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Political Trials and the Suppression of Popular Radicalism in England, 1799–1820

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Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions

Part of the book series: Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice ((PHPPJ))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the decision-making process between the Home Office and the government’s law officers in prosecuting individuals for sedition and treason in the period 1799–1820. The term state trial suggests a more centralised and government-led repression of popular radicalism than the process was in practice. Provincial reformers also faced the complex layers of their local justice system, which was more loyalist, committed to stamping out political radicalism. The trial of the “Thirty Eight” Manchester radicals in June 1812 demonstrates the mutable definitions of treason, sedition and processes of justice in the theatre of the court.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Robert Poole, “French revolution or peasants’ revolt? Petitioners and rebels from the Blanketeers to the Chartists”, Labour History Review, 74 (2009), 6–26; John Belchem, “Henry Hunt and the evolution of the mass platform”, English Historical Review, 93 (1978), 739–73.

  2. 2.

    Jennifer Mori, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution, 1785–1820 (London, 2000), 101.

  3. 3.

    Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (Manchester, 1849), ch. VI.

  4. 4.

    See Paul Halliday, Habeas Corpus From England to Empire (Cambridge MA, 2010).

  5. 5.

    The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Treasury Solicitor’s Papers, TS 25, law officers’ opinion books; Home Office Domestic Correspondence, HO 48.

  6. 6.

    Jon Mee, Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty (Cambridge, 2016), 105

  7. 7.

    TNA, Home Office Domestic Correspondence, HO 42 and HO 52; Home Office out-letter books, HO 41.

  8. 8.

    Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996), 115–20; Jon Mee, Treason, Seditious Libel, and Literature in the Romantic Period, Oxford Handbooks Online (New York, 2016).

  9. 9.

    J. H. Langbein, The Origins of the Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford, 2003); John M. Beattie, “Scales of justice: defence counsel and the English criminal trial in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”, Law and History Review, 9 (1991), 221–67; D. Lemmings, “Criminal trial procedure in eighteenth-century England: the impact of lawyers”, Journal of Legal History, 26 (2005), 73–82.

  10. 10.

    Philip Harling, “The law of libel and the limits of repression, 1790–1832”, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 107.

  11. 11.

    James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994), 41; Harling, “Law of libel”, 128; Gilmartin, Print Politics, 115–20.

  12. 12.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 108, using TNA, KB 28/351–523, King’s Bench, crown rolls, 1790–1832.

  13. 13.

    TNA, HO 41 and HO 42, Home Office correspondence out and in-books.

  14. 14.

    Epstein, Radical Expression, 39.

  15. 15.

    David Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1998), 84.

  16. 16.

    TNA, TS 25/3, 5–8, 2034–5, Treasury Solicitor’s papers, law officers’ opinion books, 1808–20.

  17. 17.

    There are about a dozen more cases recorded within the general Home Office correspondence (TNA, HO 41, HO 42) that were either not sent on to the law officers or do not include decisions.

  18. 18.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 109–110.

  19. 19.

    TNA, TS 25/5–6, law officers’ opinion books, 1812–15.

  20. 20.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 125.

  21. 21.

    TNA, TS 25/7, 8, law officers’ opinion books, 1816, 1817–18.

  22. 22.

    TNA, TS 25/6, law officers’ opinion book, 1813–15.

  23. 23.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 125.

  24. 24.

    TNA, TS 25/5, law officers’ opinion book, 1812.

  25. 25.

    TNA, HO 42/191/135, expenses bill from John Lloyd of Stockport, 23 November 1819.

  26. 26.

    Globe, 6 September 1819.

  27. 27.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 110.

  28. 28.

    TNA, TS 25/2034, f. 231, 19 October 1818.

  29. 29.

    TNA, TS 25/2034, f. 232, 19 October 1818.

  30. 30.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 112.

  31. 31.

    Lisa Steffen, Defining a British State: Treason and National Identity, 1608–1820 (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 7; Steve Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects (Manchester, 2000); John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000).

  32. 32.

    Frida Knight (ed.), The Strange Case of Thomas Walker: Ten Years in the Life of a Manchester Radical (London, 1957); Michael Lobban, “From seditious libel to unlawful assembly: Peterloo and the changing face of political crime, c1770–1820”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 10 (1990), 323, fn 80; State Trials, XXIII: 1055.

  33. 33.

    Lobban, “From seditious libel”, 323; Michael Lobban, “Treason, sedition and the radical movement in the age of the French Revolution”, Liverpool Law Review, 22 (2000), 206.

  34. 34.

    Steffen, Defining a British State, 150.

  35. 35.

    The Trial of James Watson for High Treason, 2 vols (London, 1817), II: 185.

  36. 36.

    James Fitzjames Stephen, A History of the Criminal Law of England, vol 2 (1883, reprint Cambridge, 2014), 378.

  37. 37.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 126.

  38. 38.

    TNA, TS 25/2035, f. 174, 2 September 1819.

