The slips, which had been printed at the Observer office, had been sent to me while I was on the hustings, and I delivered them to the different reporters, who applied for them. Mr. Fitzpatrick, the reporter of the New Times. was the only one who had the baseness treacherously to betray this confidence, by voluntarily coming forward in the Court, at York, to swear to the fact of my having furnished him with them upon the hustings. Thus ended the great Smithfield Meeting, held on the 21st of July, 1819.
On the 26th of the same month, at a Common Hall, the Livery of the City
of London passed a strong vote of censure upon their Lord Mayor, John
Atkins, "for his officious and intemperate conduct on the day of the
Smithfield Meeting."
I forgot to mention, in the proper place, that I had been invited to attend and preside at a great public meeting, held at Manchester, in the early part of this year; if I recollect right it was in January. This meeting had been convened by public advertisement. I slept at Stockport the night before, and was accompanied from that town to the place of meeting by thousands of the people. When I arrived there, none of the parties who had invited me to Manchester, Messrs. Johnson, Whitworth, and Co. accompanied me upon the hustings; but they attended a public dinner, which, in the evening, after the meeting, was provided at the Spread Eagle Inn, Hanging Ditch, at which upwards of two hundred persons sat down. I found a number of good men at Manchester, and amongst that number I esteem my worthy friend Mr. Thomas Chapman, of Fannel-street, one of the very best men and most honest advocates of Liberty in the kingdom. I have ever found him the same man in principle, sincere and bold in public, and kind, generous, and open-hearted in private. To know during one's political life, and to possess the friendship of, two or three such men as Mr. Chapman, is more than sufficient recompence for the treachery, cowardice, and baseness of hundreds that one must as a matter of course become acquainted with. Here I first saw Johnson, the brush-maker; he had not the courage to accompany me upon the hustings, although he was one of the most officious to invite me to preside at the meeting. John Knight and Saxton were the men who attended me upon the hustings, and addressed the people, &c. &c. I had never seen either of them before. Mr. Wroe and Mr. Fitton, of Royton, also were upon the hustings. I had seen the latter, as a delegate from Royton, at the meeting of delegates called by Major Cartwright and the Hampden Club, in the name of Sir Francis Burdett, in the year 1817.
As this meeting passed off without any difficulty or danger, Johnson the brush-maker, who was very young in the ranks of Reform, professed a determination to take a more active part at a future opportunity. In conformity with this resolution, he wrote to invite me to attend a public meeting, to be held at Manchester on the 9th of August, which invitation I accepted. The intended meeting being publicly announced in all the London papers, excited a very considerable sensation throughout the country, and particularly through the North of England. As I strongly suspected that my letters to Manchester, about this time, were opened at the post-office, I sent them by other conveyances than by the post. My family appeared to dread my second visit to Manchester, and to forebode some fatal accident, and they endeavoured to persuade me not to attend; but, although I did not anticipate a very pleasant journey, yet I had given my word, and that was quite enough to insure my attendance.
On my road, I stopped to bait my horse at Wolseley Bridge. As soon as I arrived, the landlord of the inn addressed me, and begged to know if my name was Hunt. I answered in the affirmative; upon which he delivered an invitation from Sir Charles Wolseley, requesting me to call on him. He lived only about a hundred yards from the inn. The fact was, I had slept at Coventry the night before, where I met Messrs. Goodman, Lewis, and Flavel, and one of them had written to Sir Charles Wolseley, to say that I should pass Wolseley Bridge in the morning, and this induced him to leave the message which I have mentioned. I accepted his invitation, and this was the first time that I ever met the worthy Baronet in private. I spent a few hours very pleasantly with Sir Charles, who had also, I understood, been invited to attend the meeting at Manchester; but some family reasons prevented him from complying. When I arrived at Bullock Smithey, near Stockport, I heard that the meeting was put off, and that another meeting was advertised to be held on the 16th of August, the following Monday. The cause of this was, that Mr. Johnson and those concerned in calling the meeting had, in their advertisements, stated one of the objects to be, that of electing a representative or legislatorial attorney for Manchester. This foolish proposition, directly in the face of the late proclamation, was seized on by the Magistrates of Manchester, and they issued hand-bills, and had placards posted all over the town, denouncing the intended meeting as illegal, and cautioning all persons "to abstain at their peril from attending it." Upon this, Mr. Saxton had taken a journey to Liverpool, to obtain the advice of some barrister, of the name of Raincock, who gave it as his opinion that the meeting was advertised for an illegal purpose, and that the Magistrates would be justified in preventing it, or dispersing the people when they were assembled. The parties concerned immediately, therefore, advertised, and placarded the town, to say that the meeting would not take place on the 9th of August; but that another meeting would be convened on Monday the 16th of August, "to take into consideration the best and most legal means of obtaining a Reform in the Commons' House of Parliament." A requisition in these words was immediately drawn up, signed by upwards of seven hundred of the inhabitants, and addressed to the Boroughreeve of Manchester, requesting him to call the meeting. It was presented to the Boroughreeve, who haughtily refused to call the meeting, whereupon it was immediately called in the name of those who signed the requisition, and was appointed by them to be held on the sixteenth. All this had taken place; the original meeting of the ninth, to which I had been invited, had been abandoned, the new requisition had been signed, and the meeting of the 16th had been appointed, without my having in any way received the slightest intimation of what