Source for Chartism: Ward on 1842

In the industrial areas 1842 was a year of depression, widespread unemployment and wage reductions. The choice for many operatives, as Factory Inspector Horner reported, was ‘employment on any terms, or starvation’. Inevitably, tempers in many districts ran high. There were riots at Blackburn in May, and on 5 June Marsden told a large crowd on Enfield Moor that they should march under arms to London to demand the Charter from the Queen. Emotions were heightened by the case of Samuel Holberry, the young Sheffield Chartist imprisoned for conspiracy and riot in March 1840. Holberry, like other West Riding Chartists, was imprisoned at Northallerton but after the death of his associate John Clayton was removed to York Castle, following the appeals of his friends. But the young revolutionary’s health could not stand prison conditions, and the Home Office agreed to his release, subject to sureties for his future behaviour. However, Holberry died on 21^st June and was thereafter celebrated in Sheffield as ‘a martyr to the cause of Democracy’. His funeral on the 27^th provoked an immense rally and a new folklore. Harney delivered a graveside oration:  “Our task is not to weep; we must leave tears to women. Our task is to act; to labour with heart and soul for the destruction of the horrible system under which Holberry has perished. . . . Compared with the honest, virtuous fame of this son of toil, how poor, how contemptible appear the so-called glories that emblazon the name of an Alexander or a Napoleon! . . . Come weal, come woe, we swear . . . to have retribution for the death of Holberry, swear to have our Charter law and to annihilate for ever the blood-stained depotism which has slain its thousands of martyrs, and tens of thousands of patriots and immolated at its shrine the lovers of liberty and truth.”  Holberry scarcely deserved his eulogy; but Chartism needed its martyrs after the rejection of the second petition.

Chartists were not alone in talking of possible violence. The League’s determination to embarrass the Conservative government had led some of its supporters to make equally threatening gestures, and Oastler cautioned his Northern supporters against falling into the ‘trap’: ‘if the Leaguers urge you to violence, leave that work to them!’ As the 205 remaining NCA localities elected a new executive (McDouall, Leach, Campbell, Williams and Bairstow) in June rumours were spreading that the League planned to provoke major strikes by extensive wage-cuts or lockouts. Indeed, reductions in the West Midlands had already provoked some strikes.

In early August the strike enthusiasm spread to the North. Here, Chartists had certainly discussed striking, but were scarcely in a position to organise it. Workers were provoked by threatened 25 per cent reductions at Ashton cotton mills in July and started a wave of strikes on 5^th August. A rally on Mottram Moor combined the demand for the Charter with the Oastlerite call for ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’. There-after touring mobs of ‘turn-outs’ travelled through the Lancashire mill districts, forcibly drawing the boiler plugs in order to create a general strike. As the ‘Plug Plot’ spread, Chartists naturally sought to use it, by carrying resolutions to ‘stay out’ until the Charter was accepted. Chartist leaders assembling at Manchester were astonished at the scene. ‘Not a single mill at work! Something must come out of this and something serious too’, Campbell declared on the first sight of Manchester, to Cooper who had narrowly escaped arrest in the rioting Potteries. The sixty delegates honestly confessed that they ‘did not originate the present cessation from labour’ but ‘strongly approved of the extension and continuance of the present struggle till the PEOPLE’S CHARTER became a legislative enactment’. But though, for once, the Chartist leadership was near the scene of action, its chronic divisions prevented it from assuming command; McDouall raged about `leaving the decision to the God of justice and of battle’. The rioters took little notice of philosophies, as they engaged in the sort of spontaneous outburst which Oastler had long predicted and which the NCA was unable to organise. Working people closed the mills in Ashton, Bacup, Blackburn, Bolton, Burnley, Bury, Chorley, Crompton, Droylsden, Dukinfield, Heywood, Hyde, Manchester, Newton, Oldham, Preston, Rochdale, Stalybridge and Stockport. The ragged hordes who swept over the Pennines to close Yorkshire mills in Batley, Bingley, Birstall, Bradford, Bramley, Calverley, Cleckheaton, Dewsbury, Gomersal, Halifax, Hebden Bridge, Heckmondwike, Holmfirth, Honley, Horbury, Horton, Huddersfield, Keighley, Leeds, Littletown, Marsden, Millbridge, Mytholmroyd, Ossett, Pudsey, Skipton, Stanningley, Thornhill and Todmorden cared little for Chartism. Their protest was against foul industrial conditions…And up the brave men of the ‘Union’ briefly went. But they ‘went’ without much Chartist support. The Star attacked McDouall’s ‘wild strain of recklessness’, and O’Connor desperately tried to prove his own moderation. McDouall’s bravery immediately evaporated, as he fled abroad.

