WINSTANLEY THE DIGGER 1649–1650.
In the spring of 1649, the “Digger” movement revealed a strange and unexpected manifestation of the democratic spirit in England. Free communism had been the creed of more than one Protestant sect on the continent in the sixteenth century, and the Anabaptists had been conspicuously identified with the proposal. But in England John Lilburne and the Levellers were attacking the parliamentary government in the name of political democracy, and social agitation had been unknown since the Norfolk Rising of 1549, save for a riot against land enclosures at the beginning of James I.’s reign.
Gerrard Winstanley was the leader at the sudden outbreak of social discontent, and his “Digger” movement was to end this discontent and all other miseries of the time by getting rid of enclosures of common lands, and allowing people to plough these common lands and waste spaces, “that all may feed upon the crops of the earth, and the burden of poverty be removed.”
Little is known of Winstanley, and the movement is shortlived. The “Diggers” never threatened the safety of the Commonwealth government as Lilburne and the Levellers did, for Winstanley’s social doctrine included the non-resistance principles that later found exponents in the Society of Friends, and the agrarian revolution he preached could hardly be accomplished without force of arms. What is notable about Winstanley is his witness to the fact that a social question existed—that he saw beyond the Civil War, and the strife for political liberties, a great mass of poverty unheeded; and seeing the miseries of his fellows resolutely thought out some cure for their distress, and did his best, as it seemed to him, to get this cure adopted.
Neither the Council of State nor the republican army had time or patience for Winstanley’s schemes, and the “Diggers” were dispersed with little trouble; but Winstanley’s religious teaching was to exercise considerable influence in the world when George Fox became its preacher, and his social teaching on the land question has thousands of disciples in Great Britain to-day.
Gerrard Winstanley was born in Lancashire in 1609.[125] He seems to have settled in London as a small trader and to have lost what money he had in business—cheated he says, “in the thieving art of buying and selling, and by the burdens of and for the soldiery in the beginning of the war”—so that he was obliged “to accept of the good-will of friends to live a country life.” In the country Winstanley ponders the source of the ills around him, and, having some considerable gift of expression, gives utterance, in a number of pamphlets, to a cry for reform, and gathers followers.
In December, 1648, Winstanley (or one of his friends) issued the earliest of the Digger publications under the title of “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire—A Discovery of the Main Ground, Original Cause of all the Slavery of the World, but chiefly in England. Presented by way of a Declaration of many of the Well-affected in that County, to all their poor oppressed Countrymen in England. And also to the consideration of the present army under the conduct of the Lord Fairfax.”
A month later and Winstanley publishes his “New Law of Righteousness: Budding forth to restore the whole Creation from the Bondage of the Curse. Or a glimpse of the new Heaven and the new Earth, wherein dwells Righteousness.” Here, with a good deal of mystical religious phrasing (the author explains that when he was in a trance the message came to him), Winstanley proclaims his calling and unfolds his agrarian proposals:
And when the Lord doth show unto me the place and manner, how He will have us that are called common people manure and work upon the common lands, I will then go forth and declare it by my action, to eat my bread by the sweat of my brow, without either giving or taking hire, looking upon the land as freely mine as another’s.
There is to be no forcible expropriation of landlords:
If the rich still hold fast to this propriety of Mine and Thine, let them labour their own lands with their own hands. And let the common people, that say the earth is ours, not mine, let them labor together, and eat bread together upon the commons, mountains, and hills.
For as the enclosures are called such a man’s land, and such a man’s land, so the Commons and Heath are called the common people’s. And let the world see who labor the earth in righteousness, and those to whom the Lord gives the blessing, let them be the people that shall inherit the earth.
None can say that their right is taken from them. For let the rich work alone by themselves; and let the poor work together by themselves. The rich in their enclosures, saying, This is mine; and the poor upon the commons, saying, This is ours, the earth and its fruits are common. And who can be offended at the poor for doing this? None but covetous, proud, idle, pampered flesh, that would have the poor work still for this devil (particular interest) to maintain his greatness that he may live at ease.
Was the earth made for to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land: or was it made to preserve all her children? Let Reason and the Prophets’ and Apostles’ writings be judge.... For the earth is the Lord’s; that is the spreading Power of Righteousness, not the inheritance of covetous proud flesh that dies. If any man can say that he makes corn or cattle, he may say, That is mine. But if the Lord made these for the use of His creation, surely then the earth was made by the Lord to be a Common Treasury for all, not a particular treasury for some.
Leave off dominion and lordship one over another; for the whole bulk of mankind are but one living earth. Leave off imprisoning, whipping, and killing, which are but the actings of the curse. Let those that have hitherto had no land, and have been forced to rob and steal through poverty; henceforth let them quietly enjoy land to work upon, that everyone may enjoy the benefit of his creation, and eat his own bread with the sweat of his own brows. For surely this particular propriety of mine and thine hath brought in all misery upon people. First it hath occasioned people to steal from one another. Secondly it hath made laws to hang those that did steal. It tempts people to do an evil action, and then kills them for doing of it. Let all judge whether this be not a great evil.
