William Lovett and Feargus O'Connor

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William Lovett

William Lovett (1800-77), whose fame rests on having drafted the first People’s Charter, was born in Newlyn in Cornwall and brought up in his mother’s strict Methodist household. His early years were frustrated. Fishing made him seasick and the decline of rope-making as a trade forced him to seek work in the capital. When he lost what he had saved as an unapprenticed cabinet-maker after investing in a failed pastry business, Lovett joined the London Cooperative Association as a storekeeper. Here, he became interested in Robert Owen’s cooperative movement, an early trade union. He was made secretary to the victim fund created for those who had defied the prohibitive stamp duty on newspapers and became interested in the freedom of the press.

Lovett’s moment came when Owen’s Cooperative Movement folded up. His background – Methodist, self-improving, passionate about widening access to education and information – influenced the character of the London Working Men’s Association, which he founded in 1836. The society sought education, political understanding for skilled artisans, opposed all kinds of violence and was sufficiently conciliatory to consider tactical alliances with middle and labouring classes.

By 1837 there were no less than 100 similar associations and in the same year, at a meeting in a tavern on the Strand, it was proposed that a petition be presented to the House of Commons which would extend the very limited franchise which the First (or Great) Reform Act had delivered in 1832. The petition was the basis of the People’s Charter, which was drafted by Lovett and published in May 1838.

Lovett’s Charter proposed six points: a vote for every adult man, secret ballots, the removal of property qualifications and the introduction of salaries for MPs, equal constituencies and annual parliaments. The Charter became the centre of a number of movements for political reform, since if working men had the vote, a number of other reforms might follow, including improvements in factory conditions, the promotion of workers’ education, the freedom of the press and the abolition of the 1834 New Poor Law, which had introduced, amongst other things, the hated workhouse system.

In 1839, Lovett was appointed secretary to the convention organised to coordinate a national petition in support of the Charter. At this point – the period of the play – Lovett’s moderate radicalism, with its faith in ‘moral force’ was beginning to show the strain. The rise in support for ‘physical force’ under the more charismatic Feargus O’Connor, threatened a general strike if the petition was rejected. When the convention reached Birmingham in 1839 riots ensued and Prime Minister Robert Peel’s new instrument of social control – the police – were sent in. When Lovett described the ‘Peelers’ as ‘a bloody and unconstitutional force’, he was sent to prison in Warwick.

The trouble in Birmingham and the more violent riot in Newport which followed, persuaded Lovett to detach himself from his fellow, less moderate, Chartists and he was later denounced by O’Connor for being out of touch and too theoretical in his interests. Thereafter he took a less central role in Chartist history, devoting his energies to the National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People, which he established in 1841, and writing textbooks for working class students. He lived to see the Second Reform Act of 1867 extend the vote to many men further down the class ladder.

Feargus O'Connor

Feargus O’Connor (1794-1855), Chartist leader and orator, was the son of an Irish Protestant landowner and radical. In his youth he combined the roistering life of a young squire with reform politics. In 1832, having forsaken a career in the law and armed with his genius for rhetoric, he deposed a local aristocrat from his safe parliamentary seat in County Cork. He became a radical voice in Westminster, speaking in favour of, among other causes, the abolition of stamp duty on newspapers and the repeal of the detested New Poor Law. His uncompromising views and all-too-vocal ambition cost him the support of the leader of his party, Daniel O’Connell, the champion of Catholic emancipation in Ireland.

Unseated in 1835, O’Connor turned to more direct radical agitation. On speaking tours of industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire he won popular support by the warmth of his sympathy for the victims of New Poor Law legislation and the appalling working conditions of his audiences. He was a powerful and inflammatory rhetorician, whose flair for invective was equal to any barracking: ‘You gentlemen belong to the big-bellied, little-brained, numskull aristocracy. How dare you hiss me, you contemptible set of platter-faced, amphibious politicians.’

In 1837 he began publishing the highly successful newspaper, the Northern Star and in 1838 threw himself behind the People’s Charter. His basic message to the convention was that suffrage would bring with it the correction of many other ills.

Alas, parliamentary opposition showed that little could be achieved peaceably and O’Connor vacillated. He was in support of armed risings at a national, but not a local level. He organised torch-lit meetings with background gunfire, but avoided the rising at Newport at which Lovett was arrested. It was the strength of government resistance that eventually fractured the movement: O’Connor advocating physical, Lovett and his fellow moderates moral force.

After serving an 18-month term in prison for publishing seditious libel in the Northern Star, O’Connor emerged in 1841 the undisputed leader of the Chartists and in 1842 presented government with a petition in support of the Charter, but without the middle class support that his extremism had lost the movement, it was thrown out.

Three years later O’Connor had come up with a different solution to social ills by founding the Chartist Corporation Land Society. In return for a subscription, members would be given between one and four acres of land. A large population of smallholders, O’Connor hoped, would push up the wages for the minority who would be left working in industry. By 1847 six estates had been bought, including a piece of land near Rickmansworth earmarked as ‘O’Connorville’.

In 1848 – the year of revolutions throughout Europe - O’Connor co-ordinated the last Chartist petition at Kennington Common. When the Duke of Wellington, brought out of retirement, mustered the troops, O’Connor abandoned his plan for a march and mass demonstration outside parliament and the Great Charter was sent, somewhat ignominiously, by cab. It was an anticlimax from which his career never recovered. Soon afterwards the Land Society got into financial difficulty, the Northern Star folded and O’Connor, succumbing to increasing irrationality, ended his days in an asylum for the insane at Chiswick.

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