Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class. The production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Back. Its seventeen, which was not all that long ago, really. We did an episode on the Cato Street conspiracy that happened in eighteen twenty and it was a failed plot to assassinate the entire British Cabinet. In that episode, we very briefly mentioned the Peterloo massacre, which had happened in eighteen nineteen, so the year before that was part of the context for this whole conspiracy, and several folks back at that time let us know they were really excited to hear that. Peter Lou mentioned I've gotten a few listener requests for the massacre over the years as well, and this month is it's two anniversary, so it seemed like a good time to finally move it up to the top of the list. So the Peterloo Massacre took place during a peaceful protest for parliamentary reform in Manchester, Lancashire, England, and there was a lot feeding into why people in Britain and specifically in the region around Manchester thought that this reform was needed. The Napoleonic Wars in the War of eighteen twelve had both ended in eighteen fifteen, and people had hoped that would mean a period of common prosperity. But as has happened in so many topics that we've covered following other wars, it felt like the opposite was happening. The Napoleonic Wars had disrupted grain imports into Britain from the European continent, and this had worked out pretty well for Britain's large grain farmers. Because of the supply shortage, they could sell their corn and other grains for much higher prices than normal. But then as these wars were ending, prices started falling. People were going to have access to that imported grain again. Prices dropped almost fifty percent between eighteen thirteen and eighteen fifteen. So in eighteen fifteen Parliament passed a corn law which prohibited the import of various grains and held their prices for domestically grown crops rose up to a specific level, and that exact price depended on the type of grain that was being sold. This did contribute to price increases, but not as much as landowners had been hoping for. Still, the corn Law was obviously meant to protect the financial interests of wealthy planters and landowners. Ordinary working people, on the other hand, had been struggling to pay for grain and had welcomed the drop in price. In response to the passage of the corn Law, protests and food riots broke out all over Britain. Another issue was taxes. The British government had tried to pay for the wars with an assortment of taxes and duties. An income tax in particular had been passed in and it was supposed to be a temporary wartime measure. Annual incomes over two hundred pounds were taxed at ten percent, and incomes between sixty and two hundred pounds were taxed on a sliding scale from one percent to ten percent. A lot of working class people had an income of less than sixty pound the years, so they weren't being taxed at all. The British people thought that once the wars were over, at least some of these taxes would be abolished, especially the income tax, but roughly two decades of warfare had left Britain deeply in debt. So in the spring of eighteen sixteen, Prime Minister Robert Banks Jenkinson, second Earl of Liverpool, and Chancellor Nicholas van Sattart announced a plan to keep the income tax in place. So, like we just said, there was this whole sliding scale going on, and that meant the way the income tax was structured, wealthier people were paying the vast majority of the tax, and when they found out the tax was not going away, they naturally were outraged. People protested and they signed petitions, and on March eighteenth, eighteen sixteen, the House of Commons voted to abolish the income tax. Allegedly, then all the tax records were gathered up and burned in the old Palace yard in Westminster. But that wartime debt was still there and it was huge. The government still had to bring in money somehow, and ultimately the government raised taxes on a variety of consumer goods, including tobacco, tea, sugar and beer. While the income tax had mainly affected affluent people, Britain's poorer people were most affected by these taxes on consumer goods, So people who were already struggling to pay for necessities were now also paying higher taxes on those necessities as well. Yes, so they mostly went from not being taxed at all or or taxed only a little bit on their incomes too being taxed a whole lot more on things they needed to buy. And that was really just the beginning. In eighteen sixteen was the year without a Summer, which we've talked about on a previous episode of the show. Crops failed all over Europe because of unusually wet cold weather, and that made things even harder for people who were already being affected by the corn laws and the tax increases. Britain's textile industries were shifting and becoming more mechanized, with traditional hand looms being replaced by machines. People were losing their jobs and wages were falling for people who still had jobs. We talked about this more in our previous episode on the Luddite Rising, which took place in the earlier eighteen teams, so just a little bit before all this was happening, All of this was disproportionately affecting the people who were least able to afford it. Many working class families were affected by all of this at once, with shortages of food they needed, higher prices on what they could get, additional taxes and reduced wages, all at the same time and overwhelmingly. These same people also did not have the right to vote. In most of Britain, only men who paid certain taxes or who owned property had the right to vote, and this meant that less than five percent of people in England and Wales had the right to vote. In the rest of Britain, the percentage was even smaller. Even the people who could vote couldn't necessarily do so freely. Ballots weren't necessarily kept secret. Some burrows were known as pocket burrows because one person or family dictated how people should vote. One example was Boroughbridge, who was electorate was in the pocket of the Duke of Newcastle. On top of that, parts of Britain weren't really represented in parliament. More than half of MP's were elected from southern England, while other parts of Britain weren't represented by a member of Parliament at all. As the population of Britain had shifted, it was common for small boroughs which were controlled by the gentry, to have representation in Parliament, while growing cities did not. This was true for Manchester, which had no MP even though its population had grown to more than one hundred thousand people by eighteen fifteen. Meanwhile, other areas known as rotten boroughs sent two MPs to Parliament even though they only had a handful of voters living there. Old Saram, for example, had seven voters and two MPs. So working people and poor people in Britain, some of whom were both working and poor, understandably felt like they were not being represented in the government and that the government didn't understand or care about their interests are well being, and in places like Manchester, this was heightened by just not having any representation in Parliament at all. A movement for parliamentary reform had started to grow in Britain in the late eighteenth century in response to both the American and French Revolutions and Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, which had also influenced the French Revolution. Reform groups founded in the late seventeen hundreds in early eighteen hundreds focused on changing how MPs were elected and on the idea of universal manhood suffrage, meaning that all men or all working men would get the right to vote. There were also female reform societies that were a big part of this movement, and there were some organizations that included women's suffrage among their goals. Female reform societies and women's suffragists were really heavily criticized and their members were satirized in print, with critics implying that there was something questionable about their virtue. We are going to get into how this movement developed, but first we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. The movement for parliamentary reform in Britain was really