In April, 1649, the time was ripe—so Winstanley and his friends judged—for making a start to get rid of this evil.
The Council of State, but a few months old, and much occupied with dangers in Scotland and Ireland, and with mutinous Levellers in the army, was suddenly informed of the strange activities of “a disorderly and tumultuous sort of people” by one Henry Sanders, of Walton-upon-Thames.
Sanders’ testimony affirmed that “there was one Everard, once of the army but was cashiered, who termeth himself a prophet, one Stewer and Colten, and two more, all living at Cobham, came to St. George’s Hill in Surrey, and began to dig on that side the hill next to Camp Close, and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans. On Monday following they were there again, being increased in their number, and on the next day they fired the heath, and burned at least forty rood of heath, which is a very great prejudice to the town. On Friday last they came again, between twenty and thirty, and wrought all day at digging. They did then intend to have two or three ploughs at work, but they had not furnished themselves with seed-corn, which they did on Saturday at Kingston. They invite all to come in and help them, and promise them meat, drink, and clothes. They do threaten to pull down and level all park pales, and lay open, and intend to plant there very shortly. They give out they will be four or five thousand within ten days, and threaten the neighbouring people there, that they will make them all come up to the hills and work: and forewarn them suffering their cattle to come near the plantation; if they do, they will cut their legs off. It is feared they have some design in hand.”[126]
The date of this information was April 16th, and Bradshaw, the President of the Council, at once asked General Fairfax “to disperse the people so met, and to prevent the like for the future, that a malignant and disaffected party may not under colour of such ridiculous people have any opportunity to rendezvous themselves in order to do a greater mischief.”
Fairfax sent Captain John Gladman to attend to the matter, and Gladman reports three days later that Mr. Winstanley and Mr. Everard are the chief men responsible, that he “cannot hear that there have been above twenty of them together since they first undertook the business,” and that Mr. Winstanley and Mr. Everard will wait upon Lord Fairfax. He adds; “I believe you will be glad to be rid of them again, especially Everard, who is no other than a mad man. I intend to go with two or three men to St. George’s Hill this day and persuade these people to leave this employment if I can, and if then I see no more danger than now I do I shall march back again to London to-morrow.” Gladman’s opinion is that “the business is not worth the writing nor yet taking notice of.”
The interview between Fairfax and Winstanley and Everard took place on April 20, and Everard explained that the Diggers “did not intend to meddle with any man’s property nor to break down any pales or enclosures, but only to meddle with what was common and untilled, and to make it fruitful for the use of man: that they will not defend themselves by arms, but will submit unto authority; that as their forefathers lived in tents, so it would be suitable to their condition now to live in the same.”
Fairfax evidently decided that the movement was not so alarming as the Council of State had represented, for Winstanley and his Diggers resumed their work, and at the end of May, Fairfax, with the officers of the army, paid a visit to St. George’s Hill. Winstanley returned “sober answers” to the inquiries of Fairfax, “though they gave little satisfaction (if any at all) in regard of the strangeness of their action.” Winstanley’s argument, often enlarged in his pamphlets, was that the people were dispossessed of their lands by the crown at the Norman Conquest, and that “the king who possessed them by the Norman Conquest being dead, they were returned again, being Crown Lands, to the Common People of England.”
This was not conclusive to their visitors, and “some officers wished they had no further plot in what they did, and that no more was intended than what they did pretend.” To the objection that the ground was too poor to repay cultivation, “the Diggers answered they would use their endeavours and leave the success to God, who had promised to make the barren ground fruitful.” Public opinion gave out that the Diggers were “sober, honest men,” and that “the ground will probably in a short time yield them some fruit of their labour, how contemptible soever they do yet appear to be.”
Encouraged by Fairfax’s “kindness and moderation,” Winstanley appeals to him in June against the interference of the local landowners, and getting no response (for Fairfax had said that the Diggers were to be left to “the Gentlemen of the County and the Law of the Land”), publishes an appeal to the House of Commons against his arrest for trespass by the Lords of Manors in Surrey. The House of Commons, occupied with State matters, turned an indifferent ear to Winstanley’s complaint, and the leader of the Diggers sent a “Watchword to the City of London and the Army,” telling the wrongs the Diggers suffered at the hands of the law for “digging upon the barren common”—how they were mulcted in damages at £10 a man, with costs at twenty-nine shillings and a penny, and taken in execution, and how their cows were seized by the bailiffs. At the end of November the very huts they had built were pulled down, and it was a hard winter for the little colony still left on St. George’s Hill.
Winstanley does not merely relate his injuries in these publications, he is all the time urging that his plan for setting people upon the common lands is the needful thing in England, that a common ownership of land is God’s will, and that the crown lands taken by the Normans must revert to the people on the execution of the king.
