Chapter XII: The Last Labourers’ Revolt (2)

At Salisbury, as at Winchester, evidence about distress and wages was ruled out by the judges whenever possible; thus when twelve men, nine of whom were afterwards transported for seven years, were being tried for breaking a threshing machine on the farm of a man named Ambrose Patience, the cross-examination of Patience, which aimed at eliciting facts about wages and distress, was stopped by the court on the ground that in a case of this sort such evidence was scarcely regular; it was intimated, however, that the court would hear representations of this kind later. But some light was thrown incidentally in the course of the trials on the circumstances of the prisoners. Thus one of the Pyt House prisoners urged in his defence: ‘My Lord, I found work very bad in my own parish for the last three years, and having a wife and three children to support I was glad to get work wherever I could get it. I had some work at a place four miles from my house.’ He then described how on his way to work he was met by the mob and forced to join them. ‘It is a hard case with me, my Lord; I was glad to get work though I could earn only seven shillings per week, and it cost me a shilling a week for iron, so that I had only six shillings a week to support five persons.’ Another prisoner, Mould of Hatch, was stated by Lord Arundel to be very poor: he had a wife and six children, of whom one or two had died of typhus since his committal. They had nothing to live on but what they got at Lord Arundel’s house. The benevolent Lord Arundel, or the parish, must have supported the survivors indefinitely, for Mould was exiled for seven years. Barett again, another of these prisoners, was supporting himself, a wife, and a child on 5s. a week. The usual rate of wages in Wiltshire was 7s. a week.

Evidence about the instigation of the labourers by those in good circumstances was also ruled out, and much that would be interesting in the history of the riots has thus perished. When six men were being prosecuted for breaking a threshing machine on the farm of Mr. Judd at Newton Toney, counsel for the defence started a cross-examination of the prosecutor designed to show that certain landowners in the parish had instigated the labourers to the outrages, but he was stopped by Mr. Justice Alderson, who declared that such an inquiry was not material to the issue, which was the guilt or innocence of the prisoners. If the prisoners were found guilty these circumstances would be laid before the court in mitigation of punishment. However strong the mitigating circumstances in this case were, the punishment was certainly not mitigated, for all six men were sentenced to the maximum penalty of seven years’ transportation. In a similar case in Whiteparish it came out in the evidence that Squire Bristowe had sent down buckets of strong beer, and that Squire Wynne, who was staying with Squire Bristowe, was present at the breaking of the machine. In the affair at Ambrose Patience’s farm already mentioned, the defence of the prisoners was that Farmer Parham had offered them half a hogshead of cider if they would come and break his machine, whilst in another case three men were acquitted because one of the witnesses for the prosecution, a young brother of the farmer whose property had been destroyed, unexpectedly disclosed the fact that his brother had said to the mob: ‘Act like men, go and break the machine, but don’t go up to the house.’

The proportion of charges of extorting money was smaller at Salisbury than at Winchester: most of the indictments were for breaking machines only. In some instances the prosecution dropped the charge of robbery, thinking transportation for seven years a sufficient punishment for the offence. Three brothers were sentenced to death for taking half a crown: nobody received this sentence for a few coppers. In this case the three brothers, William, Thomas, and John Legg, aged twenty-eight, twenty-one, and eighteen, had gone at midnight to the kitchen door of the house of Mrs. Montgomery, wife of a J.P., and asked the manservant for money or beer. The man gave them half a crown, and they thanked him civilly and went away. A curious light is thrown on the relations between robbers and the robbed in the trial of six men for machine-breaking at West Grimstead: the mob of fifty persons asked the farmer for a sovereign, he promised to pay it next day, whereupon one of the mob, a man named Light who was his tenant, offered to pay the sovereign himself and to deduct it from the rent.

At Salisbury, as at Winchester, the fate of the victims depended largely on the character given to the prisoners by the local gentry. This was especially the case towards the end when justice began to tire, and a good many charges were dropped. Thus Charles Bourton was only imprisoned for three months for breaking a threshing machine, whilst John Perry was transported for seven years for the same offence. But then John Perry had been convicted seven or eight times for poaching.

