CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH.PETERLOO.
PEOPLE had been naturally sanguine that the conclusion of peace would inaugurate prosperity, that commerce would flourish with the flourish of pens on the parchments of a treaty. But the war had been of too long continuance, too universal, too destructive of life and property and crops. When grounds lie untilled for years: when swords reap harvests that should have been left for the sickle; when cattle are slaughtered wholesale for unproductive soldiery, or for lack of provender; when orchards and vineyards which have taken years to mature are given to the flames, there can be no sudden re-adjustment of commercial matters. Food products are the staple of trade, which is only a system of exchange facilitated by coin and paper.
What could a food-producing continent, down-trod by the iron hoof of war, have to offer in exchange for our textile fabrics and hardware?
Trade could not revive, until there was food to sustain it. Yet the mass of the people in 1816, still further impoverished by a deficient home harvest, imputed the evil to defective legislation, and the exclusion of foreign corn save at famine prices; and discontent became universal.
Strangely enough, the agricultural districts which the Corn Laws were supposed to protect, were the first to cry out against them, and to break out into riot—not Manchester, Oldham, Nottingham, and the manufacturing centres.
This year closed on a popular demand for Parliamentary reform, but not a riotous one. Sunday schools had created readers on humble hearths, and William Cobbett supplied them with books and pamphlets bearing on their own rights and wrongs. They were read with avidity, and he became a power. He counselled peaceful persistence, not armed resistance.Hampden Clubs were formed all over the country, in which the political questions of the day were discussed with as much freedom as stringent law permitted. Public speakers and poets, of whom Samuel Bamford was one, arose from the ranks of the working classes; and the men banded together under such leadership called themselves Radical Reformers, a title which soon degenerated into Radicals.
The members of these rapidly-spreading clubs subscribed a penny a week each. Delegates were sent to meet and debate together; and on the 4th November, 1816, a large meeting was held in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester (strangely enough, the site of the present Free Trade Hall), “to take into consideration the distressed state of the country.”
Other meetings were held by the Reformers and their delegates; and on the 13th January, 1817, their political opponents held a counter-meeting, to consider the “necessity of adopting measures for the maintenance of the public peace;” for certainly the meeting of large masses of disaffected people, however peacefully disposed in the outset, and individually, becomes threatening in the aggregate. No one cares much for a grain of gunpowder; but mass the grains into pounds, and the pounds into tons, and there is certainly need of precaution in dealing with it.
Amongst the precautionary measures deemed necessary for the protection of the peace, and the suppression of seditious meetings, were the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the enrolment of the Manchester and Cheshire Yeomanry Cavalry, under the command of Sir T. J. Trafford; Laurence Aspinal, Ben Travis, and John Walmsley joining the corps.
On the 24th of March—since known as Blanket Monday—a large number of men assembled in St. Peter’s Field, with blankets upon their shoulders, with the openly-expressed design of walking to London, to lay their grievances before George, the Prince Regent, in person. The blankets were intended for coverlets on the wayside beds Mother Earth alone would spread for them. The meeting was dispersed by military, the newly-formed Yeomanry distinguishing themselves by trapping a number of the Blanketeers who had prematurely set out, and who had not got farther than Stockport.
This was the signal for widespread alarm, and for Joseph Nadin to prove his discrimination and vigilance by scenting out imaginary plots, and arresting suspected plotters, whom he tied together, handcuffed, ill-used, and hauled to prison, orbefore magistrates (whether for acquital or conviction), for little other reason than the dangerous power given by the suspension of the Habeas Corpus. He was a big, blustering, overbearing fellow, with a large grizzled head, closely set on strong broad shoulders, with overhanging brows drawn close, and a sallow skin; and his officious zeal in arresting such persons as Samuel Bamford the weaver-poet, Thomas Walker, and the amateur actors he laid hands on at a public house in Ancoats-lane, laying to their charge plots which had their origin in his own brain, did more to embitter the people against their rulers than those dust-blinded rulers suspected.
The Radical agitation reached its climax in 1819, when our friend Jabez was a well-formed, well-favoured young man of twenty, high in the estimation of his master and mistress. Popular rights had found a fresh champion in Henry Hunt, the son of a well-descended Wiltshire yeoman, a man of gentlemanlike bearing and attire, agreeable features mobile in expression, and dull grey eyes which lit like fiery stars when in the fervour of his speech his soul shone out of them.