In the spring of 1650 an attempt was made to extend the digging propaganda—for the planting of St. George’s Hill was doomed—and some of Winstanley’s disciples made a tour through the counties of Middlesex, Bedford, Hertford, Huntingdon, and Northampton, settling down at last on some waste ground near Wellingborough. Here they were very soon arrested by a local justice of the peace, the Council of State ordered their prosecution, and the movement was suppressed.
To the Council of State these Diggers were “Levellers,”[127] “intruders upon other men’s properties,” “seditious and tumultuous,” against whom the public peace must be preserved.
Of Winstanley’s future, when the days of the digging were over, nothing seems to be known. Only one pamphlet is issued by him after 1650—“The Law of Freedom in a Platform; or, True Magistracy Restored”—an open letter to Oliver Cromwell, February, 1652. With this final manifesto on the land question, and on the whole social question, as he saw it, Gerrard Winstanley disappears from history. In the multitude of prophets and preachers, visionaries and practical reformers of the Commonwealth, Winstanley is little heeded by his contemporaries. The importance of his mission is seen more clearly to-day, when statesmen, politicians, and philanthropists all urge agrarian changes and the excellence of land culture.
As to Winstanley’s claim on behalf of the people to the common lands, the advantage of possession of these lands was realized by the landowners in the eighteenth century, and from 1760 to 1830 more than a thousand acts of parliament were passed for enclosing these lands.[128]
In “The Diggers Song,” (of unknown authorship[129]), the outlook of Winstanley and his followers is expressed in popular form:
You noble Diggers all, stand up now, stand up now,
You noble Diggers all, stand up now,
The waste land to maintain, seeing Cavaliers by name,
Your digging do disdain; and persons all defame.
Stand up now, stand up now.
Your houses they pull down, stand up now, stand up now,
Your houses they pull down, stand up now;
Your houses they pull down to fright poor men in town,
But the Gentry must come down, and the poor shall wear the crown.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
With spades, and hoes, and plowes, stand up now, stand up now,
With spades, and hoes, and plowes, stand up now;
Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold
To kill you if they could, and rights from you withhold.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
Their self-will is their law, stand up now, stand up now,
Their self-will is their law, stand up now;
Since tyranny came in, they count it now no sin
To make a gaol a gin, to starve poor men therein.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Gentry are all round, stand up now, stand up now,
The Gentry are all round, stand up now;
The Gentry are all round, on each side they are found,
Their wisdoms so profound to cheat us of our ground.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Lawyers they conjoin, stand up now, stand up now,
The Lawyers they conjoin, stand up now;
To arrest you they advise, such fury they devise,
The devil in them lies, and hath blinded both their eyes.
Stand up now, stand up now.
The Clergy they come in, stand up now, stand up now,
The Clergy they come in, stand up now;
The Clergy they come in, and say it is a sin
That we should now begin our freedom for to win.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The tithes they yet will have, stand up now, stand up now,
The tithes they yet will have, stand up now;
The tithes they yet will have, and Lawyers their fees crave,
And this they say is brave, to make the poor their slave.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
’Gainst Lawyers and ’gainst Priests, stand up now, stand up now,
’Gainst Lawyers and ’gainst Priests, stand up now;
For tyrants they are both, even flat against their oath,
To grant us they are loath, free meat, and drink and cloth.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The club is all their law, stand up now, stand up now,
The club is all their law, stand up now;
The club is all their law, to keep poor men in awe,
But they no vision saw, to maintain such a law.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now, stand up now,
The Cavaliers are foes, stand up now;
The Cavaliers are foes, themselves they do disclose
By verses, not in prose, to please the singing boys.
Stand up now, Diggers all!
To conquer them by love, come in now, come in now,
To conquer them by love, come in now;
To conquer them by love, as it does you behove,
For He is King above, no Power is like to Love.
Glory here, Diggers all.
Major Cartwright
“The Father of Reform” 1775–1824
Authorities: Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, edited by his Niece, 1826; A Memoir of John Cartwright the Reformer, 1831; The Times, September 25th, 1824; Graham Wallas—Francis Place.
MAJOR CARTWRIGHT
(From a Contemporary Drawing.)
MAJOR CARTWRIGHT
“THE FATHER OF REFORM” 1775–1824.
The substance of Major Cartwright’s life is told on the pedestal beneath his statue in the dingy garden of Burton Crescent, to the south of Euston Road, in London.
JOHN CARTWRIGHT,
Born 28th September, 1740. Died 23rd September, 1824.
The Firm, Consistent and Persevering Advocate of Universal Suffrage, Equal Representation, Vote by Ballot and Annual Parliaments.
He was the first English Writer who openly maintained the Independence of the United States of America, and although his distinguished merits as a Naval Officer in 1776 presented the most flattering Prospects of Professional Advancement, yet he nobly refused to draw his Sword against the Rising Liberties of an oppressed and struggling People.
