Chapter XII: The Last Labourers’ Revolt (1)

II

The bands of men and boys who had given their rulers one moment of excitement and lively interest in the condition of the poor had made themselves liable to ferocious penalties. For the privileged classes had set up a code under which no labourer could take a single step for the improvement of the lot of his class without putting his life and liberties in a noose. It is true that the savage laws which had been passed against combination in 1799 and 1800 had been repealed in 1824, and that even under the less liberal Act of the following year, which rescinded the Act of 1824, it was no longer a penal offence to form a Trades Union. But it is easy to see that the labourers who tried to raise their wages were in fact on a shelving and most perilous slope. If they used threats or intimidation or molested or obstructed, either to get a labourer to join with them or to get an employer to make concessions, they were guilty of a misdemeanour punishable with three months’ imprisonment. They were lucky if they ran no graver risk than this. Few of the prosecutions at the Special Commissions were under the Act of 1825. A body of men holding a meeting in a village where famine and unemployment were chronic, and where hardly any one had been taught to read or write, might very soon find themselves becoming what the Act of 1714 called a riotous assembly, and if a magistrate took alarm and read the Riot Act, and they did not disperse within one hour, every one of them might be punished as a felon. The hour’s interval did not mean an hour’s grace, for, as Mr. Justice Alderson told the court at Dorchester, within that hour ‘all persons, even private individuals, may do anything, using force even to the last extremity to prevent the commission of a felony.’

There were at least three ways in which labourers meeting together to demonstrate for higher wages ran a risk of losing their lives, if any of their fellows got out of hand from temper, or from drink, or from hunger and despair. Most of the prosecutions before the Special Commissions were prosecutions under three Acts of 1827 and 1828, consolidating the law on the subject of offences against property and offences against the person. Under the eighth section of one Act (7 and 8 George IV. c. 30), any persons riotously or tumultuously assembled together who destroyed any house, stable, coach-house, outhouse, barn, granary, or any building or erection or machinery used in carrying on any trade or manufacture were to suffer death as felons. In this Act there is no definition of riot, and therefore ‘the common law definition of a riot is resorted to, and in such a case if any one of His Majesty’s subjects was terrified there was a sufficient terror and alarm to substantiate that part of the charge.’[449] Under the sixth section of another Act, any person who robbed any other person of any chattel, money, or valuable security was to suffer death as a felon. Now if a mob presented itself before a householder with a demand for money, and the householder in fear gave even a few coppers, any person who was in that mob, whether he had anything to do with this particular transaction or not, whether he was aware or ignorant of it, was guilty of robbery, and liable to the capital penalty. Under section 12 of the Act of the following year, generally known as Lansdowne’s Act, which amended Ellenborough’s Act of 1803, it was a capital offence to attempt to shoot at a person, or to stab, cut, or wound him, with intent to murder, rob, or maim. Under this Act, as it was interpreted, if an altercation arose and any violence was offered by a single individual in the mob, the lives of the whole band were forfeit. This was put very clearly by Baron Vaughan: ‘There seems to be some impression that unless the attack on an individual is made with some deadly weapons, those concerned are not liable to capital punishment; but it should be made known to all persons that if the same injury were inflicted by a blow of a stone, all and every person forming part of a riotous assembly is equally guilty as he whose hand may have thrown it, and all alike are liable to death.’ Under section 4 of one Act of 1827 the penalty for destroying a threshing machine was transportation for seven years, and under section 17 the penalty for firing a rick was death. These were the terrors hanging over the village labourers of whom several hundreds were now awaiting their trial.

The temper of the judges was revealed in their charges to the Grand Juries. In opening the Maidstone Assizes on 14th December, Mr. Justice Bosanquet[450] declared that though there might be some distress it was much exaggerated, and that he was sure that those whom he had the honour to address would find it not only their duty but their pleasure to lend an ear to the wants of the poor.[451] Mr. Justice Taunton[452] was even more reassuring on this subject at the Lewes Assizes: the distress was less than it had been twelve months before. ‘I regret to say,’ he went on, ‘there are persons who exaggerate the distress and raise up barriers between different classes--who use the most inflammatory language--who represent the rich as oppressors of the poor. It would be impertinent in me to say anything to you as to your treatment of labourers or servants. That man must know little of the gentry of England, whether connected with the town or country, who represents them as tyrants to the poor, as not sympathising in their distress, and as not anxious to relieve their burdens and to promote their welfare and happiness.’[453] In opening the Special Commission at Winchester Baron Vaughan[454] alluded to the theory that the tumults had arisen from distress and admitted that it might be partly true, but, he continued, ‘every man possessed of the feelings common to our nature must deeply lament it, and endeavour to alleviate it (as you gentlemen no doubt have done and will continue to do), by every means which Providence has put within his power.’ If individuals were aggrieved by privations and injuries, they must apply to the Legislature, which alone could afford them relief, ‘but it can never be tolerated in any country which professes to acknowledge the obligations of municipal law, that any man or body of men should be permitted to sit in judgment upon their own wrongs, or to arrogate to themselves the power of redressing them. To suffer it would be to relapse into the barbarism of savage life and to dissolve the very elements by which society is held together.’[455] The opinions of the Bench on the sections of the Act (7 and 8 George IV. c. 30) under which men could be hung for assembling riotously and breaking machinery were clearly expressed by Mr. Justice Parke[456] (afterwards Lord Wensleydale) at Salisbury: ‘If that law ceases to be administered with due firmness, and men look to it in vain for the security of their rights, our wealth and power will soon be at an end, and our capital and industry would be transferred to some more peaceful country, whose laws are more respected or better enforced.’[457] By another section of that Act seven years was fixed as the maximum penalty for breaking a threshing machine. Mr. Justice Alderson[458] chafed under this restriction, and he told two men, Case and Morgan, who were found guilty at the Salisbury Special Commission of going into a neighbouring parish and breaking a threshing machine, that had the Legislature foreseen such crimes as theirs, it would have enabled the court to give them a severer sentence.[459]

