Book #3: TOC
The Road To Being Canada (1815-1867)
Chapter 29, Riots, Oppressive Laws & Royal Scandal

There were certain events that occurred in England during the post-war years which need to be recounted as a background to the development of the "Radical Press" in these years. These events need to be taken in the context of the general discontent that followed the end of the long Napoleonic Wars, 1793-1815. Unemployed soldiers were walking the streets and the businesses that prospered during the war years closed sending more people to the streets. All were left to wonder! Why they should experience these bad times, and -- not others. Convinced they were, that there were certain people responsible for these troubles -- most thought those in government were responsible.

Food shortages brought on riots. Increasingly, the pattern of rioting changed from protests against food shortages or high food prices to protest against unemployment, short time, wage cuts and above all, the machinery held to be responsible for all these evils. These public demonstrations have come to be known as the "Luddite Riots," named after a "Ned" Ludd, an English youth who broke some labor-saving machinery in 1799. In 1813, 13 "Luddites", having been found guilty of felonious acts of violence at the York Assizes in England, were strung up and met their ends.

Then there was the "Spa Fields Riot." On December 16th, 1816, a meeting was called by certain agitators for reform. The meeting took place in the north of London, a place known as Spa Fields. Six to eight thousand people had gathered to hear the stirring speeches. The meeting was peaceful enough but that evening a bunch of rowdies broke into "some bakers' and butchers' shops." This event was by itself not enough to get the authorities too nervous but it came in the wake of two years of sporadic riots and violence, at a time when the excesses of the French Revolution were hardly ancient history. The nervous legislators established "secret committees." These committees prepared reports which the governments used to track down Luddites and those groups that had formed to advance governmental reform. One of these reports concluded that the Spa Field Riot was part of a larger traitorous conspiracy formed for "the purpose of overthrowing, by means of a general insurrection, the established government ... and of effecting a general plunder and division of property." This led to the suspension of the habeas corpus1 and the determination of the authorities to round up the "chief incendiary writers" so that they might be put in "safe custody."

On August 16, in 1819, at a place called St Peter's Fields, in Manchester, England, textile workers gathered; 80,000 people were there to listen to Henry "Orator" Hunt (1773-1835). The magistrates, in a move to arrest the speaker, ordered the cavalry in: "eleven persons, including two women, were killed or died of their injuries; over a hundred were wounded by sabres and several hundred more injured by horse-hoofs or crushed in the stampede."2 This was an event, that to a good many, amounted to an unwarranted abuse of official authority; people died there at Manchester; the events that day are, in folklore, wrapped up in the name -- "Peterloo."

Robert Banks Liverpool (1770-1828), the English Prime Minister of the time (1812-27), took immediate, and, as it turned out, effective steps to assure there would be no more events like "Peterloo." Six Acts ("The Six Acts") were passed into law by Christmas that year, and, by large parliamentary majorities.

This is Paul Johnson's analysis of these acts:

"The Six Acts are often cited, even today, as an archetypal repressive law code by those who clearly do not know what they contained. The first act prohibited unauthorized meetings to train men in the use of arms. The second authorized Justices of the Peace in areas legally defined as disturbed to search for arms, even in private houses, and to seize arms carried by individuals if they had reason to believe the intention was to break the peace. These provisions are still on the statute book [British, 1991]. The third act made it hard for those accused of sedition to postpone trial; Castlereagh accepted an amendment by Brougham to rule out delays by the Crown as well, and this amendment too passed into the law as it exists today. The fourth act provided a stricter definition of seditious meetings and made it difficult to call one of more than 50 people; and it ruled out the use of arms, flags and military formations. Here, again, Castlereagh willingly conceded a Whig amendment that exempted indoor meetings. This act eventually disappeared, but part of it was revived in 1936 Public Order Act to deal with fascism, and that, too, is still English law. The two truly repressive acts dealt with the press, authorizing the seizure of the whole of an issue containing an items of blasphemy or sedition, making the second offence transportable - that was what Southey wanted - and subjecting pamphlets that commented on the news to newspaper duty if they cost less than sixpence. The whole operation was extremely skillful, since it did not involve suspending habeas corpus - always an emotional stumbling block for Parliament - and was put through quickly and overwhelmingly, often with the cooperation of the Whigs. It was also highly effective, ruling out any possibility of a return to the military-style mass meetings of the summer."3