2. Into the Abyss of Capitalism

The Great French bourgeois Revolution of 1789-94 set Europe ablaze. Its stated ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality, the battle-cry of a new social order, became a beacon to the oppressed and downtrodden everywhere. Following the American War of Independence, which had won widespread sympathy in England, the French Revolution struck terror into the hearts of the British ruling class. While revolution in certain quarters is regarded today as very un-British, at this time the spectre of revolution was of profound concern to the British Establishment. They were petrified that the flames of revolution would spread across the narrow straits of the English Channel and provoke rebellion in England. Their reaction was similar to the ruling class outrage at the Bolshevik Revolution more than one hundred years later. Within a month of the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, Britain was at war with revolutionary France. This war would last another twenty-two years until the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo.

“The awakening of the labouring classes, after the first shocks of the French Revolution, made the upper classes tremble”, Frances Shelley noted in her diary.^[1] This fear was reinforced by widespread bread riots and the naval mutiny at Newhaven in the spring of 1795.^[2] In the aftermath of its suppression, the ringleaders were either flogged with a lash to the point of death or hanged.

While the masses gave wholehearted support to the liberating ideals that were sweeping France, the British ruling class regarded all home-grown Radicals as no better than foreign agents, bent on treason. A worried Mayor of Leicester wrote to the Home Office: “a fourth of the population would join the French Standard if they had an opportunity.”^[3] Mr. Yates, a friend of Sir Robert Peel, also wrote, “the Country is ripe for rebellion and in the most dangerous situation… a Revolution will be the consequence…”^[4] An anonymous letter to Benjamin Hobhouse, MP for Hindon states, “I am informed by many that there will be a Revolution and that there is in Yorkshire about thirty thousand in a Corresponding Society.”^[5]

These Corresponding Societies were popular radical societies founded in 1792-3 and composed overwhelmingly of working class artisans. They disseminated democratic, radical and Jacobin ideas and literature, some of which even tilted in the direction of socialist views.

“The SWINISH MULTITUDE”, declared a committee of the London Corresponding Society in 1795, “are well aware that it matters very little who are the HOG DRIVERS, while the present wretched system of corruption is in existence.”

Consequently such subversive societies were subjected to government repression and terrorised by reactionary forces in the form of frenzied “Church and King” mobs.

The growth of early trade unionism, inspired by events shaking the Continent, was very much linked in the minds of the ruling class to “subversive” Jacobinism. The ruling class, determined at all costs to prevent revolution in England, were thrown into panic by this new-found menace. The roots of social unrest, however, did not arise from radical agitators, but from the enormous gulf between those at the bottom and the affluent minority of money-grubbers at the top. To finance the war with France, labourers were forced to pay about half their income in indirect taxation. Nevertheless, all threats to the propertied classes, imaginary or otherwise, were silenced by the severest punishments. The government was determined that there would be no repeat of the “Wilkes and Liberty” popular democratic protest movement of twenty years earlier. The Wilkite movement stood for popular control by the Commons and for the assertion of popular liberties against both Commons and Crown. Such seditious ideas had to be eliminated. So the workers’ organisations, which emerged in a whole range of trades, had likewise to be crushed.

Under a series of corrupt Whig and Tory governments representing the English oligarchy, the rebellious lower classes were kept in their place by a callous system of martial law, underpinned by imprisonment, public floggings, transportation and capital punishment. In 1794 William Pitt the younger suspended Habeas Corpus (the right to a fair trial) for the following eight years, resulting in widespread arrests. Thomas Paine, the revolutionary democrat and author of the Rights of Man (1791), was forced to flee to France to avoid imprisonment. Paine can be described as an implacable enemy of tyranny and a citizen of the world. His ideas had scandalised the ruling class, but his attack on the conservative Edmund Burke and his defence of the French Revolution gave him widespread influence in the working class. To the oppressed masses the Rights of Man furnished a telling criticism of the British Constitution, from which they were excluded, as well as the corrupt ruling oligarchy. A frightened British Establishment tried Thomas Paine in his absence, found him guilty and outlawed him. He was never to step foot in England again. Despite all the repression, although men were sent to prison for selling it, some 200,000 copies of the Rights of Man were distributed and sold.

An anonymous 24-point pamphlet, issued in 1794, and typical of the popular propaganda of the time, demanded that “Workmen might no longer be punished with imprisonment for uniting to obtain an increase of wages, whilst their masters are allowed to conspire against them with impunity”, and ended with an attack on the rotten corrupt Parliament: “TRAITORS! TRAITORS! TRAITORS!” To root out this dangerous radicalism, the government came down hard on printers, publishers and sellers of seditious literature. Later they introduced a stamp duty to tax newspapers to price them out of reach of the masses, thus sparking the revolt and defiance of the great “unstamped” press.

Ireland too was a source of great instability and grave concern. It was considered, with much justification, that Ireland would be the base for a French invasion of Britain. The United Irishmen, led by Wolfe Tone, a revolutionary democrat of Protestant origin, based itself on the plebeian “men of no property” in its revolutionary struggle for national independence. Tone looked to revolutionary France for support, and in 1798 the United Irish mobilised and led oppressed Catholic and Protestant in an uprising against Anglo-Irish rule. Although this failed, the event served to add to the general panic in government circles.