In Wiltshire, as in Hampshire, the judges were particularly severe to those prisoners who were not agricultural labourers. A striking instance is worth quoting, not only as illustrating this special severity, but also because it shows that the judges when inflicting the maximum penalty of seven years’ transportation for machine-breaking were well aware that it was tantamount to exile for life. Thomas Porter, aged eighteen, a shepherd, Henry Dicketts, aged nineteen, a bricklayer’s labourer, Aaron Shepherd, aged forty (occupation not stated), James Stevens, aged twenty-five, an agricultural labourer, and George Burbage, aged twenty-four, also an agricultural labourer, were found guilty of machine-breaking at Mr. Blake’s at Idmiston. Stevens and Burbage escaped with two years’ and one year’s imprisonment with hard labour, respectively, and the following homily from Mr. Justice Alderson to think over in prison: ‘You are both thrashers and you might in the perversion of your understanding think that these machines are detrimental to you. Be assured that your labour cannot ultimately be hurt by the employment of these machines. If they are profitable to the farmer, they will also be profitable ultimately to the labourer, though they may for a time injure him. If they are not profitable to the farmer he will soon cease to employ them.’ The shepherd boy of eighteen, the bricklayer’s labourer of nineteen, and their companion of forty were reserved for a heavier penalty: ‘As to you, Aaron Shepherd, I can give you no hope of remaining in this country. You Thomas Porter, are a shepherd, and you Henry Dicketts, are a bricklayer’s labourer. You have nothing to do with threshing machines. They do not interfere with your labour, and you could not, even in the darkness of your ignorance, suppose that their destruction would do you any good.... I hope that your fate will be a warning to others. You will leave the country, all of you: you will see your friends and relations no more: for though you will be transported for seven years only, it is not likely that at the expiration of that term you will find yourselves in a situation to return. You will be in a distant land at the expiration of your sentence. The land which you have disgraced will see you no more: the friends with whom you are connected will be parted from you for ever in this world.’

Mr. Justice Alderson’s methods received a good deal of attention in one of the Salisbury trials, known as the Looker case. Isaac Looker, a well-to-do farmer, was indicted for sending a threatening letter to John Rowland: ‘Mr. Rowland, Haxford Farm, Hif you goes to sware against or a man in prisson, you have here farm burnt down to ground, and thy bluddy head chopt off.’ Some evidence was produced to show that Isaac Looker had asserted in conversation that it was the magistrates and the soldiers, and not the mobs, who were the real breakers of the peace. But this did not amount to absolute proof that he had written the letter: to establish this conclusion the prosecution relied on the evidence of four witnesses; the first had quarrelled with Looker, and had not seen his writing for four or five years; the second denied that there had been any quarrel, but had not been in the habit of speaking to the prisoner for five or six years, or seen his writing during that time; the third had not had ‘much of a quarrel’ with him, but had not seen his writing since 1824; the fourth was the special constable who found in Looker’s bureau, which was unlocked and stood in the kitchen where the family sat, a blank piece of paper that fitted on to the piece on which the letter was written. More witnesses were called for the defence than for the prosecution, and they included the vestry clerk of Wimborne, an ex-schoolmaster; all of these witnesses had known Looker’s writing recently, and all of them swore that the threatening letter was not in his writing. Mr. Justice Alderson summed up against the prisoner, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and sentence of transportation for life was passed upon Looker in spite of his vehement protestations of innocence. ‘I cannot attend to these asseverations,’ said Mr. Justice Alderson, ‘for we all know that a man who can be guilty of such an offence as that of which you have been convicted, will not hesitate to deny it as you now do. I would rather trust to such evidence as has been given in your case, than to the most solemn declarations even on the scaffold.’

The learned judge and the jury then retired for refreshment, when a curious development took place. Edward, son of Isaac Looker, aged eighteen years, came forward and declared that he had written the letter in question and other letters as well. He wrote a copy from memory, and the handwriting was precisely similar. He explained that he had written the letters without his father’s knowledge and without a thought of the consequences, in order to help two cousins who were in gaol for machine-breaking. He had heard people say that ‘it would get my cousins off if threatening letters were written.’ He had let his father know in prison that he had written the letters, and had also told his father’s solicitor. Edward Looker was subsequently tried and sentenced to seven years’ transportation: Isaac’s case was submitted to the Home Secretary for pardon.