Mr. Justice Park[460] was equally stern and uncompromising in defending the property of the followers of the carpenter of Nazareth against the unreasoning misery of the hour. Summing up in a case at Aylesbury, in which one of the charges was that of attempting to procure a reduction of tithes, he remarked with warmth: ‘It was highly insolent in such men to require of gentlemen, who had by an expensive education qualified themselves to discharge the sacred duties of a Minister of the Gospel, to descend from that station and reduce themselves to the situation of common labourers.’[461]

Few judges could resist the temptation to introduce into their charges a homily on the economic benefits of machinery. Mr. Justice Park was an exception, for he observed at Aylesbury that the question of the advantages of machinery was outside the province of the judges, ‘and much mischief often resulted from persons stepping out of their line of duty.’[462] Mr. Justice Alderson took a different view, and the very next day he was expounding the truths of political economy at Dorchester, starting with what he termed the ‘beautiful and simple illustration’ of the printing press.[463] The illustration must have seemed singularly intimate and convincing to the labourers in the dock who had never been taught their letters.

Such was the temper of the judges. Who and what were the prisoners before them? After the suppression of the riots, the magistrates could pick out culprits at their leisure, and when a riot had involved the whole of the village the temptation to get rid by this method of persons who for one reason or another were obnoxious to the authorities was irresistible. Hunt, speaking in the House of Commons,[464] quoted the case of Hindon; seven men had been apprehended for rioting and they were all poachers. Many of the prisoners had already spent a month in an overcrowded prison; almost all of them were poor men; the majority could not read or write.[465] Few could afford counsel, and it must be remembered that counsel could not address the court on behalf of prisoners who were being tried for breaking machines, or for belonging to a mob that asked for money or destroyed property. By the rules of the gaol, the prisoners at Salisbury were not allowed to see their attorney except in the presence of the gaoler or his servant. The labourers’ ignorance of the law was complete and inevitable. Many of them thought that the King or the Government or the magistrates had given orders that machines were to be broken. Most of them supposed that if a person from whom they demanded money threw it down or gave it without the application of physical force, there was no question of robbery. We have an illustration of this illusion in a trial at Winchester when Isaac Hill, junior, who was charged with breaking a threshing machine near Micheldever, for which the maximum penalty was seven years, pleaded in his defence that he had not broken the machine and that all that he did ‘was to ask the prosecutor civilly for the money, which the mob took from him, and the prosecutor gave it to him, and that he thanked him very kindly for it,’[466] an admission which made him liable to a death penalty. A prisoner at Salisbury, when he was asked what he had to say in his defence to the jury, replied: ‘Now, my Lord, I ‘se got nothing to say to ’em, I doant knaow any on ’em.’[467] The prisoners were at this further disadvantage that all the witnesses whom they could call as to their share in the conduct of a mob had themselves been in the mob, and were thus liable to prosecution. Thus when James Lush (who was afterwards selected for execution) and James Toomer appealed to a man named Lane, who had just been acquitted on a previous charge, to give evidence that they had not struck Mr. Pinniger in a scuffle, Mr. Justice Alderson cautioned Lane that if he acknowledged that he had been in the mob he would be committed. Lane chose the safer part of silence.[468] In another case a witness had the courage to incriminate himself. When the brothers Simms were being tried for extorting money from Parson Easton’s wife, a case which we have already described, Henry Bunce, called as a witness for the defence, voluntarily declared, in spite of a caution from the judge (Alderson), that he had been present himself and that William Simms did not use the expression ‘blood or money.’ He was at once ordered into custody. ‘The prisoner immediately sprung over the bar into the dock with his former comrades, seemingly unaffected by the decision of the learned judge.’[469]