“Orator Hunt,” as he was ironically dubbed by those who loved him not, was the very man to move the people as he himself was moved; his energy and fervid eloquence carried his hearers with him, and as he was wont to lash himself to a fury which streaked his pale eyes with blood, and forced them forward in their sockets, no wonder the Manchester magnates were afraid of his influence on the multitude, or that the Prince Regent should issue a proclamation against seditious meetings and writings, or the military drilling of the populace, then carried on with so fervid an orator to inflame them.
When Henry Hunt made a public entry into Manchester, and attended the theatre the same evening, a disturbance ensued, and he was expelled, and the next evening the theatre was closed, to preserve peace. Then a Watch-and-Ward, composed of the chief inhabitants, was established; a meeting called by the Radicals was prohibited; but that did not deter the calling of another on St. Peter’s Field, on the 16th of August, when a couple of large wagons were boarded over to serve as temporary hustings, whence Orator Hunt from the midst of his friends might address the assembled multitude.
Augusta Ashton had just passed her fifteenth birthday. She was slim, graceful, and tall beyond her age, and was surpassing lovely. She was still under Mrs. Broadbent’s care, and went to school that morning as usual, other meetings having passedoff quietly, and no apprehension of disorder being entertained until long after nine o’clock.
About that hour the people began to assemble from all quarters on the open ground near St. Peter’s Church—not bloodthirsty roughs, but men, women, and children, drawn thither for a sight of a holiday spectacle. True, of the collective eighty thousand, though there were many thousands of earnest, thinking men who went to grapple with important questions, yet no such mighty gathering could be without its leaven of savagery and mischief.
But those who went from the mills and the workshops, the hills and the valleys around Manchester, walking in procession, with bugles playing and gay banners flying, though they might look haggard, pinched and careworn, made no attempt to look deplorable, or excite compassion. They wore their Sunday suits and clean neckties; and by the side of fustian and corduroy walked the coloured prints and stuffs of wives and sweethearts, who went as for a gala-day, to break the dull monotony of their lives, and to serve as a guarantee of peaceable intention.
Such at least was the main body, marshalled in Middleton by stalwart, stout hearted Samuel Bamford, which passed in marching order, five abreast, down Newton Lane, through Oldham Street, skirted the Infirmary Gardens, and along Mosley Street, each leader with a sprig of peaceful laurel in his hat. Women and little ones preceded them, or ran on the footway, singing, dancing, shouting gleefully in the bright sunshine, as at any other pageant to which the music of the bugle gave life and spirit, and waving flags gave colour.
Such too were the bands which, with banners and music, fell in with them on their route, and together parted the dense multitude as a wedge, on their way to the decorated platform. Thence Samuel Bamford observed that other leaders had been less temperate. There were to be seen black banners and placards inscribed with seditious mottoes and emblems: caps of liberty, skull and crossbones, “Bread or Blood,” “Liberty or Death,” “Equal Representation or Death;” this last with an obverse of clasped hands and heart, and the one word “Love,” but all of the same funereal black and white.
But ere he could well note or deplore this, the scattered bands struck up “God save the King,” and “Rule, Britannia,” deafening shouts rent the air, and Henry Hunt, drawn in an open barouche by white horses, made his way slowly to thehustings amidst the enthusiastic cheering of the multitude. A Mrs. Fildes, arrayed in white, with a cap of liberty on her head, and a red cap borne on a pole before her, sat on the box-seat. It is said she had been hoisted there from the crowd. Be this as it may, she paid dearly for her temerity before the day was out.
Barely had Henry Hunt ascended the platform, taken off his white hat, and begun to address his attentive auditory, when there was a startling cry, “The soldiers are upon us!” and the 15th Hussars, galloping round a corner, came with their spare jackets flying loose, their sabres drawn, and threw themselves men and horse, upon the closely-packed mass, without a note of warning. All had been preconcerted, pre-arranged.
From the early morning, magistrates had been sitting in conclave at the “Star Inn,” and there Hugh Birley, a cotton-spinner, was said to have regaled too freely the officers and men of his yeomanry corps, so soon to be let loose on the “swinish multitude,” as they called them.
