The incident occurred in an affray at Rockley near Marlborough. Mr. Baskerville, J.P., rode up with some special constables to a mob of forty or fifty men, Withers amongst them, and bade them go home. They refused, declaring that they did not care a damn for the magistrates. Mr. Baskerville ordered Mr. Codrington, who was a special constable, to arrest Withers. A general mêlée ensued, blows were given and received, and Codrington was hit by a hammer thrown by Withers. Withers’ own version of the affair was that Codrington attacked him without provocation in a ferocious manner with a hunting whip, loaded with iron at the end. Baskerville also struck him. He aimed his hammer at Codrington and it missed. Codrington’s horse then crushed him against the wall, and he threw his hammer a second time with better aim. There was nothing in the evidence of the prosecution to discredit this version, and both Baskerville and Codrington admitted that they might have struck him. Codrington’s injuries were apparently more serious than Bingham Baring’s; it was stated that he had been confined to bed for two or three days, and to the house from Tuesday to Saturday, and that he had a scar of one and a half inches on the right side of his nose. No surgeon, however, appeared as a witness, and the hammer was not produced in court. Withers was found guilty and reserved, together with Lush, for execution.
The special correspondent of the Times who had been present at Winchester made an interesting comparison between the Hampshire and the Wiltshire labourers on trial (8th January 1831). The Wiltshire labourers he described as more athletic in appearance and more hardy in manner. ‘The prisoners here turn to the witnesses against them with a bold and confident air: cross-examine them, and contradict their answers, with a confidence and a want of common courtesy, in terms of which comparatively few instances occurred in the neighbouring county.’ In this behaviour the correspondent detected the signs of a very low state of moral intelligence.
When the time came for the last scene in court there was no trace of the bold demeanour which had impressed the Times correspondent during the conduct of the trials. For the people of Wiltshire, like the people of Hampshire, were stunned by the crash and ruin of this catastrophic vengeance. The two men sentenced to death were reprieved, but one hundred and fifty-four men and boys were sentenced to transportation, thirty-three of them for life, the rest for seven or fourteen years, with no prospect of ever returning to their homes. And Alderson and his brother judges in so punishing this wild fling of folly, or hope, or despair, were not passing sentence only on the men and boys before them: they were pronouncing a doom not less terrible on wives and mothers and children and babes in arms in every village on the Wiltshire Downs. One man begged to be allowed to take his child, eight months old, into exile, for its mother had died in childbirth, and it would be left without kith or kin. He was told by the judge that he should have remembered this earlier. The sentence of final separation on all these families and homes was received with a frenzy of consternation and grief, and the judges themselves were affected by the spectacle of these broken creatures in the dock and round the court, abandoned to the unchecked paroxysms of despair.[479] ‘Such a total prostration of the mental faculties by fear,’ wrote the Times correspondent, ‘and such a terrible exhibition of anguish and despair, I never before witnessed in a Court of Justice.’ ‘Immediately on the conclusion of this sentence a number of women, who were seated in court behind the prisoners, set up a dreadful shriek of lamentation. Some of them rushed forward to shake hands with the prisoners, and more than one voice was heard to exclaim, “Farewell, I shall never see you more.”’
‘The whole proceedings of this day in court were of the most afflicting and distressing nature. But the laceration of the feelings did not end with the proceedings in court. The car for the removal of the prisoners was at the back entrance to the court-house and was surrounded by a crowd of mothers, wives, sisters and children, anxiously waiting for a glance of their condemned relatives. The weeping and wailing of the different parties, as they pressed the hands of the convicts as they stepped into the car, was truly heartrending. We never saw so distressing a spectacle before, and trust that the restored tranquillity of the country will prevent us from ever seeing anything like it again.’
The historian may regret that these men do not pass out before him in a cold and splendid defiance. Their blind blow had been struck and it had been answered; they had dreamt that their lot might be made less intolerable, and the governing class had crushed that daring fancy for ever with banishment and the breaking of their homes; it only remained for them to accept their fate with a look of stone upon their faces and a curse of fire in their hearts. So had Muir and Palmer and many a political prisoner, victims of the tyrannies of Pitt and Dundas, of Castlereagh and Sidmouth, gone to their barbarous doom. So had the Lantenacs and the Gauvains alike gone to the guillotine. History likes to match such calm and unshaken bearing against the distempered justice of power. Here she is cheated of her spectacle. Outwardly it might seem a worse fate for men of education to be flung to the hulks with the coarsest of felons: for men whose lives had been comfortable to be thrust into the dirt and disorder of prisons. But political prisoners are martyrs, and martyrs are not the stuff for pity. However bitter their sufferings, they do not suffer alone: they are sustained by a Herculean comradeship of hopes and of ideas. The darkest cage is lighted by a ray from Paradise to men or women who believe that the night of their sufferings will bring a dawn less cold and sombre to mankind than the cold and sombre dawn of yesterday. But what ideas befriended the ploughboy or the shepherd torn from his rude home? What vision had he of a nobler future for humanity? To what dawn did he leave his wife or his mother, his child, his home, his friends, or his trampled race? What robe of dream and hope and fancy was thrown over his exile or their hunger, his poignant hour of separation, or their ceaseless ache of poverty and cold
‘to comfort the human want
From the bosom of magical skies’?
The three judges who had restored respect for law and order in Wiltshire and Hampshire next proceeded to Dorchester, where a Special Commission to try the Dorsetshire rioters was opened on 11th January. The rising had been less serious in Dorset than in the two other counties, and there were only some fifty prisoners awaiting trial on charges of machine-breaking, extorting money and riot. The Government took no part in the prosecutions; for, as it was explained in a letter to Denman, ‘the state of things is quite altered; great effect has been produced: the law has been clearly explained, and prosecutions go on without the least difficulty.’[480] Baron Vaughan and Mr. Justice Parke had given the charges at Winchester and Salisbury: it was now the turn of Mr. Justice Alderson, and in his opening survey of the social conditions of the time he covered a wide field. To the usual dissertation on the economics of machinery he added a special homily on the duties incumbent on the gentry, who were bidden to discourage and discountenance, and if necessary to prosecute, the dangerous publications that were doing such harm in rural districts. But their duties did not end here, and they were urged to go home and to educate their poorer neighbours and to improve their conditions. The improvement to be aimed at, however, was not material but moral. ‘Poverty,’ said Mr. Justice Alderson, ‘is indeed, I fear, inseparable from the state of the human race, but poverty itself and the misery attendant on it, would no doubt be greatly mitigated if a spirit of prudence were more generally diffused among the people, and if they understood more fully and practised better their civil, moral and religious duties.’