focused on the idea of showing the government that massive numbers of people supported these proposed reforms. This included petitioning and holding mass meetings, and the first of these mass meetings was held in November of eighteen sixteen in Spa Fields in London. It drew a crowd of about ten thousand people along with a large number of spectators. Another more radical meeting followed at the same place on December two, eighteen sixteen. There's more detail about that one in our Cato Street conspiracy episode, but in brief, some of the leaders of that meeting used it to try to start a revolution. One person was killed and it came to be known as the Spa Fields Riots. The British government began to find this movement threatening. Some of it was just about the potential loss of political power if more people had the right to vote, or seats in Parliament were reapportioned to try to more consistently represent all of Britain. But this wasn't just about power. There had been violent incidents beyond just the Spa Fields riots. Some of the movement's leaders were radical and used violent rhetoric in their speeches. The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror were also still in the recent past, and it happened just on the other side of the Channel, so there were fears that something similar could happen in Britain. So the government started taking steps to try to discourage this reform movement and the math meetings that were associated with it. Parliament renewed wartime laws that banned seditious speech, and in March of eighteen seventeen they suspended the Habeas Corpus Act. I'm putting in this definition of habeas corpus here because I feel like it's a term people are familiar with but might not actually understand what it means. It's a Latin term that has a slightly different legal nuance depending on the jurisdiction, but it roughly translates to you may have the body, meaning that if you satisfy the right legal procedures, Authorities have to produce a person that's being detained or incarcerated, usually to bring them to a court appearance, and that court appearance is often meant to determine whether the person is being held justly or unjustly. So the concept of Habeas corpus is meant to protect people from being unlawfully imprisoned. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act meant that people lost that protection and could be arrested and held indefinitely without being charged with anything. This didn't stop the protests though. In March of eighteen seventeen, a group called the Manchester Radicals gathered in St Peter's Field planning to march to London. They wanted to protest the suspension of Habeas Corpus and draw attention to the issues facing textile workers in Lancashire. These marchers carried blankets and reform petitions with them, so this demonstration was nicknamed the March of the Blanketeers. When authorities tried to disperse these marchers. Hundreds of people were arrested. Nearly thirty were imprisoned for random peeriods of time, most of them never being charged with anything or brought to trial. A volunteer force called the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry was also formed in response to the March of the Blanketeers, another unrest that happened the same year. Parliament repealed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act in January of eighteen eighteen, but the government was still focused on trying to break up the reform movement. By March of eighteen eighteen, Home Secretary Lord Sidmuth had said quote, the country will not be tranquilized until blood shall have been shed, either by the law or the sword. As a summer approached in eighteen eighteen, reformers started planning a mass meeting in Manchester. One of the speakers was to be Henry Hunt, who had been a speaker at those previous meetings that spa Fields that we mentioned a few moments ago. He had become one of the most visible people within this movement. He was a flamboyant speaker who usually wore a very recognizable white hat. He was able to draw and motivate large crowds. A lot of articles about him today are extremely critical, but they also draw a lot of sources for people who hated him, so it's not totally clear how much of that is accurate. He was widely satirized in cartoons and articles, and the anti reform side gave him the nickname Oorritor, which was meant to be disparaging, but today people pretty much always just call him or Itt or Hunt. The idea was that on August eighteen nineteen, people would march from towns all around Manchester, gathering together at St. Peter's Fields. Some were coming from as far as thirty miles or forty eight kilometers away, and some of these groups were going to be very large, numbering hundreds or thousands of people. Organizers wanted to make sure they arrived in an orderly organized way, so many practiced their marching in the moors around their towns and villages in the weeks leading up to August sixteen. A lot of people also made banners to carry on the day, which were decorated with the name of the society that was carrying the banner, or a slogan like you Night and be Free or liberty and fraternity, or taxation without representation is unjust and tyrannical. So a lot of people were carrying banners while they were practicing as well, since they were going to have to carry them all that way on the sixteenth. This was also at the same time of year that many of these communities carried out a tradition of rush bearing. This came from the practice of annually replacing the layer of rushes that covered the church's stone floor, and had gradually become more of a parade in which participants carried rushes to the church, wearing their Sunday best, carrying banners, and pulling elaborately decorated rush carts. So people had logical reasons for practicing their marching before this event, and it was all going on at a time when it was pretty normal in these communities for people to parade from one place to another. But authorities worried that there was some kind of military purpose behind the drilling, and that organizers were really conspiring to pull off something more violent than a march to a meeting. By August twelve, local magistrates were writing to each other with their concerns that all of this might really be a pretext to some kind of armed revolution. As people living in and around Manchester prepared to march to the meeting and spend the day listening to speeches and rallying for reform, the magistrates prepared to make them disperse. Chief Magistrate William Holton instructed the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry and the neighboring Cheshire Yeomanry to remain at the ready, although many of them reportedly did so by spending the morning at Manchester's taverns. The magistrates recruited three hundred people for the Manchester Special Constabulary and armed them with truncheons. British Army regulars from the Regiment of Foot and the fifteen King's Hussars were called in as well. The magistrates had rocks and stones removed from the ground so they could not be used as weapons, and planned to arrest Henry Hunt as soon as he began speaking. We'll talk about how this all played out on the day after one more quick sponsor break. The crowd that arrived at St Peter's Fields in Manchester on August nineteen was festive and excited. Sixteenth was a Monday, so people who worked in the region's textile factories would have been at work for the day, but while power loom factories were growing in Lancashire, the majority of textile workers in that area we're still working at home on hand looms, and they typically worked on Saturdays and took Monday off. Many communities female reformer societies were marching together, all dressed in white on the sixteenth, although there were also lots of women there who weren't specifically associated with the society. Children were in attendance with their families, and sources vary on the estimates of how many total people were there. Most say at least sixty thousand, Some go as high as a hundred and fifty thousand or more. It's really kind of all over the place. It was illegal gathering, and although there may have been some people who brought a stick or some of their weapon, they had been told to bring quote no other