A cordon of military and yeomanry had been drawn round St. Peter’s Field, like a horde of wolves round a flock of sheep. The boroughreeve and other magistrates issued their orders from a house at the corner of Mount Street, which overlooked the scene; and thence (not from a central position, where he could be properly seen and heard) a clerical magistrate read the Riot Act from a window in an inaudible voice.
Then Nadin, the cowardly bully, having a warrant to apprehend the ringleaders—although he had a line of constables thence to the hustings,—declared hedarednot serve it without the support of the military.
His plea was heard; and thus through the blindness, the incapacity, the cowardice, or the self-importance of this one man, soldiery hardened in the battle-field, yeomanry fired with drink, were let loose like barbarians on a closely-wedged mass of unarmed people, and one of the most atrocious massacres in history was the result.
Amid the shouts and shrieks of men and women, cries of “Shame! shame!” “Break! break!” “They are killing them in front!” “Break! break!” hussars, infantry, yeomanry rushed on the defenceless people. They were sabred, stabbed, shot, pressed down, trampled down by horse and infantry; and in less than ten minutes, the actual field was cleared of all but mounds of dead and dying, severed limbs, torn garments, pools of blood, pawing steeds and panting heroes(?). Men andmaidens, mothers and babes, had been butchered by their own countrymen for no crime.
Hunt had been taken, Bamford had escaped—to be arrested afterwards—and Mrs. Fildes, hanging suspended by a nail in the platform which had caught her white dress, was slashed across her exposed body by one of the brave cavalry.
But the butchery and the panic had spread from the deserted Aceldama over the whole town; and the roar of cannon began to add its thunder to the terrors of the day. As the first shrieking fugitives rushed for their lives down Mosley Street, with the Manchester and Cheshire Yeomanry in swift pursuit, Mrs. Ashton, for the first time alarmed for the safety of Augusta, hurried through the warehouse in search of Mr. Ashton, who was nowhere to be found. On the stairs she met Jabez in a state of equal excitement.
“Miss Augusta! Is she at school? Had I not better——”
“Oh, yes! Run! run!” cried the mother, anticipating him. “Go through the back streets, and take her to her aunt’s. It is not safe to bring her home.”
He was gone before she concluded. (His master’s daughter was the very light of his young eyes). From Back Mosley Street he tore down Rook Street and Meal Street, into Fountain Street, across Market Street—already in a ferment—and onward down High Street without a pause.
By good fortune he met the young girl and a school-fellow, on their usual homeward route, at the corner of Church Street, almost afraid to proceed, the distant firing had so scared them.
“This way, this way, Miss Ashton!” was his impetuous cry, as he hurried them from the main thoroughfare (into which a stream of terror-stricken people was flowing), through by-streets, and a long entry to the back door of Mr. Chadwick’s house, which they found unfastened; and then he thanked God in his heart of hearts that she at least was safe.
Upstairs rushed Augusta, followed by her friend, in search of her aunt and cousin, whom she found in the drawing-room in a state of the greatest trepidation and alarm.
Dolly, a stout woman-servant, had gone to Fountain Street, as was her custom, to assist her paralysed master home to dinner. From the windows they had seen men, women, and children flying along, hatless, bonnetless, shoeless, their clothes rent, their faces livid and ghastly, cut and bleeding, shriekingin pain and terror as they ran or dropped in the path of pursuing troopers; and their hearts throbbed wildly with affright as they pictured that helpless old man caught in that whirlpool of horror and destruction with only a woman’s arm to protect him.
“Jabez will go and meet them,” cried Augusta; “he is below!”
“Jabez!” exclaimed Ellen, starting to her feet, her white face flushed for a brief moment. “Oh, no!”
But without waiting to hear her cousin’s exclamation, or to note her change of colour, Augusta had run downstairs to Jabez, waiting in the long kitchen, and communicated her aunt’s fears to him.
Personal danger was unthought of when Augusta Ashton pointed to needful service. The lobby door closed after him with a bang before she had well explained her wishes; and when Augusta re-appeared in the drawing-room, Ellen Chadwick’s head was stretched from the window, watching the sturdy young man stem the on-rushing tide of humanity—the only one in all that crowd with his face turned towards the danger from which the rest fled in desperation.