In Grateful Commemoration of his inflexible integrity, exalted Patriotism, “profound Constitutional Knowledge,” and in sincere admiration of the unblemished Virtues of his Private Life,
THIS STATUE
was erected by Public Subscription near the spot where he closed his useful and meritorious career.
There is nothing false or exaggerated in this epitaph. Fox, in the House of Commons, testified to Cartwright’s “profound constitutional knowledge.” Hazlitt, who never met Cartwright, classed him with the men of one idea (and lingered over the subject), but the charge is ill-founded. It is true that for nearly fifty years, in season and out of season, Cartwright, a pupil of Locke in politics, contended publicly for annual parliaments and manhood suffrage, claiming personality and not property as the ground for enfranchisement, and insisting that while the right of the rich and the poor to the vote was equal, the need of the latter was far greater. But this agitation was by no means the limit either of his ideas or his activities.
Entering the navy at eighteen, John Cartwright, who came of an old Nottingham family, devised improvements in the gun service, and, made a lieutenant, was marked for high promotion. The revolt of the American colonies cut short his professional career. An innate love of liberty compelled the young naval officer to side with the colonists, and he writes in 1776 that it is a mistaken notion that the planting of colonies and the extending of empire are necessarily the same things. Self-governing colonies, he declares, bound to England only by “the ties of blood and mutual interests, by sincere love and friendship, which abhors dependence, and by every other cementing principle which hath power to take hold of the human heart,” are to be desired.
Lord Howe put Cartwright’s principles to the test by inviting him to join the expedition against the Americans, and Cartwright, who was “passionately attached to the navy,” and had an immense admiration for Howe, could only answer that he was unable to take part in a war he thought unjust. With this refusal his naval services were ended, in spite of Howe’s quiet and dignified reply that “opinions in politics are to be treated like opinions in religion.” (No word of reproach came from Howe, no taunt of want of courage or lack of patriotism.)
Cartwright never condemned all war. He urged in a letter to a nephew in the army that the answer to the question of the justice or injustice of a war decided whether justifiable homicide or wilful murder was committed by those engaged in battle. He hated standing armies and barracks and barrack life, and all the pomp and glory of militarism, as heartily as he hated the attempt to coerce the colonists. But no sooner was he out of the navy than, with a major’s commission, he at once set to work to train the Nottinghamshire militia, only retiring from this post in 1791 when the government cancelled his appointment for attending a meeting called to celebrate the fall of the Bastille.
The militia in Cartwright’s view was strictly a citizen army for home defence. “The militia,” he wrote, “by its institution is not intended to spread the dominion or to vindicate in war the honour of the crown, but it is to preserve our laws and liberties, and therein to secure the existence of the State.” Thirteen years before the fall of the Bastille Major Cartwright had the cap of liberty displayed on the banners and engraved on the buttons of the Nottinghamshire Militia. A greater service than providing symbols of liberty was rendered to the army by Cartwright in the matter of better clothing for the men. The misery endured by ill-clad sentries aroused his compassion and indignation, and Cartwright worried the government until it provided great-coats for all private soldiers.
The humaner courage is as conspicuous in John Cartwright’s long life as his political enthusiasm.
Four times he risked his life to save others from drowning, rescuing two men from the Trent, a naval officer at sea, and, in late middle-life, a small boy who had fallen into the New River, near London. In the year 1800, hearing of a riot planned at Sheffield, Cartwright made his way alone to the barn where the conspirators were assembled, and stayed all night, reasoning with them against their project. In the morning the confederates, dissuaded from violence, quietly dispersed, and the riot was prevented.
An untiring advocacy of democratic politics earned for Cartwright, justly, the title of “The Father of Reform.” He was the real founder of that movement for political reform, which in the nineteenth century swept away rotten boroughs, gave representation to all towns of importance, and extended the franchise to the great bulk of male householders in town and country; which to-day presses towards a general suffrage for men and women.
Major Cartwright began his speeches and pamphlets on behalf of political reform in 1776, just after his retirement from the navy, and his acceptance of the commission in the militia.
The ideas of the French Encyclopædists, the writings of Rousseau, and the revolt of the American colonists, had aroused a belief in social equality, and the “natural” rights of man, and this belief Cartwright championed till his death. His early pamphlets, beginning with “Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated,” (1777) are heavy reading to-day, but in them Cartwright argued for all the famous “six points” of the People’s Charter of fifty years later—Universal Manhood Suffrage, Annual Parliaments, Vote by Ballot, Abolition of Property Qualification for Parliamentary Candidates, Payment of Members, and Equal Electoral Districts. He even uses the modern phrase in urging “one man one vote.”
Unlike Thomas Paine, and many of the “Radical Reformers,” Cartwright pleads for political democracy as the natural outcome of the Christian faith, maintaining that “No man can have a right sense and belief of Christianity who denies the equality of all conditions of men.” Incidentally, challenged on the point of why not Votes for Women? Cartwright could only fall back on certain passages in the Bible to justify his objection to Women’s Enfranchisement. Nothing was more abhorrent to his mind than the notion that government was a matter for “experts,” an exclusive affair for persons with specially trained intelligences. “Of all the errors to which mankind have ever submitted their understandings,” he wrote, “there is no one to be more lamented than that of conceiving the business of civil government to be above the comprehension of ordinary capacities.”