weapon but that of a self approving conscience. Bishop Edward Stanley later said of the gathering, quote, I saw no symptoms of riot or disturbances before the meeting. The impression on my mind was that the people were sullenly peaceful. I don't know why. He says sullenly peaceful, when many of the other accounts say it was more festive, kind of like a fun, excited party. The Manchester Courier described it this way, quote at half past eleven, My attention was first particularly attracted by a crowd of people advancing to the ground with flags and music. They came in a sort of marching order, and were covered with dust, having, as I learned, come from some town at a distance. A number of women, boys and even children were in the procession, which had from this circumstance more the appearance of a large village party going to a merrymaking than that of a body of people advancing to overthrow the government of their country. John Benjamin Smith later became a liberal politician and part of the Anti Corn Law League, but at the time he was twenty five and he had not planned to go to the meeting. His aunt asked him to accompany her to a friend's house nearby so that she could watch, and he wrote of it quote, there were crowds of people in all directions, full of good humor, laughing and shouting and making fun. It seemed to be a gala day with the country people, who were mostly dressed in their best and brought with them their wives. And when I saw boys and girls taking their father's hand in the procession, I observed to my aunt, these are the guarantees of their peaceable intentions. We need have no fears. Magistrates met at a home that was adjacent to the meeting at about eleven in the morning, and sources differ about what happened there when Hunt started speaking and authorities moved into arrest him. Officials maintained that Chief Magistrate William Holton read the Riot Act before ordering the Yeomanry to make the crowd disperse. So here in the US, most people know the phrase read the Riot Act as a figure of speech, basically meaning giving someone a very stern lecture for some sort of misbehavior. But the Riot Act is a real act, first passed by Parliament in seventeen fourteen after a series of riots had swept through Britain, and its full title was an Act for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies and for the more speedy and effectual punishing of the rioters. The Act made it illegal for twelve or more people to quote unlawfully assemble and disturb the public peace. Local authorities had the right to approach such a group and order them to disperse, and failure to do so was a felony. The Act remained on the books until the mid to late twentieth century, so under the terms of the Riot Act, someone who was authorized to do so had to approach the unlawful assembly as closely as they safely could, call for silence or otherwise quote cause to be commanded silence, and then an allowed voice they had to read this statement and its entirety quote, our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons being assembled immediately to disperse themselves and peaceably, to depart to their habitations or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumult and riotous assemblies. God save the King. Once that statement was read, then the crowd had an hour to disperse. Accounts differ in whether authorities in Manchester that day read the Riot Act, with the reports that it was read mostly coming from magistrates and members of the military, but if it was read, it probably was not heard by the vast majority of the people there. They definitely were not given a one hour window to disperse. The Yeomanry came down on the crowd within minutes of Hunt's beginning to speak. The British Army later blamed the Yeomanry for what happened next. The crowd was very tightly packed into St. Peter's fields, and the yeoman Red quickly broke form as they charged in, leaving the members of the Womanry in very small groups surrounded by marchers who were packed in too tightly to disperse. The yeoman Read didn't have much training, and a lot of them were reportedly intoxicated, and when they found themselves trapped and kind of cut off from each other by this crowd, they started knocking people away with the flats of their sabers. In some accounts, things escalated when demonstrators started throwing rocks, although some eyewitnesses said they did not see any evidence of rock throwing or any other retaliation from the Crown. The Yeomanry sabers were also freshly sharpened, something that many sources conclude is evidence that they had intended to use them, or to at least do as much harm as they could if they accidentally or intentionally struck someone with the edge. Rather than the flat Yeah. This has been described as one of the most documented events of the nineteenth century. There's something like three hundred and fifty different eyewitness accounts, and a lot of them contradict each other in details like this. The Army regulars arrived at the field at about two pm, fired down streets to encourage people to disperse, and the fifteen hussars charged into the crowd. But Lieutenant Colonel Guiless Strange realized that the crowd had formed kind of a bottleneck and it was partly blocked in by the infantry. They couldn't disperse, they had nowhere to go, so he pulled his force back. Here's how John Benjamin Smith described the scene at that point quote it was a hot, dusty day. Clouds of dust arose which obscured the view. When it had subsided, a startling scene was presented. Numbers of men, women and children were lying on the ground who had been knocked down and run over by the soldiers. I noticed one woman lying face downwards, apparently lifeless. A man went up to her and lifted one of her legs. It fell as if she were lifeless. Another man lifted both her legs and let them fall. I saw her sometime after, carried off by the legs and arms as if she were dead, and the end eleven people were killed there on the day, five of them from saber wounds and the rest from being trampled or crushed by people or horses. The day's first fatality is usually cited as William Fields, who was a baby knocked out of the arms of his twenty three year old mother and then trampled. At least seven more people died of their injuries. Later, two constables were killed, likely by soldiers and probably by accident. This took about twenty minutes between when the yeoman recharged in and when the field was cleared. It seems as though the yeomanry and soldiers focused on people with banners and on women. Of the six d fifty four recorded injuries, at least one hundred sixty eight were women. Four of those women died of their injuries. Roughly half of those reported injuries came from sabers or other weapons, as opposed to being crushed or trampled. Based on the recorded numbers, about one eighth of the marchers were women, but women made up about one third of the injuries. There were also probably a lot more injuries that went unreported. People were really afraid to seek medical care out of fear that they would be arrested or faced some kind of other consequences for having been at the meeting. Twenty five year old James Lees, who was a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, died of injuries after being turned away from the Manchester infirmary. He was reportedly turned away because he refused to agree not to participate in such meetings in the future. He was quoted as saying, quote, at Waterloo there was man to man, but here it was downright murder. Henry Hunt was arrested and tried for seditious assembly and was sentenced to thirty months in prison. Three other speakers and organizers were sentenced to twelve months each. Although people tried to raise funds to help the injured and the families of the killed, most of this money wound up going to Hunt's legal defense. Local journalist James Rowe coined the term Peterloo massacre, combining St. Peter's Fields where it happened with the Battle of Waterloo, which the fifteenth Thustards had fought at four years before. Rose newspaper, The Manchester Observer, was shut down in the wake of his reporting on the incident, and he was charged and convicted with seditious libel. Afterwards, John Edward Taylor started the Manchester Guardian and