad tactic, but unless the hundreds of Chartist communities acted in concert, with the same will and method they had mustered for the Charter, he knew it would be a disaster. There was no mystery how the authorities would perceive it. As The Scotsman put it: the Chartists, “if not downright insane, are certainly under the influence of the most diabolical malignity, and are pursuing a course that is beyond all possible doubt intended to lead to insurrection and anarchy.” And if the strike failed, it would take away their last remaining leverage. “Once let them be defeated in this, and they were lost forever,” O’Connor explained.
A sign of his power over the nascent movement, he managed to significantly reduce the length of the strike—proposing instead that it last three days, a far less threatening prospect. When it finally did take place, in mid-August, it was done in such a scattershot way that it left little impact, just as O’Connor had feared.
As the summer of 1839 turned into fall, the movement collapsed into uncertainty and dissolution. Chartism had once been spoken of “as a thing in the clouds,” O’Connor wrote. And now he feared it would return to this airy state. The movement would be “left to local discussions and sectional power, which above all things must be avoided because nothing is more necessary than that all the currents of public opinion should so harmonize and blend together as to bring them in now overwhelming tide against the enemies of the people.” Only the petition had so far achieved anything close to this.
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THE AUTHORITIES WOULD later try to pin the violence that followed on O’Connor, incredulous that the great “I AM” was not the guiding force behind every plot. But anyone could see that it was the result of a vacuum, of hands now fidgety and without aim.
In the early hours of November 4, rain pelted the Chartists who had gathered in the hills overlooking Newport, the industrial center of south Wales. There were a few thousand, mostly coal miners and ironworkers from the valley’s surrounding towns like Nantyglo, Pontypool, Blackwood, Newbridge, and Risca. In their pockets, they carried homemade cards recording their number and division in the ragtag army. For weeks they had been dreaming up an attack on Newport that might cut it off from London and ignite other revolts throughout the country. The weather made communication difficult, and the largest group of about five thousand men stood freezing and wet most of the night outside the Welsh Oak, a small village pub, passing around drinks and occasionally firing off nervous shots. It was already light by the time their leader, a fifty-five-year-old linen draper named John Frost, onetime mayor of Newport turned militant Chartist, had them begin moving out in military formation, bearing down on the town from the west. Those who saw them marching through the hills were frightened by the rage finally released. “On they came, many of them half drunk, yelling, swearing, and waving great cudgels, a terrifying mass of men,” wrote one witness remembering what he saw as a boy hiding behind his father, who was protecting his family with a wooden-handled blunderbuss.
The current mayor of Newport, learning at dawn about the approaching armed men, preemptively arrested a few local Chartists. He held them at the Westgate Hotel, which he had declared his headquarters, fortified by the presence of thirty-one infantrymen from the Forty-fifth Regiment stationed nearby. They locked themselves up and waited, listening to the terrible sound of Chartists smashing windows with the butts of their guns and loudly chanting as they made their way through the town. When they got to the hotel, they demanded the release of the prisoners and the surrender of the mayor. More men were coming down toward the square facing the hotel and pushing their way into the entrance hall. As the bodies pressed closer and closer, a mass of pikes moving up and down, a shot was suddenly fired in the air.
The soldiers in the hotel had a good view of the street and the armed crowd below and they began firing their muskets, stepping to the large window, two at a time, shooting into the crowd, then reloading as two other soldiers took their place. People fell, screaming, and the Chartist troops began stampeding in retreat, colliding with their own comrades in the rear, and leaving in their wake streets littered with pikes and guns. The Chartists still imprisoned in the hotel meanwhile began tearing apart every piece of furniture, raging against the soldiers who had just fired on their friends. The infantrymen then opened the locked door and discharged their weapons on their captives, the air choking with gray smoke.
It all lasted about twenty minutes. “There was a dreadful scene,” wrote a special constable who remained inside, “dreadful beyond expression—the groans of the dying, the shrieks of the wounded, the pallid, ghostly countenances and the bloodshot eyes of the dead, in addition to the shattered windows and passageways ankle-deep in gore.” Some of the injured and the dying were crawling away in search of hiding places.
The Chartists who had attacked the town, their weapons now abandoned, didn’t stop running until they reached the countryside. Of those who could be counted, there were twenty-two dead and fifty seriously injured. The pocket of a young man who had fallen contained two cards. One, for his position in the uprising, reading “No. 5 of H Division”; the other, tattered proof of his membership in a local Chartist group, the Aberdare Working Men’s Association.
In the winter of 1839, with the nation still recoiling from the Newport Rising, Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish essayist and historian, published a pamphlet titled Chartism in which he tried to determine, with some sympathy, the cause of all this working-class agitation. The rebellion had devolved into chaos, and yet he desired, he wrote, “a clear interpretation of the thought which at heart torments these wild inarticulate souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them!”