The poor, because of their very poverty, had a need for the vote and for parliamentary representation which the man of property could not experience. This Cartwright emphasised in a petition he presented to the House of Commons as late as 1820:
And when your Honourable House shall further consider that the humblest mortal on earth is equally a co-heir of an immortality with the most exalted who now wears stars, or coronets, or crowns, your petitioner hopes that your Honourable House will rise superior to the mean thoughts and vulgar prejudices of the uncharitable among the wealthy, the ignorant, the interested, the vain, and the proud; and will acknowledge that, in reference to the respective claims of legislative representation by the poor and the rich, the poor have equal right but far more need.
Enthusiasm and an entirely disinterested zeal for democracy kept the spirit of youth in Cartwright, and carried him at the age of 80 over a trial for sedition undisturbed. His zeal was not to be quenched. “Moderation in practice may be commendable,” he declared, “but moderation in principle is detestable. Can we trust a man who is moderately honest, or esteem a woman who is moderately virtuous?”
This very allegiance to principle had its drawbacks in the world of practical politics, of corruption and compromise. Three times Major Cartwright stood for parliament: for the county of Nottingham in 1780, for Boston in 1806 and 1807; and on each occasion he was at the bottom of the poll. His nominations for Westminster in 1818 and 1819 received no serious support at all. The old major was no more distressed by any feeling of personal disappointment at these defeats than he was cast down at seeing no signs of the triumph of political democracy in his lifetime. At eighty-four we find him writing cheerfully, “To despair in a good cause is to approach towards atheism.”
Cartwright did not live to see the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832. Wilkes’ motion for reform in 1776 had been negatived in the House of Commons without a division. In 1780 the Duke of Richmond’s motion in the House of Lords for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments was mocked by the outbreak of the Gordon (“No Popery”) Riots in London on the very day the motion was made. Pitt’s third and last effort for parliamentary reform was rejected in 1785. The French Revolution turned men’s minds in Great Britain towards democracy, but reaction followed hard on the Terror in Paris, and for a time a government terror crushed every expression in favour of political liberty in England. Sir Francis Burdett became the parliamentary leader of the “radical reformers” early in the nineteenth century, and in 1809 found fifteen supporters in the House of Commons. Ten years later the government, in the face of a strong working-class movement for political reform, brought out the military against the people at a peaceful meeting held at Peterloo, near Manchester, and followed this up by six repressive acts of parliament, and a general prosecution of the leaders of the reform agitation.
Cartwright was eighty when, with several friends, he was charged “with being a malicious, seditious, evil-minded person, and with unlawfully and maliciously intending and designing to raise disaffection and discontent in the minds of his majesty’s subjects.”
All England knew that Major Cartwright was a single-minded and high-principled man, in whose heart was neither guile nor malice, a man who had proved his loyalty and patriotism over and over again, and was no more seditious than he was evil-minded or disaffected. Apart from his advocacy of political reform and his services to the militia, Cartwright had done much for farming and agriculture, he had helped Clarkson and Wilberforce in their anti-slavery work, and he had called the attention of the government, as loudly as he could, to the defenceless state of the east coast against foreign invasion. Yet in 1820 a British jury, obedient to the orders of a political judge, found John Cartwright guilty of “maliciously intending and designing to raise disaffection and discontent,” and a fine of £100 was inflicted.
Francis Place, the radical tailor of Charing Cross, in whose shop the later Chartists and Reformers were to be found, gives his impression of Major Cartwright as he knew him in old age:
“When he was in town he used frequently to sup with me, eating some raisins he brought in his pocket, and drinking weak gin and water. He was cheerful, agreeable, and full of curious anecdote. He was, however, in political matters exceedingly troublesome and sometimes as exceedingly absurd. He had read but little, or to little purpose, and knew nothing of general principles. He entertained a vague and absurd notion of the political arrangements of the Anglo-Saxons, and sincerely believed that these semi-barbarians were not only a political people, but that their ‘twofold polity,’ arms-bearing and representation, were universal and perfect.”[130]
To Place, chief political wire-puller of his age, industrious and persistent in getting things done, with a typical cockney politician’s scorn of disinterested enthusiasm, Major Cartwright appeared “troublesome” and “absurd”—Francis Place had quite an honest liking for the “old gentleman,” as he called him, all the same. By the government Cartwright stood convicted as a “seditious, evil-minded person.” Posterity is content to know John Cartwright by the title his contemporaries conferred upon him—the Father of Reform—and to rank him as the foremost man in England in the eighteenth century to raise the standard of Political Democracy.
