# The Chartist Movement/Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI
SEDITION, PRIVY CONSPIRACY, AND REBELLION
(1839–1840)
It is hard to resist the notion that the Chartist Convention had already ceased, long before its dissolution, to be the focus of interest, at least on the part of the more thoroughgoing Chartists. Even those who believed in constitutional methods were tired of the succession of resolutions which were not carried out, and of debates which left things much as they were before. Since the Whitsuntide campaign and the Birmingham riots, there seems to have been a notable decline in Chartist oratory and public meetings. The moderates were tending to desert, whilst the extremists were adopting quite different methods. Secret meetings on a considerable scale were now heard of in various places—meetings of small groups in private houses. There had been also notable withdrawals from the Convention of leading advocates of violence. Rider, Harney, and Frost had long ceased to take active part in its deliberations, though it was known that they were busy in various districts. A strong propaganda of violence was being carried on, but less openly. Cardo, Hartwell, and Dr. Taylor were conspicuous in this. Harney was not less active. The nervousness, not to say panic, exhibited in the latter debates of the Convention, suggests that there was some knowledge and no little apprehension of the existence of secret forces working towards violent extremes. Wemyss at Manchester reported in July 1839 that the ostensible leaders were being pushed on from behind by others who might precipitate an outbreak in ​spite of the obvious unpreparedness of the nominal leaders. This has special reference to the preparations for the National Holiday, but it no doubt indicates a state of affairs which was becoming more and more general. John Frost, the unfortunate Newport rebel, is alleged to have declared that he was compelled against his will to undertake the leadership.
The Newport Rising was the climax of this secret preparation. On the early morning of November 4 a body of some three thousand colliers under the leadership of John Frost marched in a single column upon Newport (Monmouthshire). In the centre of the town the head of the column was unexpectedly brought up by a small body of soldiers in the Westgate Hotel, covering the line of advance. A few Chartists were killed and wounded, and the remainder dispersed without coming into action.
Round this event stories and rumours of every description gathered. On the Chartist side no reliable account has ever been published. The matter became a subject of violent recrimination amongst the Chartists in later years, and the truth, known in the first instance to very few, was obscured by charges and counter-charges until the task of estimating the true significance of the event becomes well-nigh impossible.
One non-Chartist account may be given first. It comes from David Urquhart, who had been in the British Diplomatic Service in Constantinople, and had thereby become a furious anti-Russia fanatic, and saw in the Chartist insurrection of 1839 one more sample of Russian intrigue. He claimed to have derived his information from authentic Chartist sources. In this there is truth, but his information is so coloured by his peculiar notions that the story appears quite fantastic.
Urquhart begins with an account of the origin of the Chartist movement. It was set on foot as a result of a compact between Hume and Place, in order to counteract the Anti-Poor Law agitation. The movement quickly attracted advocates of violence, amongst whom Dr. Taylor, Harney, and one unnamed (probably Vincent) were the chief. These, however, were not the real leaders of the conspiracy, which was organised by men of genius. It was so marvellously designed that it betrayed the hand of past-masters in the art of secret revolution. So excellent was the plot that no Englishman ​could have excogitated it. It was of foreign origin. It was, in fact, modelled on the Greek Hetairia, and Russian agents were at the back of it. The chief of these agents was Beniowski, an alleged Polish refugee, who, however, was a former member of the Hetairia. A secret insurrectionary committee of five was appointed to direct the organisation. Cardo, Warden, Westrapp, and another, who was a high police official, were also members. Cardo and Warden were men of the highest genius, the one a Socrates and the other a Shakespeare.
A general rising was planned for the end of the year. One hundred and twenty-two thousand armed and partially trained men were ready, and a Russian fleet would provide munitions. Beniowski was to command in Wales, where apparently the main rising was to take place. Urquhart, however, got wind of the plot in time to put a stop to it. He convinced Cardo, Warden, and Dr. Taylor (who was to have some part in the plot) that they were the victims of a Russian agent provocateur, and persuaded them to abandon it. Frost, however, he did not reach in time, and so could not save him.
Feargus O'Connor was not involved in the affair at all, as he was regarded as too cowardly and unreliable. He was only concerned with the circulation of the Northern Star. This on the information of a member of the Convention of 1839—perhaps Cardo.