Perhaps the darkest side of the business was the temptation held out to prisoners awaiting trial to betray their comrades. Immunity or a lighter sentence was freely offered to those who would give evidence. Stokes, who was found guilty at Dorchester of breaking a threshing machine, was sentenced by Mr. Justice Alderson to a year’s imprisonment, with the explanation that he was not transported because ‘after you were taken into custody, you gave very valuable information which tended greatly to further the ends of justice.’[470] These transactions were not often dragged into the daylight, but some negotiations of this character were made public in the trial of Mr. Deacle next year. Mr. Deacle, a well-to-do gentleman farmer, was tried at the Lent Assizes at Winchester for being concerned in the riots. One of the witnesses against him, named Collins, admitted in cross-examination that he believed he should have been prosecuted himself, if he had not promised to give evidence against Mr. Deacle; another witness, named Barnes, a carpenter, stated in cross-examination that during the trials at the Special Commission, ‘he being in the dock, and about to be put on his trial, the gaoler Beckett called him out, and took him into a room where there were Walter Long, a magistrate, and another person, whom he believed to be Bingham Baring, who told him that he should not be put upon his trial if he would come and swear against Deacle.’ When the next witness was about to be cross-examined, the counsel for the prosecution abruptly abandoned the case.[471]

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The first Special Commission was opened at Winchester with suitable pomp on 18th December. Not only the prison but the whole town was crowded, and the inhabitants of Winchester determined to make the best of the windfall. The jurymen and the _Times_ special correspondent complained bitterly of the abnormal cost of living, the latter mentioning that in addition to extraordinary charges for beds, 5s. a day was exacted for firing and tallow candles, bedroom fire not included. The three judges sent down as commissioners were Baron Vaughan, Mr. Justice Parke, and Mr. Justice Alderson. With them were associated two other commissioners, Mr. Sturges Bourne, of assistant overseer fame, and Mr. Richard Pollen. The Duke of Wellington, as Lord-Lieutenant, sat on the Bench. The Attorney-General, Mr. Sergeant Wilde, and others appeared to prosecute for the Crown. The County took up every charge, the Government only the more serious ones.

There were three hundred prisoners, most of them charged with extorting money by threats or with breaking machinery. What chance had they of a fair trial? They started with the disabilities already described. They were thrown by batches into the dock; the pitiless law was explained to the jury; extenuating circumstances were ruled out as irrelevant. ‘We do not come here,’ said Mr. Justice Alderson, ‘to inquire into grievances. We come here to decide law.’ But though evidence about wages or distress was not admitted, the judges did not scruple to give their own views of the social conditions which had produced these disturbances. Perhaps the most flagrant example was provided by a trial which happily was for a misdemeanour only. Seven men were indicted for conspiring together and riotously assembling for the purpose of raising wages and for compelling others to join them. The labourers of the parish of Fawley had combined together for two objects, the first to raise their wages, which stood at 9s. a week, the second to get rid of the assistant overseer, who had introduced a parish cart, to which he had harnessed women and boys, amongst others an idiot woman, named Jane Stevens. The labourers determined to break up the cart, but they desisted on the promise of a farmer that a horse should be bought for it. Lord Cavan was the large landowner of the parish. He paid his men as a rule 9s. a week, but two of them received 10s. The mob came up to his house to demand an increase of wages: Lord Cavan was out, quelling rioters elsewhere. Lady Cavan came down to see them. ‘Seeing you are my neighbours and armed,’ said she, ‘yet, as I am an unprotected woman, I am sure you will do no harm.’ The labourers protested that they meant no harm, and they did no harm. ‘I asked them,’ said Lady Cavan afterwards, in evidence, ‘why they rose then, there was no apparent distress round Eaglehurst, and the wages were the same as they had been for several years. I have been in several of their cottages and never saw any appearance of distress. They said they had been oppressed long and would bear it no longer.’ One man told her that he had 9s. a week wages and 3s. from the parish, he had heard that the 3s. was to be discontinued. With the common-sense characteristic of her class Lady Cavan assured him that he was not improving his position by idling. The labourers impressed the Cavan men, and went on their peaceful way round the parish. The farmers who gave evidence for the prosecution were allowed to assert that there was no distress, but when it came to evidence for the defence a stricter standard of relevancy was exacted. One witness for the prisoners said of the labourers: ‘The men were in very great distress; many of the men had only a few potatoes in their bag when they came to work.’ ‘The learned judges objected to this course of examination being continued: it might happen that through drinking a man might suffer distress.’ The Attorney-General, in his closing speech, asserted again that the prisoners did not seem to have been in distress. Baron Vaughan, in summing up, said that men were not to assemble and conspire together for the purpose of determining what their wages should be. ‘That which at first might be in itself a lawful act, might in the event become illegal.... A respectful statement or representation of their grievances was legal, and to which no one would object, but the evidence, if they believed it, showed that the conduct of this assembly was far from being respectful. No one could feel more for the distresses of the people than he did, but he would never endure that persons should by physical strength compel wages to be raised. There was no country where charity fell in a purer stream than in this. Let the man make his appeal in a proper and respectful manner, and he might be assured that appeal would never be heard in vain.... His Lordship spoke very highly of the conduct of Lady Cavan. She had visited the cottages of all those who lived in the neighbourhood, she knew they were not distressed, and she also felt confident from her kindness to them that they would not offer her any violence.’ All seven were found guilty; four were sentenced to six months hard labour, and three to three months.