Ernest Jones and Chartism
1838–1854
Authorities: R. G. Gamage—History of the Chartist Movement; Thos. Frost—Forty Years’ Recollections; Ernest Charles Jones—Songs of Democracy; Graham Wallas—Life of Francis Place; J. A. Hobson—Ernest Jones, in Dictionary of National Biography; The Times, Jan. 27, 29; Mar. 31, 1869.
ERNEST JONES AND
CHARTISM 1838–1854.
The Chartist agitation was at once the largest, the most revolutionary, and the least successful of all the serious political movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. For ten years, with varying fortune, it threatened the authority of parliament, and then slowly expired—destroyed by its own internal weakness and the quarrels of its leaders rather than by the repression of the government.
The failure of the great Reform Act of 1832 to accomplish any particular improvement in the lot of the mass of working people brought the Chartist movement to life,[131] and roused the politically minded leaders of the workmen to agitate for changes in the constitution that would place political power in the hands of the whole people.
The six points of the Charter, embodied in the “People’s Charter” drawn up by Francis Place and Lovett in 1838, revived the old programme of Major Cartwright and, in substance, the earlier demands of John Lilburne and the Levellers. Universal manhood suffrage, the ballot, payment of members of parliament, equal electoral districts, abolition of property qualification for members, and annual parliaments, these were the “six points” of the Charter, the platform of its advocates, and for ten years the hope of multitudes of earnest and devoted men and women.
Francis Place and the Working-Men’s Association which gave Chartism its name and programme never had any considerable voice in its direction.[132]
Feargus O’Connor, who had sat in parliament from 1832 to 1835 for an Irish constituency, was from the first the real leader of the movement. His personality and his rhetorical powers roused the manufacturing districts in the North and the Midlands to form political unions for the Charter in 1838, and his presence dominated the first Convention, held in London, with Lovett for its secretary. Later, O’Connor’s obvious weaknesses, his vanity and egotism, his want of self-control and that “one fatal disqualification for a leader of revolt—the fear of the police”[133]—left leadership in his hands, but left him a leader without followers.
Next to O’Connor stood another Irish orator, James Bronterre O’Brien, a man of finer character, and clearer head, but smaller gifts of command.
South Wales, the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and towns like Birmingham, Leicester, and Northampton, were the strongholds of Chartism, and “in the dark days of the late thirties and early forties it was a real and dangerous power.”[134] Feargus O’Connor never advocated an armed rising, and advised the abandonment of the huge torchlight processions; but pikes were being fashioned and men were being drilled in preparation for a revolution that was to end the Whig rule, and give the working classes the reins of government. The circulation of the Northern Star, O’Connor’s weekly paper, stood at 50,000 in those days.
Riots at Newport (Monmouth) and Birmingham in 1839, followed by several arrests and imprisonments of the Chartist leaders the following year, ended for the time all notions of a successful revolution. Lord John Russell declared strongly against manhood suffrage when the question was raised in the House of Commons, and on a division in the House the petition for the Charter was rejected by 237 to 48 votes.
The outbreak at Birmingham, provoked, in the first place, by the interference of a body of London police with an orderly meeting in the Bull Ring, was put down in two days by the soldiers; but not till many houses had been attacked and a considerable amount of property destroyed. No robberies or petty thefts accompanied the riot.
At Newport the harsh prison treatment of Vincent, a Chartist advocate, convicted for what was held to be a political offence, brought a crowd of 10,000 men, led by Frost, William, and Jones, to demand his release. The insurgents had a few rifles and pikes, but were generally unarmed, and the fire of the military soon overpowered them. But lives were lost on both sides, and Frost and his two lieutenants were sentenced to death, though the sentence was at once reduced to transportation for life, and some years later to simple banishment from British dominions.
Feargus O’Connor, Bronterre O’Brien, and all the chief speakers of the movement were brought to trial for seditious utterance in 1840, and in most cases sent to prison either for twelve months or two years.
With these imprisonments and the general election of 1841 came the first serious disintegration of the Chartist movement.[135] O’Brien and O’Connor differed vigorously on the question of election policy, and before they were released from prison were expressing their opinions in the Northern Star. O’Connor, full of wrath at the repressive treatment meted out to Chartists by the Whig Government, was for attacking the Whigs at the election, and O’Brien objected to this as a pro-Tory policy.[136]
The decision to run independent Chartist candidates for parliament in certain constituencies, and the failure of these candidates to get returned on the limited franchise of 1832, increased disunion in the Chartist ranks and brought demoralisation.
To make matters worse for the movement, several prominent Chartists left prison with fresh notions and ideas of reform, which had come to them in their long hours of solitude and reflection. Lovett, imprisoned in connection with the Birmingham riot, though he was entirely innocent of giving any encouragement to violence, on his release was full of vast plans for national education, convinced that education must precede political democracy. Vincent had become a strong temperance advocate, and henceforth must give himself to the work of a teetotal lecturer. Other men were for bringing in religion by “Chartist Churches.”[137] Antagonism to the anti-corn law league of Cobden and Bright, and later his own “National Land Company” experiments, withdrew Feargus O’Connor from actual Chartist propaganda.