that's just the Guardian today. The massacre temporarily united reformers across the political spectrum, with the more radical and more moderate wings of the movement coming together in outrage over what had happened, but this didn't help propel the movement forward. The magistrates and other officials sided with the Yeomanry and the regulars, including holding a meeting in secret to thank the Yeomanry for their work. There was no investigation into the behavior of the Yeomanry, the Special Constables, or the military units involved. In response to the massacre, Parliament also passed legislation known as the Six Acts in November of eighteen nineteen. These were the Training Prevention Act, the Seizure of Arms Act, the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act, the Misdemeanors Act, the Blasphemous and Seditious Libel Act, and the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act. Together, these acts restricted the freedoms of assembly, speech, and the press. They specifically outlawed the kind of drilling people had been doing in the moors leading up to the meeting. Meanwhile, nearly five thousand people signed a petition denouncing the meeting that had been held, to thank the Yeomanry and condemning the violence, and that read, in part quote, we are fully satisfied by personal observation on undoubted information, that the meeting was perfectly peaceable, that no seditious or intemperate harangues were made there, that the riot Act, if read at all, was read privately or without the knowledge of a great body of the meeting. And we feel it are bound in duty to protest against and to express our uttered disapprobation of the unexpected and unnecessary violence by which the assembly was dispersed. Many of the Special Constables and members of the Yeomanry were shopkeepers, and people boycotted those shops afterward. The massacre and the government and other official response to it were widely criticized and satur rised in print. An anonymous writer created a pamphlet based on the children's rhyme who Killed Cock Robin, with the robin being the people who were hurt and killed. Somewhat similar political pamphlet was called The Political House that Jack Built and was written by William Hone and illustrated with political cartoons like the Children's rhyme. Every line builds on the one before. So this is the house that Jack built. This is the wealth that lay in the house that Jack built. These are the vermin that plunder the wealth that lay in the house that Jack built. This is the thing that, in spite of new acts and attempts to restrain it by soldiers and tax will poison the vermin that plunder the wealth that lay in the house that Jack built. The thing that's going to poison these vermin is a printing press, and the vermin are an assortment of bishops, court officials, the army, tax collectors, and the like. Percy bish Shelley also wrote a lengthy poem called The Mask of Anarchy, although it was not published until after his death, and he sent that poem to Lee Hunt, who withheld its publication for fear of political or legal consequence. Is and there were also lots of household goods like cups and tea towels that were made to commemorate the massacre. But in spite of all this criticism and publicity. It was a really long time before any of the reforms that this movement had been looking for came into being. The Representation of the People Act of eighteen thirty two was the first act to include some of these reforms, and it was past thirteen years later. It gave more men the right to vote and redistributed some seats in Parliament, which reduced the number of rotten boroughs and gave some places some representation that they had not previously had. Although it was nicknamed the Great Reform Act, these changes were far more moderate than what reformers had been working toward. Additional reform acts followed in eighteen sixty seven and eighteen eighty four, which continued to refine who could vote and how communities were represented in Parliament. But it wasn't until nineteen eighteen, almost a century after the Peterloo Massacre, that the Representation of the People Act granted universal suffrage to men. All men over the age of twenty one could vote, as could women over the age of thirty who owned property. Yeah. By that point there had been entire other movements that had come and gone in Britain, including like the Chartist movement, was in that whole window, the whole lot. Ah, do you have listener mail that's maybe not quite so sad. I mean I do in a way, and it's it's kind of connects to this because because like a lot of the investigation into what happened at the time was really focused on these martyrs and what they were up to and whether they were up to something nefarious, and not on the people who carried out the actual killing. This email is from you on I hope I am saying your name correctly and Yuan Rights, Holly and Tracy. What a timely piece. Just last week, the Mercury News printed a report on US Representative Mark to Sanier's amendment to exonerate the Port Chicago fifty that passed the House. While I barely skim newspaper headlines these days, I devoured the because I thought I had heard about the incident from your show. That must be the Halifax explosion. Your latest show added so much depth to my understanding about the Port Chicago fifty. While listening, I can't help but wondering where's the intellect of those Navy officers who looked down on the quote lowest intellectual strata given the court finding quote that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally nor intellectually capable of handling high explosives. These officers who ordered such personnel back to handling high explosives must be there lacked the intellect to understand that conclusion, lacked the intellect to integrate that conclusion into their decisions. Should they pass the previous test or should they have possessed the intellected? You both must have committed treason by attempting to further sabotage the Navy port during the active war. This is a good point, so um, thank you you on for writing two things. Number one, A couple of people have gotten in touch with us about this. On July twelve, the National Defense Authors Asian Act was passed by the House. There was a concurrent resolution the day before, and there is an amendment that's part of the authorization that would um require the Secretary of the Navy to either exonerate the Port Chicago fifty or to look into exonerating the Port Chicago fifty. I could not find the text of the actual amendment on the Congress website. That there are a lot of amendments to this particular bill, and I could not find it among them. So that currently has passed the House. Um, there is not a similar bill that has passed the Senate. It's not signed into law, so like nothing is a sure thing yet. But this representative, who I think represents the part of California that Port Chicago is in, has been trying to get the Port Chicago fifty exonerated. It's not the first time that there's been an attempt to get them exonerated, but is ongoing. We recorded that episode on July nights, so we recorded the episode before any of those things had happened. And regards in regards to a question at the end, yeah, that's just not a question that anybody was exploring at all, and any of the hearings that happened at the time, there were just a lot of examinations of the men who were loading the munitions in Port Chicago and really no examination of the decisions that led them to be doing that. So, um, that was one of the very frustrating things, and that was a very uh astute way of laying out the questions involved. So thank you you want for this email and for the link to the article about this defense bill amendment that may lead to an exhoneration if it all continues on UH If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at how stuff Works dot com. And then we're all over social media and Missing History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can come to our website, which is missing history dot com and find show notes for all the episodes that Holly and I have worked on together in a searchable archive of all of our episodes, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of my Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class. The production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly fry Back. Its seventeen, which was not all that long ago, really. We did an episode on the Cato Street conspiracy that happened in eighteen twenty and it was a failed plot to assassinate the entire British Cabinet. In that episode, we very briefly mentioned the Peterloo massacre, which had happened in eighteen nineteen, so the year before that was part of the context for this whole conspiracy, and several folks back at that time let us know they were really excited to hear that. Peter Lou mentioned I've gotten a few listener requests for the massacre over the years as well, and this month is it's two anniversary, so it seemed like a good time to finally move it up to the top of the list. So the Peterloo Massacre took place during a peaceful protest for parliamentary reform in Manchester, Lancashire, England, and there was a lot feeding into why people in Britain and specifically in the region around Manchester thought that this reform was needed. The Napoleonic Wars in the War of eighteen twelve had both ended in eighteen fifteen, and people had hoped that would mean a period of common prosperity. But as has happened in so many topics that we've covered following other wars, it felt like the opposite was happening. The Napoleonic Wars had disrupted grain imports into Britain from the European continent, and this had worked out pretty well for Britain's large grain farmers. Because of the supply shortage, they could sell their corn and other grains for much higher prices than normal. But then as these wars were ending, prices started falling. People were going to have access to that imported grain again. Prices dropped almost fifty percent between eighteen thirteen and eighteen fifteen. So in eighteen fifteen Parliament passed a corn law which prohibited the import of various grains and held their prices for domestically grown crops rose up to a specific level, and that exact price depended on the type of grain that was being sold. This did contribute to price increases, but not as much as landowners had been hoping for. Still, the corn Law was obviously meant to protect the financial interests of wealthy planters and landowners. Ordinary working people, on the other hand, had been struggling to pay for grain and had welcomed the drop in price. In response to the passage of the corn Law, protests and food riots broke out all over Britain. Another issue was taxes. The British government had tried to pay for the wars with an assortment of taxes and duties. An income tax in particular had been passed in and it was supposed to be a temporary wartime measure. Annual incomes over two hundred pounds were taxed at ten percent, and incomes between sixty and two hundred pounds were taxed on a sliding scale from one percent to ten percent. A lot of working class people had an income of less than sixty pound the years, so they weren't being taxed at all. The British people thought that once the wars were over, at least some of these taxes would be abolished, especially the income tax, but roughly two decades of warfare had left Britain deeply in debt. So in the spring of eighteen sixteen, Prime Minister Robert Banks Jenkinson, second Earl of Liverpool, and Chancellor Nicholas van Sattart announced a plan to keep the income tax in place. So, like we just said, there was this whole sliding scale going on, and that meant the way the income tax was structured, wealthier people were paying the vast majority of the tax, and when they found out the tax was not going away, they naturally were outraged. People protested and they signed petitions, and on March eighteenth, eighteen sixteen, the House of Commons voted to abolish the income tax. Allegedly, then all the tax records were gathered up and burned in the old Palace yard in Westminster. But that wartime debt was still there and it was huge. The government still had to bring in money somehow, and ultimately the government raised taxes on a variety of consumer goods, including tobacco, tea, sugar and beer. While the income tax had mainly affected affluent people, Britain's poorer people were most affected by these taxes on consumer goods, So people who were already struggling to pay for necessities were now also paying higher taxes on those necessities as well. Yes, so they mostly went from not being taxed at all or or taxed only a little bit on their incomes too being taxed a whole lot more on things they needed to buy. And that was really just the beginning. In eighteen sixteen was the year without a Summer, which we've talked about on a previous episode of the show. Crops failed all over Europe because of unusually wet cold weather, and that made things even harder for people who were already being affected by the corn laws and the tax increases. Britain's textile industries were shifting and becoming more mechanized, with traditional hand looms being replaced by machines. People were losing their jobs and wages were falling for people who still had jobs. We talked about this more in our previous episode on the Luddite Rising, which took place in the earlier eighteen teams, so just a little bit before all this was happening, All of this was disproportionately affecting the people who were least able to afford it. Many working class families were affected by all of this at once, with shortages of food they needed, higher prices on what they could get, additional taxes and reduced wages, all at the same time and overwhelmingly. These same people also did not have the right to vote. In most of Britain, only men who paid certain taxes or who owned property had the right to vote, and this meant that less than five percent of people in England and Wales had the right to vote. In the rest of Britain, the percentage was even smaller. Even the people who could vote couldn't necessarily do so freely. Ballots weren't necessarily kept secret. Some burrows were known as pocket burrows because one person or family dictated how people should vote. One example was Boroughbridge, who was electorate was in the pocket of the Duke of Newcastle. On top of that, parts of Britain weren't really represented in parliament. More than half of MP's were elected from southern England, while other parts of Britain weren't represented by a member of Parliament at all. As the population of Britain had shifted, it was common for small boroughs which were controlled by the gentry, to have representation in Parliament, while growing cities did not. This was true for Manchester, which had no MP even though its population had grown to more than one hundred thousand people by eighteen fifteen. Meanwhile, other areas known as rotten boroughs sent two MPs to Parliament even though they only had a handful of voters living there. Old Saram, for example, had seven voters and two MPs. So working people and poor people in Britain, some of whom were both working and poor, understandably felt like they were not being represented in the government and that the government didn't understand or care about their interests are well being, and in places like Manchester, this was heightened by just not having any representation in Parliament at all. A movement for parliamentary reform had started to grow in Britain in the late eighteenth century in response to both the American and French Revolutions and Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, which had also influenced the French Revolution. Reform groups founded in the late seventeen hundreds in early eighteen hundreds focused on changing how MPs were elected and on the idea of universal manhood suffrage, meaning that all men or all working men would get the right to vote. There were also female reform societies that were a big part of this movement, and there were some organizations that included women's suffrage among their goals. Female reform societies and women's suffragists were really heavily criticized and their members were satirized in print, with critics implying that there was something questionable about their virtue. We are going to get into how this movement developed, but first we're gonna pause for a sponsor break. The movement for parliamentary reform in Britain was really focused on the idea of showing the