Very few, however, of the cases at Winchester were simple misdemeanours, for in most instances, in addition to asking for higher wages, the labourers had made themselves liable to a prosecution for felony, either by breaking a threshing machine or by asking for money. Those prisoners who had taken part in the Fordingbridge riots, or in the destruction of machinery near Andover, or in the demolition of the Headley Workhouse, were sentenced to death or to transportation for life. Case after case was tried in which prisoners from different villages were indicted for assault and robbery. The features varied little, and the spectators began to find the proceedings monotonous. Most of the agricultural population of Hampshire had made itself liable to the death penalty, if the authorities cared to draw the noose. The three hundred who actually appeared in Court were like the men on whom the tower of Siloam fell.

A case to which the prosecution attached special importance arose out of an affair at the house of Mr. Eyre Coote. A mob of forty persons, some of whom had iron bars, presented themselves before Mr. Coote’s door at two o’clock in the morning. Two bands of men had already visited Mr. Coote that evening, and he had given them beer: this third band was a party of stragglers. Mr. Coote stationed his ten servants in the portico, and when the mob arrived he asked them, ‘What do you want, my lads?’ ‘Money,’ was the answer. ‘Money,’ said Mr. Coote, ‘you shan’t have.’ One of the band seemed to Mr. Coote about to strike him. Mr. Coote seized him, nine of the mob were knocked down and taken, and the rest fled. Six of the men were prosecuted for feloniously demanding money. Baron Vaughan remarked that outrages like this made one wonder whether one was in a civilised country, and he proceeded to raise its moral tone by sentencing all the prisoners to transportation for life, except one, Henry Eldridge, who was reserved for execution. He had been already capitally convicted of complicity in the Fordingbridge riots, and this attempt to ‘enter the sanctuary of Mr. Eyre Coote’s home’ following upon that crime, rendered him a suitable ‘sacrifice to be made on the altar of the offended justice’ of his country.

In many of the so-called robberies punished by the Special Commissions the sums taken were trifling. George Steel, aged eighteen, was sentenced to transportation for life for obtaining a shilling, when he was in liquor, from Jane Neale: William Sutton, another boy of eighteen, was found guilty of taking 4d. in a drunken frolic: Sutton, who was a carter boy receiving 1s. 6d. a week and his food, was given an excellent character by his master, who declared that he had never had a better servant. The jury recommended him to mercy, and the judges responded by sentencing him to death and banishing him for life. George Clerk, aged twenty, and E. C. Nutbean, aged eighteen, paid the same price for 3d. down and the promise of beer at the Greyhound. Such cases were not exceptional, as any one who turns to the reports of the trials will see.

The evidence on which prisoners were convicted was often of the most shadowy kind. Eight young agricultural labourers, of ages varying from eighteen to twenty-five, were found guilty of riotously assembling in the parish of St. Lawrence Wootten and feloniously stealing £2 from William Lutely Sclater of Tangier Park. ‘We want to get a little satisfaction from you’ was the phrase they used. Two days later another man, named William Farmer, was charged with the same offence. Mr. Sclater thought that Farmer was like the man in the mob who blew a trumpet or horn, but could not swear to his identity. Other witnesses swore that he was with the mob elsewhere, and said, ‘Money wa want and money wa will hae.’ On this evidence he was found guilty, and though Mr. Justice Alderson announced that he felt warranted in recommending that he should not lose his life, ‘yet, it was his duty,’ he continued, ‘to state that he should for this violent and disgraceful outrage be sent out of the country, and separated for life from those friends and connections which were dear to him here: that he should have to employ the rest of his days in labour, at the will and for the profit of another, to show the people of the class to which the prisoner belonged that they cannot with impunity lend their aid to such outrages against the peace and security of person and property.’

We have seen that at the time of the riots it was freely stated that the farmers incited the labourers to make disturbances. Hunt went so far as to say in the House of Commons that in nineteen cases out of twenty the farmers encouraged the labourers to break the threshing machines. The county authorities evidently thought it unwise to prosecute the farmers, although it was proved in evidence that there were several farmers present at the destruction of the Headley Workhouse, and at the demonstration at Mr. Cobbold’s house. Occasionally a farmer, in testifying to a prisoner’s character, would admit that he had been in a mob himself. In such cases the judge administered rebukes, but the prosecution took no action. There was, however, one exception. A small farmer, John Boys, of the parish of Owslebury, had thrown himself heartily into the labourers’ cause. A number of small farmers met and decided that the labourers’ wages ought to be raised. Boys agreed to take a paper round for signature. The paper ran as follows: ‘We the undersigned are willing to give 2s. per day for able-bodied married men, and 9s. per week for single men, on consideration of our rents and tithes being abated in proportion.’ In similar cases, as a rule, the farmers left it to the labourers to collect signatures, and Boys, by undertaking the work himself, made himself a marked man. He had been in a mob which extorted money from Lord Northesk’s steward at Owslebury, and for this he was indicted for felony. But the jury, to the chagrin of the prosecution, acquitted him. What followed is best described in the report of Sergeant Wilde’s speech in the House of Commons (21st July 1831). ‘Boyce was tried and acquitted: but he (Mr. Wilde) being unable to account for the acquittal, considering the evidence to have been clear against him, and feeling that although the jury were most respectable men, they might possibly entertain some sympathy for him in consequence of his situation in life, thought it his duty to send a communication to the Attorney-General, stating that Boyce was deeply responsible for the acts which had taken place: that he thought he should not be allowed to escape, and recommending that he be tried before a different jury in the other Court. The Attorney-General sent to him (Mr. Wilde) to come into the other Court, and the result was that Boyce was then tried and convicted.’ In the other more complaisant Court, Farmer Boys and James Fussell, described as a genteel young man of about twenty, living with his mother, were found guilty of heading a riotous mob for reducing rents and tithes and sentenced to seven years’ transportation.[472]