Although, as we have said, the Government, or its representatives, grew rather more lenient towards the end of the proceedings at Salisbury, it was evidently thought essential to produce some crime deserving actual death. The culprit in this case was Peter Withers, a young man of twenty-three, married and with five children. His character till the time of the riots was exemplary. He was committed on a charge of riot, and briefed a lawyer to defend him for this misdemeanour. Just before the trial came on the charge was changed, apparently by the Attorney-General, to the capital charge of assaulting Oliver Calley Codrington with a hammer. His counsel was of course unprepared to defend him on this charge, and, as he explained afterwards, ‘it was only by the humane kindness of the Attorney-General who allowed him to look at his brief that he was aware of all the facts to be alleged against his client.’ Withers himself seemed equally unprepared; when asked for his defence he said that he would leave it to his counsel, as of course he had arranged to do when the charge was one of misdemeanour only.

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.

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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’?

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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.’

The Dorsetshire labourers had unfortunately arrived at the precipitate conclusion that a spirit of prudence would not transform 7s. a week into a reasonable livelihood. They used no violence beyond breaking up the threshing machines. ‘We don’t intend to hurt the farmer,’ they told the owner of one machine, ‘but we are determined that the land shall come down, and the tithes, and we will have more wages.’ When money was taken it seems to have been demanded and received in an amicable spirit. The sums asked for were often very small. Sentence of death was pronounced on two men, Joseph Sheppard and George Legg, for taking 2s. from Farmer Christopher Morey at Buckland Newton. The mob asked for money, and the farmer offered them 1s.: they replied that they wanted 1s. 6d., and the farmer gave them 2s. Sheppard’s character was very good, and it came out that he and the prosecutor had had a dispute about money some years before. He was transported, but not for life. Legg was declared by the prosecutor to have been ‘saucy and impudent,’ and to have ‘talked rough and bobbish.’ His character, however, was stated by many witnesses, including the clergyman, to be exemplary. He had five children whom he supported without parish help on 7s. a week: a cottage was given him but no fuel. Baron Vaughan was so much impressed by this evidence that he declared that he had never heard better testimony to character, and that he would recommend a less severe penalty than transportation. But Legg showed a lamentable want of discretion, for he interrupted the judge with these words: ‘I would rather that your Lordship would put twenty-one years’ transportation upon me than be placed in the condition of the prosecutor. I never said a word to him, that I declare.’ Baron Vaughan sardonically remarked that he had not benefited himself by this observation.

The tendency to give less severe punishment, noticed in the closing trials at Salisbury, was more marked at Dorchester. Nine men were let off on recognisances and ten were not proceeded against: in the case of six of these ten the prosecutor, one Robert Bullen, who had been robbed of 4s. and 2s. 6d., refused to come forward. But enough sharp sentences were given to keep the labourers in submission for the future. One man was transported for life and eleven for seven years: fifteen were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment; seven were acquitted. It was not surprising that the special correspondent of the _Times_ complained that such meagre results scarcely justified the pomp and expense of a Special Commission. In the neighbouring county of Gloucester, where the country gentlemen carried out the work of retribution without help from headquarters, seven men were transported for fourteen years, twenty for seven years, and twenty-five were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from six months to three years. All of these sentences were for breaking threshing machines.

The disturbances in Berks and Bucks had been considered serious enough to demand a Special Commission, and Sir James Alan Park, Sir William Bolland and Sir John Patteson were the judges appointed. The first of the two Berkshire Commissions opened at Reading on 27th December. The Earl of Abingdon, Lord-Lieutenant of the County, and Mr. Charles Dundas were the two local commissioners. Mr. Dundas has figured already in these pages as chairman of the meeting at Speenhamland. One hundred and thirty-eight prisoners were awaiting trial at Reading: they were most of them young, only eighteen being forty or over. The rest, with few exceptions, varied from seventeen to thirty-five in age, and must have lived all their lives under the Speenhamland system.