government that massive numbers of people supported these proposed reforms. This included petitioning and holding mass meetings, and the first of these mass meetings was held in November of eighteen sixteen in Spa Fields in London. It drew a crowd of about ten thousand people along with a large number of spectators. Another more radical meeting followed at the same place on December two, eighteen sixteen. There's more detail about that one in our Cato Street conspiracy episode, but in brief, some of the leaders of that meeting used it to try to start a revolution. One person was killed and it came to be known as the Spa Fields Riots. The British government began to find this movement threatening. Some of it was just about the potential loss of political power if more people had the right to vote, or seats in Parliament were reapportioned to try to more consistently represent all of Britain. But this wasn't just about power. There had been violent incidents beyond just the Spa Fields riots. Some of the movement's leaders were radical and used violent rhetoric in their speeches. The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror were also still in the recent past, and it happened just on the other side of the Channel, so there were fears that something similar could happen in Britain. So the government started taking steps to try to discourage this reform movement and the math meetings that were associated with it. Parliament renewed wartime laws that banned seditious speech, and in March of eighteen seventeen they suspended the Habeas Corpus Act. I'm putting in this definition of habeas corpus here because I feel like it's a term people are familiar with but might not actually understand what it means. It's a Latin term that has a slightly different legal nuance depending on the jurisdiction, but it roughly translates to you may have the body, meaning that if you satisfy the right legal procedures, Authorities have to produce a person that's being detained or incarcerated, usually to bring them to a court appearance, and that court appearance is often meant to determine whether the person is being held justly or unjustly. So the concept of Habeas corpus is meant to protect people from being unlawfully imprisoned. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act meant that people lost that protection and could be arrested and held indefinitely without being charged with anything. This didn't stop the protests though. In March of eighteen seventeen, a group called the Manchester Radicals gathered in St Peter's Field planning to march to London. They wanted to protest the suspension of Habeas Corpus and draw attention to the issues facing textile workers in Lancashire. These marchers carried blankets and reform petitions with them, so this demonstration was nicknamed the March of the Blanketeers. When authorities tried to disperse these marchers. Hundreds of people were arrested. Nearly thirty were imprisoned for random peeriods of time, most of them never being charged with anything or brought to trial. A volunteer force called the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry was also formed in response to the March of the Blanketeers, another unrest that happened the same year. Parliament repealed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act in January of eighteen eighteen, but the government was still focused on trying to break up the reform movement. By March of eighteen eighteen, Home Secretary Lord Sidmuth had said quote, the country will not be tranquilized until blood shall have been shed, either by the law or the sword. As a summer approached in eighteen eighteen, reformers started planning a mass meeting in Manchester. One of the speakers was to be Henry Hunt, who had been a speaker at those previous meetings that spa Fields that we mentioned a few moments ago. He had become one of the most visible people within this movement. He was a flamboyant speaker who usually wore a very recognizable white hat. He was able to draw and motivate large crowds. A lot of articles about him today are extremely critical, but they also draw a lot of sources for people who hated him, so it's not totally clear how much of that is accurate. He was widely satirized in cartoons and articles, and the anti reform side gave him the nickname Oorritor, which was meant to be disparaging, but today people pretty much always just call him or Itt or Hunt. The idea was that on August eighteen nineteen, people would march from towns all around Manchester, gathering together at St. Peter's Fields. Some were coming from as far as thirty miles or forty eight kilometers away, and some of these groups were going to be very large, numbering hundreds or thousands of people. Organizers wanted to make sure they arrived in an orderly organized way, so many practiced their marching in the moors around their towns and villages in the weeks leading up to August sixteen. A lot of people also made banners to carry on the day, which were decorated with the name of the society that was carrying the banner, or a slogan like you Night and be Free or liberty and fraternity, or taxation without representation is unjust and tyrannical. So a lot of people were carrying banners while they were practicing as well, since they were going to have to carry them all that way on the sixteenth. This was also at the same time of year that many of these communities carried out a tradition of rush bearing. This came from the practice of annually replacing the layer of rushes that covered the church's stone floor, and had gradually become more of a parade in which participants carried rushes to the church, wearing their Sunday best, carrying banners, and pulling elaborately decorated rush carts. So people had logical reasons for practicing their marching before this event, and it was all going on at a time when it was pretty normal in these communities for people to parade from one place to another. But authorities worried that there was some kind of military purpose behind the drilling, and that organizers were really conspiring to pull off something more violent than a march to a meeting. By August twelve, local magistrates were writing to each other with their concerns that all of this might really be a pretext to some kind of armed revolution. As people living in and around Manchester prepared to march to the meeting and spend the day listening to speeches and rallying for reform, the magistrates prepared to make them disperse. Chief Magistrate William Holton instructed the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry and the neighboring Cheshire Yeomanry to remain at the ready, although many of them reportedly did so by spending the morning at Manchester's taverns. The magistrates recruited three hundred people for the Manchester Special Constabulary and armed them with truncheons. British Army regulars from the Regiment of Foot and the fifteen King's Hussars were called in as well. The magistrates had rocks and stones removed from the ground so they could not be used as weapons, and planned to arrest Henry Hunt as soon as he began speaking. We'll talk about how this all played out on the day after one more quick sponsor break. The crowd that arrived at St Peter's Fields in Manchester on August nineteen was festive and excited. Sixteenth was a Monday, so people who worked in the region's textile factories would have been at work for the day, but while power loom factories were growing in Lancashire, the majority of textile workers in that area we're still working at home on hand looms, and they typically worked on Saturdays and took Monday off. Many communities female reformer societies were marching together, all dressed in white on the sixteenth, although there were also lots of women there who weren't specifically associated with the society. Children were in attendance with their families, and sources vary on the estimates of how many total people were there. Most say at least sixty thousand, Some go as high as a hundred and fifty thousand or more. It's really kind of all over the place. It was illegal gathering, and although there may have been some people who brought a stick or some of their weapon, they had been told to bring quote no other weapon but that of a self approving