The great virtue of the petition had been to make the working class legible to itself and to the upper and middle classes. The violence had now scrambled this legibility. It made Chartism look, indeed, “inarticulate.” It allowed its many critics among the political and business elite to dismiss it as unfocused and impotently raging. “They call themselves the masses but they are no more the masses than the dust in a whirlwind,” editorialized the London Examiner.
O’Connor was devastated by what had happened in Newport. On the same day that the Welsh Chartists began gathering in the hills with their guns, he had just returned from a monthlong stay in Ireland. It’s unclear how much if anything he knew about what was to occur—no more “than the man in the moon,” he insisted—but it’s highly unlikely he would have supported violently taking over a single town. O’Connor had always thought, after the petition failed, that Chartism had to build on the national campaign, expand its ambition and its reach, not contract into factions that whispered and stockpiled arms. During his travels in Ireland that fall, he had been trying to establish a system of interconnected Chartist clubs that would help elect radical candidates in the next general election to Parliament. Constitutional means backed up by tough words still seemed to him the clearest path.
What the Chartists needed was a new national goal, to pull back into concert all the various activists and communities that had seemed to spin out of control over the past several months. And O’Connor realized that the crisis presented him with an opportunity: their objective could be to save the life of John Frost.
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THE LEADER OF the Newport Rising had fled the scene of the massacre with tears in his eyes. He hid for a day in a coal truck, but when he emerged wet and tired at night to visit the home of a Chartist printer and change his clothes and eat something, he was arrested. His two collaborators were soon caught as well: William Jones, a traveling actor, hiding in the woods clutching a pistol, and Zephaniah Williams, a freethinking innkeeper, a few weeks later in Cardiff with a bag of gold coins aboard a ship bound for Portugal. The government called for an expedited trial. And so Jones, Williams, and Frost found themselves on the last day of 1839 in a courtroom in Monmouth, being judged for the rare charge of high treason—no one had been tried and punished for such a crime since 1820.
In the weeks leading up to the trial, O’Connor threw himself into raising money for a legal defense. This, after all, was what he did best, in front of different audiences every night, moving from town to town. He even had the profits of the December 21 issue of the Northern Star donated to Frost’s legal team. It was a tense time, with many Chartists assuming that a conviction would finally signal total and national armed revolt. A rumor spread that the Northern Star would be printed in blood-red ink as a sign for the revolution to commence. But O’Connor had no such plan. In the January 4 issue, while he himself sat in the courtroom observing the trial, the Star editorialized that any talk of violence would be “ill-advised in the extreme, and must be everywhere carefully suppressed. The time for big words and loud talking is gone by.”
After a week of hearings in which Frost’s face in particular was scrutinized for the slightest twitch, the jury deliberated for less than half an hour. The three men were found guilty. “It was then, for the first time, that his countenance changed,” reported The Observer about Frost’s demeanor. “His excessive agitation was betrayed by the convulsive movement of his lips, and as the fatal words resounded through the Court, he sank back into the dock overwhelmed with grief.” Then came the punishment. Death alone was clearly too light a sentence. The judge read out the details a week later: “You, John Frost, and you, Zephaniah Williams, and you, William Jones, be taken hence to the place from whence you came, and be thence drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, and that each of you be there hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that afterwards the head of each of you shall be severed from his body, and the body of each, divided into four quarters, shall be disposed of as Her Majesty shall think fit, and may Almighty God have mercy upon your souls.”
The Chartists were confirmed in their feelings of sheer helplessness. There was no recourse for them, no political power they could yield, no vote they could cast. Even the money they had contributed to Frost’s legal defense would be for naught. Many wanted vengeance. But O’Connor returned to a means he had come to trust: the best, maybe only, way, to remind the Chartists that they were Chartists, part of an aggrieved collective who must be heard. He called for another petition.
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EVEN THOUGH THE CHARTER had failed, it had undoubtedly given shape to the movement—growing it and setting its direction. The emotional response to Frost’s fate, properly channeled, could inspire a similar effort, though one with the more particular goal of commuting a death sentence that the Whig government was eager to carry out quickly. The court decreed the three men’s punishment on January 16, and even with an appeal pending, it looked unlikely they could be saved. Behind closed doors, the government was intent on using this sensational form of execution to send a message to the working class. The cabinet member Lord Broughton recorded in his diary that there was unanimity as to this point and that even the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, felt that such measures “were indispensable to prevent anarchy.”