It is impossible to compare the accounts of the Special Commissions in Berks and Bucks with those in Hampshire and Wiltshire without noticing a difference in the treatment of the rioters. The risings had been almost simultaneous, the offences were of the same character, and the Commissions sat at the same time. The difference was apparent from the first, and on 1st January the _Times_ published a leading article pleading for uniformity, and pointing out that the Berkshire Commission was ‘a merciful contrast’ to that at Winchester. The cause is probably to be found in the dispositions and characters of the authorities responsible in the two cases. The country gentlemen of Berkshire, represented by a man like Mr. Dundas, were more humane than the country gentlemen of Hampshire, represented by men like the Duke of Wellington and the Barings; Mr. Gurney, the public prosecutor at Reading, was more lenient than Sir Thomas Denman, and the Reading judges were more kindly and considerate than the judges at Winchester. Further, there had been in Berkshire little of the wild panic that swept over the country houses in Hampshire and Wiltshire. The judges at Reading occasionally interjected questions on the prisoners’ behalf, and in many cases they did not conceal their satisfaction at an acquittal. Further, they had a more delicate sense for the proprieties. Contrary to custom, they asked neither the Grand Jury nor the magistrates to dinner on the first day, being anxious, we are told, to free the administration of justice ‘from the slightest appearance of partiality in the eyes of the lower classes.’ The Lord Chancellor and Lord Melbourne had been consulted and had approved.

It must not be supposed that Mr. Justice Park’s theories of life and social relationships differed from those of his brothers at Winchester. In his address to the Grand Jury he repudiated with indignation the ‘impudent and base slander ... that the upper ranks of society care little for the wants and privations of the poor. I deny this positively, upon a very extensive means of knowledge upon subjects of this nature. But every man can deny it who looks about him and sees the vast institutions in every part of the kingdom for the relief of the young and the old, the deaf and the lame, the blind, the widow, the orphan----and every child of wretchedness and woe. There is not a calamity or distress incident to humanity, either of body or of mind, that is not humbly endeavoured to be mitigated or relieved, by the powerful and the affluent, either of high or middling rank, in this our happy land, which for its benevolence, charity, and boundless humanity, has been the admiration of the world.’ The theory that the rich kept the poor in a state of starvation and that this was the cause of the disturbances, he declared later to be entirely disproved by the conduct of one of the mobs in destroying a threshing machine belonging to William Mount, Esq., at Wasing, ‘Mr. Mount having given away £100 no longer ago than last winter to assist the lower orders during that inclement season.’

A feature of the Reading Commission was the difficulty of finding jurymen. All farmers were challenged on behalf of the prisoners, and matters were at a deadlock until the judges ordered the bystanders to be impannelled.

The earlier cases were connected with the riots in Hungerford. Property in an iron foundry had been destroyed, and fifteen men were found guilty on this capital charge. One of the fifteen was William Oakley, who now paid the penalty for his £5 and strong language. But when the first cases were over, Mr. Gurney began to drop the capital charge, and to content himself, as a rule, with convictions for breaking threshing machines. One case revealed serious perjury on one side or the other. Thomas Goodfellow and Cornelius Bennett were charged with breaking a threshing machine at Matthew Batten’s farm. The prisoners produced four witnesses, two labourers, a woman whose husband was in prison for the riots, and John Gaiter, who described himself as ‘not quite a master bricklayer,’ to prove that Matthew Batten had encouraged the riots. The first three witnesses declared that Batten had asked the rioters to come and break his machine in order to serve out his landlord and Mr. Ward, and had promised them victuals and £1. Batten and his son, on the other hand, swore that these statements were false. The prisoners were found guilty, with a recommendation to mercy which was disregarded. Goodfellow, who was found guilty of breaking other machines as well, was sentenced to fourteen, and Cornelius Bennett to seven years’ transportation. The judge spoke of their scandalous attempt to blacken the character of a respectable farmer: ‘it pleased God however that the atrocious attempt had failed.’ It would be interesting to know what were the relations between Matthew Batten and his landlord.

