London Story 1848

L O N D O N

S T O R Y

1 8 4 8

CHARTISTS,

CONFEDERATES,

REVOLUTIONARIES

CATHERINE HOWE

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Copyright ©2020 Catherine Howe

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First published worldwide by APS Books in 2020

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher except that brief selections may be quoted or copied without permission, provided that full credit is given.

Cover photograph of Kennington Common demonstration by William Edward Kilburn 1818-1891

Frontispiece cartoon Alfred Pearse 1855-1933

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Writing of today’s Britain, Angela Eagle and Imran Ahmed say in their The New Serfdom: ‘When so many feel their basic needs and wants are being denied, it’s not hard to see where the inchoate, latent anger that is driving our political volatility comes from.  When people feel the rich have lived it too large and left so little for their fellow citizens, there comes a time of political revolution.’  It seems to me pertinent to set side-by-side this view of today’s Britain with the Britain of 1848 for it so well describes our society back then.

The events which occurred in London in 1848 have already been thoroughly researched and recorded by David Goodway, London Chartism 1838-1848, and John Saville, 1848, The British State and the Chartist Movement.  These books have enabled me to write this simple telling of the story of that year from what might be called the ground up.  I mean to offer here a small window, howsoever dust-laden, on the individuals who found themselves caught up in the events of 1848 and to give some sense of what they might have thought and felt through what can be gleaned from government papers, parliamentary reports, letters, biographies, memoirs, journals and newspaper reportage.  Anger and frustration are the emotions which characterise one side, fear the other.  I find that my view of the way in which the events of this significant year played themselves out departs in one particular from those of many eminent Chartist historians.  The predominant view is that Chartism was never an insurrectionary organisation.  I could not help but conclude that in 1848 the National Charter Association did act as an insurrectionary organisation, albeit briefly.  And so, with this caveat in mind, I hope these pages give a useful telling of the events of 1848 to any who read them.

Catherine Howe

March 2020

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to the archivists who so kindly helped me during my visits to their collections. The majority of off-line sources for London Story 1848 are held in London’s National Archives; the British Library; London Metropolitan Archives; Parliamentary Archives and the Law Society; and in Manchester at the Working Class Movement Library and the Cooperative archive at Holyoake House. Warm thanks also go to Stephen Roberts for reading the manuscript, and for his unfailing encouragement, and to Paul Mangan of Breviary Stuff Publications for his editorial suggestions. Thanks also go to my brother Nicholas Howe for his early text corrections and his numerous pointings-out of passages to be clarified and lastly but not at all least to Andrew Sparke for making this book available to any who are interested in reading it.

LONDON STORY 1848

CONTENTS

PART 1 1842-1848

Chapter 1 London 1848       

Chapter 2 The Silence (Ireland 1845-1848)

Chapter 3 The Blind Eye (England 1845-1848)         

Chapter 4 The Confederates         

Chapter 5 The Chartist Convention         

Chapter 6 Kennington Common         

Chapter 7 Prelude to the June Crisis        

Chapter 8 The June Crisis 1848        

PART 2 The Summer Risings

Chapter 9 The June Plot        

Chapter 10 The Irish Rising          

Chapter 11 August Conspiracy          

Chapter 12 Hearings and Trials        

Chapter 13 The Prisoners          

Chapter 14 The Middle-Class Element     

PART 3 After 1848

Chapter 15 Death and Deportation: 1849     

Chapter 16 Class Co-operation       

Chapter 17 Ireland: ‘That coming storm’          

Chapter 18 The Prisoners’ Fates                   

Chapter 19 Why No Revolution In Britain?         

Chapter 20 The After Story   

Arrests of prominent London Chartists and Confederates     

References and Annotations        

Bibliography       

PART ONE

1842-1848

1

London 1848

In the bitter cold of early February 1848 Londoners first heard news from Italy of Lombardy and Venetia’s expulsion of Austrian troops from their provinces.  For thirty years Austria had occupied northern Italy and now daily reports of the Italian rising came into London from Paris with unprecedented speed through the telegraph service. Austria ‘fears that Italy will understand them and rise as one man to respond to the call’ printed the Northern Star while The Times assured its readers that ‘The power of Austria to crush any popular movement attempted in the states has at no time been doubted’¹  London’s colonies of Italians, Irish, French, Germans, Poles reading these reports would wonder if this was the start of something.  Three weeks later revolutionaries took Paris and as more continental countries rose against their rulers, suddenly the future looked malleable. 