In the same year, naval mutinies at Spithead and Nore shook the British Establishment to its very foundations.

“Shall we who have endured the toils of a tedious, disgraceful war, be the victims of tyranny and oppression which vile, gilded, pampered knaves, wallowing in the lap of luxury, choose to load us with”, stated the Manifesto of the Nore delegates to their fellow countrymen. “Shall we, who amid the rage of the tempest and the war of jarring elements, undaunted climb the unsteady cordage and totter on the topmast’s dreadful height, suffer ourselves to be treated worse than the dogs of London Streets?…

You cannot, countrymen, form the most distant idea of the slavery under which we have for many years laboured. Rome had her Neros and Caligulas but how many characters of their description might we not mention in the British Fleet – men without the least tincture of humanity, without the faintest spark of virtue, education or abilities, exercising the most wanton acts of cruelty over those whom dire misfortune or patriotic zeal may have placed in their power – basking in the sunshine of prosperity, whilst we (need we repeat who we are?) labour under every distress which the breast of humanity can suggest.^[6]

It was out of such atrocious conditions that the mutinies gathered support. As far as the ruling classes were concerned, they would show no mercy. After the mutinies were put down, in a display of cold cruelty, the mutineers were flogged, deported or hanged. One of the Nore sailors was sentenced to be flogged with the cat-o’-nine-tails 380 times, a punishment that no human being could endure.

As part of the general repression, the London Corresponding Society was outlawed, its members arrested and its leaders charged with high treason. However, they steadfastly refused to incriminate themselves, and one of the leaders, named Sharp, an engraver, was particularly obstinate. “Well! We can do without his evidence”, bellowed Pitt. “Let him be sent to prison and hanged with the rest of them in the Tower.”^[7] By these savage acts, the Society was driven underground and turned into a conspiratorial body. Oath-taking became common as a consequence.

To counter this phenomenon, and crush the growing social unrest, an act against illegal oaths was introduced in 1797. This was swiftly followed by the introduction of the draconian Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 aimed at completely eradicating the early trade unions.

“Nothing in my opinion,” writes the factory owner Mr. Gray, “is more unwise in any case than to allow the lower orders to feel their strength, and to extend their communications with each other without restraint. Allow them to go on uninterrupted and they become daily more licentious…”^[8]

The Pitt government introduced the Combination Acts following a petition – one of many – from the Master Millwrights of London, demanding action against the newly established trade unions. At the instigation of the pious William Wilberforce, so concerned about the slave trade, but regarding trade unions as “a general disease”, Parliament passed a general Act “to prevent unlawful combinations of workmen”. This Act was tightened up the following year, forbidding strikes, union meetings, and the collection of union monies. The anti-union legislation made liable to three months imprisonment, or two months’ hard labour, “any worker who combined with another to increase wages or decrease hours, or conduct any such trade union activity.”

Nominally, the law of the land also prohibited employers’ combinations, but this, of course, was never enforced. In any case the magistrates who administered the laws were either landowners or industrialists. There was no trial by jury. A magistrate would preside over court cases, although this was later amended to two magistrates in a second Act. Under the law, workers (but not employers) were forced to give evidence against themselves or their associates. According to the Hammonds, the new laws “gave the masters unlimited power to reduce wages and make conditions more severe. They established the new industry on a basis of… serf labour and low wages.”^[9]

The class interests of the British Establishment were paramount. The full force of the capitalist state was employed to crush the spirit of revolt within the working class and eradicate this “evil” of trade unionism, to use the words of William Pitt. At this time, troops were used frequently to put down local disturbances. “The whole country”, wrote AL Morton, “was covered with a network of barracks built so as to prevent contact between the people and the soldiers who had formerly been billeted in houses and inns.”^[10] A system of government spies, agents and informers were used to infiltrate and terrorise the workers’ groups and radical societies. Informants’ so-called evidence was then used to frame, imprison and prosecute their organisers and leaders. Indeed, prosecution was a lucrative business, a kind of piece-work, as a price was placed on the head of every “conspirator” found guilty.

“Two or more Justices meet daily at one or other of the Manufacturing Towns,” a Home Office emissary wrote from the west of England in 1802, “and as the Combination Act affords a very convenient pretext for summoning and examining upon Oath any suspected Persons I have continually come before them.”^[11]

1. Quoted in Thompson, op. cit, p.60

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2. See Dudley Edwards, The Soldiers’ Revolt, Spokesman pamphlet no.62

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3. Quoted in Hammonds, The Town Labourer, p.80

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4. Hammonds, The Skilled Labourer, p.66

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5. Ibid, p.173

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6. Selected Documents, Revolution, from 1789 to 1906, edited by R. W. Postgate, 7- New York, 1962, p.73-74

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7. John Hostettler, The Criminal Jury Old and New: Jury Power from Early Times to the Present Day, p.93, Waterside Press 2004

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8. Quoted in Cole & Postgate, The Common People, p.157

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9. Hammonds, The Skilled Labourer, p.101

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10. Hammonds, The Town Labourer, p.141

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11. A.L. Morton, A People’s History of England, London 1938

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