On the last day of the trials Mr. Gurney announced that there would be no more prosecutions for felony, as enough had been done in the way of making examples. Some interesting cases of riot were tried. The most important riot had taken place as early as 19th November, and the hero of the proceedings was the Rev. Edward Cove, the venerable Vicar of Brimpton, one of the many parson magistrates. A mob had assembled in order to demand an increase of wages, and it was met by Mr. Cove and his posse of special constables. On occasions like this, Mr. Gurney remarked, we become sensible of the great advantages of our social order. Mr. Cove without more ado read the Riot Act; the mob refused to disperse; his special constables thereupon attacked them, and a general mêlée followed in which hard blows were given and taken. No one attempted to strike Mr. Cove himself, but one of his companions received from a rioter, whom he identified, a blow rivalling that given to Mr. Bingham Baring, which beat the crown of his hat in and drove the rim over his eyes: it was followed by other and more serious blows on his head and body. The counsel for the defence tried to show that it was distress that had caused the rioters to assemble, and he quoted a remark of the Chairman of Quarter Sessions that the poor were starved almost into insurrection; but all evidence about wages was ruled out. The court were deeply impressed by this riot, and Mr. Justice Park announced that it had alarmed him and his fellow judges more ‘than anything that had hitherto transpired in these proceedings.’ ‘Had one life been lost,’ he continued, ‘the lives of every individual of the mob would have been forfeited, and the law must have been carried into effect against those convicted.’ As it was, nobody was condemned to death for his share in the affray, though the more violent, such as George Williams, alias ‘Staffordshire Jack,’ a ‘desperate character,’ received heavier penalties for machine-breaking in consequence.

Three men were reserved for execution: William Oakley, who was told that as a carpenter he had no business to mix himself up in these transactions; Alfred Darling, a blacksmith by trade, who had been found guilty on several charges of demanding money; and Winterbourne, who had taken part in the Hungerford affair in the magistrates’ room, and had also acted as leader in some cases when a mob asked for money. In one instance the mob had been content with £1 instead of the £2 for which it had asked for breaking a threshing machine, Winterbourne remarking, ‘we will take half price because he has stood like a man.’

Public opinion in Berkshire was horrified at the prospect of taking life. Petitions for mercy poured in from Reading, including one from ladies to the queen, from Newbury, from Hungerford, from Henley, and from other places. Two country gentlemen, Mr. J. B. Monck and Mr. Wheble, made every exertion to save the condemned men. They waited with petitions on Lord Melbourne, who heard them patiently for an hour. They obtained a reprieve for Oakley and for Darling, who were transported for life; Winterbourne they could not save: he was hung on 11th January, praying to the last that his wife, who was dangerously ill of typhus, might die before she knew of his fate.

Fifty-six men were sentenced to transportation from Reading--twenty-three for life, sixteen for fourteen years, seventeen for seven years: thirty-six were sent to prison for various terms.

The same commissioners went on to Abingdon where proceedings opened on 6th January. Here there were only forty-seven prisoners, all but two of whom were agricultural labourers, most of them very young. The cases resembled those tried at Reading, but it is clear that the evidence of Mrs. Charlotte Slade, whose conduct we have already described, and her method of dealing with the rioters, made a great impression on Mr. Justice Park and his colleagues, and opened their eyes to the true perspective of the rhetorical language that had assumed such terrifying importance to other judges. One young labourer, Richard Kempster by name, who was found guilty of breaking a threshing machine, had carried a black-and-red flag in the mob, and when arrested had exclaimed, ‘be damned if I don’t wish it was a revolution, and that all was a fire together’: it is easy to imagine the grave homily on the necessity of cutting such a man off for ever from his kind that these words would have provoked from the judges at Winchester. Mr. Justice Park and his colleagues sentenced Kempster to twelve months’ imprisonment. At Abingdon only one man was sentenced to be transported; Thomas Mackrell, an agricultural labourer of forty-three. Another, Henry Woolridge, had sentence of death commuted to eighteen months’ imprisonment. Thirty-five others were sent to prison for various terms.