So much for Urquhart's story. It forms the source of the very unsatisfactory narrative of Thomas Frost, a Croydon man who came into the Chartist movement in its last stage, eight years or so after the events at Newport. Frost appears to give much credence to Urquhart's story, but adds nothing to it. The narrative of Gammage is more circumstantial even than Urquhart's. Gammage came into the movement about 1842, and later developed into a thoroughgoing opponent to O'Connor. His account is published with a view to blackening O'Connor, and is based upon the revelations of one William Ashton of Barnsley. These latter were made public in 1845 in the midst of fierce attacks upon O'Connor, then Chartist dictator, and purported to be damning evidence of O'Connor's treachery in connection with the affair. There is a further account by Lovett, but it is of no great value. Lovett was in ​prison at the time of the rising, and his account was not published till 1876.
All these not altogether trustworthy accounts have one thing in common, that a general rising of some kind was projected, and that the outbreak in Wales was to be the signal. There was a committee in Birmingham and another with its headquarters at Dewsbury in Yorkshire. The head committee was no doubt in London. Dr. Taylor, Frost, Bussey, and Beniowski are mentioned as the chiefs of the affair. Taylor was to take the lead in the North, Bussey in Yorkshire, Frost and Beniowski in Wales. It should be noted, however, that if we take into consideration all the accounts of this projected rising, practically no prominent and unimprisoned Chartist's name would be omitted from the list of the reputed leaders of the alleged rising.
Of the activities of these men and of the local committees we have little or no information previous to the Newport affair. Beniowski was a Polish refugee, and followed the not unusual career of revolutionary intrigue. He was a fine, tall, aristocratic-looking man of considerable talent and energy. He appears to have been a prominent member of the London Democratic Association, which was saturated with the sentiments of French revolutionaries. He was in receipt of a pension of £3 a month from the British Government as trustee for a fund for the support of Polish refugees. In May Lord John Russell ordered this to be stopped, on information regarding Beniowski's behaviour. Evidently the Government had been keeping him under surveillance. All accounts assign to Beniowski one of the chief places in the plot. Of his doings nothing is known definitely until after the Newport affair, though it is probable that he was actively engaged in the military preparations.
Frost had been sent back into the district early in May, when the news of Vincent's arrest was known. He was a Newport man and the leader of the local Chartists, and had been town councillor, mayor, and justice of the peace. But early in 1839 Lord John Russell had removed him from the Commission of the Peace by reason of his seditious language at meetings. This mild martyrdom had greatly increased his local popularity. After the collapse of the Convention he threw all his energies into organising violent proceedings in Newport and the neighbouring coal-mining valleys of ​Monmouthshire. The result was the most formidable manifestation of physical force that Chartism ever set on foot.
The idea of a rising had been mooted early in the year, but the lack of preparation, which had scotched the general strike, had brought about a postponement. When Vincent had been lodged in Monmouth Gaol the notion of rescuing him by force seems to have been entertained, but the evidence given at the trial suggests rather that the immediate purpose of the local rising was to give the signal to the other confederates, the rescue project remaining in the background. One story, that the non-arrival at Birmingham of the mail-coach, which passed through Newport, was to be the signal for action in the Midlands, may well be true, for there was a committee at work in Birmingham, of which Brown, the ex-delegate, one Parkes, Smallwood, and Fussell were apparently, the chiefs. They held secret meetings, which, however, were not unknown to the police, whose agents tried in vain to obtain admission. The Birmingham magistrates had already issued an order that all makers of munitions must deposit their stocks in the barracks. Drilling and training were carried on, and communication was kept up in a kind of cipher. Whenever any suspicious persons entered the meetings, a semi-religious character was imparted to the gathering. The Chartists at Birmingham seem to have had a friend at court in one of the magistrates, who gave them warning of police activity, but they suffered greatly from the attentions of spies employed by the new police commissioner in the city. Fussell and Harney himself remain under grave suspicion in this connection, and a serious attempt was made to corrupt Parkes.