conscience. Bishop Edward Stanley later said of the gathering, quote, I saw no symptoms of riot or disturbances before the meeting. The impression on my mind was that the people were sullenly peaceful. I don't know why. He says sullenly peaceful, when many of the other accounts say it was more festive, kind of like a fun, excited party. The Manchester Courier described it this way, quote at half past eleven, My attention was first particularly attracted by a crowd of people advancing to the ground with flags and music. They came in a sort of marching order, and were covered with dust, having, as I learned, come from some town at a distance. A number of women, boys and even children were in the procession, which had from this circumstance more the appearance of a large village party going to a merrymaking than that of a body of people advancing to overthrow the government of their country. John Benjamin Smith later became a liberal politician and part of the Anti Corn Law League, but at the time he was twenty five and he had not planned to go to the meeting. His aunt asked him to accompany her to a friend's house nearby so that she could watch, and he wrote of it quote, there were crowds of people in all directions, full of good humor, laughing and shouting and making fun. It seemed to be a gala day with the country people, who were mostly dressed in their best and brought with them their wives. And when I saw boys and girls taking their father's hand in the procession, I observed to my aunt, these are the guarantees of their peaceable intentions. We need have no fears. Magistrates met at a home that was adjacent to the meeting at about eleven in the morning, and sources differ about what happened there when Hunt started speaking and authorities moved into arrest him. Officials maintained that Chief Magistrate William Holton read the Riot Act before ordering the Yeomanry to make the crowd disperse. So here in the US, most people know the phrase read the Riot Act as a figure of speech, basically meaning giving someone a very stern lecture for some sort of misbehavior. But the Riot Act is a real act, first passed by Parliament in seventeen fourteen after a series of riots had swept through Britain, and its full title was an Act for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies and for the more speedy and effectual punishing of the rioters. The Act made it illegal for twelve or more people to quote unlawfully assemble and disturb the public peace. Local authorities had the right to approach such a group and order them to disperse, and failure to do so was a felony. The Act remained on the books until the mid to late twentieth century, so under the terms of the Riot Act, someone who was authorized to do so had to approach the unlawful assembly as closely as they safely could, call for silence or otherwise quote cause to be commanded silence, and then an allowed voice they had to read this statement and its entirety quote, our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons being assembled immediately to disperse themselves and peaceably, to depart to their habitations or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumult and riotous assemblies. God save the King. Once that statement was read, then the crowd had an hour to disperse. Accounts differ in whether authorities in Manchester that day read the Riot Act, with the reports that it was read mostly coming from magistrates and members of the military, but if it was read, it probably was not heard by the vast majority of the people there. They definitely were not given a one hour window to disperse. The Yeomanry came down on the crowd within minutes of Hunt's beginning to speak. The British Army later blamed the Yeomanry for what happened next. The crowd was very tightly packed into St. Peter's fields, and the yeoman Red quickly broke form as they charged in, leaving the members of the Womanry in very small groups surrounded by marchers who were packed in too tightly to disperse. The yeoman Read didn't have much training, and a lot of them were reportedly intoxicated, and when they found themselves trapped and kind of cut off from each other by this crowd, they started knocking people away with the flats of their sabers. In some accounts, things escalated when demonstrators started throwing rocks, although some eyewitnesses said they did not see any evidence of rock throwing or any other retaliation from the Crown. The Yeomanry sabers were also freshly sharpened, something that many sources conclude is evidence that they had intended to use them, or to at least do as much harm as they could if they accidentally or intentionally struck someone with the edge. Rather than the flat Yeah. This has been described as one of the most documented events of the nineteenth century. There's something like three hundred and fifty different eyewitness accounts, and a lot of them contradict each other in details like this. The Army regulars arrived at the field at about two pm, fired down streets to encourage people to disperse, and the fifteen hussars charged into the crowd. But Lieutenant Colonel Guiless Strange realized that the crowd had formed kind of a bottleneck and it was partly blocked in by the infantry. They couldn't disperse, they had nowhere to go, so he pulled his force back. Here's how John Benjamin Smith described the scene at that point quote it was a hot, dusty day. Clouds of dust arose which obscured the view. When it had subsided, a startling scene was presented. Numbers of men, women and children were lying on the ground who had been knocked down and run over by the soldiers. I noticed one woman lying face downwards, apparently lifeless. A man went up to her and lifted one of her legs. It fell as if she were lifeless. Another man lifted both her legs and let them fall. I saw her sometime after, carried off by the legs and arms as if she were dead, and the end eleven people were killed there on the day, five of them from saber wounds and the rest from being trampled or crushed by people or horses. The day's first fatality is usually cited as William Fields, who was a baby knocked out of the arms of his twenty three year old mother and then trampled. At least seven more people died of their injuries. Later, two constables were killed, likely by soldiers and probably by accident. This took about twenty minutes between when the yeoman recharged in and when the field was cleared. It seems as though the yeomanry and soldiers focused on people with banners and on women. Of the six d fifty four recorded injuries, at least one hundred sixty eight were women. Four of those women died of their injuries. Roughly half of those reported injuries came from sabers or other weapons, as opposed to being crushed or trampled. Based on the recorded numbers, about one eighth of the marchers were women, but women made up about one third of the injuries. There were also probably a lot more injuries that went unreported. People were really afraid to seek medical care out of fear that they would be arrested or faced some kind of other consequences for having been at the meeting. Twenty five year old James Lees, who was a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, died of injuries after being turned away from the Manchester infirmary. He was reportedly turned away because he refused to agree not to participate in such meetings in the future. He was quoted as saying, quote, at Waterloo there was man to man, but here it was downright murder. Henry Hunt was arrested and tried for seditious assembly and was sentenced to thirty months in prison. Three other speakers and organizers were sentenced to twelve months each. Although people tried to raise funds to help the injured and the families of the killed, most of this money wound up going to Hunt's legal defense. Local journalist James Rowe coined the term Peterloo massacre, combining St. Peter's Fields where it happened with the Battle of Waterloo, which the fifteenth Thustards had fought at four years before. Rose newspaper, The Manchester Observer, was shut down in the wake of his reporting on the incident, and he was charged and convicted with seditious libel. Afterwards, John Edward Taylor started the Manchester Guardian and that's just the Guardian today. The