The same three judges proceeded to Aylesbury to try the Buckinghamshire rioters. The chief event in this county had been the destruction of paper-making machinery at Wycombe. The Commission opened on 11th January: the Duke of Buckingham and Mr. Maurice Swabey were the local commissioners. There were one hundred and thirty-six prisoners to be tried, almost all young and illiterate: only eighteen were forty years of age or over. Forty-four men and boys were found guilty of the capital charge of destroying paper machinery. Most of the other prisoners who were charged with breaking threshing machines were allowed to plead guilty and let off on their own recognisances, or else the charge was not pressed. An exception was made in a case in which some members of a mob had been armed with guns. Three men who had carried guns were sent to transportation for seven years, and thirteen others involved were sent to prison for two years or eighteen months. Several men were tried for rioting, and those who had combined a demand for increased wages with a request for the restoration of parish buns were sent to prison for six weeks.[481] One more trial is worth notice, because it suggests that even in Buckinghamshire, where the general temper was more lenient, individuals who had made themselves obnoxious were singled out for special treatment. John Crook, a miller, was indicted with four others for riotously assembling and breaking a winnowing machine at Mr. Fryer’s at Long Crendon. As Crook was charged with a misdemeanour his counsel could address the jury, and we learn from his speech that Crook had been kept in prison since 2nd December, though £2000 had been offered in bail and many other prisoners had been allowed out. The explanation, it was argued, was to be found in the fact that Crook had come into some property which qualified him to hold a gun licence and to kill game. He was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment without hard labour, and to pay a fine of £10.

Thirty-two men in all were sent to prison for the agricultural disturbances in addition to the three sentenced to transportation. Forty-two of those concerned in the breaking of paper-making machinery received sentence of death, but their punishment was commuted to life transportation for one, seven years’ transportation for twenty-two, and imprisonment for various terms for the rest. Two men were reserved for execution. One, Thomas Blizzard, was thirty years old, with a wife and three children. His character was excellent. At the time of the riots he was a roundsman, receiving 1s. a day from the overseer’s and 1s. 6d. a week from a farmer. He told his employer at Little Marlow that he would take a holiday to go machine-breaking, for he would endure imprisonment, or even transportation, rather than see his wife and children cry for bread. John Sarney, the other, was fifty-six years old and had a wife and six children: he kept a small beer-shop and his character was irreproachable. Petitions on behalf of the two men were signed extensively, and the sentence was commuted to transportation for life. The Aylesbury sentences seem lenient in comparison with those given at Salisbury and Winchester, but they did not seem lenient to the people in the district. ‘Pen cannot describe,’ wrote a _Times_ correspondent, ‘the heart-rending scene of despair, misery and want, prevailing at Flackwell-Heath, the residence of the families of the major part of the misguided men now incarcerated at Aylesbury.’ The same correspondent tells of a benevolent Quaker, who had become rich as a maker of paper, helping these families by stealth.

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The work of the Special Commissions was now over. Melbourne had explained in Parliament that they had been set up ‘to expound the law’ and to bring home to the ignorant the gravity of their crimes against social order. In spite of the daily imposition of ferocious punishments on poachers and thieves, the poor apparently did not know in what letters of blood the code against rioting and discontent was composed. These three weeks had brought a lurid enlightenment into their dark homes. In the riots, as we have seen, the only man who had been killed was a rioter, killed according to the reports of the time by a yeomanry soldier, according to local tradition by a farmer, and for that offence he had been refused Christian burial. On the other side, not a single person had been killed or seriously wounded. For these riots, apart from the cases of arson, for which six men or boys were hung, aristocratic justice exacted three lives, and the transportation of four hundred and fifty-seven men and boys,[482] in addition to the imprisonment of about four hundred at home. The shadow of this vengeance still darkens the minds of old men and women in the villages of Wiltshire, and eighty years have been too short a time to blot out its train of desolating memories.[483] Nobody who does not realise what Mr. Hudson has described with his intimate touch, the effect on the imagination and the character of ‘a life of simple unchanging action and of habits that are like instincts, of hard labour in sun and rain and wind from day to day,’ can ever understand what the breaking of all the ties of life and home and memory meant to the exiles and to those from whose companionship they were then torn for ever.