While Italy and France were thus engaged, a Londoner called John James Bezer, thirty-one years old, known familiarly as Monops because he was blind in his left eye (from having contracted smallpox when a baby), was mixing with the political radicals of London’s East End where he lived and worked as a street-seller of fish.  He had been born in Spitalfields in 1816 to Mary, a cotton winder, and James, an ex-navy man turned barber.  By the time he was nine years old he and his mother were on the streets of London’s East End selling hot cross buns, unsuccessfully, so he became an errand boy for a warehouseman in Newgate Street.  When the errand work ended, he helped out at his Sunday School on Raven Row until taking up employment as a chemist’s assistant in a corner shop on Jewin Street.  By the time he was a teenager he was working as an assistant to a grocer down in Camberwell, work which he enjoyed, but family difficulties brought him back to his mother, still living in Whitechapel.  There he started making shoes, though not trained for it, before gaining employment as a bookbinder’s porter. In the late 1830s, when a young married man, he descended into the dim world of street begging.  James Bezer was so ashamed of this necessity that each day he took himself across the river into Surrey, as far away as Brixton village, to practice the occupation of street-singer in the hope that no-one there would recognise him.  By his early twenties he had grown rebellious against authority. By 1848 he was thinking of revolution.  The newspaper reports of the risings in Sicily, Italy and France in February 1848 would have beeen a great encouragement to him.²

Some three miles to the west of James Bezer, a lawyer named James Macnamara was sitting in his rooms on Cleveland Row, behind The Mall, waiting for clients.  Few came.  He was young, inexperienced and lacking useful contacts.  Little did he know in early February 1848 that the reports of risings on the Continent heralded a time, not far off, when he would have more than enough work to occupy him.  Ten minutes’ walk south of James Macnamara, at Chesham Place, Lord John Russell the British Whig Prime Minister would contemplate the same newspaper reports in a very different light from the fish-seller Bezer or the lawyer Macnamara.  There was pressing reason for any unease he and his Home Secretary George Grey might feel at news of continental uprisings. The revolutionary provinces of northern Italy were ruled from Vienna, Ireland was ruled from London, and in Ireland unrest was increasing.  Prosecutable offences in Ireland had doubled in the last three years; years in which Ireland had faced a protracted and appalling famine.³  In response, George Grey brought in a Crimes and Outrages Act in an attempt to stop attacks in Ireland on landowners and their livestock.  In London there were already many Irish, and revolutions on the Continent would be an encouragement to Irish nationalists everywhere to fight for repeal of the Act of Union which in 1801 had swept away Ireland’s own parliament.⁴

To add to the British government’s unease, the National Charter Association, which for the past ten years had campaigned for parliamentary reform, was about to convene at the Literary & Scientific Institute on John Street by Tottenham Court Road.  Its plan; to present a People’s Charter calling for political reforms backed by a great petition signed, it was claimed, by five million British working people.  Only one in every seven men in Britain had the vote, and the possibility of a vote for women was beyond sensible contemplation.  The National Charter Association’s ‘People’s Charter’ of 1848 called for a vote for all free men over the age of twenty-one, so that laws affecting the lives of everyone would be fashioned by the voice of every man.  But what so exercised the Whig government and its majority in parliament was that the National Charter Association had at last succeeded in drawing the Irish Nationalist Confederates into an alliance.  The Confederates would support the Chartist call for parliamentary reform, the Chartists would support the Confederate call for Repeal of the Union.  This alliance was a great threat to the Whig government and those it represented.  To the ruling classes in London the threat of insurrection in Ireland was a real and dreadful one and something altogether different from the home-grown Chartist threat.  This, combined with continental revolutionary events, made the propertied classes of London very apprehensive indeed. 

Six months earlier, a member of the National Charter Association speaking from the heights of Blackstone Edge, a spectacular outcrop of stone which looks out over mile upon mile of east Lancashire, had urged a crowd of Lancashire and Yorkshire working people to raise the petition to back the People’s Charter.  The speaker was thirty-four-year-old Peter Murray McDouall, a Scot, a medical doctor, ardent of temperament, sparkling-eyed, and with fair hair long enough that he must push it behind his ears.⁵  He was a long-standing Chartist and had only recently returned to England with his wife and young children after self-imposed exile in Paris to avoid arrest by the British authorities.  At Blackstone Edge he urged the preparation of a petition in support of the People’s Charter. The two previous petitions of 1839 and 1842 had impressed the socialists in France and had raised the British Chartist cause to such prominence there that he believed the Association should petition again.

And so, in the following months what would be the great 1848 Chartist petition was signed by those millions of working people in time-honoured fashion, on hillsides and in fields, in streets and squares, meeting rooms and lecture halls.  Its sheets would be taken to London, stuck together, made into enormous rolls and then carried to the Houses of Parliament by a great crowd of supporters.  No-one anticipated that at the very time of its presentation to parliament at Westminster the Continent would be in the throes of revolution.