Beyond this there is little information as to the preparations for the rising of which Frost's was to be the beginning. The Newport affair was planned and carried out with great secrecy. The conditions were favourable. In the scattered and lonely colliery villages amongst the hills the hand of authority was almost unknown, and it was easy to preserve secrecy. It was known that the available military force was small. There was a tiny detachment at Newport, a larger body, two companies, at Abergavenny, about eighteen miles—a day's march—away, and a still larger force at Newtown in Montgomeryshire, which, by reason of its remoteness, was quite out of ​relation to the South Welsh movement. Armed associations had been formed at Newport under the suggestion of Lord John Russell. All things considered, the military and civil force was not such as could have offered much resistance to a carefully planned attack. The affair was planned with a certain modicum of military technique. Reconnaissance of a sort was made, and outposts were stationed to arrest strangers and prevent news from reaching the town. So good were the preparations that no precise information appears to have filtered through until the Chartists were actually assembling for the march, on the evening of November 3. The chief rendezvous was the mining village of Risca, on the Ebbw, six miles north-west of Newport. It was intended to occupy the town during the night, hold up the mails, thus giving the signal to the other districts, and then to march on Monmouth to release Vincent. The force which is said to have assembled was much larger than the authorities expected. One part was apparently told off to block all exits from the town and to hold off reinforcements and relief, whilst the other smaller body, variously estimated at one to ten thousand strong, marched into the town. Thomas Phillips, the energetic Mayor of Newport, who took a prominent part in the fighting, says the Chartists were organised in sections of ten under a section commander, and the marching column occupied a mile of road—perhaps 3000 men, as untrained troops would straggle in marching. Perhaps the Morning Chronicle's estimate of a thousand is the best. Such a force would be ample to overpower what was then a small town with a garrison of twenty-eight soldiers.
Night operations are naturally the most difficult of military undertakings, and even with trained forces the utmost care is required to avoid loss of direction, delays, noise which will betray, and to ensure the exact co-ordination of the various parts of the scheme. This affair was naturally bungled. A brewer named Brough relates his experiences. He was seized by a patrol on the Pontypool road at half-past nine on Sunday evening, November 3, and marched about for eight hours until Frost ordered his release. There was much marching and counter-marching; some detachments had marched all night; and a great deal of time was wasted. Instead of reaching Newport at 2 a.m., it was nine o'clock and broad daylight when the column attained its objective. The authorities had been warned of the assembling of armed bodies in the hills ​by the arrival in the town of terrified refugees who escaped the Chartist sentries. It was the same at Abergavenny, where there was no little panic. At Newport the troops had been lodged in the Westgate Hotel, fronting the main street and covering the Chartist advance. As the insurgents debouched opposite the hotel there was a fierce burst of musketry. The colliers made a stand, but were at a disadvantage against troops under cover. Some managed even to enter the hotel by a passage way, but after a short engagement the Chartists fled, leaving fourteen dead and some fifty wounded, of whom ten died shortly after. One hundred and twenty-five persons were arrested, including Frost, Zephaniah Williams, and William Jones, the chief leaders. Twenty-nine of these were committed for trial, all but eight on a charge of high treason. A Special Commission was issued to try them, and the trial commenced on December 10 at Monmouth. No question of the law's delays here.
So ended the Newport Rising, and with it collapsed, for the time being, all the other preparations for insurrection. The attention of the Chartist world was now concentrated upon the probable fate of Frost and his fellow-prisoners. Feargus O'Connor exerted himself to procure funds for the defence, and engaged Sir Frederick Pollock and Fitzroy Kelly, both men of considerable eminence, on behalf of Frost. He gave a week's profits of his paper to the fund, and swore to save the life of his colleague at all hazards. On the other hand, it appears that the idea of rescuing Frost and the others by an armed insurrection was quickly taken up, and preparations on an even wider scale were set on foot. A great revival of Chartist activity followed. Everywhere meetings were held, either to protest against the prosecution of the Newport rioters on the ground that the rising was the work of agents provocateurs, or to collect funds, or to concert plans of rescue. A kind of Convention met to organise the Frost rescue movement, but it accomplished nothing. The secret organisations flourished and grew apace.
