The Peterloo Massacre - The Historiography

The Historiography of Peterloo

It is part of a Left-wing dogma that Peterloo was an act of class war perpetrated by Lord Liverpool’s government on the working class, that the 60,000 people peaceably assembled in St Peter’s Field on 16^th August 1819 to listen to Hunt’s speech on reform were unprovokedly dispersed by drunken cavalry who savagely sabred several innocent people to death and wounded many others, all on the orders of the panic-stricken specially formed select committee of magistrates. It needed a Mancunian antiquarian bookseller of today, Mr. Robert Warmsley, to put the factual record straight 150 years after the event and after thirty years of patient and scrupulous research for his monumental book, Peterloo: The Case Re-opened. [Michael Kennedy] [1]

Although it became known as the Peterloo Massacre, the events in and around St. Peter’s Field on 16^th August 1819 were regarded by both sides with a great deal of passion. At the time the Peterloo massacre divided English society as a whole, with petitions and mass meetings being organised for and against the position taken by the authorities.[2] As Philip Lawson emphasises contention lies at the heart of Peterloo because ‘one side argues that the reformers went too far in their protest or demonstration at St Peter’s Field and that in the aftermath of Peterloo, support for the established order was reaffirmed by the mass of the population’ and ‘on the other side exists the view that a legitimate movement of popular constitutionalism ended in a massacre, betrayed on all sides by middle-class equivocation and a corrupt and repressive political system.’ [3]

In the aftermath of Peterloo an examination of the historiography shows that Peterloo quickly grew into a battle between the loyalist authorities on the one side and the reformers on the other. [4] In the words of the radical Manchester Observer, Peterloo was ‘a day of paramount importance to the liberties of our country,’ and as ‘Big with the fate of Freedom and of Albion.’ In contrast, the Reverend Mr Hay thought that; ‘The meeting was looked upon, on both sides, as an experiment-a touchstone of the spirit of the Magistrates, and of courage of the mob.’ [5]

Within two weeks after Peterloo Francis Philips, a cotton manufacturer and a prominent member of the Pitt Club and Tory party, published An Exposure of the Calumnies circulated by the Enemies of Social Order and reiterated by their abettors Against the Magistrates and Yeomanry Cavalry of Manchester and Salford, (1819) defending the behaviour of the Manchester Magistrates and the yeomanry cavalry on the day. This prompted John Edward Taylor to write his riposte Notes and Observations Critical Explanatory, on the Papers Relative to the Internal State of the Country recently presented in Parliament; To which is intended a Reply to Mr Francis Philip’s Exposure, London, (1820). Meanwhile the Radical press continued to report on protest meetings and trials in an attempt to have the aggressors identified and punished without success. In contrast the Tory newspapers continued to make excuses for the Manchester magistrates and the yeomanry cavalry praising them and the military for their conduct.[6]

I would agree with Neville Kirk’s analysis that since the late 1950s the historiography of Peterloo has been dominated by three conflicting interpretations.[7] The first interpretation by Donald Read, Peterloo The ‘Massacre’ and its Background, (1957), identifies Peterloo as a massacre although he qualifies this in the preface to his book:

The successful designation of Peterloo as a ‘massacre’ represents another piece of successful propaganda. Perhaps only in peace-loving England could a death-roll of only eleven persons have been so described.[8]

Read argues that the ‘massacre’ was the result of panic and a serious lack of foresight on part of the Manchester magistrates rather from central government direction or premeditation. Read also argues that blame for the deaths and injuries at the August 16^th meeting lies with the magistrates but not with the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, who advised the magistrates to use caution and only to use force as a last resort.[9] According to Read:

The evidence of the Home Office papers was used to show how Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, had advised the Manchester magistrates to act with very great circumspection at the meeting, to collect evidence of any seditious intention, but not to intervene unless violence broke out.[10]

Read’s final conclusion is that the central government was not responsible for the massacre. Instead Read argues:

Ominously, on August 3^rd the ‘loyalist’ Manchester Mercury newspaper, reported that the Cheshire magistrates had ‘come to a determination to act with decision, and to suppress all Seditious Meetings immediately as they assemble.’ It was this policy, not the one advocated by the Home Office, which produced the Peterloo Massacre. [11]

Read also argues ‘How far the attitude of the Home Office differed from that of the Manchester magistrates responsible for the Peterloo massacre was shown in a letter written by Hobhouse to James Norris one of the Select Committee of Magistrates twelve days before Peterloo.’ Henry Hobhouse was the under-secretary to the Home Office and urged the magistrates simply to gather evidence of what took place at the meeting to ignore any illegal proceeding for the time being and not to use force. Read produces the following letter as evidence in support of his claim:

Lord Sidmouth has no doubt that you will make arrangements for obtaining evidence of what passes; that if anything illegal is done or said, it may be the subject of prosecution. But even if they should utter sedition or proceed to the election of a representative, Lord Sidmouth is of the opinion that it will be the wisest course to abstain from any endeavour to disperse the mob, unless they should proceed to acts of felony or riot...His Lordship [concluded Hobhouse in a similar letter to a Rochdale magistrate eight days later] considers that on various Accounts this mode of proceeding is far preferable to an attempt to disperse the Assembly by force.[12]

Read also stresses ‘as the evidence of the Home Office shows, it was never desired or precipitated by the Liverpool Ministry as a bloody repressive gesture for keeping down the lower orders. If the Manchester magistrates had followed the spirit of Home Office Policy there would never have been a massacre.’ [13]

The second interpretation by E. P. Thompson in The Making of The English Working Class, (1963) argues that:

We shall probably never be able to determine with certainty whether or not Liverpool and Sidmouth were parties to the decision to disperse the meeting by force.[14]

Thompson is critical of Read’s book and a highly charged historical debate followed after Thompson writes:

Dr. Read succeeds in writing an entire book on Peterloo without finding space for a single eye witness account by a member of the crowd...It is difficult to follow the argument that an historical technique which screens all the evidence, accepting O.K. witnesses and official papers but rejecting the evidence of people who were ridden down or sabred, is likely to turn out ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ work.[15]

Thompson goes one step further and writes:

There is reason enough to suppose that the Government had determined upon a show-down with the reformers before Peterloo. At some point Old Corruption, faced by swelling demonstrations, a full-blooded Radical press, the election of national representatives, drilling...and threats to withhold taxes, together with ominous symptoms of a growing middle and working-class alliance, was bound either to retreat...or to resort to repression.[16]

It can be seen how these two historical interpretations vary. Donald Read argues that Peterloo was the unfortunate consequence of the lack of foresight on the part of the Manchester magistrates. Whilst E.P. Thompson suspects that it may have been ‘planned as a show-down with the radicals’ definitely in the case of the magistrates and possibly involving Lord Liverpool’s government. Nevertheless, both Read and Thompson agree that the evidence suggests that the crowd at Peterloo were ‘orderly and generally peaceful.’ [17]

The third interpretation by Robert Warmsley in his book Peterloo: the Case Reopened, (1969), disagrees with Thompson on practically every issue and with Read in one issue in particular. Warmsley says that ‘No one has ever seriously tried to refute the radical interpretation of Peterloo,’ and that he intends ‘to put the record straight.’ Firstly, Warmsley agrees with Donald Read that the central government was not responsible for Peterloo. Secondly, Warmsley attempts to absolve William Hulton the magistrates and the yeomanry from any blame at the Peterloo meeting. He also disagrees with both Read and E. P. Thompson along with the majority of other historians of Peterloo. In fact Warmsley’s assertions are nothing more than an endorsement of the testimony given by William Hulton, members of the yeomanry cavalry and special constables. Warmsley’s argument is that the yeomanry rode into the crowd not to injure and kill but to arrest Hunt, and that, only when assailed by missiles from a minority of the crowd, did the yeomanry react in self defence. William Hulton, upon seeing the yeomanry under attack, ordered the 15th Hussars to disperse the crowd.[18] Warmsley concludes:

All the actors in the tragedy were victims. The radicals on the platform, the militants in the crowd, the peaceable in the crowd, the Yeomanry, the constables, the magistrates in their room, and the captives in the New Bayley, were each and severally as much the victims of the tragic chain of circumstances as the dead special constable lying in the Bull’s Head, the wounded in the infirmary, and Mrs Partington, crushed to death, lying at the bottom of the cellar steps. The Statesman sardonically wrote of a Victory; there were no victors and no vanquished, only victims.[19]

The 150^th anniversary of Peterloo witnessed the appearance of Jane Marlow’s The Peterloo Massacre, (1969), a valuable contribution and general reader on this controversial historical topic.[20] At the same time Warmsley’s book received some complimentary press, when Michael Kennedy a journalist from the Daily Telegraph in his article ‘What really happened at Peterloo?’ wrote ‘Warmsley’s massive research challenges the accepted version,’ his book ‘leaves no fact unchallenged and uncorroborated, no document unread in full, no source unchecked,’ and that it ‘utterly discredits the accounts in Prentice and Bamford,’ furthermore ‘In the melee the crowd fled. It seems that most of the casualties were caused by panic and that several people were trampled to death by their fellows.’ [21] This was followed by Michael Kennedy’s book Portrait of Manchester, London, (1970), in which he also endorses Warmsley’s view and asserts:

It is part of a Left-wing dogma that Peterloo was an act of class war perpetrated by Lord Liverpool’s government on the working class, that the 60,000 people peaceably assembled in St Peter’s Field on 16^th August 1819 to listen to Hunt’s speech on reform were unprovokedly dispersed by drunken cavalry who savagely sabred several innocent people to death and wounded many others, all on the orders of the panic-stricken specially formed select committee of magistrates. It needed a Mancunian antiquarian bookseller of today, Mr. Robert Warmsley, to put the factual record straight 150 years after the event and after thirty years of patient and scrupulous research for his monumental book, Peterloo: The Case Re-opened.[22]

In addition Michael Kennedy writes:

Why is Peterloo, a comparatively trivial affair not to be compared with the riots in Bristol and Nottingham...the facts of Peterloo and the motives behind it are a good deal less lurid than Socialist propaganda has made out over the years...It was an inspired journalist on the staff of the Manchester Observer, who, with Waterloo but four years in the past, coined the word Peterloo and by this single idea alone probably ensured that the incidents on St. Peter’s Field would have a place in history far beyond their merits or deserts.[23]

Michael Kennedy in defence of the Manchester authorities writes ‘before they are condemned utterly as reactionary oppressors let it be remembered that the excesses of the French Revolution were still fresh in the minds of governing authority.’ [24]

In marked contrast on 11^th December, 1969, an anonymous review of Robert Warmsley’s book appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, which was later discovered to be written by E. P. Thompson. This review was later re-published as ‘Thompson on Peterloo,’ in the Manchester Regional History Review, (1989), and later in a series of essays by Thompson in Making History: Writings on History and Culture, New York, (1994). In this publication Thompson who argues that:

Warmsley is mainly interested, in the events of the day of Peterloo, and even more closely in the events of one half-hour of that day-between 1.15 and 1.45 p.m. and yet the fact is that Mr Warmsley has no new facts to adduce about this half-hour at all. Because the main thrust of Mr. Warmsley’s argument is that, what happened on the day was unintentional, and the crowd (or part of it) was the first aggressor.’ [25]

Thompson also argues that Warmsley ‘would have us believe that the Yeomanry were ordered to support the special constables in the execution of the warrant to arrest the speakers and then advanced in reasonable order and without aggressive intention or action into the crowd; and then that the crowd closed in upon them in a menacing manner and the Yeomanry were assailed, at some point close to the hustings, by brickbats and sticks hurled by a portion of the crowd, but that most of the Yeomanry kept their heads until Hunt and his fellow speakers had been arrested, and then, increasingly assailed by brickbats and hemmed in on all sides by a threatening crowd they were forced to beat off their attackers only using the flats of their sabres, in self defence.’ [26]

Thompson says ‘from the outset Warmsley asserts that both Samuel Bamford and Archibald Prentice, ‘continued to pass on their own version…as wilful deceivers of posterity’ and stresses that:

Mr. Warmsley became convinced, not only that William Hulton had been unfairly treated by historians, but that he and his fellow magistrates were victims of nothing less than a Radical conspiracy to falsify the events of the day-a conspiracy fostered by Hunt, Bamford and Richard Carlile, and furthered by Archibald Prentice, (author of Historical Sketches of Manchester), and John Edward Taylor, of the Manchester Guardian, and in which John Tyas, the correspondent of The Times who witnessed the events from the hustings, the Rev. Edward Stanley, and dozens of others who were witting or unwitting accessories-a conspiracy so compelling that even Donald Read, in his sober and by no means radical study of Peterloo (1957), failed to detect it. [27]

Soon afterwards, Donald Read wrote his contrasting review of ‘Peterloo: The Case Re-opened, by Robert Warmsley,’ in History, Volume, 55, (1970), in which he says:

It was probably inevitable that a right wing reassessment of the responsibility for the Peterloo Massacre would follow the emotional left wing interpretation offered by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class.[28]

Read further points out that both Warmsley and Thompson are dissatisfied with his distribution of responsibility for the massacre in his Peterloo: the ‘Massacre’ and its Background, (1957), although they differ from him for contrasting reasons. Read stresses that Thompson rejected his interpretation arguing that ‘Sidmouth was anxious for a violent showdown with the Radicals, and that the absence of evidence for this in the Home Office papers was proof only of Establishment cunning in fixing the record.’ Read continues; ‘Nevertheless extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing observers of early Radicalism seem to share a propensity to be deeply impressed by the lack of evidence.’ [29]

