1820
There’s not much in between the Stuarts and 1820 and the last armed uprising on mainland Britain so, for the moment, let me pass on.
In 1820, a brooding suspicion lay over the whole country. There were many discharged soldiers unemployed and bitter at the way they had been treated after fighting Napoleon. There were also many, just as bitter, displaced to make way for sheep from crofts in the Highlands and small rented farms elsewhere. Most could spin and weave but the factories needed only so many.
New groups with starving families flowed into the cities and found the only way they could get employment to feed their children was to work for less money, not understanding that they were starting a sequence that would bring their own ruin in the end. The trickle became a stream, the stream became a flood and wages fell to starvation levels.
Instead of being separated on crofts and shielings and steadings, the people were now grouped together in factories and towns, where they could discuss their complaints among themselves. They formed societies and in that humid atmosphere, discontent bred discontent.
Discontent was not confined to any region. It extended throughout the British Isles and the people formed societies to press the King and his ministers for change. With the example of the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, the people began to express their discontent. With the new methods of printing, the Irish corresponded with England; the English corresponded with Scotland; the Scots corresponded with Ireland. Pamphlets from Dublin were read in Manchester; pamphlets from Manchester were read in Glasgow and Falkirk; Glasgow pamphlets were read out to the people in Tipperary.
The mill owners and industrialists, fearful of a general uprising, called on the government to act. The government dealt with it piecemeal; in Ireland, where Captain Midnight rode and hangings were commonplace, they dealt with it savagely; a gathering at Peterloo in England was declared a riot and charged by sabre yielding cavalry, leaving a score dead and many screaming from the pain of gaping sabre cuts.
The Scots took their case to the courts. The magistrates were sympathetic and set a minimum wage. The mill owners ignored the courts, claiming they were facing growing competition from the Netherlands, from Germany and France, from India and Japan. This bred general discontent and anger against THEM.
Faced with officialdom’s opposition, the societies went underground and became secretive, each local group knowing only the representative they sent to the area committee, the area committee knowing only their representative to the national committee. Only the National Committee knowing each other.
Their secrecy became their worst enemy. The reform committees were infiltrated. Government agents, claiming to be from the national committee, were accepted locally and worked hard to incite open rebellion, which would bring the leaders expose the leaders and more fanatical radical supporters into the open.
Some of the action took place in the area I grew up in but, despite my years learning history, I knew more of Marie Antoinette than I did about 1820. As I read, particularly Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumass Mac a’Ghobainn’s book The Scottish Insurrection of 1820, I realised there was a novel about ordinary people in it, a follow up to Drover.
Drover McPherson