From various evidence it seems that O'Connor was, perhaps on the strength of his promise to save Frost's life, regarded as the leader of this second insurrectionary movement. He was at least expected to provide funds. But O'Connor's conduct at this juncture was, to say the least, very unsatisfactory. It may safely be said that O'Connor was never at any time prepared to imperil either his life or his reputation by engaging in ​any armed enterprise. By great dexterity, and by means of a month's visit to Ireland paid at this exceptionally dangerous moment, he managed to be the last of the earlier Chartist leaders to come under the ban of the law. There is every reason to believe he was suspected by the physical force extremists before the Newport affair, and it is very probable that he was deliberately prevented from taking an active part in it. He afterwards denied all knowledge of it, which is absurd on the face of it, as Gammage argues. Lovett declares that O'Connor put a stop to the affair except in Newport, and this is confirmed by William Ashton, who says that O'Connor could have stopped Frost's rising too, but preferred to sacrifice him out of jealousy. This is scarcely to be believed, though O'Connor was not incapable of unscrupulous methods of eliminating rivals.
At any rate, O'Connor took this opportunity of quitting the country. He was engaged to lecture and agitate in Lancashire from October 7 to 12, but on October 2 he wrote to cancel this engagement on the ground that he was going to found Radical Associations in Ireland, and to array the people of Cork against the aristocracy in view of the next General Election. He arrived in Dublin on October 6, and was back in Leeds on November 6, two days after the events at Newport. On a later occasion he said that he went to Ireland to raise money on his property there. Both versions appear equally unsatisfactory, and even if O'Connor was not really implicated in the plot, he must remain under the gravest suspicion of having run away and allowed his friends to engage in a futile and dangerous enterprise which a word from him could have stopped.
Meanwhile preparations were going on for a second rising to take place in the event of Frost's condemnation. The Newport authorities were on the alert. About ten days after the rising, the presence of Beniowski, Cardo, and Taylor in the district was known or suspected. Cardo was actually arrested outside the Westgate Hotel on November 15, and his papers searched. He declared that "he did not believe that Mr. Frost headed the mob, and attributed the outbreak to Russian ​agency." So reports the Mayor—a curious corroboration of part of Urquhart's story from an apparently independent source, although Cardo may have picked up the idea from hearing Urquhart lecture in the course of a strenuous tour in the winter of 1839–40. When sending Cardo away by the mail on the 16th, the Mayor observed a stranger who was said to be Dr. John Taylor. The Mayor requested the Government to send down somebody who knew Beniowski by sight. He received an anonymous letter alleging that Beniowski had been sent with 138 lbs. of ball cartridge from London via Bristol. Three men were arrested on suspicion, but apparently no further proceedings were taken.
About the same time the Bradford magistrates report secret proceedings. They managed to corrupt a Chartist, and obtained information of the intended rising. On December 17 they received a long report, probably through this channel. The rising was to take place on the 27th. A secret Convention would meet in London on the 19th and give the signal. There had been a meeting in Manchester the previous week, in which Taylor was the leading spirit. The soldiery were to be harassed by systematic incendiarism, and an attempt was to be made to assassinate the judges on their way to the trials at Monmouth.
The Birmingham secret meetings continued, and there, too, there was talk of organising incendiarism. A memorandum describing the organisation is amongst the Home Office papers. The Chartist body there numbers some three or four hundred organised in lodges. The members are carefully selected. Each lodge is headed by a captain, who is a member of the General Committee. This body meets at private houses—a different one in each case. A password is given, and all precautions against surprise by the police are taken. It was intended to have a general rising in case of Frost's conviction. Some Chartists talked of proclaiming a republic, whilst others declared that, if Frost were not released, the Queen's marriage would not take place.
Similar reports of secret organisations of Chartists emanate from Loughborough and the hosiery villages in the neighbourhood. There the organisation in sections of ten, which seems to have been the general model, was in full swing. The project of a general rising was entertained, and the Newport men were blamed for being so hasty and premature. A similar ​organisation existed in London. If Phillips's report on the Monmouthshire Chartists is to be believed, this organisation in sections was for both military and administrative purposes.
