[263]Lord Melbourne’s Papers, pp. 147-150, letters dated November 3 and 7, 1832. Lord Melbourne seems to have thought, probably quite incorrectly, that these rural organisations were in connection with the political organisation called the National Union of the Working Classes, founded by William Lovett in 1831, to support the Reform Bill.
[264]Times, March 20, 1834.
[265]Lord Melbourne’s Papers, p. 158.
[266]Times, March 18, 20, 31; April 1, 16, 19, 1834; Leeds Mercury, April 26, 1834.
[267]A prominent Owenite agitator of the time, incumbent of St. Nicholas, Warwick, who is said to have been inhibited from preaching by his bishop.
[268]Times, April 22; Companion to the Newspaper, May and June 1834. Trade Union accounts declare that 100,000 to 200,000 persons were present. A detailed description of the day is given in Somerville’s Autobiography of a Working Man(1848), not usually a trustworthy work.
[269]Times, April 19, 1834.
[270]The agitation for their release was kept up, both in and out of Parliament, by the “London Dorchester Committee”; and in 1836 the remainder of the sentence was remitted. Through official blundering it was two years later (April 1838) before five out of the six prisoners returned home. The sixth, as we learn from a circular of the Committee, dated August 20, 1838, had even then not arrived. “Great and lasting honour,” writes a well-informed contemporary, “is due to this body of workmen (the London Dorchester Committee), about sixteen in number, by whose indefatigable exertions, extending over a period of five years, and the valuable assistance of Thomas Wakley, M.P. for Finsbury, the same Government who banished the men were compelled to pardon them and bring them home free of expense. From the subscriptions raised by the working classes during this period, amounting to about £1300, the Committee, on the return of the men, were enabled to place five of them, with their families, in small farms in Essex, the sixth preferring (with his share of the fund) to return to his native place.” (Article in the British Statesman, April 9, 1842, preserved in Place MSS. 27820—320.) See also House of Commons Return, No. 191 of 1837 (April 12); and Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. xxxii. p. 253.
[271]The series of “Initiation Parts,” or forms to be observed on admission of new members, which are preserved in the archives of the Stonemasons’ Society, reveal the steady tendency to simplification of ritual. We have first the old MS. doggerel already described, dating probably from 1832. The first print of 1834, whilst retaining a good deal of the ceremonial, turns the liturgy into prose and the oath into an almost identical “declaration,” invoking the “dire displeasure” of the Society in case of treachery. The second print, which bears no date, is much shorter; and the declaration becomes a mere affirmation of adhesion. The Society’s circulars of 1838 record the abolition, by vote of the members, of all initiation ceremonies, in view of the Parliamentary Inquiry about to be held into Trade Unionism. But even the simplified form of 1838 retains, in its reference to the workmen as “the real producers of all wealth,” an unmistakable trace of the Owenite spirit of the Builders’ Union of 1832.
[272]Times, April 30 to June 10; House of Lords debate, April 28; Globe, May 21, 1834; Home Office Papers, May 10, 1834, 40—32; The Tailoring Trade, by F. W. Galton, 1896.