This was not the only case in which the sympathies of the jury created a difficulty. The Home Office Papers contain a letter from Dr. Quarrier, a Hampshire magistrate, who had been particularly vigorous in suppressing riots, stating that Sir James Parke discharged a jury at the Special Commission ‘under the impression that they were reluctant to convict the Prisoners which was more strongly impressed upon the mind of the Judge, by its being reported to his Lordship that “some of the Gosport Jurors had said, while travelling in the stage coach to Winchester, that they would not convict in cases where the Labourers had been driven to excess by Poverty and low Wages!” It was ascertained that some of those empannelled upon the acquitting Jury were from Gosport, which confirmed the learned Judge in the determination to discharge them.’[473]

An interesting feature of the trials at Winchester was the number of men just above the condition of agricultural labourers who threw in their lot with the poor: the village mechanics, the wheelwrights, carpenters, joiners, smiths, and the bricklayers, shoemakers, shepherds and small holders were often prominent in the disturbances. To the judges this fact was a riddle. The threshing machines had done these men no injury; they had not known the sting of hunger; till the time of the riots their characters had been as a rule irreproachable. _Nemo repente turpissimus fuit_, and yet apparently these persons had suddenly, without warning, turned into the ‘wicked and turbulent men’ of the archbishop’s prayer. Such culprits deserved, in the opinions of the bench, severer punishment than the labourers, whom their example should have kept in the paths of obedience and peace.[474] Where the law permitted, they were sentenced to transportation for life. One heinous offender of this type, Gregory, a carpenter, was actually earning 18s. a week in the service of Lord Winchester. But the most interesting instances were two brothers, Joseph and Robert Mason, who lived at Bullington. They rented three or four acres, kept a cow, and worked for the neighbouring farmers as well. Joseph, who was thirty-two, had a wife and one child; Robert, who was twenty-four, was unmarried. Between them they supported a widowed mother. Their characters were exemplary, and the most eager malice could detect no blot upon their past. But their opinions were dangerous: they regularly took in Cobbett’s _Register_ and read it aloud to twenty or thirty of the villagers. Further, Joseph had carried on foot a petition for reform to the king at Brighton from a hundred and seventy-seven ‘persons, belonging to the working and labouring classes’ of Wonston, Barton Stacey and Bullington, and was reported to have given some trouble to the king’s porter by an importunate demand for an audience. The recital of these facts gave rise to much merriment at his trial, and was not considered irrelevant by judges who ruled out all allusions to distress.[475] An interesting light is thrown on the history of this petition by a fragment of a letter, written by Robert Mason to a friend, which somehow fell into the hands of a Captain Thompson of Longparish, and was forwarded by him to the Home Office as a valuable piece of evidence.

‘_P.S._--Since I wrote the above I have saw and talked with two persons who say “Bullington Barton and Sutton has sent a petition and why not Longparish Hursborne and Wherwell send another.” I think as much, to be sure if we had all signed one, one journey and expense would have served but what is expence? Why I would engage to carry a Petition and deliver it at St. James for 30 shillings, and to a place like Longparish what is that? If you do send one pray do not let Church property escape your notice. There is the Church which cost Longparish I should think nearly £1500 yearly: yes and there is an old established Chaple which I will be bound does not cost £25 annually. For God sake....’ (illegible).

The first charge brought against the Masons was that of robbing Sir Thomas Baring’s steward of £10 at East Stretton. The money had been taken by one of the mobs; the Masons were acquitted. They were next put on their trial together with William Winkworth, a cobbler and a fellow reader of Cobbett, and ten others, for a similar offence. This time they were accused of demanding £2 or £5 from Mr. W. Dowden of Micheldever. The Attorney-General, in opening the case, drew attention to the circumstances of the Masons and Winkworth, saying that the offence with which they were charged was of a deeper dye, because they were men of superior education and intelligence. A humane clergyman, Mr. Cockerton, curate of Stoke Cheriton, gave evidence to the effect that if the men had been met in a conciliatory temper in the morning they would have dispersed. Joseph Mason and William Winkworth were found guilty, and sentenced, in the words of the judge, to ‘be cut off from all communion with society’ for the rest of their lives. Robert Mason was still unconvicted, but he was not allowed to escape. The next charge against him was that of going with a mob which extorted five shillings from the Rev. J. Joliffe at Barton Stacey. He admitted that he had accompanied the mob, partly because the labourers had urged him to do so, partly because he hoped that Mr. Joliffe, being accustomed to public speaking, would be able to persuade the labourers to disperse before any harm was done. There was no evidence to show that he had anything to do with the demand for money. He was found guilty and sentenced to transportation for life. When asked what he had to say for himself, he replied, ‘If the learned Counsel, who has so painted my conduct to you, was present at that place and wore a smock frock instead of a gown, and a straw hat instead of a wig, he would now be standing in this dock instead of being seated where he is.’