In London the Chartist preparations were reported assiduously by spies and informants of various descriptions. One Robert T. Edwards, who was in the employ of Hetherington at 126 Strand, and, therefore, had opportunity of seeing and hearing what was going on, furnished information calculated to implicate all the Chartist leaders in the Newport affair, and warned the Government to keep an eye on the Bradford Chartists, and especially Pitkeithly. This, by the way, is almost the sole mention of Pitkeithly in this connection. An anonymous informant made considerable revelations about the middle of November. He speaks of a council of three as directing the plot (a Bradford report speaks also of a council of three in London), and says, "Their Ame is to fire property, the shiping in the River and Docks, to kidnap the principal men of the State." "They have several thousands of fire arms to the account of Feargus O'Connor: the democratic association meet nightly at Mr. Williams (Baker) Brick Lane Spitalfields where they receive daily communications from Wales. Major Beniwisk (sic) went down to survey the country." The informer attended a meeting of over 300 "delegates" at the Trades Hall, Abbey Street, Spitalfields, where Cardo, Neesom, Beniowski, Williams the baker, and others addressed the audience with "very inspireing and highly dangerous language." This letter is dated the same day that saw Cardo hustled out of Newport by the Mayor, and must refer to some date considerably earlier, if it is true at all. This meeting appointed a Committee to raise funds which were to be handed over to the "Council of War." £500 was promised by Feargus O'Connor. A rising on the day previous to that fixed for Frost's execution was planned for London, Manchester, and Newcastle. A further report speaks of secret meetings at which members of the Convention are expected to be present. The Chartists (in London?) are 18,000 strong.
A report, dated November 12, was received by Wemyss at Manchester from Halifax. The magistrates there say that the Chartists are continuing to meet, but in private houses. At one of these meetings a well-known leader was ordered to communicate with the local leaders as to the best means of ​"going to work, and to do it in better fashion than it had been done in Wales, where they consider it to have been badly mismanaged." Bradford is the objective of the would-be insurgents. Wemyss further reports meetings of similar character at Bolton, Todmorden, Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Burnley, and Bury. The Ashton Chartists are known to have been in touch with the Newport leaders. He also relates that Feargus O'Connor was in Manchester at the time of the Newport rising, and this is not impossible, as he may have stopped there on his way from Ireland to Leeds, which he reached, as we have seen, two days after the Newport failure. On December 22 Wemyss declares that there were very persistent rumours of a projected rising on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border for the end of the month. So serious was the news from Bradford that Napier went there in person. Bury is another centre specially mentioned in this connection, and another letter from Wemyss suggests that Fielden's mill at Todmorden was an important place of meeting. In spite of all these rumours, however, Wemyss reports that the general impression was that nothing would happen.
And this is in fact the general impression made by all the secret reports, papers, and informations. Without going into the question as to how far these doings were prompted by agents provocateurs, it may be safely said that there was some real intention of doing something desperate in connection with the trial of Frost, but that the lukewarmness generated by the failure at Newport, the suspicions which were abroad as to the trustworthiness of the leaders, the presence of spies, and the wariness of the authorities, combined to cause the whole business to peter out in a rather ridiculous fashion! In the controversy which raged between O'Connor and his detractors in 1845, neither side denied the existence of a plot of some sort. O'Connor even mentioned that Dr. Taylor fitted out a vessel to waylay the convict-ship conveying Frost to Australia. Another story, related by Lovett, attributes the collapse of the plot to the cowardice of Bussey, who shortly afterwards fled to America. There was a plot and it came to nothing.