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We have said that one feature of the rising was the firing of stacks and ricks and barns. This practice was widespread, and fires broke out even in counties where the organised rising made little progress. Associations for the detection of incendiaries were formed at an early stage, and immense rewards were offered. Yet not a single case of arson was tried before the Special Commissions, and the labourers kept their secret well. Many of the governing class in the early days persuaded themselves that the labourers had no secret to keep, and that the fires were due to any one except the labourers, and to any cause except distress. Perhaps the wish was father to the thought, for as the _Times_ observed, persons responsible for grinding the faces of their labourers preferred to think the outrages the work of strangers. Sometimes it was smugglers, suffering from the depression in their trade: sometimes it was foreigners: sometimes it was mysterious gentlemen in gigs, driving furiously about the country, led by Captain Swing, scattering fireballs and devastation. These were the fashionable theories in the House of Lords, although Richmond reminded his brother peers that there had been a flood of petitions representing the sufferings of the labourers from the very beginning of the year, and that the House of Lords had not thought it necessary to give them the slightest attention. Lord Camden ascribed the outrages to the French spirit, and argued that the country was enjoying ‘what was undeniably a genial autumn.’ The Duke of Wellington took the same view, denying that the troubles were due to distress: the most influential cause of disturbances was the example, ‘and I will unhesitatingly say the bad and the mischievous example, afforded by the neighbouring States.’ Eldon remarked that many of the prisoners taken in the riots were foreigners, a point on which Melbourne undeceived him. The speakers who regarded the disturbances in the south of England as the overflow of the Paris Revolution had no positive evidence to produce, but they had a piece of negative evidence which they thought conclusive. For if the labourers knew who were the incendiaries, they would surely have given information. In some cases a reward of £1000 with a free pardon for all except the actual author was waiting to be claimed, ‘and yet not one of the miserable beings have availed themselves of the prospect of becoming rich.’

Some eleven cases of arson were tried at the Assizes in Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Surrey: all the prisoners were agricultural labourers and most of them were boys. Eight were convicted, often on very defective evidence, and six were executed. One of the eight, Thomas Goodman, a boy of eighteen, saved his life by declaring in prison that the idea had been put into his head by a lecture of Cobbett’s. Two brothers of the name of Pakeman, nineteen and twenty years old, were convicted on the evidence of Bishop, another lad of eighteen, who had prompted them to set fire to a barn, and later turned king’s evidence ‘after a gentleman in the gaol had told him of the big reward.’ This fire seems to have been a piece of bravado, as no doubt many others were, for Bishop remarked, as the three were sitting under a hedge after lighting the barn, ‘who says we can’t have a fire too, as well as them at Blean?’ The two boys, who had never been taught to read or write, scandalised the public by displaying a painful indifference to the ministrations of the chaplain, and dying without receiving the sacrament.[484] A half-witted boy of fourteen, Richard Pennells, was tried at Lewes for setting fire to his master’s haystack for a promise of sixpence from a man who was not discovered. His master, who prosecuted, remarked that he was ‘dull of apprehension, but not so much as not to know right from wrong.’ The boy, who had no counsel, offered no defence, and stood sobbing in the dock. The jury found him guilty, with a recommendation to mercy on account of his youth and imperfect understanding. Sentence of death was recorded, but he was told that his life would be spared.

These same Lewes Assizes, conducted by Mr. Justice Taunton, afforded a striking example of the comparative treatment of different crimes. Thomas Brown, a lad of seventeen, was charged with writing the following letter to Lord Sheffield, ‘Please, my Lord, I dont wise to hurt you. This is the case al the world over. If you dont get rid of your foreign steward and farmer and bailiff in a few days time--less than a month--we will burn him up, and you along with him. My writing is bad, but my firing is good my Lord.’ Lord Sheffield gave evidence as to the receipt of the letter: the prisoner, who had no counsel, was asked by the judge if he would like to put any questions, and he only replied that he hoped that his lordship would forgive him. The judge answered that his lordship had not the power, and sentenced Brown to transportation for life.[485] Later on in the same Assizes, Captain Winter, a man of sixty, captain of a coasting vessel, was tried for the murder of his wife, who had been killed in a most brutal manner. He had been hacking and wounding her for four hours at night, and she was last seen alive at half past two in the morning, naked and begging for mercy. Her body was covered with wounds. The man’s defence was that he came home drunk, that he found his wife drunk, and that he had no knowledge of what followed. To the general surprise Captain Winter escaped with a verdict of manslaughter. ‘The prisoner,’ wrote the _Times_ correspondent, ‘is indebted for his life to the very merciful way in which Mr. Justice Taunton appeared to view the case, and the hint which he threw out to the jury, that the parties might have had a quarrel, in which case her death by the prisoner would amount to manslaughter only.’