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Six men were reserved for execution, and told that they must expect no mercy on this side of the grave: Cooper, the leader in the Fordingbridge riots; Holdaway, who had headed the attack on Headley Workhouse; Gilmore, who had entered the justices’ room in Andover ‘in rather a violent manner’ and parleyed with the justices, and afterwards, in spite of their remonstrances, been a ringleader in the destruction of a foundry in the parish of Upper Clatford; Eldridge, who had taken part in the Fordingbridge riot and also ‘invaded the sanctuary’ of Mr. Eyre Coote’s home; James Aunalls, a lad of nineteen, who had extorted money at night with threats of a fire, from a person whom he bade look over the hills, where a fire was subsequently seen, and Henry Cook. Cook was a ploughboy of nineteen, who could neither read nor write. For most of his life, since the age of ten, he had been a farm hand. For six months before the riots he had been employed at sawing, at 10s. a week, but at the time of the rising he was out of work. After the riots he got work as a ploughboy at about 5s. a week till his arrest. Like the other lads of the neighbourhood he had gone round with a mob, and he was found guilty, with Joseph Mason, of extorting money from William Dowden. For this he might have got off with transportation for life, but another charge was preferred against him. Mr. William Bingham Baring, J.P., tried, with the help of some of his servants, to quell a riot at Northingdon Down Farm. Silcock, who seemed the leader of the rioters, declared that they would break every machine. Bingham Baring made Silcock repeat these words several times and then seized him. Cook then aimed a blow at Bingham Baring with a sledge-hammer and struck his hat. So far there was no dispute as to what had happened. One servant of the Barings gave evidence to the effect that he had saved his master’s life by preventing Cook from striking again; another afterwards put in a sworn deposition to the effect that Cook never attempted to strike a second blow. All witnesses agreed that Bingham Baring’s hat had suffered severely: some of them said that he himself had been felled to the ground. Whatever his injuries may have been, he was seen out a few hours later, apparently in perfect health; next day he was walking the streets of Winchester; two days later he was presented at Court, and within a week he was strong enough to administer a sharp blow himself with his stick to a handcuffed and unconvicted prisoner, a display of zeal for which he had to pay £50. Cook did not put up any defence. He was sentenced to death.

Perhaps it was felt that this victim to justice was in some respects ill chosen, for reasons for severity were soon invented. He was a heavy, stolid, unattractive boy, and his appearance was taken to indicate a brutal and vicious disposition. Stories of his cruelties to animals were spread abroad. ‘The fate of Henry Cook,’ said the _Times_ correspondent (3rd January 1831), ‘excites no commiseration. From everything I have heard of him, justice has seldom met with a more appropriate sacrifice. He shed some tears shortly after hearing his doom, but has since relapsed into a brutal insensibility to his fate.’ His age was raised to thirty, his wages to 30s. a week. Denman described him in the House of Commons, after his execution, as a carpenter earning 30s. a week, who had struck down one of the family of his benefactor, and had only been prevented from killing his victim by the interposition of a more faithful individual. This is the epitaph written on this obscure ploughboy of nineteen by the upper classes. His own fellows, who probably knew him at least as well as a Denman or a Baring, regarded his punishment as murder. Cobbett tells us that the labourers of Micheldever subscribed their pennies to get Denman’s misstatements about Cook taken out of the newspapers. When his body was brought home after execution, the whole parish went out to meet it, and he was buried in Micheldever churchyard in solemn silence.