This time, the collection of signatures happened swiftly and at a tremendous scale. Whereas it had taken weeks and months for the national petition to reach a critical mass, now Chartists were accumulating similar numbers of supporters within days. In Sunderland, 17,000 names were gathered in three days, in Oldham 18,000 in just two, and in Birmingham 30,000 in six. Scotland proved particularly fruitful: Chartists in Aberdeen, using their door-to-door tactics, collected 15,000 signatures, and in Edinburgh 5,000 more people signed for Frost than put their names on the 1839 petition. Dundee also brought in more than 20,000 signatures, and in Paisley, where the town council took the lead on canvassing, 14,784 signatures were amassed in the span of fourteen hours.
This was a sign that the petitioning was creating something durable, a movement capable of snapping to attention when needed. Over the past year and a half, the culture that had first fused around work on the Charter—all those small local associations—now seemed self-sustaining. There were temperance societies, groups that raised money for funerals, collective newspaper-reading clubs, lectures, and garden parties. That one gesture of putting your name to paper created a new sort of allegiance to a set of values and those who shared them. There were Chartist songs, weekend gatherings, and massive picnics. Many pubs self-identified as proudly Chartist, and one could find the Northern Star there on every table wet with beer suds. Chartists decorated their homes with those prints of Chartist leaders that came with special editions of the Northern Star. They could order Chartist products from Chartist stores—Chartist shoe polish, ink, textiles, or a powdered corn concoction for breakfast. They signed their letters “Yours in Chartism” or “Your brother in the Cause of Right against Might.” The fanatically committed even named their children Feargus, though not without some repercussions. One little boy, Feargus O’Connor Holmes, the son of wool combers from Keighley, spent his school years referred to only as “F” by a headmaster who wouldn’t utter the radical’s name. When little Feargus O’Connor Mabbot was baptized, the vicar of Selby deadpanned, “I suppose they want the child hanged.”
The press reported with awe on the enormous number of signatures so speedily gathered by these communities. And in the end, it made a difference. The gallows were already set up outside the Monmouth jail when the government suddenly relented. There was the matter of Queen Victoria’s wedding to Prince Albert, taking place on February 10, and the worry that all that pomp would be spoiled by the gruesome reports of the men’s beheading and quartering. But the main reason lay elsewhere. The petition campaign made it impossible to ignore the large constituency opposed to such a punishment. The memory of the Newport Rising still sizzled. It seemed good sense to listen. In a letter to Parliament in early February, a government minister, Lord Normanby, explained his logic to the queen and how “the proceedings which have taken place since their trials” had made it “advisable to recommend to her Majesty to extend the Royal mercy to the said prisoners, on condition of transportation for life.” They would be exiled.
Within a day of her decision, Frost, Jones, and Williams were woken up in the middle of the night and taken in chains to Portsmouth without a chance to say goodbye to their wives or children. A few weeks later they were placed on the Mandarin, a convict ship headed for Van Diemen’s Land, today known as Tasmania. They were condemned to spend the rest of their lives there in hard labor. The ship was delayed for a few days for repairs after one of the masts was damaged at port during a storm. A sympathizer snuck on board in the guise of a missionary, and he caught a glimpse of Frost chained in the hold, his face “wan and haggard and indented with deep furrows.” There was no escaping this voyage, but it was a far better fate than the punishment the state had intended to mete out.
For O’Connor, the result was an invigorating boost. Though the victory might have felt small to some—replacing execution with a life of hard labor in a foreign land—for him it was clear validation of the petition as a tactic, of the power it could exercise. It was no small thing to shift the government from its resolve, and O’Connor considered this the Chartists’ first real success. They had focused their collective attention, avoided disintegrating as a movement, and emerged with new strength. Dorothy Thompson, a scholar of Chartism, saw the commutation as a turning point, an act that, being “the result of peaceful constitutional pressure,” undermined the greatest threat and biggest advantage the authorities had, their “fundamental violence.” O’Connor quickly pivoted to another petitioning effort, to win a complete royal pardon for the three men. By May of the following year, 1841, the Chartists had collected nearly 1.5 million signatures to deliver to Parliament, surpassing the People’s Charter and nearly gaining approval (the Speaker’s deciding vote broke a tie, and clemency was ultimately rejected).
But O’Connor would not be presenting that petition. Not long after Frost’s ship set sail for Van Diemen’s Land, five hundred Chartists were thrown into prison, including most of the leaders. O’Connor was put on trial again in March for seditious libel. One of his speeches and another printed in the Star were said to promote violent rebellion. O’Connor, true to his character, turned the courtroom into a stage. “I shall console myself with the reflection that I have perfumed the whole atmosphere with a scent—the essence of Chartism,” he wrote after his trial. His opening remarks, delivered as if he were standing before a crowd of hundreds of thousands at Kersal Moor, lasted nearly five hours.