* * * * *

When the disturbances began, the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Sir Robert Peel Home Secretary. But in November 1830 Wellington, who had made a last effort to rally the old Tories, sulking over his surrender on Catholic Emancipation, by some sudden thunder against Reform, had been beaten on the Civil List and resigned. Reform was inevitable, and with Reform the Whigs. Thus, towards the close of the year of the Revolution that drove Charles X. from France, Lord Grey became Prime Minister, to carry the measure which as Charles Grey, lieutenant of Charles Fox, he had proposed in the House of Commons in 1793, a few months after Louis XVI. had lost his head in the Revolution which had maddened and terrified the English aristocracy. Fortune had been sparing in her favours to this cold, proud, honourable and courageous man. She had shut him out from power for twenty-three years, waiting to make him Prime Minister until he was verging on seventy, and all the dash and ardour of youth had been chilled by disappointment and delay. But she had reserved her extreme of malice to the end, for it was her chief unkindness that having waited so long she did not wait a little longer. Grey, who had been forty-four years in public life, and forty-three in opposition, took office at the moment that the rising passed into Hampshire and Wiltshire, and thus his first act as Prime Minister was to summon his colleagues to a Cabinet meeting to discuss, not their plans for Parliamentary Reform, but the measures to be taken in this alarming emergency. After a lifetime of noble protest against war, intolerance, and repression, he found himself in the toils and snares of the consequences of a policy in which war, intolerance, and repression had been constant and conspicuous features. And those consequences were especially to be dreaded by such a man at such a time.

Grey became Prime Minister to carry Reform, and Reform was still enveloped to many minds in the wild fancies and terrors of a Jacobin past. To those who knew, conscious as they were of their own modest purposes and limited aim, that their accession to power boded to many violence, confusion, and the breaking up of the old ways and life of the State, it was maddening that these undiscerning peasants should choose this moment of all others for noise and riot. The struggle for Reform was certain to lead to strife, and it was hard that before they entered upon it England should already be in tumult from other causes. Moreover, Grey had to reckon with William IV. So long as he could remember, the Court had been the refuge of all that was base in English politics, and it was a question whether Liberal ideas had suffered more from the narrow and darkened mind of George III. or the mean and incorrigible perfidy of George IV. In comparison with his father, the new king had the wisdom of a Bentham or an Adam Smith; in comparison with his brother, he had the generous and loyal heart of a Philip Sidney or a Falkland. But seen in any less flattering mirror, he was a very ordinary mortal, and Grey had known this jolly, drinking, sailor prince too long and too well to trust either his intellect or his character, under too fierce or too continuous a strain. These riots tried him severely. No sooner was William on his throne than the labourers came out of their dens, looking like those sansculottes whose shadows were never far from the imagination of the English upper classes. The king’s support of Reform was no violent enthusiasm, and the slightest threat of disorder might disturb the uneasy equilibrium of his likes and fears. In the long run it depended on the will of this genial mediocrity--so strangely had Providence mixed caprice and design in this world of politics--whether or not Reform should be carried, and carried without bloodshed. Throughout these months then, the king, always at Melbourne’s elbow, trying to tempt and push the Government into more drastic measures, was a very formidable enemy to the cause of moderation and of justice.

These influences were strong, and there was little to counteract them. For there was nobody in the world which Grey and Melbourne alike inhabited who could enter into the minds of the labourers. This is readily seen, if we glance at two men who were regarded as extreme Radicals in the House of Commons, Hobhouse and Burdett. Each of these men had served the cause of Reform in prison as well as in Parliament, and each with rather ridiculous associations; Hobhouse’s imprisonment being connected with the ballad inspired by the malicious and disloyal wit of his friend and hero, Byron, and Burdett’s with the ludicrous scene of his arrest, with his boy spelling out Magna Charta on his knee. It is difficult for those who have read Hobhouse’s _Diaries_ to divine what play of reason and feeling ever made him a Radical, but a Radical he was, an indefatigable critic of the old régime, and in particular of such abuses as flogging in the army. Burdett was a leader in the same causes. To these men, if to any, the conduct of the labourers might have seemed to call for sympathy rather than for violence. But if we turn to Hobhouse’s _Diary_ we see that he was never betrayed into a solitary expression of pity or concern for the scenes we have described, and as for Burdett, he was all for dragooning the discontented counties and placing them under martial law. And even Radnor, who as a friend of Cobbett was much less academic in his Radicalism, sat on the Wiltshire Commission without making any protest that has reached posterity.