Bingham Baring himself, as has been mentioned, happened to offend against the law by an act of violence at this time. He was not like Cook, a starving boy, but the son of a man who was reputed to have made seven millions of money, and was called by Erskine the first merchant in Europe. He did not strike his victim in a riot, but in cold blood. His victim could not defend himself, for he was handcuffed, being taken to prison on a charge on which he was subsequently acquitted. The man struck was a Mr. Deacle, a small farmer who had had his own threshing machine broken, and was afterwards arrested with his wife, by Bingham Baring and a posse of magistrates, on suspicion of encouraging the rioters. Deacle’s story was that Baring and the other magistrates concerned in the arrest treated his wife with great insolence in the cart in which they drove the Deacles to prison, and that Bingham Baring further struck him with a stick. For this Deacle got £50 damages in an action he brought against Baring. ‘This verdict,’ said the _Morning Herald_, ‘seemed to excite the greatest astonishment; for most of the Bar and almost every one in Court said, if on the jury, they would have given at least £5000 for so gross and wanton an insult and unfeeling conduct towards those who had not offered the least resistance; the defendants not addressing the slightest evidence in palliation or attempting to justify it.’ The judge, in summing up, ‘could not help remarking that the handcuffing was, to say the least of it, a very harsh proceeding towards a lady and gentleman who had been perfectly civil and quiet.’ Meanwhile the case of the magistrates against the Deacles had collapsed in the most inglorious manner. Though they had handcuffed these two unresisting people, they had thought it wiser not to proceed against them. Deacle, however, insisted on being tried, and by threatening the magistrates with an action, he obliged them to prosecute. He was tried at the Assizes, and, as we have seen, the trial came to an abrupt conclusion under circumstances that threw the gravest suspicion on the methods of the authorities.[476] Meanwhile the treatment these two persons had received (and we can imagine from their story how innocent poor people, without friends or position, were handled) had excited great indignation, and the newspapers were full of it. There were petitions sent up to Parliament for a Committee of Inquiry. Now the class to which Cook was unlucky enough to belong had never sent a single member to Parliament, but the Baring family had five Members in the House of Commons at this very moment, one of whom had taken part with Bingham Baring in the violent arrest of the Deacles. The five, moreover, were very happily distributed, one of them being Junior Lord of the Treasury in Grey’s Government and husband of Grey’s niece, and another an important member of the Opposition and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer under Peel. The Barings therefore were in less danger of misrepresentation or misunderstanding; the motion for a Committee was rejected by a great majority on the advice of Althorp and Peel; the leader of the House of Commons came forward to testify that the Barings were friends of his, and the discussion ended in a chorus of praise for the family that had been judged so harshly outside the walls of Parliament.

When the Special Commission had finished its labours at Winchester, 101 prisoners had been capitally convicted; of these 6 were left for execution. The remaining 95 were, with few exceptions, transported for life. Of the other prisoners tried, 36 were sentenced to transportation for various periods, 65 were imprisoned with hard labour, and 67 were acquitted. Not a single life had been taken by the rioters, not a single person wounded. Yet the riots in this county alone were punished by more than a hundred capital convictions, or almost double the number that followed the devilish doings of Lord George Gordon’s mob. The spirit in which Denman regarded the proceedings is illustrated by his speech in the House of Commons on the amnesty debate: ‘No fewer than a hundred persons were capitally convicted at Winchester, of offences for every one of which their lives might have been justly taken, and ought to have been taken, if examples to such an extent had been necessary.’[477]

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These sentences came like a thunderclap on the people of Winchester, and all classes, except the magistrates, joined in petitions to the Government for mercy. The _Times_ correspondent wrote as follows:--

‘WINCHESTER, Friday Morning, _7th Jan._

‘The scenes of distress in and about the jail are most terrible. The number of men who are to be torn from their homes and connexions is so great that there is scarcely a hamlet in the county into which anguish and tribulation have not entered. Wives, sisters, mothers, children, beset the gates daily, and the governor of the jail informs me that the scenes he is obliged to witness at the time of locking up the prison are truly heart-breaking.

‘You will have heard before this of the petitions which have been presented to the Home Office from Gosport, Portsmouth, Romsey, Whitchurch, and Basingstoke, praying for an extension of mercy to all the men who now lie under sentence of death. A similar petition has been got up in this city. It is signed by the clergy of the Low Church, some of the bankers, and every tradesman in the town without exception. Application was made to the clergy of the Cathedral for their signatures, but they refused to give them, except conditionally, upon reasons which I cannot comprehend. They told the petitioners, as I am informed, that they would not sign any such petition unless the grand jury and the magistracy of the county previously affixed their names to it. Now such an answer, as it appears to me, is an admission on their part that no mischief would ensue from not carrying into effect the dreadful sentence of the law; for I cannot conceive that if they were of opinion that mischief would ensue from it, they would sign the petition, even though it were recommended by all the talent and respectability of the Court of Quarter Sessions. I can understand the principles on which that man acts, who asserts and laments the necessity of vindicating the majesty of the law by the sacrifice of human life; but I cannot understand the reasons of those who, admitting that there is no necessity for the sword of justice to strike the offender, decline to call upon the executive government to stay its arm, and make their application for its mercy dependent on the judgment, or it may be the caprice, of an influential aristocracy. Surely, of all classes of society, the clergy is that which ought not to be backward in the remission of offences. They are daily preaching mercy to their flocks, and it wears but an ill grace when they are seen refusing their consent to a practical application of their own doctrines. Whatever my own opinion may be, as a faithful recorder of the opinions of those around me, I am bound to inform you, that, except among the magistracy of the county, there is a general, I had almost said a universal, opinion among all ranks of society, that no good will be effected by sacrificing human life.’[478]