Unrest spread via Carlisle to Scotland, where conditions were desperate in several areas. The weaving town of Paisley faced near starvation; the Lanarkshire miners struck in protest against wage cuts; rallies of the unemployed on Glasgow Green demanded instant relief; Dunfermline weavers burnt down local factories; in several burghs it was resolved to strike until the adoption of the Charter. Yet in general the moderation of the Scottish radical press and Chartist leadership restrained Scottish Chartists. The principal scene of activity was the flax and jute town of Dundee, where the shoe-maker-preacher John Duncan and the Democratic Society organised a strike at a series of excited meetings on Magdalen Green in August. But the affair ended with the tragi-comic march of a ragged group of Chartists to Forfar, the arrest of the leaders and the real tragedy of Duncan’s death in a lunatic asylum in 1845.

The strike wave soon ended. By late August many workers were returning on the employers’ terms; by late September all was over. And it soon became apparent that the Chartists had made another strategic error. They could never have organised the strikes; they had only sought to take advantage of disputes caused by industrial troubles; but they were widely blamed for the events. The overworked Graham at the Home Office and the Tory publicist Croker continued to suspect that the League might be at the root of the trouble, but were never able to gain proof. Graham was ‘by no means prepared to use Military force to compel a reduction of wages…’ He regarded the government’s role as being ‘to preserve peace, to put down plunder and to prevent…intimidation’. But although he accepted that workers had ‘just cause of complaint against their masters’ and was sickened by the panic of cowardly justices, he considered that ‘a social insurrection of a very formidable character’ could only be met by force. And it was the Chartists who were arrested. By late September, John Mowbray was complaining of the ‘languid state’ of the cause in the North East.

In the autumn of 1842, Chartism was once again rent by bitter recriminations. McDouall, Cooper and others had undoubtedly been excited enough by the opportunity offered by the strikes to advocate violence in some form. But O’Connor had opposed such talk, and the NCA had limited itself to asserting that ‘all the evils which affected society…arose solely from class legislation’ and urging workers to stay out until ‘the only remedy for the present alarming distress and widespread destitution’ -- the Charter -- was adopted. Lovett added his voice, urging workers to ‘avoid violence…[and] restrain outrage’. But Chartists were widely arrested and sentenced. From October, 274 cases were tried in Staffordshire, resulting in 54 sentences of transportation and 154 of imprisonment; Cooper, initially released, was later sent to Stafford Gaol for two years, during which he wrote his celebrated Purgatory of Suicides (1845). Fewer cases were tried in Lancashire, culminating with the trial of O’Connor and fifty-eight others in March 1843. Chartists again raised defence funds.