The day on which news of the successful French revolution hit London, Friday 25th February 1848, a colleague of Peter McDouall, George Julian Harney, was so exultant that he upset a fruit seller’s stall as he ran from Charing Cross to tell his émigré friends living in Soho of the wonderful event.⁶  Revolution in France signified something much as a starting gun does.  It represented the chance of great social change everywhere and Julian Harney had been waiting a long time for it.  When James Bezer was struggling as a street beggar in the late 1830s, the fiery young Harney had worn the red cap of the 1789 French Revolution, had wielded a dagger, had urged action upon the first Chartist Convention of 1839, held in London, later Birmingham, believing that the only way to persuade government to enact the People’s Charter was through insurrection.  Since then he had seen attempted British risings and one great national strike, none of which had resulted in full-blooded revolution.  Julian Harney now doubted that the British would ever be sufficiently inclined to depose their rulers through risings as the Parisians were but when news of the French Revolution of 1848 reached London, he seems to have allowed himself a brief belief in the imminence of change.  The terms of the People’s Charter could become reality after all.

The British parliament was astounded at the news from France.  When the people had raised the barricades and taken to the streets of Paris on 23rd February, support from the National Guard had, within hours, put the Parisian revolutionaries in a position of power ‘with not the slightest idea how to govern,’ said one English commentator.⁷  Alphonse de Lamartine now presided over a Provisional Government in Paris while Louis Blanc led the socialist camp within that government and succeeded in establishing a Ministry of Labour and Progress to oversee workers’ conditions; the dynamics between Lamartine, conservative in his politics, and Louis Blanc’s Socialists would play themselves out in following months. 

In London, the Whig Prime Minister John Russell assured parliament that his government would not interfere in any way with France’s internal affairs.  No, the main concern was in what manner this revolution would affect dissidents at home: the Chartists and Irish Confederates.  In Ireland, news of the Paris rising came to the Confederates ‘like a message from heaven.’⁸  In the House of Lords it produced great apprehension which was made worse by evidence received from Dublin of openly declared revolutionary intent. 

On Thursday 24th February, Lord Stanley read out loud to his fellows in the House of Lords from the United Irishman, a paper produced by John Mitchel, young Irish lawyer and journalist.  In it Mitchel placed a letter to ‘The Right Hon. The Earl of Clarendon, Englishman; calling himself her Majesty’s Lord Lieutenant General and General Governor of Ireland:

‘My Lord...the sway of your nation here is drawing near its latter days...An exact half-century has passed away since the last holy war waged in this island, to sweep it clear of the English name and nation. And we differ from the illustrious conspirators of [1798], not in principle—no, not an iota—but, as I shall presently show you, materially as to the mode of action. Theirs was a secret conspiracy—ours is a public one...In plain English, my Lord Earl, the deep and irreconcilable disaffection of this people to all British laws, law-givers, and law-administrators, shall find a voice. That holy hatred of foreign dominion which nerved our noble predecessors fifty years ago...still lives, thank God! and glows as fierce and hot as ever. To educate holy hatred, to make it know itself, and avow itself, and at last fill itself full, I hereby devote the columns of the United Irishman.’ ⁹

When writing of ‘the last holy war’ John Mitchel was calling down the spirit of the Irish rebellion of 1798.  A leading rebel of 1798, Arthur O’Connor, was alive still and living in France and as it so happened, his nephew, Feargus O’Connor, was now leader of the Chartist movement and living in London.  Feargus O’Connor had worked with Peter McDouall and Julian Harney for many years.  In all weathers they had stood together upon numberless hustings calling for the terms of the Charter, they had suffered arrest and imprisonment, and they had threatened that physical force brought against them by the authorities would be met with the same. Now they were planning a huge demonstration of working-class strength to accompany the Chartist petition to the Houses of Parliament.  What could be more threatening to the authorities than that?  And at what a time for it to be unfolding, with revolution across the Channel and violent unrest in Ireland. 

2

The Silence (Ireland 1845-1848)

1848 opened in London to freezing temperatures and an influenza epidemic.  The streets around Spitalfields, where James Bezer lived, were occupied by families with undernourished children and elderly clinging to the remnants of a hard life.  The buildings here housed sometimes forty people under one roof and viral infections would go through these communities like wild fire.  There was the fear of cholera too, but that horror would not materialise until the year’s end. 

London had a population of some two million. The many thousands living in cellars, crowded and decrepit houses and workhouses of the metropolis had been too long demoralised to apply themselves to