Following the Lion of Freedom

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The action of Jack Shepherd’s new play, Holding Fire!, takes place at the height of the Chartist movement. Stephen Roberts conducts a brisk tour of some of Victorian Britain’s most turbulent years.

Chartism was a movement of mass protest, which, in the late 1830s and 1840s, enlisted the active support of tens of thousands of working people across Britain. In almost every town and village, Chartist associations were formed and signatures collected for the great petitions of 1839, 1842 and 1848. If the movement did not achieve during its existence its objective of giving the people a voice in the making of British law, it certainly filled its supporters with self-awareness and self-confidence. Each Saturday, in workshops, public houses and the open air, the Chartists read, or had read to them, their newspaper, the Northern Star. This was filled with reports sent in by the Chartists themselves of their meetings and demonstrations and with their poetry. Later in the century, many former Chartists had established themselves as newspaper editors, ministers and local councillors.

This vast campaign coalesced around the most important radical manifesto issued in 19th-century Britain. The People’s Charter, published in May 1838, called for manhood suffrage protected by secret voting and the discontinuation of property qualifications for MPs. Hundreds of Chartists were imprisoned for advocacy of these principles. Chartism arose amidst feelings of anger and betrayal. The Reform Act of 1832 had enfranchised only the middle class. With their new-found power, the middle class went on to introduce the hated New Poor Law which enforced a system of segregation for the impoverished working class families who had no choice but to enter the workhouse.

Outside the workhouse, life was only marginally better. As an economic depression gathered pace in the late 1830s, mill owners responded with wage cuts. In the face of this oppression, the working class came together in a campaign of defiance and optimism.

The People’s Charter was drafted by William Lovett. Self educated and a teetotaller, Lovett was an earnest man. He believed that working men should spend their free time in museums rather than in public houses. In his view the vote could be won by peaceful persuasion by a sober, industrious working class. He did not agree with the strategy of confrontation, the idea of pressurizing the government into conceding the vote by a huge display of support through ‘monster meetings’.
But this was precisely the way in which Feargus O’Connor believed the campaign should be conducted. A charismatic Irishman, O’Connor was a superb orator and provoked very strong loyalties among the working class. He was known as the ‘Lion of Freedom’, and many of the children of the Chartists were named after him.

Though O’Connor was the most important Chartist leader, the movement recruited many other talented individuals. These were not failures or drop-outs, but men who had often sacrificed better prospects to be part of the movement. Peter Murray McDouall exchanged the comfortable life of a doctor to become a very popular Chartist speaker; he survived by lecturing and peddling a concoction called ‘McDouall’s Florida Medicine’ to his audiences. Samuel Kydd was a man of outstanding qualities in his generation, becoming a successful barrister after his years of successful Chartist activity. Thomas Cooper turned Leicester into a Chartist stronghold, enlisting the support of 3000 working people in the town. His autobiography, which eloquently describes his remarkable achievements as an autodidact and his advocacy of working class political rights, still deserves to be read today. There were also tragic figures in the Chartist story. William Ellis, transported on perjured evidence in 1842, never saw his wife or four children again. Samuel Holberry died in prison, aged only 27 years.

Signed by 1.3 million working people, the first Chartist petition of 1839 was given short shrift by the House of Commons. Its rejection was followed by an attempt at armed rising by the Chartists. Outside the Westgate Hotel in Newport in November 1839 some 22 Chartists were shot down by soldiers. The leaders of the rising, John Frost, William Jones and Zephaniah Williams, were transported for treason, and became the first of many Chartist martyrs.

The dismissal of the second Chartist petition of 1842, which had 3.3 million signatures, was followed by a wave of strikes and property destruction across the industrial districts of Britain. The authorities struck back with their own kind of force. At Stafford, for example, in the largest Chartist trial ever held, 56 men were transported and 116 men and women imprisoned for up to two years.

From the mid-1840s, Chartism became a different sort of movement. Though manhood suffrage remained its main aim, Fergus O’Connor also launched his Land Plan. This scheme was extremely popular in working class communities with subscriptions of over £100,000 sent in. O’Connor hoped to settle thousands of these subscribers in independent cottage smallholdings, but, with legal difficulties continually put in his way, he managed to relocate only 250.

The mass demonstration on Kennington Common and the third petition of 1848 is the most famous episode in the Chartist story. When the petition was examined by parliamentary clerks, it was discovered that many of the signatures were false. It is possible that some of the signatories were trying to avoid revealing their identities to their employers. Nevertheless, the 1.9 million signatures which the clerks declared to be genuine represented an enormous level of support for the Chartist cause.

When Feargus O’Connor died in 1855, 40,000 people attended his funeral. For these working people he was still the ‘Lion of Freedom’. William Lovett survived until 1877. He was able to look back on a lifetime fighting for the causes he believed in. As the demands of the People’s Charter were gradually conceded, many working men and women were able to remember with great satisfaction what they had done a generation earlier. In the Liberal landslide of 1906 W.H.Chadwick, who had been imprisoned in 1848, was still wearing with pride his O’Connor medal.

Stephen Roberts is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham. His books Images of Chartism (co-authored with Dorothy Thompson, (1998) and The People’s Charter: Democratic Agitation in Victorian Britain (2003) are published by Merlin.

Holding Fire! directed by Mark Rosenblatt with music by John Tams opens at the Globe on 28 July.

This article is published in the magazine of Shakespeare's Globe 'Around the Globe', issue 36, Summer 2007. Subscription details

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