O’Connor, as usual, had temporised. While Hill had condemned the strikes entirely as a League plot, O’Connor had seized the main chance. Both men had opposed McDouall’s fatal motion, but O’Connor had agreed to its being publicised by the NCA executive (of which he was not a member). Feargus was therefore surprised to be arrested in late September, and henceforth blamed McDouall for the disaster--even opposing the collection of funds to support him in exile. McDouall returned to Britain in 1844, blaming O’Connor for his flight and subsequent poverty. It is difficult to decide between two such convincing liars. Another whipping boy was the executive, which appears to have been neither efficient nor altogether honest. Cooper consequently proposed its replacement, and a December investigation of its activities and accounts led to its disappearance. The League itself remained highly suspect in many Chartist (and Tory) minds. O’Connor therefore turned another policy somersault, condemning ‘the leaning of the Complete Suffragists to the Free Trade party’: now the CSU must be destroyed as a ‘League Job’. The opportunity was soon at hand. The CSU-Chartist alliance was to be cemented at a Birmingham conference on 27 December, which was to be elected (on Lovett’s plan) half by electors and half by non-voters. O’Connor denounced this scheme and urged Chartists to secure election wherever possible. After some bitter arguments, the result was a Chartist victory: to Sturge’s mortification, O’Connor was returned for Birmingham. The CSU and others were aware of the danger; as O’Brien wrote, “A conference composed of such materials as Mr Feargus O’Connor would pack into it would soon find itself utterly powerless and without influence for any purposes but those of mischief …”  But the CSU could do nothing against O’Connorite packing. ‘The Chartists were anxious to get their men elected if possible at the Complete Suffrage meetings,’ recalled Gammage, ‘in order to avoid the expense falling on themselves alone, and in many cases they succeeded in so doing.’

The conference, attended by 374 delegates, assembled in the Birmingham Mechanics’ Institute. The arrogance of a section of the CSU, in rejecting the Chartist name and presenting a secretly prepared 96-clause ‘New Bill of Rights’ in place of the Charter, achieved the almost impossible by uniting the Chartists. Lovett proposed and O’Connor seconded a motion to substitute the Charter for the Bill -- although Lovett (whose ‘lip…was curled in scorn’ as O’Connor spoke, according to Gammage) scarcely enjoyed the alliance. Middle-class CSU men were dismayed by Lovett’s opposition; his known hostility to O’Connor and sympathy with a class-collaboration policy had seemed to guarantee his support. But honest Lovett could not accept the dropping of that document which had advocated  “just and equal representation…in plain and definite language, capable of being understood and appreciated by the great mass of the people…[and for which] vast numbers had suffered imprisonment, transportation and death…”

It was in vain that Lawrence Heyworth maintained that ‘it is not your principles that we dislike, but your leaders’. To Chartists there was something sacred about the old cause and the old styles; and there was a blasphemy, a sacrilege in the proposed change. ‘Give up the Charter! The Charter for which O’Connor and hundreds of brave men were dungeoned in felons’ cells, the Charter for which John Frost was doomed to a life of heart-withering woe!’ roared Harney. He would not give way,  “to suit the whim, to please the caprice or to serve the selfish ends of mouthing priests, political traffickers, sugar-weighting, tape-measuring shopocrats. Never! By the memories of the illustrious dead, by the sufferings of widows and the tears of orphans, he would adjure them to stand by the Charter.”  Chartists were simply not prepared to be patronised by tactless and supercilious Complete Suffragists. To Cooper it seemed that “there was no attempt to bring about a union, no effort for conciliation, no generous offer of the right hand of fellowship. We soon found that it was determined to keep the poor Chartists at arm’s length.”

The varied Chartists carried Lovett’s motion by 193 votes to 94 on 28 December. Sturge thereupon led a secession of the majority of CSU delegates to the local temperance hall, to prepare a Bill for presentation by Crawford. The breach was accompanied by expressions of hope for future collaboration. But the fact was that O’Connor had broken another danger to his controlling position.