Two rather curious reports of Chartist doings in Manchester may be cited. A Chartist committee of eight met on December 16, a police agent being concealed in the vicinity. They were discussing the collection of subscriptions for ​Frost, and the whole tenour of the proceedings was one of depression and distrust. The balance sheet was read to the accompaniment of quarrelsome discussion, for scarcely anything had been collected. Another report relates that one member of the Manchester Chartist Council declared that not one in twenty of those who attended the meeting addressed by O'Connor and Cardo to raise funds for Frost, would be sorry if Frost were hanged. At Birmingham the Chartists could scarcely raise a penny for this purpose. One report shows that expenses of £2:17:4½ had been incurred to raise a subscription of £2:16:9, so that, as a speaker put it, Frost owed them 7½d. There was a quarrel with Cardo on December 31. Cardo was accused of being in the pay of foreign and Tory agents, a charge to which he refused to reply. This charge, at least as regards Tory agency, was true. Cardo was apparently not a man of good character. Place thought him dishonest. Cardo, Warden, Richards, Lowery, and others appear during 1840 as the paid agents of an anti-Russian, anti-Palmerston committee of which Attwood's brother and David Urquhart were the chiefs, facts which give still more colour to the latter's narrative of the Chartist plottings. At Carlisle Cardo repeated his assertion that Frost was betrayed by Russian agents. As regards the rest of Urquhart's story, it may be admitted that he was correctly informed as to the nature of the plot which came partially to a head at Newport, and probably, too, the fantastic designs which he describes may actually have been entertained. Apparently, too, he did win over Cardo and Warden and even others to his peculiar views, Cardo in fact within a short time of the rising. But whether the rising was so marvellously planned, and whether Cardo and Warden had the important rôles which he described, may well be doubted. These details were probably thrown in to justify Urquhart, who was a bit of a megalomaniac, in assuming the title of "the tamer of the English Democracy."
Meanwhile the trial of Frost and his companions began. On December 14 the Grand Jury found a true bill for high treason, and the trial was fixed for the 31st. Geach, a relative of Frost and a solicitor, prepared the case for the defending counsel. Geach was a man of dishonest character, and does ​not seem to have managed the case too well. He was in constant touch with O'Connor, who was supplying funds, and was even mentioned in connection with the proposed attempt to rescue Frost.
The unfortunate prisoners in Monmouth Gaol had no illusions as to their fate. Frost made over all his property to his wife (they had started inn-keeping) to avoid the confiscation which follows condemnation for high treason. On December 21 Geach transmitted a very pathetic petition from the prisoners, affirming that they "never entertained any feeling or spirit of hostility against your Majesty's sacred person, rights, or immunities, nor against the Constitution of your Majesty's realms as by law established." They beg for pecuniary assistance to enable them to employ counsel. There are twenty-two signatures, and sixteen sign with a cross. Frost's name is the last; the hand of Zephaniah Williams is that of an educated man. The petition was refused, like some hundreds of others to the same purpose. On January 16 sentence of death by drawing, hanging, and quartering was passed on the three chiefs, Frost, Williams, and Jones. A technical objection caused an appeal to the Court of Exchequer Chamber, which quashed it on the 28th. Four days later the sentence was commuted to transportation for life to Botany Bay, and by the end of February the hapless rebels were on their way to exile.
There were, after all, one or two small outbreaks in the interval between Frost's condemnation and the passing of the sentence. On the night of January 11 a number of Chartists attacked the police at Sheffield, and a large quantity of arms, ammunition, hand-grenades, fire-balls were seized from them. At Dewsbury on the same night the Chartists assembled and made signals by means of shots and fire-balloons. These were answered from Birstall and Heckmondwike, but nothing further took place. A similar affair occurred at Bradford, and in London preparations were made against extensive incendiarism. At Sheffield a number of Chartists were arrested and arraigned on a charge of high treason. It was stated that they intended to seize and hold the Town Hall, and that a similar attempt was to be made at Nottingham. On January 16 a meeting of Chartists in Bethnal Green was rounded up by the police, and Neesom, Williams the baker, and others were ​arrested. Beniowski escaped. This meeting was an armed assembly, and Ashton afterwards declared that it was part of the intended rising in London.