massacre temporarily united reformers across the political spectrum, with the more radical and more moderate wings of the movement coming together in outrage over what had happened, but this didn't help propel the movement forward. The magistrates and other officials sided with the Yeomanry and the regulars, including holding a meeting in secret to thank the Yeomanry for their work. There was no investigation into the behavior of the Yeomanry, the Special Constables, or the military units involved. In response to the massacre, Parliament also passed legislation known as the Six Acts in November of eighteen nineteen. These were the Training Prevention Act, the Seizure of Arms Act, the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act, the Misdemeanors Act, the Blasphemous and Seditious Libel Act, and the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act. Together, these acts restricted the freedoms of assembly, speech, and the press. They specifically outlawed the kind of drilling people had been doing in the moors leading up to the meeting. Meanwhile, nearly five thousand people signed a petition denouncing the meeting that had been held, to thank the Yeomanry and condemning the violence, and that read, in part quote, we are fully satisfied by personal observation on undoubted information, that the meeting was perfectly peaceable, that no seditious or intemperate harangues were made there, that the riot Act, if read at all, was read privately or without the knowledge of a great body of the meeting. And we feel it are bound in duty to protest against and to express our uttered disapprobation of the unexpected and unnecessary violence by which the assembly was dispersed. Many of the Special Constables and members of the Yeomanry were shopkeepers, and people boycotted those shops afterward. The massacre and the government and other official response to it were widely criticized and satur rised in print. An anonymous writer created a pamphlet based on the children's rhyme who Killed Cock Robin, with the robin being the people who were hurt and killed. Somewhat similar political pamphlet was called The Political House that Jack Built and was written by William Hone and illustrated with political cartoons like the Children's rhyme. Every line builds on the one before. So this is the house that Jack built. This is the wealth that lay in the house that Jack built. These are the vermin that plunder the wealth that lay in the house that Jack built. This is the thing that, in spite of new acts and attempts to restrain it by soldiers and tax will poison the vermin that plunder the wealth that lay in the house that Jack built. The thing that's going to poison these vermin is a printing press, and the vermin are an assortment of bishops, court officials, the army, tax collectors, and the like. Percy bish Shelley also wrote a lengthy poem called The Mask of Anarchy, although it was not published until after his death, and he sent that poem to Lee Hunt, who withheld its publication for fear of political or legal consequence. Is and there were also lots of household goods like cups and tea towels that were made to commemorate the massacre. But in spite of all this criticism and publicity. It was a really long time before any of the reforms that this movement had been looking for came into being. The Representation of the People Act of eighteen thirty two was the first act to include some of these reforms, and it was past thirteen years later. It gave more men the right to vote and redistributed some seats in Parliament, which reduced the number of rotten boroughs and gave some places some representation that they had not previously had. Although it was nicknamed the Great Reform Act, these changes were far more moderate than what reformers had been working toward. Additional reform acts followed in eighteen sixty seven and eighteen eighty four, which continued to refine who could vote and how communities were represented in Parliament. But it wasn't until nineteen eighteen, almost a century after the Peterloo Massacre, that the Representation of the People Act granted universal suffrage to men. All men over the age of twenty one could vote, as could women over the age of thirty who owned property. Yeah. By that point there had been entire other movements that had come and gone in Britain, including like the Chartist movement, was in that whole window, the whole lot. Ah, do you have listener mail that's maybe not quite so sad. I mean I do in a way, and it's it's kind of connects to this because because like a lot of the investigation into what happened at the time was really focused on these martyrs and what they were up to and whether they were up to something nefarious, and not on the people who carried out the actual killing. This email is from you on I hope I am saying your name correctly and Yuan Rights, Holly and Tracy. What a timely piece. Just last week, the Mercury News printed a report on US Representative Mark to Sanier's amendment to exonerate the Port Chicago fifty that passed the House. While I barely skim newspaper headlines these days, I devoured the because I thought I had heard about the incident from your show. That must be the Halifax explosion. Your latest show added so much depth to my understanding about the Port Chicago fifty. While listening, I can't help but wondering where's the intellect of those Navy officers who looked down on the quote lowest intellectual strata given the court finding quote that the colored enlisted personnel are neither temperamentally nor intellectually capable of handling high explosives. These officers who ordered such personnel back to handling high explosives must be there lacked the intellect to understand that conclusion, lacked the intellect to integrate that conclusion into their decisions. Should they pass the previous test or should they have possessed the intellected? You both must have committed treason by attempting to further sabotage the Navy port during the active war. This is a good point, so um, thank you you on for writing two things. Number one, A couple of people have gotten in touch with us about this. On July twelve, the National Defense Authors Asian Act was passed by the House. There was a concurrent resolution the day before, and there is an amendment that's part of the authorization that would um require the Secretary of the Navy to either exonerate the Port Chicago fifty or to look into exonerating the Port Chicago fifty. I could not find the text of the actual amendment on the Congress website. That there are a lot of amendments to this particular bill, and I could not find it among them. So that currently has passed the House. Um, there is not a similar bill that has passed the Senate. It's not signed into law, so like nothing is a sure thing yet. But this representative, who I think represents the part of California that Port Chicago is in, has been trying to get the Port Chicago fifty exonerated. It's not the first time that there's been an attempt to get them exonerated, but is ongoing. We recorded that episode on July nights, so we recorded the episode before any of those things had happened. And regards in regards to a question at the end, yeah, that's just not a question that anybody was exploring at all, and any of the hearings that happened at the time, there were just a lot of examinations of the men who were loading the munitions in Port Chicago and really no examination of the decisions that led them to be doing that. So, um, that was one of the very frustrating things, and that was a very uh astute way of laying out the questions involved. So thank you you want for this email and for the link to the article about this defense bill amendment that may lead to an exhoneration if it all continues on UH If you would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at how stuff Works dot com. And then we're all over social media and Missing History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can come to our website, which is missing history dot com and find show notes for all the episodes that Holly and I have worked on together in a searchable archive of all of our episodes, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of my Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.