This outburst of public opinion saved the lives of four of the six men who had been left for execution. The two who were hung were Cooper and Cook. But the Government and the judges were determined that the lessons of civilisation should not be wanting in impressiveness or in dignity. They compelled all the prisoners who had been condemned by the Commission to witness the last agonies of the two men whom public opinion had been unable to rescue. The account given in the _Times_ of 17th January shows that this piece of refined and spectacular discipline was not thrown away, and that the wretched comrades of the men who were hanged suffered as acutely as Denman or Alderson themselves could have desired. ‘At this moment I cast my eyes down into the felons’ yard, and saw many of the convicts weeping bitterly, some burying their faces in their smock frocks, others wringing their hands convulsively, and others leaning for support against the wall of the yard and unable to cast their eyes upwards.’ This was the last vision of English justice that each labourer carried to his distant and dreaded servitude, a scene that would never fade from his mind. There was much that England had not taught him. She had not taught him that the rich owed a duty to the poor, that society owed any shelter to the freedom or the property of the weak, that the mere labourer had a share in the State, or a right to be considered in its laws, or that it mattered to his rulers in what wretchedness he lived or in what wretchedness he died. But one lesson she had taught him with such savage power that his simple memory would not forget it, and if ever in an exile’s gilding dreams he thought with longing of his boyhood’s famine-shadowed home, that inexorable dawn would break again before his shrinking eyes and he would thank God for the wide wastes of the illimitable sea.

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The Special Commission for Wiltshire opened at Salisbury on 2nd January 1831. The judges were the same as those at Winchester; the other commissioners were Lord Radnor, the friend of Cobbett, and Mr. T. G. B. Estcourt. Lord Lansdowne, the Lord-Lieutenant, sat on the bench. The foreman of the Grand Jury was Mr. John Benett, who has already figured in these pages as the proprietor whose property was destroyed and the magistrate who committed the culprits. There were three hundred prisoners awaiting trial.

The method in which the prosecutions were conducted in Wiltshire, though it did not differ from the procedure followed in Hampshire and elsewhere, provoked some criticism from the lawyers. The prosecutions were all managed by the county authorities. The clerks of the committing magistrates in the different districts first took the depositions, and then got up all the prosecutions in their capacity of solicitors to the same magistrates prosecuting as county authorities, to the exclusion of the solicitors of the individual prosecutors. Further, all the prosecutions were managed for the county by a single barrister, who assisted the Attorney-General and left no opening for other members of the Bar. The counsel for one of the prisoners objected to this method, not only on the ground of its unfairness to the legal profession, but on the wider ground of the interests of justice. For it was inconsistent with the impartiality required from magistrates who committed prisoners, that they should go on to mix themselves up with the management of the prosecution; in many cases these magistrates served again as grand jurors in the proceedings against the prisoners. Such procedure, he argued ‘was calculated to throw at least a strong suspicion on the fair administration of justice.’ These protests, however, were silenced by the judges, and though the Attorney-General announced that he was willing that the counsel for the magistrates should retire, no change was made in the arrangements.

The Salisbury prisoners were under a further disadvantage peculiar, it is to be hoped, to that gaol. They were forbidden to see their attorney except in the presence of the gaoler or his servants. This rule seems to have been construed by the authorities in a manner that simplified considerably the task of the prosecution. The facts of the case of James Lush, condemned to death on two charges of extorting money in a mob, were made public by Hunt in a letter to the _Times_, 22nd January 1831. Lush was a very poor man, but when first committed he sent for an attorney and made a full confession. ‘This confession, so confidentially made to his attorney (by an extraordinary rule of the gaol) the legal adviser was compelled to submit to the inspection of the gaoler, which paper he kept in his hands for several days and in all human probability, this document, or a copy of it, was either submitted to the inspection of the judge, or placed in the hands of the prosecutor, the Crown Solicitor, or the Attorney-General: when this man was called up for trial, such was his extreme poverty, that he could not raise a guinea to fee counsel, and he was left destitute, without legal advice or assistance.’ The Attorney-General could only answer this charge in the House of Commons by declaring that he had no recollection of any such circumstance himself, and that no gentleman of the Bar would avail himself of information obtained in such a manner. Lush could not distinguish these niceties of honour, or understand why his confession should be examined and kept by the gaoler unless it was to be used against him, and it is not surprising that he thought himself betrayed. It is only fair to Lord Melbourne to add that when Hunt drew his attention to this iniquitous rule in Salisbury Gaol he had it abolished.

The cases tried were very similar to those at Winchester; batch after batch of boys and men in the prime of life were brought up to the dock for a brief trial and sentence of exile. Such was the haste that in one case at least the prisoners appeared with the handcuffs still on their wrists, a circumstance which elicited a rebuke from the judge, and an excuse of overwork from the gaoler. Amongst the first cases eight prisoners, varying in age from seventeen to thirty, were sentenced to transportation for life for doing £500 worth of damage at Brasher’s cloth mill at Wilton. Thirteen men were transported for seven years and one for fourteen years for breaking threshing machines on the day of the Pyt House affray. Mr. John Benett was satisfied with this tale of victims in addition to the man killed by the yeomanry, and refrained from prosecuting for the stones thrown at him. For this he took great credit in the House of Commons, and no doubt it was open to him to imitate Bingham Baring’s friends, and to talk of that kind of outrage as ‘murder.’