O’Connor’s constant purges inevitably cut down conference membership. Having done his duty, Lovett departed. By 31^st December only thirty-seven delegates remained in the NCA-dominated section. And even now the NCA men (who were joined by a few CSU delegates, including Solly, while Vincent threw in his lot with the CSU) were divided. Cooper wanted an annual convention, from which a five-man executive should be elected annually, with only the secretary being paid a regular salary. His plan was (for the moment) generally accepted. But White bitterly opposed Parry’s proposal for continued co-operation with the CSU, and O’Connor, while professing to calm matters, provoked further divisions. Many Chartists left the conference to face their trials, often with great courage: White, while conducting his defence, insisted on the provision of sandwiches and wine and William Jones maintained a running fight with Baron Gurney. The sheer guts of men about to go to prison deserved a worthier cause than the highly personalised, self-centred O’Connorite dream. Place might protest; Lovett might be sickened; Oastler was inevitably almost unheard. What was left of organised English Chartism was now controlled by the megalomaniac Irishman. Place’s rival Metropolitan Parliamentary Reform Association soon disappeared.

The triumph was almost complete. Real or potential rivals to the despot were either running ineffective evening classes (like Lovett) or about to be imprisoned (like the now doubting Cooper). The CSU was cut down to its appropriate size. Its Bill, proposed by Crawford, was rejected by 101 votes to 32 on 18^th May 1843. And when, on 31^st January 1844, it dared to hold a rally under Crawford at the traditional venue of the Crown and Anchor tavern, O’Connor and his supporters contrived virtually to destroy it. But O’Connor was now the monarch of a declining kingdom. By fair means and foul, he had converted the Chartist remnant into a personal following. He was now to try to mould it to new purposes. A sign of coming attitudes was given in the Star in January 1843:  “Chartism is superior to Christianity in this respect, that it takes its name from no man…There should be no sectarianism in it. Chartism is no invention of one man, any more than truth is. Our cause has no father but the First Great Cause…What greater honour can a man have than to be a Chartist? …We worship Truth -- we worship God.”  This was not the first or the last appearance of such arrogance. And it was sadly unfounded. 1842 marked a Chartist peak never to be reached again.

J. T. Ward, Chartism, Batsford, 1973, pages 160-67.

Sources for Chartism: Hovell on 1842

Chartism stood helpless when the combination of Whigs and Tories had thrown out of Parliament the National Petition of 1842. The autocrat of Chartism [Feargus O’Connor] had staked everything on a false move. Once more “moral force” had failed to convince the representatives of the middle-class electorate. Once more there only remained the trial of “physical force.” But, however much he might bluster, O’Connor was neither willing nor able to fall back upon the alternative policy of the hot-bloods whom he had so often denounced. And O’Connor still dominated the movement to such an extent that a course of action of which he disapproved was condemned to futility. Hence the tameness with which organised Chartism bore the destruction of its hopes. Hence the weakness and incoherence of the measures by which the stalwarts of the party strove to maintain the Chartist cause after the failure of the Petition. Hence, too, their eagerness to adopt as their own any passing wave of discontent and claim the storm as the result of their own agitation.

The collapse of the Petition was followed by a few protests, much violent language in the Northern Star, and a few public meetings, notably in Lancashire, where the speaking was even more unrestrained than were the leading articles of the Chartist organ. A notable instance of these assemblies was the great gathering held on Enfield Moor, near Blackburn, on Sunday, June 5^th. Its business was “to consider the next steps to be taken to obtain the People’s Charter.” Marsden of Bolton put before the crowd the fatuous proposal that the people should collect arms and march in their thousands on Buckingham Palace. “If the Queen refuses our just demands, we shall know what to do with our weapons.” But nothing came of this or any other similar manifestations of Chartist statesmanship. It looked as if the leaders could no longer carry on an effective agitation.

The outbreak of a widespread strike in August added a real element of seriousness to the situation in the North. Here again Lancashire was the storm-centre, but the strike movement broke out simultaneously in other districts, ranging from Glasgow and Tyneside to the Midlands, where the colliers in the Potteries and in the South Staffordshire coal-field went out. It is very doubtful whether the strike had much directly to do with Chartism. Its immediate cause was a threatened reduction of wages, which was answered by the workmen in the Lancashire mills drawing the plugs so as to make work impossible. For this reason the operatives’ resistance to the employers’ action was called in Lancashire the Plug Plot.