had been going on. I had arrived on the eighth at Bullock Smithey, which is within ten miles of Manchester, and within three miles of Stockport, where I had appointed to sleep on Sunday, the day previous to the intended meeting, and I had not yet heard one word of its being put off. I had travelled two hundred miles in my gig for the purpose of presiding, and when I learned that I had been made such a fool of, I expressed considerable indignation, and declared my intention of returning into Hampshire immediately. I was, however, at length prevailed upon to proceed to Stockport to sleep that night, as I understood that Mr. Moorhouse had provided a bed for me, and a stall for my horse. On my road to Stockport I was met by Johnson, the brush-maker, and Mr. Saxton, who explained to me the whole of the circumstances, and at the same time expressed a great desire that I should remain in Manchester, to be present at the 16th, as they had, without my knowledge, advertised my name as chairman of the intended meeting. At first I positively refused to comply with their wish, and I assigned more reasons than one for my refusal. At length, it was agreed that I should proceed through Manchester the next day, Monday the 9th, to dine with Mr. Johnson at Smedley Cottage, to meet some friends whom he had invited to join me there.
I slept at the house of Mr. Moorhouse that night, and received from him every polite and kind attention. When I arose in the morning, I was agreeably surprised by a note being brought to me from Sir Charles Wolseley, to say that, soon after I had left Wolseley Park, he had followed me; that he was at the inn, and would accompany me to Manchester, if I would let him know the time at which I meant to start for that place. I immediately waited upon him at the inn, and, after breakfast, we proceeded together in my gig to Manchester, attended by many thousands of the Stockport people. Johnson, the brush-maker, and others, from Manchester, had come to meet us, and they followed in a chaise, and Mr. Moorhouse followed, with a party, in his coach. We were greeted with the utmost enthusiasm by the people of Manchester. In one of the open spaces I addressed them briefly, and explained to them the reason of my then appearing amongst them. I told them that I had travelled two hundred miles to keep my appointment, and that it was not till the day before, when I had arrived within a few miles of their town, that information was given to me of the meeting having been postponed.
We dined at Smedley Cottage; and, after having, for a length of time, resisted the most urgent intreaties, I was at last, though still very much against my inclination, and quite in opposition to my own judgment, prevailed upon to yield to the pleadings of Mr. Johnson and his friends, to remain with him till the following Monday, in order that I might take the chair at the intended meeting. Had Johnson's life depended upon the result, he could not have been more anxious to detain me. He begged, he prayed, he implored me to stay; urging that without my presence the people would not be satisfied; and, in fact, foreboding the most fatal consequences if I departed before the meeting took place. I solemnly declare that I never before consented with so much reluctance to any measure of the sort. I had important engagements of my own to attend to, which I had put off to enable me to take the chair on the 9th, and to remain from home another week would cause me the greatest personal and private inconvenience. I was, nevertheless, ultimately prevailed upon to stay, from a conviction that my presence would promote tranquillity and good order, and under the assurance that, if I did quit the place, confusion and bloodshed would, in all probability, be the inevitable consequence. The manner in which those in authority had treated them, had irritated to the highest degree the people in and near Manchester, and they had also been excited to acts of desperation and violence, by some of those who professed to be their leaders. As for Johnson, the brush-maker, he was a composition of vanity, emptiness, and conceit, such as I never before saw concentrated in one person. It was the most ridiculous thing in the world to see him assuming the most pompous and lofty tone, while every one about him did not fail openly to express contempt for his insignificance and folly. In truth, even amidst all his pomposity, of which he had so enormous a share, this poor creature could not conceal the fact from any one, that he had not the slightest confidence in himself; he expressed the greatest terror at the idea of my leaving to him the management of the intended meeting, and swore that he would run away from it altogether if I did not stay. In this he involuntarily did himself justice; for, in reality, every one appeared to dread the thoughts of the thing being left in his hands. Every thing, therefore, conspired to impress on my mind the conviction that I alone had the power of conducting this great meeting in a peaceable, quiet, and Constitutional manner. I knew and felt, indeed, that it would be a task of great difficulty, danger, and responsibility. Yet as I had never turned my back upon the people because difficulties and dangers presented themselves, so I made up my mind not to desert them upon this trying occasion, when I knew they were surrounded by the most base and blood-thirsty opponents, who were laying in ambush, and only waiting for a pretext to take every unmanly and cowardly advantage of any accidental disturbance or disorder that might occur. I repeat again, that I consented most reluctantly to accept Johnson's pressing invitation to remain at his house during the intervening week prior to the 16th of August; and I can, with great truth, affirm that this was one of the most disagreeable seven days that I ever passed in my life, not excepting the period of my solitary imprisonment in the Manchester New Bailey and Ilchester Bastile. However, most fortunately for me, Johnson was from home a considerable portion of this time, attending to his brush-making and other business; this alone rendered the visit to Smedley tolerable: he frequently invited me to visit, with him, the surrounding neighbourhood, from the inhabitants of which places I had received pressing invitations; but all these I declined from prudential motives, and it was fortunate I did so, or my prosecutors would have found some pretence for the charge of conspiracy, of which, as it was, they could never bring the slightest shadow of proof.