The sights and sounds that met her eyes and ears were terrible: gashed faces and maimed limbs; appeals and imprecations mingled with the roar of a surging crowd; the dropping fire of musketry; the coarse shouts of the yeomanry, drunk with wine and blood!
As her fearful eyes followed Jabez, a man rushed past whose hand had been chopped off at the wrist. With the remaining hand he held his hat to catch the vital stream which gushed from the bleeding stump; and as he ran, he cried, “Blood for blood! blood for blood!” in a tone which made her shudder.
Faint and sick, she drew back her head; but open apprehension for her dear father, and secret fear for the apprentice who had gone so readily to pilot him through that surging human sea, caused her to look forth once more. Augusta and her friend, with blanched cheeks and lips, were also at the window, fascinated as it were with that which chilled them.
Jabez turned the corner into Piccadilly, where one or two good houses had been converted into shops without lowering the floors, or removing the original palisades, which enclosed bold flights of steps leading to doors with good shop-windows on each side. A confectioner of some standing named Mabbott occupied the second of these. He and his neighbourwere hurriedly putting up their shutters as Jabez, crushing his way through the thickening crowd, saw Molly and Mr. Chadwick jammed up against the palisades, a young mounted yeomanry officer, in all his pride of blue and silver, brandishing his sabre, urging his unwilling steed upon them, and shouting—
“Move on, you rebels, move on! or I’ll cut you down!”
Strong of nerve and will, Jabez thrust the impending throng aside, and grasped the horse’s reins to force it back, crying as he did so—
“Shame, you coward! to attack a woman and a paralysed man!”
“Come in here, quick, Mr. Chadwick!” cried Mr. Mabbott at that instant, opening his closed gate and drawing the feeble gentleman and his attendant within, as the sabre, raised either to terrify or strike the old man, came down on the outstretched arm of Jabez, gashing it frightfully.
Another of the corps riding past, with his eyes full upon them, stopped his horse at the gallop as if to interpose, but he was too late.
“My God! Aspinall, what have you done?” he exclaimed, and throwing his own reins over the palisades, he dismounted hastily, caught at Jabez, who had staggered back, and drew him too within the iron screen, and helped him also into the confectioner’s, as the other, with a derisive laugh which ill-became his handsome face, turned at a hand-gallop up Oldham Street, where he overtook aconfrere, and with him sneered at “that soft-hearted Ben Travis.”
Ellen and Augusta had not lost sight of Jabez many minutes when two of the Manchester Yeomanry, their dripping sabres flashing in the August sun, wheeled their panting chargers round, and rode (heedless of the shrinking wretches beneath their hoofs) across the footway, and made the brute beasts rear and plunge against the area-rails.
“Shut your windows, or we’ll fire upon you!” they shouted.
Nothing daunted, Ellen called back indignantly—
“John Walmsley, I’m ashamed of you!”
Not sober enough to distinguish friends from foes, again the pair launched their threat, “Shut the window, or we fire!” and Ellen, seeing pistols advanced, drew the window down, Mrs. Chadwick in much trepidation closing the other.
“Who was that handsome officer with John?” asked Augusta, as they drew back, “he’s a perfect Adonis.” (Augustadipped surreptitiously into Mrs. Edge’s novels at times, and a handsome man in uniform was, of course, a hero in her eyes).
“Oh, Augusta, how can you talk of handsome officers at such a fearful time?” remonstrated Ellen. “I think them hideous, every one!”
“But who is he? Do you know him?” she asked, even through the tears drawn by the scenes she beheld.
“Oh, yes; know him? yes. He’s a friend of John Walmsley. He’s too wild to please either Charlotte or me!—Oh, mother! I do wish father had come home!” and Ellen turned a worried look towards Mrs. Chadwick, whose rigid face and clasped hands betrayed the anxiety which kept her silent.
Augusta, though not naturally void of feeling, longed to know more of the handsome yeomanry officer who had so captivated her young fancy; but that was not the season for such inquiries, and she was conscious of it.
“Hark! what is that?” burst from Mrs. Chadwick, some half-hour later, as the sound of feet was heard from below; and Ellen, rushing to the stairs, came back followed by her father leaning on the arm of a big muscular man, in the blue and silver uniform of the yeomanry cavalry, a red cord down his pantaloons, hessian boots, and, to make assurance sure, M.Y.C. upon the shako which his height compelled him to doff ere he entered the doorway.