After this came another period of trials and imprisonments. In March 1840 Richardson, O'Brien, W. V. Jackson, and others were tried at Liverpool and sentenced to imprisonment—O'Brien and Jackson to eighteen months, and Richardson to nine months. At Monmouth Vincent was condemned to a second imprisonment of a year. Holberry and the Sheffield Chartists were tried at York for conspiracy (not for high treason) and condemned to various terms of imprisonment. At York, too, Feargus O'Connor was tried for a newspaper libel. He called, or proposed to call, fifty witnesses to prove that he had never advocated physical force, though it does not appear that this point was at all material to the question. He was condemned to eighteen months' imprisonment, but actually served only ten, being released on account of bad health. From the gaol he contrived to smuggle out letters to the Northern Star, and his account of his sufferings there brought him unbounded sympathy. W. P. Roberts and Carrier were sentenced at Devizes in May to two years' imprisonment, and in July the two Sunderland leaders, Williams and Binns, were sentenced to six months' imprisonment at Durham Assizes. Many of the important leaders were thus accounted for. Frost, O'Connor, O'Brien, Lovett, Collins, Stephens, Richardson, Benbow, Roberts, Vincent were all in durance. Dr. Taylor was still at large, but was hurrying himself by his excesses to the grave, which received him in 1841. Bussey and Deegan fled overseas. Cardo and Warden were lost to the cause. Lowery ceased to take a very prominent part in the movement. Marsden, Harney, Rider, MacDouall—all prominent advocates of armed revolt—were still at large and lived to fight, or talk of fighting, another day. The Scottish Chartists in general took no part in these later proceedings, and pledged themselves at a Conference, held at Edinburgh in September 1839, to pursue the agitation only by peaceable and constitutional methods. They never again entered into a thoroughgoing co-operation with the English Chartists. Nor did Wales play a prominent part in the movement after the fearful day of Newport. In fact, Chartism never again attained the extent and dimensions it possessed in 1839. It degenerated into sects and factions, ​deriving their importance from sources which were not within themselves.
Sufficient, it is hoped, has been said in the course of the narrative as to the causes which brought the first phase of Chartism from so promising a beginning to so futile an end. In spite of the appearance of unity which the movement exhibited at the beginning of the year 1839, Chartism was then far less of a homogeneous thing than at any time in its career. It never again included such heterogeneous elements. The movement in 1839 was a tumultuous upheaval of a composite and wholly unorganised mass. It was a disease of the body politic rather than the growth of a new member of it. The various sections of Chartism had been brought together upon the common but negative basis of protest against things as they were, but the positive fundamentals of unity were lacking. The protest against the Poor Law Amendment Act, the protest against the existing currency theory, and the vaguer but much more violent protest against poverty and economic oppression, had all been swallowed up in the general but doctrinaire protest against political exclusion and monopoly, and it was under the last standard that the Chartist legions marched. But the fundamental differences of outlook remained. One section, and that the largest, had been brought up on a strong diet of unreasoning sentimentalism by Stephens and Oastler, and hungry and starving men had long been inured to insurrectionary suggestion by Vincent, O'Connor, O'Brien, and other demagogues. The rude, half-barbarian ignorance of the miners and colliers in the North of England and in South Wales, and the famishing desperation of the poor weavers and stockingers, made these men very susceptible to such inflammatory teaching. They fell nominally under the leadership of intellectuals like Lovett and his friends, and of impractical fanatics like Attwood. Both Lovett and Attwood had come forward to build up organised parties, but Lovett had a permanent and Attwood only a temporary purpose. Both ideals came to grief through the dog-like attachment of the great mass of their nominal followers to their own local leaders—Harney, Bussey, Frost, Fletcher, MacDouall, O'Connor, and the rest. This destroyed all real organisation, for the organisation was concentrated in the persons of the leaders. This was the "leadership" which Lovett so strongly condemned. ​The fidelity of the rank and file was at once the strength and weakness of the movement. It was given to good and bad leaders with equal indiscriminateness, and produced an unprecedented amount of self-deception, which later so cruelly avenged itself.
These diversities of aims and outlook made effective co-operation in revolutionary action impossible. They were, in fact, the same fundamental divergencies of policy which had been, as we have seen, reflected in the Convention, which swayed constantly between the two extremes of French revolutionary and English middle-class conceptions of political agitation. One section was for armed insurrection, and looked upon the Convention as a provisional government—a Committee of Public Safety in posse; another conceived it as a great agitating body, like the Anti-Corn Law League conferences; another, of which O'Connor was typical, was content to use the threats of the one and the methods of the other. To Lovett the Convention must have been a great tragedy—a long torture which his imprisonment brought to a welcome end. The futile boastings of would-be Marats and self-styled Robespierres, and the cowardly shufflings of irresolute babblers, who feared imprisonment more than they respected their own principles, must have thoroughly sickened him. It is not to be supposed that the delegates were generally cowards and rogues. The majority were quite sincere men, who in good faith had thoroughly deceived themselves and their followers, but who had not the moral courage to face the real facts, when they were finally undeceived, nor the mental dexterity of O'Brien and O'Connor to withdraw themselves from a false position without loss of prestige. On every material point the would-be insurrectionary leaders were wrong: they underestimated the strength of the Government and the influence of the middle classes, strengthened as these were by the upper strata of working people; they underrated the military forces opposed to them; but most of all, they attributed to English people that thoroughgoing lawlessness which had been inculcated in the French by generations of arbitrary government. For even Stephens thought it wrong to overturn a Government by arms, though it was right to oppose a bad law. According to O'Brien it was right to knock a policeman on the head, but wrong to destroy property.