The movement languished. But in spite of government repression, the indifference of parliament, the hostility of the wealthier classes, and its own jarring elements of discord, Chartism was not dead.[138]
The misery of the English people kept it from death. With one in every eleven of the industrial population a pauper in 1842, general satisfaction with the state of government was impossible for men of strong social sympathies. Some exerted themselves, like Sadler and Oastler, in following Lord Shaftesbury’s entirely disinterested and successful crusade against the horrors of factory oppression. Others supported the Free Trade agitation.
To one man, Ernest Jones, it seemed, in 1845, that before all else must come political enfranchisement, that the social miseries and discontents of England were not to be cured save by the people of England. The evils might be mitigated by ameliorative legislation, but it was not enough that the decencies of life—then very far beyond the reach of the mass of town and country labourers—should be secured for people; the main thing was that people should have freedom to work out their own industrial salvation.
So in 1846, Ernest Jones plunged boldly into Chartism. He quickly became a leader, and his reputation has endured: for Ernest Jones was the most respected, single-minded, and steadfast of the many who sat in Chartist conventions. Chartism for him was the cry of the uncared-for, because voteless, multitudes, and Ernest Jones was ready to give his life that the cry should move the rulers of the nation.
It was a bad time for England in 1846, that was plain,[139] and Ernest Jones, believing with the average Englishman that in politics lay the key to necessary change, was henceforth a Chartist advocate and till his death the faithful preacher of democracy. Without becoming a socialist, Ernest Jones, in his “Songs of Democracy” and in his speeches and newspaper writings, is clear that political enfranchisement was but the high road to social and economic reform, that the Charter was to bring a better distribution of wealth as the consequence of a better distribution of political power.[140]
Ernest Jones was twenty-seven when he joined the Chartist movement. The son of an army officer—who had been equerry to the Duke of Cumberland—and educated on the continent, Ernest Jones came to England when he was nineteen, and was duly presented to Queen Victoria (as Robert Owen had been) by Lord Melbourne in 1841. He married a Miss Atherley, of Cumberland, and settled down in London, writing novels, verses, and newspaper articles. In 1844 he was called to the Bar, and two years later took the step which separated him from the friends and acquaintances of his social order, and placed him on the hard and strenuous road of the political agitator.
Averse from faction, realising the fatal folly of internal jealousies and strife, and alive to the importance of discipline in the army of revolt, Ernest Jones did his best to work with O’Connor—and was naturally charged with cowardice by the Chartists who hated O’Connor’s supremacy. In 1847 he began writing in the Northern Star, and was joint editor with O’Connor of The Labourer. His “Songs of Democracy” were to the Chartists what Ebenezer Elliott’s “Corn-Law Rhymes” were to the Free Traders, and his “Song of the Lower Classes” has retained a place in the song-books of social democrats to our own day.
At the general election of 1847, when, to everybody’s astonishment, Feargus O’Connor was elected member for Nottingham, Ernest Jones stood for Halifax, but though immensely popular at the hustings, he only polled 280 votes.
1848, the memorable year of revolutions abroad, saw Chartism once more a formidable movement in England. An enormous petition was again prepared for parliament, and the Chartists decided to carry the petition to the House of Commons after a mass meeting on Kennington Common on April 10th. Lord John Russell and his Whig government became thoroughly alarmed. The Duke of Wellington, as commander-in-chief, undertook to guard the safety of London, and garrisoned the city with troops, and protected the bridges, while 70,000 special constables (of whom Prince Louis Napoleon was one) were quickly enrolled. But on the government prohibition of any procession to Westminster, Feargus O’Connor at once decided against any collision between the people and the authorities. The mass meeting was held, some 50,000 persons were present, and O’Connor and Ernest Jones made speeches. Then the petition was sent off in a cab to parliament, and all was over.
O’Connor had boasted that the monster petition contained 5,000,000 signatures, but on investigation it was found that the signatures only amounted to 1,975,496, and many of these were duplicates and forgeries. Anti-Chartists had signed in several places, using ridiculous names, like “Pugnose,” “Punch,” and “Fubbs,” or boldly signing as “Queen Victoria” and “Duke of Wellington.”[141] Parliament gladly took advantage of O’Connor’s characteristic exaggeration to discredit the whole movement. At the same time the government hastily prepared a bill to suppress the renewed agitation, and the “Treason Felony” bill was passed, making “open and advised speaking with seditious intent” a crime. This clause in the act only remained on the statute book for two years, but it was sufficient for securing the conviction of all prominent Chartist speakers.
Ernest Jones, unlike Feargus O’Connor, believed that the people should arm, and that a display of force was necessary for carrying the Charter. The failure of April 10th strengthened this belief, and for the next two months he was busy speaking in England and Scotland, urging the necessity for enrolling a national guard and forming a provisional government.