“Where is Jabez Clegg?” faltered Ellen, as she pressed to her father’s side, led him to his chair, and placed his cushions to his liking, Augusta bringing a buffet on which to rest his foot.
The stalwart young fellow’s eyes followed the attentive daughter, as he answered—
“We have left Jabez Clegg at Mr. Mabbott’s, Miss Chadwick,” with an inclination of his head. “He was afraid you would be anxious for your father’s safety, and I offered to see Mr. Chadwick home in his stead.”
Ellen’s black eyes expanded questioningly, and Mrs. Chadwick’s mild voice, in accents indicative of some fear, asked—
“I hope not of necessity, sir?”
“Well, yes, madam; and I must hasten back; he has received a sabre-cut on—— Eh, dear!”
Ben Travis, for he it was, darted forward to catch Ellen Chadwick, just as he had previously caught Jabez at Mabbott’s gate:—Aspinall’s sabre had wounded two instead of one—Ellen Chadwick, who that day had seen what sabre-cuts meant, hadfainted. Ben Travis bore her to the sofa, Mr. Chadwick pulled the bell-rope, Augusta ran for water, Mrs. Chadwick called for vinegar and burnt feathers, and in the midst of the commotion Mr. Ashton burst into the room in a state of excitement very foreign to his nature, which was tolerably easy-going.
“Thank God, Augusta, you are here!” he exclaimed. “Your mother is almost distracted about you—Why, what is the matter with Ellen? The whole world seems gone mad to-day—or hell has set its demons loose. I’ve just seen our friend Captain Hindley’s horse take fright in Mosley Street at the firing, and dash with him against those half-built houses at the corner of Tib Street. He was pitched off amongst the bricks and scaffolding, and the horse dropped. Old Simon Clegg happened to be there, and he helped me and another to raise Hindley, who had fared better than his horse, for it was stone-dead, and he is only badly hurt.”
He had gone on talking, though hardly anyone had listened to him. Ellen’s fainting fit engrossed feminine attention, and the yeoman, seeing her revive, was saying to Mr. Chadwick, “You will excuse me now, sir. I must look after our poor friend Jabez.”
“Eh what! Jabez? You don’t mean to say anything has happened to Jabez Clegg?” exclaimed Mr. Ashton, pausing in the act of drawing forth his snuff-box.
Travis was gone, but Mr. Chadwick, whose tongue now was none of the readiest, stammered out—
“Yes, William, w-we le-ft him at Mab-bott the confectioner’s. In try-ying to-o save me he got b-badly w-wounded. I’m v-very s-sorry, for he is a n-noble y-young man.”
“The wretches! I’d almost as soon they’d wounded me! Stay here, Augusta;” and with that Mr. Ashton was off after Ben Travis. The main streets were unsafe, so he also took the back way, and across Back-Piccadilly to Mr. Mabbott’s, with a celerity scarcely to have been expected, for he was not a young man. But his apprentice had won upon him not only by his integrity and business qualifications, but by his manifest interest in the family he served, especially the daughter. Let me not be misunderstood. Augusta was the cynosure of Mr. Ashton’s eyes; the homage of the apprentice to the school-girl, he estimated as the homage of an apprentice merely, and was gratified thereby, but his imagination never travelled beyond.
He found Jabez on a chintz-covered couch in Mr. Mabbott’s sitting-room, his arm bound tightly with a towel, through which the blood would force its way. He was pale and exhausted from excessive hæmorrhage, but seemed more concerned about the fate of the multitude outside than for his own.
Ben Travis, discovering that no one had dared to venture in quest of a doctor, threw himself across his horse, which he found where he had left it, and was off up Mosley Street and thence back to Piccadilly, intent on bringing either Dr. Hull or Dr. Hardie. His uniform was a protection, and so the doctors told him; Dr. Hardie plainly saying that black cloth was not plate-armour, and that his friend, whosoever he might be, must wait until the tumult had somewhat subsided.
But Jabez was only a few hours without attention. There were hundreds wounded that day, who had to skulk into holes and corners to hide themselves and their agony as best they might, afraid of seeking surgical aid, lest Nadin and his myrmidons should pounce upon them, and haul them to prison as rebels.