Whatever the origin of the strike, the Chartist leaders eagerly made capital out of it. They attributed the proposed reduction to the malice of the Anti-Corn Law manufacturers, anxious to drive the people to desperation, and thus foment disturbances that would paralyse the action of the Protectionist Government. In a few days the country was ablaze from the Ribble to the confines of Birmingham. At a great meeting of the Lancashire and Cheshire strikers on Mottram Moor on August 7^th it was resolved that “all labour should cease until the People’s Charter became the law of the land.” A similar resolution was passed at Manchester and in nearly all the great towns of Lancashire. On August 15^th, the same resolution was passed at a meeting on Crown Bank at Hanley, at which Thomas Cooper presided. Despite his exhortations to observe peace and order, serious rioting broke out.

The Chartists’ leaders now gathered together at Manchester, where the Executive Council of the National Charter Association was joined by delegates from the Manchester and West Riding areas. It first assembled on August 12^th, but members came in by slow degrees. It met in Schofield’s chapel[1] and was dignified by the Northern Star with the name of a conference. In this McDouall took the lead, and was not displaced from it even when O’Connor, Campbell the Secretary, and Thomas Cooper, hot from his stormy experiences in the Potteries, joined the gathering. Cooper has left a vivid account of his escape from Hanley by night and of his vacillation between his desire to stay with his comrades in the Potteries and his wish to be in Manchester, where he rightly felt the real control of the movement lay. He trudged along the dark roads from Hanley to Crewe, a prey to various tumultuous and conflicting thoughts. But he was sustained by the noble confidence that O’Connor would be at Manchester and would tell everybody what to do. At Crewe he took the train and found Campbell the Secretary in it. Campbell, now resident in London, was anxious to be back in his old home and see how things were going there. As soon as “the city of long chimneys” came in sight and every chimney was beheld smokeless, Campbell’s face changed, and with an oath he said, “Not a single mill at work! Something must come out of this and something serious too!”

The conference speedily resolved that the strikers should be exhorted to remain out until the Charter became law. To procure this end, McDouall issued on behalf of the Executive a fierce manifesto appealing to the God of battles and declaring in favour of a general strike as the best weapon for winning the Charter. But divided counsels now once more rent asunder the party and made all decisive action hopeless. Even in the delegates’ meeting it had been necessary to negative an amendment denying any connection between the existing strike and Chartism. At Ashton-under-Lyne the strikers declared that they had no concern with any political questions.

The fatal blow came from O’Connor, to whom simple men like Thomas Cooper had gone as to an oracle for guidance. Even in the Convention his puppets had supported dilatory tactics. In a few days O’Connor fiercely attacked McDouall in the Northern Star, for “breathing a wild strain of recklessness most dangerous to the cause.” Good Chartists were advised to retire from a hopeless contest, reserving their energies for some later season when their organisation should have been perfected. The strike, far from being a weapon of Chartism, was a crafty device of the mill-owners of the Anti-Corn Law League to reduce wages and divert men’s minds from the Charter.

Riots and disturbances further complicated the situation. Cooper had fled from the burning houses of Hanley and the fusillade of soldiers shooting men dead in the streets. Now the trouble spread northwards into Lancashire and the West Riding. Shops were looted, gas-works attacked, trains were stopped, two policemen were killed in the streets of Manchester. Troops were rapidly poured into the disaffected districts. There were over two thousand soldiers with six pieces of artillery in Manchester alone. At Preston and Blackburn the soldiers fired on the crowd; Halifax was attacked by a mob from Todmorden. Widespread alarm was created, but there is little evidence that the disorders were really dangerous. O’Connor strongly urged peaceable methods in a public letter. “Let us,” he said, “set an example to the world of what moral power is capable of effecting.” His violent pacifism was largely attributed to lack of personal courage.