But in spite of great public meetings the movement was already breaking up. The Chartist Convention, which met in London on May 1st, dissolved on May 13th in hopeless disagreement, and Ernest Jones, who had attended as a member of the executive committee, exclaimed that “amid the desertion of friends, and the invasion of enemies, the fusee had been trampled out, and the elements of their energy were scattered to the winds of heaven.” Still he tried to rally the broken ranks, and the government decided that the time had come to put the movement down by means of the new “Treason Felony” Act. Feargus O’Connor, now a member, was no longer dangerous to the authorities. His attendance in the House kept him from the agitation in the country, and Ernest Jones was the man to be struck at.
On May 29th and 30th Ernest Jones addressed great, but quite orderly, meetings in London, on Clerkenwell Green and Bishop Bonner’s Fields, and then proceeded to Manchester. Here he was arrested and put on trial with five other Chartists—Fussell, Sharpe, Williams, Vernon, and Looney. The judge had little patience for the prisoners, and Ernest Jones was frequently interrupted in his defence. In the end, he and his fellows were all found guilty of seditious speech, and Ernest Jones was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, to find sureties, himself in £200 and two persons in £150, and to keep the peace for five years.
A number of police spies procured many more arrests and convictions by gaining admission to Chartist meetings, joining Chartist unions and inciting the members to violent speech and an armed conspiracy. By these means at the end of the year 1848 the government had succeeded in getting the prominent Chartists into prison, as it had done in 1840. That Ernest Jones exhorted his followers to learn to bear arms is indisputable; that the success of the revolutionary movements on the continent encouraged the belief amongst a certain number of Chartists that an armed rising was desirable and could be successful in England is equally true. But as no serious attempt was made in 1848 by the “physical force” Chartists to organize such a rising, no rising took place, and “the conspiracy,” as it was called, was chiefly the work of the government’s police spies.
The riots at Newport and Birmingham gave some excuse to the government for repression in 1839–40; in 1848 no outbreaks were even threatened to justify the sentences on Ernest Jones and other Chartist speakers. The government’s chief concern was to end the agitation, even if this could only be accomplished by means of a special act of parliament, and the unsavoury methods of agents provocateurs. Lord John Russell and his Whig colleagues were not the men to be kept from their purpose by any nice discrimination in the choice of weapons. It was not the time, when crowns were falling on the continent, to hesitate about crushing a movement which seemed to menace public safety in England. That the strength of Chartism was in the sober, law-abiding character of most of its adherents the government knew no more than they knew that the movement was already doomed for want of cohesion.
The bitter hostility of the government pursued Ernest Jones in prison, and left him to be treated as a common felon. Ordered to pick oakum he refused, and was put on a diet of bread and water. The struggle between the prisoner and his gaolers was at last brought before the House of Commons,[142] and in the end Ernest Jones was allowed to purchase exemption from the allotted prison tasks by a small payment of money.
On his release from prison the Chartist movement was flickering out. It was impossible to work with O’Connor, who, now looking favourably on household suffrage, was already failing in health and showing signs of the insanity which possessed him two years later. The trade-union movement and the co-operative store were attracting the attention of intelligent workmen, to whom for the time political enfranchisement seemed a lost cause. Contesting Halifax in 1852, Ernest Jones only polled 52 votes, and the People’s Paper, which he started in that year and edited, never had the success of the Northern Star.
Feargus O’Connor was led away from the House of Commons hopelessly insane, to die in 1855, and Chartism utterly disintegrated could not be revived by Ernest Jones. In 1854 the movement was extinct, and from that time till his death Ernest Jones gave his political support to the advanced Radicals. He contested Nottingham in 1853 and 1857, but without success, returned to his old practice at the Bar, and wrote novels and poems. In 1868, the year of household suffrage in the towns, he was adopted by the Radicals as parliamentary candidate for Manchester, and then on January 26, 1869, came a sudden failure of the heart, and death ended all earthly hopes and plans for Ernest Jones. He was just fifty when he died, and though Chartism had passed away, Ernest Jones had not outlived his usefulness or his popularity with all those who believed in the ultimate triumph of democracy, and he had gained the respect of many earlier foes.
The People’s Charter remains unfulfilled, but two of its points have long been granted—the ballot, and the abolition of a property qualification for members of parliament. Annual parliaments are no longer desired by any section of political reformers, the extension of the franchise to the agricultural labourer in 1884 brought manhood suffrage appreciably nearer, equal electoral districts were never more than a plan of quite reasonable political theorists, and the demand for payment of members, never altogether dropped by Radicals, is once more heard in the land.
The great contention of Ernest Jones and the Chartists that political liberty should precede the granting of reforms by parliament, that the people should have the power to control and direct the deliberations of parliaments still has its advocates; but government is passing—almost unnoticed—once more into the hands of an executive, for that “eternal vigilance” which is the price of political liberty is oftentimes relaxed.