​Thus in most of the delegates excitement and a new-found popularity amongst unreasoning followers produced exaggerated expectations and unbounded self-esteem; experience brought disillusionment and shifty shufflings which robbed the Convention of its following long before it dissolved. Abandoning their leaders, the more desperate followers embarked upon projects of futile violence, ending in the imprisonment, transportation, and death of nearly 500 men.
* ↑ The Scottish Chartists had wholly withdrawn from the English movement as early as August, when a Scottish delegate assembly drew up the plan of a separate organisation. Chartist Circular, preface.
* ↑ Home Office, 40 (43); Manchester Guardian, July 30.
* ↑ Estimates of the number vary extraordinarily. The affair, it must be remembered, took place in the dark.
* ↑ Diplomatic Review, July 1873.
* ↑ Forty Years' Recollections, London, 1880, pp. 102 et seq.
* ↑ History of the Chartist Movement, 1854, pp. 282 et seq.
* ↑ Northern Star, May 3, 1845.
* ↑ Life and Struggles, pp. 239-40.
* ↑ Home Office, 40 (44), Metropolis.
* ↑ There is in the Home Office papers a letter from the Birmingham police commissioner which throws much suspicion on Harney. When Harney was charged at Birmingham with sedition, no evidence was offered, and he was discharged! (Northern Liberator, April 11, 1840).
* ↑ Parkes at Birmingham expressed his suspicions on October 30 (Home Office, 40 (49), Birmingham).
* ↑ History, ed. 1854, p. 282 et seq.
* ↑ Northern Star, May 3, 1845.
* ↑ Ibid. October 5, 1839.
* ↑ Ibid. November 9, 1839: account of his trip.
* ↑ Ibid. May 3, 1845.
* ↑ Cf. Lowery's statement in Gammage, ed. 1854, p. 287.
* ↑ Home Office, 40 (45), Monmouth. November 16, 17, 18, 19.
* ↑ Ibid. 40 (51), Yorks.
* ↑ Ibid. 40 (49), Birmingham.
* ↑ Trial of Ayre (Northern Liberator, January 31, 1840).
* ↑ Home Office, 40 (44), Metropolis.
* ↑ Ibid.
* ↑ Ibid. 40 (43), Manchester.
* ↑ Home Office, 40 (43), Manchester. Is it possible that the Irish visit was merely a blind?
* ↑ Ibid. 40 (43), Manchester.
* ↑ Ibid.
* ↑ Home Office, 40 (49), Birmingham.
* ↑ Northern Liberator, February 21, 1840.
* ↑ Ibid. October 31, 1840. This paper gives most information about Urquhart's campaign.
* ↑ Except the Russian fleet!
* ↑ Diplomatic Review, July 1873.
* ↑ Home Office, 40 (45), Monmouth.
* ↑ Northern Liberator, January 18, 1840; January 24, 1840.
* ↑ Gammage, 1854, pp. 186 et seq; Northern Star, May 3, 1845.
* ↑ Ibid. 1854, pp. 186 et seq.
* ↑ Northern Liberator, September 21, 1839.
* ↑ This is shown by the complete collapse of the movement in 1840 when the leaders were in prison.
* ↑ This without prejudice to the question whether these methods were not largely the invention of the middle class.
* ↑ Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 238: 443 persons were in prison alone for political offences in 1837–40. According to Rosenblatt's useful tables in his Social and Economic Aspects of the Chartist Movement, pp. 205-6 (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, vol. lxxiii. 2, 1916), there were 543 individual convictions between January 1, 1839 and June 1840. The distribution of these, emphasised in Mr. Rosenblatt's table, is interesting.