The vigorous action of the Government soon re-established order. Then came the turn of the leaders to pay the penalty. The panic-stricken authorities put into gaol both those who had advocated rebellion and those who had spoken strongly for peaceful methods. O’Connor himself was apprehended in London, while William Hill, the editor of the Northern Star, was taken into custody at Leeds. Cooper was arrested soon after his return home to Leicester. But there was long delay before the trials were concluded, and many were released on bail, among them Cooper and O’Connor. The most guilty of all, McDouall, evaded, by escape to France, the consequences of his firebrand manifesto. In the course of September the strike wore itself out. The workmen went back to the mills and coal-mines without any assurances as to their future wages. The economic situation was as black as was the course of politics. With a falling market, with employers at their wits’ end how to sell their products, there was no chance of a successful strike. The appeal from the Commons to the people had proved a sorry failure. Once more the Chartists had mismanaged their opportunities through divided counsels and conflicting ideals.

The discomfited remnant that was still free fiercely quarrelled over the apportionment of the blame for the recent failure. There was a strong outcry against the old Executive. It was denounced for insolence, despotism, slackness, wastefulness, and malversation. A warm welcome was given to a proposal of Cooper’s that the Association should receive a new constitution which dispensed with a paid Executive. As a result of an investigation at a delegates’ meeting towards the end of the year, the Executive either resigned or was suspended.

McDouall was made the scapegoat of the failure. He it was who had given the worst shock to the credit of Chartism. How many tracts might have been published and distributed with the money lavished upon McDouall. In great disgust the exile renounced his membership of the Association. However, he came back to England in 1844, and at once made a bid for restitution. His first plan was to drive home the old attack on O’Connor by an attempt to set up a separate Chartist organisation for Scotland independent of the English society. At the same time he denounced O’Connor for his ungenerous exploitation of his pecuniary obligations to him in the hope of binding him to him and gagging him. It was O’Connor, too, who had advised him to run away in 1842 in order to throw upon him the whole responsibility for the Plug Riots. Both accusations are only too credible, but no trust can be given to McDouall’s statements. His veracity and good faith are more than disputable, and his constant change of policy was at least as much due to self-interest as to instability. He was one of the least attractive as well as most violent of the Chartist champions. It is startling after all this to find that in 1844 O’Connor was welcoming McDouall back to the orthodox fold and that the Glasgow Chartists raised the chief difficulties in the way of the ostentatiously repentant sinner. There was no finality in the loves and hates of men of the calibre of O’Connor and McDouall.

Though its prospects were increasingly unhopeful the Complete Suffrage agitation was not yet dead. At Sturge’s suggestion a new attempt was made to bridge over the gulf between Suffragists and Chartists, which was found impossible to traverse at the Birmingham Conference. With this object a second Conference met on December 27^th, 1842, also at Birmingham. Sturge once more presided over a gathering which included representatives of both parties. The Suffragists were now willing to accept the Chartist programme, but they were as inveterate as ever against the use of the Chartist name. To the old Chartists the Charter was a sacred thing which it was a point of honour to maintain. Harney thus puts their attitude:

“Give up the Charter! The Charter for which O’Connor and hundreds of brave men were dungeoned in felons’ cells, the Charter for which John Frost was doomed to a life of heart-withering woe! . . . What, to suit the whim, to please the caprice, or to serve the selfish ends of mouthing priests, political traffickers, sugar-weighing, tape-measuring shopocrats. Never! By the memories of the illustrious dead, by the sufferings of widows and the tears of orphans he would adjure them to stand by the Charter.”