During this week I was waited upon by many very respectable inhabitants of Manchester and the surrounding country, and on the Friday Mr. Edward Grundy and a friend from Bury called, and informed me that there was a report in circulation in Manchester, that it was the intention of the Magistrates to have me apprehended, under the plea of having committed some political offence, in order to interrupt the proceedings of the meeting; but these gentlemen assured me that they would become my bail to any amount, if it should be so. However, this did not satisfy me, and on Saturday, morning I drove down to the New Bailey, where the Magistrates were sitting, and applied to know if there was any charge against me?—if there was, I begged to know what was the nature of it, as I was then ready to surrender myself and to meet it. Mr. Wright, who was present, appeared surprised at my application, and said he had not heard of any such thing, and he called Nadin, and asked him, if he had heard of any charge having been made against Mr. Hunt? Nadin, who appeared to be surprised at the question, replied, "none whatever." I then informed them that I understood the report to come from the police office, which induced me to attend for the purpose of ascertaining the fact. I was, I told them, then ready, and should at all times be ready, to meet any charge that had been or might be preferred against me; and, consequently, there could be no necessity to issue any warrant or summons whatever, as the slightest intimation of my conduct being called in question would always insure my attendance. Mr. Wright, as well as Nadin, professed they were perfectly satisfied of this, and appeared to shew to me all the polite attention that they were capable of showing. I left the Court House with the full assurance from them that there was no charge against me, nor, as far as they knew of, any person who designed to bring a charge against me. Although I was fully impressed with the treacherous and blood-thirsty characters of those with whom I had to deal; and, of course, was not wholly satisfied of the sincerity of their language, yet I was conscious of having in this instance performed an important duty to the public, by depriving the authorities of every fair pretence for interfering with the proceedings of the intended meeting. I therefore returned to Smedley Cottage, with the conviction upon my mind that I had done all that a man could do, or ought to do, upon such an occasion.
On Sunday morning intimation was brought to me that one Murry, a sort of spy of the police, had, early in the morning, been very much beaten and ill-used, for interrupting some persons, who had assembled on a neighbouring Moor, to practice the method in which they should come into Manchester, to join the meeting on the following day; their wish being to enter the town with that sort of regularity which should give the least possible room for complaint to the authorities. I was sorry to hear of this breach of the peace, as I foresaw that an advantage would be taken of the circumstance, to inflame the minds of those who were perhaps as yet only half bent upon the diabolical plot against the liberties of the people, and that it would be used as a plausible pretext to alarm the more timid part of those who are called the respectables of Manchester. I, therefore, passed the Sunday with that degree of anxiety which every person not wholly devoid of sensibility must have naturally felt for the result of the coming day.
Monday arrived, and a beautiful morning it was. From my bed-room I beheld the people, men, women, and children, accompanied by flags and bands of music, cheerfully passing along towards the place of meeting. Their appearance and manner altogether indicated that they were going to perform an important, a sacred duty to themselves and their country, by offering up a joint and sincere prayer to the Legislature to relieve the poor and needy, by rescuing them from the hands of the agents of the rich and powerful, who had oppressed and persecuted them. In fact, the conduct of the people, in every instance, was such, that none but devils in human form could ever have premeditated to do them any injury.