  39. 39.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 126; Malcolm Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester, 2013), p. 208; The Republican, 15 October 1819; The Trial of Sir Francis Burdett, Bart. for a Seditious Libel (London, 1820); The Trial of the Rev. Robt Wedderburn … for Blasphemy … edited by Erasmus Perkins (London, 1820).

  40. 40.

    Chase, 1820, 208–9.

  41. 41.

    Epstein, Radical Expression, 35.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 35.

  43. 43.

    Gilmartin, Print Politics, p. 115; E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth, 1975), 263.

  44. 44.

    Harling, “Law of libel”, 117; T. J. Wooler, An Appeal to the citizens of London against the alledged lawful mode of packing special juries (London, 1817).

  45. 45.

    Bentley, English Criminal Justice, 90–2.

  46. 46.

    Epstein, Radical Expression, 64; Black Dwarf, 21 and 28 April 1818.

  47. 47.

    Epstein, Radical Expression, 60.

  48. 48.

    TNA, HO 42/185/289, Wooler to Bagguley, 2 April 1819.

  49. 49.

    TNA, TS 11/1071, King vs Wolseley and Harrison, Chester Spring Assizes, 1820.

  50. 50.

    TNA, HO 42/185/293, Wolseley to Bagguley, 2 April 1819.

  51. 51.

    Chester Courant, 27 April 1819. The revived reform societies in Stockport, Hull, Manchester and Oldham raised subscriptions for the bail money, but could not succeed in the strained economic circumstances of working-class support: Black Dwarf, 3 January 1819.

  52. 52.

    Chester Courant, 27 April 1819.

  53. 53.

    Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (Manchester, 1849), 24–5.

  54. 54.

    J. R. Dinwiddy, “Luddism and politics in the Northern counties”, in J. R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850 (London, 1992), pp. 384–5; TNA, HO 40/1/451, Milne to Litchfield, 17 June 1812.

  55. 55.

    TNA, TS 11/1059, King vs William Washington and others, brief for the prosecution, August 1812, and notebook transcript of the trial; A Correct Report of the Proceedings on the Trial of Thirty Eight Men… (M. Wardle, Market Street, Manchester, 1812), which is the pamphlet most widely surviving in libraries; the rarer version is The Trial at Full Length of the Thirty Eight Men from Manchester … (J. Plant, Sickle Street, Manchester, 1812), copy in Working-Class Movement Library, Salford.

  56. 56.

    The Trial at Full Length, 90. Newspaper reports of the trial include: Lancaster Gazette, 29 August 1812; Morning Chronicle, 1 September 1812; Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette, 5 September 1812; Leeds Mercury, 5 September 1812.

  57. 57.

    Frances D. Cartwright, The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, 2 vols (London, Henry Colburn, 1826), II: 34–7; Manchester Archives, BR F 324.942733, Shuttleworth scrapbook, fo. 8, Walker to Shuttleworth, 21 August 1812.

  58. 58.

    The Trial at Full Length, 22.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 20.

  60. 60.

    Epstein, Radical Expression, 32; David Lemmings (ed.), Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850 (Farnham, 2012), 2.

  61. 61.

    Gilmartin, Print Politics, 123–4; Kevin Gilmartin, “In the theater of counterrevolution: loyalist association and conservative opinion in the 1790s”, Journal of British Studies, 41: 3 (2002), 291–328.

  62. 62.

    The Trial at Full Length, vii.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 126.

  64. 64.

    Thanks to Tim Hitchcock for his interpretation of the court scene. See also Claire Graham, Ordering Law: The Architectural and Social History of the English Law Court to 1914 (Aldershot, 2003).

  65. 65.

    David G. Barrie and Susan Broomhall, Police Courts in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, vol. 1 (Farnham, 2014), 225–6; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 399; Peter King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), 258.

  66. 66.

    Julienne Hanson, “The architecture of justice: iconography and space configuration in the English law court building”, Architecture Research Quarterly, 1 (1996), 50–9.

  67. 67.

    TNA, TS 11/1059, notebook minutes of the trial of the Thirty Eight, 1812.

  68. 68.

    The Trial at Full Length, 31.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 42–3.

  70. 70.

    Dinwiddy, “Luddism and politics”, 385.

  71. 71.

    Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 579.

  72. 72.

    Archibald Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (Manchester, 1851), 81.

  73. 73.

    Ibid.

  74. 74.

    Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 577.

  75. 75.

    Lobban, “From seditious libel to unlawful assembly”, 323.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK

    Katrina Navickas

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Correspondence to Katrina Navickas .

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  1. School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University, Southport, QLD, Australia

    Michael T. Davis

  2. Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Emma Macleod

  3. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Gordon Pentland

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Navickas, K. (2019). Political Trials and the Suppression of Popular Radicalism in England, 1799–1820. In: Davis, M., Macleod, E., Pentland, G. (eds) Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions. Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98959-4_8

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