The Conference was carefully packed by the O’Connorites, but there was more than O’Connorism behind the pious enthusiasm that clung to the party tradition. Nor can the Sturgeites be acquitted of recourse to astute tactics to outwit their opponents. Knowing that they were likely to be in a minority, they got two lawyers in London to draft a new Bill of Rights which they laid before the conference in such a way that they burked all discussion of the Charter in its old form. The New Bill of Rights embodied all the “six points” of the Charter, but the old Chartists bitterly resented the tactics which gave priority to this new-fangled scheme. Lovett came out of his retirement to move that the Charter and not the Bill of Rights should be the basis of the movement. He sternly reproached the Sturgeites for their lack of faith. O’Connor himself seconded Lovett’s proposal and strove, though with little effect, to conciliate with his blandishments the stubborn spirit of his old adversary. But even their momentary agreement on a common policy united for the time the old Chartist forces. In the hot debate that followed, the doctrinaire tactlessness of the Sturgeite leaders added fuel to the flames of Chartist wrath. “We will espouse your principles, but we will not have your leaders,” said Lawrence Heyworth, the most offensive of the Sturgeite orators. Years afterwards Thomas Cooper voiced the general Chartist feeling when he declared “there was no attempt to bring about a union--no effort for conciliation--no generous offer of the right hand of fellowship. We soon found that it was determined to keep the poor Chartists at arm’s length.”

In the end Lovett’s resolution was carried by more than two to one. Thereupon Sturge and his friends retired, and the Conference broke up into two antagonistic sections, neither of which could accomplish anything that mattered. The failure practically put an end to the Complete Suffrage Movement, which was soon submerged in the general current of Radicalism. No doubt the dispute in the form in which it arose was one of words rather than things, but it was no mere question of words that brought Chartists of all sorts into a momentary forgetfulness of their ancient feuds to resist the attempt to wipe out the history of their sect. The split of the Conference arose from the essential incompatibility of the smug ideals of the respectable middle-class Radical, and the vague aspirations of the angry hot-headed workman, bitterly resenting the sufferings of his grievous lot and especially intolerant of the employing class from which Sturge and his friends came. The gulf between the Complete Suffragist and the Chartist is symbolised in the extreme contrast between the journalism of the Nonconformist and that of the Northern Star.

The Birmingham failure was another triumph for O’Connor. He had dragged even Lovett into his wake and could now pose more than ever as the one practical leader of Chartism. It was to little purpose that Lovett, shocked at the result of his momentary reappearance on the same platform as his enemy, withdrew, with his friend Parry, from the O’Connorite Conference. The remnant went to a smaller room and finished up their business to their own liking. If Chartism henceforth meant O’Connorism, it was because O’Connor, with all his faults, could upon occasion give a lead, and still more because, lead or no lead, it was O’Connor only whom the average Chartist would follow.

The failure of this last effort at conciliation was the more tragic since it was quickly followed by the conclusion of the long-drawn-out trials of the Chartists, accused of complicity in the abortive revolt of the summer of 1842. Some of the accused persons, notably Cooper and O’Connor, were still on bail at the Conference and went back to meet their fate. Their cases were dealt with by special commissions which had most to do in Staffordshire and Lancashire. The Staffordshire commission had got to work as early as October, and had in all 274 cases brought before it. Thomas Cooper was the most conspicuous of the prisoners it dealt with. Acquitted on one count, he was released on bail before being arraigned on another charge. He finally received a sentence of two years’ imprisonment, which he spent in Stafford Gaol. In prison he wrote his Purgatory of Suicides, a poetical idealisation of the Chartist programme, which won for him substantial literary recognition. Most of the Staffordshire sentences were much more severe than that of Cooper, fifty-four being condemned to long periods of transportation. In Lancashire and Cheshire the special commission was presided over by Lord Abinger, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, whose indiscreet language gave occasion for a futile attack on him by the Radicals in Parliament. But the actual trials do not seem to have been unfairly conducted, and the victims were much less numerous than in Staffordshire. O’Connor was found guilty, but his conviction, with that of others, was overruled on technical grounds. His good fortune in escaping scot-free, while other Chartist leaders languished in gaol or in exile, still further increased his hold over the party. It was another reason why O’Connorism henceforth meant Chartism...

Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement, 2^nd ed., Manchester University Press, 1918; 1925; re-print edition, 1963, pages 259-67.

---

[1] James Schofield was the leader of the ‘Church Chartists’ in Manchester.