Further Read argues, ‘However, Warmsley dismisses Thompson’s argument and agrees with Read that, ‘the Home Secretary and his assistants were not responsible for the massacre.’ and ‘Warmsley is agitated because this inevitably lays responsibility for the tragedy exclusively upon the magistrates, and especially upon their chairman at Peterloo, William Hulton.’ Moreover, Read says, ‘Warmsley’s explicit chief intention is to defend Hulton from what he regards as the calumnies of both contemporaries and historians.’ [30]

It can be seen how historical interpretations vary. Firstly Donald Read identifies Peterloo as a massacre, albeit of a peculiarly English kind which resulted from panic and serious lack of foresight on part of the Manchester magistrates rather than from central government direction or premeditation. Secondly, E. P. Thompson, sees Peterloo as a bloody class-based massacre in which premeditation was definitely evident in the case of the Manchester magistrates and possibly by Lord Liverpool’s government. Thirdly, Robert Warmsley has offered the revisionist argument that Peterloo constituted an unfortunate tragedy rather than a massacre, resulting from a series of mishaps and misunderstandings, and in which there were only victims as opposed to victors and vanquished. [31]

In conclusion the three historical interpretations discussed all have their flaws. Both Read and Warmsley ignore the eye witness accounts and inevitably give a pro loyalist bias to their work. On the other hand E. P. Thompson seeks to implicate Lord Liverpool’s Government in the massacre without the support of documentary evidence and in the face of the contradictory evidence presented by Donald Read. Other writers have of course, merely repeated one of these interpretations depending on their sympathy or inclination. For example most recently Robert Poole writes ‘A conservative strain of history has downplayed Peterloo, which in some versions is relegated to the status of a ‘tragedy’ or even an ‘incident.’ [32] In another study the Yeomanry were described as the ‘‘murders of Manchester’’ while another reduced all the events of 16^th August to ‘‘the St Peter’s Field incident.’’ [33] A major problem with in the historiography of Peterloo is of course, most historians have not based their research on primary source documentation and eye witness accounts. Instead the history of Peterloo has been largely based on the assumptions of previous writers and their analysis of the facts taken from secondary works which have simply been repeated in every generation. However, I must agree with Robert Poole that ‘the contrived debate over ‘blame’ for the massacre has been unproductive and attempts to exonerate the Manchester authorities have been wholly unconvincing.’ [34]

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[1]Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Manchester, (The Portrait Series), London, (1970), p. 66.

[2] W. A. Speck, A Concise History of Britain 1707-1975, Cambridge, (1995), p. 67.

[3] Philip Lawson, ‘Reassessing Peterloo,’History Today, March, (1988), pp. 24-25.

[4] Philip Lawson, ‘Peterloo: A Constables Eye-View Re-Assesed,’ Manchester Regional History Review, Vol. iii, (1989), p. 39.

[5] Diana Donaldson, ‘The Power of Print: Graphic Images of Peterloo,’ Manchester Regional History Review, Vol. iii, (1989), p. 21.

[6]Turner, op. cit., pp. 266-268.

[7] Neville Kirk, ‘Commonsense, Commitment And Objectivity: Themes in The Recent Historiography of Peterloo,’ Manchester Regional History Review, Vol. iii, (1989), p. 61.

[8] Read, op. cit., p. vii.

[9] Kirk, op. cit., p. 61.

[10] Read, op. cit., p. 207.

[11]Ibid, p. 122.

[12]Ibid, p. 120. Citing, Hobhouse to Norris, 30^th June 1819, ; Hobhouse to Crossley, 10^th August 1819, (H.O. 41/4).

[13] Ibid, p. 207.

[14] Thompson, op. cit., pp. 749-50. Working Class

[15] E. P. Thompson, ‘God and King and Law,’ New Reasoner, 3, (1957-8), p. 79.

[16] Ibid, p. 81.

[17] Kirk, op. cit., pp. 61-66.

[18] Ibid, p. 64.

[19] Warmsley, op. cit., p. 233.

[20] Birkhamstead Gazette, 8^th August, 1969.

[21] Daily Telegraph, 16^th August, 1969.

[22] Kennedy, op. cit., p. 66.

[23] Ibid, pp. 68-69.

[24] Kennedy, op. cit., p. 63.

[25] Thompson, op. cit., p. 68. On Peterloo

[26] Ibid, pp. 68-69.

[27] Ibid, pp. 68-69.

[28] Donald Read, ‘Peterloo: The Case Re-opened, By Robert Warmsley,’ History, Vol. 55, (1970), pp. 138-140.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Kirk, op. cit., p. 61.

[32] Poole, op. cit., p. 115.

[33] Lawson, op. cit., p. 39. Peterloo: A Constables Eye-View Re-Assessed

[34] Poole, op. cit., p. 112.